A sermon preached for RSCM Music Sunday during Come-and-Sing Choral Evensong at St Mary’s, Shenley Church End. Readings: Isaiah 49.8-13 and Colossians 3.12-17; Anthem: “O Magnum Mysterium, by Morten Laurisden; Psalms: 119.169-end, 122.
Many of you will no doubt be familiar with the traditional Chorister’s Prayer:
Bless, O Lord, us thy servants,
who minister in thy temple.
Grant that what we sing with our lips,
we may believe in our hearts,
and what we believe in our hearts,
we may show forth in our lives.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
It first appears in its current form in the 1934 Choir Boy’s Pocketbook, unattributed but possibly written by the then Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Gordon Laing, or possibly by the founder of the RSCM, Sir Sydney Nicholson, and seems to be based on a latin prayer dating to at least the fourteenth century.
Whatever its origins, the power of the prayer lies in its explicit connection between singing, faith, and action: “what we sing with our lips… believe in our hearts… show forth in our lives.” It is a connection which has good, biblical precedent, not least in the readings we heard today.
Paul in his letter to the Colossians urges them to “sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” but also to “clothe yourselves in love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony”. Harmony for the early church is something more than musical, but it is unsurprising that Paul reaches for a musical metaphor. For the early church, as for the church today, worship, and the singing of praise together, is something which both reflects and shapes the collective life of the church and the way we live out our faith.
In our reading from Isaiah, it is not only the community of believers, not only the human community, who join in that work of harmonious praise: “sing for joy, O heavens, and exult, O earth; break forth O mountains into singing.” All creation sings God’s praise.
Worship is the underlying music not only of our lives, but of the whole universe. When we lift our voices in song, we are joining in the unceasing, eternal praise of all that is and has been and will be, in earth and in heaven. Cosmic praise of God the creator of all rings out in every time and place, and we are given the gift of music to help us hear it and join in.
To sing to God in worship is the thing for which we were made. “My lips will pour forth praise,” says the psalmist, “my tongue will sing of your promise.” This is faith embodied. As all of us who sing will know, singing is a deeply embodied thing, something we do with our whole selves. So too the life of faith.
In the incarnation, God made flesh in the person of Jesus Christ, God says once and for all that flesh, bodies, our bodies are holy. Faith in God who takes on human flesh is always an embodied faith. Our voices, our hearts and mind, our bodies and actions, all are part of how we reflect God’s glory and inhabit God’s praise.
We need everything at our disposal, all that we are, all that God has created us to be, to enter into encounter with the living God. Sometimes, perhaps often in the life of faith, words are radically insufficient to come anywhere near the reality of who God is. And one of the things we turn to when words are not enough is, as it has been from the earliest days of the story of God’s people, music.
Take this evening’s anthem: “O magnum mysterium…”, “O great mystery…” There is something here about the great mystery of God’s incarnation among us, the awe and wonder and depth of love, which is impossible to capture in words. But in music, in Laurisden’s music which draws us in to sense and inhabit that mystery, we might draw closer to it.
Laurisden wrote “O magnum mysterium” and indeed most of his music, in old shop front in a little out of the way town in Washington State, where he was continually interrupted by people wanting to see the great composer at work. In such a setting, he surely inhabited something of what his music reflects: the sublime among the ordinary, the divine in human substance, the mystery of God among us in the everyday.
The challenge to us, then, is to receive and inhabit and embody the riches of the musical tradition which we have received in ways which bring faith alive: our own and other people’s. What we sing draws us into the mystery of God. It is an encounter with the divine which will, if we let it, transform our hearts and our lives until we resonate with the sound of God’s deep love for us and the whole creation.
So may we pray with all those who have shared with us in worship which draws us into the harmony at the heart of God, all those who have passed onto us the rich gifts of music which sustains the life of faith, and all who praise God in heaven and on earth:
Bless, O Lord, us thy servants,
who minister in thy temple.
Grant that what we sing with our lips,
we may believe in our hearts,
and what we believe in our hearts,
we may show forth in our lives.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
... because God is love 