Stewards of the Lord's Song

October 26, 2001, address to St. Paul’s Church, Marquette, on the occasion of their annual dinner and stewardship campaign

Greetings sisters and brothers in Christ.

JOKE: Three men died. All three went to heaven. The first man was greeted by St. Peter at the pearly gates.

St. Peter “And how much money did you make annually my son?”

1st man “$750,000”

St. Peter, “Well, you must have been a fine doctor.”

The second man was asked “And how much money did you make last year?”

2nd man “$500,000”

St. Peter replied, “Not too bad for a lawyer.”

And addressing the third man, St. Peter asked him how much money he had made the last year.

The third man replied, “$12,000.”

“Ah,” said St. Peter, “and what instrument did you play?”

It is a privilege and honor to contribute to this wonderful annual event that St. Paul’s has established. This gathering offers a healthy focus on the stewardship of life that God has called us to live: “Seven whole days, not one in seven” as the English mystic poet George Herbert sings. THESE days a writer might say, “24/7” with a contemporary temporariness of language.

St Paul says that our stewardship of prayer should be “unceasing.” But does Paul mean “pray a lot?” or does he REALLY mean, literally “pray without ceasing?” I believe that he DOES mean, literally, PRAY WITHOUT CEASING and that one of our best ways to this end is song; the Lord’s song. Tonight I offer a few comments on the Stewardship of the Lord’s song since at our baptism each and every one of us was commissioned as a “Steward of the Lord’s Song.”

You probably have some idea of the word “stewardship.” To some it means: “the church wants money.” To others it means: “we give back to God a portion of what God has given us.” Still others might suggest that stewardship includes every breath that we take. We honor God by taking that very breath given us at birth and directing it back in praise and thanks to God. A favorite prayer of mine includes these words: “Tune our hearts to sing your praise…to invoke the blessing of creation upon its source.”

Certainly your dedicated, determined, and ongoing effort to restore the stunning stained glass of St. Paul’s Church can be viewed as stewardship of the Lord’s gifts. I congratulate you on this effort to maintain these inspirations of the Holy Spirit brought about by the efforts of many who came before you in Marquette. You are being good stewards. Preserving the windows helps them tell the story of the good news, and that makes you missionaries.

The dictionary states that a steward is responsible for the maintenance of property. How does this apply to music; to song?

Just as we know that the Church is not the building, or the windows, neither is the church the songs. The windows and songs of Christianity are not the Church, they are PROPERTY of the Church; they are EXPRESSIONS of the Church, and we are privileged to be entrusted with their keeping and use.

As Americans, we are each stewards of freedom; servants of liberty if you will. That is why we each, individually feel so responsible for upholding our nation’s spirit and greatness in this time of doubt and trouble. We instinctively know that even though we may have no DIRECT connection to the events of Sept 11, or the ongoing battles, WE ARE CONNECTED nevertheless. As the great Anglican priest, preacher and writer John Donne says: “No man is an island... every man’s death diminishes me.”

Well friends, this is our connection to music: our SONGS. If you strip away the extra stuff, the thundering organs, brass, drums, guitars...if you take away these tokens of ours, or someone else’s culture, you end up with the essence of music common to all Christians, as well as other religions: SONG.

From King David to Jesus, to Martin Luther, to Bishop Cranmer, to Martin Luther King, to Archbishop Tutu, to Jan Brodersen, to Mark Engle, there is SONG. From the richest cathedral to the most humble worship in a third world country, we have our SONG in common; the song put in our heart by the Christ when he rose and smashed forever the darkness in our soul. As the American Christian song puts it: “How can I keep from singing?”

Yet singing suffers, particularly in our spectator society. We let others do the lifting for us; we let them sing our song, and soon we forget the words, and soon we forget the sound, and soon we doubt that there is a song of salvation in our heart at all. As one priest has put it, the Church can be like a football game at which 22 people who need a rest run around the field while 75,000 people who need exercise sit and watch. Are we each being the best steward of the Lord’s song? Are we letting others do it in our place? Does it matter?

