Sermon: Music in Worship

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Part II: Music in Worship

By Charles Rush

[ Part I: Luther & Congretational Singing - By David Snyder ]

October 19, 2003

sic is not only important to worship. In some sense, it actually leads. And it does so because spirituality fundamentally points us to a transcendent realm and you have to actually participate in this realm, you can't simply talk about it or describe it theoretically. You have to live it.

Music is primal for facilitating spiritual transcendence. A few years ago, I was at a worship service led by one of my students from Princeton Seminary. The service was in Brooklyn and the congregation was composed of people primarily from Guyana- as in South America. The Guyanese churches have done this marvelous blend of Christianity and the West African spiritual traditions from the Yoruba people. They are also very ecumenical. They had asked me to preach, representing the European tradition. And they had asked two Native Americans to come and do some sacred drumming.

These two guys brought drums that were probably six feet in diameter and they began drumming as part of the prelude… Boom, boom, blam, boom, boom, blam. You could feel the rythms just shoot right through you. It was like standing in front of a bass speaker listening to hip hop. Right off everyone was on their feet and moving. Then we had the processional. The Minister sang and the church responded. Now this processional moved pretty slow. As the preacher I was at the back. Wayne, it probably took us fifteen minutes to get up to the front of the church. The whole place was moving, sacred dancing. The drums just shot right through you, the music just merged inside you, and you just moved with it. Even the white guys were moving pretty good… and with abandon. You just let it roll over you. If you go with it, you enter into a waking meditation. Some people even go into a kind of trance.

It occurred to me that I was enacting one of the very basic spiritual disciplines of our ancestors… the ancestors literally of each and every one of us here today. It would usually occur at night, often around a bonfire, stretch skinned drums probably being the oldest musical instrument in human civilization. The beat echoing the pulsation that courses through the heart of our being, the beat that sensates through all living things around us and echos off the crashing tides on the distant shore. That beat that precedes us, in which we move and have our being, opens us into the transcendent dimension of the cosmos. It is physical, it is sensual. The Greeks used to say that we lose ourselves in these moments. They are ecstatic, the Greek word that means literally “to stand outside of yourself” Music takes us into that dimension. These days people regularly say that they wish they had a spiritual experience and they say that because much of our liturgy has lost it's aboriginal, multisensory, mysterious quality. All those qualities that our ancestors took for granted when they were dancing in the night, against the wide canopy of nature that seems to aborb even our loudest shouts and shrieks in its vastness, opening ourselves to the mystery of the world. We don't have any of that anymore… we are more sophisticated now and entertain ourselves with “Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire”. We don't have mystery but we do have MTV and that has a beat. We don't have the dark night, just the dark before the movie comes on… The point is not that we need to go back, we can't anyway.

But I understand when people say they are spiritually bored, spiritually anemic. We want to be swept away and music helps us do that. I think it is particularly important at two different times in the life of the Church.

The first is as we approach the heart of the Christian message around Christmas and Easter. In a very real sense, the closer we get to the heart of the Christian message, the more mystery envelopes us. In the resurrection, we are given a number of notoriously difficult texts that poetically allude to the fact that something new, indeed unique, happened to the Christ that transcended normal death and that, whatever it was, it was so powerful that a group of 12 frightented men and an unknown number of anxious women, became so emboldened with a new sense of spiritual power that, despite all manner of persecution, the Christian message was spread to the four corners of the earth and eventually developed an impact on all of us too great to summarize briefly.

In divinity school, you learn all of the problems that surround the texts on the resurrection, you learn all of the historical problems associated with it. They teach you to think critically about the texts that you grew up with as children, completely unaware that there was even any problem. As Children we just knew the profound message of redemption, the profound hope of Easter that God can overcome all adversity and that because of that, we need not fear death, and we too, even as compromised as we are, can be used in the great drama of God's plan. And there are similar critical approaches to the Virgin Birth and the Christmas story, despite its overpowering and positive message that God is with us, that God loves us and looks out for us before we even knew we needed looking out for. So every year, when I was younger, I had to work through all this in the Christmas season and at Easter, what to say and how to say it, thinking critically and affirming spiritually.

