Sing Me to Heaven

This morning Charles Billings has been the Director of Music at Farmington for 19 years. So, as we continue to take a closer look at church, it seems fitting that this morning we turn our attention to the role of music in our worship.

So, why does music matter? Consider this description of the importance of music: “Music is powerful. It can excite, energize, calm, and comfort. It can thrill you with its beauty or reduce you to tears. It can lift your mood after a bad day; invoke a memory from long ago; and get you tapping, swaying, and dancing when you least expect it. But music’s ability to conjure emotions is only part of why it’s so incredible. Music is a wonderful conduit for learning… When paired with movement and instrument play, it creates neurological magic, lighting up [the] brain and positively impacting all areas of development.” (Kindermusik)

Music connects to our emotions and our intellect – our heart and our head. When we study anthropology, we see that music is an inherent part of every society. The unearthly sounds of throat-singing Mongolia and Siberia are as important to their cultures as Bach is to European cultures or drum-driven song and dance are to Native American cultures. Since music is such an important part of life, it should not be surprising that the Bible says a lot about it. As early as Genesis 4:21, in Cain’s ancestry, we meet Jubal, the father of all who play the harp and flute. After Moses led the Israelites across the Red Sea and they escaped from the Egyptians, Moses and the Israelites sang, and the women followed Moses and Aaron’s sister, Miriam, with tambourines and dancing as she sang too. And when we see the Israelites returning from battles victorious, they celebrate by singing. Worship was filled with singing, 1st Chronicles records that more than one in ten of the Levite priests in the Temple were musicians. King David and King Solomon were both musicians. David wrote about half of the songs recorded in the book of Psalms, which was the hymnbook of the Israelites, and is the longest book in the Old Testament. Solomon is credited with 2 psalms, the Song of Solomon, and 1 Kings says that his songs numbered 1005.

In the Old Testament, music was a part of common life. When someone was leaving, you sang to them. When someone arrived, you met them with timbrels and dancing. They trod the grapes and worked in the fields with joyful song. They sang as the went to war and as they returned from war. Music and trumpets marked coronations and fine singers were like fine foods to royalty, and of course they had harps and lyres, pipes and timbrels at their banquets. And the walls of Jericho fell to the sound of trumpets.

In the New Testament, we see flute players with mourners, and there is music and dancing at the party for the prodigal son. Jesus and his disciples sing as they leave the Passover feast to pray in the Garden of Gethsemane. The Apostle Paul teaches the church at Ephesus that being filled with the Spirit is speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs. He tells them to sing and make music from your heart to the Lord. And the passage that we read of Paul’s letter to the Colossians says that it is through our music that we teach and admonish one another in wisdom.

The people of God sing – in praise and lament, in joy and sorrow – we sing. One of the criticisms I have of our current hymnody, not just the hymnbook we just adopted, but all modern hymnbooks, is that they lack hymns of lament.

We don’t have many favorite hymns that allow us to confess our faith at the same time that we sing our true emotions like we find in the Psalms, “Answer me when I call to you, O my righteous God, Give me relief from my distress.” Or “Give ear to my words, O God, consider my sighing.” “Why, O Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” When life gets hard, we need some good hymns of lament like Psalm 13 “How long, LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me? Look on me and answer, God. Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death, and my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,” and my foes will rejoice when I fall. But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing the LORD’s praise, for the Lord has been good to me.”

Now the new hymnbooks do have every psalm set to music, which at least gives us music to sing them. But, I believe we need new laments – like the anthem the choir just sang. You have the words on the insert in the bulletin. Our hearts contain truths that aren’t flowery and poetic. There are truths – feelings and experiences – that we have hidden there that there just aren’t words for. And in the silence left by the absence of words, music is able to sigh and soothe, wrapping us in song.

