Urban Doxology – Art & Theology

Pentecost Playlist

May 14, 2023May 17, 2023 Victoria Emily Jones3 Comments

Celebrated fifty days after Easter, Pentecost is one of the great feasts of the Christian year. It commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit on Jesus’s apostles when they were gathered in Jerusalem for the Feast of Weeks ten days after Jesus ascended to heaven, marking the birth of the church. Acts 2 describes the Spirit’s coming as accompanied by a “rushing mighty wind” and “tongues of fire”—quite the dramatic entry! The Spirit filled the apostles with the miraculous ability to preach in speech that was comprehensible to all the many Jewish pilgrims, from various language groups, who were gathered in the city, resulting in the conversion that day of three thousand to the Jesus Way.

I’ve compiled a Spotify playlist of one hundred-plus Pentecost songs that celebrate God’s Spirit poured out over the face of the earth, bringing life and power. The indie folk genre is heavily represented, but there’s also an Appalachian fiddle tune, a Renaissance motet, a Native American dance song, a Russian Orthodox kontakion, Sacred Harp hymns, modern classical, Pentecostal gospel, blues, jazz, pop, lo-fi, and more. I hope to capture something of the Spirit’s dynamism with these selections.

The Holy Spirit ministers in a handful of ways. He renews, purifies, transforms. He gifts and empowers. He guides and illumines and comforts. He dwells within, a constant friendly presence. He intercedes for us with wordless groans. He unites believers across lines of difference, making us one. He enables us to bear fruit—love, joy, peace, etc.—for God’s glory and the world’s good.

So many songs centered on the Holy Spirit have an individualistic focus and a gentle, subdued tone. The Spirit does of course minister to the individual, and can be gentle and soothing (Jesus refers to him as the Comforter, after all!), and we often invoke him in our weariness. But the Spirit is also wild and uncontainable. And the life he brings is not merely of an inward spiritual kind; his impact manifests itself in tangible deeds out in the community, as those whom he fills go forth to serve their neighbors after the example of Christ.

Urban Doxology’s “Spirit, Send Your Fire” is a good example of a Holy Spirit song with an outward, communal focus, and it’s full of anticipatory excitement:

In terms of energy, consider the vigor with which Bach ornaments the final line of the Gloria, “Cum Sancto Spiritu in gloria Dei Patris” ([You, Jesus Christ, alone are the Most High] with the Holy Ghost in the glory of God the Father), in his B minor Mass. And for wildness: the loud clashing of the piano chords in Daniel Glover’s “The Descent of the Holy Spirit” from Misteria, evoking a sense of the disorientation that must have been felt on that historic day when the Spirit came suddenly sweeping in and the apostles started speaking multiple languages at once. (Some observers thought they were drunk!)

“Let the Waters” is another high-octane Pentecost song—this one in a rock style—which Michael Gungor wrote in 2014 when he was part of the Liturgists. In 2020 he revisited it with the Good Shepherd Collective, adding as a tag the African American spiritual “Wade in the Water” [previously]. In this context the spiritual references both the Spirit’s tendency to disrupt and the ancient Jewish folk belief that an angel would periodically come down to stir the waters of a certain pool in Bethesda, activating its healing properties (see John 5:4). The GSC released this new arrangement later in 2020 under the title “Pentecost,” featuring on vocals Gungor, Liz Vice, and Charles Jones.

Let the waters cool ya
Let the Spirit move ya
Feel the fire on your lips and sing your hallelujah
Sing your hallelujah

O my soul, sing hallelujah

Wade in the water
Wade in the water, children
Wade in the water
God’s gonna trouble the water

Led by Betty Pamptopee of Isabella Reservation, Michigan, “Methodist Hymn” is the first verse of “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing” in Ojibwe (but to the tune of “Alas, and Did My Savior Bleed”). Even though “tongues” in the song’s titular first line is probably referring not to languages but to the individual’s desire to maximize God’s praise—as in “Oh, that I had more tongues to praise you with!”—I love the implications for Pentecost, when the gospel went out in many tongues, the beginning of the “proclaim[ing] and spread[ing] through all the earth abroad / the honors of [Jesus’s] name.” I think there’s massive potential for a multilingual choral arrangement of this hymn. (I’m thinking, for example, of Laurel MacDonald’s “Qui habitat,” featured here.)

