Sermon Archive

Prayer as Syncopation

Festal Evensong
Sunday, March 31, 2019 @ 04:00 pm
The Fourth Sunday In Lent (Laetare)

The Fourth Sunday In Lent (Laetare)


Gracious Father, whose blessed Son Jesus Christ came down from heaven to be the true bread which giveth life to the world: Evermore give us this bread, that he may live in us, and we in him; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

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Scripture citation(s): Amos 8:4-7; James 2:1-4

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It is a great honor to be included in the Choir School’s Centenary Observation. I’m grateful to Fr. Turner for the invitation to preach today and to Bishop of New York Andy Dietsche for allowing me to be an interloper in his diocese. It is a great joy and privilege to be here not only with the Boys and Men of St. Thomas Choir, but also with the Dean and Choristers of Kings College, Cambridge. I bring you all greetings from the faithful of the 144 congregations that comprise the Diocese of New Jersey.

I attended Choir School from 1967 – 1970; from fifth to seventh grade. I didn’t graduate, and so my picture is not in the school building with those of the class of 1971. I wasn’t the best student and life’s direction led me elsewhere, but this magnificent church is an important sacred place for me. My love for Jesus Christ and his Church deepened in my worship of him in this sanctuary. The Choir School and St. Thomas, Fifth Avenue hold an important and dear place in my heart.

The theme of this Lenten series of sermons, the famous dictum attributed to St. Augustine, “when we sing, we pray twice,” articulates a profound truth for me and for many. The words of hymns and anthems utter prayer. Their melodies, harmonies and rhythms touch the soul. Hymns and anthems learned as a choir boy are in my head, heart and soul all the time. I am aware of my own spiritual pulse by considering the hymn in my head at any given time. By God’s grace, I can, and do, alter my spiritual state of mind by turning to God through hymns in faithfulness and prayer, singing them, even if only in my head, as a discipline of prayer. Three weeks ago, Mother Turner considered “Prayer as Melody.” Last week former chorister Fr. Sean Mullen of St. Mark’s, Philadelphia, reflected on “Prayer as Harmony.” I have been assigned the task of considering “Prayer as Syncopation.”

As a boy singing in this choir, I learned the polyphony of Byrd, Praetorius, Palestrina and others who offer early examples of the use of syncopation in Western Music. In a fascinating and, I believe, important 2018 book titled Melodies of a New Monasticism[i] which explores fresh forms the church might take in our contemporary context, author Craig Gardiner embraces the metaphor of polyphony and its various uses of melody and rhythm as a way of considering how faith might be lived out today.

Most significantly, Gardiner identifies the cantus firmus ­ the “firm song” of the Church’s polyphony; the strong melody in which the whole of the Church’s music must be grounded. That cantus firmus is Jesus Christ. He writes, “If Christ is conceived as the cantus firmus of all Christian living, then his “solid song” will be fragmented, mirrored, echoed, and retextured within a variety of people whose own diverse and individual melodies only find their unity, indeed their community in Christ.”[ii] This speaks to me in our pluralistic, post-modern age. It also works well with this evening’s sermon theme.

The Essential Dictionary of Music defines syncopation straight-forwardly: “To shift the accent of a note or a chord to a weak beat or the weak part of the beat.”[iii] Wikipedia, my favorite on-line source, elaborates on this, stating, “In music, syncopation involves a variety of rhythms which are in some way unexpected, making part or all of a tune or piece of music off-beat. More simply, syncopation is ‘a disturbance or interruption of the regular flow of rhythm’: a ‘placement of rhythmic stresses or accents where they wouldn’t normally occur…’”[iv] Okay, good…But how to relate this prayer?

Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land, saying, “When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and the sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit with false balances, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat.” The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Surely I will never forget any of their deeds. (Amos 8:4-7)

The writings of the prophets often take the form of syncopation in our worship, in our reading of Scripture, and if we are faithful to biblical reading in daily life, especially in reading the Daily Offices, in our prayer. The prophets’ fierce “Hear this!” or “Thus says the Lord” are often “unexpected…off-beat…” They are “a disturbance…an interruption of the regular flow and rhythm of our world and of our lives.” They are syncopation.

