“God Loves Music”
Rev. Dr. David E. Gray
Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church
Pentecost - May 23, 2010
Acts 2: 1-8; Colossians 3: 12-16
The Psalmist writes that we are to “sing a new song to the Lord.” Music is one important way that we praise and worship God. God no doubt appreciates it. Yet music also has important impacts on us. Let us pray.
God loves music.
The prophet Zephaniah wrote that “God will rejoice over you with singing.”
Mathew reports that Jesus and his disciples sang as they went to the Mount of Olives.
Paul wrote to the Ephesians that when filled with the Holy Spirit, they could speak to each other in “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.”
And in our second lesson, we hear that same phrase in Paul’s letter to Colossians, that when filled with the Holy Spirit, the people of God could sing “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.”
Today is Pentecost. And we celebrate the Holy Spirit’s presence with us. In the second chapter of the book of Acts, we read that a diverse group of people gathered in Jerusalem fifty days after Passover to commemorate an agricultural festival of gratitude to God called Shavuot. Christians recognize this time as Pentecost. Pentecost signals not only the fulfillment of the Holy Spirit, but the start of the church. In the succeeding section of the Book of Acts, the Apostle Peter would preach persuasively to the community of believers, and the church began to flourish.
But first, the Holy Spirit came upon the community, giving the people an ability to express themselves in languages they had not previously known. Significantly, the Holy Spirit came to the community. The text tells us that the Spirit came to “each of them;” to the total group. This is significant because too often we focus only on how the Holy Spirit comes to us as individuals. Certainly individual expression of the Spirit is important. But Pentecost is about how the Holy Spirit brings the church together as a community.
The church did not begin with unity. It began with people expressing themselves in different tongues.
There are certainly lots of ways for individuals to express themselves in our time. The technologies of our world, such as computers, internet, and cell phones, give us abilities to express ourselves in unfiltered ways.
Rather than being forced to get our information from only a few sources with only one viewpoint, television and the internet allows us to access many ideas and many viewpoints. Individuals can distribute their opinion pieces in blogs and reach people that previously only magazines and newspapers could. People can tell about themselves and learn about others through Facebook in real time. Folks can express themselves by posting videos on YouTube.
During Biblical times, before these technologies, most people only heard the viewpoints of the people who lived near them. But during major festivals like Shavuot, when people came from far and wide from all over the region and from many nations, there was a great diversity of ideas and viewpoints gathered in Jerusalem. Add to it that the Spirit gave people the ability to speak in languages that they previously could not and you had a recipe for misunderstanding. One of the miracles of Pentecost was that the Holy Spirit brought understanding and cohesion out of that chaos, and that cohesion would lead to the formation of the church.
As with the scene of what became the first Pentecost, our community of faith at Bradley Hills is a community of diverse opinions and expressions. I pull into the church parking lot each day and there are cars with pro-Obama and anti-Obama bumper stickers on them. We have members with different points of emphasis about worship, mission and use of our physical space. One Sunday last year I had two people speak with me after worship. One person criticized my message for being too liberal for him and then later another person criticized the same message for being too conservative for him.
We are too big a group to be of one mind, with people who grew up in different parts of the nation and world, with people who grew up or have been members of a variety of different denominations and who continue to be influenced by the world and by our interfaith witness.
In the book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, there is an item called a “Point of View Gun,” which allows people to zap others and the people zapped are compelled to see things from the first person’s point of view. We don’t have Point of View guns and cannot simply make everyone agree with our point of view.
The challenge for us then is to respect and seek to understand each other and allow church to be a place that supports each spiritual journey in its growth.
Our second lesson from Paul’s letter to the Colossians gives advice for how a church might be successful in doing just that. This passage lists the virtues “compassion, humility, kindness, meekness and patience” that are necessary for people to get along. These qualities allow the community of faith to “bear one another” as Paul puts it. To “bear one another” is to accept each other, including each other’s differences, weaknesses and faults, to have sympathy for one another, and to see the worth in each other. We are called to do so because God bears, forgives and loves us.
We reinforce these qualities of scripture through our music. Paul concludes his statement of how people should act towards one another with the idea that we should “let the word of Christ dwell in (us)…..teaching…one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.”
When Paul writes that we should teach one another and sing hymns and songs, the purest translation of the Greek is that singing hymns and songs helps teach us lessons.
Music is one way we internalize the word of God, letting the values of Christ dwell in us, and reinforcing to ourselves what it is we believe.
To paraphrase music teacher Will Shuster in this week’s episode of the TV show Glee, (Music) is “not just about expressing yourself to everyone else, it’s about expressing yourself to yourself.”
My toddler Andrew walked around our house this week singing “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world.” He learned that song in the Bradley Hills Nursery School and my wife and I like his singing because it reinforces our teachings about God’s grace.
When Paul suggests teaching songs so they can reinforce values, the teaching and learning he refers to requires give and take. Give and take is particularly important in diverse settings like the first Pentecost crowd or a church setting.
The ability to see the world through someone else’s eyes is important in life. It’s critical in the church. It’s part of the compassion Paul refers to. When Paul writes about the importance of humility, meekness and kindness, he is in part calling on us to step outside our own agendas. In church that means looking at the big picture of how church can be a place where people of a variety of backgrounds and viewpoints come together to grow in their faith and to worship God.
As some of you know I played bass guitar in rock bands in high school and college. I wasn’t very good musically, but I had a lot of fun. I feel I had two contributions to my college band in particular. One was to pick the name of the band, which I called Black Leather Agenda, a name some folks thought was kind of edgy until they realized I took the name from my black Franklin Planner calendar appointment book. My greater contribution was to be a peacemaker between some of the more volatile elements in the band. If the group couldn’t get along, we would not have been able to make music together.
The thing about music is that it doesn’t always start out unified or even beautiful. Have you ever been to a symphony concert? When you go to a concert they often begin with lots of different musicians warming up at the same time. And when they are warming up they make all sorts of different sounds. They often don’t sound very coordinated. It can sound like lots of contradictory sounds in fact. And if that continued through the concert with each musician competing to play their instrument the loudest, things wouldn’t sound very good.
But when the conductor raises his or her hands and the musicians put on humility and compassion, as well as passion, and they play coordinated music, it can be something beautiful.
On Pentecost, the people who were gathered spoke different languages. But the Holy Spirit worked to unify them into the church. The Holy Spirit is with us as a community and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit is what gives the church its power to proclaim the risen Christ.
When we sing hymns and spiritual songs, we sing out of the same hymnbook, the same sheets of music. But like the people at the first Pentecost, we don’t all sound the same. Within our choir and congregation we have some people with high voices and some with low voices. Some sopranos, altos, tenors, basses. And the notes sung at the same time are not all exactly the same notes. But when the notes complement each other, the result is harmony. And in our second lesson, what does Paul say results from our bearing one another with love– he says that what results is “perfect harmony.”
We in this church are not “Johnny one note.” If anything we are Bradley many notes. Many different notes, ideas, backgrounds, understandings of the world, that come together to follow the great teacher, Jesus Christ, who conducted a band of followers called disciples and through the Holy Spirit called the church into being. We all can sing our own notes, but we need to work in concert, to bear, understand and love each other, in order to be in harmony.
So let us play and hear and sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with grace in our hearts, knowing that the only audience that really matters in worship, our eternal God, loves the music that we can make together. Thanks be to God. Amen.
