This is the story of Death.

He was born in the most pristine of settings, at the dawn of creation. His first cries were heard amidst the teeming, shining newness of plants erupting joyfully from the fresh new earth.

Along with the birdsong and the rippling rush of four rivers had been the sound of a Voice. Once it issued a warning: “the day when you eat of that tree over there, you shall surely die.

Life was off to a grand start. But at the crunch of a bitten fruit, with the drip of its juices running off human lips, the shadow slipped darkly into world. This was the birthday of our story’s protagonist.

He was there to drink Abel’s blood when it soaked into the dirt. He was there amidst the many sounds of clashing steel and whizzing arrows. He laid joyfully in the sun on the red ground, smiling broadly while he fed corpses to his precious pets—the great black birds with noses for rot.

Death’s rise to supremacy over all the lands was almost immediate.

This was not a reign marked solely by quick endings. He does not just bring the absence of life. He is happy to poison life, to make its every breath raspy, its every heartbeat a quiver. Death can be a slow influence as well as an instantaneous stopping of the heart. He seeps into veins and vessels, into neural pathways, into the mystical fibers of souls. He is as pleased with administering his signature work of bringing closure through slow, subtle processes as well as by the sudden swing of sabers.

His reign has not gone entirely uncontested.

Rumors were whispered. Sometimes a voice shouted. Prophets raised clenched fists into Death’s snarling face and announced that his rule was terminal. Isaiah talked about a meal in which Death featured as the main course for the hungry jowls of the living God. Ezekiel saw a mass grave resurrected from a heap of bones to a living, breathing army.

Then another birth took place amidst the shadows. This birth was viewed as posing some sort of death threat to Death. Soldiers were dispatched to a small village with drawn blades to bring an ending. The little boy somehow made it out. Alive.

(Alive.)

This child became a man. His every breath was breathed into Death’s face. Once a tomb even got emptied. No contender had ever shown such potential for unseating the Throne of Violent Endings.

Then Death got the upper hand as the hands of this tomb-emptying Contender were nailed to a dead tree. Finally, Death could regain his grin, cupping the flow of unstaunched blood with glee. He had his way with this man, this man whose ending put an end to all opposition.

No one could really have guessed the sudden turn that comes next in the tale. It was unforeseeable.

The tomb-emptying dead man escaped the ultimate place of closure. This man clutched so tightly that his blood and breath were squeezed out forever put an end to his own ending.

There is a breech in the system. Fissures popped in the impenetrable superstructure of Death’s governance. The empty tomb of the Crucified is a hole that cannot be patched, a ripped open tear than cannot be resealed, a puncture wound that cannot be plugged.

This is the day Death began choking on his own fumes.

This is the day Death began to age and wrinkle.

This is the day Death began to die.

This day is today.

The biography does not end on this day. Not yet. Death is coughing and spluttering, but his claws are still sharp, his teeth still red. Chomping, snatching, stealing, threshing… it is all still underway. The black birds still fly with bellies full.

Death’s biography cannot be written posthumously. Not today. But the story’s ending can be recorded here with confidence. And the genre is “tragedy.” The great tomb-emptying antagonist of Death has trumpeted news of a new order.  The endings will end.

He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more.

Easter tidings to all.

Dark. Tomb dark.

The Light of the world is snuffed out. No city shines on the hill. The nearest hill around is called “Skull-Place,” and it’s marred by the black stains of dried blood.

The sky was deathly quiet yesterday, on that Friday we now call “good.” Eloi, eloi, lema sabachthani? was met with no reply. Now, the ironclad silence has given way to stone sealed night.

The grave: when silence is at its quietest; when darkness is most dense. No closure is more final than that of a sealed up tomb.

There are no embers to stoke. No spark in which to infuse any sort of hope. All former hoping is now exposed as gross naïveté.  Everything must now be reconfigured around those grim perpendicular bars. The cross mauled and pulverized all promises. Dreams flickering with the heat of prophetic urgency are now lightless and smouldering in the smoke of ruin.

He’s gone. Over in that garden lies the disfigured heap of his corpse.

Yes, today is the day when God’s body laid drying in the dust as a corpse.

Shame on you for hoping. Cursed are you who believed. Fools.

Fools.

Holidays come with special meals. The smells wafting out of the kitchen can conjure memories of playing with our cousins, of long road trips, of good times with family and friends. That was happening the night Jesus sent disciples into Jerusalem to prepare for the Holy Day feast of Passover. The smoke from cooking fires lingered in the lanes.

When Americans celebrate Thanksgiving, we are drawing on a tradition that stretches back hundreds of years. The Passover Meal drew on something that had happened well over 1000 years earlier. But on this night, Jesus altered the symbolism. He redefined the traditions, infused new meaning into this meal.

This is my body. It is for you. Take and eat.

Then he took the cup. He gave thanks once again, and again he gave this cup to his friends. They all drank of it. Probably from the same cup. And with the moisture of the wine still on their lips, small droplets on their beards, the pungent sweetness on their tongues, Jesus said, “This is my blood.” The blood of the covenant, blood poured out—expended, spilled—on behalf of many.

This is not the only cup we will hear about from this night.

Up the Mount of Olives and out into a garden called Gethsemane. Jesus takes Peter, James, and John with him.  They just heard him sing. Now they hear him twist up in dread and misery: Guys, my soul is wrecked. Wrecked to the death. If you could just stay awake and keep watch, I’ve got to pray….

Jesus has just offered a priceless cup to his disciples. No meal can boast of finer fare. The cup of the life-blood of Jesus, the Ultimate Sacrifice, the once-and-for-all Passover Lamb. Blood-wine that is the seal of a new covenant. No cup has ever been filled with more precious contents. There is no drink like this, no cup like the one that somehow holds eternity. This is THE cup, the best of drinks.

But Someone is also offering Jesus a different sort of cup. It is worst of drinks.

And said to them, “I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and keep awake.” And going a little farther, he threw himself on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. He said, “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want.” (Mk 14:34-37)

There were two cups offered on this night. One was the cup of glory. The cup of new life, a cup of silky sweetness that makes dying souls burst out in song in the night. The sort of cup you shout about, invite 1,000-member angel choirs out to sing about. And this is the cup offered to you and me during Communion.

The best of drinks.

The other cup reeks and stinks. Father… remove this cup from me, but I will take it if you want me to. And he took it. The stiffest of drinks. A putrid drink foaming with filth and pain. A cup of pure poison and soured froth. A devilish brew of nails and nakedness. A death draught.

And because He raised that cup to his lips… and now, you and I drink new wine.

Isaac Wardell is the director of Bifrost Arts and the Director of Worship Arts at Trinity Charlottesville (PCA).  He’s been involved in church music and church plants in Georgia, Tennessee, and New York.  He studied at Covenant College.  While serving in New York City he played and performed with the Welcome Wagon, and has produced two Sacred Music anthologies with various musicians under the Bifrost Arts banner (Come O Spirit! & Salvation is Created), with a third due out in April.

I got the chance to chat with Isaac about hymnody, worship, the psalms, what it means to be a contemporary musician serving the church, and the relationship between worship and obedience.  Part One of the interview introduces the history of Bifrost Arts, hymnody and praise music.  Scroll to the bottom to stream an exclusive preview of “Psalm 46” from the upcoming album.  Part Two previews the April 22-24, 2013 conference taking place in Philadelphia titled “The Cry of the Poor.”  Scroll to the bottom to stream an exclusive preview of “By His Wounds” from the upcoming album.

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Hopeful Realism:  Tell us about the genesis of Bifrost Arts.

Isaac Wardell:  While I had been living up in Williamsburg (Brooklyn) [serving at Resurrection Presbyterian with Vito Aiuto], I had been quietly developing an ethos for approaching church music.  I had been studying music in college, studying hymnody, had a strong classical music background, and had been living in an urban, post-Christian community.  Incidentally, for about ten years, I had zero exposure to the “Christian culture industry.”  I was working in church plants which meant that I was deciding what we were listening to.  I wasn’t listening to Christian radio, but was going through hymnals and psalters finding ways for us to worship.  In the summer of 2007, we started doing a series of events we called “Sacred Music Festivals” where in small spaces we would  invite people to come and talk about sacred music and about this crazy novelty of people singing together- probably 75% Christians or religious people, but 25% or so just interested in esoteria.  Those events led to a partnership with Rev. Joseph Pensak, ministering locally to college students, as well as connections with other local churches and pastors who helped.

