Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy
1809-1847

Unlike so many composers, superbly gifted people who are unhappy, miserable, depressed, neurotic, sometimes out-and-out psychotic, Mendelssohn was happy. He was cheerful and contented and enthusiastic throughout his entire life, brief as it was. His name — “Felix”, Latin for “happy” — couldn’t have suited him more.

His father’s given name was “Abraham”, and his grandfather’s, “Moses”. Mendelssohn was Jewish. His grandfather, Moses, was an able philosopher much esteemed in academic circles in Germany in spite of the virulent anti-semitism of Frederick the Great. His father, Abraham, used to say, “Formerly I was known as the son of my father; now, as the father of my son.”

Felix himself was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1809. Three years later his mother, Leah Salomon, and his father became members of the Lutheran Church and had their son baptized Christian, adding the name “Bartholdy” in hope of lessening the social penalties of being Jewish.

Felix showed musical promise very early in his life. His mother, a cultured woman (she read English, French, Latin and Greek) was his first piano teacher. She recognized his prodigious talent and next year sent him to Paris for training. He emerged as a “boy-wonder” pianist when he was nine and as a composer at ten. At age eleven he was taken to visit Goethe, Germany’s greatest poet, then seventy-two years old. Immediately the older man recognized the child as his intellectual and creative equal.

At seventeen Mendelssohn composed the overture to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which composition was deemed thereafter to be as fine a piece of music as he would ever write. Also at seventeen he conducted Bach’s St.Matthew’s Passion. The performance was hailed as one of the glories of German music-making. In the midst of the adulation heaped on him around this event Mendelssohn commented, “And to think that it should be…a Jew who gave back to the people the greatest Christian work.”

By this time Mendelssohn was dazzling music-lovers as a composer, pianist, violinist, violist, and conductor. (Less widely known were his gifts as painter and poet.) When only twenty he stunned English audiences on the first of his ten trips to England. He loved to travel, and since he regarded the sea as the finest of nature’s beauties, a trip to Scotland’s Hebrides inspired the masterpiece, Fingal’s Cave.

Mendelssohn knew he was extraordinarily talented, yet he never flaunted it, always preferring in genuine humility to elevate and encourage those around him. On one occasion, when he was to be the pianist in a piano-cello-violin trio, his music, the music for the piano-part, was missing. Now he didn’t need his music, being able to play his part out of his head. But not wishing to embarrass the cellist and the violinist who needed their music, he placed any music he could find upside down on the piano (so as not to distract him) and then had a friend turn the pages throughout the performance.

A prodigy as a conductor too, Mendelssohn found himself music-master of Dusseldorf and leader of the city’s symphony orchestra. Here he began his first oratorio, St.Paul. Plainly a genius, he was promoted to the world-famous music-position in Leipzig, where he was introduced to Chopin, Schumann, and Schumann’s future wife, Clara (herself a superb pianist).

In 1837 (by now he was twenty-eight) he married Cecile Jeanrenaud, a painter and the daughter of a Lutheran clergyman in Frankfurt. Together Felix and Cecile had five children.

Mendelssohn penned two hundred musical compositions, his violin concerto being acknowledged one of the best. He is regarded as the consummate nineteenth century writer of oratorios. Notwithstanding his German identity, his music is performed more in England to this day than in any other nation.

In 1847, at the age of thirty-eight, he fell ill and died. One year earlier he had written an oratorio specifically for an English audience: Elijah. The inspiration for the oratorio was the Hebrew figure of old, Israel’s greatest prophet.

Elijah

Unlike Mendelssohn, Elijah looms up at us out of nowhere. We know nothing about his parents, his upbringing, his inner or outer life apart from his vocation as prophet.

But what a prophet! The God of fire ignited him again and again. Wherever we come upon Elijah he is aflame. Polish? Subtlety? Social niceties? Soft speech? He was as far from all this as anyone could be. If we can’t understand why he is always and everywhere afire, he can’t understand why we appear not to be lit.

King Ahab, the wickedest king in Israel’s troubled history, decided it would be politically correct and personally advantageous to have his cake and eat it too. Why not mix together Baal, the pagan deity, and Yahweh, the holy one of Israel? Why not have the self-indulgence that Baal permits his people and the security that Yahweh promises his people? Why not the fornication that Baal laughs about and the forgiveness that Yahweh weeps to bestow? Haven’t popular preachers always retained their popularity by telling hearers that we can all have the “goodies” of the world together with the gospel of God?

In a blazing rage Elijah thundered, “No! The holy one of Israel will shortly expose Baal for the inconsequential puff of smoke that he is. And as for you, Ahab, you are finished. Dogfood, in fact; the scavenger canines that forage in the city streets will lick your blood.” And so they did.

Jewish people always knew that Elijah, the greatest of the Hebrew prophets, would come back. He would come back at the end-time when the kingdom of God was breaking in on the world; he would come back when what all Israel called the “Age to Come” was dawning as it superimposed itself on what Israel called the “Present Evil Age.”

When our Lord Jesus Christ began his public ministry his detractors taunted him saying, “You can’t be the Messiah; everyone knows that before the Messiah comes, Elijah must return. And Elijah hasn’t been seen for eight hundred years!” “Yes, he has!”, Jesus retorted. “Elijah did come back, recently. And you made fun of him. You called him names: John the `dunker’, `dipper’, `ducker’, `soaker’. But make no mistake: Elijah is here. And therefore his word is still operative.”

Paul

Yet another Israelite pointed to our Lord. Whereas Elijah pointed ahead to him, the apostle Paul pointed at him. Paul was unshakably convinced that Jesus Christ is alive, present to our world, present in it, the contemporary who can never become antiquated or obsolete.

Paul came from a sophisticated, well-to-do Jewish family on the north Mediterranean. Unlike Jesus, who grew up in a one-chariot town, Paul grew up in a centre of learning and commerce and culture. He knew Hebrew and Aramaic and Latin and Greek.

Paul’s vocation owes everything to that never-to-be-forgotten encounter on the Damascus road, where the risen Lord knocked him down with the kind of violence that was so foreign to Paul (but so natural to Elijah). Thereafter Paul could no more have denied the intimacy and immediacy and intensity of his life with his Lord than he could have denied that he was alive and breathing. It’s no wonder that he said simply and unselfconsciously to the congregation in Philippi, “Christ means `life’ for me.” The Christ who was indeed `life’ for him was always the crucified Messiah. Unlike so many modern church people who look upon the cross as something that Jesus endured for a few hours on Friday and left behind forever on Sunday, Paul knew that his Lord was raised, to be sure, yet raised as crucified. He knew that the risen one was raised with the marks of his suffering still upon him. He knew that Christ’s resurrection doesn’t mean that Jesus of Nazareth has been elevated beyond suffering and vulnerability and misunderstanding and treachery; he knew instead that Christ’s resurrection means that Jesus of Nazareth has been rendered victorious, triumphant, effective, in the midst of suffering and vulnerability and misunderstanding and treachery. The modern hymnwriter who penned the line, “Rich wounds yet visible above”, captured it perfectly.