One source says of Amos, the 8th century B.C. Judean prophet, “he was called to the difficult task of preaching harsh words in a smooth season.”[v] Amos was sent by God to confront an Israel that had grown complacent in its relationship with God; arrogant in its overreliance on military might; blind and callous in its treatment of the poor, the sick, the elderly and marginalized; corrupt in its privileging of the rich and the powerful. This is clear in the portion of Amos we heard this evening.

When I attended General Seminary here in New York, the story was famously, and perhaps apocryphally, told of a senior seminarian who, in responding to a question on the General Ordination Exam asking for a summary of the book of the prophet Amos, responded by quoting one lone verse – Amos 5:24 “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” It is reported the seminarian was given full credit his response. That clarion call, “Let justice roll down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream,” sounded a syncopated note to Amos’s Israel and sounds one still in our time and place today.

And then there’s the Letter of James written in the early days of the nascent church. The great German Reformer, Martin Luther referred to James as an “epistle of straw” because he felt it stressed works righteousness at the expense of justification by faith through grace.[vi] James, too, presents “a disturbance or interruption of the regular flow of rhythm…”

My brothers and sisters,do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, “Have a seat here, please,” while to the one who is poor you say, “Stand there,” or, “Sit at my feet,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts? (James 2:1-4)

Syncopation…disturbance in the regular rhythm…Upsetting the status quo…Conviction and challenge. In truth, if we are faithful to the Gospel of Jesus Christ in prayer, we experience regular syncopations, disturbances, interruptions in the regular flow of rhythm of our daily lives and of the world in which we live. The kingdom, or reign of God, proclaimed by Jesus Christ is a disturbance, an interruption in the regular flow and rhythm of our hyper-individualistic, consumerist, often de-humanizing mechanistic world.

In his words and in his example, Jesus invites, urges, commands us, to consider what biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann often terms “an alternative construal of reality”[vii] – not a construal of reality offered by self-serving politicians, but one that represents the dream and vision of God. In this alternative beat, good news is proclaimed to the mass-incarcerated and immigrant captives, recovery of sight to the blind, healing to the poor sick and elderly, liberation to the oppressed.[viii]

In prayer, sung and spoken, Gods syncopated notes tune our ears and hearts to these disturbances, interruptions, alternative beats in our daily routines marked too often by passivity and apathy. In this syncopated rhythm we join with God in Jesus Christ and God’s concern for the world and, especially, on this syncopated weak beat, we join with God’s concern for the world’s weak and marginalized.

Prayer as syncopation…. It’s about God’s wondrous, loving, topsy-turvy reign which often interrupts and disturbs the ruthless rhythm of our world and of our lives; calls us to new notes, new rhythms of faithfulness, joy, light and life, leading us to what our Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry describes as the way of Jesus and his love.[ix] Yes, that’s what it is…It’s love song; a new, old love song.

Sing to the Lord a new song Cantate Domino [x] The Choir School motto – Sing to the Lord a new song…Sing it with love…Sing it with heart and soul…Sing it in wonderful, ragtime, syncopated rhythm…Sing it, remembering Jesus, our cantus firmus, always our cantus firmus – Jesus, our firm song, our sure foundation.

[i] Gardiner, Craig Melodies of a New Monastacism: Bonhoeffer’s Vision, Iona’s Witness Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2018

[ii] Gardiner, p. 10 (Kindle Location 311)

[iii] Harnsberger, Lindsey S. Essential Dictionary of Music (Los Angeles: Alfred Publishing, Co.,Inc. 1976) See “syncopation”

[iv] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncopation#cite_note-Hoffman-1

[v] See “Introduction” to the Book of Amos in The New Oxford Annotated Bible New Revised Standard Version (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)

[vi] See Luther’s Works, vol. 35, Word and Sacrament I (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1960), 395-397

[vii] See Brueggemann, Walter Finally Comes the Poet: Daring speech for Proclamation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989) Kindle location 67 – The phrase “alternative construal of reality” was also used by Walter Brueggemann at The Episcopal Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea when he was the John C. and Elizabeth Smaltz Lecturer in in 1996.

[viii] See Luke 4:18-19

[ix] See https://www.episcopalchurch.org/way-of-love

[x] Psalm 96:1; Psalm 98:1