EDITOR’S NOTE: As someone who continues to be fed by the richness of the Anglican Choral Tradition, one of the biggest losses for me through this whole Coronavirus situation is that of singing some of my favorite hymns and anthems during Holy Week. As such, we here at Earth & Altar are pleased to offer Sounds of Holy Week, a set of articles that will come out five times (including today) over the next week, with thoughts from us and some of our friends about our favorite hymns and anthems of this time, alongside a YouTube playlist you can listen and sing to as you read.

“We Know that Christ Is Raised” (Engleberg)

When I was considering becoming Episcopalian, I started attending the Episcopal Church right around Lent.  Finally, Easter morning arrived.  I went to the early morning Easter Vigil and one hymn sticks out to me to this day: We Know That Christ Is Raised.  The theology, the power of belief, the broken hold of death, my despair turned to joy, the universe restored and singing as one, all of it resurrected me.  Easter was new to me and what I believed felt true.  To this day, this hymn is one of my favorites, as I consider it the soundtrack to my conversion to the Episcopal Church, with gratitude to St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Troy, AL for being the congregation that welcomed me home.

- Erin Jean Warde

God’s Not Dead (Like a Lion) by Newsboys

This pop-rock entry in the canon of “Contemporary Christian Music”—or CCM—is my go-to song come Easter Sunday.

The music video frames it as Newsboys’ apologetic response to a fictitious announcement by the scientific community that “God is a Myth”. In settings across Manhattan, band members are seen rebutting various objections to Christian faith by proclaiming their belief: that God created humanity in God’s own image; that the universe came “from SOMETHING [sic]”; that the evil in the world speaks to human free will rather than to God’s inadequacies; that Jesus was dead, but now is “alive forevermore”.

At the end of the day, however, this song subordinates rational argumentation to the experience of entering into a personal relationship with the living God and thereby being born again. For it is evangelism rooted in individual conversion that Newsboys herein have in view. “My God’s not dead/He’s surely alive,” we hear Newsboys lead singer Michael Tait declare; “He’s living on the inside/Roaring like a lion.” These are the words of one who knows God intimately, not as an abstract force or an intellectual proposition but as an agent actively reforming one’s life. And they confess a faith that looks towards Pentecost, the outpouring of God’s Spirit that empowers Christians to witness—publicly and for the benefit of every nation—to the good news of Christ’s death and resurrection: “Let heaven roar/And fire fall/Come shake the ground/With the sound/Of revival.”

Thus does “God’s Not Dead (Like a Lion)” capture, I think, what is ultimately at stake on Easter Sunday: That because our experience of God tells us with certainty that the tomb is, indeed, empty and God is not dead, there is hope that not only will God transform us but so, too, will God transform our broken world.

- Charlotte Dalwood

Easter Song by Keith Green

My dad found Jesus in southern California during the whirlwind of the 1970s and ‘80s. He had been raised in a home that was generally Christian, but not practicing in any particular faith community. When he encountered contemporary musicians—rock and roll, pop, even hip-hop—singing about the love of Jesus who forgave all sins and desired a deep, personal, and everlasting relationship with even the biggest sinners, my dad fell in love and began attending a variety of evangelical churches. 

Although I grew up knowing that same love of Jesus deep in my own heart, I quickly realized as a young person that the evangelical church of my childhood—a church which had welcomed and nurtured my dad in his faith—was not the place for me. As soon as I had earned my driver’s license, I would drive to the Lutheran or Roman Catholic or UCC churches across town and worship with them. 

Our family worshipping with different communities was not a remarkable thing on most Sundays. The sting of separation was, however, pronounced on Christmas and Easter, when families all over would gather and worship together. It saddened my dad on Easter morning to be sitting alone at Calvary Church. It likewise saddened me to be sitting alone across town at Trinity Lutheran Church. 

When we each got home from our respective Easter morning services, we would listen to Easter music that we both liked—perhaps even the music we had just sung in our own respective faith communities—while making Easter brunch together. The music was different each year, but the one steady offering was Keith Green’s Easter Song (from his 1977 album For Him Who Has Ears to Hear.) Although we could not agree on much theologically, we could agree on the central truth of Easter, a central truth that it proclaimed so strongly: “Joy to the world! He has risen! Hallelujah!” 

This song, with its strong piano line and soaring language, brought together a family otherwise separated by theology and tradition and gave them a few moments of unified worship and fellowship.

- Cody E. B. Maynus

Erin Jean Warde is a Teaching Assistant at Tempest Sobriety School and the lifestyle & humor editor at Earth & Altar.
Charlotte Dalwood is a graduate student at Yale University pursuing a Master of Arts in Religion with a concentration in theology through the School of Divinity and a Certificate in Anglican Studies through Berkeley Divinity School at Yale.
Cody E. B. Maynus is the Diocesan Curate of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Rapid City, SD and is the Secretary to the Editorial Board for Earth & Altar.