Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity
Service Date:
20 September, 2009
Mark 9:30-37
This Sunday we are celebrating the first ten years of our organist and choirmaster, Douglas Jones, in St Andrew's. Douglas has chosen the hymns and readings for this service. And some of you may be thinking after this reading, hold on a moment, we've heard this before somewhere. You'd be right, for just a week ago we used this reading when we were thinking about the work of the Contact Centre and how we, like Jesus, can be glad to welcome children.
But last week we looked at the edited highlights. This week we can see there's more to the story. Because the stories in the Gospels are like the different notes that go to make up a tune - Mark has chosen very carefully what goes next to what. And just before our familiar story about Jesus and children begins, we have a much darker melody line.
Jesus and his closest friends are walking through Galilee together. Some of them have seen him on the top of a mountain, shining whiter than white and talking to Moses and Elijah. All of them have seen him heal by his prayers a boy they could not help. But he's left the crowds now, because he wants to teach them something hard to hear. He's already told them once, just after Peter recognised him as God's chosen leader. But it's so difficult for them to hear that he'll have to go over and over it with them, just like a choir leader trying to help singers learn a difficult piece of music, until they have it by heart. And what's this hard music he must teach them to sing? It's his death. Not just that he's going to die. No one wants to think about that before they have to, and Jesus' friends are so involved with him, even the idea is bound to hurt. But how he's going to die - that someone is going to break the trust he has in them, to hand him over to his enemies. And that there are people who hate him enough to want him dead. How can any of this be, when he's just shown how close he is to God, how powerfully he can work for good, how much the crowds are drawn to him? Why does he have to go into a minor key, when everything is sounding so triumphant? And what on earth does he mean by rising to new life? They don't understand at all.
So they go back to songs they know well, songs they can hum without thinking, songs about who's most important and who can do things best and who's the favourite. We know those songs. When things are going well for us, there's the soundtrack of ‘We are the champions!' in the background. When things are going badly for us, we're apt to sing a different tune, ‘I'm so terrible, nobody loves me, I'll always be a failure.' Horrible songs, but at least we know the tune. But Jesus gives us a new song to sing: not ‘I'm perfect' or ‘I'm rubbish', but ‘I'm forgiven'. He invites us, like little children, to take each day as a gift, a new verse of our song.
You'll have worked out the potential snag to this: most of us in this room are not little children. We carry our histories with us like theme tunes: the joyful things, the sad things, our shame and our gratitude. How can we pretend to forget all that? It's impossible. But what Jesus asks us to do is to welcome and spend time with little ones - with their spontaneity, their trust. And as we welcome those childlike qualities in others, we may find them again in ourselves. It is no easy task, taking off the armour of status, making ourselves vulnerable like children. But with Jesus' help, we can persevere.
This Sunday we are celebrating the first ten years of our organist and choirmaster, Douglas Jones, in St Andrew's. Douglas has chosen the hymns and readings for this service. And some of you may be thinking after this reading, hold on a moment, we've heard this before somewhere. You'd be right, for just a week ago we used this reading when we were thinking about the work of the Contact Centre and how we, like Jesus, can be glad to welcome children.
But last week we looked at the edited highlights. This week we can see there's more to the story. Because the stories in the Gospels are like the different notes that go to make up a tune - Mark has chosen very carefully what goes next to what. And just before our familiar story about Jesus and children begins, we have a much darker melody line.
Jesus and his closest friends are walking through Galilee together. Some of them have seen him on the top of a mountain, shining whiter than white and talking to Moses and Elijah. All of them have seen him heal by his prayers a boy they could not help. But he's left the crowds now, because he wants to teach them something hard to hear. He's already told them once, just after Peter recognised him as God's chosen leader. But it's so difficult for them to hear that he'll have to go over and over it with them, just like a choir leader trying to help singers learn a difficult piece of music, until they have it by heart. And what's this hard music he must teach them to sing? It's his death. Not just that he's going to die. No one wants to think about that before they have to, and Jesus' friends are so involved with him, even the idea is bound to hurt. But how he's going to die - that someone is going to break the trust he has in them, to hand him over to his enemies. And that there are people who hate him enough to want him dead. How can any of this be, when he's just shown how close he is to God, how powerfully he can work for good, how much the crowds are drawn to him? Why does he have to go into a minor key, when everything is sounding so triumphant? And what on earth does he mean by rising to new life? They don't understand at all.
