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TRUMPET, TIMBREL AND LOUD CLASHING CYMBALS

October 14, 1990

8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan

Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicaga

Scripture
Matthew 21:33-43
Philippians 4:4-7

"Let everything that breathes praise the Lord."
—Psalm 150:6(RSV)

In this gorgeous Gothic space there is a silent, continual music
playing. Overhead at the top of each column, there is an angel. Most are
holding musical instruments. You have to jook carefully to see them. The
first is playing a stringed instrument, like a cello. It's actually a viol.
Directly across a trumpet is playing. Beside him is a lyre and harp. Back
across the way are bells, and number five on your right, cymbals poised -
about to be clashed together; and, in back there is a drum and one man

holding a score of music. The architect and interior design people who
planned and built this space seventy-six years ago chose Psalm 150 as the

guiding, defining motif. They were, I believe, inspired. My guess is that
there were no more actual cymbals clashing in this space then than there
are now, probably far fewer trumpets, stringed instruments and pipes.
Presbyterian worship in the early twentieth century was not exactly
exuberant. In fact, for a long time our Presbyterian forbears were
suspicious of musical instruments in God's house, Psalm 150
notwithstanding. Nevertheless, those artists knew something important,
namely that the essence of religion is praise: that the heart of the
matter is not penitence, confession, reverence, sacrifice, but praise,
glorious music, sung and accompanied by trumpet and timbrel and loud
clashing cymbals.

Perhaps the architect, in preparing for his task, read the Catechism.
When an assembly of British Calvinists gathered in London in the 17th
century to write down what became the basic tenets of Presbyterianism they
produced a major statement, the Westminister Confession of Faith, and two
teaching tools, the Larger and Shorter Catechisms. When I became a church
member, a "“Communicant" at the age of twelve, the way you did it was to
memorize the Shorter Catechism. I recall none of it, except the first
question and answer, and almost everybody remembers it:

What is the chief end of man?
Man's chief end is to gloryfy God
and enjoy him forever.

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Phe architects knew it. The old theologians knew it. The person who
collected 150 separate hymns and poems and prayers in the Psalter knew it t
hy cheosing a.gloriaus doxology as the conclusion, the climax to the
collection. There are actually five of them, Psalms. 146 through 150: the
Hallel Psalms; each begins with the Hebrew word for Hallelujah: Halle] =
Praise, jah = short form of Jahweh. “Praise the Lord."

There is in the earliest religion of our Jewish forbears, a religion
which produced and nurtured Jesus of Nazareth; a curious idea that the
purpose of human life is to praise God, that the goal of life is what Old
Testament scholar Walter Bruggemann calls extravagant, spontaneous,
unreserved adoration of God. “Praise is Israel's proper destiny." The
final expectation of the Old Testament is not obedience to the law, but the
adoration of God. Heaven is where God is praised continually. [he
Message of the Psalms]

It's a deceptively simple concept. It does not mean that God needs
our praise, but that there is something about us that is incomplete until
we engage in the adoration of God. But at first it appears to be a
religious duty upon which we will one day be judged.

C. S. Lewis wrote a helpful little book on the Psalms in which he
confesses that he was put off by the Biblical insistence on the praise of
God.

He wrote:

“When I first began to“draw near to belief in God

and even for sometime after... I found a stumbling

block in the demand so clamorously made by all religious
people that we should 'praise' God; stil! more is the
suggestion that God himself demands it. ‘What kind of
God,' Lewis asked at first, would engage in what seems
like pettiness.' We all despise the man who demands
continued assurance of his own virtue, intelligence or
delightfulness; we despise still more the crowd of
people around every dictator, every millionaire, every
celebrity, who gratify that demand. Is that what
worship is?... fawning over a God who apparently needs a
lot of love and praise? The nation that God commands
this sort of non-stop, obsequiousness seemed to him
nothing short of silly pagan bargaining."

[Reflections on the Psalms, p. 77]

But then Lewis began to understand that there is a deeper wisdom
here. Ever the careful analyst, he saw that there is a sense in which all
true human enjoyment overflows into praise. Who hasn't experienced the
frustration, the sense of incompleteness when we were not able to share
joy, happiness, love, heauty, passion? It's very difficuit to enjoy
solitary beauty in isolation: It is almost impossible to enjoy a beautiful
painting,a wonderful piece of music or a lovely sunset on the lakefront and
not at least say to the stranger beside you “isn't that lovely?" And the
deeper and more profound the joy or grief, the more it demands to be
communicated, expressed interpersonally. One of my enduring memories of

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our first-months in Chicago was that incredible night in January of 1986
when the Chicago Bears wan the Super Bowl, and the exuberant, extravagant
joy that simply had to be expressed. PeopJe were literally beside
themselves, leaping out of cars on Michigan Avenue ta shake hands, hug even
(it was a very cold night) and then leap back in as the light changed. I
put on a coat and went out to be part of it. It seemed the most natural

thing in the world to exchange a "high five" with total strangers on the
sidewalk.

