This morning’s gospel tells the story of the person who brought Jesus his first converts as well as the person with whom he had the longest conversation recorded in the gospels. In Greek sermons written from the 4th to the 14th centuries the Samaritan woman is often compared to the male disciples and frequently found to be their superior. During this same period many hymns were composed to honor this woman who encountered Jesus at the well. One 6th century hymn called her “wise”, “holy”, “faithful” and “god-bearing”. In time she was canonized by the Eastern Orthodox Church and enrolled among her saints.
The Samaritan woman’s cult spread throughout the Eastern Mediterranean world and reached as far west as Spain. In Roman martyrology she was known as Photina. There’s also a legend which claims that she preached the gospel in various places, went to Carthage, was imprisoned for three years for her faith and finally died a martyr during the reign of Nero. Martyred along with her were her two sons, Joseph and Victor; three sisters and three others. A Spanish legend says that Photina converted and baptized Nero’s daughter, Domnina, along with a hundred of her servants.
The legends about this woman have always been much more widespread in the Eastern Orthodox Church than in the West and her feast day was celebrated last Sunday. A modern Orthodox writer, Eva Topping, points out that Photeine is still a name that’s very common among Greek Orthodox women and describes her as the “nameless woman of the Gospel who becomes transfigured into light and is listed in Orthodox liturgical books as the “Glorious Saint and Great Martyr Photeine, the Samaritan Woman”.
Now all that’s very interesting, especially to us women as we have so few role models in the Scriptures. But the real question is what does this woman have to say to us today? Well in the first place if we’re going to understand her story, we have to remember the rigid Levitical legalism to which Jesus would have been subjected as a faithful Jew because it provides the essential backdrop for this gospel story. First of all, there isn’t any other story in the scriptures which more powerfully reveals God’s evolution of grace through Jesus’ transformation of rules into relationships than this intense encounter between Jesus and the woman at the well because so many of the prohibitions of the Levitical Holiness Code come into play.
For example, in Jesus’ day Jewish men could neither speak to nor touch a women who wasn’t their wife. Why? Because they didn’t want to run the risk of becoming unclean. Since they wouldn’t have had any way of knowing where the woman was in her monthly cycle. If she were “unclean” then they would have become unclean simply by touching her.
As the story in this morning’s gospel unfolds we discover that this woman is promiscuous. If not a prostitute then certainly someone who seems to have had a very hard time staying married. It’s highly probable that she’d also broken the strict divorce codes of the time which would explain why she was at the well at noon all alone instead of coming to the well at daybreak or dusk which was the time women gathered water for their families and gossiped among themselves. So you see, simply by talking to her, Jesus was breaking the holiness code in several different ways.
We also have to remember that she was a Samaritan, a despised foreigner, in many respects; the equilivant of a Palestinian in the eyes of today’s Israeli. So this morning we should be just as astounded as the disciples were when they found Jesus talking to this woman. In some ways Jesus willingness to talk to the Samaritan woman revealed his own human need to make a connection with the deep spiritual need within her. In a way, Jesus plumbed the well of the Samaritan woman’s soul just as deeply as she had plumbed the ancient well of Jacob.
What we have in this story is a stunning example of Jesus embodying a new understanding of holiness. This story isn’t about the purity code of ritualistic law but rather the compassionate code of the human heart. For in this story Jesus completely rewrites the definition of piety. Instead of rigidly excluding people on the basis of behavior or status or law, in this story we have Jesus radically including people on the basis of need and value and worth. Dorothy Sayers, the great English mystery writer, once wrote, “Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the cradle and the last at the cross. They had never known a man like this Jesus. There had never been such another”.
In today’s gospel we have an example of Jesus demonstrating a new way of being human. He looked into the eyes of this woman and met her as she was. He ignored the cultural stereotyping and judgment which was expected from a Jew toward a Samaritan and he refused to behave according to the expectations of his tradition. By doing this Jesus threw down the gauntlet to all of us who bear his name. As a result, you and I are faced with seriously evaluating how well we’re doing at this business of grace? How open, accepting and non-judgmental are we to the rich variety of people, both sinners and saints, who come our way? Are we sensitive, intuitive and responsive to their needs?
Justice Harry Blackmun was named to the Supreme Court by President Nixon because he was considered a constitutional conservative. Blackmun served for 24 years and surprised everyone including himself as he gradually broadened his understanding of the law. One of his former law clerks, who wrote an eulogy at the time of his death, remarked that Blackmun grew in his sensitivity to the needs of the people who lurked behind the pages of the court briefs. Because of his own Christian faith Blackmun began to realize that compassion had to serve as the basic foundation of judicial reasoning. Or as another colleague put it Blackmun worried about the “little people who had no angels on their shoulders. He insisted on seeing the litigants as individuals and not as abstract categories”.
