Friday 7 April 2017

‘Singing the Psalms’ Opoho Church Sunday 12 March 2017

We pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our rock and our sustainer.  Amen.

We have had a friend staying for the last few day – a cricket lover no less – and we were going through some photos from back in 1985 at a folk festival in Amberley.  Goodness we looked young and full of energy.  But it seemed such a long time ago.  BC as in before children, even!
Imagine then how we get our heads around 500 years ago – when the beginning of what was to become the reformation in the church happened.  Martin Luther nailed his 95 thesis to the doors of Church Castle in Wittenberg, hoping upon hope that the church of Rome would listen and reform.  It wasn’t until 3 years later that the actual break with the church came when he burned the Papal Bull excommunicating him.  It was the beginning of a journey of rediscovery for many of what it means to be church, to worship, to live in the way of Christ.  From Luther to Calvin to John Knox – those are our antecedents, a big part of our story as the Presbyterian church in New Zealand.  And it is a story of highs and lows, stumbling and getting up again, constantly seeking to know God better in prayer and praise and scripture and community. Reformed and reforming – that ‘ing’ word again. 

A part of that journey has been in around church music, and especially participatory or congregational singing.  Small wonder then that I was particularly drawn to Scotland explore some of the stories of music in worship for my study leave last year. 

The very early church, in the years after Jesus, came out of the tradition of music within the synagogue – the songs of David, the sound of cymbals and drums and flutes raised in praise to God.  Chronicles details how music is to be used in the temple for instance.  Catriona mentioned on Tuesday night two passages of Hebrew Scriptures that had passed me by before where there is mention of the music of God. 
One is from Zephaniah 3 "The Lord your God in your midst, the Mighty One, will save; He will rejoice over you with gladness, He will quiet you with His love, He will rejoice over you with singing".  [1]

And in Isaiah we hear whistling attributed to God.
He will raise a signal for a nation far away, and whistle for a people at the ends of the earth.[2]
On that day the Lord will whistle for the fly [Egyptians] that is at the sources of the streams of Egypt, and for the bee [Assyrians] that is in the land of Assyria.[3]

We hear that Jesus and the disciples sang hymns in the garden of Gethsemane and Paul, in Ephesians 5 talks of the close connection that singing hymns has to the Holy Spirit, the presence of God, in our worship.

But it wasn’t long before the church started to discuss the right and wrong use of song by the church.

You could categorise the continuing debate on the place of music in worship in the church as being between the head and the heart.  Much as King David was told off by Michal as showing too much passion in dancing for the Lord so the early church was suspicious of too much emotion or soaring notes being included in the singing – it was seen to take the mind off the Word, the focus of all worship.

Then, 1500 or so years later, when John Calvin came along, part of the response to the excesses of the Catholic church was to remove instruments from worship, seeing them leading us away from focussing on the words of scripture in our singing.  To some extent this has produced an inheritance that has turned some of our church singing into why could best be described as a dour, passionless experience, more concerned with serious reverence than                 exuberant praise.  And at other times and places singing or music in church has been used to emotionally persuade without engaging the head at all, a dangerous practice. 
I was on a search for ways in which we worship God where both the Word and the heart are brought together as the path to the sacred in our music and singing, a place of emotion and reflection and particularly connection.  And I found out that in the end it has nothing to do with instruments or not or particular tunes or words but rather with a desire to praise God with heart and mind, with passion and purpose.

In our travels we visited a congregation of the Free Church of Scotland in the outer Hebrides on the Isle of Lewis where Catriona was born.  It was there that I heard in real time the singing of the psalms in gaelic, without instruments, familiar yet not, incredibly moving, beyond words pretty much.  That is all they sing – from the psalms.  They sing from their bibles – no need of hymnbooks, they sing the words of scripture.  There was a sense of timelessness and connection – with Calvin, with the people who came from Scotland especially to Otago, with the Word that has fed generations of Christ followers, with the sense of praise and encounter with God, even though I had no idea what words they were singing.

The psalms – the hymnbook of the bible – the heart expression of what it means to be a person of faith for the people of Israel.  The psalms have a lot of emotion in them, anger, awe, lament, indignation, remembering, hoping…  They are real: intimate, tender, reminiscent and bombastic all at once.  When we bypass the psalms, we are missing a vibrant part of scripture that speaks of heart and mind faith in God.

Now I would like to invite Catriona up here to speak a little about the worship that she grew up with in Lewis and the place of the Psalms in her life before we sing a psalm in gaelic together here  in Dunedin, with our settler ancestors alongside and our Scottish forebears forgiving our pronunciation and style because we are all, after all, raising out voices to God in praise and thanksgiving and hope.

Margaret Garland



[1] Zephaniah 3:17  (New King James version).

[2] Isaiah 5:26
[3] Isaiah 7:18

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