One year, I had a conversation with another friend of mine who had grown up in the conservative religion of the South and was just finishing his dissertation at Harvard. We were talking about the intersection between our critical heads and preserving the mystery that our souls need. He said to me, “you know, there are some things that I can no longer say, but I can sing them.” That is right.

We must have critical thought in the Church, but only critical thought is wooden and two dimensional too. As Immanuel Kant, a critical thinker if there ever was one said, ‘there are limits to human reason alone.' That is why, on Easter Sunday, several years ago, Wayne and I began the tradition of closing the service with Handel's Messiah. Regardless of what is said from the pulpit, you can walk away with the spiritual nutrient you need because Handel sang it right and it is mostly something that you sing about period.

That is why, we also, instituted a tradition on Christmas eve, reading the wonderful introduction to John. Someone reads it and Wayne fills it with the cosmic gravity and warmth that the text invites. “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the World was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were mad through him, and without him was not anythingmade that was made. In him was the life and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it… The true lifht that enlightens ever man was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world knew him not. … And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth… We get a little reverberation of the groaning that attends the birth of creation and the gravity of the Creator of the Universe actually dwelling in our midst.

We sing, we accompany as we get closer to the heart of the mystery of the faith. Finally, we also sing words of affirmation in the midst of loss, words of assurance when we are most skeptical and fragmented, words of hope when we are sullen and dull. Our opening hymn this morning “Now Thank We All Our God” is one of those hymns. It was written by Martin Rinkart, a Lutheran pastor in Germany who lived in the first half of the seventeenth century and was a relatively young pastor during the Thirty Years War that wrought untold devestation as one region of Germany invaded another for nearly two generations continuously.

The first two stanzas of the song he wrote as thanksgiving blessing to be sung with his children before the evening meal. They are more poignant when you know that his home town Eilenburg was a walled city which became a refugee center for thousands of people during the long civil wars. During one year alone, a year in which plague and pestilence followed the ravages of war, Pastor Rinkart buried over 4000 people, that is 11 people a day for a year for those of you doing the math.

Imaginatively enter that space for a moment, the weariness, the fatigue, the random sense of inanity, pointlessness, futility in living- all that you have to spiritually manage day in and day out. And this is what he wrote to sing every day. He needed it.

Now thank we all our God, with heart and hands and voices

Who wondrous things hath done, in whom this world rejoices;

Who from our mothers arms, hath blessed us on the way

With countless gifts of love, and Still is ours today

O may this bounteous God through all our life be near us,

With ever joyful hearts and blessed peace to cheer us;

And keep us in God's grace, And guide us when perplexed,

And free us from all ills in this world and the next.

We sing the affirmations of faith, hope, and meaning- most especially when our hearts are too heavy to actually speak them. We sing them when we do not feel them. We sing them as a reminder to ourselves and to each other that somewhere on the other side of this dull leaden numbness we will again recover the joy of living, the hope of the future, the goodness of God. But at the moment…

And it is not always tragedy that prompts us. Sometimes, the unexpected goodness of the world just overwhelms us too. The great cellist and director Mitslav Rostopovitch, you may recall, was exiled from Russia in the 70's for his support of artistic freedom, support for the author Aleksandr Soltsynetzin in particular, who was labeled an enemy of the Communist state. Rostopovitch wrote a letter of protest over Soltzynetizin's house arrest and released it to the western press when he was on tour in Germany.

He was exiled from his homeland, he knew he would be, and resigned himself to being an alien in the West for the rest of his life… Until one night, like the rest of us, he watched a television in Paris, dumbfounded by the images on CNN of people taking sledge hammers to the Berlin Wall, celebrating with champagne all night long.

The next morning, he flew to Berlin, overcome with emotion. He set up his Cello in the midst of the rubble of the Berlin Wall and he played Bach as sledge hammers pounded in the background, making new music of out of old demons.[1] Sometimes, the overpowering joy of the unimaginable in our midst is simply too much for words alone.

We need words, and God knows we need critical thought in religion. But, at the end of the day, it is not only about insight. It is not only about wise convictions. There is a transcendent flow to the life of the Spirit that takes us up and out of ourselves and that is what we lift up today. So happy birthday Austin and thank you choir, thank you my colleague Wayne. Why don't we close with a song?

Amen.

[1] I heard or read this somewhere.