A sermon preached on 8th September by Revd Canon Peter Moger

ANTHEM: Ubi caritas (Gjeilo)

Music is a noble art….. All other arts and sciences will die with us.  Lawyers cannot use their skill in heaven, for there will be no trials….. Nobody in heaven will ask a doctor for a prescription…  But the things theologians and musicians learned on earth, they will also practise in heaven – that is, to praise God.

So wrote Bach’s contemporary, the composer Johann Mattheson. 

One of the great themes of the Christian faith is that ‘the best is yet to be’ – that this life is, in a sense, a preparation for what lies beyond the grave.  That, as we journey from day to day in God’s company, we are gradually fashioned into the people God created us to be and eventually we become fully ourselves. 

Of course, we don’t actually know what heaven will be like.  Much Christian thinking derives from the visions of St John the Divine, whose book of Revelation offers us tantalising (and often puzzling) pictures in words of a life still to come.  Those word pictures have been further interpreted by artists and by musicians.  Because what does come across more than anything else from St John’s writings is that if there is one thing that God’s people do in heaven, it is sing.  As we heard in the 2^nd lesson:

         Around the throne,

day and night without ceasing, they sing       

Holy, holy, holy, the Lord God the Almighty,

           who was, and is, and is to come. [Rev 4]

Singing has always been important for people of faith.  Within the Christian tradition, we have St Paul’s famous words telling us that we should ‘…. sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs to God.’

In fact, in the Bible there are no fewer than 166 uses of the verb to sing, 48 references to singers and 35 to singing.  The Bible uses musical metaphors (and singing especially) to mark out the really significant moments in the story of God’s relationship with his people. 

The writer of the Book of Job, for instance, tells us that, at the creation of the world, ‘the morning stars sang for joy’ [Job 38.7].  In the 1^st lesson we heard that, after the Israelites had escaped through the Red Sea from slavery in Egypt, Moses and Miriam sang a song to the Lord [Exodus 15.1-18].  Mary sang the Magnificat on discovering that she was to be the mother of God’s Son.  And when Jesus was born, it is the song of the Angels [Luke 2.14] which announces his birth to the shepherds.  And if we want to find reference upon reference to singing we need look no further than the Psalms.  As we sang earlier:

O sing unto the Lord a new song :

for he hath done marvellous things. (98.1)

For all the references to musical instruments in the Psalms, it is singing which is the primary activity of God’s people in worship.  The psalmist tells us not only to praise God but to ‘sing unto the Lord a new song.’  To praise and to sing are almost one and the same thing.  So in Psalm 137—which was written out of the experience of exile in Babylon—we find the words, ‘How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’  The only response the Israelites could make to God’s absence (as it seemed to them), was to stop singing altogether.  But what’s so special about singing?

First, singing is good for us.  The medics tell us that singing increases the flow of oxygen to the brain, is good physical exercise, and helps co-ordinate a huge range of bodily functions.  Singing helps us towards becoming whole human beings.

Second, singing helps build community.  There is nothing quite like singing as part of a group where all are committed to producing something of beauty and excellence, and any choir is always far greater than the sum of its parts.  Recent research has revealed that when singers sing together in a very focussed way, their heartbeats become synchronised.

Third, singing helps form us as people.  It’s well known that what we sing lodges far more deeply within us that the words we say or hear.  After this service, we are far more likely to remember the words of our hymns than this sermon(!).  Because singing is such a holistic activity, in that it involves body, mind and spirit, what we sing becomes a part of us.  I was talking to one of our Cathedral choral scholars last term, and he was telling me about his favourite Psalm and that, because he had been singing it in cathedral choirs since the age of 8, he simply knew it through and through.  And I wouldn’t mind betting that, in 40 years’ time, he will still be able to sing that Psalm – and to Bairstow’s chant – by heart, because it will have become part of him.  Over time, all that we sing helps form us into the people God is calling us to become.

St Augustine is reputed to have said that the person who sings, prays twice.  In a way, he was right, because when we sing something, the words are transformed.  They retain their meaning, but something is added: their expression is given new depth, the music adds a new dimension.  That is certainly true of this evening’s anthem – which sets words from an antiphon derived from the 4^th chapter the first letter of St John.  The words are lifted onto another plane because of the musical setting.

