"New and Full"

The polymath John Ruskin once famously defined the sermon as "30 minutes to raise the dead." Let's see if — relying on the good grace of the Word and the Spirit — perhaps six minutes will do. 

This is a song that brings a lot of old threads together: 

• a short (2:25) excerpt from "Those Who Hear Will Live," an unpublished Easter sermon on John 5; in which ...
• the kerygmatic real presence of Christ is invoked;
• along with the phrase "from the beginning" (the title of the ELP song that has haunted me from my youth);
• some chord changes that have been with me for a long time, even from when I first picked up a guitar, but more specifically, from tracks on the first and second albums ("The Call" and "Grace Upon Grace," respectively), and those are just in the bridge, which I could play until the kingdom comes;
• the Psalms, and in this case some overlooked verses that I think have prophetic bearing on ...
• eschatology (the doctrine of Christian hope);
• everything coming together as the calendar turns to the season of Advent, with the traditional Gospel reading coming from the Olivet discourse: "one will be taken and one will be left." 

The video also includes a simple, old charcoal sketch from 1996 that finally sees some daylight here.

I should acknowledge other influences, like certain songs of Bruce Cockburn, Andy Thornton, and others that — short of collapsing into rap as such — do not shrink from issuing a similar battery of words to describe the depravity of the human condition (don't ask me to name the songs, as the titles elude me at the moment); others like those of Nick Cave and Doug Gay that draw on apocalyptic themes; a renewed conversation about matters of first importance with a treasured friend who is also an extraordinary poet; and, of course, my own (sometimes actually righteous) indignation at the "progress" of recent human affairs. As Ernst Kasemann said, "Apocalyptic is the mother of theology." It is also the hopeful stuff toward which we gravitate as conditions in church and society deteriorate.

For the record, "New and Full" was written on the 12-string, which only arrived last Friday. After messing about with another song that day, the musical setting came Saturday, which I recorded and edited on Sunday (recorded on both 6 and 12-strings, but the 6 sounded better for the bulk of it; I only added the 12-er at the end for the big, heavy chorus effect), the words came between Sunday and Monday; vocals were recorded and edited Monday, the old sermon excerpt was added either late Monday or early Tuesday, with almost no edits, apart from snipping the sample itself. I think I excised one stammered syllable, but otherwise all the changes in the cadence of the sermon aligned perfectly with the musical changes. It is as if the old recording had waited two decades to find its soundtrack and be re-released into the world. 

Ultimately, "New and Full" is a total gift, one that came very gradually, then suddenly. People often quote Hemingway's twofold description of how he went bankrupt to note how disasters often materialize, but — believers, take note — apparently gifts can come that way, too! 

Soli Deo Gloria. Come, Lord Jesus.