Ear Worm

 

Hey, Cobblestone,

 

    Do you happen to have an “ear worm” playing in your head at the moment – the jingle from a commercial you saw last night, a song you thought you’d forgotten long ago, a fragment of something your child was singing yesterday? (Well, if you didn’t before, maybe you do now!) It’s the nature of song to land in a different place than spoken word, and stick; the rhythm and meter of music will go deeper and stay longer than most of the less connected sounds we hear. With that ear worm pestering you just now, maybe this is a good time to measure music on the Three R’s scale: is it something to be Received as all good; should it be Rejected as all bad; or treated as an inherently good thing, and Redeemed from whatever bad purposes it may have been put to?

     By now, you’re fully aware of my fondness for redemption – cooperating with the Creator in bringing all of creation to what it was always meant to be – so you know where I’m headed. But to stay true to the pattern, let’s think: Can music and song be Received as all good? I’ll bet each one of us can pull at least one no-good song from memory in an instant, and another half dozen shortly thereafter. One of the hot-shot philosophers – Voltaire in this case – has said, “Anything too stupid to be said… is sung.” I’m not a Voltaire fan, but like it or not, certain songwriters and musicians have been making his point for him throughout history. Receive is out. How about Reject? You may not know this, but the first recorded words of a human being might have actually been a song: This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh… (Adam, speaking at Genesis 2:23a). He seems to be thrilled that “the rest of him,” meaning Eve, is now on the scene, and most modern Bible translations print his words in the same format as a song or psalm. And as recently as ten minutes ago, you could have heard Etta James singing, “At last, my love has come along! My lonely days are over, and life is like a song.” A life without song sounds awful; to Reject music out-of-hand would be a terrible idea. Are you ready, then, to become a little-r music-redeemer?

     What do you suppose it’ll take? What could your part amount to? With music being such a far-ranging subject, what’s the best and most redemptive work you can do within your given context? Maybe we should start with a micro-study on the nature of music.  

     For all its fantastic possibilities, music will take you to what is real. One of the beautiful aspects of music of any genre is that it can take you to realities you wouldn’t have encountered by any other means. A fair and potentially redemptive question to ask, then, is, “Where is this music taking me?” Even with Bible songs, it’s a question worth asking. 

     David was the most prolific songwriter in the Psalms. In the 62^nd he covers a lot of reality: God is his fortress, his enemies are fierce, riches and status are fleeting and ultimately meaningless. None of what he said was unreal – true, every word. And if you scope out a bit, you’ll see the healthiest and most helpful reality of all:

 Once God has spoken;

   twice have I heard this:

that power belongs to God,

   and that to you, O Lord, belongs steadfast love (Psalm 62:11-12a).

     Music and song have the ability to take you beyond what was spoken to what was meant, beyond words to understanding, and even to the motive for speaking the words. Music is powerful stuff. Like all things powerful, we really ought to approach it with some awe and even trepidation, looking to understand what it’s up to.

     Several years ago there was a contemporary Christian song based on half of Psalm 73 – “half” being the operative word here. I won’t mention the title or artist; it would only start an argument. Psalm 73 is coming up in our Bible reading plan next week, and when you see it (sing it?), you’ll see that, like many of the Psalms, it has a hard pivot point. The song stopped short of the pivot point, leaving the hearers stranded in all the unhelpful realities. That wasn’t the motive behind the psalm; the motive was to give a nod to the hard realities, then carry the hearer through to the glory. Half-a-psalm was worse than no psalm at all. Catchy tune, but it needed at least one more verse to be redemptive.

     Where is the music taking you? Can you use it to take others to healthy and helpful realities, even if that means passing through the harder ones? Can it, in any way, honor God? If you’re willing, where and how, exactly, will you start redeeming music?

 

    And yeah, in case you’re curious at all, the worm in my ear at the moment is indeed Etta James, and she can stay there all day long. I walked my daughter down the aisle to Etta singing “At Last,” and into a God-honoring marriage with the man who is my son-in-law. Some mighty sweet realities, those.

  

Grace and Peace (the music to your ears),

 

John