Hilton Head Island, SC – July 1, 2012
The Chapel Without Walls
Psalm 149; Psalm 150; Ephesians 5:1-2,11-20
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – But be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with all your heart, always and in everything giving thanks in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God the Father. – Ephesians 5:18b-20 -RSV
When I was a student at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, I used to attend the Fourth Presbyterian Church every Sunday. The pastor was Elam Davies, who has had the greatest influence on my ministry through all the years since I was ordained. I was absolutely enthralled to hear that outstanding Welsh preacher deliver sermons. He was the finest preacher I ever heard. Whatever gifts I have as a preacher, most of it I learned from him.
But there was a second reason why Sunday was the most wonderful day of the week in seminary. That was because I was able to hear what surely was one of the finest choirs in Christendom, and also one of the most magnificent pipe organs ever constructed. Fourth Church had an Aeolian Skinner organ of four keyboards and over a hundred ranks consisting of thousands of pipes. To listen to that choir and that organ and fourteen hundred people joining together in singing hymns was a weekly inspirational experience I shall never forget. The sound was simply electric. I still have recordings from Fourth Church which can completely restore me if I am glum or dispirited. And the frosting on my career-path-cake is that, three years after serving as pastor in my first congregation, I had the unparalleled opportunity to return to Fourth Church as an assistant minister and to work under the direction of Elam Davies and to hear that spirit-soaring music again for an additional five years.
William Congreve was an English playwright who was active at the beginning of the 18th century. On our bulletin cover this morning is a quote from his play Love for Love, in which one of the characters in the drama says, “Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.” The English poet Matthew Green must have been familiar with Congreve, because a few years after Love for Love first played on an English stage, Green wrote in one of his poems, “Music hath charms, we all may find/ Ingratiate deeply with the mind.”
Today is Adrian Austin’s last Sunday as our regular soloist. In light of that, I wanted to devote this sermon to the place of music in worship as a way for all of us to express our gratitude to Adrian for his ministry of music among us over the past year. He can’t be a professional choir whose glorious sounds echo off the walls of a large Gothic church, but Adrian has been as close to that as we can get in this beautiful synagogue. He and Larry Mercer have provided music of inexpressible charms to sooth the savage breast, and to ingratiate deeply upon the mind and spirit of each of us.
The last five Psalms, Psalms 146 through 150, are called “The Songs of Hallel.” Each one opens with the same three words: “Praise the Lord!” And not just “Praise the Lord,” but “Praise the Lord – Exclamation Point!” In Hebrew the word hallel means “praise.” Hallelu-Jah literally means “Praise God (Jah or Yahweh).” And how are we to praise God? The last Psalm declares that we are to praise Him “with trumpet sound; praise him with lute and harp! Praise him with timbrel and dance; praise him with strings and pipe! Praise him with sounding cymbals, praise him with loud clashing cymbals! Let everything that breathes praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!” (Psalm 150:3-6) Gustav Holst has a setting of the 150th Psalm which can transport the spirit of the most grumpy grouser to the highest reaches of heaven. It knocks all socks off.
Over our history, we humans have discovered that the best way to praise God is through music. The hymn writer Fred Pratt Green wrote, “When in our music God is glorified/ And adoration leaves no room for pride/ It is as though the whole creation cried/ Alleluluia! Let every instrument be tuned for praise!/ Let all rejoice who have a voice to raise!/ And may God give us faith to sing always: Alleluia!”
I am who I am because I was blessed regularly to hear excellent preachers in my formative years and in my early adulthood. I believe what I believe, I feel what I feel, because as a youth I sang in choirs in church and school, in college and seminary, and, when the directors would allow me, in the choirs of the churches I served through the years. My theology is what it is in major part because of the theology to which I have had the privilege to give voice in hymns and anthems and oratorios. I know scores of stanzas of hymns by heart, and hundreds of phrases and snatches of music both sacred and secular from hither and yon which have permanently entered my brain over the past seven decades. Without music, I would find myself a sadly impoverished parson. But because of music, I have a storehouse of praise to God which I am certain shall never fail me, come what may. And when, at the end, I draw my last breath, I trust that either consciously or subconsciously some music shall be passing through my aged cranium.