A street minister in Chicago tells the story of a young mother who came into his homeless shelter sick, frightened, and completely racked by guilt and despair. She was a prostitute and a drug addict who in a cocaine-induced hysteria had offered her two year old daughter for sex so that she could feed her own ravenous addiction. Completely revolted by this revelation, at first the street minister was speechless. Finally, when he spoke he asked her whether she’d ever thought of going to church for help. “I’ll never forget the look of pure astonishment that crossed her face” he said. ‘Church” she cried. ‘Why would I ever go there? They’d just make me feel even worse than I already do!’” What a condemnation of the contemporary Christian Church? After all aren’t we the community which is called to represent Christ to the world in our times?
But let’s take another look at our gospel story because there’s more here than a gracious, generous, compassionate, inclusive Jesus. For if we listen carefully we’ll also hear that our warm fuzzy Jesus quickly became as hard as nails. Before very long the conversation between Jesus and the woman at the well quickly became intense. For as they connected spiritually, emotionally and intellectually all the pretense and politeness was stripped away. Suddenly the comforting Jesus had become a confrontational Jesus. For if he was going to engage this woman as a child of God then he needed to engage all of who she was. In other words, her brokenness, her weakness, her corruption, her need, and most of all, her deep, deep thirst for a sense of purpose and worth. That’s why Jesus confronted her with her sexual history.
He told her, with no holds barred, that until she encountered God she would never experience the abundant life. Until she drank deeply of the living water, the very roots of who she was would remain shriveled, dry and barren. Because she was so precious in the eyes of God, Jesus showed her in glaring detail the unworthiness of her present lifestyle. The result of that confrontation was her transformation. She was transformed from a woman living on the edge of society into the first Christian evangelist, a glorious saint, the great martyr Photina. Instead of being offended by Jesus’ confrontational approach she was empowered. For through seeing herself in the mirror of Jesus’ truth, she was able to meet herself honestly for the very first time. It was that clear view of who she was that enabled her to change. She wanted more from life. She wanted relationship and authentic intimacy. So with great courage she reached for more.
That’s probably why she left her water jar behind as she ran to the village. She ran back to share the living water that was now overflowing from her soul. Because of those actions this fallen, rejected, broken woman became the first evangelist in the gospel of John. The first person who, with passionate joy, proclaimed the Good News of the Gospel. “Come my friends,” she cried. “Come and see the man who told me everything I have ever done. He is the Messiah! He is the God who sees us as we are! He is the God who loves us as we are! He is the God who empowers us to become who we still need to be!
Once upon a time there was a Rabbi who was much beloved by the people. He was a brilliant, wise and charismatic leader. Crowds surrounded him constantly seeking blessing and healing and truth. But there was always one surly man in the crowd who always appeared wherever and whenever the Rabbi would speak. This old man contradicted the Rabbi pointed out the Rabbi’s weaknesses and generally made fun of his defects. This heckler infuriated the people who loved and revered the Rabbi. And then one day the heckler died. Everyone heaved a sign of relief and thought to themselves “Good riddance!” Everyone that is, except the Rabbi, who came to the heckler’s funeral overcome with grief and loss. When he was asked if he was mourning over the eternal fate of this wicked man the Rabbi responded, “Oh no, no! Why should I mourn over our friend who is now surely in heaven? It is for myself that I am grieving. This man was the only true friend I had. I’m surrounded by people who revere me. He was the only one who ever challenged me and now I fear that with him gone I’ll stop growing.” As he said these words he burst into tears.
This morning, my friends, I want to urge you to come to the well to meet Jesus. For he’s the only true friend you really have. That’s why you must come. Come in the glare of the noonday sun like she did. Come and offer your thirst as well as your need. The promise of our faith is that Jesus will be there to greet you, to touch you, to comfort you, to confront you and ultimately to help you grow. Never forget, that there’s nothing you have done or have not done that will turn him off. All you and I have to do is to be open and receptive and if you’ll do that Jesus will fill you with living water. The living water of hope and grace and possibility so that you’ll never be thirsty again. AMEN
Peace and Justice Film Series - Waiting for Superman
"Waiting for Superman"
Wednesday
April 13
7:00 PM
Controversial but much-praised documentary on the state of children’s education in America, by the director of An Inconvenient Truth. Audience Award for best documentary at 2010 Sundance Film Festival, Best Documentary Feature at Critics’ Choice Movie Awards.
From Wikipedia: "Joe Morgenstern, writing for the Wall Street Journal, gave the movie a positive review saying, ‘when the future of public education is being debated with unprecedented intensity’ the film ‘makes an invaluable addition to the debate.’ WSJ’s William McGurn also praised the film in an op-ed piece, saying it is a ‘stunning liberal expose of a system that consigns American children who most need a decent education to our most destructive public schools.’ Kyle Smith, for the New York Post, gave the movie 4-and-a-half stars, calling it an ‘invaluable learning experience.’ Forbes Melik Kaylan similarly liked the film, writing, ‘I urge you all to drop everything and go see the documentary Waiting For Superman at the earliest opportunity’."
Spirituality and the Arts
Returning, by popular demand:
Many remember – and have favorably commented upon – the Spirituality and the Arts series we did two years ago during Lent, and have requested a “return engagement.” I’m happy to say that a sub-committee of our Adult Education Planning Committee has met, and we have scheduled the following series of events for this Lent:
Sundays at 11:30:
March 13 - David Stoneman: The Bach Passion Pieces. Johann Sebastian Bach composed four (or five) settings of the passion story to be used during Holy Week. Two have survived, and each of these is a grand accomplishment of theater, sermon, concert and liturgy that deserves exploration.
March 20 - Jack Miles: Is the Bible Self-Conscious? Do you file the Bible under literature or religion? If under both, do you make a distinction between the two? Does the Bible, which has no word for either fiction or nonfiction, recognize a distinction between the two? Did Isaiah know he was a poet? Can music, painting, or literature be religious without reference to God? If so, how do we recognize it as religious? We will engage these questions with two simple examples from popular music and two from the Bible.
March 27 - Kitty Crary and Jack Miles: Messiah Reader’s Theater Presents G. K. Chesterton’s “The Surprise” Explore your inner actor as we organize to present an informal Readers’ Theater performance of G. K. Chesterton’s “The Surprise.” Readers’ Theater is a dramatic presen-tation of a play by actors reading from the script; the focus is on reading the text with expressive voices and gestures and there is no memorization. This charming short play is a lively consideration of free will and what can go wrong when we misuse it. “The Surprise” includes puppets that miraculously become real, romance, marriage and two sword fights.
“The Surprise” has roles for eight readers, including a princess, a poet, a brave king, several soldiers and God. We’re looking for volunteer readers, no acting experience needed. We’ll be doing this for our own pleasure.
Join us Sunday, March 27 at 11:30 a.m. to learn more about the play and about G. K.Chesterton, the English Anglican and Roman Catholic writer famous for his wit, his weight, and his paradoxical way with words. (A “Chestertonian Paradox” is a statement that at first seems obviously wrong but turns out, on second thought, to be surprisingly right.) On the 27th, we will cast the actors/readers who will present “The Surprise” at Messiah on Saturday, April 16 as part of Spirituality and the Arts. Join us at the casting call!
April 3 - Lorna Adkins and Carolyn Estrada: The Poetry of Transition: an exploration of poetry as a means of expressing life-changes, especially through the works of Charles Wright, Christian Wimen, Seamus Heaney and others.
April 10 - Jim Herbert: Renaissance Perspective and the Infinity of God. Painting in 15th-century Italy developed a system called “linear perspective,” a new technique useful for depicting the ordinary space of this world. And yet these images often depicted Gods that exceed such ordinary space. In this presentation, Jim Herbert will look at how Gods came to take a place in such pictures without losing their divine attributes.
April 16 - Saturday Workshop
9:00 – 9:15 - Registration and Coffee
9:15 – 9:30 - Plenary Session: The Relationship of Arts and Spirituality: How is engaging with art like a spiritual practice? What is it about the arts that puts us in a mindful or prayerful state?
9:15 – 11:00 - Hands-on Art Experiences:
- Rose Windows: Beca Hendrickson
- Quilting: Sylvia Middlebrooks
- Poetry: Lorna Adkins and Mark Hendrickson
- Musical Improvisation: Ken Kawamura
- Scrapbooking: Deanna Richeson
11:10 – 12:00-ish - Act I of The Surprise, by G. K. Chesterton.
12:00 – 12:45 - Lunch from the Messiah Soup Kitchen (Participants who find spiritual expression in cooking may also spend the morning helping to prepare the soup for our lunch!)
12:45 – 1:45 - Act II of The Surprise.
2:00 – 4:00 - Workshop on the Aramaic Lord’s Prayer: John Middlebrooks
4:10 - Taize service
If you have an interest in participating, either as participant or as facilitator of a group, please sign up at Coffee Hour or contact Carolyn.
March 13, 2011 - The Reverend Carolyn Estrada
Genesis 2:15 – 17; 3:1 – 7 Psalm 32 Romans 5:12 – 19 Matthew 4:1 - 11
As I was growing up, whenever anyone was looking for something, someone was bound to quip: “Go look in Cheri’s bottom drawer!”
Go look in Cheri’s bottom drawer!
My younger sister’s bottom drawer was the repository of anything she came across which intrigued her, and all her treasures wound up stored safely away in that space. The simple act of opening that bottom drawer resulted in a kind of explosion as the accumulation of things were released from their compacted space and spilled over onto the floor!
Of course, what Cheri was looking for was generally buried underneath and obscured by all manner of other things…
As we all know all too well – yesterday’s treasures can easily become today’s clutter!
So, too, with our lives, I think.
We acquire stuff – possessions, surely, but also tasks, activities, busy-ness, opinions – until our lives – and our treasure – get lost in our accumulated habits…
Like the fish who doesn’t know he is swimming in water, we become accustomed to our clutter, we assume it rather than recognize it for what it is.
I well remember one point in my late thirties when I suddenly looked up an realized that if anyone had simply dropped me into my life at that moment – with responsibilities for house, husband and family, raising three young children, working, being active in my community – like the proverbial frog dropped into boiling water, I would have leapt out immediately! But most of us aren’t simply dropped into the busy-ness and demands of our lives – it happens gradually, almost insidiously, so that we hardly recognize the “water we’re swimming in” as it were…
Sometimes, when we begin to feel overwhelmed – or perhaps even when we get some perspective that gives us a moment of clarity – we may try to modify things a bit, moving this piece from here to there… But it’s hard to do: everything seems important, valuable, so often our “changing” is simply a shell-game of sorts.
In the Middle Ages, remains of saints were highly prized as objects of veneration, and as a consequence there evolved a practice which came to be known as Furta Sacra – “holy thefts” – the moving of the pilfered remains of saints from one shrine to another. Each of us has our own highly prized objects of veneration as well – perhaps not saints, but venerated nonetheless: for most of us, I think, it is our busy-ness, our indispensability, our activities, our need to take on just one more project, yet one more activity… I think in our lives we often practice a kind of Furta Sacra – we can’t quite give up this project or that activity – and so we simply shift it to another part of our lives, pilfer it from here, enshrine it anew over there, until our lives get lost in the demands of what we are doing…
Think about your own life, for a moment.
Standing apart, looking – can you begin to recognize some of the clutter? Can you begin to see your life apart from what you do, what you think, what you have? Where are YOU in that mix? Where is GOD?
One of the great values of Lent, I believe, is the opportunity it gives us to be intentional about “cleaning out” that bottom drawer of our lives.
What have we accumulated that is clutter, and what treasure? Can we get rid of the things that obscure what is really important?
Jesus is led – Mark says “driven” – into the wilderness for a time of fasting, prayer, discernment. It is a time in which he, too, sorted through the clutter of his life – the hammer and nails of his carpenter vocation, perhaps, the cultural mores of honor and shame, the societal expectations of wife and children, the conflicting demands of Jewish religious groups around the rigor of the law and the appropriate response to Roman oppression…
Who is HE in the midst of all this?
Where is GOD in the midst of all this?
What is God calling him to be/do in the midst of all this?
It is at the end of his forty days of discernment that Jesus has attained a clear enough sense of self, of who he is and who God is and how he is called to live, to be, that he is able to recognize Satan when he appears to tempt him…
When Satan approaches him, Jesus is not distracted. Because he has sorted through the flotsam and jetsam of his life, the attachments and demands and expectations, he is able to see the tempter’s challenges for what they are: an attempt to lure him back into living on this-world terms. Confident in who he is, Jesus doesn’t have to prove anything to Satan. He doesn’t have to allow Satan to set the terms-and-conditions for this-world success. Jesus holds fast to Scripture, and replies simply:
It is written:
‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’
It is written:
‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’
It is written:
‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’
There is an old Tibetan saying: “When a pickpocket meets a saint, what he sees are his pockets.”
So with Satan and Jesus: When Satan sees “Jesus, my Son, the Beloved, in whom I am well-pleased” he sees simply the power he just might be able to pick. Satan sees Jesus as a this-world Messiah – one who operates by human standards, expectations, rules: “Okay, Jesus… I get it; you’re just like everyone else, only more-so!”
He sees this Son of God as amped-up power – but not qualitatively different Sonship.
What defeats Satan is Jesus’ self-knowledge, his understanding that his Messiahhood is different; his Kingdom of God is not just one more this-world government with yet a different ruler.
Jesus was able to recognize the tempter BECAUSE he had cleared away the detritus of his life; his wilderness time had helped him sort out what was important and what was not, had helped him know himself and God…
Like the pickpocket and the saint, or Satan and Jesus, we often see only the pockets: we see what we must do, without the context of where the Doing fits into the Being of our lives.
Pickpocket and saint, Satan and Jesus, Work or Life: it is easier to see what we have or what we have accomplished, than who we are.
Our life – or our work.
Who we are – or what we do, own, have accomplished.
Like the pickpocket and Satan, we miss what is important.
Lent gives us a time to strip away the clutter and BE; a time in which we can clear away what it is that obscures the treasure of our lives.
Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness, clearing away the clutter of his attachments, his life, so that he could see and respond clearly to God’s call.
How much more so do we need this clutter-clearing time!
As we enter this time of self-examination and repentance let us ask ourselves: Can we clear away the clutter so that we can see what is of value, and what needs to be discarded? Where are the tempters, the temptations, concealed within our clutter? We might ask ourselves the tempter’s questions:
- Have we fallen into the trap of “living by bread alone”?
- Do we put God to the test?
- What other powers in our lives have seduced us into service?
The theologian Frederick Buechner points out that the word that God speaks to us is an incarnate word – “a word spelled out to us, not alphabetically, in syllables, but enigmatically, in events.”
Have we left room for those enigmatic events in our lives? One of the functions of Lent, I believe, is to clear the space in which we can experience those events, allow them to work on us, allow ourselves to enter into their mystery. Such experiences cannot happen in the left-overs of our days or weeks, in the odd corners when we have time – but come as full-bodied experiences when we are simply present and alive to what is happening.
We may be able to read the words during a commercial break, or standing in line at the grocery store – but we can’t engage the experience, get drawn into the enigma, without showing up with our whole selves, undistracted and open.
Once again, in the cycle of our Liturgical year, we are called into the observance of a Holy Lent. May our wilderness time give us the clarity to let go of some of our attachments that we might more clearly hear God’s call in our lives.
Amen.
Lent Events Lent Events to Help You Grow In Christ
- Wednesday Morning Eucharist and Book Discussion, 6:30 a.m., Eucharist from the New Zealand Prayerbook with homilies by parishioners, light breakfast and book discussion.
- Tuesday Evening Contemplative Prayer, every Tuesday at 7 p.m., in the Upper Room. Spiritual Director Karen Goran leads this exploration of varieties of Christian prayer.
- Men Seeking God, a spirituality support group for men, meets at 6:30 p.m., third Tuesday of each month in members’ homes.
- Women’s Bible Study, meets the second Friday morning of the month from 9:30 - 11:30 in the Upper Room.
- Prayer at Home, meets the second Saturday evening at 6:30 p.m. each month in parishioner’s homes for dinner and evening prayer.
- Wednesday’s Women, a women’s spirituality group, meets the first Wednesday of every month at Linda Barnhurst’s home.
- Intercessory Prayer, meets in the Upper Room every Wednesday morning at 9:30 to pray with special intention for those in our own community and the world as a whole.
- Sts. Aelred and Hildegard LGBT Ministry meets in the members’ homes the third Sunday of each monty at 6 p.m. for Evening Prayer and a potluck dinner.
Save the Date!
Mark your calendar for the Church Auction on May 21! We’re planning for a fabulous, festive evening filled with great food, lots of merchandise and events, and your Messiah Family coming together for an exciting time. We’ll be accepting donations of objects and events (and just plain cash) for the auction. More information coming soon.
Paul Cook-Giles
Paul Cook-Giles
Profile Committee News
The next step for the Profile Com- mittee is to translate the statistical information from the surveys into an account of what is important to Messiah, what excites us and what we do well. Your thoughtful comments and questions will help to shape this section of the Parish Profile document.
Coming Sunday May 1: Where would we like Messiah to be in five years? A chance for the parish to talk about our future together. Watch for more information in the April Messenger and on our website.
Kitty Crary, Profile Committee Chair
Anticipating my first potluck challenge...
It's only Ash Wednesday, and I'm already looking nervously ahead to Saturday's potluck - a joint meeting of the Grupo de Libros and the Women's Book Group. How can I afford potluck on my $50/wk?!! But fortunately yesterday was Shrove Tuesday, and I commandeered some left-over ham from our pancake supper, which I'll put into a scalloped potato dish... potatoes I can afford (I think!)! All these things we take for granted, and now we can't...
The Pre-Lenten Challente of the Lenten Food Challenge!
Am I the only one struggling with the temptation of "stocking up" prior to Lent? I have to keep (figuratively!) slapping my hands to keep from putting that extra something-or-two into my shopping cart in anticipation of when I won't have a much money to spend! Already my awareness of what and how I spend my money has increased! (I said farewell to my morning latte-at-the-beach last week!)
March 6, 2011, Friends of Music Sunday - Dr. James D. Herbert
As Jim Vaskov played those notes, did you need Brad or Carolyn chanting to hear the words in your head? Probably not: the music from the organ reaches deep into our brains, and, for many of us, draws from countless previous masses we have attended to cause the opening phrases of the Great Thanksgiving to echo somewhere within us. Music serves this rudimentary purpose quite well: it helps embed the liturgy firmly into our minds.
