Listening to God, Part II: We are Part of God’s Song

Transcribed from the sermon preached February 24, 2013

The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

Scripture Readings: 2 Chr. 5:7-14, Ps.33: 1-4, Isa.12:1-6

Before we get to the music of Scripture, I thought I would share Dave Barry’s winners of the Bad Song Survey. In analyzing these results Dave said, I had to make a few adjustments. For example, the Bob Dylan song “Lay Lady Lay” would have easily won as Worst Overall Song with 17,006 votes, except that I had to disallow 17,004 votes on the grounds that they were cast by my research department, Judi Smith, who tabulated the votes and who HATES “Lay, Lady, Lay”.
To win a song had to be known well enough that a lot of people could hate it. Many perfectly horrible songs didn’t make the list because they were not known enough for people to love or hate them. Tremendously unpopular songs, for their lyrics or overall badness are: “Manchester Park”, “Muskrat Love,” “Sugar Sugar”, “I’m Too Sexy,” “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” “Afternoon Delight”, “Feelings,” “You Light Up My Life” and “In the Year 2525.”
In Scripture this morning, we see whether it is the establishment of a temple or a church, the celebration of hope and new life, or thanksgiving and recognition of forgiveness and redemption, the people of God sing and make music.  Virtually all music in scripture is performed because of or on behalf of God. It is the same in Church, where we have tremendous musicians and wonderful music, we give glory to God whose music is being played through musicians. It is God’s performance, not ours. In scripture the most common music is intended for praise, but there is also lament. Music enhances storytelling and prophetic speech, for example the songs of Hannah and mother Mary announce that the proud will be brought down and the lowly lifted up. While we speak to and of God in music, we also speak to each other. Music expresses emotion and connection and ties people together by the common culture of music. Of course there are angels and heavenly beings who appear as God’s messengers and court musicians announcing God’s presence God’s arrival, God’s judgment and God’s redemption and salvation.
Music from a more basic or mystical perspective lifts us up to a new level of consciousness and invites us to contemplation where we are open to the voice and music of the Divine. There are different theories on the origin of music. Theorists assume that music comes with intentionality, with the concept of past and future, and thus arises between 60,000 and 30,000 years ago with painting, jewelry, and the burying of the dead. The idea that makes the most sense to me is that music originated as communication between mother and child. Before language, mothers and fathers try to communicate feelings through sound. If you have ever cared for an infant you know it comes quite naturally. I find myself creating these crazy feeling songs to dolphins when they swim by. I feel like sentiment moves through tone without words.
The idea that infants react to sound and music from moms before they are verbal says to me that there are rhythms to life, and that humans likely imitated those rhythms very early. We may suspect that music develops as an imitation of life’s sounds, even as human creativity would quickly improvise new music. Surely then our ability to listen and hear and feel music precedes our creation of music, and perhaps even words. The music of the creator precedes us. Superstring theory in physics suggests that the microscopic landscape is suffused with tiny strings whose vibrational patterns orchestrate the evolution of the cosmos (Greene 1999). God’s whole universe is music.
Isaiah 55[12]  

Or Psalms 96[11]

Created in the image of God, we develop the capacity to communicate like God. We get to be co-creators in God’s great symphony.
I remember a conversation with Bill Bennett, the principal oboist for the San Francisco Symphony, while we were hanging out on the beach watching the kids play in the water. He said that he wasn’t sure there was a defined human-like God, but he had moments, and he was having one of them, when the beauty and synchronicity of life seemed, well, divine. He had experienced it too, sometimes when the symphony would get into a groove and they went from individuals playing parts of music to being a group played by the music… they make moves and turns intuitively, instinctively, like birds flying and turning in perfect synchronicity. He said there is something special, mystical, unifying and beautiful about this experience. I would say that this experience is God: they the sum of our individual lives lives, and our lives together is greater than the parts: the individual musicians in a band together make music that is greater and exists beyond them, beyond us. For a moment it is eternal and yet is invisible and it disappears. Yet the Gospel tells us – once eternal always eternal.
Isn’t it strange that whether in sport or art or even everyday work, when we are at our individual, unique best, we break beyond the ego and tap into something most unifying. When we surrender to the task we have been called to, to the person we are created to be, we experience both unique individuality and freedom, and at the same time freedom from self and unity with the life force itself. The mountains and hills before you shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field clap their hands.
Hafiz says: