The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

Readings  – 1 Kings 19: 1 – 16; 2 Peter 1: 16 – end

“Lord, we beseech thee, give ear unto our prayers and by thy gracious visitation lighten the darkness of our hearts by our Lord Jesus Christ.”
I can think of no better words to start a sermon with – as well as a service.  Those were the words of our introit this evening, set by Adrian Batten, who was roughly contemporary with William Byrd but is rather less well known.  One historian of church music has noted of Batten: “There is one virtue in Batten’s sacred music which was possessed by only a few composers; and that is his constant endeavour to think of music as the servant of divine worship and not as the central figure of that service.”
There are many ways of thinking about the place of music in worship.  In my experience it’s one of those subjects which almost always provokes strong reactions.  I’m not aiming to be provocative, and I don’t claim to have any definitive answers, but I want to explore a little this evening the question of how we hear God and how music helps us. 
In our first reading, we heard the account of Elijah who encounters God not in the wind, not in the earthquake or in the fire, but in “a sound of sheer silence”, sometimes translated as a “still small voice”.  In a very quiet place, or after loud noise, silence does indeed seem to have a sound which is more powerful than the loud noises which preceded it.  It’s in the silence that God makes himself known to Elijah.  
So, if God speaks in silence, what is the place of music?
Music is a gift of creation; the first musician, Jubal, the ancestor of those who play the lyre and pipe, is mentioned in Genesis Chapter 4. Many theologians have written about music but have thought about it in widely differing ways.  Karl Barth, the great 20th century Protestant theologian, wrote that if he ever got to heaven he would first seek out Mozart and only after that other theologians. Barth, who played the piano and violin and sang with a fine baritone voice, had an almost obsessive love of Mozart.  For him, Mozart was the perfect composer because his music reflected “the harmony of creation in which “the shadow is not darkness, deficiency is not defeat, sadness cannot become despair, trouble cannot degenerate into tragedy and infinite melancholy is not ultimately forced to claim undisputed sway.”  Friedrich Schleiermacher, writing at the time of the Romantic Movement, gives music a crucial place among the arts.  For him it is the most inward of the arts and the one most closely related to religious feeling.  He even suggests that one could dispense with words in church music.
 Saint Augustine, writing centuries earlier, had been rather more ambivalent about music, acknowledging its power over himself.  He wrote:
“How I wept during your hymns and songs! I was deeply moved by the music of the sweet chants of your church.  The sounds flowed into my ears and the truth was distilled into my heart.”
But, as with everything which gave him pleasure, he also felt acutely the danger of being overwhelmed and led into sin, saying:
“I fluctuate between the danger of pleasure and the experience of the beneficent effect [of music]”.
At the time of the Reformation, while Luther thought that “next to theology there is no art which is the equal of music”, the Swiss Protestant Zwingli, took a very strict line indeed. As he said:
“Farewell my temple murmurings!  I am not sorry for you.  I know that you are not good for me.  But welcome, O pious private prayer that is awakened in the hearts of men through the Word of God.  Yes, a small sigh, which does not last long, realises itself and goes away again quickly.”
No music at all for him!
There have been plenty of others besides Augustine and Zwingli, both Christian and from other religions who have felt that music, or at least some forms of it, were simply too dangerous and distracting to be allowed.
The danger is real.  And it is precisely because of the beauty of music, its power to move us.  There is always the possibility of falling into idolatry and of worshipping the music itself. 
Following in the wake of the theologians, different church traditions have also taken different approaches.  One commentator describes this as a conflict between two opposite poles:
“One pole,[he says], which we might call the “intellectual” approach to worship, is ultimately predicated on the conviction that worship is a means by which humans can and must come to know God better;  it is necessarily demystificatory in its approach, and it finds its natural expression in  preaching, reading, and other modes of intellectual accessibility……The other pole exists in stark opposition to the first, ….the “aesthetic” approach is founded upon the unknowability of the omnipotent God….its natural medium is the elevated strains of high liturgy.”
Some of us are naturally more attracted to one or other of these poles.  Hence some of our arguments about the ways in which we worship.  But “the elevated strains of high liturgy” bring me back to Evensong, where we started.
And to Elijah, who I left coming face to face with God in silence.  Here is another tension, between music and silence, but one which can perhaps be resolved after all.
In order to write about music, Schleiermacher tells a story about a young girl who is both musical and devout, who plays the piano and sings and leads a group of family and friends in singing carols one Christmas.  Some join in and others listen:
“And when they had finished, all remained still, as so often happens with religious music, in a mood of inner satisfaction and retirement.  The reaction was followed, however, by a few silent moments in which they all knew that the heart of each person was turned in love toward all the rest and toward something higher still.\”
I have had this experience at Evensong.  It suggests to me that we need both music and silence.  Because it is in the silence that follows the music that we know that we have met with God.
Amen