GLORY
December 17, 2000
FOURTH CHURCH PULPIT
John M. Buchanan

The old song of my spirit has wearied itself out.

It has long ago been learned by heart;

It repeats itself over and over,

Bringing no added joy to my days or lift to my spirit.

I will sing a new song.

E must learn the new song for the new needs

J must fashion new words born of all the new growth
of my life—of my mind—of my spirit.

I must prepare for new melodies that have
never been mind before,

That all that is within me may lift my voice unte God.

Therefore, I shall rejoice with each new day

And delight my spirit in each fresh unfolding.

I will sing, this day, a new song unto the Lord.

Howard Thurman
The Mood of Christmas

FOURTH
PRESBY
TERIAN
CHURCH
A LIGHT IN THE CITY

Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago
126 East Chestnut Street, Chicago, IL 60611-2094
(312) 787-4570

GLORY
December 17, 2000

JOHN M. BUCHANAN, PASTOR
FOURTH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

Isaiah 12
-Luke 2:8-14.
““,.. and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.” Luke 2:9
(NRSY)

As we draw closer to Bethlehem, O God, startle us again with the old story we have heard so

many times. Startle us with the truth and glory of it. Now silence in us any voice but your
own, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Every year at about this time, when I’ve concluded that everything that can be said about
Christmas has already been said, I go to my files and pull out a dog-eared copy of an essay
which appeared first in The Christian Century in 1933 and was reprinted fifty years later.
It is by Reinhold Niebuhr, the most important American theologian of the first half of the
20" century, Professor of Theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York, author of
many books and whose theology was succinct, readable and very influential. The essay is
titled “A Christmas Service in Retrospect.” Niebuhr wrote:

I went to church in the Cathedral on Christmas Day. It is one of the few days of the
year on which I am able to attend church without preaching myself. On that day,
although a free-church Protestant myself, I prefer a liturgical church with as little
sermon as possible. It is not that I don’t like to hear anyone but-myself preach. I
merely dislike most Christmas sermons. Only poets can do justice to the Christmas
story and there are not many poets in the pulpit. It is better therefore to be satisfied
with the symbolic presentation of the poetry in hymn, anthem and liturgy.

Niebuhr goes on to observe that the preacher ordinarily tries to mount a defense of the
historic reality of the Christmas story to make it acceptable to the intellect, a project that
continues today. Richard Ostling’s article in the Thursday Tribune explained the latest
argument among New Testament scholars, historians and archaeologists about where Jesus
was really born. And as Niebuhr observed, it all gets pretty dull and ultimately
uninteresting. And then the great scholar, who devoted his whole life to a reasonable
presentation of the Christian faith, makes this wonderful and helpful observation:

I suppose it is necessary and inevitable that the poetry of religion should be
expressed in rational terms, but something is always lost in the rationalization.
Dogma is rationally petrified poetry which destroys part of the truth embodied in
the tale in the effort to put it in precise terms.

And so that’s why at Christmas we do turn to music and art and drama to give expression
to a truth bigger than we have words with which to describe it. How much more eloquently
cal anyone express the meaning of Christmas than Charles Dickens did in A Christmas
Carol without ever mentioning theology or religion; or O. Henry in The Gift of the Magi, or
Charles Shultz, for that matter, in the classic_.A Charlie Brown Christmas? It’s all there, a
reviewer for The Washington Post observed last week: the wonder, the awe, the weak and
small being lifted up, the inconsequential—even Charlie Brown’s pathetic, skinny
Christmas tree radiating the very glory of God, as Linus simply recites the story straight—
the shepherds, the angels, the glory.

In a fine new book, Life is a Miracle, poet Wendell Berry argues eloquently against
reductionism, the scientific methodology that assumes that if you reduce a thing to its
smallest component parts and study the parts, you will understand the thing itself—the
plant, person, experience. Reductionists have trouble with the idea of mystery. To the
pure scientific reductionist, for instance, love is only hormones calling to hormones and
self-sacrifice, martyrdom, merely our genetic code acting to save the species. “We are alive
within mystery, by miracle,” Berry wrote (p.45) There is a lot about us—about life—about
the world—that cannot be explained.

Actually, the scientists know it better than anybody. The more we discover about the
universe, about the human body, the bigger the mystery becomes, the unknown.

It was Albert Einstein himself who wrote, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is
the mysterious. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder, is as
good as dead.”

And the beautifully haunting Appalachian Carol—

I wonder as I wander out under the sky,

How Jesus our Savior did come for to die

For poor ornery sinners like you and like I

I wonder as I wander out under the sky,

When Mary birthed Jesus, twas in a cow’s stall
With wise men and shepherds and farmers and all.
But high from God’s heaven a star’s light did fall
....1 wonder as I wander.

