The Rev. Canon Carl Turner

Sunday, January 24, 2016 @ 11:00 am

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The Third Sunday After The Epiphany In the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity
Septuagesima

The Third Sunday After The Epiphany In the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

Give us grace, O Lord, to answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ and proclaim to all people the Good News of his salvation, that we and the whole world may perceive the glory of his marvelous works; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

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Sunday, January 24, 2016
The Third Sunday After The Epiphany In the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity
Septuagesima

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Scripture citation(s): Luke 4:14-21; Psalms 137

✛
A Sermon by
The Rev. Canon Carl Turner
on
Luke 4:14-21; Psalms 137
✛

How shall we sing the Lord's song?

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When I was a boy I remember learning British folk songs and sea shanty’s around the piano at school. None of that really happens now. In fact, singing in state schools in the United Kingdom and the United States is often non-existent. The publishers of the English Hymnal invited Vaughan Williams to be the principal editor and he insisted that it should be filled with folk melodies from England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. These melodies are more than just tunes – they are placeholders of memory, which allow the stories of generations to converge and create a kaleidoscope of experience.

Last Sunday I mentioned the siege of Jerusalem and the exile to Babylon and Isaiah’s prophecies about restoration and home-coming. When the people were exiled, one of the significant things that happened was the loss of national song. Significantly recorded in Psalm 137, we hear of the power of song and how the powerful can also silence song:

By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept : when we remembered thee, O Sion.
As for our harps, we hanged them up : upon the trees that are therein.
For they that led us away captive required of us then a song, and melody, in our heaviness : Sing us one of the songs of Sion.
How shall we sing the Lord’s song : in a strange land?

Silencing song also silences story. Traditional melodies are the means of passing on story from one generation to another. I think I once mentioned this in some words of the great American liturgical musician, Marty Haugen:

“We sing to remember who and whose we are. The leader of prayer, the one who reads, and especially the one who sings, must know more than the notes. She must know the stories of our faith as well as the stories of her own community, and she must know how they are brought together in worship.”^{^[1]}

There is something about God’s creativity in our music-making – I think it was John Donne who said that the ear is the Holy Spirit’s first door. And, of course, traditional iconography depicts Pope St Gregory the Great with a dove, representing the Holy Spirit, apparently humming the eight plainsong tones into his ear! We know it is the Holy Spirit because animals do not, generally sing; music and singing in particular seems to be a human thing and directly associated with the creativity of God. Or, as Louis Armstrong once said, “All music is folk music. I ain’t never heard a horse sing a song.”

I remember a friend back in the UK many years ago – she was a professional opera singer. She had cut her first CD’s and was just emerging onto the international stage when, suddenly, her life fell apart and her husband left her. She described the awfulness of the situation and how he had abandoned their young children. The result? She could not sing. I remember how poignant it was as she described the end of her singing career just as it was blossoming. “Carl,” she said, “if I had played an instrument, perhaps I could have made my fingers move and produce something. But the voice is part of who I am – and, then, who I was. I could not physically sing.”

So that takes us back to the exile and the inability of the Hebrew people to sing their traditional songs: “How shall we sing the Lord’s song : in a strange land?”

At the same time, melody and song can also be a means of protest and challenge; whole musical genre have developed out of the marginalization of people and from their desperation comes melodies and musical forms from the past and deep within the soul; jazz, gospel, African American spirituals – these are but three examples of the way that songs can be of protest and also solidarity.

When the Jews returned to Jerusalem they found the city in ruins and, if it had not been for people like Ezra and Nehemiah, they might have given up and continued to ‘hang up their harps’. Instead, they rebuilt the walls and the Temple and they rededicated the Temple and began to worship. Here, our Old Testament lesson is so significant and it is easy to miss the significance of it because the compilers of the Lectionary have done their usual thing of trying to be helpful by omitting two verses full of long, complicated names. But these verses are crucial to understanding the text: “The scribe Ezra stood on a wooden platform that had been made for the purpose; and beside him stood Mattithiah, Shema, Anaiah, Uriah, Hilkiah, and Maaseiah on his right hand; and Pedaiah, Mishael, Malchijah, Hashum, Hash- baddanah, Zechariah, and Meshullam on his left hand.” (verse 5) Who were these people? They were the Levites. And what were they doing? Well, the other verse that was omitted tells us… “the Levites, helped the people to understand the law, while the people remained in their places.” And as we heard, “they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading.” How did they do this? They sang. The Levites were musicians – they were singers – they sang the songs of faith back to the people so they understood the meaning again.

Marty Haugen comments on a friend from Ghana, Sowah Mensah who described to him the role of the musician with those cut off from the community in African communities: He said that “they were the people whom you went to when your life was in crisis–when your marriage was in trouble, when you were cut off from the community, when you felt lost and alone. I told him that in America, an artist or musician tends to be the last person you go to for advice about relationships (with the possible exception of a politician). Sowah said that the artist is the one who knows all the songs of the community–the songs of their history, the songs of their relationship and the songs of their vision. In his words, “The musician sings the song to you and ‘re-members’ you back into the community.”^{^[2]}

My friends, this is exactly what the Levites did. It is what Jesus did in the Synagogue in our Gospel reading – he would have chanted the reading. And it is what our choir are doing today. Let us join with them, so that our stories become part of God’s great story of redemption for, as the Lord himself has said, “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

__________

[1] Extract from a lecture by Marty Haugen ‘Keeping the People’s Song Alive’ delivered to a conference of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in 1998.

[2] Ibid.

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How shall we sing the Lord's song?

The Third Sunday After The Epiphany In the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

How shall we sing the Lord's song?