God gave the tools of culture to be used to lift our hearts to a loving connection with the Creator.
Advent is the time in the Christian year that we prepare to celebrate the wonder of the incarnation – God becoming a human being, born as a baby in an obscure little town in Israel over 2,000 years ago. Advent in the larger culture is reduced to calendars filled with chocolates or little gifts as a countdown to the big day of Christmas. Christmas is celebrated as a time for family, friends, good cheer, feasting and gift-giving and peace and goodwill among people. Preparations involve shopping, decorating, extra parties and gatherings. For a lot of people it is a time of isolation if you can’t engage in all those activities, grief over those who will be missing from the table, stress over the busyness and the financial over-extension that often happens.
We are grateful for the tools of culture that the Creator has blessed us with.
Advent for those of us who welcome Jesus and his birth should have different elements. We are preparing to celebrate – yes! We celebrate that God our Creator loves us so much as to become a human being in the most humble of circumstances, to share our lives and walk alongside us. The fancy word for God becoming human is “incarnation”, meaning that the Creator took on flesh. Jesus came in order to offer us a way to truly live in this life and then in the one that comes after death. In Advent we prepare to welcome him and look forward to when he comes again to make all things right and just, to restore the whole creation to its intended perfection.
The way the Nazko house church marked Advent several years ago was to recognize that Jesus came as a human being to show that being human was a good thing, and that our cultures can affirm that. We believe that God gave the tools of culture to be used to lift our hearts to a loving connection with the Creator. In most Indigenous traditions, one of the ways to do that is with music and the drum. So we marked Advent by an act of worship together as we built a big drum that we have used now in all the years since to sing the praises of the Lord.
Our act of worship started the previous summer as Rosie Cassam and I worked at scraping a young moose hide someone in the community had hunted. We scraped one side and used the opportunity to teach the school students in grades 8 and 9 how to do it on the other side. We then also scraped a deer hide and prepared it. Early that year we also contacted a master Stó:lō drum-maker in Washington state who created a cedar frame for us. He is also a follower of the Jesus way and made our frame steeped in his prayers.
On the first Sunday of Advent we gathered and instead of our regular time of worship, we built our drum. We laid out the hides and cut them, cutting string by cutting small strips from the remainder of the hide.
Inside the frame we wrote the words of Psalm 149:1-5 –
“Praise the Lord. Sing to the Lord a new song,
his praise in the assembly of the saints.
Let Israel rejoice in their Maker;
let the people of Zion be glad in their King.
Let them praise his name with dancing
and make music to him with tambourine and harp.
For the Lord takes delight in his people;
he crowns the humble with salvation.
Let the saints rejoice in this honor
and sing for joy on their beds.”
Along with the verses, we each signed our names. The next step was to create small holes around the edges of the hides. Then we put the hides on either side of the frame, sealing in the words of God and our names, and we began to weave the strings back and forth from top to bottom all around the drum to put it together. We created a handle for carrying it and then set it to dry. When we had finished putting the drum together, we gathered all our instruments that we use to play our praise music: guitars, piano, rattles, Indigenous flute, alongside the drum and we dedicated them with prayer to honour our God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Each instrument was prayed over with the smoke of sage, anointed with oil and we laid our hands on them to offer them to honour the Lord. In doing so we recognize that the Creator calls us to use every instrument that we have to help us worship. No instrument is good or bad. They are all tools given to us to show how awesome God is.
Our drum was the first Big Drum in the community. We have been able over the years to bring it to many places and sing our songs of praise. Funerals, Indigenous People’s Day celebrations, and even a government-run Northern Health Indigenous Health conference where we were invited to be the opening drum each morning, singing our worship songs. We have been able to welcome people to sit with us at the drum who had never done so before. One church leader from Ontario was so excited to play with us as in her tradition women could not sit at the big drum. Generally to the east of the Rockies, women do not play the big drum as it is considered the men’s instrument, while west of the Rockies, most communities welcome women at the big drum. Our drum has been played by men, women, old and young, always in songs of worship to our Lord.
Our act of Advent worship that year provided us with a moving instrument for praising God as well as many opportunities to share the love of Jesus with people outside the church. We are grateful for the tools of culture that the Creator has blessed us with. Praise him with everything you have!