I was in my twenties at the time and probably felt a stronger burden about church music needing to be more excellent, more beautiful, more soulful…rather than reactive, creative.  That’s what I really excited about, especially because of my context.  I was working in a cultural context where those were the real values.  And much Christian music had such a reputation for being facsimile, consumer-driven and draconian.

HR:  Was there a major shift moving from Brooklyn to Charlottesville?

IW:  Bifrost has changed a lot.  As you said, now I work in Charlottesville, VA, essentially in a megachurch.  There are suburban evangelicals, brilliant minds like James Hunter and Nicholas Wolterstorff, college town culture and an evermore diversifying racial complexion.  When I think about how Bifrost can help the church, the idea of being aesthetically innovative and challenging the church to think about the arts in a much more deeply theological way is more of just one sliver of what we’re doing now.  We do much more education and thinking about how we can educate congregations, worship committees, and people involved in planning worship services to think about their way of approaching worship services.

While I’m really excited about releasing this record in the coming months, I’m actually starting to feel more and more that these church curricula that we’re putting out and these conferences and small events are the most helpful thing that we do.  It’s not so much just modeling this sort of ethos but really unwrapping it and showing some biblical concepts that you can bring into your congregation that can really give your congregation a new vocabulary for worship.

When I first came to Trinity it became obvious that our worship vocabulary was so impoverished.  People have “traditional-contemporary,” “high church-low church,” people talk about being relevant…all these things that are really not very descriptive about what the bible has to say about worship.

HR:  Tell me a little bit about a tension you might feel in your work between tradition and innovation.  Singing hymns in new contexts seems to have gained a lot of momentum and quite a following over the last decade or so.  I’ve noticed that the times when the Bifrost records do cover hymnody there isn’t an automatic impulse to necessarily “re-tune” the setting.

The hymn conversation is a fascinating one.  My personal thinking has evolved a lot in the last ten years.  The last thing I want to do is offend anybody, especially my friends who are involved in setting old hymns to new music.  A lot of people who grew up in evangelical churches didn’t grow up singing hymns.  I grew up singing popular Christian music.  When I got to college, I discovered hymns- the depth, beauty, poetry…all these things that were clearly missing from my previous worship experience.  A lot of people have that experience through RUF and others setting those hymns to new music.  That wasn’t exactly my experience because I went to school on a music scholarship, and was involved in a really traditional music program.  My discovery was in the classroom.  My falling in love with them wasn’t in a context of innovation, but rather just falling in love with them for what they were.  I have a more romantic relationship with the organ and the hymnal.  I don’t have a personal history of thinking of “old, dead hymns.”  When I first heard “Be Thou My Vision” it was a new beautiful, adult experience for me.

Part of what I did in my twenties when I was working at these church plants was just opening up the hymnal.  We didn’t have an organ.  It wasn’t some kind of evangelistic decision.  We were just trying to interpret these hymns in a faithful way.  If you listen to the Bifrost records, to a song like “Just A Closer Walk With Me” that’s just me playing the song.  There’s strings and a particular musical perspective that I’m bringing to it, but we certainly weren’t trying to turn anything upside down on its head and we weren’t trying to indict anything.

HR:  Inevitably every artist makes some sort of aesthetic decision.

IW:  Sure.  And I’ve spent the last four or five years digging even more deeply into the way I feel.  At this point I think I’ve come full-circle in thinking that the problem that hymns address is obvious.  Everyone can agree that in turning on [Christian] radio, the music doesn’t address real theological questions, all the facets of the human heart.  And you open up hymnals and they address that problem.  We can agree on that.  Beyond that, to say that hymns are the answer to all of our modern worship problems is problematic.  If you bring discernment and a historical ear to your hymnal you’re going to find some beautiful things in there, some things that were beautiful because of their context, and some things that are not beautiful because of the failures of their times.

