Song, Resurrection

On Easter, I wrote a song. At church, we played the song for the first time. It was an exhilarating moment. I had hoped it would be exhilarating, and I still wonder if that kind of hope is wrong.

The word resurrection is in the name of my church. The resurrection is something I never doubted. It was never that difficult to believe. If you can have incarnation, resurrection is not that much of a stretch. Yet, I have been struck by the number of people who have denied it, and have expended much energy trying to deny it. There are all sorts of apologist kind of debates, which became familiar to me growing up around evangelical circles. However, when I was in Freiburg engaging people in evangelistic discussion, the question was not about proofs. There seemed to be an overall consensus, right or wrong, that something so long ago could not be proved for certain, though the evangelicals are right in saying that the testimonies and behavior of the Apostles are worth noting. The question was more whether we need to believe in the Resurrection. Is it something truly so important? Can it be a symbolic myth, that folks could choose to believe if they are comfortable with it? It seemed to them an unnecessary and divisive miracle.

It occurred to me that, in a fashion not untypical to evangelicalism, I had lost the theology and the beauty of the Resurrection in the apologia. Easter was a holiday of uncomfortable clothes and sugary pastels. We sang beautiful songs about the cross, but the songs about the Resurrection seemed comparatively shallow.

Easter, while attending a church that purposefully celebrates the Resurrection, inspired me to write a song about it. I wanted to write a song that would manage to capture a drop of the rapturous joy, rich theology and weighty consequences that convinced Paul that any theology without it is hopeless. We will follow our Rabbi, our King, from death to life, and that joyful thought should be a sobering, happy weight on our hearts that we cannot ignore.

If my song (or the words above) could catch a drop of that endless waterfall, it is by God's merciful grace. These were my thoughts as I wrote it, and I hope they were holy, as much as they could be so, and I hope that these were words that God could smile on.

I wanted to share it with my church, and dread set in. It seems arrogant to want to even write something about it, something almost too beautiful to utter. I worried that the song structure would not be compatible to group singing or that my theology would be off. I wanted it so badly to be accepted that I spent too much time worrying. Not exactly a Resurrected way of looking at things, free of pride and fear.

In any case, we sang it, and it went very well. People sang and seemed to truly worship (as did I), which is all a praise song can ask for. I reveled in it a bit, fantasizing about selling the rights to Chris Tomlin and growing rich off the royalties. I have always dreamed of being some sort of artist, and I wonder if others, particularly Christian artists, struggle between worry and pride, to the point where the beauty of the message is lost in self-reflection (the blog itself perhaps is an attempted to exorcise this). C.S. Lewis seemed to know this. Biographers marvel at how humble he managed to stay among is fame and success. He wrote that God wants us to be the kind of creatures that can make a cathedral or symphony, know very well that it is good, take joy in this goodness, and go along our way. He said that true humility dispenses with modesty. As little creators we can revel in the joy of the Creator, in as long as we are learning to reflect him, as long as we are learning to follow Christ, out of pride and into art, out of self and into Him, out of death and into life abundantly, resurrection.