THe MISSION OF MUSIC
Text: 1 Samuel 16: 14-23
Pastor Noel Anderson, First Presbyterian Church of Upland
GOD SENDS THE BLUES
Saul was a typical politician—an impressive figure of a man with natural leadership abilities—but he goes sour. Power and ego get the best of him until he becomes a tragic figure. Our text says that God sent an evil spirit to Saul. Hold the phone: God sent an evil spirit? Maybe it’s a mistranslation. The Hebrew says, well, evil spirit. From God. Hmm.
First, remember that Saul had stopped listening to God once he realized he was not God’s number one pick for office. As God’s favor for Saul’s kingship is withdrawn, how else would Saul feel? The absence of God’s favor would be a kind of torment all by itself.
Second, God is not sending a demon. In this text, an “evil spirit” just means an angel of the heavenly court commissioned on a job. That spirit is to impress upon Saul the reality of his distance from God. The “evil” in “evil spirit” is not a description of the spirit’s character, but a job description, perhaps temporary. The spirit is to lean heavily on Saul. Perhaps Saul may yet come to repentance.
Thirdly, God is in charge and provident over all things. We see that God is drawing David and Saul together, and David will be endeared to Saul because of his excellent solo work on the harp.
All this to say that when David played the harp, Saul felt better. Music heals and music improves people.
Martin Luther said: “My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.”
"The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat"
My favorite book title ever. In it, Dr. Oliver Sacks describes the case of a very real “Absent-minded Professor.” Students and faculty thought him quaint, or rather a character, for turning to a bush and speaking to it, or ignoring certain people entirely in one moment while paying them the dearest attention at another. He was a brilliant man, so his indiosynchrasies and peccadillos were overlooked. But his wife was fed up.
She told the doctor (Oliver Sacks) how her husband could go completely catatonic in the middle of a sentence and remain frozen there for 2-3 minutes, and then snap out of it with no awareness of the lapse. She feared his absent-mindedness and Mr. Magoo-ish behavior were symptoms of a deeper issue.
When the professor came in to see Dr. Sacks, he was given a standard reflex test—swiping a key along the sole of the foot. Everything seemed normal enough. The professor answered all the doctor’s questions with no problems, but when Dr. Sacks told him he could put his shoe back on, he held up his shoe and asked, “Is this my foot?” Sacks continued with questions, but the professor grew irritated with the examination, insisting there was nothing wrong with him. As he got up to leave, he reached over to his wife’s head with his hand and grasped it exactly as though he was reaching for his hat. As he tugged, his wife looked at the doctor with that “please kill me” look.
It turns out the professor suffered something called visual agnosia, a neurological condition that makes him unable to recognize objects or people. Oddly enough, they discovered it was only a problem if a person or object was still, at rest. When in motion, there was no problem. This is why he could sometimes recognize students just fine, but otherwise mistake a shrub for student, or his wife for a hat.
His therapy was music. Music is movement and motion, so the professor’s prescription was to sing his life—to have a little song for everything he did that made up his day. A song for getting dressed in the morning, a song for eating breakfast, a song for talking to people—everything, as long as it was attached to music and movement—functioned just fine. No more catatonic episodes, no more Mr. Magoo, no more mistaking his wife for a hat.
His story inspired Michael Nyman to compose an opera of the same name, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, because he was intrigued by the idea of this man’s life having to be turned into music. His life was now, daily, to be tuned like a guitar, and his every behavior imbued with rhythm, melody, and blissful harmony.
In Oliver Sacks words:
Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears – it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more – it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity.
Music can do more than soothe our nerves; it can undergird our entire day, helping us to rightly order our minds and emotions. We, too, can turn our lives into song and sing our way through our days. So music can be a critical factor in our spirituality.
LANGUAGE DEEPER THAN WORDS
Listen to Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “Music will help dissolve your perplexities and purify your character and sensibilities, and in time of care and sorrow, will keep a fountain of joy alive in you.” Could he not have been talking about the Holy Spirit? Or even of Joy?
As music works on us at deeper levels, it resembles the work of the Holy Spirit. Music speaks without words deeper than language, speaking directly to our hearts and filling them with light and energy.
Bad music—or rather shallow music—never penetrates the surface. It may be fun, but it stays on the skin and has no deeper or lasting impact.