Our children’s choir came in yesterday singing “Jesus Loves me This I Know.”  In this and a plethora of other hymns written between 1825 and 1925, that great 19^th century British period of hymnody, there are a lot of references to dying.   “And when you die Jesus will hold or cradle you.”  It’s alarmingly consistent.  “If I love him when I die/He will take me home on high.”  You look into it historically and you find that during that period of time in the Industrial Revolution is the highest rate of childhood and infant mortality in world history.  In all these Sunday School classes, you have these kids showing up to worship and having to deal with their peers dying.  So you have people in ministry answering those questions.  You can picture those conversations and their attempts at answers that make their way into their music.  Some of these answers seem odd or perhaps even questionable, but for the moment they were appropriate responses in their contexts.  Likewise, you open up the hymnal and you see people answering questions in hymns.  Addressing questions about war, inexplicable suffering and death, globalization and mission; in the best-case scenarios you see these hymns answering the real questions that people are wrestling with in their times.

I don’t think that hymns answer those questions for our time.  What we can learn is to be inspired by our hymnal to actually look at the questions people are asking in our times.  You read James Hunter’s book: central questions about identity, sexuality, what does it mean to be a person, how do we know that life has any value?  Questions about money, human relationships…these are the questions that are on the news every night.  I don’t know that I can turn on the radio and hear Christian music answering these questions.  But I also don’t necessarily know that you open your hymnal and find answers to these questions.

I’d like to issue a call to songwriters not to stop writing songs and just use your hymnal, but to write new things.  The new Bifrost record, and probably any subsequent records, will be all original hymns and worship songs.  It’s important for us to start modeling that.  In some way there’s something incredibly faithless about resigning yourself to saying that “they wrote all this great stuff back there and we’re not capable of writing stuff like that now.”  I’d like to suggest that the same Holy Spirit that inspired Isaac Watts is the Holy Spirit that can inspire us to write something as beautiful as “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.”

HR:  Beyond answering specific questions for a specific place and time, how do you see worship music working within a framework of a ‘theology of desire?’  Your last conference’s curriculum began to explore some of these themes, seeing a human person as primarily affective or liturgical, how do you design worship with music that takes that whole person seriously?  Hymns don’t let you necessarily range the whole spectrum of emotions in the way that perhaps even the most simple praise chorus, that you could pick on all day, may be able.

I’m assuming you’re probably familiar with Jamie Smith and Desiring the Kingdom?  I love Jamie and his writing and teaching, and his new book, Imagining the Kingdom is explicitly about applying that question in a worship context.

For my Presbyterian, Reformed context, one of the main areas of poverty in the PCA’s collective understanding about worship is this understanding of worship as being just a transmission of information.  Presbyterians get really excited about hymns being good theology set to music.  And there’s something to that.  But this fundamental understanding of worship being information and a system of understanding imparted to you so that music is just a vehicle- that’s a terribly small way of understanding what worship is.

In the Liturgy, Music, and Space (LMS) curriculum, we try to give the reader two handles.  On the one hand, worship has a formative aspect; worship forms us to think a certain way.  And worship has an expressive aspect; in worship our love for God is expressed.  Worship is the expression of a whole relationship with God and its also the formation of a whole relationship with God.

That’s what we’re trying to offer, not contemporary-traditional, not high-low, but formative-expressive as the most scriptural worship categorization.  These two qualities are manifest in scripture, from the Old Testament to the New Testament, that you see God telling the people, ‘when you worship I want you to do it in the very formative way.’  Even Deuteronomy, he says, ‘I want you to write these truths and hang them in front of your eyes on little leaflets and I want you to write it on your doorposts.’  And even when God is telling the Israelites how to celebrate Passover, he says ‘I want you to set your table, sit down, and you’ll say this prayer, and the oldest son is going to ask the dad this question and the dad will answer in this way…’  This is a very formative prescription for worship.