C. S. Lewis suggests that a feeling isn't complete, isn't really
felt, until it is expressed. He wrote poignantly about the incomplete and
crippled lives of those who are tone~deaf, have never been in love, never
cared for a good book, never enjoyed the fee] of morning air on cheeks.
"Praise," he said, “almost seems to be inner health made audible."

And so this praising God business, finally, is about us - our need to
praise in order to be fully alive, fully human. That's what the Old
Testament knows about us with all this urging us to Praise the Lord. Lewis
wrote:

“God is that object to admire which is simply to he
awake, to have entered the real world: not to appreciate
which is ta have lost the greatest experience, and in the
end to have lost all." [p. 79]

And several centuries before C. S. Lewis, another Englishman,
Shakespeare, wrote similarly:

“The man that hath no music in himself, nor

is not mov'd with concord of sweet sounds,

Is fit for treason, strategems, and spoils:
The motions of his spirit are dull as night...
Let no such man be trusted."

{The Merchant of Venice]

It is an important step in our spiritual maturation when we learn
that we come to church not because God needs us to be here, but because we
need to give voice, ta express our deepest feelings and emotions and
hopes and fears and loves. The need is ours.

And so those angels up there are making a profound statement, not
simply to God, but about us.

There is a growing body of academic evidence that music is important
anthropologically, psychologically, even biologically. Part of being an
adolescent is identifying a musica] idiom to define oneself which, after
all is what is supposed to happen in adolescence. Of course the music
offends the older generation. That's what it's supposed to do. Their
music was offensive to their parents. When I commented on my children's
taste in music, I heard verbatim, my father's comments on my preferences.
All societies have some form of singing and dancing, and all societies
have sacred music. The name of the academic discipline that looks for it
and analyses it is called Ethnomusicology. In every culture music
expresses the relationship of people to the holy, the mysteriaus, the

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.other. Music from the beginning has been the way human beings have
addressed what Rudolf Otto called the "Mysterium Tremendum." And in al]
cultures, music functions as a basic cooperative energy. We've heen
‘singing, it seems from the beginning. When we stood up on two feet and
started reshaping our environment, one of the first things we made
apparently, was a pipe to make music. <A noted Ethnomusicologist writes:
"It is safe to assume that Neanderthals were singing 100,000 years aga."

The neurologist, Oliver Sacks, who wrote The Man Who Mistook His Wife
For a Hat, tells about the elderly woman ina nursing home who awoke one
morning deafened by the sound of songs from her childhood in Ireland
inging in her ears. If there is a miman need to praise, there is a human
capacity to make and hear and enjoy music that is primal. It has nothing
to do with intelligence quotients or objective reason. People with very
major mental handicaps maintain basic music responsiveness. It is built
into us apparently. Charles Ives wrote once, "I think there must be a
Place in the soul all made of tunes." Apparently he was right.

So we have a need to praise and we have the capacity - biologically,
neurologically, to do-it musically. That's why we sing. It's why we begin
worship with a Doxology - a Hallelujah ~ "Praise God from whom all
blessings flow." It's why we have a choir, not only to help us sing, which
the old Calvinists said was the reason for having a choir, but also to sing
gloriously on our behalf. It's -why we have organ recitals and choral
festivals and a children's choir. It's why we have an annual Festival of
the Arts. It's why Dave Brubeck will play a concert in here this evening
to praise the Lord with piang, bass, drums and clarinet - first cousins to
lute, harp, pipe, and loud clashing cymbals. It's why we sing at the
beginning and in the middle and at the end of worship.

