After last Wednesday’s gathering I received a couple questions and comments about one of the songs we sang. “This doesn’t sound like a worship song. Why are we singing it in worship?” Good observations. So I thought I would take a moment and say a little something about it.
The song is “Learning How To Die” by Jon Foreman. It tells a story. In other words it doesn’t just state stand-alone facts, it follows a narrative. The characters are “he” and “she.” This could be a young man and his aging grandmother or even mother, regardless it is some “she” who is close enough to death’s door to see though to the other side. Or perhaps this is the same “she” and the same “he” we read about in the Proverbs, the fair lady Wisdom and a maturing young man. And perhaps not.
The fact that the song doesn’t mention God explicitly may seem like it disqualifies the song from being considered worshipful in and of itself. But I would simply want to bring up a story in our Bibles found in the book of Esther. The entire book doesn’t so much as mention God and yet the story is absolutely God-glorifying at it’s core. That alone isn’t justification for this song to be sung this morning, however, I bring Esther up because it reminds us that our God is so big and preeminent that everything is always glorifying Him at some level because every little story is a part of His bigger story. Every story and every character and every song is either magnifying Truth or magnifying a lie. Every song or story is either propaganda or it is proclamation. And therefore every character is participating in one or the other.
So the title is a good summary of what the song is about, learning how to die. Worship? Really? Learning how to die? Yes. Think about what Jesus, in His life and death, teach us (one of the many things). He teaches us that if we want to really live, we have first learn to cry. If we want to really become strong we must learn brokenness. If we want to experience true joy and satisfaction, we must learn emptiness. He even explicitly taught this paradoxical reality when He said that we must lose our life to find it. And for the Christian, that is precisely what our wild journey on this globe is all about, it is about learning how to die. And that of course means every day we wake with breath, we practice living well. We must be those who are living with our mortality in view. Walking toward the sunset toward our sense of home.
You see, Jesus came and lived and died not so we could live. No. Jesus died so we could die. The rest of the story is that three dark days later our Sovereign Christ rose and conquered death and that means this enemy death, has been defanged and defeated. Death has lost all power and while it still makes us cry, it cannot sting us with hopelessness.
Proverbs tells us that the end of joy is grief. To bring this doctrine a little closer to the ground, all we must do is look around at the people around you. One of you will be the last one breathing. You sit around your dinner table with all of your favorite people knowing that inevitably, one of you will have to say goodbye (if only for a little while) to all the others. That is a heavy dose of reality I know, but that shouldn’t make us shrink back from living and loving and risking. In fact it should do the opposite. This reality should make us live and love and risk all the more.
This view, this understanding is not something that comes pre-packaged and ready to download on some abstract, intellectual flash drive. This is something that our loving God teaches us by taking our hand and walking with us thought the valley of death-shadow. This is something that the Good Shepherd teaches us by comforting us with His rod and staff as He whispers in our ears, “Hold on my child, I will never leave you or lose you. You are mine and we will be together forever. We are going home.”
When you hear songs or stories like “Learning How To Die” try not to get hung up on on a narrative that doesn’t explicitly mention “God.” Recognize His hand—His signature at the end of the narrative. When you hear Truth magnified, even if it isn’t a “worship song”, worship the God who holds your hand and is whispering in your ear. Our God who put on flesh and came to die to teach us how to die.