Paul knew that only a crucified Messiah could get close enough to fragile people like you and me to help us; and he knew that only a crucified Messiah whose raised and therefore rendered triumphant would be able to help us.

For years the apostle had wanted to get to Rome, the nerve-centre of the empire. Then he had wanted to push beyond Rome into Spain, announcing the gospel where it had never been heard before. He got to Rome but not to Spain. While he was in Rome, under house-arrest, emperor Nero decided to make scapegoats of Christians and blame them for a fire that had devastated a sizeable part of the city. Along with Peter, his fellow-apostle, he died in the savagery Nero unleashed. All his death did was permit him to know what he had anticipated for years: the Christ who was his everything to him in life was richer still in death.

Victor Shepherd
March 1996

1674-1748

The singing of God’s praise is the part of worship most
clearly related to heaven; but its performance among us
is the worst on earth. (I.W.)

Watts wrote them superbly, yet he wrote eversomuch more than his 697 hymns. A textbook on logic, for instance, that was used for years at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale. Not to mention his two books on geometry and astronomy. Upset at the inability of students to handle the English language creditably, he penned The Art of Reading and Writing English. It was followed by his Philosophical Essays (with its appendix, “A brief Scheme of Ontology”, ontology being that branch of philosophy that discusses being), then by Improvement of the Mind (this was actually a “how-to-study” book, and even A Discourse on the Education of Children and Youth. A minister for virtually all of his adult life, Watts also published ten volumes of sermons and scores of theological treatises.

Isaac Watts was born in 1674, the eldest of eight children, six of whom survived. The last quarter of the 17th century was a troubled time in England. Dissenters (those who refused to conform to the established church) were not only denied access to suitable employment and the universities; Dissenters were liable to prosecution and imprisonment for no greater “crime” than persisting in worshipping God according to their conscience. Watts’s father, a Dissenter, was imprisoned one year after he was married. His wife, Watts’s mother, gave birth to Isaac while her husband was in jail. She regularly nursed her infant son on the jail steps in the course of visiting her husband. (When Isaac was nine years old his father was jailed a second time — for six months — for the same offence: refusing to conform to the worship-practices of the established church.)

Young Isaac was plainly precocious. He had learned Latin by age four, Greek at nine, French at eleven, and Hebrew at thirteen. French was not usually studied in English elementary schools during the 1600s, but Watts was raised in Southampton, and Southampton was a city of refuge to hundreds of refugees who were fleeing persecution in France. The youngster thought he should know French so that he could converse with his neighbours.

A physician recognized the boy’s intellectual gifts and offered to finance his education at either Oxford or Cambridge. But regardless of his brilliance Watts would be admitted to either university only if he were willing to renounce Dissent and conform to Anglicanism. He wasn’t willing. (Had his father suffered for nothing?) He would never surrender conviction to expediency. As a result he went to a Dissenting Academy, the post-secondary institution for those barred from the universities. While completing his formal education Watts wrote much poetry, most of it in Latin. Upon leaving the Academy at age 20 he wrote his first hymn, “Behold the Glories of the Lamb” — yet did so only when challenged sharply by his father.

The writing of his first hymn was significant in view of the fact that hymns weren’t sung in English churches. German Lutherans had been singing hymns for over 100 years. Calvinists in Switzerland and France, however, had not. The Calvinists disdained hymns as unscriptural and popish. Calvin had wanted his people to sing only the psalms of scripture. English Protestants of Calvinist parentage had adopted the practice of singing only metrical psalms in worship. The texts of these metrical psalms were poetically crude and frequently ludicrous; for instance,

Ye monsters of the bubbling deep,
Your Master’s praises spout,
Up from the sands ye coddlings peep,
And wag your tails about.

The texts were ludicrous, the mood was ponderous, the tone of the entire service dreary, and one day Watts discovered he couldn’t endure any of it a minute longer. Returning from the service one Sunday morning he complained vehemently to his father about the psalm-singing that put people off worship. “Why don’t you write a hymn suitable for congregational singing?”, his father retorted. In the course of the afternoon Watts did just that, and the congregation sang hymn #1 the same evening.

Yet it must not be thought that Watts disesteemed the psalms. Far from it. So highly did he value them, in fact, that he immediately set about rewriting the metrical versions in a smoother idiom. Compare the metrical version of Psalm 20 with Watts’s version:

In chariots some put confidence,
Some horses trust upon;
But we remember will the name
Of our Lord God alone. (Metrical)

Some trust in horses train’d for war,
And some of chariots make their boasts;
Our surest expectations are
From Thee, the Lord of heav’nly hosts. (Watts)

(As relatively smooth as Watts’s hymn-line was, it would be made even smoother by 18th century poets such as Charles Wesley.)

Not everyone thanked Watts for his efforts. Some of his contemporaries complained that his hymns were “too worldly” for the church. One critic fumed, “Christian congregations have shut out divinely inspired psalms and have taken in Watts’s flights of fancy!” His hymns outraged many people, split congregations (most notably the congregation whose pastor, years earlier, had been John Bunyan, himself the author of an English classic), and got pastors fired. Still, Watts knew what his preeminent gift was and why he had to employ it.

Needless to say we of Streetsville United Church, having been thoroughly exposed to the genius of Charles Wesley, cannot help comparing the hymnwriting of Wesley and Watts.

Wesley’s hymns concern themselves chiefly with God and the individual human heart: their relations, their estrangement, their reconciliation, their union. Watts writes of this too, but with a major difference: the backdrop of God’s intercourse with the human heart is the cosmos in its unspeakable vastness. Watts sees the drama of the incarnation and the cross, the dereliction and the resurrection, as apparently small events that are in fact possessed of cosmic significance. Watts’s universe is simply more immense than anything Wesley imagined. For Watts nature is more prodigious, time more extensive, eternity more awesome. (This is not to say that Wesley is inferior. Indeed no one would rate Watts a better poet. Wesley had more poetic skill than Watts, and more thorough training in the forms of classical poetry. It is simply to say that Watts’s universe was larger.) It is said of Milton that he is the English poet who, above all others, makes the reader aware of the sky. In the same way Watts, with his fondness of astronomy, singularly makes the reader aware of the hugeness of the firmament.