Our American culture remains stamped with some features of the Puritans who were highly suspicious of beauty and art in service to the Gospel. We think that SPOKEN communication is the norm and sung things are “fancy,” “decoration,” “extras;” something optional that might be nice, but is dispensable. Friends: any art in service to the Gospel is MUCH MORE than decoration.

It is interesting to analyze human activity for the presence of “sung” or “spoken” communication. Science and medicine tell us that the development of an individual repeats the same steps as the development of the whole species. In the womb we have gills for a while as we live in a liquid environment, we sprout arms and legs, later fingers and toes, our head develops with a front and back, we grow lungs, we are born and join the air and what happens next? Speech? NO, SONG! We cry. In fact we cry and moan for quite awhile and succeed in communicating our needs quite clearly before we start to use a specific word-based language.

If our path of development as a species is recreated in our growth as a baby, then human beings must have spent many, many eons humming, grunting, moaning, shouting, crying, and communicating quite well, thank you very much, without benefit of WORDS.

If we hurt, we cry. If we are sad, we weep and moan; we are “speechless” but hardly uncommunicative. If we are happy, we shout, all actions that a newborn can do. We are hard-wired to raise our voices in some kind of song, whether we use this new invention of words or not.

It appears that singing is a more basic human act than speaking. We avoid it, limit it, ignore it, at the peril of our being; at the risk of our health, spiritual, emotional, and physical.

In Orthodox Christian theology, worship is far too important to speak. EVERYTHING IS SUNG. These days we hear Muslim prayers, and calls to prayer, SUNG. Jewish prayers are sung. We even find it important in our culture to not just speak the Happy Birthday song, we must SING it! The word Psalm means song, but for how many years did the Church glumly speak these, week after week? I know that at St Paul's, you always sing the psalms. Good for you!

If we can sing Happy Birthday, we can sing the songs from the Bible that we know Jesus sang. Song is not always decoration, it can be effective communication that lodges deeply in our hearts and lasts longer, and holds us stronger than words alone.

One rather incendiary, but effective comparison is this: Music is for decoration like women are for decoration.

I have made an observation from my own experience, and by studying recent history, about the role of MUSIC AND SONG in our culture, and at worship, as well as the role of SILENCE in our culture and at worship.

As the advent of recording increasingly provided alternatives to making our own music, singing, particularly corporate singing, declined. At the same time, silence decreased. Now instead of a range which includes deep silence at one end, and loud participatory music at the other, we seem to dwell in a gray, middle ground in which things are never quite silent, yet corporate participation is ever more tepid and restrained. Not too loud, not too quiet, just a middle haze of non-stop sound which seems of little importance to us. Background music has conditioned us to pay less attention to any music, even when it is not supposed to be background. As an organist I have tried without success to become accustomed to people chatting while the organ is preaching; and it IS preaching.

What a change this is from only a few years ago. I am fascinated by your wonderful Austin organ at St. Paul’s dating from 1913 and essentially sounding as it did when installed. Quite a number of stops on it are so quiet that I expect in a typical American congregation they would not even be audible. The phrase “quiet as a church” seems to have less meaning in our day and age of the “constant hum.”

What does silence have to do with us stewards of the Lord’s song?

John Cage, an avant-garde composer of the 20th century presented a work which might at first appear to be a clever joke disguised as art, while in fact I think it is art in the disguise of a clever joke. It is called 4’33” and calls for the performer to sit at a piano for 4’33” in silence. Cage wants us to hear all the sounds around us as MUSIC, not the LACK of it.

Our MTV culture seems to view silence as a threat; a space meant to be filled; something missing; a mistake, KEEP silent is what we might say. A nun at Taizé, introducing a small group of us to a week of silent meditation, used the phrase “make a silence” which suggested silence as a positive thing, rather than the lack of something. Instead of saying, “keep silent” should we say “keep noise?” Wouldn’t that be the companion phrase? Is that what we want in our world, to “keep noisy?” If we always viewed silence as something to “make,” perhaps we would view sound as more special; more valued, and valuable; more inviting; more EVANGELICAL.