At the same time, you have all these instances in the scriptures, from the prophets right through the New Testament, where God tells his people, ‘I’m not interested in you just going through the motions of worship, not interested in your feasts and festivals, if your heart is not right and your not being obedient to my word.’  And that’s the expressive part.  There are times throughout the bible that you read of these exuberant expressions, things much more expressive than we’re comfortable with: banging cymbals, beating drums, David’s dancing in the street.  Even in the New Testament where in Peter’s worship services people are accused of being drunk.  There is a very descriptive element of expressive worship in the scriptures.

Isaac Wardell (Photo by Adam Clark)

I don’t think that delineating between praise choruses and hymns is always necessarily helpful or accurate.  The category that we use around here is ‘scripture songs,’ a subcategory being ‘psalms.’  I think those are really important categories to have in this conversation, because the Psalms are a best-case scenario due to the fact that they are super-expressive.  They’re very raw.  They’re more expressive than any Chris Tomlin song.  The Psalms are the psalmists bringing all their whole hearts to God.  But the Psalms are also deeply formative.  The Psalms are really challenging.  They don’t just give you words for what you already feel.  They give you words to grow into.  I think the Psalms have to be our model…you see that from Jesus.  When he went to worship God, he learned how to worship using the Psalms, he sung the Psalms, and in his hour of need, Jesus quoted the Psalms.  When he’s hanging on the cross, he’s not extemporizing.  He’s not just expressing, but he quotes something he would have sung.  You see the Psalms even forming Jesus’s heart and giving him language for how to talk to God.

The Psalms are the starting place and then out of the Psalms you have a criterion from which you can judge how good a praise song is and how good a hymn is.  If you start to see a great disconnect between our hymnody and our psalter or praise chorus catalog and our psalter, it should be clear to us where the poverty is.

But that’s not the way we operate.  We’ve gotten so upside-down in our understanding.  You have both traditional people that would hate it if you brought the emotion of the Psalms into worship, and then there are those who are all about expression, who have made an idol out of emotive expression – so that when you try to make a case that the bible just doesn’t want us to express things we feel but to learn to express things that we ought to feel – they’d react really poorly as well.  I think the psalms are indicting on the state of our worship wars.  The one thing we can agree on is that nobody wants to worship that way.

HR:  I recently interviewed Sarah DeShields from Renovatus Church in Charlotte, NC.  They’re really trying to hold this in tension and use the handles “the liturgy and the shout” to speak of that dialectic of formation and expression.  Interestingly, they’ve wound up doing a few psalm-based texts to do this on a congregational level.

[Dear HR Readers: please forgive the delay in posting. I have been directing most of my writing energy to completing the manuscript for 'TheoMedia,' my latest book project. Almost done... just almost. Below is a piece that I was hoping to include in the manuscript, but I am afraid it will have to be cut due to space. So here is a "deleted scene," if you will.]

I am not very handy with technology stuff, but from what I can gather, for a technological update to enable a device or program to deal with new situations and scenarios, something internal must be adjusted and tweaked (or something new purchased).

In contrast, the working assumption for the church’s hermeneutical endeavors is that the Bible maintains integrity and sufficiency as an authoritative medium regardless of time’s passage, even in a high-tech digital age.

But unlike our screens, the pages of the Bible lack a “refresh” icon. So the Bible’s wisdom and theological vision must be appropriately interpreted for new situations and scenarios that emerge along time’s onward march. Though we have a “static” textual corpus it is given “dynamic” properties though the church’s varied traditions of interpretation.[1] To read Scripture like a script is to take a static document and enact it in a particular, contemporary context.[2]

Before the closing of the canon, the process of Scripture’s expansion and development could be understood to some degree as a process of updating and upgrading. Editorializing was certainly a part of the ongoing tradition of Scripture. And new material was gradually added which affected, to varying degrees, how the previous material was understood. As the corpus of sacred texts was enlarged, the older content was not erased or dragged to the “trash” file. It was just interpreted in light of the additions.

We especially see this hermeneutical process at work when early Jewish Christians tried to make sense of Jesus in light of their sacred texts. The Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension necessitated a Christological re-appropriation of all previously penned Scripture.

