August 22, 2010

A Graceful Sound

A message by Scott R. Cooper

St. Andrews Episcopal Church, Prineville, Oregon

August 22, 2010 (13^th Sunday after Pentecost)

Much to the consternation of the Worship Committee and Sally, I like to choose my own hymns on Sunday mornings when I am leading worship.

It’s not that there is anything inferior or wrong with the choices that others make. I like to do my own thing just because I generally have a message in mind and I want everything in the service to support that message. So I choose hymns as well as collects and prayers that are intended to support the central themes that I intend to emphasize as the morning’s readings and the morning’s message unfold.

Now honestly, I don’t know whether this really works or not. After all, music impacts people differently.

Music is very important to me.

In my younger days when lived in more urban places I would actually move around from church to church as I kept discovering better and better worship options, largely based on the quality of their music programs.

In Columbia, Missouri, I attended Missouri United Methodist because it had this fabulous pipe organ. The fabulous preaching alone was enough to blow you out of your pew, but what really got everybody moving was the end of the service when the organist opened up the pipes at the end of the service, and really let that organ fly. That organ was really special. It is still one of the largest pipe organs in the Midwest and it cost $31,000 when the church purchased it in 1928. It has siblings in the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake, Riverside Church in New York and Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. For a college boy coming out of the electronic-organ culture of Prineville, Oregon, the opportunity to hear that organ each week was enough to bring me back Sunday after Sunday.

After college ended, I moved to Indianapolis. It was even bigger than Columbia, so I had even better options. I particularly liked Christ Church Cathedral on Monument Circle in Indianapolis because they had an amazing Boys Choir that performed Benjamin Britten’s Festival of Carols at the holidays and filled in beautiful music in between. But I also liked Meridian Street Methodist, , because they drew their musicians from the Indianapolis Symphony and every service was like a free concert. For three years, I was an Episco-Methodist, and I went back and forth between the congregations depending on who was playing and whether I was willing to deal with the parking hassle that was a routine part of worshipping with the Episcopalians downtown.

A few years after that job I made another career change and moved to Denver. It took me almost no time to find Trinity United Methodist, which was an historic building with a big ol’ pipe organ. This one was a Roosevelt Organ which had 4,277 pipes. The carved wooden façade took up the entire front of the church and provided a beautiful backdrop for the Sunday service. I probably would have stayed there, had girlfriend troubles not intervened. Funny, how life gets in your way sometimes. But discretion being the better part of valor and Denver being a big city, I waltzed on over to St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral, which was itself renowned for its multiple choirs and its vibrant music program. Of special memory there was the Carillion which rang each morning, calling people to worship and the gathering of the clans which was featured at services once a year and involved numerous bagpipe and drum bands competing to fill the vast stone walls of the cathedral with their individual renditions of Amazing Grace. Although it could be a little difficult to greet people during the peace after all that noise, it was awfully fun.

After Denver, I moved back to Prineville. Unfortunately, Prineville does not have much to offer in the way of amazing musical options combined with inspiring worship. Sally does innovative and enjoyable things to liven us up with the addition of service music, the Orff instruments, the bell choir, the piano and the organ, and Gary and Rita Bowne manage to get us off our feet and moving now and then when they come to play, but despite those heroic and much-appreciated efforts, we don’t seem to be moving toward becoming a destination church based solely on our musical offerings.

So if I’m not going to get your attention with the big Pipe Organ and Bagpipe Band, it seems to me that the next logical thing to do is to try to choose hymns that might somewhat inspire you.

Which brings me back to this morning.

Today we are singing three hymns:

Morning Has Broke, Precious Lord and Seek Ye First.

Here’s what I have to say about each of these:

First, Cat Stephens did not write Morning Has Broken. He just made it famous when he recorded a version of it in 1972. It was also not written by Judy Collins, Neil Diamond, Art Garfunkel, Kenny Rogers or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, who also performed versions of it. It was actually first published in 1931, and even then it was simply new words set to an old Gaelic tune. I think this is a great “mood setting” hymn, taking us back to the beginnings of all things—the first morning, the first bird, the newly fallen rain, the dew on the morning grass and God’s presence among us today, just as he has been present with us each and every day since the very beginning.

What a great way to approach worship and to approach God. As the tune soars, we are reminded that God is always with us in all things. Regardless of the business of our lives and the troubles that surround us, God is with us, even if we take him and his presence for granted every bit as much as we take the rising of the sun and the dawn of each new day for granted. In the words of the hymn, we hear the words of Jeremiah from this morning’s Old Testament reading reminding us that "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you.” God is ever with us, has ever been with us and will ever be among us.

The second hymn this morning is Precious Lord, Take My Hand. I will forgive you if you think Elvis Pressley wrote this song, but I will be more impressed if you remember that this was one of Martin Luther King’s favorite songs and that Mahalia Jackson sang it at his funeral. It is song of great hope, which might be why more than 34 legendary music recording stars—according to Wikipedia—have used it as a cover version. In addition to Pressley and Jackson, it has been sung by everybody from Tennessee Ernie Ford to Tina Turner to Pat Boone to Gladys Knight to Randy Travis and Faith Hill.

