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Psalm 33

Singing the New Song

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Psalm 33

Singing the New Song

Sing to the Lord a New Song; music two thousand five hundred years old. Sing and play. Music has always been there and always will be, it seems … at the heart of every wedding and birthday and anniversary and funeral. Holidays, feasts, celebrations without the songs and the dance, whether in Haifa or Greece, or Hamburg or Grand Rapids, what would they be. It has soothed the troubled breast since the days of the first music therapist, David the shepherd, to the lullabies every mother knows to sing to her child at rest. It has stirred the hearts of warriors from the drums of Roman legions to the trumpets of Nazi Germany. It has seduced the hearts of lovers from Vienna to the Paladium. It has lifted the spirits of worshipers from the Jerusalem of the Psalms to the Canterbury of the Book of Common Prayer. Music, music, everywhere. What’s it all about? Why so universal a part of human life, the melodies and rhythms, the moods and harmonies?

Frankly, I prefer the old songs that have melody and rhythm and harmony. Red Sails in the Sunset. Mood Indigo. In the Mood. Moonlight in Vermont. Moon over Miami. The last time I saw Peoria. April in Pittsburgh. I remember them because I played them as the DJ on the Saturday Night Dance Party, WKBZ, ABC in Muskegon during my senior year in high school, much to the chagrin of my Baptist elders. But I remember them today as if it were just yesterday. The problem I have with the music of the younger today is that it rarely seems memorable.

But it is pervasive, isn’t it. It must be because music does something incredibly important. It does take us outside ourselves, doesn’t it, lifts us beyond our black moods, our meanness, our despair, our anxiety, our isolation, all that dampens and depletes and debilitates. Ever think how hard it is to be nasty and sing at the same time, very hard to be angry and sing, hard to be depressed and sing.

Music is a self-transcending experience. Music functions not to impart information, but to impact us, to move us. One woman tells of taking her child to a Christmas concert of the Messiah. At one pause she turned to her daughter and said, “Now this is great music. The trouble with your music is that it is just the same old words over and over again.” She says she had no more than said it, than they rose to sing “Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah.” But what is this all about but the calling us out of ourselves, moving us to heights of emotional exhilaration and release. The great Richard Rodgers tells how one problem confronting him in the Sound of Music was the opening piece in which nuns are heard chanting a Catholic prayer. “I had to make sure that what I wrote would sound authentic. Through friends, I got in touch with Mother Morgan, head of the music department at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York. She invited me to a specially arranged concert at which the nuns and seminarians sang and performed many different kinds of religious music. An unexpected moment came when Mother Morgan, waving her arms like a cheerleader at a football game, was vigorously conducting a particularly dramatic passage. As the music built to its peak. Mother Morgan’s booming command could be clearly heard, shouting, “Pray it. Pray it.” Way outside herself.

And this becomes especially important in life’s rougher passages, its troubled hours, its painful days. Music has the power to move us from inner chaos to calm, from anxiety to hope, from despair to faith. Haven’t you ever felt it take over, take the turmoil and turn it into peace, take the despair and turn it into courage?

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Nancy Burke writes, “Someday I may be able to personally thank Patti La Belle for sharing her magnificent voice and extraordinary heart in song. Until then, this will have to do. Every week, for two winters and two summers, as I drove to and from the cancer clinic for treatments, I played her renditions of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “There’s a Winner in You” over and over. When I was frightened and thought I couldn’t make one more trip, I played those songs to get me there. Afterward, when I was tired and afraid I couldn’t make the drive home, I played them again. My spirits never failed to recover, and the miles just flew by. I found such courage and hope in her passionate music. In the midst of the darkest time of my life, that voice made me feel grateful to be alive…” She concludes, “There’s a song for everyone, one incalculable mix of melody and magic that so neatly wraps the heart that we are lifted out of the here and now. And something in us is healed. Search for your song.”

This is especially true of the artists and composers we count great. Think of Beethoven and his struggle with deafness which led to his determination to take life by the throat and win. Or of Vivaldi, whom we are hearing this morning. He was ordained as a priest in 1703. The best research I have read suggests that he did not practice the ministry because of a bad asthmatic condition which made it impossible to say mass. So he spent his life associated with the Hospital of the Pieta in Venice, an orphanage for illegitimate, indigent and abandoned girls. And gave us 500 concertos, 50 operas, and above all this moving “Gloria.” In 1741, penniless, he went to Vienna, hoping for a commission and died. He was buried in a pauper’s grave.

In the words of Yeats, “An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, Unless the Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress.”

So I like the old songs. But then, what is this about a new song. Have you seen the movie “The Pianist.” It is the story of one Jew, Wladyslaw Szpilman who escaped the Warsaw Ghetto and the cattle cars to Treblinka during World War II, a story he tells in his book of the same name. A concert pianist, he lives basically for his family and above all his music, ever hiding and on the run from the Nazis. Finally, while scrounging in an abandoned house for food, Szpilman comes face-to-face with a German officer. Instead of drawing his revolver, the officer asks Szpilman what he does for a living, and then leads him to a piano. Szpilman manages to perform Chopin’s Nocturne in C-Sharp Minor, whereupon the officer hides him in an attic directly above the German headquarters until the Germans retreat. In the movie, this soldier is presented as a senior staff commander and Third Reich poster boy.

