“Sing to the Holy One a new song; the whole earth to the Holy One, sing” (Psalm 96.1).
The late Tim Hauser of The Manhattan Transfer once said that a band or artist shouldn’t record a cover version of a song unless they had something new to bring to it. He was talking about their choice to record a version of a Beach Boys tune, but it holds true for any song. We shouldn’t just sing the song as it’s always been sung. We should ask what we bring to make the song new.
We have a whole book full of songs in the Psalter. To make sense of them, they’re classified in categories and subcategories. There are songs of praise and there are songs of sadness. Many Bibles add headings above each of these psalms telling us its category, it’s genre if you will.
Psalm ninety-six is, as one of my Bibles describes it, a “song of praise to God the ruler and judge.” It encourages us to lift our voices with all of creation to the One who made all things and whose power is far greater than ours. It ends by celebrating the Holy One who will come to judge the world with righteousness. We Christians have read and sang these words in this genre for generations.
Which is funny since it’s encouraging us to sing a new song.
I’m guilty of approaching the psalms as a lot of artists approach well-known songs. There’s a reverence for the words and a reluctance to tamper with the sacred. Psalm ninety-six is a song of praise, it says so right above it. It’d be wrong to sing it any other way. Wouldn’t it?
Sometimes artists so effectively make a song their own, many of us forget that their version is a cover. “All Along the Watchtower” is a great example. Most of us would probably say that Jimi Hendrix wrote that song. But his recording is a cover of a Bob Dylan song. Hendrix made the song his own. He took it from a slow folk song to…well, a classic. He brought to it some of himself. And, in so doing, he sang a brand new song.
While sometimes it’s good to let the psalms guide us to praise when we cannot find the words, I think they, like every song, are wanting us to bring ourselves to them. They are no more bound by the genre and categories written into our Bibles than any song is bound to its assigned genre. And even a song of praise can be sung in sorrow.
Doing this, however, asks more from us than if we only follow the proscribed and traditional ways. We have to be honest before the song and before Christ. Instead of singing the song as it’s always been sung, we have to open our heart and allow it to set the tone, the tempo, and the mood. It is difficult, and it might make us face feelings we’d prefer to keep hidden.
But we might find a new song to sing.