In other words, the early Christians—Jewish and soon also Gentile—were faced with a hermeneutical crisis. This was perhaps their most urgent question: are the sacred texts of Israel compatible with the Person and work of Jesus?

Rather than ordering an entirely new media product fresh off the shelves to satisfy their need for a sacred corpus tidily conducive to Christology, they opted for hermeneutics. They opted for a vigorous discipline of re-reading their old media in light of the Word becoming flesh, and then dying, rising, ascending, and eventually returning. The media announcement of the Gospel has become a primary hermeneutical lens for the church’s understanding of Christian Scripture. We read through Jesus:

“Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word. When he had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high. . ..” (Heb 1:1-3)

The finality and sense of authority perceived in the word of Christ (and the need to preserve that finality and authority as heresies grew) led to the official closing of the canon. Ever since, the New Testament’s testimony to Jesus has been deemed sufficient for interpreting not only all the Scriptures, but also all new situations in life.

So the content of Scripture is theologically competent to guide us into futuristic, high-tech horizons without a cutting edge update. But we do need fresh, Christological interpretation of our ancient, sacred texts that tenders wisdom as we live in a society ever searching for the next and the new.

Inspired by my fellow contributors’ Advent posts, I’d love to share a few items from my community’s Advent observation.

1) Each of the last several years, I’ve had some part in writing and/or curating a church devotional.  Even though these reflections usually take place while there are still leaves on the trees and it’s not yet sweater weather, this rhythm of pre-Advent preparation has been a pastoral boon for me.  Unlike some things, even some sermons, I’ve found this exercise to be preparatory rather than exhausting.  By the time we’re lighting candles on Sunday morning (in an elementary school gym), I’m more prepared and excited rather than bored or tired.  Here is this year’s devotional (available for free download).  Clicking here will get you to some of the previous material, also freely given.

2) It has been really special as a pastor immersed in a community (both church and wider) chock-full of creative types to attempt to foster that creativity.  To pastor people who consider (and some who don’t) themselves artists has been one of the most joyful, challenging, and favorite parts of my duties and the Lord’s provision.  This season, I especially enjoyed the give-and-take that went along with commissioning this piece for our church’s Advent.  I got the opportunity to work conceptually with the artist, Nathan Hood, on a work that would adorn our bulletins and the advent devotional.

© 2012 Nathan Hood

Here are some of Nate’s words on his process:

When putting things together for this Advent imagery there were a few themes in my mind upfront, including the power of God in the helplessness of a human baby and the mystery of God made known in Christ. Reflecting on it now, two things come to mind most readily.

First is the awesomeness, the wonder, the amazing happening of the Uncreated becoming a created being, becoming human. The question always arising from that thought for me is, “If God himself were to walk among us, what would God do, what would God be like if we could see, touch, hear, taste, and smell him?”  ”What would he be up to?”

Secondly, comes the thought that Christ is at once God and man, our King and our Servant, the Lion and the Lamb. There are many realities alive in Him at the same moment. There are many alive in us, and so many if we have received the love and the sonship he holds out to us.

What do you see? What are your thoughts during this time?

Ultimately in our expression of these truths words fail us, as does imagery. Forgive me for attempting both, and thank you for letting me be a part of this. May our capacity to receive the love of our Father grow, increase, abound. Peace to you church.

3) Finally, our music ministry at church decided to give some of our Advent music away.  In 2010, this short record came together as a companion to our Advent devotion.  At the time, we were (and still are) trying to figure out what it means to observe this season of waiting and how Advent tempers our unabated early embrace of Christmas (or at least the sentimental christmas-iness around us).  The result is a “night-themed” collection of alternately chilly and warm devotionally-sprung, but missionally-minded tunes.

I’d love to invite you to take advantage of this here:

Hope, peace, joy, and love during this season.  May God enable you through his Spirit to be an attentive and expectant wait-er.  May we anticipate our Lord’s second coming with the “thrill of hope” that we experience and celebrate his first.

-Chris Breslin