Several of the songs on the playlist highlight the Spirit’s creativity, such as verse 1 of “Come, Holy Spirit” (alt title: “Holy Spirit, Groaning”) by David Benjamin Blower. Genesis 1 says that in the beginning, the Spirit hovered over the waters of chaos—implying that he was active in creation. And he is still a creative force, bringing forth new life.

Hildegard of Bingen [previously], a twelfth-century nun and polymath from Germany, wrote several beautiful Latin antiphons to the Holy Spirit, both words and music, which together convey a sense of mystery and awe. One of them is “Spiritus sanctus vivificans,” from her Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations, sung here by soprano Anna Sandström:

Here are two English translations; I can’t decide which I like best, so I proffer them both:

Holy Spirit, 
giving life to all life,
moving all creatures,
root of all things,
washing them clean,
wiping out their mistakes,
healing their wounds,
you are our true life,
luminous, wonderful, 
awakening the heart
from its ancient sleep.

Trans. Stephen Mitchell

The Spirit of God
is a life that bestows life,
root of the world-tree
and wind in its boughs.

Scrubbing out sins,
she rubs oil into wounds.

She is glistening life
alluring all praise,
all-awakening,
all-resurrecting.

Trans. Barbara Newman

Most songs take the form of calling on the Spirit to descend once more with the breath or fire of revival, such as many of the old hymns: by Ambrose (retuned by Bradford Loomis and Beth Whitney), Rabanus Maurus, Bianco da Siena (retuned by Seth Thomas Crissman, and another version by Luke Brodine), Martin Luther (retuned by Paula Best and Tara Ward), Heinrich Held (retuned by Joshua Bennetch), Isaac Watts (retuned by Jon Green), Joseph Hart (retuned by Stephen Gordon), Charles Wesley (retuned by Jered McKenna), Benjamin Beddome, and Samuel Longfellow (retuned by Seth Thomas Crissman, and another version by Greg Yoder, both of The Soil and The Seed Project).

For example, we might ask the Spirit to increase our love for God and others. In Watts’s “Come, Holy Spirit, heav’nly dove,” we beseech him to come “with all Thy quick’ning pow’rs; come, shed abroad a Savior’s love, and that shall kindle ours.” Or elsewhere, similarly, to “light up our mortal frame” with love, “till others catch the living flame” (Ambrose). The Spirit also kindles belief and trust. “Revive our drooping faith,” prays Hart.

(Related post: “Pentecost roundup”)

Further, the Spirit knits together diverse peoples into a brand-new family whose head is Christ. Fr. Peter Raymond Scholtes, a Catholic priest living on the south side of Chicago, penned the post–Vatican II hymn “One in the Spirit” (aka “They’ll Know We Are Christians by Our Love”) against the backdrop of the civil rights movement. It proclaims that Christians are united by their share in, as the apostle Paul puts it, “one body and one Spirit . . . one hope . . . one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all . . .” (Eph. 4:2–5), and prays “that all unity [across all humankind] will one day be restored.” It also emphasizes the importance of the church’s public witness through acts of love. As Jesus says in John 13:35, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Love is the primary fruit of the Spirit that Paul lists in Galatians 5:22–23. Here’s a jazz arrangement of the hymn performed by Ruth Naomi Floyd:

Unity is also the theme of one of four featured hymns from the Orthodox liturgy for Pentecost, the text of which translates to: “When the Most High descended and confused tongues [at the Tower of Babel], he scattered the people; but when he distributed the tongues of fire, he called all to unity. Therefore, with one voice, let us praise the most Holy Spirit.” Pentecost is often referred to as a reverse Babel.

