The Summary of the Law - AUDIO!

Here's a rough recording of my Summary of the Law song (love God and love neighbor) posted to SoundCloud ... WARNING: It was recorded live sitting at my desk, directly into SoundCloud, using the built-on mic on my laptop.  So it's not great quality, and it distorts whenever it gets too loud.  But it's something!  :)  I hope is that this can be useful to any of you who wanted to hear how the song goes.  The leadsheet (words, melody and chords) is of course still available in the previous post.

The Summary of the Law

The Summary of the Law

Last Fall our church was going through a series on the Ten Commandments.  To bring a New Testament connection to the series we decided to make use of the Summary of the Law (Jesus' words about what is the greatest commandment, as recorded in Mark 12 and Matthew 22).

As a liturgical element, however, The Summary of the Law can get a little clunky if its just spoken or read responsively every time (IMHO).  So I decided I'd try to set it to music.

The result was a simple, singable worship chorus (a little 80s-Maranatha-sounding if you ask me), which we worked into the services during that series from time-to-time as a different way of incorporating The Summary.

In case this is something you or your church might be interested in, here's a link to a free downloadable PDF of the leadsheet for this song.  Click here.

If you give it a try with your church or just sing through it on your own, come back and leave a comment, or send me a tweet (@lukehyder), and let me know what you think!

Psalm 43 (Send Out Your Light)

I've decided to try out SoundCloud as a means of making my music available online, at least to preview.

I've put up a couple tracks on there, the latest of which is an early home recording (using GarageBand on my wife's macbook) of an original song based on Psalm 43.

This song has been published in Psalms For All Seasons, released this year by FaithAlive and the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. It's "43B" in the book (on page 270).

This version is mainly guitar, mandolin, and several layers of voices (mine), and it includes a pre-chorus that was not in the final printed version.

If you give it a listen, please let me know and give me feedback ... comment, facebook, twitter (@lukehyder) ... whatever. I'd love to hear what you think!

Here it is:

02 Psalm 43 (Send Out Your Light)

There's a Wideness

"There's a Wideness in God's Mercy" is one of my all-time favorite hymn texts (by Frederick Faber in 1862), but I've never been a fan of the usual traditional tunes to which it's been set.

So a while ago I worked out a new tune for it. I wanted to capture the expansiveness of the initial lyrical idea (with music that felt like it had some "wideness" to it), as well as express the longing quality of the text as it pleads with listeners to return to the wide-open arms of God's mercy.

I'm experimenting with how best to post these songs on this blog. Feedback is certainly welcome.

For now, I've uploaded a pdf to Google docs. You can view the song here.

A New Direction

Well if anyone has been checking out this blog (and that's a BIG if) ... you may notice that I have not posted since the month before becoming a father. So much for being inundated with baby pictures! That has become the role of facebook, which has indeed become overrun with pictures and posts related to my amazing, beautiful daughter, Eliza Lela, who is now 18 months old!

Now I've decided to commit this space to a new purpose ... the posting and distribution of my musical endeavors.

Who knows if this blog will ever draw any kind of readership, but hopefully it can provide a place where pastors, church musicians, and worship curators looking for new, well-written, scripturally-based corporate worship songs and re:tuned hymns can find a few songs that may be a blessing to their worshipping communities.

So ... look here in the coming weeks & months, and may the songs posted here be used as God wills.

Grace and peace,

luke <><

NT Wright rocks

So... I'm finally getting a blog post up sometime this century... (WARNING: this blog will soon become overrun by baby pictures and the gushing of a new father... 2 weeks today till the due date!)

I'm ever so slowly getting some reading done in the large stack of books on the edge of my office bookshelf consisting of books I've bought in the last four years but not yet read. Right now it's N.T. Wright's classic - Following Jesus.

I've just read the first chapter so far, but it's been awesome. He discusses a different biblical passage (or entire book) in each chapter, as it pertains to who is Jesus is and what it means to follow him.

This first chapter consists mostly of an overview of the book of Hebrews... that's right, the NT book considered so difficult to understand that Michael Card waited to do it last in his series of albums based on books of the bible, even after Revelation. Yet Wright makes it so understandable.

Here's what rocked me about Wright's explanation of Hebrews:

"Look at it from the viewpoint of a wider biblical theology. God chose the human race to be the priests of all creation, offering up creation's worship to him and bringing his wise order to it. When humans sinned, God chose the nation of Israel to be the priests of the human race, offering up human praise and putting into operation God's solution to the problem of sin. Israel herself, however, was sinful; God chose a family of priests (the sons of Aaron) to be priests to the nation of priests. The priests themselves failed in their task; God sent his own Son to be both priest and sacrifice. The inverted pyramid of priesthood gets narrower and narrower until it reaches one point, and the point is Jesus on the cross. The sacrifice of Jesus is the moment when the human race, in the person of a single man, offers itself fully to the creator."

I love this! And one of the things I love about it, is that I think Wright's "inverted pyramid" of the whole arc of biblical theology can be expanded back out again in a chiastic form (like an hour glass, or this shape ><>

I remember fondly every year I worked at Calvin Crest the end of the staff orientation week, when in a worship service the summer staff were commissioned by the executive staff and camp board members with a litany that included these words from 1st Peter 2:9: "But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light."

The whole story of the Bible--the entirety of salvation history--comes down to the single point of Jesus, God in the flesh, on the cross. But like the BIG BANG, that single point explodes outward with the power of the resurrection, the commissioning of the disciples, the pouring out of the Holy Spirit, the birth of the Church, the expansion of the Gospel, and now our participation--in Christ--in God's mission to the world! Because Christ is our one priest and sacrifice, in Christ we who follow him are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, lifting up a living sacrifice--love of God and love of neighbor--by the grace of our Loving Savior!

Cool beans.

Drinking from a fire hose

My good friend, Steve Goodenberger (who've I've been blessed to see while here at the Calvin Worship Symposium), asked me, "So, do you have that drinking from a fire-hose feeling yet?" ... And he asked me that in the middle of the afternoon on THURSDAY... the first day of this three-day symposium!

Today has been very rich... but too rich for me to really try to regurgitate at a quarter till midnight with another long day and long drive coming tomorrow.

So, until I have opportunity to put more thoughts to pixels on the worship experiences of this day and on the wonderful content from Laura Truax, Jeremy Begbie, Dale Bruner (again!) and Marva Dawn... I'll direct you to my twitter page (@lukehyder) for the brief thoughts that caught my ear throughout the day (and which you can follow tomorrow for continued updates!), and then leave you with a quote to ponder from Jeremy Begbie (actually, Begbie was quoting someone else, but I didn't get the reference):

The rhythm of worship at its deepest: "Church is where the Son's journey from the Father's heart into death and hell, and back again, is lived out."

Grace and peace,
luke