All three hymns this morning are hymns about hymns. They are music about music. They extol the place of musical compositions in Christian worship. Ever ascendeth the song and the joy/ Ever descendeth the love from on high…. For the joy of ear and eye/ For the heart and mind’s delight/ For the mystic harmony/ Linking sense to sound and sight…. From all that dwell below the skies/ Let the Creator’s praise arise…. In every land begin the song/ To every land the strains belong.”
Church-music professor Louis Ball once told a group of preachers what they should know about hymns and church music. He said they should – quote – “Hold your Bible in your right hand. Hold your hymnal in your left hand. Now repeat after me: ‘These two books are the most important books in my ministry.’” Then Prof. Ball added, “If the Bible is the source of all theology and doctrine, then the hymnal is the distillation of that theology. The one who selects the hymns of the congregation selects its theology.” I could not agree more! And I can tell you this: I have spent far more time trying to decide what hymns should be used in conjunction with my sermons than I have ever spent deciding what to preach about. Sermon topics have never been the challenge; the right hymns to go with those sermons has always been the challenge.
By no means, however, is it only sacred music which has enormously inspired me. I will never forget hearing my first Broadway musical. It was not on Broadway; it was in the Blackstone Theater on South Michigan Avenue in Chicago, and it was Music Man. From the first scene where the traveling salesmen are in the railroad car boasting of their sales prowess until the last scene where seventy-six trombones parade through the streets of River City, Iowa, led by that wondrous charlatan Harold Hill and the newly sadder but happily wiser Marian Paroo, I was lifted to a realm I have experienced only by means of musical theater. The phrases ricochet through my head: “There’s a place somewhere, a time and place somewhere… Climb every mountain, ford every stream … To dream the impossible dream, to fight the unbeatable foe… Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger… Kiss today goodbye, and point me toward tomorrow. We did what we had to do. Won’t forget, can’t regret what I did for love… When you walk through a storm, keep your had up high, and don’t be afraid of the dark… I dreamed a dream in time gone by/ When hope was high/ And life worth living/ I dreamed that love would never die/ I dreamed that God would be forgiving…Do you hear the people sing?/ Lost in the valley of the night/ It is the music of a people/ Who are climbing to the light.”
Robert Shaw was the famous conductor of the Robert Shaw Chorale and the Atlanta Symphony and other musical ensembles. In my senior year in college I happened to be the president of the University of Wisconsin A Cappella Choir. Mr. Shaw was invited to the University to conduct all four of our major choral groups in the Brahms Requiem. It was my great privilege to be asked to drive him to a banquet and to and from rehearsals. He was an amazing man, and he surely was one of the most inspirational men I ever met.
A man named Keith Burris studied “the Shaw sound,” and what made his conducting so unique. Several years ago Burris wrote, “There still remains an X factor, something beyond the 82-year-old maestro’s considerable bag of technical tricks. It has to do with Shaw’s teaching style. He has the ability to imagine and then explicate the music for the musicians. With verbal finesse, he inspires them to rise to the very top of their abilities – and maybe a little above them. Voices, particularly, can be manipulated with the power of suggestion, and Shaw’s suggestions are powerful.” Robert Shaw was able to do those things in a way which at least momentarily if not permanently transformed everyone who ever sang under his magnificent guidance.
Or consider that one whom many consider the most gifted musical talent ever to live: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Nicholas Wolterstorff said of him, “Mozart’s rhythms – have you noticed? – are the rhythms of the dance while Mozart’s harmonies are the harmonies of melancholy. The Bible is Mozart. In Genesis one gets the rhythms: the applause, the laughter, the clapping, the dancing. In the gospels one gets the harmony: lament. One has to hear them both together.”
