The Power of Music and Singing in Expressing Faith and Worship, Study notes of Music

Download The Power of Music and Singing in Expressing Faith and Worship and more Study notes Music in PDF only on Docsity! Sermon 12202010 Luke 1:46-55 Thank you (GINNY OR CHOIR). I’m glad to hear such joyful music. Throughout the service today, I’ve been uplifted by people singing – and not just myself! What a fundamental thing. Raising thoughts into words into song. It’s powerful. It’s a way to express things, to communicate things, that words just can’t handle otherwise. There’s a poem that says, “In my heart's sequestered chambers lie truths stripped of poets' gloss Words alone are vain and vacant, and my heart is mute In response to aching silence, memory summons half-heard voices And my soul finds primal eloquence, and wraps me in song When we sing we’re speaking two languages at once. The language of the mind, and the language of the heart. Music touches us in a primal way – it takes us back to the world outside of this one, and before this one. Throughout Scriptures, people are using verse – poetry and song – to praise God, to thank God, because normal speech just can’t cut it. Music is creative – to us, and to God. Victor Hugo said that, “Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and cannot remain silent.” J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote the Lord of the Rings books, wrote a book of the mythology of that world. In that story, Iluvatar, the one being that existed before all other things, produced a group of angelic figures, and it had them sing. That song created all the Universe, and it became real and living when Iluvatar joined in and struck a chord – “deeper than the Abyss, higher than the firmament, and piercing as the light of the eye of Iluvatar”. In this story, the music of this universe’s God and of its angels creates the world. Now, this is fiction, and we don’t believe it as an account of the behavior of the real God, but I think it’s an interesting way to understand Creation. And we already proclaim the link between Creation and music in our songs – “Angels from the realms of glory, wing your flight o’er all the earth/ Ye that sang Creation’s story, now proclaim Messiah’s birth.” Or, as Ginny sang for us a few months ago, “I danced in the morning when the world was young/ I danced in the moon, and the stars, and the sun.” Scripture affirms it, too. True, the Creation in Genesis doesn’t say anything about singing. But the Psalms specifically use music to express Creation. In Job 38, God says, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? … When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” Making music – even making a joyful noise, as in Psalm 98 – is a little piece of the beauty of God’s creation. Music is a deep part of God’s creation, and it will be again. According to the book of Revelation, part of God creating a new heaven and a new earth is singing – the angels and the faithful, singing a new song. It is a song of comfort and justice, a song of praise and proclamation – it was a new song, and the story was the new creation. It combined the song of Moses, a great song of thanksgiving for God’s deliverance after the Exodus, with a song of the Lamb, a song of mercy and redemption. These are the qualities that the angels and the saints are singing into the new creation. Music was also a deep part of God’s second Creation, in Jesus Christ. When Mary gets the announcement from the angel that she’s pregnant, she goes and confirms with her cousin Elizabeth, and then, as soon as she’s sure, what does she do? She sings. She opens her mouth, and what comes out is considered among the quintessential songs of thanksgiving ever composed. We call it the Magnificat. In Latin, “magnificat”, and in the Gospel’s Greek, “megaluno” – both of them mean the same thing: to magnify. Literally, to make something bigger. When Mary sings God’s praises, she’s trying to add to God. Of course, we can’t make God bigger, but we can make God’s name greater. We can increase God’s renown, we can increase knowledge about God, we can add our own voices to the multitude of voices shouting God’s praise. We can make our own lives a part of the story of God, and we can make a bigger place in God’s interactions with humanity. When Mary says, “My soul magnifies the Lord,” she’s saying, “You know that God has done these things: God has displayed mighty power, God has scattered the proud. He has taken down the powerful and raised the humble and poor to new heights. He has deprived those who were full and given food to those who were hungry. God has kept God’s promises to Israel, to Abraham and Abraham’s descendents, and to me; and I’m here to tell you that God has done something else. Today, God has done a new thing. That’s Mary’s proclamation. That’s what she had to express so deeply that normal words wouldn’t cut it. She knew that the same God who had been faithful and good to her people for generations had looked and seen her as a good place to begin the coming of the Kingdom. In verse 48, she nails it on the head: “God has looked favorably on his humble servant. From now on, all generations will call me blessed.” That’s what was so great that she just had to sing about it. The church can take two big cues from Mary today. The first thing is that we can listen to what Mary’s singing, and take it as a true and powerful testament to the God we worship. This is the God who dismisses the people with power, money, and food – the people who are able to provide for themselves – and instead blesses the poor, the ignored, the humble and scared, the powerless. Mary was a poor young girl, who didn’t own a thing in the world – she owned no property, no food, not even her own body, which was betrothed to Joseph. She had a cousin, Elizabeth, who had married a priest, so he had some power – but Elizabeth didn’t bear Jesus. Elizabeth bore John, the one who was not even worthy to tie Jesus’s sandalstraps, while poor little Mary, unmarried and powerless, was given the gift and responsibility of Jesus, and that made her blessed. The first thing that Mary can teach us today is that this is the God we worship – the God who does real, tangible good for people in the world who have nothing good. If we, the church, are meant to be the bastion of God’s Kingdom on earth until it arrives in full, then that’s the work that we need to be doing, too: tangible good for those who need it. That’s the church of the God that Mary sang to. The other thing Mary, and the other musical figures in the Bible, can teach us is that we should keep being thankful, raising that thankfulness to the level of words, raising those words to the level of verse and song. We should keep expressing our praise to God in the best and most glorious ways we know – for Mary, that was singing. For Moses, and for Miriam the prophetess, right after the Exodus, it was singing, and dancing too. I’m not much of a dancer, but song in any form – that’s the best expression I can muster of my praise to God, that’s my best expression of the might and majesty and glory and infinity of the God that we serve. I’m not saying that if you can’t sing, you can’t worship – I’m saying that the Psalms call for a joyful noise for a reason. Bring a sound from your heart to God’s ears, and it will be heard.