Tunesday: Twelve songs of 2016

Welcome to the last ‪#Tunesday of 2016!
This is the soundtrack of my 2016, twelve theme songs that tell the story of my year, through the symphony of highs and lows.

1. “All Glory Be To Christ” – King’s Kaleidoscope

This year began with the refrains of “All Glory Be To Christ,” and it’s followed me throughout the year—from my college fellowship to the the church in my hometown that I’ve been checking out this month.  And this song is one which still rings now at the end of the year as I head into 2017.

2. “Good Good Father” – Chris Tomlin

This was the most overplayed song of my 2016.  It’s an earworm, albeit a very good earworm that testifies of the goodness of God, which has been so evident this year.

3. “Rise Up” – Andra Day

Because Andra Day is awesome.  A new discovery of this year.  This song represens this year with my family, we all love Andra Day’s powerful, unique voice.  And this is easily her best song.

4. “Happiness” – The Fray

The somber tone of this song, as it speaks to the fleeting nature of happiness, was the mood of many days of 2016.  This and a lot of Fray songs have this feel of beautiful melancholy.

5. Holding On To You – Twenty One Pilots

This was a battle cry this year.
Every part of this song resonated with me, especially this verse:
“Fight it, take the pain, ignite it
Tie a noose around your mind
Loose enough to breath fine and tie it
To a tree tell it, you belong to me, this ain’t a noose
This is a leash and I have news for you
You must obey me”
“Entertain my faith.”  Lord, entertain my little faith, in my efforts to keep holding on to You.

6.”Even Me” – I Am They

For every doubt of God’s love that plagued me this year, the truth of the simple chorus of “Yes, Jesus loves me, even me,” was such a sweet comfort.

7. “Air I Breathe” – Mat Kearney

A  dynamic, revitalizing song of surrender.  Truly a breath of fresh air for me this year.

8. “No Longer Slaves” – Jonathan David and Melissa Helser (Bethel Music)

Such a beautiful song of freedom.  An anthem for me as I faced many of the fears that I was enslaved to, and learned to live in the freedom of being a child of God.

9. “Multiplied” – NEEDTOBREATHE

The unofficial theme song of the “Multiply” fall conference this year.  A song of worship and surrender.  Yet wrapped up in this song, for me are many of the challenges and tears and frustrations of this year.  And still, God was working in all of it.  (Also, it sparked my head-first dive into NEEDTOBREATHE’s music.  Good stuff.)

10. “Farther Along” – Josh Garrels

It took a while, but I finally got into Josh Garrels.  To me, this song is peace in the unresolved, a promise that “farther along we’ll understand why” things happened the way they did.  A song of trusting God’s sovereignty.  Sort of like Ghost Ship’s “Where Were You.”  (That might be a Tunesday feature in the near future.)

11. “Hope Is The Anthem” – Switchfoot

“Sometimes what you need is what you fight/Like a wounded man out on the run/
Like shadows hiding from the light/But your love is what I was running from”
Hope was indeed the anthem of my soul this year, my battle march as I fought to not run from what I needed: the love of God and other people.  Even if the battle is a lifelong war, I have hope—that God is who He says He is, and that his promises to see me through are true.

12. “Live It Well” – Switchfoot

(Of course there are two Switchfoot songs on my soundtrack for this year.)
“Life is short; I wanna live it well.”  Enough said.
So good.  A sentiment I want to carry into 2017:
Life is short.  I want to live it well—by making God the one I’m living for.

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He Knows… (Reflections on Omniscience)

This picture is mostly unrelated, save for the fact that it has Santa in it.  It’s just always been one of my favorite random Santa images, just because of the very reasonable fire hazard Santa exposes himself to by sliding down chimneys into possibly lit fireplaces.

 

He sees you when you’re sleeping
He knows when you’re awake
He knows if you’ve been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake!

“Santa Claus Is Coming To Town”

Sometime in June, I was reflecting with a friend on Psalm 139, and she recalled a verse from this song about the ever-watching Santa Claus.  In the psalm, David writes these oddly analogous lines:

You have searched me, Lord,
    and you know me.
 You know when I sit and when I rise;
    you perceive my thoughts from afar.
 You discern my going out and my lying down;
    you are familiar with all my ways.

Psalm 139:1-3 (NIV)

Apparently Jesus, like Mr. Claus, also knows our circadian rhythms, and if he is familiar with all our ways, surely he knows whether we’ve been bad or good.  However, Jesus isn’t just familiar with our actions, but also our thoughts, our unspoken words:
“Before a word is on my tongue you, Lord, know it completely” (Psalm 139:4).

The response to Santa’s omniscience is to try your darnedest to “be good for goodness sake!”  Work harder!  Be better!  Stop pouting!  Stop crying!  Be (or at least appear to be) good.  Hopefully Santa will see you as good enough to get what you want for Christmas instead of coal.

But then on the other hand we have the psalmist.  He stands before the God who knows his every action and thought, the God who has “set our iniquities before [him], our secret sins in the light of [his] presence” (Psalm 90:8).  The possibility of running or hiding is not left open.  David asks, “Where can I go from your Spirit?  Where can I flee from your presence?” (Psalm 139:7).  The answer is nowhere.

The psalmist has nothing to be proud of before a God who knows him inside out.  And yet, surprisingly, his response is praise, and this invitation to God: “Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.  See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting” (Psalm 139:23-24).  It’s  as if the “naughty” kid invited Santa to investigate his actions even more closely and tell him how bad he’s been.

This would only make sense if we knew what kind of God we’re dealing with.  While Santa sits far off, watching us, judging us for our actions, the God of the universe longs to draw near to us and be in relationship with us.  With Santa, we can only hope that we’re good enough.  But the beauty of the gospel is that God, fully knowing that we’ve been nothing but bad, still chose, at great cost to Himself, to give us the greatest gift, the one we never knew we needed—reconciliation with Him, our loving father.

It seems that as a culture we’ve replaced the baby Jesus with a god of our own creation.   Santa is just the kind of god we’d imagine.  Perhaps this is who we think the real God is: an ever-watching, all-knowing cosmic vending  machine, that stays out of our lives for 355 days out of the year, from whom we can get what we want in life if we earn it by good behavior.  But if we don’t appease this tubby, jolly red man, the stakes are far lower than our eternal fate.  At the worst, we’ll get coal.

The story of Jesus is far more terrifying, and yet far more beautiful.

Six Types of Holiday Songs (and why they’re awful)

I’ve was thinking about writing an exhaustive review of the top Christmas carols based on their depth of meaning.  As I began brainstorming and doing preliminary research, I realized it was a Herculean task to catalog and comment on over a hundred songs.  But as I mulled over it a bit more, my tired and cynical ears were able to boil it down to this:

All Christmas songs fall into a handful of basic categories.  

There are, of course, as with any broad categorizations, some exceptions and some songs that span categories.  But for the most part, name a holiday song, and it’ll fit right into one of these:

1. Songs about Jesus

The original holiday songs, Christmas carols are all about Jesus.  More modern songs such as “Mary, Did You Know,” also add beautifully to the canon of meaningful Christmas music.
I actually have very few gripes about songs in this category.  “That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”  My only complaints are against songs like  “Silent Night” that idealize a night that was most likely noisy, dirty, and somewhat chaotic, but still so very Divine.  That’s an article for another day.  The CCM world has also added a good deal of songs to this category, with some good ones like Relient K’s “I Celebrate the Day,” but also muddied the water with many banal cliche originals and reworkings of old carols.  These would form a bonus seventh category: “Attempts by CCM”

2. Alternative Christmas Lore

Any songs about Santa, Rudolph, Frosty the Snowman.  If Christmas isn’t about Christ, we needed a set of stories to tell, a set of characters to sing of at Christmastime.  Even if they distract us from the true meaning of Christmas, these songs are mostly harmless, innocent fun, tales full of cute, friendly characters that we grew up with.  (Much easier to explain Santa to kids than the miracle of the virgin birth.)   No one actually believes in Santa…right???
Other unconventional inclusions: “Christmas Shoes”  or Capital Lights’s “His Favorite Christmas Story,” both tear-jerking stories in song form.

