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
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