Heretical Challenges to the Well Trodden Path of Worship - [A Warning]

|  Cold, Broken, and Empty Hallelujahs

Please begin with this. 

I don't know how you can listen to that and not be on the verge of tears. There is something about this song that hits you in the soul, where the progression of the music accompanies a rising movement of pressure in your chest. 

Many people assume that because the song uses the phrase "Hallelujah" then it is automatically a Christian song. But the chorus, the part that seems so esoteric, is actually quite sad. 

The hallelujah being song is described as being baffled and destructive and cold and broken and lost. 

This is a song about missing the point. 

It is a song about empty hallelujahs. 

The first verse alone is loaded and brilliant - there is this secret chord, the trick to making good music, the the thing that will really get people going and tug at their hearts. It is the idea that the music is actually about you, where we say it is about worship or some noble idea, but it is really just playing the right notes to elicit the right response. The music is just the means to something else. 

And we are told that this secret chord that David has configured, he is playing it to "please the Lord" and it is almost like there is this formal structured setting that people come to play their "secret chords" that has completely lost touch with the reality of what God is interested in. Because the next line simply says, "But you don't really care for music do ya?" 

When you use music and the right notes and progressions as a platform to accomplish the same old self-oriented goals, God has a certain lack of interest in what you are doing. You can do something with the mindset of "pleasing the Lord", but if it is actually about the power of this "secret chord" you've found, then there will always be a distance between what you say you are doing and what you are actually doing.

What David is up to, God isn't into that. The music David is playing has missed the point. But he keeps playing anyways. And the very thing that is in the way, David goes on to do, he plays the secret chord, the thing that really gets the response he is looking for. The baffled king just keeps singing and singing his empty hallelujahs. 

This is what the song is about. 

That you can be singing hallelujah and not actually be singing any sort of hallelujah. 

And beyond the lyrics, the thing that makes Leonard Cohen such a genius is that he uses the very chord progression that misses the point to play the song about missing the point. This is why people can listen to this song without actually knowing what it is about and cry. It just shows that you can put the right notes together and the right builds and rhythm and get people to emotionally throw their hands up, even if the song is communicating against the very thing people are doing. 

I think this has a lot to say to our worship. 

That it might be possible to be "worshipping" without any real worship going on. 

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What happens when worship becomes just about music is that it becomes performance based.

It becomes about putting on the best show. 

The secret chord. 

More like a recital than a worship experience.

And when worship is seen as a particular style of music, then certain "rockstars" develop in that genre and churches simply become a new type of bar where bad cover bands show up to regurgitate what the idols have produced. We take the top bands and artists and repeat it. So if you can't pay to see Chris Tomlin or Hillsong, then just show up to church. 

And it seems that these sorts of cultures that have been produced around worship might be missing the point. And while this is most common with music, it can happen with whatever medium is used to carry out chavah. 

If what we are doing is more about the lights on the stage or the performance of the Christian Top 40, then we have captured the essence of what it means to sing the empty hallelujahs. When eliciting the right response or being a good musician become what we are after, I think it is safe to say that God doesn't really care for that music anymore. 

Because if you don't want God to be a part of it, God will honor that. 

God won't intrude on our recitals and cover band concerts and our mindless pursuit of having "good worship" if we don't want God to.

We have to be honest that it is possible to turn worship into just another way to get something. It is possible to use it, whether it be music or art or liturgy or the Eucharist, for the sake of something else. We can play the secret chords and please the Lord, all the while God is searching for us to realize we are missing the point because it is possible to worship and not actually be doing any worshipping.

However we go to enter into the experience of chavah, we must heed this warning:

That it is easy to end up with a cold and broken and empty hallelujah
and completely miss the point of what we are participating in.

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Note: This is part 3 of a series on worship.




Read Part 1


Read Part 2