The Sacredness of Music

Sermon

When C. S. Lewis created his stories about Narnia, he included a story about the creation of Narnia, and this is how he described it.

“A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and [it was] hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes [it seemed] it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. It was hardly a tune. But it was beyond comparison, the most beautiful sound… ever heard.” (The Magician’s Nephew)

I like to think that God sung the creation into being and maybe there is something to that thought. That led me down an interesting rabbit hole after Googling “music at creation/song of the big bang,” which led me to this story from Nautilus magazine.

A composer named Darryl Kubian has become interested in the universe. More specifically, he sought an answer to the question of how to capture, in music, the expansion of the universe, electromagnetic radiation, and black holes.

That led me to learning – or relearning – about Johannes Kepler, a German 17th century astronomer who wrote a philosophical treatise called “The Music of the Spheres,” based on ancient work by Pythagoras. Kepler, in “The Music of the Spheres,” stated “that the [angular velocities of planets in their] orbits—when you line them up and put them into a ratio—come amazingly close to what we consider our major and minor scales today.” Darryl Kubian, upon learning Kepler’s theory, said, “Wow, the way music has developed its ideas of musical scales is actually embedded in the sky that we look up at every day.”

More recently, when scientists were looking at the cosmic microwave background and making some of the first detailed maps of the universe, some people noticed that the way matter was distributed actually corresponded to the overtone series in Western music. In essence, it was the sound waves, and other factors like gravity, that helped clump all the stuff together, eventually becoming the galaxies. Kubian commented, “I find it particularly inspiring that sound had a helping hand in crafting our universe.” https://nautil.us/music-for-the-birth-of-the-universe-10250/

Maybe that’s what the writer of Job meant when he spoke of the morning stars singing together.

But consider this: if God did not sing the world into being, God certainly made the world a musical place. Some of us love the sound of waves crashing at our favorite cove on the Oregon Coast. Others love the trilling of a creek making its way down a hillside or the sound of frogs in the earliest hours of morning. The song of birds (except maybe the crows) lightens our hearts and reminds us that spring is here. There is a symphony in the rustling of wheat sheaves, in the quaking of aspen leaves, in the cricking of the crickets, and in the silence we hear all too rarely.

Which is to say that music is sacred because God made it. And sacred things affect us.

When I started in ministry, I was always surprised when after a worship service, people would come up and say something like, “I don’t know what it is about church, but I sit down, and the second that first note is played…” or “as soon as we start singing the hymn, I start to cry.” Perhaps that’s never happened to you, but if it has, then you must get a glimpse of the sacredness of music.

A song reaches a different part of us. It goes beyond intellect; it goes beyond auditory stimulation. Maybe it’s the ancient echoes of creation that aim straight for our heart and lodge there. Maybe it’s something we cannot explain, only experience.

Today we celebrate that gift of music that Michael Barnes has brought us for over thirty years, and that is something to celebrate. We will get to that in just a few minutes. But I want to add something else that Michael brings to Westminster.

Last week I was chatting with him as I am wont to do when he and I are in the sanctuary practicing our respective parts before worship begins. We have a few minutes of catch up. And because Michael is also the organist at Temple Beth Israel, we spoke about the vandalism they experienced. Michael said the rabbi spoke a little about it at the service, but mostly the rabbi spoke about his recent trip to Poland to see and provide aid for Ukrainian refugees there.

As Michael recounted this to me, his eyes welled up in tears. And here’s the thing: when your world is music – making music, offering music – your heart cannot help but be opened up to the beauty and pathos of the world. Every note you play is an expression of something – joy, sometimes; grief, often; excitement, fright, wonder, awe, anger – it’s all there.

And because Michael has been opening up the gift of music for us for thirty years, his heart is open, too – big enough to hold the suffering of the Ukrainian people; big enough to have compassion for his colleagues at the temple; big enough to welcome all sorts of people up after worship who just want to talk to this man who brings us this gift week after week after week.

So “thank you” does not seem an adequate thing to say to someone who offers us sounds of the divine. But Michael, we thank you all the same.

I am quite aware that there are many members of our Westminster community who are here because of the music, and honestly, I’m just fine with that. One can tire of the human voice speaking on and on. Very rarely do I tire of any of the music in our worship services.

Thank God we have music; how uninteresting the world would be without crickets and mockingbirds and whales making their songs. How our hearts would ache knowing they were missing something they could not describe. How we would miss harmonies, and chords, and fugues and trills and glissandos.

Enough of the spoken word, then. Let us sit in silence, and then let us add our song to the music of the spheres.