But in spite of all that, the reality is that we are not all
equally comfortable with nor happy about hymn singing as an act of praise.
It's always a surprise for the clergy - who ordinarily sit here beneath the
choir and organ - to sit out there with you and discover that there isn't
much singing going on. The trouble is a catch 22: with a few marvelous
exceptions, most of us are not wild about the sound of our own voices
singing - for good reason - and so we tone it down. So does the person
sitting on our left or right. And so it becomes a contest to see who can
sing more softly - the purpose is not to be heard. As if anyone cares.
We're not singing for one another... we're singing for God... and I reason
that God gave us these voices, our instruments of praise - so they must be
okay - all of then. ,

A newspaper columnist, Mike Hardin, wrote a funny piece about church
music in which he confessed that he never understood and didn't like the
hymns of the evangelical church of his youth. "Gladly, the Cross I'd
Bear," he thought, was a song about a grizzly who needed glasses. He was
both revolted and fascinated by the graphic aesthetics of "Lift High the
Blood Stained Banner." He became a Roman Catholic as an adult and wrote
that at most of the Catholic weddings he attended hymns had been replaced
by “a fourteen-year-old kid in a fuchsia tux strumming a six-stringed
Yamaha and braying, 'You Light Up My Life.'" Ina concluding review of the
musical possibilities in town on a Sunday morning he advised his readers to
“stick with downtown Presbyterians whenever you can. They have a lot of

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Pipes and charal arrangements, and no one sings along with the Bach."
[Columbus Dispatch, Sunday Magazine, 9/18/83]

The prohlem is a basic one defined by the contrast between that
exuberant and loud music going on over our heads and the typical

church-going attitude of determined, serious business, for which we dress

up or down, and become our most reserved. Religion does not have to be
grim. Religion should not be grim. Religion is about ideas so big and
good and ultimately joyful that we have to be creative to find ways to
express them. Religion is basically happy business, not superficially so:
not in a way that denies tragedy, grief and sadness, nor oppressive
injustice. Sometimes it is funny business. God has to have a sense of
humor. God has to laugh a lot about us and with us. Funny things happen in
church. I sat alone in the chancel of the First Presbyterian Church of
Kalamazoo two weeks ago ~ a downtown Presbyterian congregation with a
dignified Gothic building and lots of history and tradition - while the
minister did a children's sermon. He sat down on the chancel steps with
the children gathered around him and was telling them about how God

loves us and wants us to be kind and considerate and peaceful. And in the
middle of this, two four-year-olds began to poke and push and finally fell
on each other and actually wrestled behind the Communion Table. The
congregation couldn't see them - never knew a thing. The minister couldn't
see them. Only I could see them - and God. J was laughing - I'll bet God
was too.

It isn't grim at all. Reverence is not synonymous with sadness. The
purpose of worship is to provide. us a way to express a joy so profound we
really don't have a way to express it alone,.

Lewis Thomas, who writes beautifully about science ina way that
approaches theolagy, in his best-seller, The Lives of a Cell, wrote an
essay, “The Music of this Sphere.”

"Nature abhors silence," Thomas observes,

"Somewhere is a continual music. Almost anything that an
animal can use to make a sound is put to use. Termites

make percussive sounds to each other by beating their heads
on the floor. Bats produce strange, solitary and lovely
beljJ-like notes, hanging at rest upside down in the depths

of the woods... Gorillas beat their chests. Fish make sounds
by clicking their teeth. Toads sing to each other... even
earthworms make sounds, faint staccato notes in regular
clusters." [p. 21]

Thomas wishes he could hear it all — together - the "grand canonical
ensemble" he calis it: the whole creation making music. What a marvelous

image. "Let everything that breathes praise the Lord."

We believe in God. We believe that we are not alone, that we are
intended, loved, cared far by the one who made us.

We believe that one came among us in Jesus Christ, the only son and
that he lived for us, died for us, conquered death for us.

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We believe that in Christ we are safe and free: that in all of life
nothing will’ever happen to us, including our own death, that will separate
us from the love of God.

We helieve things so bold and so good that merely saying them like
that doesn't begin to do justice to them.

So we paint and write and sculpt and we build cathedrals, And we
Play music and sing. And it is in singing that we believe it best and
most, That is how it should be. That is how we are made.

God has to love music. God has to love the sounds of creation.

And you and I are never more human, never more in tune with Gad's
intention for creation than when we are playing music, listening to music,
singing. God, I believe, made it so that we really do need each other in
order to do this fundamental human act of praising. The only time most of
us will raise our voice in song is either when we are absolutely alone and
no one can hear, or when we are together and can blend our particular
voices in a large voice, the voice of God's people.

Somehow when it wells up in us, that basic humanness, that awe
and wonder and love at the goodness of life, the world, God, and the
incredible mystery of God's love in Jesus Christ, and we give it voice, we
are joining a chorus of creation, accompanied by trumpets and timbrels and
loud clashing cymbals, which has been singing to God's glory since time
began and will continue singing forever and ever.

Amen.

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