There are experiences that will not be reduced to objective, rational descriptions and truths
that cannot always be fully conveyed in propositions and theses however eloquent.
Christmas, the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, the Eternal Word become flesh, is one of these
and the preacher, more than anyone, knows it and that is why clergy much wiser than I
turn it over to J. S. Bach and the musicians for the morning. Bach himself gave testimony.
He was a religious scholar in his own right. Of the 200 books in his personal library, 80
were theological books. His production was enormous, and inscribed on every single one of
his manuscripts was his motto, Soli Deo Gloria, “To the Glory of God Alone.”

{ don’t know what it was like out on that hillside in the dark and cold, huddling around a
small fire—watching the sheep. Luke says there was an angel with a message about a
child’s birth and then a whole chorus of angels praising God and singing. “The glory of the
Lord shone around them and they were sore afraid,” the lovely old narrative told it.
“Terrified,” the literal translation, is more like it.

The philosopher William James wrote his classic, Varieties of Religious Experience in 1882
and in it observed, “It is as if there were in human consciousness a sense of reality, of
objective presence, a perception of what we may call ‘something there,’ more deep and
more general than any of the special and particular senses.” (p.58)

Luke calls it simply, the Glory of the Lord and that, finally, is what we strive to recall, and
celebrate and experience and share in these traditions, and the glorious music of the season,
a truth for which we don’t have words big enough.

Earlier this season I told about being in Leipzig to visit the church where J. S. Bach was the
organist and where he wrote his chorales for the Sunday liturgy, St. Thomas Church,
where he presented The Magnificat on Christmas Eve, 1723. We also visited The Frauen
Kirche where he frequently played and where protestors and dissenters were given shelter
during the darkest days of the East German Communist regime. It was from those
churches that thousands and thousands of Germans emerged holding candles—to
encourage their fellow citizens to encircle the entire city—as the regime began to topple.

I told about visiting the Wall in Berlin and in the Check Point Charlie Museum seeing a
wonderful video of the famous Russian cellist, Msistlav Rostoprovich sitting, alone, in front
of the crumbling wall, playing a Bach unaccompanied cello suite.

I have since learned more about him, heard him play—a Bach Suite, and had the very
great privilege of meeting him and talking with him. He and his wife irritated the old
Soviet regime by advocating for human rights and by sheltering in their home the famous
Russian author, patriot and human rights advocate, Alexander Solzhenitsn. In 1973 when
they were in Paris for a concert—she too is a distinguished musician, a soprano—the Soviet
Government suspended their citizenship and told them they could never go home again.
Suddenly the Rostoproviches had no home and had to leave behind belongings, family,
friends, music, orchestras. And so they lived in exile and continued their very
distinguished musical careers.

Rostoprovich is in his seventies; if you have ever seen him perform with the Chicago
Symphony, you know he is charming, effusive—after his concerts he customarily kisses the
conductor, concert master, sometimes the entire string section, walks through the orchestra
congratulating and kissing the players. He showers the audience with blown kisses, and
invites the audience to applaud his cello and the composer. It all happened in the
wonderful concert in Dallas where he played the concerto Shostakovich had written for
him, and a Bach suite as an encore. Afterward, at a reception and dinner party, I told him

I was a Reformed minister, that a group of us from Chicago had seen the video of his
playing at the wall. I told him that I was deeply moved by his gesture and that I had told

my congregation in Chicago about it. He liked that a lot and proceeded to tell me the whole
Story.

He was in Paris when the news began to break that the Berlin Wall was coming down and
the Communist regime in East Germany was apparently over. What that meant to him, of
course, along with similar events throughout the Eastern Bloc, and in the Soviet Union, was
that his exile was over and that he could go home again. How to celebrate this momentous
event? How to express his profound joy? He knew what he had to do, he said. He took his
cello and caught the first plane to Berlin. He jumped in a cab and instructed the driver to
take him to the wall. When he arrived, a funny thing happened, he said. In his
concertizing with the world’s greatest orchestras, one thing he has never had to think about
was the chair he would sit on. There is always a chair ready for him on the Stage. You
have to have a chair to play a cello. Undaunted, he knocked on the door of the nearest
house, explained his situation and the German family produced a small kitchen chair. So
the distinguished Russian cellist and human rights advocate did the only thing he could to
express himself—to convey his profound joy at the gift of freedom and homecoming and
reunion and renewal. He played his cello.

“You chose Bach,” I said. “Yes,” he responded, with tears in his eyes, “I chose Bach to say
thank you to the great God.” Soli Deo Gloria

“Then the angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around
them... .”

Thanks be to God.

Immediately following, The Magnificat, J. S. Bach, was presented by the Fourth
Presbyterian Church Morning Choir and Chamber Orchestra, John W. W. Sherer
conducting.