There are several musical settings of scripture on the playlist, including:

“Psalm 104: Lord, Send Out Your Spirit” by Roderick Bell and Rawn Harbor, a setting of Psalm 104:1, 24, 29–30, 31, 34, with an adapted verse 30 serving as the refrain: “When you send forth your spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground.”
“O Children of Zion” by Seth Thomas Crissman (The Soil and The Seed Project), a setting of Joel 2:23a, 28: “O children of Zion, be glad and rejoice in the LORD your God. . . . I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.”
“If Ye Love Me” by Thomas Tallis, a setting of John 14:15–17: Jesus says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate [/Helper/Comforter; Gr. parakletos, Paraclete], to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him because he abides with you, and he will be in you.”
“The Spirit of Life” by Cody Curtis (Psallos), a setting of Romans 8:1–17, about living not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit, who is “life and peace” and who abides in us, enabling us to resist sin and bearing witness that we are children of God and therefore join heirs with Christ
“God Is Love” by Ri-An, a setting of 1 John 4:7–21, about how we abide in God, and God in us, through the Spirit, who is love

There are also a few songs that reference the story of Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones [previously], in which God brings his prophet to a desolate landscape littered with human bones. But then: “Thus says the Lord GOD to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. . . . Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live” (Ezek. 37:5, 9). And the bones reassembled, took on flesh, and became animated once again—a picture of the regenerative power of God’s Spirit. (The Hebrew word for “spirit” is ruach, which can also be translated “breath”; same with the Greek pneuma.) Here’s Caroline Cobb’s “Dry Bones”:

Several of the playlist songs I’ve featured before on the blog: “Wind” by Joseph, “Abbeville” (Come, Holy Spirit, Come), “The Elements: Fire” by Hiromi and Edmar Castaneda, “Untitled” by Seryn, “If Ye Love Me” by Thomas Tallis, “The Earth Shall Know” by the Porter’s Gate, “Blessed Be the Tie That Binds,” “Make of Our Hearts” by Hiram Ring, “Your Peace Will Make Us One” by Audrey Assad, and “This Little Light of Mine.”

I hope the Art & Theology Pentecost Playlist helps you to more fully exult in the myriad workings of the Spirit, who came in a blaze some two thousand years ago and burns still, all over the globe, where Christ’s kingdom has taken root.

I Am Covered (Artful Devotion)

September 1, 2020September 30, 2021 Victoria Emily Jones3 Comments

Altarpiece by Sieger Koder — Altarpiece (closed) by Sieger Köder (German, 1925–2015), 1970, St. Stephen’s Church, Wasseralfingen, Germany. Photo: Zvonimir Atletić / Alamy Stock Photo (ref. no. 2BAA8HW).

The LORD said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, “This month shall be for you the beginning of months. It shall be the first month of the year for you. Tell all the congregation of Israel that on the tenth day of this month every man shall take a lamb according to their fathers’ houses, a lamb for a household. And if the household is too small for a lamb, then he and his nearest neighbor shall take according to the number of persons; according to what each can eat you shall make your count for the lamb. Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male a year old. You may take it from the sheep or from the goats, and you shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month, when the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill their lambs at twilight.

“Then they shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they eat it. They shall eat the flesh that night, roasted on the fire; with unleavened bread and bitter herbs they shall eat it. Do not eat any of it raw or boiled in water, but roasted, its head with its legs and its inner parts. And you shall let none of it remain until the morning; anything that remains until the morning you shall burn. In this manner you shall eat it: with your belt fastened, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand. And you shall eat it in haste. It is the LORD’s Passover. For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments: I am the LORD. The blood shall be a sign for you, on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you, when I strike the land of Egypt.

“This day shall be for you a memorial day, and you shall keep it as a feast to the LORD; throughout your generations, as a statute forever, you shall keep it as a feast.”

—Exodus 12:1–14

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SONG: “Passover Song” by IAMSON (Orlando Palmer), on Bread for the Journey by Urban Doxology (2016) and iAmSon (2017)

Passover is a major Jewish holiday celebrated every spring, marking God’s deliverance of the people of Israel out of Egyptian bondage. Exodus 12 tells the story of how in Egypt God sent death as a means of judgment against oppressors but “passed over” the houses of the faithful who, following God’s instructions, smeared their doorposts with the blood of a lamb.