3. Songs about Christmas Traditions

“O Christmas Tree” and its German cousin “O Tannenbaum” are the epitome of this.  It’s a whole song devoted to the adoration of a tree.  A tree.  A more modern take on this particular tradition is “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.”  At least it kind of involves people having fun.  Other Christmas traditions chronicled in song are “Deck[ing] the Halls,” “Jingle[ing] Bells,” and of course the infamous “Twelve Days of Christmas” with its list of terrible gifts to give.

4. Songs of Unjustified Festivity

Pure, undiluted sentiment.  Songs that are happy just because it’s Christmas time, no explanation of why Christmas is so great in any secular or sacred context.
Prime example:  Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmas Time.”  I’ve heard this one too many times on whatever station my dad listens to in the car.
“Feliz Navidad” and “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” have the same underlying tone, except they’re directed to you, the listener.  Bah humbug.  Have yourself a merry little Christmas.  And get off my lawn.
Unjustified festivity.   Mostly worthless.  At their best, they’re fun and cheerful.   At their worst, they’re deeply insensitive to the pain and hardship that some people experience during the holidays, and they’re incapable of consoling with anything more than empty words.

5. Christmas Love Songs

Blech.  Either “All I Want for Christmas is You” or “Last Christmas”… I gave you my heart and the very next day, you gave it away.  All the sappiness of being in love or the blues of being out of love, except intensified for the holidays, because deep down we all dread being alone during the holidays.  *Cue existential crisis*

6. Songs About Winter Weather…for Some

As a resident of a Mediterranean climate zone, I’m tired of all the songs about a “White Christmas” or “Walking in a Winter Wonderland.”  If you grew up at high altitude or far enough north, this might have been your experience over the holidays, but it sure wasn’t mine.  It doesn’t snow for my Christmas.  Nor do I think it snowed for baby Jesus in Bethlehem.  Sorry for the buzzkill, but Jesus was probably not born in winter, when shepherds and their sheep would have been freezing to death.  A truly silent night.
“Let It Snow”?  I think no.

They Bear Witness About Me

What baffles me the most during this time of year is the secular world’s enthusiasm for traditional Christmas carols.

It struck me during a Pentatonix holiday television special.  One moment, they were performing a beautiful rendition of “Mary, Did You Know,” asking Mary—and the audience too, I suppose—whether she knew that the “sleeping Child she’s holding is the great I AM.”  In another moment, in the ending of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” they crescendo into a proclamation of Jesus’s birth.  But then, immediately afterwards, Scott Hoying explains his favorite parts of Christmas—the nostalgia, the old and new memories with family and friends.

And it’s not just Pentatonix. To American culture as a whole, Christmas is about family, friends, gifts, winter, and traditions.  If that’s all Christmas is about, songs like “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “The Christmas Song” about chestnuts roasting on an open fire should suffice.  But we cling to these songs about Jesus, this baby who was supposedly the Son of God, whose birth somehow brought joy to the world.  We listen to this cool story, but it simply remains a story, and we return to our festivities, leaving baby Jesus out in the cold, in a manger some two thousand years ago.

In John 5, the grown-up Jesus says this to a bunch of religious people:

“You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.” (John 5:39-40, ESV)

This verse has been in the back of my mind for quite a while, and I can’t help thinking it applies here as well.

I can just as well imagine Jesus saying something along these lines:
You sing these Christmas carols day and night, because it’s part of your tradition.  You honor me with your lips—declaring me Lord, declaring me the Son of God—but your hearts are far from me.  These songs you sing bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.

