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Prayer as Melody

Choral Evensong
Sunday, March 17, 2019 @ 04:00 pm
The Second Sunday In Lent

The Second Sunday In Lent

O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from thy ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of thy Word, Jesus Christ thy Son; who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

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Scripture citation(s): Judges 5:1-5, 10-12, 19-22, 24-31; Ephesians 5:6-20

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Grant that what we sing with our lips we may believe in our hearts, and what we believe in our hearts we may show forth in our lives, through Jesus Christ our Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

If you go downtown to the Financial district you may come across John Street United Methodist Church, a little church at first glance, tucked away. This church was for many years the regular place of worship for missioner and songwriter Fanny Crosby, whose centenary of birth approaches this time next year.

You may not recognize her name, but if I were to sing the hymn “To God be the Glory”, you would immediately remember the melody and I am sure the next words “great things he hath done’” would follow in your mind. This was just one of her astonishing 8000 gospel texts which transformed and enriched hymnody in the nineteenth century at a time when women had little voice in leading worship in church.

Fanny Crosby’s hymns mirrored the themes of her faith journey, and the story and song of her beloved faith community. They reflected both God’s Blessed assurance and call to her and indeed to each one of us, to praise our savior ‘all the day long’ and as we just heard in the letter to the Ephesians “to sing and make melody in your heart to God.”

Crosby’s hymns reflected her hopeful, healing and heaven-bound relationship with Jesus with words that were to became both her legacy, and an inspiration to Christians throughout the world who sang her hymns and confirmed her faith experience as their own; she is one whose very life could bear the epitaph The one who sings prays twice, for to her, music and prayer were one.

Perhaps there are hymns or melodies that help you pray, that have inspired you and are part of your life, with its moments of joy and sadness. We may read the words in our head or even speak them aloud, but to sing them is to bring the breath of life into those words. For melody, prayer, and breath are all intertwined; they cannot be separated any more than the mind from the body or the heart from the soul; they are woven in together to witness to God’s glory, through our song as a story of faith and common life.

Simply reciting words in our head or decoding notes on a piece of music manuscript as it were a puzzle for the first time isn’t our best way to praise God and give him the glory. Perhaps this is why the Royal School of Church Music has the beautiful motto, “I will sing with the Spirit and with understanding also.” (1 Corinthians 14:15b). Music-making engages our whole being; it is not one-dimensional but an all-consuming exercise of “hearts and minds and hands and voices in our choicest psalmody,” to use the words of that great hymn Angel Voices ever singing.

We all know the reading from Ecclesiastes, which begins “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8). So, too, the Psalms are songs that echo a multiplicity of themes in our lives. The psalms affirm, reunite us and remind us where we come from and where we are going as a Christian community. There are psalms of praise and psalms of sorrow; psalms about the environment, and psalms about war; agricultural psalms; psalms in distress; cursing psalms and psalms for the poor and the Royal Family. Psalms when one is sick or dying and psalms that tell of history. Psalms for pilgrimage; psalms when depressed; psalms in stillness, and psalms of protest. Psalms for the sinner and psalms for praise.

We hear the origins of the psalms in the song Deborah, from our first lesson, when the community immortalized her part in destroying a ruthless King; they took the story and the made a melody that they could teach their children, just as Miriam had done all those years before when the Hebrew tribes crossed the Red Sea.

Music as storytelling and remembrance – giving melody to history – is at the heart of what we do in our worship. The American musician, Marty Haugen, reminds us how these things are so interrelated in the liturgy and how choirs help pass on the story of our faith. He says, “The first reason we sing is to remember who and whose we are. The leader of prayer, the one who reads, and especially the one who sings, must know more than the notes. She must know the stories of our faith as well as the stories of her own community, and she must know how they are brought together in worship.” (Marty Haugen, speaking at the ‘Keeping the People’s Song Alive’, Evangelical Lutheran Church Conference, USA, 1998).

Many of you experienced just this in the Centennial Evensong of Saint Thomas Choir School two weeks ago as the near 80 strong choir of Alumni, Gentlemen and Boys led the singing, and with all their heart and voice sang the hymn of their Founding Organist and Director of Music, T. Tertius Noble, “Come Labor on.”

Such a powerful song attributed to so many memories in this place takes on its own dimension as a song of remembrance that energizes the community and gives its members courage to tell their story and to become a witness to faith. So, like Deborah all those years before, we shall continue to filled with the Spirit as, in the words of our second lesson, “we sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among ourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in our hearts, giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (cf. Ephesians 5:18-20)

Singing can become prayer, and the melodies help nurture us and help us all in the practice of prayer and the expression of faith by helping us remember the story of our faith. In other words, our prayer can become a canticle of praise, even in the dry times of our lives. May this kind of song carry all of us in that kind of prayer, and may our melodies be deeply rooted in each one of us as well as our diverse communities.

The Royal School of Church Music’s chorister prayer has these words: “Grant that what we sing with our lips we may believe in our hearts, and what we believe in our hearts we may show forth in our lives.” This is a daily reminder that our prayer, our melody, and our song are not simply our own but part of something so much bigger and stretching back in time. So, choristers of St Paul’s, Norwalk, as was said to Deborah all those centuries ago … “awake, awake and sing!”