Is this how it works? Words convey the real meaning, while music assists us to remember? That might seem to be the commonsense attitude. Words come first—to be really Protestant about it, the Word comes first—while music comes after. Music functions as an aid, or as entertainment: or perhaps something more nefarious than that. We hear in today’s first reading about Moses heading up Mount Sinai. When, in Schönberg’s Opera Moses and Aron, the prophet descends back down the mountain, he brings with him the truth of the spoken (not sung) Word. Meanwhile his singing brother Aaron has been busy seducing the Jewish tribe with music—music and a Golden Calf. Something has gone amiss in this opera. Music, false music like the false god of the Calf, exerts a priority over text, and the world suffers.
But I wonder: what if Schönberg’s Aron, not only his Moses, has a valid point after all? What if music does something more than viciously distract from the Word, ,more even than virtuously serve the Word? What if music brings something to worship that the Word cannot? I read once somewhere—though my quick Wikipedia-level research in preparation for today failed to confirm it—the speculation that parts of musical thought occur in the brain further down the brain stem than do any parts of the formation of spoken language. If this is true, than music constitutes a more basic, a more primitive, aspect of human experience than does plain speech. Specifically, it would seem to come, at least in part, from a part of the brain that precedes the formation of individuality, of the ego, of the self. And that strikes me as intuitively right. We may have our soloists (a modernist innovation, I’d speculate, probably no older than, say, 10,000 years), but music is fundamentally a communal activity. The conjoining of voices in the unison of Gregorian chant; the magical moment of harmony when emergent resonance produces a sound that exceeds the sum and character of the individual voices. As with a tribe of hunter-gatherers circled around a fire eons ago, music draws us . . . together. In music, we are a group, not a monad.
To be sure, language, too, can bring humans into communion. The Bible, more than practically any other book, has certainly formed a sense of identity among peoples, across the continents and across the centuries. But it’s amazing, really, to realize how quickly language evolves in unexpected directions; how, for instance, even the written declarations of the founding fathers of this nation probably don’t mean the same thing to us as they did to the gentlemen of the eighteenth century. Even their relatively proximate world is deeply strange to us—and if we don’t recognize it as strange, then we’re not looking close enough, and are instead projecting our ways of thinking on them. And two thousand years? What unites us with people of biblical times? Are we not constantly confronted, when listening to the readings each Sunday, about how inscrutable the concerns of those ancient inhabitants of the Near East are to us? Not just all that stuff about dietary habits and skin diseases and the inexplicable and cruel wrath of Jehovah; even basic concepts such as “love,” “neighbor,” and “faith,” and certainly “God” have undoubtedly drifted far in their modern meanings from their ancient intent. So, when reading the Bible, we encounter both the miracle of communion despite vast differences, but also the mystery of people and worlds that may be very difficult for us to comprehend. I think that music may help us bridge that gap. Again, raw speculation on my part, but I suspect that the deep-brain resonance of a song may often echo more successfully across distance and time than do the literal meaning of the Words. This is why we are still moved by Gregorian chants while we would almost certainly reject out-of-hand almost all of the content of first millennia preaching, if we even had access to it all. We cannot know all our Christian brethren, not really. As an entirety, they remain as mysterious to us as is the majesty of God. But music builds community, not only in this wonderful building today, but with all those unknown others. Music celebrates, and overcomes, and deepens, the mystery of our differences, and forges our unity.
This service today is dedicated to the role of music in our liturgy and in our community. Music is strong in this community. That statement verges on tautology, because music (if I’m right in what I’ve been arguing) is itself a form of community. Music is strong in this community, but we can make it stronger. You may be thinking, “Yes, music at Messiah is important to me”; and you may be asking yourself, “What can I do?” Well . . .
First, you might consider joining the choir. Yes, you: not those other people, over there. I may be up here in the choir stalls, but I have my spies out there in the pews, and I know we’ve got some folks in this parish who are just waiting to find their song. It’s a great group of folks that gather here every Thursday evening for rehearsal; we tend to have a blast. Not quite as debauched a time as Schönberg would lead you to believe that Aaron’s people of music enjoyed, but a good time nonetheless. You don’t need to worry about ability: our range of skills up here is great, and when you sing with the choir over time, you do get better—or, at least, I hope I have. We find true joy working together to craft a sound that we lift each week to the glory of God. I recall distinctly, when I first began singing in a church choir, which was at St. Michael’s and All Angels down in Corona del Mar; I remember an occasion when the men alone were rehearsing an anthem. Tim Getz, the wonderful music director and organist there at the time, listened to us once through, and said something like: “I can hear each of your voices alone, and they’re all more or less right, but I don’t hear them as an ensemble. Sing it again, but this time, listen to the voices to your right and to your left; don’t focus on your own. I want to hear a single sound.” We tried again, and what followed felt like a miracle. We each abandoned our individuality and blended into a collectivity. That sort of experience, which is both musical and philosophical, even theological, happens every week with the choir here at Messiah—well, actually, if truth be told, not exactly every week; we do have our off days. In short: at its best, the choir realizes, in microcosm, what the church in macrocosm itself can become, across vast distances and through long spans of time: a means to join into a community greater than the self.