It puzzles me to hear people sing about Jesus, play Christmas music that tells of Him, and know that they consider it no more true than stories of Santa.  Surely Jesus’s claims are far more devastatingly life-changing than Santa’s.  I’m not saying people who don’t believe in Jesus can’t celebrate Christmas or enjoy Christmas carols, it just doesn’t make sense to me why they do.  It baffles me in the same way it baffles me to see my dad bow his head to say grace before a meal, when I know he does not believe in God.

But before I sit on my soapbox and criticize American culture and moan about the war on Christmas and all of that nonsense, I need to examine my own heart.  So often, I too find myself in this predicament, guilty of this same accusation.  This Christmas break, I’m motoring through all four gospels at a pace of three chapters per day, which, if you know how dense the gospels are, it’s a good deal of text.  It’s so easy to spend a good chunk of time reading the Bible and still miss Jesus in all of it, and in the next moment turn to my own selfishness, my time, my way, instead of choosing what is better—to sit at His feet, to come to Him and have life.

So God is continuously making his appeal—to be reconciled to Him, to come to Him and have life, especially in this Christmas season.  To those practically born in the church and to those for whom church is the last place they want to go, to the saint and the sinner, the call rings out in churches, in shopping malls, and on national television.
How will you respond?

Tunesday: Seven Christmas Songs for Those Already Tired of Christmas Music

Happy ‪#Tunesday!  And happy holidays!

It’s my guess that some of you, like me have had a tough time getting into the mood for Christmas.  This year, in particular, I haven’t been inundated with Christmas music in every store I enter.  With the exception of the times when I was trying to write spirited Christmas cards, I’ve mostly been listening to Switchfoot and Josh Garrels since Thanksgiving.  For me, the music of the holidays, whether the old familiar carols, or the banal secular “baby come home”-white winter songs all ring quite dull in my ears.

In my search for meaningful, soul-stirring Christmas music that has not been dulled by years of being overplayed, I found these gems, and I wanted to share them with you!
(Each of these songs has an artist in parentheses, who performs a version I quite like, although other versions may exist.)

1. Joy Has Dawned (Kings Kaleidoscope)

This one just sounds so…joyful.  The multi-instrument jamfest from Kings Kaleidoscope celebrates the joy that Christ’s arrival brings.

2. Child of Glory (The Sing Team)

A slow, heartfelt song of worship to the “child of glory, infant holy,” a celebration of what He brings us, and a pledge to live for Him.

3. Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus (Red Mountain Church)

I know I featured this one last year in my post about Advent, but it’s so good.  It’s a beautiful song of yearning for Jesus and the deliverance he brings.  Kings Kaleidoscope also does a very different rendition of this one.

4. Joyful Joyful (The Brilliance)

Beethoven’s Ode to Joy!  A tune many of us have heard before.  But now arranged with lyrics that perfectly to express the joy of Christmas in rhyme and meter.

5. God Is With Us (Sojourn)

A song that celebrates Immanuel, God With Us.  My favorite part is that our response is to “bring him more than our silver and gold.”

6. Lo How A Rose E’re Blooming (Derek Webb)

Wow, I was just looking up the lyrics to this one, and they’re intense, using a rose as a metaphor for Jesus.  It’s beautiful; it’s poetic and full of meaning.   Even though I just discovered this song this year, it’s actually quite a traditional song from the late 1800s/early 1900s; it’s just a bit more obscure than the other Christmas carols that have been overplayed throughout the years.

7.  All Glory Be To Christ (Kings Kaleidoscope)

I consider this more of a New Year’s song, but I suppose since Auld Lang Syne is also played during the Yuletide season, it’s also appropriate.  I really love this one.  It’s the melody of Auld Lang Syne reworked with lyrics that bear more than mere sentiments of friendship, but glory to Christ.  I’ve ranted about this before.

Honorable Mentions:

• Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silent (The Modern Post/Red Mountain Church)
• Come and Stand Amazed (Citizens & Saints)
• Yahweh (The Brilliance)
• Many runners up from Sojourn: Glory Be, A Voice Is Sounding, Knocking At Your Door
  They really have a great collection of 0riginal Christmas songs.

All of the above mentioned songs, for your Christmas joy: