What goes around comes around?

I haven't posted at all in the past two weeks.  I'm on the end of three weekends of weddings and travels to different cities.  Curiously, as far as the search for a common ecumenical liturgy is concerned, the American wedding ceremony may be the most familiar and predictable liturgical rite understandable to the greatest cross section of worshipers!  Lutheran, Catholic, Methodist, Evangelical - all follow a very predictable pattern. 

The next week ahead promises rejuvenation in the activity of backpacking.  I suggest Psalm 104 as backpacker's meditation. 

To remain true to my commitment to remain in communication regarding sabbatical activities, here are some tidbits from Frank Senn's "The People's Work" to contemplate.  I marvel at the similarities of vexations facing church leaders in centuries past to those in our time. 


After the Roman empire recognized Christianity, Sunday as a day of rest was promoted by the governing authorities throughout the Roman empire.  Secular distractions abounded.  Senn writes:

"The church did no ask for this legislation in their own theological reflections on the Lord's Day.  They continued to stress the need to assemble for worship on the Lord's Day.  But the new idleness on Sunday meant that Christians had to be occupied in edifying ways so they would not succumb to vice. 

In particular, Christians had to be urged to assemble for worship and not to assemble with the crowds that attended the circuses, theater, and games that were held on Sundays. . . . Major sports events, in the form of contests between men and beasts, gladiatorial combat, and chariot races, also were condemned by the bishops.  They remained a problem for Sunday worship attendance in the fourth century."  (Senn, 65)

Vikings?  Nascar?  Tickets to the Guthrie?  All modern day concerns for pastors and musicians planning Sunday morning worship that must be finished by "kick-off." 

The consternation over musical style and instrumentation was not stranger to the church patriarchs, either.  The issue is establishing a Christian identity that remains distinct from the secular culture.  "The increasingly strident denunciation of instrumental music in the writings of the church fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries suggests that instruments were, in fact, being used in public worship, or that there was popular pressure to use them, and that this had to be discouraged precisely at a time when a stark contrast was being drawn between Christian and pagan cults.

"In contast with the use of "lifeless" instruments in pagan rituals . . . the church fathers preferred the "living" instrument of the human voice.  Writers as diverse as Clement of Rome, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Pachomius, John Chrysostom and Augustine of Hippo extol unison singing as a powerful witness to unity. . . . The fathers also criticized the lewdness that accompanied pagan instrumental music and dancing.  Thus, the condemnation of the use of musical instruments by the church fathers was not an aesthetic criticism, but a matter of staking out Christian identity and morality."  (Senn 119)

Similar arguments are raised today regarding the appropriateness of electric guitars and such, with an appeal to maintaining a distinction between the commercial pop culture and immoral behavior of the musicians being emulated.  I'm not arguing one way or the other here; I'm just curiously observing the similarity of the problem. 

Last, on the rise of the professional musical class, of which I am definitely a part, and on the desire to get all worshipers singing:

"The Constantinian Age was also the time when hymnody, or spiritual songs, also flourished.  The strophic hymn, which originated in Syria, countered the professionalization of recitative singing in larger assembly halls by making it possible for the people to sing. (My italics.)  Ephriam is credited with developing a type of strophic hymn in which quantitative verse was replaced by isosyllabic verse, in which there was a regular pattern of accented syllables and the endings of lines often rhymed.  This made possible singing all the stanzas to the same melody. (My italics; note in other posts my problem with pop influenced music that has no pattern or predictability, and thus are difficult to sing together.)