In fact, Roman Polanski does not tell the true story. Michael Oren points out that far from being a young Nazi monster who is transformed by the music of Chopin, the officer who saved Szpilman was Wilm Hosenfeld, a recreational reserve officer in his late forties, a committed teacher and family man, an ardent Christian who abhorred Nazism. He lived his life by another music. In the name of justice, in the name of love, he repeatedly risked his life to rescue others, Poles and Jews, from extermination. These survivors later tried unsuccessfully to obtain Hosenfeld’s release from a Soviet labor camp, where he died in 1952. He hazarded to keep a diary in which, on September 1, 1942, he asked: “Why did this war have to happen at all?” This was his guess. “Because humanity had to be shown where its godlessness was taking it …. This denial of God’s commandments leads us to all the other immoral manifestations of greed-unjust self-enrichment, hatred, deceit, sexual license and the downfall of the German people. God allows all this to happen … to show mankind that without him we are only animals in conflict, who believe we have to destroy one another. We will not listen to the divine commandment: “Love one another”…and must die, guilty and innocent alike.”

This sounds to me a lot like the new song of the Psalmist. Not the song of Chopin, but the song of Vivaldi. The ever new song of faith in God and his justice and his love. “The Lord thwarts the plans of nations, frustrates the intentions of peoples; but the Lord’s plans hold good forever. A large army will not keep a king safe, nor does the hero escape by his great strength. It is a delusion to rely on the horse for safety. The word of the Lord is integrity itself, all he does is done faithfully, he loves justice. His love fills the earth. Shout for joy to the Lord.”

What have we here? A singer standing in the midst of a world of chaos and uncertainty where the presence and power of his God is nowhere self-evident. A small struggling band of the faithful have returned from Persia but live as oppressed vassals of that great power. To all appearances, the distant dictator and his large army determine their lives and future. But the singer sings of one whose mysterious ways will slowly but surely work justice and love over against the plans of nations, the strength of heroes, the machinations of the mighty. It is a song against all the obvious, a song in a world of injustice and hate about the presence and power of a justice and love that will finally determine the future. I dare say, a song that can keep us going no matter the confusion of these days, the future dark and uncertain. The deep confidence that God yet rules in the affairs of humans, works justice and love whatever comes.

“See how the eye of the Lord is on those who revere him, on those who rely on his love, to rescue their souls from death, and to keep them alive. Our soul awaits the Lord.”

A woman tells how it was for her. “In a darkened camp lodge, I sat in a circle of some thirty young people and a few adults. We gathered for worship at the end of a weekend retreat together … My friends knew that I had received word early that evening that my mother lay critically ill, and that it was a difficult time for me. Near the end of the worship, a very sensitive and rather shy young man with a guitar introduced a hymn called, “Free at last.” Although it was more timely than he knew, somehow he must have felt the need to allow for my feelings.

He turned to me and said, ‘This might not be the best song for right now, but maybe I can sing another song for you later.’ I thanked him with a tight throat and listened hard as the music filtered softly around the room. ‘Free at last. Free at last.’ After the service I was enfolded by various expressions of caring, some with words, some with eyes, some with arms. Later in the evening I realized I was being sung to once again. ‘Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, a long way from home.’ How could he have known that by dawn I would be motherless and 700 miles from my home.

As I flew home to say good-bye to my mother and to be with my father, I carried the music and the affirmation and love of a roomful of beautiful people, and through the pain of the next days the memories and the songs gave me the confidence I never thought I’d have … to say, ‘It’s alright, it’s ok, this too is the day the Lord has made. Let us be glad and rejoice in it.'”

Hard to stay hopeless, hard to give up on life, unless you only sing the blues. Any song worth singing, hearing, sharing, leads to love of life and hope in life, yes, even when hope is hard and the future is dark. I have always loved the strange counterpoint of that old spiritual. Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen. Glory, Hallelujah. What must I do to be saved from the paralyzing preoccupations, the wearing worries, the many moods and miseries of life? Trust your world, your life to Him, beginning with a song.

Does it ever occur to us that we are required by our faith to sing. “Sing a new song to the Lord. Sing to the Lord and bless his name.” Does it ever occur to us that we are commanded to rejoice. Seventy-three times in the New Testament comes the command, Rejoice, Rejoice. Caught up in God and joy and life. Yet, it is strange. Not once in forty-seven years in the ministry has anyone ever come to me to say, “I am having trouble singing.”

But it is imperative if we truly want to live life calm and courageous with one another in community. Inside or outside, we must sing again and again, on our own, with the choir, to the tape, around the table. We must sing! You say, “I can’t carry a tune to save my soul.” Well, thank God you don’t need to and you are in good company. Abraham Lincoln once remarked to the singer Lillie de Hegermann-Lindencrone that if he heard her sing often he might have had to become a musician himself. “But,” he added, “so far I only know two tunes.” “Hail, Columbia?” she asked. “You know that, I am sure.” “Oh, yes,” he replied, “I know that, because for that I have to stand up and take off my hat.” “And the other one?” she asked. “The other one? Oh, that’s the one when I don’t have to stand up.”

So perhaps we can’t continually walk around singing. But the Psalmist does add, “Let our hearts rejoice in him.” Music of the heart counts every bit as much as music of the tongue. The asthmatic who could not speak or sing, could set to music his heart. “Thou who sittest at the right hand of the father, have mercy on us. For Thou alone are holy. Thou alone are Lord. Thou alone art the most high, Jesus Christ. With the Holy Spirit in the glory of God the Father. Amen.”