But there is a further dimension to singing in worship.  There’s a link between the worship we offer here and now, and the worship that is and shall be offered in heaven.  John Milton expressed it so well:

O may we soon again renew that song

And keep in tune with Heaven, till God ere long

To his celestial consort us unite,

To live with him and sing in endless morn of light.

           [At a solemn musick]

Whenever we worship, we do so as part of the ceaseless round of worship offered by the whole company of heaven.  And it’s as though through our singing here on earth, we are tuning in to that heavenly worship: ‘log on to the heavenly broadband’ as one friend of mine once put it.  And therein lies its value for us. 

As we worship, and lift the concerns of earth to heaven, so heaven is brought down to earth, and we catch a glimpse of God`s glory.  The vision of that glory is accessible not only to those who profess faith, but to anyone who is prepared to be caught up in the beauty of what is going on and open to the possibility of being drawn into God’s heart of love.

It’s this vision—the vision of connectedness between earth and heaven—which lies at the heart of the Anglican service of Evensong.  Sometimes, the congregation has little to do other than listen and soak up what is sung on our behalf by the choir.  But what is offered is far greater than the sum of its parts.  I’ve already alluded to what happens to words when they are set to music.  This evening, we’ve been privileged to hear as the anthem Ola Gjeilo’s setting of Ubi caritas.

This music has an inherent warmth which reflects so well the words of the text.  The words are an antiphon for the washing of feet at the Maundy Thursday liturgy, and have probably been in continuous use since the 8^th century.  Maundy Thursday is the day when we remember Jesus giving his ’new commandment’ ‘Love one another as I have loved you’ (John 13.34).  St John picks up on this same theme in his 1^st letter, writing:

Those who live in love live in God,

and God lives in them. (1 John 4.16b)

and this then gives rise to the words of the antiphon:

           God is love, and where there is true love,

God himself is there.

It is perhaps the warmth of God’s love which is felt most keenly in Gjeilo’s setting.  The writing for the individual voice parts is quite simple—sometimes in unison—but when there are chords, they are rich and sonorous, with added 9ths in places.  The melody feels like plainsong – but it’s not!  Those of us who know Maurice Duruflé’s setting of the same words will know.  Duruflé sets the real plainsong, but Gjeilo creates something new. 

There are some subtle moments of genius.  There’s a change to a brighter key at the words Et ex corde diligamus nos sincero. (And may we love each other with a sincere heart.)  This is point at which the antiphon move from the fact that God is by nature a God of love to Jesus’ commandment to love one another.  The key change emphasises this and, in most of us I suspect, at this point, will sense the shift that this is now about us. 

But there’s another subtle element, too.  At the very end of this line, Gjeilo uses a very sharp dissonance (an augmented 4^th between the B of the bass and tenor and the E# of the alto, and pitted against the soprano’s F#).  There is just a hint here that within love is also the possibility of pain.  And if we map this onto Jesus washing the disciples’ feet, knowing that his love was to lead him to cross, we get just a glimpse of the pain which is part of God’s love for the world.  The hymnwriter Timothy Rees expressed this so well:

         And when human hearts are breaking

           under sorrow’s iron rod,

           there we find the self-same aching

           deep within the heart of God.

It is this profoundly theological statement which is expressed in that single dissonance in Gjeilo’s setting.

This evening’s anthem, then, doesn’t simply perform a liturgical function, nor is it just nice to listen to – though it is!  It gives new expression, and new depth to ancient words, so in so doing they take us beyond ourselves and deeper into the truth to which those words point.  We experience, through the music, not only that God is love, but that God’s love is costly – and that this is the sort of love we are called to show too.  The music helps make the theology explicit, and accessible, beyond the realm of words alone.

To be present as a worshipper at Evensong is certainly not to be spectator, nor even a passive participant.  It is to eavesdrop on the worship of heaven, to meditate on the word of God, and be taken more deeply into the heart of God, through God’s most excellent gift of music.

Let us pray.

God of glory,

around whose eternal throne all the heavenly powers offer you ceaseless songs of praise:

grant that we may overhear these songs,

and with our own lips and lives interpret them to all

in whose presence we sing:

that your Church may behold the beauty of its King,

and see with mortal eyes the land that is afar off,

where all your promises are celebrated,

and where all your love in every sight and sound

is the theme of eternal rejoicing;

through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.