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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