Our Stammering Alleluias

Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
May 16, 2010, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

Exodus 4:10-17
Hebrews 12:18-19; 22-24a; 29

“‘…but I am slow of speech and slow of tongue,’ Then the Lord said to him, ‘Who gives speech to mortals? Who makes them mute of deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord?’”

With the sound of praise still resounding in the synapses of my soul and with the accumulation of every movement dared, week after week, of dramatic remembrance and hope that is our worship of the living God, I am acutely aware that you and I were made to be, at once, witnesses and wonder-stuck players whose stammering alleluias on the stage of human history are God’s means of making the world new. “Praise,” says Walter Brueggemann in his classic work on doxology, “is not a response to a world already fixed and settled, but it is a responsive and obedient participation in a world yet to be decreed and in process of being decreed through this liturgical act.”

Most Sundays, according to Annie Dillard, we worship “like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute.” But now and again, this Sunday being now, the table and the font being the sacramental gift of again, we find ourselves, in spite of ourselves, provoked to astonishment before a Presence mediated through word and sacrament, voice and instrument, that evokes our stammering alleluias.

For such praise as reaches to the highest heavens even if the same notes should touch the inmost of our being, we have the artist to thank and, more specifically today, the musician and the poet. “It is in and through music,” writes Cambridge don George Steiner, “that we are most immediately in the presence of the…verbally inexpressible but wholly palpable energy in being that communicates to our senses and to our reflection what little we can grasp of the naked wonder of life.”

Awash in wonder after two movements of Bach’s Cantata 51, some of us may have arrived at the powerful and dangerous intersection of aesthetic and religious experience, an intersection considered suspect by Calvinists, who banished art from the sanctuary and music from worship lest emotion wrest from the mind both reason and control. Five hundred years later, at the intersection of High German culture, National Socialism and a state church where the hands raised in benediction were indistinguishable from their heil to Hitler, the same suspicion was tragically fulfilled. For this reason, the Reformed witness to God’s Word in worship passes first and necessarily “through the narrow gate of speaking and hearing,” lest we mistake the internal landscape of mortal imagining for God’s revelation. But once through that narrow gate, in the words of the wordiest Reformed theologian of them all--Karl Barth, “What else can we say to what God gives us but stammer praise of this gift and the Giver?” Or as Cantata 51 confesses in soaring beauty, “Although our feeble voice before his wonders stammers,/Perhaps e’en modest praise to him will yet bring pleasure.” Before the God who gives speech to mortals, who makes them mute or deaf, seeing or blind, we stammer our alleluias, says Steiner, because “To try and [speak] what happens inside oneself as one affords vital welcome and habitation to the [the mystery of otherness] is to risk the whole gamut of muddle and embarrassment.” But try he does!

In the first place, says Steiner, the Presence that comes to call on us in poetry and painting, in cantatas and chamber music, as “spontaneous visitation and summons” [think Moses and the burning bush; think Gabriel and Mary] calls on us “unbidden. Even where there is a readiness,” says Steiner, “as in the concert hall, in the museum, in the moment of chosen reading, [on the Sabbath at sundown or on a Sunday morning], the true entrance will not occur by an act of will.” Our stammering alleluias bespeak our utter surprise if the call should come to us. Of course those whose vocation it is to study the brain would likely point to parts of the cerebrum come alive at the sound of a soprano singing or the sight of Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son, suggesting that we are hard-wired for the visitation or summons that is mediated in art. They would say we cannot help ourselves and this may, in part, be true.

But truer is the astonishment that never ceases to be our human response to the ineffable Presence who is other than we are and who, in freedom, takes the initiative toward us when we are least expecting to be met. “It was between trains,” Steiner confesses, “in a Frankfurt station bookstall, that I picked up and leafed through, scarcely attentive, a very thin book of poems….Almost the first line I skimmed across or towards spoke of a language to be composed of words ‘north of the future’.” The poetic is the language of classic liturgy as well, of a world “yet to be decreed and in the process of being decreed” north of the future. We pick up and leaf through, scarcely attentive, a very thin bulletin of prayers on Sunday morning, of language composed of words that summon us to set out for the city of the living God “north of the future.”

Then, in the second place and not unrelated to the phenomenon of those whose stammer disappears in singing or whose doubt gives way to astonishment before the naked wonder of life, Steiner says, “Music puts us in touch with that which transcends the sayable, which outstrips the analyzable….It has long been, and continues to be,” he says, “the unwritten theology of those who lack or reject any formal creed.” So it was for poet Florence Victor whose poem entitled Friday Night Cantata (While listening to Bach’s Cantata No. 51) is nothing less than a stammered alleluia of one who has run from cult and creed:
    Unfit for worship, still I learned each
    prayer,
    And hoping that the rabbi couldn’t tell
    It was the music which I loved so well,
    And not his God, and not his patent stare
    Which broke the spell, I shook hands in
    despair
    And fled the synagogue, an infidel
    Who craved only a song, who feared no hell
    But speech or silence, sanctity left bare.

    My heresy full-grown, I often now
    Stand waif-like while the congregation
    prays;
    Idolater of sound, I must profane
    The joy in God each offering displays,
    And yet alone on Friday night I bow
    To something even Bach could not explain.

Likewise we bow even now in this sanctuary where a world yet to be decreed is in the process of being decreed and where the unsayable, the mystery whose praise we can but stutter, is being sung this very hour! For we have not come to something that can be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness and gloom and a tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that not another word be spoken to them. But we too have come to bow to something even Bach could not explain: to the city of the living God and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, crying out, “Alleluia! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns! Thanks be to God. Amen.

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