There are technical comparisons as well of the poetry of Watts and Wesley. Wesley preferred a six-line stanza, but when writing a four-line stanza usually rhymed first and third lines as well as second and fourth. Watts preferred a four-line stanza and usually rhymed only the second and fourth lines. As a result Watts’s stanzas tend to read less compactly than Wesley’s. While Wesley combined Anglo-Saxon expressions (they are customarily blunt, one-syllable words like “hit”) with Latin expressions (usually multi-syllable words like “transported” or “ineffable”), Watts wrote page after page of hymns lacking even one word with a Latin derivation (despite the scores of Latin poems that he wrote). Watts evidently preferred to write hymns in words of one syllable.

Watts was a man with limitless appreciation of the passion of God. He himself was possessed of the profoundest experience of God. Listen to him:

Here at the cross, my dying God
I lay my soul beneath thy love.

*

The mount of danger is the place
Where we shall see surprising grace.

*

Turn, turn us, mighty God,
And mould our souls afresh;
Break, sovereign grace, these hearts of stone,
And give us hearts of flesh.

(Note that the last line, “And give us hearts of flesh”, consists of six words of one syllable each.)

Watts was accorded the recognition he deserved. By age 50 he was a national figure, esteemed by Anglicans and Dissenters alike. John Wesley had long acknowledged the genius, discipline and piety of Watts, and when Wesley came to publish his first hymn book, one-third of its hymns were Isaac’s. When John Wesley published his tract, The Doctrine of Original Sin, he incorporated 44 pages of Watts’s earlier work, Ruin and Recovery.

The poetic genius of Watts is evident. Yet since few poets (if any) have made a living from poeticizing, how did Watts manage to survive?

Upon graduating from the Academy Watts eked out a living as tutor to the son of a well-to-do English merchant. He never thought for a moment, however, that this was his vocation. In 1702, when he was 27 years old, he was called to a pastorate in London. The next ten years were spent fruitfully and happily as Watts immersed himself in the relentless round of responsibilities that every pastor must attend to — at the same time as he wrote books, treatises, poems and hymns.

The easygoing ten years were ended abruptly by a major illness from which he never recovered fully. While he was unable to work during his illness he asked the congregation to discontinue his salary. The congregation refused, and instead raised it so that he could pay his medical bills.

The illness incapacitated him for four years. When the worst of it abated he was left frail, fragile, sickly. In addition there was an apparently non-specific psychiatric component to his now-chronic weakness. On the one hand he wasn’t sick enough to die for another 38 years; on the other hand, he wasn’t sickness-free enough to be well. A wealthy benefactor, Thomas Abney, invited him to his home to assist his recovery. He gratefully accepted, and went on to live there for the rest of his life.

Watts preached whenever he could. There were periods when he could preach with little interruption, as well as periods when he was simply deranged and couldn’t function at all.

In 1739, at age 65, Isaac suffered a stroke that left him able to speak but unable to write. A secretary was provided for his dictated poems and hymns.

He died on 25th November, 1748.

Isaac Watts was unusual in many respects. A short man (five feet tall), his frail body was capped with a disproportionately large head. Virtually all portraits of him depict him in a large gown with large folds, an obvious attempt at having him appear less grotesque.

Unusual? How many working pastors write a textbook on logic that is used for decades by the preeminent universities of the English-speaking world?

Unusual? Who among us can write a book on metaphysics that probes ontology, and at the same time write a book of children’s poetry that goes through 95 editions within 100 years of its publication?

Unusual? Who has written hymns that have been translated into dozens of languages from Armenian to Zulu?

Unusual? What modern thinker has published a learned tome on astronomy and also published graded catechisms (one for five-year olds, another for nine-year olds, another for twelve-year olds)?

Watts was unusual: he regularly gave away one-fifth of his income, deploying his tithe locally yet also sending it as far afield as Germany and Georgia to help beleaguered people there.

Yet surely he was most unusual in that the jockey-sized man, ugly as well, handicapped by a thin voice and a history of psychiatric illness, could appear in a pulpit whenever sanity overtook him and draw hundreds who hung on words rising from a heart that hearers knew to be wrapped in the heart of God.

Watts was not unusual in one important respect. Like all Christians he knew that God is to be loved with the mind, and therefore reason must never be discounted in the exercising of faith or the discipline of the Christian life. Yet he knew too that the mystery of God himself, while never irrational, is oceans deeper than reason can fathom. Who among us would say anything else? Then it is proper for us to conclude with a four-line stanza Isaac Watts wrote concerning the fathomless mystery of God.

Where reason fails,
With all her pow’rs,
There faith prevails
And love adores.

Victor A. Shepherd
October 1994

Ephesians 5: 18-20

I: — Why do we sing hymns at every service of worship? Why do we sing hymns at all? To ask this question is to find ourselves asking another question, “Why sing?” But if “Why sing?”, then also “Why make music? Why dance? Why paint? Why write poetry?”

Let’s begin with the last question. Why write poetry? Wouldn’t prose do as well? No, it would not. Poetry has what prose will never have. There is a density to poetry, a compression, a compactness which prose lacks. There is an immediacy to poetry, an intensity, a passion which prose will never have. Because of the vivid imagery in poetry there is a concreteness to poetry compared to which prose is very abstract. You must have noticed that children do not think abstractly; children think concretely. So do primitive peoples. That’s why poetry comes naturally to children and primitive peoples. Only developed societies use abstract prose. Poetry, like music and dancing, is rooted so deep in the human psyche that it could not be deeper.

Poetry plus music gives us song. We sing inasmuch as our psychic constitution impels us to sing.

And why do we sing hymns? Because God himself has reached into the very deepest depths of our heart. God, after all, is our creator. He has fashioned us in his own image. Luke tells us that all humankind has been made to “feel after” God. In addition, in Jesus Christ God has come upon us, poured himself over us, pressed himself upon us, overwhelmed us and soaked us. Every time he thinks of this St.Paul is startled afresh: “He loved me, and gave himself, for me”. St.John says, “When I saw him, I fell at his feet as one dead.” Jeremiah exclaims, “The word of the Lord is like fire in my mouth.” The psalmist cries, “The Lord…delivered me from all my fears. Look to him, and be radiant!” Mary, mother of Jesus, shouts, “My spirit rejoices in God my saviour”.

Something this profound can find expression only in a vehicle which is deeper than deep. The vehicle is poetry and music together. It is no wonder that we sing.

As the gospel informs us we learn the depth of God’s mercy, the extent of God’s patience, the scope of God’s wisdom. All of this stamps itself upon us as Jesus Christ stamps himself upon us. Not surprisingly, then, our hymns come to have a precise content, a rich substance, a specific theme and thrust. Our hymns articulate more exactly that truth of God which has seized us and now sustains us. It is surely obvious now why we sing hymns, and why we shall always sing them.