The poet, Jane Griner, and composer, Daniel Gawthrop, of Sing Me to Heaven tell about being invited to hear a high school chorus sing in Washington DC. The director had mentioned that one of the students in the choir had been diagnosed with a fatal illness and that Sing Me to Heaven had become especially meaningful to the choir that year. Since they would be singing close to where Jane Griner, the poet, and Daniel Gawthrop, the composer, lived, he invited them to come hear them sing. As Gawthrop tells it, their schedules didn’t permit them to come and hear a concert. But the choir really wanted them to hear them sing this piece. So, the only time they could arrange it was right before lunch in the middle of a day that was busy for everyone. Gawthrop says, “We arrived at their big, downtown hotel a little later than we wanted to (Washington DC traffic!) and rushed into the lobby to find all the students in the lobby, along with the usual noisy, bustling crowd that inhabits a large hotel lobby. After hurried greetings and introductions we were told by [their director] that what we were about to experience happened every day in their choir rehearsal. Escorted by a beautiful, delicate young woman we were put into the center of a circle of students who quietly, without a director, began to sing “In my heart’s sequestered chambers lie truths stripped of poets gloss”…The hotel lobby went silent as people stopped to listen. The young lady with us in the circle was dying – she knew it and the students knew it. Unable to cure her, they had come up with this daily ritual as the only healing they could offer. It was heartbreakingly beautiful, and profoundly moving.”

Music allows us to connect not just with the story of the performer or the composer or the poet, it allows us to connect with our story. And so the people of God sing.

Karl Barth, arguably the greatest Reformed theologian of the 20th Century said of music in worship:
The Christian church sings. It is not a choral society. Its singing is not a concert. But from inner, material necessity it sings. Singing is the highest form of human expression….What we can and must say quite confidently is that the church which does not sing is not the church. And where…it does not really sing but sighs and mumbles spasmodically, shamefacedly and with an ill grace, it can be at best only a troubled community which is not sure of its cause and of whose ministry and witness there can be no great expectation….The praise of God which finds its concrete culmination in the singing of the community is one of the indispensable forms of the ministry of the church.

Through song, we tell our story, we express our faith, we rehearse the biblical story, and to a very real degree our faith is formed. And so it is important that our hymns do say what we believe, that they express the range of our experiences from great joy to deep lament, that we sing songs of thanksgiving and praise as well as songs of prayer and dedication, and that the diversity of the family of God in all times and places is represented. We need hymns from all over the world. We need hymns for young and old and middle-aged. We need hymns that are old that we know by heart and hymns that are new that force us to examine our hearts again.

Psalm 96 that we read this morning and “Sing Me to Heaven” that the choir sang were both commissioned pieces. The psalm was commissioned for the annual festival of the enthronement of the Lord. Every year in worship, they celebrated the Lord as King and every year when the celebration approached on the church calendar, the Temple priests wanted to make worship meaningful, they wanted to truly engage the congregation in worship that transformed, not just have a day when everyone remembered the dove release or the streamers. So, the poets among the priests would compose a new hymn each year.

The commissioning of Sing Me to Heaven came from a community chamber choir. The director wanted something that spoke “to the way that [singers] feel about music in [their] lives.” Daniel Gawthrop was commissioned to write the piece, but he didn’t know of a text to fit the commission. So, he approached Jane Griner, a poet, to write something new.

Jane noted that there are times in our lives when only music can comfort us: when we’re very young (“sing me a lullaby”), when we’re in love (“sing me a love song”), and when we’ve lost someone (“sing me a requiem”). It all seems to add up to “sing me to heaven.”

The Book of Revelation describes heaven. God is seated on the throne, holding a scroll that no one on earth, or in heaven, or under the earth is worthy to open. And at the center, by the throne is the Lamb, who appears to have been slain, and he takes the scroll from the right hand of God. As he takes the scroll, four living creatures and 24 elders fall to their knees. They are each holding two things: a harp and a golden bowl full of incense which are the prayers of God’s people. And they sing a new song, and they are joined by angels, encircling them, numbering thousands upon thousands, and ten thousand times ten thousand, singing “Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain!” Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, singing: “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power, for ever and ever!”

On earth, and in heaven, the people of God sing. Our song connects our emotion and our intellect, our hearts and our minds; our song connects our story to the story of God in all generations; our song is part of the music of heaven as every creature in heaven and on earth sings praise to God!