So I propose that the lack of appropriate silence has joined forces with timid musical expression to give us a gray, bland, white-noise which offers little beauty, joy, hope, healing, forgiveness, and mission to the world. Lusty singing and profound silence would seem to be two sides of the same coin.

If indeed we are worse off for the lack of corporate silence, are there other indicators of the need of it?

It is true in the whole history of the Church, and for other institutions as well, that if an important element is missing, it will sooner or later emerge from the people as a corrective to its absence.

What do we see today in many young people raised only in this bland “white-noise”, “non-stop-sound” world?

Young people are leaving Christianity and becoming interested in new-age religions, which focus on a kind of peace and quiet. Some become Buddhists, but Buddhism often dwells on silence to the exclusion of action.

Young Christians by the tens of thousands flock every week of the year to secluded Taizé, France where 51 weeks a year at the ecumenical community there, three to five hours are spent in sung prayer with long periods of silence. Youth visiting Taizé often report that liturgical silence is the most important element. They return to the “world” ready for action in Christ’s name. They are ready to BEGIN their work; they don’t feel like they have just FINISHED their work.

The mystical part of Christian liturgy and living seems to have been systematically suppressed by recent rampant rationalism.

Here are two more occurrences that suggest that we hunger for something mysterious, now mostly hidden in American Christianity.

In a Southern American city of 150,000, the fastest growing congregation is a Greek Orthodox parish.

I am told that at some recent seminars directed at Evangelical, so-called Conservative Christians, the most popular workshops focused on the use of incense at worship!

How can we be better stewards of our Lord’s song? What can I do?

Mark Engle and Jan Brodersen provide skilled, responsive, sensitive leadership to the music in service to worship at St. Paul's. First, understand that and respect it. They do not have ALL the answers, but they have incredible experience in shaping and forming the time you spend making Eucharist and the music that carries it. Before you dismiss a hymn, or song, be sure that you understand its place and function. Since music is NOT decoration, the matters of taste: “do I like it? ...do I dislike it? ...can I dance to it? ...does it have a good beat?” are questions a bit off the mark,

When we sing “Happy Birthday” it is not because it is our favorite song; because we love the style, the beat, the words. It is because we know it well, and so it carries meaning. When we sing the Star-Spangled Banner, we may think it hard to sing (it is) but we sing it anyway. It carries meaning more than thousands of words could ever communicate.

How can we be better stewards of our Lord’s song? What can I do?

Take your home copy of the great HYMNAL 1982 and look up the hymns for the coming Sunday. If meaning begins with knowing, then hymns need more knowing through study in order to have that meaning. Try it. Pray over the hymns and lessons for the next Sunday. I promise you will find a deeper value in them on Sunday morning.

Then an amazing thing will happen: You will belong to those words more strongly; it will be harder to keep quiet, you will sing with more strength, and as others do the same, the song will turn right back to you and provide even more strength to your soul. Then it will catch an unbeliever, a visitor, a doubter, and pull them into your community. Later, with a strong memory of the collective Spirit-filled singing, you may recall the song with more value. It will continue to speak to you all week; all your life. Hymns have been called the “take-home package” of the people. Embrace the song, take it out the door and you have accepted a gift of the Holy Spirit and become a missionary right here in Marquette; a good steward.

After that, another amazing thing will occur. You will find these well-learned songs creeping into your daily life. You will wake up at three in the morning with a tune in your head carrying words of prayer. YOU ARE PRAYING WITHOUT CEASING! Your BREATH has become prayer. I think it was the 20th century American mystic Thomas Merton who said: “To breathe is to pray.” We CAN pray without ceasing.

So, my message to you: Keep the faith, sing the faith. Sing the faith with more vigor and strength.

My message to you: Keep the faith, MAKE the silence. Make the silence pray, and find a balance to our noisy world. OFFER that balance to our noisy world. LIVE that balance IN but not OF our noisy world.

My message to you: Keep the faith, sing the faith. Make your singing pray, and your praying sing.

My message to you, stewards of the Lord’s song:

... is to tell you God’s message of deep love: YOU ARE FREE!

Our only response is: THANKS BE TO GOD! THANKS BE TO GOD! THANKS BE TO GOD!