II: — What kinds of hymns should we sing? Hymns are divided roughly into two kinds: objective and subjective. Objective hymns sing about God, even sing to God. Subjective hymns sing about us. An objective hymn is “Glory be to God the Father, Glory be to God the Son”. A subjective hymn, “O that will be Glory for me”. Many hymns fall in between, embodying elements of both.

Remember, objective hymns sing about God, his person, his truth, his way with us. Subjective hymns sing about us, our moods, our feelings, our aspirations, our response. Now think about this. The New Testament is of one mind that on Calvary’s cross something was done for us, done on our behalf, done, ultimately, by God himself. What was done for us was done in order that something might also be done in us. The order is important. Scripture always moves from the objective to the subjective, from God to us. St.Peter says compactly, “Jesus bore our sins in his body on the tree, in order that we might die to sin and live to righteousness”. Ultimately God did something for us in order that God might consequently do something in us.

If I were to ask you to name the best hymn in the English language concerning the cross, which hymn would you select? Many would select, “When I Survey The Wondrous Cross”. But have you ever noticed that this hymn really isn’t about the cross at all. It says nothing about the atonement. It is about the way our attitudes change when we survey the cross. When we. behold the cross we pour contempt on our pride; we count our richest gain but loss; we cease our boasting. These are all appropriate changes of attitude, to be sure. Nevertheless, the hymn is not about what was done for us on Good Friday. The best hymn about what God has effected through the cross, in my opinion, is a Christmas carol: “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” Listen to some of the lines:

“Pleased as Man with man to dwell” (an affirmation of the incarnation, the presupposition of the atonement)
“God and sinners reconciled”
“Born that man no more may die, born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them second birth”
“Light and life to all he brings”.

Let’s sing a stanza or two of each kind of hymn, objective and subjective, to illustrate the difference. The objective hymn is “All hail the power of Jesus’ name”. Note how the music supports the theme of the hymn. The sustained notes stand out just because they are sustained; they support the theme, Crown him Lord of all”. The subjective hymn is “O brother man, fold to thy heart they brother.”

III: — Let me say that there is a place for both kinds of hymns. At the same time we must be careful to retain a proper balance and emphasis. The emphasis has to be on the objective hymn; the balance is that we bracket a subjective hymn by having objective hymns on either side of it. We sang a subjective hymn immediately prior to the sermon today: “Beneath the cross of Jesus, I fain would take my stand.” It is unquestionably subjective: “My sinful self, my only shame, my glory all, the cross.” Yet we began the service with an objective hymn and we shall end with one, as we always do.

Let me tell you of my experience a year or two ago. I was flown to Winnipeg to deliver the annual academic lectures at a bible college. I had never had anything to do with the place; I had never had anything to do with any bible college, and didn’t know what to expect. When I arrived I discovered that the students were not interested in academic lectures at all. Following the lectures I was asked to preach at a chapel service. For the service I selected hymns such as “A safe stronghold our God is still” and “Now thank we all our God”. The students would not sing. They stared at the hymnbook and uttered not a sound. The worship-leader, eager to save the day, jumped in and added half-a-dozen highly subjective ditties of minimal substance and maximal sentiment. Whereupon the students sang with gusto. Do those students think that their consciousness, their feelings are the measure of truth? Do they really want to sing about themselves to the exclusion of singing about God? Do they have more confidence in their own (supposed) piety than they have in the gospel? Do they think their faith is stronger than the Word and grace of God which engendered their faith? I was appalled.

Let me repeat. We should sing subjective hymns, for reasons we shall bring forward in a moment. Yet proper emphasis and balance must be maintained. After all, the gospel did not originate with us; the gospel is the self-disclosure and the self-bestowal of God.

To say that there is a place for subjective hymns is not to say that there is a place for mindless sentimentality. Years ago a hit-parade song had one line repeated endlessly: “All you need is lu-uv, doodely doodely doo”. There is a church equivalent: a ditty which consists principally of one line, and says very little. For instance, “Jesus is my friend/Jesus is my friend/Jesus is my friend/ My very own friend.” In terms of substance it doesn’t come close to the great hymns of the church. It says nothing about who Jesus Christ is, what he does, or what he calls forth from us. It is virtually mindless.

There are subjective hymns, however, which are much better than this; subjective hymns which profoundly gather up and articulate our fears, our guilt, our loneliness, as well as our exhilaration and exclamation — all in the light of the goodness and patience, the truth and triumph of God. These hymns we should sing, and sing every week. For we should be honest about ourselves and give expression to what is going on in our hearts, especially in view of the storms within and the storms without.

Think for a minute about bereavement. While it is not healthy for the bereaved person to be weeping all the time, it is equally unhealthy if the bereaved person never weeps. The person who has suffered enormous loss and yet never has a bad day thereafter is unconsciously denying her grief. What is denied is actually buried, soon festers and eventually causes greater emotional discomfort, distortion and even disability. Hymns which permit us, even encourage us, to express our suffering and sorrow in the light of God’s care are health-giving; they are the vehicle of our outcry to God as we hold up our burden to him.

If a thousand and one stresses are beginning to unravel us it is good to sing, “I heard the voice of Jesus say, ‘Come unto me and rest.'”

When we are newly-acquainted with the bottomless depths of our depravity and we are stunned at how vast a work of restoration remains to be done in us, we shall be glad to sing, “Sin and want we come confessing, Thou canst save and thou canst heal.” When we are feeling abandoned (and who hasn’t felt abandoned) it is good to sing, “O love that wilt not let me go”. When we are so wounded that we are beyond even shedding tears we shall sing, as our foreparents did, “Come ye disconsolate, where’er ye languish”.

In all of this we must never lose sight of one glorious truth: how we feel is no indication of where we are. Believing people are “in Christ”, to use Paul’s favourite expression. Our Lord cherishes and secures us even if we feel we are only minutes away from extinction. We are in Christ, and he will ever bind us securely to him.

A splendid hymn which gathers all of this together is “Jesus, lover of my soul”. Before we sing it I want to say a word about the tune to which the lyrics are set. One tune is in a minor key, the other in a major key. Music in a minor key moves us toward introspection, reflection. Minor-key music is haunting, evocative. Not sentimental in the sense of maudlin, but certainly sober, pensive. I like to sing in minor keys now and then, since there is a place for singing soberly, pensively. At the same time, I am especially pleased when Robin Dalgleish resolves the last chord of a minor-key hymn so that we conclude on a major-key note; our mood then shifts from pensive introspection to affirmation. Let’s sing, “Jesus, lover of my soul”, the first two stanzas in a minor key, the latter two stanzas in a major key.

