A "Jug O' Punch" in Church?

Did you ever get that mass email that warns you not to flash your lights at an oncoming car with their high-beams on, because of a new "gang initiation ritual" where initiates to some enigmatic (probably Asian) gang drive around with their high-beams on and are required to chase down and shoot the first motorist who signals them like this?

It's an urban myth.

Or how about the one about the man who follows a beautiful seductress home from the bar, only to wake up, one or two spiked-drinks later, shivering in a bathtub full of ice with mysterious stitches in his side and a note (maybe written in lipstick on the mirror, for effect) explaining that one of his kidneys was surgically removed while he lay anesthetized, to be sold on the organ-donor's black market?

Urban myth.

I once heard some sociologist suggest that urban legends like these are actually significant narrative acts whereby a social group tries to justify its deepest cultural anxieties by framing them in outrageous stories that are just plausible enough to need no substantiation. The gang initiation myth, for instance, allows us to justify our irrational xenophobia; the stolen kidney allows us to narrate our anxieties about the dangers of promiscuity, or our suspicion of the mysterious powers of modern medicine.

The Faith, of course, has its own versions of these narrative acts. Heard the one about the unassuming first-year college student who calmly refuted the belligerent professor of evolutionary biology or nihilistic philosophy using nothing but cool reason? Or how about the one about some high-tech space-clock at NASA that inexplicably discovered a missing day in the chronology of the solar system and thus inadvertently proved Joshua 10:13?

Christian-urban myths.

But here's another Christian urban myth you might have heard. It usually comes up when people in the church are asking questions about whether the latest rock-music style is appropriate for worship. At some point someone quips that, after all, Luther used bar songs for the melodies of some of his greatest hymns; if Luther could use drinking songs, surely a bit of fuzz on the electric guitar shouldn't turn heads.

But here's the thing. Although the hymnals of the Reformation were indeed criticized for their rollicking rhythms, there's no evidence that Luther ever used bar tunes for his hymns. In fact, as far as we know, the only time he actually used a secular folk tune, he ended up changing the tune because of its worldly associations. (Here's some hard data from the Works of Martin Luther: of Luther's 37 chorales, 15 were tunes he composed himself, 13 came from Latin service music, 4 were German religious folk songs, 2 were pilgrimage hymns, 2 are of unknown origin, and only one came from a secular folk song.)

Some music historians suggest that the legend about Luther using drinking songs comes from the fact that most of his hymns follow a musical pattern known (coincidentally) as a "bar form."

Luther didn't use bar songs, he wrote his songs in "bar form."

Now, to be clear: this is not a post about whether or not rock music belongs in church. But it is a post about the stories we tell ourselves to narrate and validate our irrational anxieties. And I wonder: are there anxieties about our relationship to culture as Christians that a myth like "Luther used drinking songs" narrates for us?

I'm just thinking out loud here, but could it be that, musical styles aside, there's this niggling thought in the back of our mind that in some way, on some level, we've acquiesced to the worst of culture-- it's glare, it's wealth, it's power-plays, maybe-- in ways we feel we need to justify?

And maybe an urban myth-- like the one about the great Church reformer who used his culture's drinking songs to revamp the church's worship-- helps us do this.