Second, you can take advantage of the marvelous Concerts by Candlelight series that Jim Gilliam puts together each year. Our next concert comes up just next Sunday, a week from today, and features the California Quartet, intriguingly, playing along with projected film. Recently, Jim joined a consortium of chamber music venues in southern California, which gives us access to a superb list of performing groups that will be appearing in the months and years to come as part of the Candlelight series. Beyond being events that members of this parish can themselves enjoy, the concerts and the champagne receptions that follow provide excellent occasions to invite friends and acquaintances to visit Messiah. Once they see the building and they meet the people, such visitors stand a much greater chance to return on a Sunday morning. Growth of our parish family needs to be ongoing concern that all of us share, and these concerts are a fine means to introduce visitors to our active faith community and our community projects. If you do attend, we can always use volunteers to bring finger food, and to assist with the set-up and clean-up.
Finally, I would ask you to consider making a separate contribution, beyond your usual pledge to Messiah, to the Friends of Music. There may be some confusion on this point; certainly, I myself did not quite understand how music finances works here at Messiah until very recently. The Friends of Music budget is quite small, and only a relatively small portion of it goes to pay for the concerts and other incidental expenses, such as sheet music. The majority of the funds go toward paying our two staff singers, David Sheridan and David Stoneman. Some parishes pay staff singers out of the regular parish budget; here at Messiah we do not. Now, you all know what fine soloists David and David are, from the many times each has sung during communion (both are such unrepentant modernists in that regard!). Less obvious, perhaps, is the remarkable job they do leading the men’s sections week after week. I know that I panic any time Sheridan gets stuck in the snow, and I realize that I’m actually going to need to find my own way through the tenor part for that week. So the Davids don’t simply contribute their own voices; they keep all of the lower voices in line through their indispensable leadership. They are both real professionals, even though we pay them much below professional scale; they—along with the many professional quality musicians in our women’s sections, who are such a blessing—are giving their time and expertise as a gift to us every week; and our choir would be inconceivably worse without their contribution.
Music in this community; music is this community. However best you are able to join in, God welcomes you to follow the melody, to sense the rhythms, to be a voice in God’s earthly harmonies.
Is this how it works? Words convey the real meaning, while music assists us to remember? That might seem to be the commonsense attitude. Words come first—to be really Protestant about it, the Word comes first—while music comes after. Music functions as an aid, or as entertainment: or perhaps something more nefarious than that. We hear in today’s first reading about Moses heading up Mount Sinai. When, in Schönberg’s Opera Moses and Aron, the prophet descends back down the mountain, he brings with him the truth of the spoken (not sung) Word. Meanwhile his singing brother Aaron has been busy seducing the Jewish tribe with music—music and a Golden Calf. Something has gone amiss in this opera. Music, false music like the false god of the Calf, exerts a priority over text, and the world suffers.
But I wonder: what if Schönberg’s Aron, not only his Moses, has a valid point after all? What if music does something more than viciously distract from the Word, ,more even than virtuously serve the Word? What if music brings something to worship that the Word cannot? I read once somewhere—though my quick Wikipedia-level research in preparation for today failed to confirm it—the speculation that parts of musical thought occur in the brain further down the brain stem than do any parts of the formation of spoken language. If this is true, than music constitutes a more basic, a more primitive, aspect of human experience than does plain speech. Specifically, it would seem to come, at least in part, from a part of the brain that precedes the formation of individuality, of the ego, of the self. And that strikes me as intuitively right. We may have our soloists (a modernist innovation, I’d speculate, probably no older than, say, 10,000 years), but music is fundamentally a communal activity. The conjoining of voices in the unison of Gregorian chant; the magical moment of harmony when emergent resonance produces a sound that exceeds the sum and character of the individual voices. As with a tribe of hunter-gatherers circled around a fire eons ago, music draws us . . . together. In music, we are a group, not a monad.