And why wouldn’t they sing it? Listen to the lyrics: “Precious Lord, take my hand, Lead me on, let me stand. I am tired, I am weak, I am worn. Through the storm, through the night, Lead me on, to the light. Take my hand, Precious Lord, lead me home.” Who doesn’t want that in their relationship with God? Who doesn’t long to lay all their lives cares and woes on one person who can make it better.

I think of the crippled widow in our gospel reading today. For 18 years, she struggled through her disability to walk to the temple—to keep the law and the commandments and to be in God’s presence on the Sabbath. She couldn’t even stand up straight, she had no particular hope of ever being cured, but still she made that faithful walk. Did the Jews have a hymn like “Precious Lord, Take My Hand?” I don’t know, but she surely could have used one, if for no other reason than just a reason to keep on walking. This woman’s dedication puts me to shame when I think about how many times I’ve not made it to church on a Sunday morning because I was too tired from staying up too late the night before, or I simply needed a mental health break, or maybe I just needed to mow the lawn ahead of the heat of day. If I met Jesus in the synagogue courtyard, would he heal me? Have I earned that? Probably not, but then the crippled lady wasn’t expecting much either. Jesus just decided right then and there to give her the gift of grace. And she was healed. And when I sing “Precious Lord” (and St. Augustine tells us that One who sings prays twice) I guess what I’m really asking for is the gift of Grace for myself and for you and for the whole church family—the gift of God’s grace, bestowed undeservedly and expectedly—the gift of grace to get me through the darkness and to let me be present by virtue of God’s grace when Morning Breaks on the other side.

The closing hymn of the day is a shorty, but one that we all know: Seek Ye First. “Seek Ye First the Kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you. Alleluia. “ Who wrote it? Well, Mathew did—or at least, whoever wrote Matthew, and that author claimed at least to be quoting Jesus. No wonder it’s such a catchy little tune.

The composer who put Jesus’s words to music was Karen Lafferty. She was working as a nightclub entertainer, entertaining the bar crowd when she penned this song as a way to make money to pay overdue bills. When the Maranatha singers recorded it, Karen’s it overnight became one of the best known hymns of modern times and today it is standard in the hymnals of most denominations. For Karen it was life changing because that song and the royalties from it allowed her to refocus her life on ministry. She says that about 40 percent of the money that supports her international ministry come off the royalties from that one little song that we’re going to sing today.

This song and its associated story just bring it all together for me today.

Here’s Karen Lafferty, down to her last nickel, sick of the bar scene and wondering where God is in her life, and then she pens a little song based on a Bible verse, and it all turns around.

In Jeremiah this morning, God says, “Do not be afraid, for I am with you to deliver you. Then the LORD put out his hand and touched my mouth; and the LORD said to me, "Now I have put my words in your mouth.” If that’s not Karen Lafferty’s story, then I don’t know what it.

We pick up the same theme in the Psalm: “For you are my hope, O Lord GOD, my confidence since I was young. I have been sustained by you ever since I was born; from my mother's womb you have been my strength; my praise shall be always of you.” Certainly, for Karen Lafferty, who was raised in a Christian home and drifted away but always felt that pull to come back, she experienced God’s grace in a powerful way when returned to her roots and penned that little song. She took literally those words-- “My praise shall always be of you,” –and made an amazing and precious gift from them for the rest of us.

And then there is the New Testament Reading the Gospel reading.

Now matter how down and out things seem. No matter how hopeless our situation—whether it is Karen Lafferty wondering where next month’s car payments and rent will come from or the widow encountered by Jesus in the synagogue—God is present and available to work miracles. Although the world may feel like at time it is shaking around us, “His kingdom cannot be shaken. “ Now matter how long we have been patiently or impatiently waiting in bondage, we always have hope that God’s grace may be right around the corner. No matter what the “rules” say, whether it’s a prohibition against healing on the Sabbath or the prognosis of a medical expert or the unwritten social rules that stigmatize and ostracize, the Grace of God can surmount any of those obstacles.

The ever present Grace of God is the message today, the message of the readings, the message from the pulpit, the message in the music.

I can’t reinforce my message with pipe organs or bell choirs or bagpipes. I can reinforce my message with the songs we choose to sing. That’s why I pick my own hymns, and that’s why I hope you’ll choose to sing them today—with volume, with enthusiasm, with feeling and with all the emotion they are intended to convey.

And here’s what I want you to think about as you take the words and the music we have heard and sung today away from this place:

God is eternal. His presence comes among us each day as surely as the sun rises and the morning breaks.

God’s love is all-encompassing. Lean on him in times of trouble and trust him to take you home.

God’s hears us when we cry. He knew us before we were born, and he has consecrated each of us for something. But God also is also mysterious. He works on his own time and in his own way. His Grace may be waiting in the Fellowship Hall at coffee hours or it may be 18 more years before he chooses to answer your prayers. He’ll show up when the time is right. Meanwhile, don’t stop asking. Seek and you WILL find.

As we continue with our worship this morning, I invite you to contemplate the words that we have heard, the words that have been spoken, the words that we will hear and the words that we will speak. I invite you to contemplate the songs that we have sung and the song the songs that we have yet to sing.

Grace abounds among us. Lift your voice and claim it.

Amen.