As some of you know, Mozart’s relationship with his father was both very fruitful and very troubled. You may also remember that he died at 35, having hundreds of incomparable compositions which sprang miraculously from his speed-of-light quill pen. Not long before he died, Mozart wrote this to his father: “Since death … is the true goal of our lives, I have made myself so well acquainted with this true and best friend of man that the idea of it no longer has terrors for me, but rather much that is tranquil and comforting. And I thank God that he has granted me the good fortune to obtain the opportunity of regarding death as the key to our true happiness. I never lie down in bed without considering that, young as I am, perhaps on the morrow I shall be no more. Yet not one of those who knows me could say that I am morose or melancholy, and for this I thank my creator daily and wish heartily that the same happiness may be given to my fellow man.” And so it has been. Consider his last great composition, his Requiem. Or the Great Mass in C - or Figaro or Don Giovanni or Exsultate, Jubilate. In sharps and flats and naturals Mozart showed us how to live, and how to die.
The publisher Henry Regnery said, “We are given life to lead as best we can and in accordance with those gifts and circumstances allotted to us, and those who lead a good life can face death with the composure and confidence of old Bach, who, on his deathbed, asked those around him to sing his last chorale, Before Thy Throne with This I Come, composed only a few days before, doubtless in preparation for the event.” Regnery concluded, “That our Maker feels kindly toward us, his creatures, the music of Bach and Mozart would be for me sufficient evidence, if there were not more.” Music hath charms, Christian people; music hath charms.
We have all seen film clips of Hindu snake charmers. They take up wooden flutes or recorders, and they play their soft notes over hooded pythons coiled in reed baskets. The snakes rise up, and sway to the music, coming perilously close to the sonorous sound-makers, and then drop safely back into the baskets in their rhythmic undulations. Could that be part of what one of our hymns calls “the music of the spheres”? What is music, but mathematics, set to sound?
Everyone has an opinion about every kind of music. We like this singer, but not that one, this group, but not that one, this band, but not that one. We like dixieland jazz, but not progressive jazz, or vice versa, classical but not popular music, or vice versa, bluegrass but not barbershop, Mozart but not Mahler, Beethoven but not Bruckner, Watts but not Wesley, Gladden but not Gaither. We know what we like, but far too many of us know far too little about why we do or don’t like whatever we do or don’t like.
Familiarity is a good part of it. Music we are familiar with we tend to like better than music we have never heard, even if that new music is heralded by musicians as outstanding. Psalm 149 proclaims, “Sing to the Lord a new song!” That’s easy for them to say. But have they heard some of the new stuff? But of course all the good old stuff was new stuff once. Furthermore some of it was rejected in its own time, and didn’t emerge again for many years. In my opinion, Johann Sebastian Bach is the greatest composer of Christian music who ever lived. He and his wife had scads of children, several of whom became composers themselves, Carl Philippe Emanuel being probably the most famous. After he died, Bach became practically unknown, and C.P.E. Bach rose to the top of the 18th century charts. But in the 19th century, Bach staged a comeback, in which, I firmly trust, he shall continue to the last syllable of recorded time.
Music hath charms, but it also has power. It can express for us what we cannot express for ourselves. It can evoke feelings and emotions and thoughts which otherwise would escape our limited abilities to formulate or fortify. Perhaps musicians feel the power of music more than non-musicians, and performers more than those who are not performing. I have been swept up into a spiritual high much more by singing music than by hearing it. Nevertheless, recalling the Fourth Presbyterian Choir or the First Presbyterian Choir or the House of Hope Presbyterian Choir, I have been lifted above the sanctuary ceiling to the very gates of heaven by the glories of the sound and sounds. As Isaiah --- and Jesus --- said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
Good music is great music if it’s the best anyone can do. Those River City kids back there in the Blackstone Theater were magnificent when they first took up their horns and tooted their terribly terrific notes. In the end, it all came together in an enthusiastic cacophony.
With a song in our hearts, it all comes together. “In cheerful sound all voices raise/ And fill the world with joyful praise…. Thy praise shall sound from shore to ashore/ Till suns shall rise and set no more.”
And so we affirm what Paul said to the Ephesians: “Be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with all your heart, always and for everything giving thanks in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God the Father” (Eph. 5:18b-20).
Have you ever wondered why we sing, or why we have preludes and postludes and offertories? Have you ever thought what it would be like if we didn’t sing and heard nothing? Could proper worship of God be possible without music? Who would ever want to test it? And why? “Praise the Lord! Sing to the Lord a new song, his praise in the assembly of the faithful!” (Psalm 149:1)