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Rolling the radio around the stations one morning during summer vacation, it became evident that there is not much of a taste for "new songs." From static to station and back again, the radio dial was alive with oldies stations. Hits from the '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, and now even the '90s! Oldies. Each decade claims a niche of style, a series of songs that generations sing through adolescence and hopefully, into adulthood. These songs are reveled in, each one serving as a benchmark for a memory that improves in quality with the passage of time.

Oldies are, of course, fine. It's great fun to pull out those old 33 1/3 vinyl records and place them on the turntable. Even more fun is to watch the amazement on the faces of the young, who are all plugged in with MP3 files and other high tech means of listening. They can scarcely believe that such antiquity still exists, let alone actually works!

But it is these young ones who are listening to a "new song." One wonders if they, too, will be cemented to their "oldies" as time marches on for them. Is it only the young who can sing a "new song"? Is each successive generation condemned to being handcuffed to the past? And if so, why is that?

This psalm calls us to sing a "new song" to the Lord. But how many congregations and parishes are stuck singing the oldies? How often have people intoned this phrase in one form or another? "We've always done it this way." Or, "We tried that once and it didn't work...." Yes, it's true. People tend to find memory's niche and build a nest therein. They decorate the walls of this nest with distortions and blurred vision of how things really were in those good old days.

Through it all, however, the call still comes to sing a "new song" to the Lord. One can't help but wonder what that might look like in today's cultural milieu. Is it bringing a "praise band" into worship? Perhaps. Is it celebrating ethnic diversity and trying to worship in different languages? Possibly. It could be these or a host of other new tunes taking the shape of worship, fellowship, mission, and witness. However the song goes, this new song, sung to the Lord, must also be sung to the community in which the church exists.

If the people in the community hear the song and turn off the radio, it doesn't do much good, does it? Yes. This new song must be sung to the Lord, but the Lord isn't the only one in the audience. The church today needs to reach out with this new song to welcome, to witness, and yes to evangelize a whole new generation who have yet to discover the wonder of this God who deserves our songs.