Sermon: Come to the Choir Rehearsal
Date: December 5, 2004
Text: Acts 16: 20-34
By: Kendall Brown Kendall's Notebook Page 37
Singing in choirs has been a part of my life ever since I sang in the junior choir when I was in first grade. As a parish minister with much on my mind on Sunday mornings, choir rehearsal is often my worship – a time to be in church, with other Christians, and to engage in song which is the essence of worship. In all that we do to worship on Sunday mornings, we sometimes forget that worship is 95% praising and thanking God, our Creator. The best vehicle for praise and thanksgiving is joining in song.
Choir rehearsals are important and fun. Sometimes the rehearsing choir sounds more like a piano with broken strings or an alley cat with a scratchy throat, but better to make those sounds in rehearsal than in church on Sunday mornings. Choir rehearsals are great fun with the back row always ready to spin a pun on words or sound, and the front row struggling to keep up with Letta’s directions and the back row’s promptings. But when it comes to our week to week worship, the choir is a group of laity who over and over make a weekly contribution to the spirit, tone and smoothness of the worship service through song.
Choir rehearsals stand also as a metaphor for life and for Advent.
Whether or not you have ever sung in a choir, your life is a choir rehearsal as mine is. Here is a little of my story. My mother’s family is very musical. My grandmother played the piano and other instruments and passed the music on. I still have a collection of gay nineties – that is 1890’s – piano music that was my grandmother’s. My mother played the cello and piano and sang. Her sister played the piano and accordion. Her brother sang with a deep bass voice and played the violin. Uncle Earle, on Sunday mornings could be found in churches all over the state of Maine as a guest soloist. A couple times a year he would show up at our church. I still remember my Mother’s excitement the days before he would sing. During the week she would often be heard saying between her own songs, “Oh, this Sunday, Earle will be here to sing. It will be so good.” In fact, the choir sang in a delightful cacophony of flat parts and scratchy notes and it was a moment of melodious relief for my mother to have her brother come and sing.
During High School my mother, my uncle and aunt with some of their friends made up a band and traveled around on weekends to play at dances in old country dance barns. I imagine you had some of those here in Indiana and may have as many memories and stories about them as do my mother and her brother and sister. They would not tell many of the stories. But we knew they were there.
Up the street from my grand parents was and still is a summer theatre. Every July and August, the theatre was the summer home of the American Savoyards, a company from New York City that featured Gilbert and Sullivan productions. As a small child, I loved attending those operettas. I would go off to school in the fall singing:
“I Am the Lord High Executioner”
“I Am the Very Model of A Modern Major General”
or “When I was a lad, I served a term as office boy to an attorney’s firm. I cleaned the windows and I swept the floor and I polished up the handle on the big front door. And I polished up that handle so carefully that now I am the ruler of the Queen’s navy.”
Those lines have been in me since I was 8 years old. I let them flow to witness how music that we learn in the rehearsal of life becomes a part of us. The music is in our spirits, shaping and guiding us.
An occasional moment in pastoral ministry is when the minister is with someone who is dying and hears the parishioner start to sing a childhood song, like
“Jesus Loves Me This I Know,” or “Amazing Grace” or some other old favorite, which the parishioner has been rehearsing for a long, long time.
Sometime, the parishioner will ask the minister to sing for him or her and that old song will be an expressive prayer touching the souls of both parishioner and minister and bringing peace and calm to the final moments of life.
In today’s Scripture lesson, Paul and Silas were thrown in jail on trumped up charges. They were beaten, chained and tossed into an innermost cell in the prison. What did they do? At midnight, they had a choir rehearsal. “About midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God.” In the dark of prison and the pain of being beaten, they were sustained by song and prayer. Song broke the chains, brought light into the darkness and freed them from their bondage. Song still does that for us. Breaks the chains and frees us from the darkness of fear and pain. There is a lot of pain and darkness in life and a lot of bondage. The time spent rehearsing is well worth the effort. Singing was a part of the disciples being together with Jesus in the Upper Room where the sacrament of communion was established. Mathew 26:30, “And after they had sung a hymn together, the went out to the Mount of Olives.” We don’t know today what that hymn was, but I bet the disciples didn’t forget it for the rest of their lives.
They didn’t forget that supper and that song because in that moment they were with their Lord as completely as they could be in this earthly life. They were one with him, all except Judas, in mind and soul and body and song. That is what it is all about. In this time and place around this table, we are rehearsing for another time and place beyond our dying. We are rehearsing for that time when we will be one with our Lord, completely one with him. Song is the gift of God that will help us get there. That is well worth rehearsing. Come to the table. Come, come to the rehearsal for the time to come which is the promise of Advent.