Christians interpret this event as a prefiguration of the death of Jesus, the lamb of God, whose blood saves from death those who choose to place themselves under it, liberating us from our slavery to sin. Driving home the connection, all four Gospel writers mention that Jesus was killed during the feast of Passover. His blood smeared the wooden posts of the cross.

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Father Sieger Köder was born in Wasseralfingen in Swabia in southwestern Germany in 1925. From 1947 to 1951 he attended the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart, where he trained as a silversmith and a painter. While establishing his art practice, he also worked as an art teacher at a secondary school in Aalen for just over a decade. Increasingly he felt a pull into Christian ministry, so from 1965 to 1970 he studied theology in Tübingen, becoming ordained in the Catholic Church a year later. He served as a parish priest in Hohenberg and Rosenberg from 1975 to 1995, combining that vocation with his work as an artist. He continued his art making well into retirement, dying in 2015 at age ninety. His religious paintings can be found all over Germany and in other parts of Europe.

The artwork above is the closed view of the high altarpiece Köder made for the parish church in his hometown, Saint Stephen’s (Sankt Stephanus).

The outer left panel shows the Hospitality of Abraham (Genesis 18:1–21)—that is, Abraham’s entertaining three men who turn out to be a theophany, an appearance of God in a human body (or in this case, three human bodies). I’m guessing that the man on the left, who is veiled, represents God the Father; the man in the middle, who’s holding the cup, is God the Son; and the man on the right, who appears to have a broken arm and to be naked except for a blanket draped over him, is God the Spirit—though he is likely also meant to show how God often comes to us in the guise of the poor, the hungry, the unsheltered (Matthew 25:31–46). Above the heads of this trinity, glowing through the oak leaves, is a fiery orb reminiscent of the burning bush from which God would call Moses a few centuries later. At the bottom of the painting Abraham’s wife Sarah laughs from inside her tent, having eavesdropped on the visitors’ news that she, a nonagenarian, will conceive a child. The lineage of that child, Isaac, would produce Jesus.

The outer right panel, based on Sunday’s lectionary reading, shows the first Passover. Israelite families huddle around a meal of roast lamb, unleavened bread, and bitter herbs as a cloaked, skeletal presence passes by overhead. One of the adults tries to steady the rattling table with his hand while a mother protects two of her children, hugging them tightly to herself. Though afraid, they are in no danger, as their doorway is covered in the blood of the lamb whose flesh they eat.

When opened, the triptych reveals three Resurrection-themed panels. The inner left panel shows one of my favorite biblical episodes, which I call “Breakfast on the Shore”: Jesus’s resurrection appearance to Peter at dawn on the Sea of Galilee (John 21). Following Jesus’s instruction in Jerusalem (Matthew 28:7, 10), Peter had returned home with some of the other disciples and, not knowing what to do, took back up his fishing nets. He and six others are on the lake when a man calls out from the shore, “Children, do you have any fish?” They don’t. The man tells them to cast in their nets once more, and when they do, up comes a humongous catch. After which Peter exclaims, “It is the Lord!” Ever the impulsive one, he throws himself into the sea and pushes his way through the water to greet Jesus. They chargrill some of the fish and sit down to eat.

The scene is one of reconciliation. Peter had denied he knew Jesus three times the night of Jesus’s arrest, abandoning him in his time of need, and now, after breakfast, Jesus gives Peter three chances to reaffirm his love for him, asking him thrice, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” The foregrounding of the hot coals in Köder’s painting is perhaps a subtle nod to the recent failure of Peter’s, as earlier in his Gospel John mentions that, in the courtyard of the high priest where Jesus was being tried, Peter warmed himself at a charcoal fire alongside Jesus’s captors (John 18:18). There’s also a hand coming up out of the water that I’m guessing references the earlier episode of Peter’s walking on water and then, when doubt in Jesus’s power set in, sinking, only to be saved by Jesus’s outstretched hand (Matthew 14:22–33). But Jesus forgives Peter’s weaknesses and disloyalty, restoring him to fellowship. He invites Peter to come and feast. The sun at the top indicates that it’s the dawn of a new era.

The bright-red morning sun also appears on the inner right panel, which shows another very personal encounter between the risen Christ and a disciple: Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb. In Köder’s visual retelling, Mary wades through a sea of poppies—a red flower symbolic of sacrifice—her hand shielding her eyes from the brilliance of Jesus’s resurrection body. He who she initially thought to be the cemetery gardener is in fact her dear friend and Lord.

Look closely at some of the grave markers, and you’ll notice that they carry the names and/or dates of wars: “1914–1918,” “1939–1945,” “Vietnam,” “Biafra” (a reference to the Nigerian Civil War). The latter two were still raging on when Köder painted this. The artist was actually a prisoner of war during World War II, and underneath the cross representing that war in the painting is a bullet-blasted soldier’s helmet. I take these graves to imply that Jesus’s resurrection put death to death.

I’m not sure what the Hebrew grave inscriptions say—anyone know?

Update, 9/30/21: Dr. Franz Posset, a former student of the artist’s, emailed me today with transcriptions and translations of the Hebrew tombstone inscriptions:

האדם – Adam, The Man (lower right corner, next to Mary’s elbow)
חוה – Eve, The Woman (in the shadows at the right, behind the “Vietnam” tombstone)
החכם – The Wise (to the right of Mary’s raised hand)
כסילה – The Fool (to the left of Mary’s raised hand)

The central panel of the altarpiece portrays the Supper at Emmaus as a sort of Transfiguration à la Mount Tabor, an unveiling of Christ’s glory. Luke tells us that after the resurrection Jesus appeared to Cleopas and another unnamed disciple, who were on their way home from Jerusalem; their hearts “burned within them” as he spoke about the scriptures, but their eyes weren’t opened to his true identity until he blessed and broke the bread at mealtime. In Köder’s painting, Jesus’s form is barely discernible through the red glow—he’s a pillar of light, really. Artists have always struggled to give an impression of what Jesus’s resurrection body might have looked like: it was a flesh-and-bone body, for sure, but a glorified one, not always immediately recognizable, and it seems as though he was able to walk through walls and disappear. Köder bathes him in the color of blood—of his passion, and of life. Köder’s nonrepresentational approach emphasizes the otherness aspect of the newly risen Christ and the marvel the two Emmaus disciples must have felt upon realizing who they were dining with.

Jesus appears between Moses, who holds a basket of manna (Exodus 16), and Elijah, who cradles a raven with a morsel of bread in its beak, a reference to his being fed miraculously by God in the wilderness (1 Kings 17:1–7). The figure to the right of Elijah may be Paul (Saul) fallen off his horse on the road to Damascus.

Koder, Sieger_Wasseralfingen Altarpiece (wide shot) — East end of Saint Stephen’s, Wasseralfingen. Altarpiece by Sieger Köder, stained glass windows by Rudolf Haegele. Photo © Stadt Aalen.

At Saint Stephen’s the Eucharist is celebrated regularly before this altarpiece. (The metalwork tabernacle below, decorated with stalks of grain and clusters of grapes, is where the eucharistic elements are stored.) Köder reminds partakers that they are covered (pardoned) by Jesus’s blood, that Christ is present in the meal, that he nourishes and sustains his people with his very self. Death has passed over us because it struck the firstborn of all creation, who bore the curse on our behalf. However, death could not keep him down, and on the third day he rose again, appearing to many, the firstborn of new creation. “Mary,” he called out to one of his closest followers outside his tomb, speaking her name in a familiar tone, sparking recognition and joy. “Come and have breakfast,” he called out to Peter. To the Emmaus disciples he illuminated the scriptures and finally revealed himself around a table. Christ invites us into fellowship with him, through his blood.

P.S. It appears there is yet a third configuration of the altarpiece, as indicated by this photo, which includes a Madonna and Child, the Tower of Babel, and I can’t make out the left two panels.

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To view all the Revised Common Lectionary scripture readings for Proper 18, cycle A, click here.