Song Talks

As we make our way through the Advent season, we come to the word "peace".  In Hebrew, the word is "shalom". Many greetings and wishing of glad tidings come with the word "shalom". In the Old Testament, the word "shalom" has a variety of meanings, but primarily it refers to completeness. When a wall is complete with no holes or missing bricks it is said to be in "shalom". When relationships are healed there is a sense of "shalom" between the two parties. This peace, or absence of war, must have been what Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was referring to in his famous poem turned into a song, "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day". Longfellow was living in the midst of Civil War times. Battles were being fought in every corner of the eastern seaboard and Longfellow's son, Charles, longed to join the fighting. He was a skilled soldier and decided to join the Union army despite his father's displeasure. Henry ...

Good morning, afternoon or evening! I'm sure you've heard the story of Silent Night and how the song came to be. But in case you haven't, there are a few different versions. Some say that Joseph Mohr wrote the lyrics in 1816 and then when the organ broke, he ran to his friend and composer Franz Gruber and they composed a simple melody that was set to guitar for the Christmas Eve service in 1818. Another version is that Mohr was coming back from a speaking engagement one evening and was taken aback by the stillness of the moonlight mountains and began to reflect on what the night Christ was born must have been like. He sat down on a hillside and composed these well-known lyrics: "silent night, holy night, all is calm all is bright, round yon virgin, mother and child, holy infant so tender and mild. Sleep in heavenly peace, sleep in heavenly peace." Providentially the song came into being that Christmas Eve, when apparently a mouse had chewed away the ba...

New songs are hard to find. The sheer volume is mind-numbing. So when you find a couple of good ones that could possibly span generations, us worship guys use them like crazy. Christmas is different. People want to sing Christmas carols and songs. You only get them once a year and there are a bunch of great songs/carols that you can cram into four Sundays in December.  You never hear anyone complain about the Christmas radio station that plays the old school and new school Christmas music! It's just Christmas music! Who doesn't like to hear Bing Crosby sing a little "White Christmas" or "Adeste Fideles"? And my kids are crazy about Michael Buble's Christmas Albums as well as Pentatonix! So, what do we do at Christmas at Second? We sing Christmas carols and songs, and we sing them a lot! Not only is there a wealth of great music, but the lyrics are rich with theological truth and color. We rarely sing lyrics like "second Adam from a...