'To download a copy of this sermon please click
here'
Sermon for March 15, 2009
...
Sunday, March 15, 2009 8:43:41 AM
From:
Phil Hobson
...
View
To:
Phil Hobson
The Reason Why We Sing
Exodus 15:1-2, 21-22
Psalm 150
Acts 16:16-40
Matthew 13:44-52
Grace and Peace to you this morning. Grace and Peace.
Singing has been a part of faith in God for as long as there has been a faith. Singing as a response to God’s saving acts is as old as Moses and Miriam. Theirs are the first songs in the Bible. And from them until the last of the psalms, psalm 150, heard this morning, the offering of thanksgiving in song lies at the core of faithful people.
So by the time we get to Paul and Silas, arrested and beaten and thrown in jail, and there they sit in chains, singing hymns and praying, music has been a part of worshiping God for several centuries. We might wonder at the songs they sang. Are they laments, like the slave songs that proclaimed, “Nobody knows the troubles I’ve seen....” Or are they hymns of praise for all the things God has done, and now allowing them to witness to other prisoners.
In these three passages we find two of the great purposes of music in worship. We sing our praise and our thanks and our joy and our faith when we know or feel or experience or remember the saving acts of God, the moments of grace, the touch of Christ in our lives. As Miriam and Moses and the psalmist did.
And when we are in the midst of all that stuff we are in the midst of, whether it be prison like Paul and Silas, or whatever difficulties our day brings, we sing to remind ourselves, to reconnect with our faith, to strengthen ourselves and those around us. We sing laments, so that we can find voice for our prayers and our pain. We sing of what God has done, so that we hang on for what God is about to do.
One of the difficulties in church music is we often think that the congregation is the audience, that the chancel is a stage, and God is somewhere backstage directing the show. And so when a piece of music sung by the congregation, or the choir, or played on the piano or organ really moves us, we feel a similar catharsis to a really good play or movie.
There are without a doubt cathartic moments in worship, moments of deep emotions. But the stage and audience and director are all backwards. If worship is to be worship, then the ones on the chancel are the directors. The congregation are the actors, even in the role of active listening, and God is the audience. When someone offers a piece of music as part of worship, and we are moved to clap, it is not the same as applauding an actor on stage. Our clapping is adding our amen to what they have just offered to God.
We are the inheritor of myriad traditions. How many of us want to sing the music of our childhood church in worship? How many of us shared the same church in our childhoods?
Even if we grew up in the same church, but in different generations, there have been changes to the music. But church music has never been static.
But as Jesus tells the disciples in Matthew, any scribe fit for the Kingdom is going to bring forth treasures both old and new. So too with our music.
Luther was in the midst of reforming the church when he wrote new songs and hymns to try and compete with the drinking tunes of the day. Everybody knew the songs of the taverns. He saw the need to write songs of equal sing-ability in order to compete. So he made church music more accessible, easier to sing and understand, used it to help teach the Gospel, and changed church music from then on. He wrote contemporary praise music in the 1500's.
Much of our hymnody comes from the German music of Luther and those who followed him: A Mighty Fortress is Our God (Luther’s most famous hymn), and Silent Night, O Sacred Head Now Wounded, O How Shall I Receive Thee, or our hymn of reflection this morning.
This last was written by a pastor, Martin Rinkart, who served the church during the Thirty Years War and the plagues that followed. He buried more than 4,000 people, including many of his own family. And yet the song he wrote enjoins us “Now thank we all our God....” That is prayer and praise.
Two centuries later in England, the only songs to be sung in church were the psalms set to music. Isaac Watts complained to his father, who is supposed to have said to him, “If you think you can write better, do it.” So he did.
Watts reworked the psalms in the language of the New Testament and for the church in his day.
Joy to the World
O God Our Help in Ages Past
Jesus Shall Reign Where’er the Sun
Come Ye That Love the Lord
When I Survey the Wondrous Cross
Alas! and Did My Savior Bleed
and our opening hymn this morning, I Sing the Mighty Power of God, along with about another 500 hymns.
When music inherited from church traditions didn’t meet where people were, he wrote new music.
Then there is Charles Wesley, the brother of the founder of Methodism, John Wesley. He and John did not set out to found a new church, but to build up and restore and encourage the Church of England. From his efforts to build up the church we inherit music we sing all the time, especially at Christmas and Easter.
Christ the Lord Is Risen Today
Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus
Hail the Day that Sees Him Rise
Hark! the Herald Angels Sing
Love Divine, All Loves Excelling
O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing
Rejoice, the Lord is King
Ye Servants of God along with about 7000 more.
We have also inherited the music of the American religious revivals, the tent meetings, the frontier church. We inherit the Gospel traditions of the church, born out of the spirituals of the slaves and of the poor whites of Appalachia. We have Latin texts from the ancient church translated and re-tuned, and we have the folk and guitar traditions of more recent years. We have meditative traditions and social justice music. And new music is being written daily.
And if we are honest, the music that is most meaningful for us does something to us.
In Dallas we would Christmas carol at one of the local nursing facilities. One woman in a wheelchair was brought to the room where we were singing. She was mostly non-responsive. She didn’t acknowledge where she was or what was going on. That was until we sang Silent Night. She started singing along.
“Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht!
Alles schläft, einsam wacht....”
She was singing the language of her childhood, German. Any understanding of music in worship needs to take into consideration that powerful, emotional connection we have to the music that is most closely held, often the music with which we are most familiar.
What is your “trouble” music? What hymn do you sing, hum or simply let play in your mind when times are tough? What is your “go to” music when the plane you are on hits turbulence?
Music works on us and in us in ways that mere speech can never touch.
But music makes us uncomfortable as well, just as our faith often shakes us from our comfort zones. Take the recent flaps over inclusive language. The convention of using the masculine pronoun “Man” to mean all of humanity is an old one. But when we speak of a personal connection to God, we use personal language. And for over half the population, and certainly more than half the worshiping congregation on any given Sunday, the masculine language for who can be a faithful follower, a disciple, a minister, is not appropriate.
As far as the names of God, to limit descriptions to the masculine in only part of the story.
The kingdom of God is like a mother hen who gathers her chicks under her wing.
The wisdom of God calls to her children from the pinnacles of the Temple, and her children know the sound of her voice.
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
The masculine imagery and language for God is Biblical, but only partially so. Male and female he created them, both in God’s image, belies a difficulty in trying to use one gender for God. It is the danger of language that both describes and defines, when God is difficult and dangerous to describe and define in ways that are exclusive and exhaustive.
So here we have the mess we are in.
Many traditions which we lump together as “the way it has always been,” that were each born of changes to meet the needs of the day.
New music, which means change, and the only ones who like changing are wet babies, and even they cry.
The desire for the comforts of music, when sometimes a challenging piece is a more faithful choice.
The fact that music is subjective, and deeply emotional, and so there is no “one right way to do it.” The songs that are deeply and personally important to me may not be known to my neighbor, and likewise the other way around. Music is personal, and should be. But unless we want to worship alone, it is also a community act, and we need to figure out how to talk with our neighbor about it.
But it all brings us back to the first song of the Bible and the last of the psalms. No matter what we sing, it starts as a response to God’s saving acts, the grace in our lives. And it carries through to Paul and Silas, where singing is one of the ways we faithfully meet the difficulties of the day.
So let us thank God. And let us do so in song.
Amen.