So they go back to songs they know well, songs they can hum without thinking, songs about who's most important and who can do things best and who's the favourite. We know those songs. When things are going well for us, there's the soundtrack of ‘We are the champions!' in the background. When things are going badly for us, we're apt to sing a different tune, ‘I'm so terrible, nobody loves me, I'll always be a failure.' Horrible songs, but at least we know the tune. But Jesus gives us a new song to sing: not ‘I'm perfect' or ‘I'm rubbish', but ‘I'm forgiven'. He invites us, like little children, to take each day as a gift, a new verse of our song.
You'll have worked out the potential snag to this: most of us in this room are not little children. We carry our histories with us like theme tunes: the joyful things, the sad things, our shame and our gratitude. How can we pretend to forget all that? It's impossible. But what Jesus asks us to do is to welcome and spend time with little ones - with their spontaneity, their trust. And as we welcome those childlike qualities in others, we may find them again in ourselves. It is no easy task, taking off the armour of status, making ourselves vulnerable like children. But with Jesus' help, we can persevere.
Hymns:
R&S 405 was written in 1861 for the dedication of an organ in the parish church at Wingate in Lancashire, and later published by the author, Francis Potts, with the title, ‘For the Dedication of an Organ or for a Meeting of Choirs'. The tune Angel Voices was written for the same occasion.R&S 528 was adapted by Percy Dearmer from two verses in a medieval Latin hymn, Missus Gabriel de caelis (‘Gabriel was sent from heaven') originally translated by J.M. Neale from the Latin. The tune Quem Pastores Laudavere (‘Him whom shepherds praised') is a German carol melody from the fourteenth century, arranged by Ralph Vaughan Williams.
Psalm 1 is sung this morning using ‘Anglican chant', a harmonized, metrical adaptation to English texts of the Gregorian method of psalm singing, in which a short melody is adjusted to the length of different psalm verses by repeating one tone, the recitation tone, for any number of words in the text.
R&S 522 was written, words and music, by the contemporary hymn-writer Graham Kendrick, for the 1983 Spring Harvest convention. Its poetry takes us from creation to the cross.
R&S 39 is taken from the ‘Canticle of the sun' traditionally composed by St Francis during, according to the Companion to Rejoice and Sing, ‘a period of extreme ill-health, incipient blindness and physical discomfort' - which would not be guessed from the words! The tune Lasst uns erfreuen (‘Let us rejoice') comes from Cologne in 1623.
Sermon:
Isaiah 11:1-9; Psalm 1; James 3:13-4:8a; Mark 9:30-37Today we're celebrating Douglas' ten years with us as organist and choirmaster, and that started me thinking about the idea of God as conductor, not only of the heavenly choir but of us too, even the very few among us who are tone-deaf. Anyone who has been in choirs - and I guess in sports teams as well - will recognise two sorts of leaders. One sort scares us silly, and everyone does as well as they can in order not to get yelled at. The other sort still gets the best out of us, but does it by love, not fear. From what I hear, Douglas is the second sort of choirmaster, drawing unsuspected talent out of our choir and the boys he teaches by patient encouragement - and I reckon in the long run that gets much better results. But I suspect that some of us, through childhood training or through the circumstances of our lives, may be tempted to think of God as the first sort: someone who will badger us into heaven through our fear of hell. And that picture of God isn't just inaccurate; potentially it damages us and our relationships with others as well as with God.
