Sing a New Song
As part of our weekend of early music we had a performance last night of Handel’s Messiah. Our own choirs provided the soloists and choruses and were joined at high points by the untrained voices of children from some of our local schools, a truly joyful uninhibited sound. And it set me thinking about the place of music in our faith and in the life of the Church.
Our New Testament reading this morning must rank as one of the most obscure and difficult passages in scripture. We’ve got St Paul writing about ‘our ancestors’ being baptized into Moses, in the cloud and in the sea. And the Rock that mysteriously followed them and ‘that rock was Christ’. It turns out that God was not pleased with them and thousands were struck down.
And then you get to the point. The recipients of Paul’s letter, members of the Church at Corinth, have been tolerating what we would call inappropriate sexual relationships and are in danger of God’s judgment.
What I want to reflect on this morning is not sex or judgment, but what Paul is actually doing in this passage when he compares the Corinthians to the Israelites who crossed the Red Sea. In what way were they ‘baptized into Moses’ and what does that strange phrase mean. If you look back to the Exodus story they were not baptized at all, they didn’t even get wet.
Paul is looking at the story of the Exodus from Egypt as a kind of portent or prophecy. The more technical word is a ‘type’. Exodus lays down a pattern which is then replicated in the present and future. Once you understand the principle of that, ‘typology’ as it is called, and get a feel for it, scripture begins to make a great deal more sense.
It’s what enabled Handel, in ‘The Messiah’, to take nearly all his texts from the Old Testament. The coming of the Messiah is already there if you have the eyes to see and the ears to hear. The great themes of scripture, creation, sin, exile, redemption, heaven are all there in the Old Testament, and we, the listeners of Paul’s time and now, are those – quoting from Corinthians again ‘on whom the end of the ages has come’. It came true for them. It is coming true for us. That’s why on Holy Saturday, as we wait for the joy of Easter, we will listen to passages from the Old Testament, the creation, the flood, the exodus, the whole story of redemption. An early Scripture Scholar, Origen of Alexandria wrote a lot about the journey of God’s people through the wilderness, not just as something that happened in the past, but as something happening now: ‘We too were in Egypt; he wrote, ‘We too were in the night of ignorance and error’. And like, the Israelites, we were brought out of captivity by God’s Word.
Scripture is full of prophecies, portents, or to use the technical term again, types. Now think about music, something we are all familiar with whether our taste runs to today’s four partmass by William Byrd or Taylor Swift or Ed Sheeran. All music is a way of playing with time, by rhythms, by metre, by theme, by repetition, variation and resolution, pitch, melody, harmony, polyphony.
Jeremy Begbie, an accomplished musician and theologian, has written that music has much to teach us about the Bible and the Christian life, helping us to understand what it is to live through time well and how to be at peace with time. And how the themes of creation, sin, forgiveness and redemption are played out in our personal lives and in the life of the world.
If he is right, the Bible is not a history book, recording events or a novel, making things up, but a source, the source of meaning. Like music it sets out its grand themes and variations, its movements and moods, its different melodies and harmonies.
So its not surprising that scripture has always been sung, often chanted. Not so long ago in this cathedral the deacon would not have read the Gospel but sung it, to a simple repeated chant. One reason being that if you have no sound amplification it is easier to hear words sung to pitched notes than straightforward speech.
Andrew Gant, one of the speakers at our early music weekend describes what he calls ‘excited speech’, a way of speaking based on the rising and falling of pitch in a pattern which foreshadows the rises and falls of folk song.
There are actual songs in scripture of course, the psalms and the canticles. There is evidence of Christian chant from Syria which goes back to the third century. Latin translations of scripture were sung by Irish monks as they sailed to Lindisfarne and then to Northumbria, bringing the Gospel to the North of England. In the 6th century what we now known as Gregorian chant, plainsong, came with Augustine of Canterbury on his mission to Kent. Later this would sometimes be accompanied by pipe organs.
So music and scripture belong together and singing has been an expression of faith from the beginning. It expresses the faith of the Church and the faith of each one of us.
The challenge to us, as we go through our lives is not only to hear the music, but to become the music. It is the Holy Spirit praying within who enables you to offer your particular giftsof mind and body in God’s service, who helps you endure the wounds and sufferings of time and points you onward to liberation.
Today’s Collect speaks of God’s dear Son going not up to joy, but first he suffered pain and entering not into glory before he was crucified. Joy and glory, pain, suffering and hope. These are the themes of Christ’s life and of every human life. We are conformed to Christ by living the life we have been given. So ‘Let’s face the music – and dance’. ‘Thank you for the music’.
Sing to the Lord a new song, the song only you can sing, and let it be woven into the enduring song of heaven.
Angela Tilby
Canon of Honour Emeritus