Saturday, May 9, 2015

Joining in Singing the Music of the Spheres


A Reflection for VI Easter       All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, N.C. 
May 10, 2015                           Thomas E. Wilson, Rector
Joining in Singing the Music of the Spheres
The lesson from the Book of Acts for today is the ending of an episode in the life of the early church in which the people realized that God was not calling them not to be a tightly-knit group of believers who agreed on everything. Rather, they were to go outside their comfort area and encounter people who were different from them and discover that the same Holy Spirit binds them to these strangers. They were not to sing the same old songs but to learn to sing God’s new song.

Sing to the Lord a New Song” is the opening line of Psalm 98. I just had a hard time getting past that line. The Psalm is a celebration of how the musicians and nature are all singing the same song, as the horn, lyre, lute, and voices join the hills and rivers in this New Song as old as creation. It was one of the reasons Steve and I chose the opening hymn, “Earth and All Stars”, which has the refrain “He (the LORD) has done marvelous things and I too will praise him (The Lord) with a new song.” The hymn was written by Herbert Brokering and the music composed by David Johnson. Brokering was a Lutheran pastor and poet who wrote more than a hundred hymns. He wrote this one in 1964 for the 90th Anniversary of St. Olaf College where Johnson was the head of the Music department. Brokering viewed each part of the multifaceted university as a distinct entity able to praise God by its work. The Psalm celebrates the sharing of the same song by the musicians and nature, and Brokering expands on all things in nature as part of God’s music, from snowstorms in the winter, flowers and trees in the spring and summer, and rustling dry leaves in the fall. He hears the musical instruments blending with loud boiling test tubes and athletes and hammers and lectures and the prayers as all part of the great symphony of creation. 
 
The Hymn was included in the 1982 Hymnal, and it was the first time that hymn was exposed to Episcopalians who hate new things and who “loved” the old 1940 Hymnal. One of my Professors at Seminary was the head of the committee who put together the Hymnal, and this piece resonated with me because it reminded me of how a university is supposed to work - working together as we respect the building of a common good, a community of learning. By definition a college is a gathering together of colleagues to teach a discipline, and a university is a gathering of a number of colleges to create a whole, a universe of learning. I felt that I had been part of a community of learning when I taught at a college before I went to seminary where the relatively small Psychology, Sociology, and Social Work Departments would work together to create options to expand learning opportunities for our students rather than building our own reputations. 
 
My first posting after ordination was as a chaplain at a University, and it was a disappointment to me to see how the individual departments were so obsessed with going deeper in their separate areas and forgetting the nature of a university. The church I was working with had a bunch of academic types, but they were so busy getting research grants to keep their programs together and publishing paper after paper - many times variations of the same theme - in order to get tenure. It was part of my job to minister to the graduate students, junior faculty, and research fellows and their families being ground up in the maul of the “publish or perish” machine that regimented the undergraduates who took lots of classes but never got to the education of the whole person. The University was trying to move from being a very good regional university to being a top-tier University with a national reputation for tough, top-notch scholarship. People working so hard, so busy at being busy, so intent on competing with each other to climb the greasy pole of academe, they could not hear the music of the spheres. Milton wrote:
Aristotle ... imputed this symphony of the heavens ... this music of the spheres to Pythagorus. ... But Pythagoras alone of mortals is said to have heard this harmony ... If our hearts were as pure, as chaste, as snowy as Pythagoras' was, our ears would resound and be filled with that supremely lovely music of the wheeling stars. Then indeed all things would seem to return to the age of gold. Then we should be immune to pain, and we should enjoy the blessing of a peace that the gods themselves might envy.

Being out of sync with the fact that we are called to sing God’s creation song is not difficult in such an environment. However, this noise is not confined to institutions of higher learning but is symptomatic of the larger society. In an interview a few months ago, Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann opined
We in the United States live in a deathly social context that’s marked by consumerism and militarism and the loss of the common good. That ideological system causes us to be very afraid, to regard other people as competitors, or as threats, or as rivals. It causes us to think of the world in very frightened and privatistic forms. The gospel (however) very much wants us to think in terms of a neighborhood, in terms of being in solidarity with other people, in sharing our resources, and of living out beyond ourselves. The gospel contradicts the dominant values of our system, which encourages self-protection and self-sufficiency at the loss of the common good. The church is in some ways a reflection of those dominant values.

One of the things I like about our choir is that Steve Blackstock keeps working with the members of the choir about how they are to sing together; yes they have different parts, but the parts are not independent, competing sections but complementary constituents of a whole. They are not here to perform and have us “ooh and aah” at how good they are, but to lead us by showing how we can come together to sing the music of the cosmos of God. The choir does its work when it shares a “common good” of praise.

We are here as a church not to compete against the Methodists or Baptists or Roman Catholics or Presbyterians or Lutherans but to join them in one song to create a common good – to join with them in singing with the Lord the music of the spheres.

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