What Are We Doing Here? Sermon by Rev. Dr. Mark Belletini First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, OH

Transcription

1 What Are We Doing Here? Sermon by Rev. Dr. Mark Belletini First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, OH Sunday, February 28, 2016 All Souls Unitarian Church, New York City One of the great privileges of my life was to serve as chair of the commission that put together this gray hymnbook. It was 6 year of rewarding work with seven of the finest people I know. But I was the only one on the team who didn t sight-read music---i was there more for the texts we were going to sing to that music so I decided it was important for me to learn more about the music realities in our congregations. So every summer, for six years, I attended the Unitarian Universalist Musician s Network Conference, held in one of our larger congregations around North America. One year, the celebrated composer Alice Parker came to lead us in a series of choral exercises. Now one day, knowing that a new hymnbook was in preparation, she asked all these music directors to sing from the book we were about to replace, namely, 1963 s Hymns for the Celebration of Life. The musicians all protested at once. We re replacing this book for a reason, you know they complained. Tut, tut, she replied. Let s just see what you have here. So she opened the book, called out a number, and we all turned to the page. Again, calls of disgust rose from the attendees. Terrible melody! cried one. Obsolete theology! bristled another. Boring, whispered a third. The elegant Ms. Parker just smiled at us and instructed: We ll sing this one first. So we sang it through, and sure enough, the melody was dull as dirt, the words outdated. But then Parker voiced a question: Is this really the kind of music they sang back in 1538? I mean, look at the date right there on the page. Her question startled us all. Someone answered, No, this tune is too blah for that era. In 1538 they had more bounce in the music, then, more syncopation as we now say. Right, she said. You couldn t dance to this tune as it is at a wedding, but you might be able to she paused, if we added a syncopation here, and here and here. She tapped on certain notes in the notation. Then she said, Let s sing this again, but this time, with the syncopations restored, and in four-part harmony. Again, some of the musicians, who understood what she meant by syncopation, by bounce, complained You can t just change music already printed in a hymnbook like that, can you? She smiled. Oh my goodness, she said, you didn t think that the notes on the page are the same thing as the music, did you? And at that very moment, I suddenly understood what I have been doing every Sunday morning for almost 40 years, leading service after service which I crafted

2 painstakingly. For worship is no more the sum of any hour of word, music, and silence any more than music is but the sum of ink spots on a page. What we call the service has been long in the making, rooted deep in the textcentered traditions of synagogue and Protestant services. But the experience of worship per se is hardly confined to an hour of structured time once a week. So what is it? Worship, for me, is a word suitably used of any feeling, or thought, or even bodily sensation, which wakes me up till I m aware that I am just a part of all there is. I m neither the whole, nor the center; I worship when I realize, maybe under the stars at night, or in the presence of tragery, that I am woven together with all that dwell below the skies, with all souls, if you will. I experience worship when I know I am not separated out, even when it feels that way to me, as it sometimes does indeed. Worship is the recognition that despite my denials and fantasy life, I am not really in control of almost anything at all. A sense of worship also reminds me that it s this world where I am called to live out my brief life. not some other world. It really makes little difference whether I personally choose to use the word God or not. After all, the word worship in English used to be used in the wedding ceremony, where the during the vows one spouse says to the other, With my bodye I thee wurshippe a very human usage to be sure. But how does what we are doing this Sunday structure of words and music in an hour s time... relate to that sense of worship I just outlined? The one, I mean, that is not confined to Sunday, which might startle me on any random Tuesday afternoon, or when I am in my bed at night, unable to sleep; or when I am walking through a garden, or standing under the star Altair on a summer s evening? I mean, you may tell me that you come here for the community, for the amazing music alone, for the chance to converse intimately with folks who express theology different from everyone of your family members; and all of those make sense to me. Certainly. But what of the sense of worship itself? Like Alice Parker saying that the music is not confined by the notes, so the sense of worship is not confined to Sunday services. It s larger than any particular songs,

3 sermons or silence. But if this structured experience each Sunday is not the be all and end all of what worship means, what is it? Well, as I prepared to preach here, and observed the order of service used here, I noticed first the repetition I find here. Familiar words spoken week after week, a familiar repeating structure. It s been this way for decades. Oh, yeah, it s changed a little, bit by bit, sure. No one lit a chalice 50 years ago. And as you heard, there was a very different hymnbook long ago, with a decidedly distinct style in music and word. But the rhythmic repetition of this service remains the same, year after year. Washington University scientists, Pascal Boyer and Pierre Lienard discovered, back in 2008, that ritual repetition in our activities actually affects the brain in a positive way, and builds neural networks, which create a certain pleasure in familiarity. This, they say, creates in us a distinct state of attention where we break off from the more unconscious flow of our daily lives and start to notice and feel things that we rarely do in our day-to-day lives. Moreover, ritual repetition as in a Sunday service, serves as sort of portrait of our actual mortal lives. Both are limited events in time. Both begin, and both end, with a middle in between. Ellen Bass, in her poem, In Praise of Repetition, shows how her life, like this service, also benefits from repetition. She walks the same streets each day, she listens over and over to same jazz piece, Lush Life, never tiring of it. Oh, she admits she sometimes feels like she wants to break free of that repetition in her life. But, then, I was moved to read, she admits that it s in the very context of the reliable repetitive commonplaces of her life, that she can face something so great as death. She puts it this way. When I get back in bed, I find the woman who s been sleeping there each night for thirty years One morning one of us will rise bewildered without the other, and open the curtains. There will be the same shaggy redwood in the neighbor s yard and the faultless stars going out, one by one, into the day. So as I see it, the service of worship in this church is a kind of art-form, which represents, in a limited span of time on Sunday, the very lives we lead, helping us to face the mysteries of life and death we find there. But why not just lead our lives, and not come here for the art-form? What else is going on here that may not be going on in our lives? What are we doing here? Well for one each week we repeatedly sing from all that dwell below the skies. All, we sing. Not some. Hope for everyone, not a handful. We speak every week of the service of all. And that means, this hour provides a lens by which to see our lives outside these walls differently way. That all All Souls, Serve all, From all that dwell breathes within us when we leave because we repeat it. And I say I need

4 something like that repeated all in my life. When I go out into the world, no matter how up or down my own life is, I see a much more sinister repetition going on all around me. My head hurts, my heart aches when I see the gruesome repetitions of our age: Just a few days ago, random shootings in Kalamazoo MI, and then in Arizona. My office was filled with people getting sick from expected over work, or no work. The homeless line the streets in every city I know, no matter how cold. In this Black History month, few in this nation know much of it; and Martin Luther King Jr. himself has been ejected from that history to become a rope in a political tug of war between left and right. I obviously could go on, with all the wars and rumors of wars, Isis and Syria, the blaming and shaming; but what I am saying is that the repetitive nature of it, day after day, wears me down. Which is why worship, as an art form in time, a repetitive art-form anchored to that sense of universal worship I defined earlier, and which invites us to consider the saving power of the word all, has been so important to us over the centuries. Here we can feast on a different kind of repetitive narrative not random violence and inhumanity, but the great poetry of the ages, the reminders of the prophets and teachers of all humankind to love one another, and tell the truth. Here we are reminded to treat each other justly, each and all, to sing hallelujah and amen instead spewing hate and bigotry. The text from Yeshayahu, or Isaiah, which you heard earlier is a good example. The author is critical of ANY ritual worship which does NOT offer a lens on day to day life: how we treat each other: families, co-workers, employees, the poor on our streets, those enslaved to debt by the system, even fellow congregants. The 2500 year old text says this about worship: The purpose of ritual is to help: break the chains of injustice; get rid of exploitation in the workplace, free the oppressed, cancel debts. share food with the hungry, to invite the homeless into real homes, put clothes on the shivering ill-clad, and be available to your own families. Maybe another way of putting it is this: the purpose of the art-form of worship on Sundays is to help transform the world of our daily lives into a larger version of this service, where all that dwell below the skies are part of a growing community of mutual support, care, love, freedom and truthfulness. At the Musician s Network conference, composer Alice Parker continued to take dated old hymns and invite us to transform them by seeing music as something greater than ink on a page. The power we created together by her insight startled us all. At the end of our time she said: I am going to sing a song by myself now, as a closing ritual. It s a song many of you are familiar with. All I ask is for you all to cradle me with your voices. The musicians understood what she meant, even though I didn t at the time. She stood in the center of our circle 200 strong. Then she started singing with her wavery, sometimes cracking voice There is a balm in Gilead. the very song that began our time together this morning. We all supported her by singing ah ah and harmonizing with her as her voice floated over us. By the end of the song, no one complained about the text, no one critiqued the

5 style of music, no one was doing anything, in fact, but letting tears spill on their cheeks. It had been an experience of spontaneous ritual worship very different in form from this one. On a Thursday, not a Sunday. But, we all knew at the moment that all who dwell below the skies can support each other, cradle each other, as we sing our individual songs of life and love, however wavery we think our voices may be. We learned that together we could begin to feel the worship experience, the one not confined to any particular form, and embody it in our lives, so that instead of wringing our hands and bowing to fear, we might abandon our habits of saying yes, but and open instead toward the love of all, by singing Glory, Glory Hallelujah! Blessing after James Broughton Let your life be a fanfare of joy. Announce that a thaw is coming by how you live. Let no one annex you and remodel you. Give birth to yourself even if it takes a lifetime. Dance on the hot coals of astonishment every day. Repeating acts of love is never boring. Oh, yes, and while you re at it, love one another and always tell the truth. Love to you all.