I don't mean to say that God, or a good conductor, will just wave a hand around in time to the music and say, You just sing however you fancy, one way's as good as another. Our psalm this morning shows that cannot be so. By Douglas' special request - and he has chosen all this morning's readings and hymns - we have sung Psalm 1 using the method known as Anglican chant. As we've heard, this method means we do a lot of singing on one note, and it takes discipline to do that right. If Douglas had just said, Pick any note you like to start on and go up or down depending on how you're feeling - well, I suspect angel voices might not recognise the result. And the words of the psalm also make it clear that walking in God's way, like singing a piece of chant right, involves us in making hard choices, in being patient and in persevering. The psalm points to the source of Jewish faith in God's law, which shows us how to live the way God wants. But we Christians can also look to Jesus, God's worked example of the human song sung right.
But doing things right doesn't necessarily mean everyone doing things the same way. As we know, Douglas is a great organist. But I also love it when he directs our choir singing a cappella, with no musical accompaniment, and we hear four different voices at work, all singing together yet each singing something unique. In a good choir like ours, whether the music is unison or harmony, the singers not only listen to their own voices, but also to the voices of those nearby, in order to produce a conversation between them. Difference isn't something to fear or to suppress; it is part of the greater music which none of us can achieve on our own.
Our Hebrew Bible reading illustrates that beautifully when it describes Isaiah's vision of how the world should be, and how it will be when God's kingdom comes. Wolves and lambs, leopards and goats, calves and lions will be best friends, herded by toddlers. Babies will play near snakes' holes and come to no harm. There will be no hurt or destruction, yet no uniformity either. Imagine sopranos and altos, countertenors and tenors and baritones and basses, singing their hearts out, all being the best they can be.
Yet as Jesus has warned his friends twice now in our journey through Mark's Gospel, the way to that kingdom, found by following God's leader, comes through suffering. Right now, instead of justice and peace for all, there is poverty in the world and in Sheffield; wickedness in the world and in Sheffield. And just as much as when Isaiah wrote, four thousand-odd years ago, there is need for judgment, not by superficial observation or by taking media reports at face value, not using as our measuring tools for respect wealth and power and status, but God's wisdom, which welcomes small children and is on the side of the unimportant and weak.
This is as true in a choir as in the rest of life. As you know, I have quite a strong singing voice - apologies to those of you who use the loop, if you get deafened by me during the hymns! But when first I came to join my school choir, I was told firmly that if my voice drowned out the rest, I wasn't singing right, for everyone's voice must be heard.
When I speak of letting every voice be heard, I don't just mean the voices of people we may not want to hear. Jesus' voice was hard for his friends to hear when he spoke of his coming death, and impossible for them to understand when he spoke of his coming resurrection. Within us there are also thoughts and impulses we may try to ignore, yet the letter of James does not let us pretend that all is sweetness and light within. Our reading from James this morning begins with a comparison between God's wisdom and the wisdom James calls earthly. And that comparison is easily made. God's wisdom produces peace, gentleness, a willingness to see the other's point of view, fairness, mercy. Earthly or rather devilish wisdom gives rise to envy, selfish ambition, bitterness, destruction.
That may sound far from this congregation, but it's back to the trap Jesus' disciples fell into along the road: who's most important? Who does she think she is, standing for that committee? Why does the minister always talk to him and not me? Why did they make that decision when they should have consulted me first? That sort of feeling, if unacknowledged, easily spills over into whispering and arguments and church politicking. And James really weighs into us. Why are there such conflicts in a Christian community? he asks us. It's because instead of admitting our need of love and recognition and bringing it to God, we try to satisfy it ourselves by playing the status game. That may be why people outside churches often call us Christians hypocrites. We are trying so hard to be good that we don't want to admit we have weaknesses, and hope they'll go away - but people will always see through our pretences, and so does God. How much better for us and for others it is if we recognise our own faults instead of ignoring them, ask for forgiveness, and thus draw ever closer to the God who is mercy. For while God is our conductor who helps us keep to the note in plainsong and helps us listen to one another in harmony, our God is also a jazz musician, an improviser who will take all our notes, even the duff ones like betrayal and death, and make unexpected beauty out of them, like resurrection.
