"Story" Teaching Leads to Musical Collaboration

Caleb Keller approached me at a music rehearsal in November of 2014 with an idea to write a song, as our network was studying Jeff Reed’s series on the Story. "What if we added some verses to O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, so that it was a really full depiction of The Story?" The first verse was evocative of Israel’s messianic expectation in exile, but the Story was not fleshed out through the rest of the original verses. Caleb wanted to use that longing for Emmanuel to frame a song laying out the major points of the Story leading up to the coming of Christ.

Caleb asked me if I would write a new version of the song. I was inspired by the idea, and that day I wrote a rough draft of several verses. As I drove home from that rehearsal, I kept humming the tune, scrawling notes at stop lights. Then I sat in my driveway scribbling lyrics before they evaporated.

As the holidays brought their busyness, we both forgot about the song and we let the idea rest for almost a year.

We picked our project up again in November of 2015 and started really digging into it and navigating the collaboration process. Caleb cast the vision and I was the writer. As I wrote and rewrote drafts, his vision for the piece sharpened and became clearer to both of us.

We decided to create a new piece to stand alone using only the first verse of O Come, O Come, Emmanuel to frame our verses, rather than adding verses to the original song, because in Caleb’s words, “if you frame our three verses by repeating that one original verse, what you get is a song that is about the history of Israel up to exile, and their longing for the messiah to appear.” We decided to lay out the first three major points in The Story, settling on one verse each for Abraham's covenant (Genesis 12:1-3), the Nation of Israel and the law (Exodus 19:1-5), and the Davidic covenant (2 Samuel 7:8-17).

Throughout this process, our goal was to create a high quality, theologically sound piece of art for the purpose of sharing it with our churches and families to teach The Story and to set the coming of Christ into proper context. We wanted the song to reflect Israel’s longing for the coming Messiah through the Old Testament part of The Story.

Caleb cast, recast, and sharpened the vision and commissioned the piece. I wrote, he edited, we both picked it apart and completely rewrote it several times. At one point, we were both happy with it and about to call it done, and the next day I got a message that he wanted me to rework the whole song’s meter from iambic pentameter into iambic tetrameter (in order to match the meter of the original song), so I did that. He was right. It is much better in iambic tetrameter.

Eventually, Caleb was picking through our lyrics to find any word that could be better. There were times when I felt like we should just call it done, and then he'd pick out the exact word that had bothered me when I wrote it, but I couldn’t find anything better. He came at it from another angle and his ideas would spark something. I would then add my voice in, and each time we ended up with a word or phrase that worked perfectly.

One day Caleb called it done, and so it was finished! We both enjoyed and benefitted from the whole process of collaborating to create a piece of art, and the finished product turned out better than either of us could have done alone.

We have each brought the song to our churches, and Caleb collaborated with Sean Huston to create a beautiful musical arrangement of it that they performed at a network-wide gathering featuring the work of our Arts Guild. Their collaboration on the music side was rich with creative process as well. Caleb describes one significant musical element that they landed on: “Sean played this very haunting chord. I said, ‘That’s amazing! What is it?’ He said, ‘It’s a minor major 9th - the James Bond chord.’ I suggested that he try the E minor major 9th as our ending, and it sounded great! It left the song hanging in this unsettled, tenuous place - exactly the mood of Israel in exile, longing for God’s faithfulness to appear, in spite of every indication that its story is at an end. Sean increasingly wove the chord into the piano part, giving the song a very haunting quality.”

This process has been so valuable to me as a writer, because I have never collaborated with anyone on a project like this before. I know that Sean and Caleb’s work on this song was inspiring to them as well, and they’ve continued to work together, arranging and writing some fantastic songs using texts from the Bible to help establish the church in the Story of the Bible. We are so pleased with the quality of art and the establishment tool that we have produced with this project.

O come, O come, Emmanuel
And ransom captive Israel
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Sun of God appear
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel!

O come, thou God of Abraham,
And heal thy broken promised land.
Descendant of the blessing send,
And by him bless all tribes of men
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel!

O come, thou Lord of Sinai’s awe,
That Israel obey thy law,
And Jacob thy possession be,
Thy treasure bound eternally.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel!

O come thou Rod of Jesse, come
And take thy place on David's throne
Establish an eternal reign
And build a house in thine own name
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, O come, Emmanuel
And ransom captive Israel
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Sun of God appear
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel!