Sermon for the 19th of October - Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity

Jacob was quite a character — deceitful, cunning, duplicitous. And yet, God doesn’t despise him. Quite the opposite: Jacob becomes Israel, the father of the twelve tribes, the one through whom the promise continues.  Earlier in Genesis, Jacob dreams of a ladder reaching between heaven and earth — a bridge between the divine and the human. And in our reading today, he wrestles through the night until daybreak. It’s another encounter with God — a struggle that leaves him wounded, blessed, and renamed. He calls that place Peniel, literally “the face of God.”

These encounters speak of thin places — moments when the veil between heaven and earth seems to lift, when we glimpse the divine presence and know that we stand on holy ground.

But in our modern, scientific age, we have often forgotten how to see such places. The Enlightenment gave us astonishing insight into the physical world, but it also narrowed our vision. The philosopher Charles Taylor calls this the immanent frame — a worldview that confines us to what we can measure and prove. The ladder between heaven and earth seems to have been dismantled, the window to transcendence closed.

And yet, even in this immanent frame, the longing for something beyond remains. Richard Dawkins himself has spoken of the “miracle” of existence — the wonder of being alive. Science offers us stunning insights into the natural world, but it struggles with such inexpressible dimensions, often reverting to religious language.

That’s where faith — and especially worship — opens a larger vista. The Church is a sacred space not only of words and creeds, but of beauty: of art, architecture, silence, and above all, music. Through beauty, we are drawn again toward the transcendent — the God who is both within and beyond us.

As we celebrate Andrew’s thirty years of ministry among us, we give thanks for the way he has helped us climb that ladder again and again. Music, in his hands and in the choir’s voices, open us a place of encounter linking heaven and earth.

Sigmund Freud once confessed that he resisted the “oceanic feeling” that music awakened in him — the overwhelming sense of something vast and sacred. He feared, perhaps, to lose control before the mystery of beauty. But for those of us who allow it, music can open us up to the divine.

The Scottish Catechism asks, “Why was I created?”  And it answers: “To worship God, and to enjoy him for ever.” When we forget how to worship — how to wonder — we become less than human.

Worship is not simply singing hymns or saying prayers. It’s the movement of the soul beyond itself — towards love, towards the Other, towards God. And music is one of the most powerful ways that movement happens.

Here’s an example of the transforming power of beauty, and of music. In the movie ‘The Pianist’, a Nazi Officer finds an escaping Jewish pianist playing the piano in a bombed out building in Warsaw, and he tells the pianist to play. The German officer stands behind the pianist as he plays Chopin’s 1st Ballade. He has a pistol in his belt – with which, as you watch, you’re certain the German will shoot and kill the pianist. Yet, miraculously, it’s precisely the beauty of that 1st Ballade of Chopin which transforms the German Officer. Following the piece, he gives his uniform coat to help the pianist to escape. The officer is transformed from the destructive ideology of Nazi prejudice by the experience of a transcendent beauty.

Karen Armstrong writes that “the desire to cultivate a sense of the transcendent may be the defining human characteristic.” And she adds: “Music has always been inseparable from religious expression, because, like religion, it marks the limits of reason. It goes beyond the reach of words.”

Poets, painters, musicians — they build ladders to heaven. They help us wrestle, as Jacob did, with mystery, until dawn breaks and blessing comes.

St Augustine said, “To sing is to pray twice.” Perhaps today we might say, “To sing is to pray with the whole of ourselves” — with mind and heart, with reason and imagination, with both sides of the brain.

Through music, we are drawn out of our small selves — beyond our anxieties, our egos — and lifted into worship, into communion, into joy. Music becomes the key that unlocks the iron cage of rationality and opens us to God’s transforming grace.

That, after all, is the mission of the Church: to reconnect us to the God who loves us and calls us into communion, and to share that love by serving the community. And for thirty years, Andrew, you have helped us make that connection here at St George’s.

Through your gifts, your faith, and your music, you have led us again and again to the face of God. For that, we give thanks — to you, and to the God who still sings through you.

Amen.

Reference:

Michael Marshall, ‘Exploring faith through music’ talk, 18th October, 2016