It’s the same with reading Scripture. We hear the Word of God beneath literalism in deeper layers of apprehension. Literalism always fails. The Bible is not a collection of pat answers or rules; it is a conversation between God and humankind. Not everyone who merely reads Scripture reads it correctly. There is a work of the Spirit that must take place in order for the reader to be drawn to Christ. Two people read the same Scripture. One says, “I read about Jesus and gain information about him.” Another says, “This Jesus is the Lord—the Son of God!”
The Bible contains the Word of God. The Word of God, according to Scripture, is Jesus Christ himself. The Bible is God’s Word insofar as it makes witness to Jesus.
There is a rhetorical device called metonymy, where something is described by the thing it contains. If I’m pouring coffee and ask you, “Would you like a cup?” we know what is meant. If I hand you an empty cup you are right to roll your eyes at me. We both know you don’t really want the cup itself, but the coffee it contains. In the same way, the Bible is the means by which we meet and come to know Christ (through the work of the Holy Spirit). The Bible is the vehicle of the Word of God, but not strictly the Word of God in and of itself. The Bible contains and mediates God’s Word the same way a large picture window offers us the garden outside. What good is a window by itself? If you have no opening in the wall, then the window is just glass in a frame, revealing nothing.
It’s possible for people to read the Bible and get nothing. They look only at the frame and the glass. Those who get it are those who read and see the garden drenched in sunlight beyond. And that kind of reading is a gift of the Holy Spirit.
T.S. Eliot speaks of “The word within a word that never speaks a word.”
Music, at its best, runs beneath the surface. It opens chambers in the human spirit that surprise us. When music does its job, we experience magical, mystical charms. We taste beauty in all its mystery. Images of Heaven open up—dreamlike settings and landscapes that water dry souls--and we are swept into that kind of longing that C.S. Lewis calls Joy.
JOY TRANSFORMS US
Joy is that song in our heart that turns our even mundane lives into music. For the Christian, joy is the constant backdrop before which the events of our lives—good and bad—play out. Because of that joy, that music, whether we flourish or suffer, we know the goodness and providence of God make up the bigger, truer, more beautiful reality. In pain and suffering, our hope is intact.
The gift of the Holy Spirit—the one Jesus calls the Counselor, the Advocate, and the Comforter—meets us exactly like good music. It works beneath the surface—often beneath our conscious awareness—working on us, gently kneading our souls into shape. That is how we are sanctified and transformed, which is to say it probably won’t be the result of a lot of conscious self-help work. The deep changes we desire can only be wrought from the inside out, which means we depend upon the Holy Spirit for that work to be completed.
“Music will help dissolve your perplexities and purify your character and sensibilities, and in time of care and sorrow, will keep a fountain of joy alive in you.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Is it any wonder that singing has always been a part of worship? When we sing hymns and praise songs, we are being inculcated by the gospel—steeped in messages written to reach the depths of our hearts.
UNITY IN DIVERGENCE
Finally, our unity in song parallels the mystery of our oneness in Christ. And though one, we remain individually distinct.
As patriots, when we sing the national anthem at a baseball game, we feel a oneness and brotherhood with our fellow citizens. It can warm the heart in the midst of other divisions. This is a shallower version of what happens when we gather for worship and sing hymns and songs of praise. It’s more than just the pleasure of belonging—social conformity—the warmth of the herd and all that; it is part of the remaking of who we are.
When we worship, we each become part of the praise. We may not particularly like all the songs, be we stand dutifully and learn the new tunes, doing our best to follow along and meditate on the words, ultimately making them our own.
What a wonder it is when we fuse our emotions with the message! We rise up in praise and worship, giving utterance to truth and beauty. More than that, we do so in a mystical fellowship with all of our brothers and sisters in faith.
The uniqueness of our own voice is not diminished or lost in being combined into a collective whole, but rather we sing together and are united in spirit and purpose, not absorbed into unity, but composed together, like a bunch of bright, unique blossoms gathered together into a fascinating bouquet.
Our unity in song and spirit is not one of diminishment, which is to say we are not like drops of water lost and dissolved in the ocean. No, we are preserved. Every individual who praises God shines as an individual. The more completely and authentically we praise God, the less we resemble the whole, even as our unity increases.
The song in our hearts, brothers and sisters, is the good news of God’s salvation through Jesus Christ. Our evangelism, simply put, is very much like the music leaders trying to get the rest of us to sing along and put some heart into it. That is the mission of music. †