To be sure, language, too, can bring humans into communion. The Bible, more than practically any other book, has certainly formed a sense of identity among peoples, across the continents and across the centuries. But it’s amazing, really, to realize how quickly language evolves in unexpected directions; how, for instance, even the written declarations of the founding fathers of this nation probably don’t mean the same thing to us as they did to the gentlemen of the eighteenth century. Even their relatively proximate world is deeply strange to us—and if we don’t recognize it as strange, then we’re not looking close enough, and are instead projecting our ways of thinking on them. And two thousand years? What unites us with people of biblical times? Are we not constantly confronted, when listening to the readings each Sunday, about how inscrutable the concerns of those ancient inhabitants of the Near East are to us? Not just all that stuff about dietary habits and skin diseases and the inexplicable and cruel wrath of Jehovah; even basic concepts such as “love,” “neighbor,” and “faith,” and certainly “God” have undoubtedly drifted far in their modern meanings from their ancient intent. So, when reading the Bible, we encounter both the miracle of communion despite vast differences, but also the mystery of people and worlds that may be very difficult for us to comprehend. I think that music may help us bridge that gap. Again, raw speculation on my part, but I suspect that the deep-brain resonance of a song may often echo more successfully across distance and time than do the literal meaning of the Words. This is why we are still moved by Gregorian chants while we would almost certainly reject out-of-hand almost all of the content of first millennia preaching, if we even had access to it all. We cannot know all our Christian brethren, not really. As an entirety, they remain as mysterious to us as is the majesty of God. But music builds community, not only in this wonderful building today, but with all those unknown others. Music celebrates, and overcomes, and deepens, the mystery of our differences, and forges our unity.
This service today is dedicated to the role of music in our liturgy and in our community. Music is strong in this community. That statement verges on tautology, because music (if I’m right in what I’ve been arguing) is itself a form of community. Music is strong in this community, but we can make it stronger. You may be thinking, “Yes, music at Messiah is important to me”; and you may be asking yourself, “What can I do?” Well . . .
First, you might consider joining the choir. Yes, you: not those other people, over there. I may be up here in the choir stalls, but I have my spies out there in the pews, and I know we’ve got some folks in this parish who are just waiting to find their song. It’s a great group of folks that gather here every Thursday evening for rehearsal; we tend to have a blast. Not quite as debauched a time as Schönberg would lead you to believe that Aaron’s people of music enjoyed, but a good time nonetheless. You don’t need to worry about ability: our range of skills up here is great, and when you sing with the choir over time, you do get better—or, at least, I hope I have. We find true joy working together to craft a sound that we lift each week to the glory of God. I recall distinctly, when I first began singing in a church choir, which was at St. Michael’s and All Angels down in Corona del Mar; I remember an occasion when the men alone were rehearsing an anthem. Tim Getz, the wonderful music director and organist there at the time, listened to us once through, and said something like: “I can hear each of your voices alone, and they’re all more or less right, but I don’t hear them as an ensemble. Sing it again, but this time, listen to the voices to your right and to your left; don’t focus on your own. I want to hear a single sound.” We tried again, and what followed felt like a miracle. We each abandoned our individuality and blended into a collectivity. That sort of experience, which is both musical and philosophical, even theological, happens every week with the choir here at Messiah—well, actually, if truth be told, not exactly every week; we do have our off days. In short: at its best, the choir realizes, in microcosm, what the church in macrocosm itself can become, across vast distances and through long spans of time: a means to join into a community greater than the self.
Second, you can take advantage of the marvelous Concerts by Candlelight series that Jim Gilliam puts together each year. Our next concert comes up just next Sunday, a week from today, and features the California Quartet, intriguingly, playing along with projected film. Recently, Jim joined a consortium of chamber music venues in southern California, which gives us access to a superb list of performing groups that will be appearing in the months and years to come as part of the Candlelight series. Beyond being events that members of this parish can themselves enjoy, the concerts and the champagne receptions that follow provide excellent occasions to invite friends and acquaintances to visit Messiah. Once they see the building and they meet the people, such visitors stand a much greater chance to return on a Sunday morning. Growth of our parish family needs to be ongoing concern that all of us share, and these concerts are a fine means to introduce visitors to our active faith community and our community projects. If you do attend, we can always use volunteers to bring finger food, and to assist with the set-up and clean-up.
Finally, I would ask you to consider making a separate contribution, beyond your usual pledge to Messiah, to the Friends of Music. There may be some confusion on this point; certainly, I myself did not quite understand how music finances works here at Messiah until very recently. The Friends of Music budget is quite small, and only a relatively small portion of it goes to pay for the concerts and other incidental expenses, such as sheet music. The majority of the funds go toward paying our two staff singers, David Sheridan and David Stoneman. Some parishes pay staff singers out of the regular parish budget; here at Messiah we do not. Now, you all know what fine soloists David and David are, from the many times each has sung during communion (both are such unrepentant modernists in that regard!). Less obvious, perhaps, is the remarkable job they do leading the men’s sections week after week. I know that I panic any time Sheridan gets stuck in the snow, and I realize that I’m actually going to need to find my own way through the tenor part for that week. So the Davids don’t simply contribute their own voices; they keep all of the lower voices in line through their indispensable leadership. They are both real professionals, even though we pay them much below professional scale; they—along with the many professional quality musicians in our women’s sections, who are such a blessing—are giving their time and expertise as a gift to us every week; and our choir would be inconceivably worse without their contribution.
Music in this community; music is this community. However best you are able to join in, God welcomes you to follow the melody, to sense the rhythms, to be a voice in God’s earthly harmonies.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)