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As the curtain goes up on Glastonbury today

I’ll admit to wistful memories of my own festival-going student days.

For most, it was about letting off summer steam,

about meeting people and the possibility of romance

or even about the issues and causes filling the political air at the time.

We insisted very earnestly that it was about the music, though thinking back

there was a sense of adventure and freedom which makes me smile now

though no money would pay me to relive the experience!

Yet I often sense an irony.

As more and more I grow to relish the reverence and sanctity

of what’s familiar and time-tested in worship,

I’m conscious that a number of the psalms in the choral repository I love

strike a markedly different chord.

Sing to the Lord a new song,

opens Psalm 149, to quote just one example:

let them praise his name with dancing,

making melody to him with tambourine and lyre.

For the Lord takes pleasure in his people.

It can’t just be a matter of age.

The innovation and imagination showcased at Glastonbury

certainly isn’t the preserve of the young

and some of the loudest champions of traditional worship I’ve ever met

have been teenagers.

Surely it’s more to do with what’s real

in how we express ourselves spiritually,

what’s authentic in the way we give creative vent

to our experience of God’s loving goodness.

Singing new songs to the Lord

seems to come naturally to every generation of Christian believers –

naturally and spiritually.

It’s as though every fresh twist of musical style and technology

is just waiting to be enervated by the power and energy of the Divine.

Lord by your Spirit free us and loosen us

that as we cherish and rejoice in the old songs,

so we may pour from our hearts the new songs

Amen