IV: — You must have noticed that we begin and end every service of worship in Streetsville with objective hymns. When we sing a subjective hymn it is always in the middle. (Remember what I said about emphasis and balance!) Have you ever noticed how the written gospels begin and end? Matthew and Luke begin with the annunciation of the birth of Jesus, Messiah, Saviour and Lord; they end with a narrative of the resurrection. Mark begins with a comment on Christ’s public ministry, and ends with his appearance to startled women. John begins with the foundational Word, with the insistence that the entire creation was made through this Word which became flesh. John ends with the risen one commissioning Peter to feed the flock of God. The written gospels neither begin nor end with people looking in upon themselves, fishing around inside themselves for who knows what. They begin and end with with a ringing declaration of the purpose of God in Christ and the fulfilment of that purpose. Shouldn’t this be the way we begin and end a service of worship?

Look at Paul’s letters. They begin with the apostle’s saying, “Grace and peace”. They end with the very same affirmation. Grace is the faithfulness of God whereby God keeps his promise to be our God and not give up on us. Grace points to God’s mercy-riddled steadfastness. Peace, shalom, is God’s end-time restoration of the creation when everything which contradicts the love of God and the truth of God, everything which harasses God’s people, will be dispelled forever. Every epistle begins and ends with the pronouncement of grace and peace.

What happens in the middle of the epistle? Highly disturbing stuff. In Corinth one parishioner was committing incest and appeared not to be the slightest bit upset about it. Some women in the congregation were dressing like streetwalkers and speaking out with comparable brazenness. Some charismatics were trying to turn the service of worship into an emotional exhibition.

In Galatia some church-members were bent on circumcising everything in sight, thinking that in order to be a Christian you first had to become a Jew. Paul was so angry about this that he boiled over and wrote, “If you are so knife-happy why don’t you go all the way and castrate yourselves?” In Colosse some church folk had decided to go in for asceticism: bizarre diets and silly self-denials, none of which was going to help their discipleship at all.

Nevertheless, at the conclusion of every epistle Paul speaks of grace, and only of grace. In other words, regardless of what silliness is going on in congregational life, however painful the truth he has to tell, however ridiculously some people have skewed the gospel, he concludes it all by commending his people to the faithfulness of their God who has promised never to fail them or forsake them. Isn’t this how we should conclude our service of worship?

V: — This morning it remains for us to hear how we are to sing. We are to sing with the same exuberance, ardour and unselfconsciousness that intoxicated people sing with at a party. Paul noted how many of the townspeople in the city of Ephesus became drunk regularly. He told the Christians in Ephesus that they shouldn’t be filled with fire-water; they should be filled with the Spirit (capital “S”!), “singing and making melody to the Lord with all your heart, always and for everything giving thanks in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God the Father.”

Centuries earlier still the psalmist had cried, “Sing praises to God, sing praises.” Isaac Watts, perhaps the best hymnwriter in the English-speaking world, said, “Let those refuse to sing who never knew our God.”

F I N I S

Victor A. Shepherd
October 1993

TAMBOURINE/TIMBREL God’s deliverance of Israel from soul-destroying slavery in innermost Egypt; God’s rescue of Israel from Pharaoh’s cruelty at the shores of the Red Sea; no event would ever root itself more deeply or fix itself more securely in Israel’s consciousness. To this day Passover is a festival in Jewish homes, a day of rejoicing, frolicking, and even fun-and-games for children.

Miriam, a prophet in Israel, was one of the first to magnify Passover celebrations. She grabbed a tambourine and began to dance. In no time scores of others followed suit. The book of Exodus tells us that “Miriam … took a timbrel in hand; and all the women went out after her with timbrels and dancing. And Miriam sang to them, `Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; the horse and the rider he has thrown into the sea.'”

In Israel of old the tambourine provided the rhythm for dancing. People danced whenever they beheld something magnificent at the hand of God.

When David came home after a major victory over the Philistines people turned out for a ticker-tape parade; as their hero passed before them they danced unselfconsciously.

The unselfconscious dancing of David’s admirers, however, was nothing compared to the unrestrained dancing of David himself a few months later. After their initial defeat, the Philistines regrouped, raided Israel, and carried off the Ark of the Covenant, the Ark being the sign of God’s presence among his people. When David’s men managed to wrest the Ark away from the Philistines and bring it back, David’s elation soared. He danced. The English text says, “He danced.” The Hebrew text, however, says, “He whirled about.” He leapt, he cavorted with greater agility than an acrobat. (David wasn’t into ballroom “gliding”; he had passion!)

Michal, his wife, on the other hand, had none. Michal was Saul’s daughter, a blue-blood, aristocratic. Compared to her David was a vulgar oaf who came from a social class 16 levels below hers. Then why had she married him? He was everybody’s hero. Once she was married, however, she found out that David loved to dance, while she couldn’t dance at all. Michal couldn’t dance for two reasons. One, she had no passion in her; two, the Ark of the Covenant meant nothing to her. (If the Ark had meant something to her, she would have had passion in her.) To be sure, the Ark of the Covenant was only the sign of God’s presence; it was God’s presence that mattered unspeakably. Yet because God mattered supremely to David, the Ark mattered too. But not for Michal. It didn’t matter simply because David’s God mattered less to her. She could never have written, “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want… for God’s goodness and mercy will drive my life for as long as I have breath”; she didn’t have it in her. When David wept his heart out over his misadventure with Bathsheba and wrote through his tears, “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow”, Michal didn’t weep one tear. She didn’t have any in her.

Michal never knew David’s God. For this reason she was deaf to the song in her husband’s heart. Those who are deaf always despise those who dance, don’t they? When David danced and his kilt flew up and the servant-girls snickered at his knickers Michal sneered, “You jerk!” David replied, “What’s your problem? I was dancing before the Lord. Nothing else matters.”

One thousand years later Jesus told a story about a young man who became sick of home; in a few months — poor now, degraded, humiliated — he was homesick; then he was home again. Sick of home, homesick, home. His father threw the biggest party the village had ever seen: a feast, music, dancing.

Shouldn’t we dance when someone dear to us finally bows to God and is restored to the Father and admitted to his household and family? Shouldn’t we dance when we ourselves are the person who is home at last, and home forever?

TRUMPET I want with all my heart to be a pacifist (believe it or not). I am almost “there”, almost a pacifist by conviction, when I happen to see again a film clip of little children huddled on a railway platform anywhere in Europe. Distraught parents are trying to comfort the children, trying so very hard not to let their dread betray the false hope with which they can ease their children for a day or two. As soon as I see once more a film clip of this scene, my pacifism vanishes.

Recently I was discussing the U.S. Civil War with a parishioner. We were talking about the never-before-seen horrors that emerged in the civil war. The new horror was threefold.

One, the machine gun. It cut men down like a scythe. No soldier could escape a weapon that fired hundreds of bullets per minute.

Two, the pre-set artillery fuse. Prior to the civil war artillery shells exploded upon impact with the ground. When the shell exploded, the shrapnel flew upwards and outwards. The safest place to be was flat on the ground. The smart soldier lay down during an artillery barrage and didn’t lift his head so much as one inch. Then the new shell was invented. The shell’s fuse was pre-set to detonate the shell in mid-air, 200 feet above the ground. Now shrapnel hurled down on the soldier. He couldn’t hide. Lying down was no protection at all. And in the civil war, he had no protection for his head. During the fiercest fighting there were 25,000 casualties per day.

Three, the phenomenal increase in psychiatric breakdown. This horror was the result of the first two. In previous wars relatively few soldiers had collapsed psychiatrically. Now they were collapsing in droves. During the civil war psychiatric casualties outnumbered physical casualties three-to-one. Hundreds of thousands of 20 year-old fellows would be deranged for life.

The parishioner with whom I was discussing all of this remarked, “Then there was no justification for the civil war!” Whereupon I told her a story about Abraham Lincoln. One day Lincoln stood with the crowd at a slave-auction in New Orleans. Male slaves were auctioned off at a good price. Then a female slave was led up onto the platform. She was young and healthy and strong; would be useful in the cotton fields. She had a six month-old baby in her arms. A plantation owner said to the auctioneer, “I’ll take the woman — but get rid of the child. The child will only distract the mother from her work.” And so mother and child were separated, never to see each other again. Lincoln returned home and swore he would stop at nothing to overturn this iniquitous practice.

Twenty-five thousand casualties per day; hundreds of thousands of young men deranged for life. Was it worth it? Should we prefer to see a slave-auction with a baby ripped away from its frantic mother?

St.Paul writes in I Corinthians 14, “If the trumpet gives an indistinct sound, who will get ready for battle?” I know, the conflicts he had in mind didn’t concern Jewish children in Eastern Europe or black children in North America. Nevertheless, there does come a time when the sound of the trumpet must be distinct lest someone think he has an excuse for not showing up when he should.

The conflict Paul refers to immediately is that spiritual conflict which rages in the heart of every believer. For believers would never agree with Oscar Wilde that the best way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. (Yield to it, and the temptation is over!) Jesus sweat in Gethsemane until the sweat poured off him like blood from a forehead gash. Jesus wrestled with the evil one for 40 days in a contest to see who was going to face down whom.

We are called to do as much ourselves. The trumpet must sound a distinctive note — or else the sleepyheads among us might forget there’s a battle to be fought!

In fact there are countless battles to be fought in the name of Christ. Some of them all Christians are called to fight. Other battles only a few Christians are called to fight. (For instance, the few who are extraordinarily gifted intellectually are to meet the intellectual challenges of a world that thinks its self-understanding to be the only understanding possible.) And then there is that one battle that the individual Christian is to fight: the battle against that one besetting sin that the individual alone knows about, surrender to which is unthinkable.

“If the trumpet gives an indistinct sound, who will get ready for battle?” The trumpet-note must be as unmistakable as it is undeniable.

HARP Israel was — and is — unreservedly grateful for its release from Egypt. Yet Israel was not so disgusted at Pharaoh as to disdain everything Egyptian. Israel left Egypt with Egypt’s favourite musical instrument, the harp.

Throughout scripture the harp is the instrument of comfort and consolation. When King Saul was overcome by what is spoken of as an “evil spirit”, David helped Saul by playing on his harp. Now the evil spirit that overcame Saul was no small matter: Saul would become suspicious, then agitated, then paranoid, finally murderous. The harp defused his explosiveness and suffused peace throughout him.

Last October, when we honoured Isaac Watts, we learned that Watts wrote not only hundreds of hymns but also many different kinds or classifications of hymns. One classification he referred to as “Hymns of Consolation”. These “Hymns of Consolation” sing not so much about God in his glory as they do about us in our need, us in the comfort God lends us. Two of Watts’s better-known “consolation” hymns are “When I survey the wondrous cross” and “O God, our help in ages past”.

Did Watts write these hymns merely because he thought other people needed them? I think not. I am sure he wrote them also for himself. Watts, we learned last October, was mentally ill episodically. There were long periods when he had to be absent from his pulpit because he was in “different space”; very different space. Plainly he didn’t write hymns when he was ill. When healthier, however, he penned words that will comfort people until the day of our Lord’s appearing relieves them definitively.

I have been a pastor for 25 years. As I am rendered speechless at the “clobbering” life hands people, I am not at all amazed that some people break down; I am amazed that many do not.

The harp has its place. Hymns of consolation have their place. They aren’t the only hymns we should sing; they aren’t the chief hymns we should sing. But we should never be without them.

Think of some of the better-known consolation hymns. For instance, “Jesus, thou joy of loving hearts” — with its fourth stanza, “Our restless spirits yearn for thee, where’er our changeful lot is cast.” And then there is Charles Wesley’s fine hymn, “Jesus, lover of my soul”, with a poignant second stanza:

Other refuge have I none,
Hangs my helpless soul on thee.
Leave, ah! Leave me not alone;
Still support and comfort me.

And perhaps the most haunting of all, because written out of palpable anguish,

Come, ye disconsolate, where’er ye languish.
Come to, the mercy-seat, fervently kneel.
Here, bring your wounded hearts; here, tell your anguish.
Earth has no sorrows that heaven cannot heal.

The harp has its place.

FLUTE/OBOE/”PIPE” Flute-like instruments (i.e., woodwinds) were used at weddings and funerals, events where people are most touched, most moved.

Let’s think for a minute about weddings. In ancient Israel a wedding was regarded as the most significant human event anyone could share in or witness, as well as the most joyful event. Because a wedding was the most joyful event in Israel, the prophets used the absence of wedding-joy as a vivid picture of national disasters. Whenever the prophets had to wake up the people to the bad times God’s judgement was bringing upon the nation, the prophets horrified the people not by saying that the interest rate was going to rise or the stock market was going to fall; they said, “There shall no more be heard in the land the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride.”

Israel of old knew that there is nothing like a wedding, just because there is nothing like marriage. Marriage is the most significant human undertaking anyone can enter upon; it is also the most joyful. A rabbi’s instruction was deemed so important that nothing was allowed to interrupt it; nothing, that is, except a wedding. If a wedding procession wound through the village the rabbi and his students suspended their exploration of the word of God and fell in with the procession. They magnified the wedding-celebration and soaked up the joy surrounding it.

Scripture speaks profoundly of marriage. “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife; the two shall be come one, one flesh.” Marriage entails radical exposure to each other, radical vulnerability before each other, radical commitment to each other, radical penetration of each other.

In the Hebrew bible marriage is the commonest metaphor for faith. If marriage is the commonest metaphor for faith, then faith means that God and I, God and you, are radically exposed to each other, radically vulnerable before each other, radically committed to each other; it means we radically penetrate each other, right to the other’s innermost heart.

To be aware of this can only mean that we must consecrate ourselves to God anew.

Victor A. Shepherd
April 1995

 

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

1756-1791

I: —  A French atheist, proud of his atheism, who heard the seven year old concert pianist in Paris exclaimed, “I have seen a miracle.”  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wasn’t a miracle in the biblical sense of the word; nevertheless, he was a marvel.

   Today he couldn’t be exploited and exhibited as he was in his childhood.  (After all, today people who are highly unusual physically, for instance, aren’t allowed to be exploited and exhibited in circus side-shows.)  Mozart’s father, however, was less wise and therefore less kind.  The elder Mozart, himself a composer and violinist of no little ability, quickly recognized that his son was extraordinary.  Mozart’s sister, Marianne (five years older), was gifted too.  Father Mozart sent the two children on a concert tour that lasted three and a half years.  Crowds sat agape as the seven year old boy and his twelve year old sister played two-piano duets breathtakingly.  Paris, London, Amsterdam, Geneva, Lausanne, Zurich, Winterthur, Schaffhausen; at last the concert tour was over and the exhausted children were home again.

   Mozart was born 27^th January 1756 in the city of Salzburg, Austria, and was named Johannes Chrysostomos Wolfgangus Theophilos Mozart.  “Theophilos”, Greek for “lover of God”, was Latinized to “Amadeus”.  Thereafter he was known by his last three names, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

   His father began instructing him in music theory when he was three.  By age four he was playing minuets flawlessly and had composed his first piano concerto.  His father looked at his son’s composition and remarked that wonderful as it was on paper, it was so difficult that no one would be able to play it.  Whereupon the four year old played it.  When he was eight he was asked to accompany a singer in an Italian aria.  He had never heard it before.  Still, he improvised each repetition by developing it from the previous stanza.  When the singer had finished, Mozart kept playing the piece, fully scored, ten times over, each time with a different variation.  He would have continued playing in his inner transport and untrammelled spontaneity had not the adults in the room stopped him.

   In 1782 Wolfgang married Constanze Weber.  His father vehemently opposed the marriage, vowing he would have nothing to do with her; thereafter he treated Constanze contemptuously if he had reason to deal with her at all.  Wolfgang, for his part, wrote his father, “I am just beginning to live.”   Her life would never be easy.  In six of her nine years of marriage she would be either pregnant or recovering.  (The longest interval between pregnancies was seventeen months; the shortest (twice), six months.)  In 1789 she was bedridden for weeks with fever, severe nausea, and lameness.  The pseudo-medical treatment prescribed for her was to bathe her feet in water in which the entrails of an animal had been boiled.  The child she was carrying died at birth.  Throughout her life she lacked everyday wisdom, homespun “horse sense”.  Despite her appalling lack of worldly wisdom and her relentless suffering, Constanze remained uncomplaining.

   The young husband and wife were happy.  They were both silly, frivolous, and financially unteachable, apparently a perfect match.  They moved twelve times in their nine years of marriage, house-rent being one of the financial items they could never quite manage.  

   In the social pecking order of eighteenth century Europe musicians were generally disdained, being one step (but only one) above the bricklayer or stonemason or blacksmith; certainly nowhere near the gentry, let alone the nobility.  Constanze belonged to the same social class and knew it.  She and Wolfgang never strove to leave it.  Whereas Beethoven was socially ambitious and committed notable social blunders in his zeal for social climbing, Mozart didn’t blunder in that he scorned the game; he never cared a fig for ingratiating himself with social superiors.

   In some respects he never grew up.  Emotional immaturity was as natural to him as musical sophistication.  On one occasion he was practising the piano in an auditorium when he suddenly took note of the silence of those who had come to hear him rehearse as they hung on every note.  He thought these people entirely too serious, entirely too adulatory; after all, he was only practising.  Whereupon he jumped up on the back of a seat and capered around the room from seat-back to seat-back, all the while meowing like a cat.

   Despite the people who recognized his gifts, and despite his fondness for partying, Mozart was so very isolated that it hurts even to read of it.  Other musicians envied him and shunned him.  Salieri, a court-composer of vastly less ability, plotted intrigues to ensure Wolfgang’s non-recognition.  As has already been mentioned, his father detested Constanze.  (Later she burned every letter the older man had sent to his son.)  His sister, not wishing to alienate her father, took the father’s side and was barely civil to Constanze.

   So lonely was Mozart that his heart leapt when he found recognition and affirmation in a bird.  He was passing a pet shop in Salzburg when he heard a bird chirping a few notes from one of his piano sonatas.  Now only recently he had decided to attempt a measure of financial responsibility by writing each expenditure in a notebook, hoping thereby to see exactly where his money was going and get himself and his wife beyond their pecuniary precariousness.  The notebook shows careful entries of small sums for pencils or buttons or food; then a huge entry for the bird.  Mozart had done it again: bankrupted himself unthinkingly, recent resolution thrown to the wind, as he knew he had to have this bird.  Having dutifully jotted the purchase price in his notebook, he wrote down the musical notes he heard the bird chirp, commenting that the bird did not sing a G-sharp and several grace-notes.  Underneath all of this he penned, “Das war schoen” — “That was beautiful.”  The bird lived three years.  When it died he mourned it as he was to mourn little else.  

   A talent as rich as his would always ensure isolation.  His music pioneered new harmonies.  His grasp of counterpoint left people gasping.  (Counterpoint is the art of writing two different melodies in the one piece of music.)  Whereas many composer/performers wrote a few piano or violin pieces and then took them on the concert tour, playing them over and over to different audiences in different cities, Mozart found that the more he performed the more he was inspired to write.  As a result he frequently wrote new sonatas and concertos for each performance on a concert tour.  When he did repeat a piano item with orchestral accompaniment, the orchestra, of course, played the music he had scored for it.  Mozart himself, however, played what he had written for himself the first night only; from the second night on he improvised, composing on the spot, nothing written at all, his on-the-spot creation fitting perfectly into the orchestral score.  Each night there was the same orchestral accompaniment but a brand new piano rendition, never heard before, and never to be heard again, since nothing was written and nothing recorded.

   Unlike Rachminoff who had huge hands, Mozart’s hands, like his body, were small.  So dextrous were they nonetheless that they caused the most difficult passages to resemble “flowing oil”, in the words of the little man himself.  At the same time, his wonderfully able hands were useless for virtually everything else.  And yet at the dinner table his wife customarily cut up his meat, a knife and fork being too difficult for him to coordinate.

   On one occasion he asked a fellow-composer if he could look over the latter’s new symphony.  The man refused to let Mozart see it.  Whereupon our friend went to a concert hall where it was being performed, heard it once, returned home and wrote out every note for every instrument.

   Despite his financial disasters and his isolation at the hands of the musical fraternity he never lost his confidence.  In fact he was self-assured in a way that others found off-putting.  When the Austrian emperor, no less, remarked that an aria had too many notes in it, Mozart replied (to the emperor), “…there are just as many notes in it as there ought to be.”  (Wolfgang, remember, wasn’t a social climber.)

   Most composers created music at the point of a pencil, writing and erasing over and over until they got down what they wanted.  Mozart, however, created exclusively in his head; then he wrote it all out once, once only, never erasing a note.  Not surprisingly, he found the writing of music mechanical drudgery and a bore.  When asked about his musical inspiration and his manner of composing he remarked that he had very little to say about it.  “Travelling in a carriage, walking after a good meal, during the night when I can’t sleep; it’s on such occasions that my ideas flow best and flow most abundantly.  Whence and how they come I know not; nor can I force them…. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once.”  As soon as he had heard the full orchestra in his head at once, all that remained to be done, he liked to say, was mere scribbling.

   There was no form of music which he didn’t write superbly.  Symphonies, quartets, trios; piano, violin, cello, clarinet and trumpet concertos; operas, church music.  Indeed it was as church musician that he acquired what he had long wanted: a job with a salary and therefore a regular income.  As Master of the Chapel in Salzburg he wrote music for the Sunday services.  He and the archbishop, however, could not get along.  Their relationship worsened until in May, 1780, having had the long-awaited steady job for a year and four months, he was fired.  

   While our soloist is singing Mozart’s church music today and the congregation a hymn-tune, relatively little of his church music is sung in Protestant worship.  His church music is largely the musical setting for the Roman Catholic mass.  Furthermore, the Protestantism Mozart was exposed to was exceedingly dilute.  The rich gospel of the Reformation, addressed to the entire person, had given way to a dry, cold, mental abstraction, little more than an intellectual parlour game employing a religious vocabulary.  It led Mozart to comment that Protestant Christianity was a head-trip that left people unmoved, inert.  

   Another critical observation was even more telling.  The Lutheran recovery of the biblical truth of justification — namely, that God justifies sinners or puts them in the right with himself as they seize in faith the crucified one whom God has given as provision for sinners — this glorious dimension of the gospel was distorted and diluted until “justification” was nothing more than the thinnest coat of whitewash applied to sin, which sin was deemed only skin-deep and didn’t matter anyway.  For this reason Mozart commented that Protestants rarely understood the core of the Roman mass, “O Lamb of God that takest away the sins of the world.”

   His poverty worsened.  In order to earn money he gave piano lessons to the children of aristocrats, virtually all of whom were without musical talent.  One fellow, however, pleaded with him for lessons, and Mozart recognized enormous talent in the youngster; but Mozart’s father was dying and he felt he couldn’t spare the time or the concentration which so promising a pupil needed.  He declined to take on this one outstanding student.  The student’s name was Beethoven.

  Wolfgang began selling as much as he could part with.  His long, green velvet coat with the flared skirt, plus his red velvet coat (his favourite), even his viola — he sold them all, his viola fetching only a few dollars.  Between major compositions he dashed off little ditties, tunes for what had become the new rage in Austria, mechanical music boxes with revolving metal cylinders.  These music boxes sat on a woman’s dresser and tinkled a tune while she brushed her hair.  Surprisingly, he was well paid for these.  Still, he was so far in debt that he was beyond help.

   By now he was not only poor but sick.  His illness worsened rapidly.  In the last year of his life, knowing himself in a race against death (as he often said), he produced a torrent of glorious music.  At the same time, with only months left to him, he performed 20 two-hour piano concerts in four weeks.  Very ill now, he wrote to a friend in England, “I go on writing because composition tires me less than resting.”  A stranger commissioned him to write a Requiem.  He put the finishing touches to his last opera, The Magic Flute, and began work on his final piece of church music.  Sick unto death, he summoned three men who sat with him for several afternoons while he hummed the parts and dictated the score.  When he whispered to Constanze, “I have the taste of death on my tongue”, she summoned a priest.  He died at 1:00 o’clock in the morning, 5th December 1791, aged thirty-five, and was buried in a pauper’s grave, unmarked.  

   His debts were massive.  The emperor sponsored a benefit concert for Constanze, as did his old friend Haydn, and the money gave her a small monthly pension.  Her health improved now, and she lived until she was seventy-nine.  Whereupon she was buried in the grave of the man who had afflicted her for years and whose letters she had burned, her husband’s father.

Mozart’s life was short.  His published works number six hundred and twenty-six.  We shall never know how much more music he wrote which his elbow knocked onto the floor and a broom later swept up.  And of course we shall never hear the music he played but never wrote.

   Music-experts regard him as the most gifted composer ever.  Leonard Bernstein, American composer, conductor and pianist, maintains that compared to other outstanding composers Mozart resembles a deity who kissed the earthy briefly and then departed.

   This little deity, however, was humble too.  All his life Mozart was especially fond of people below his social station.  He loved to play for sick, elderly people in nursing homes.  “The unlearned will appreciate my music without knowing why”, he commented.  They did.  They do.  And they always will.

II: — Why are we honouring Mozart today in a service of worship?  Music isn’t the Word of God.  To cherish Mozart’s gift isn’t to relish the gospel.  Then why do we bother with him at Sunday worship?

(i)  In the first place, while music is not the gospel it does assist us in our praise of God.  Architecture also assists us in our praise of God.  Sunday by Sunday we worship God in this building.  It cost much to build and it costs much to maintain.  Yet we continue to maintain it and gather within it inasmuch as it facilitates our worship of God.  Music does as much.  

   It always has.  Our Hebrew foreparents knew this.  They used the flute at weddings and funerals; in other words, the flute was used in services of worship which had to do with the extremes of elevated joy or piercing grief.  The tambourine was used in conjunction with dancing, and was always associated with gladness.  The trumpet was used to remind the people of God’s summons to spiritual conflict.

   We sing here Sunday by Sunday just because singing expresses a devotion, an ardour, a response of the heart so deep that merely spoken words can’t do justice to it.  The lyrics of our hymns are poetry.  But we don’t stand and recite poetry together week after week; we sing it.  Poetry which is sung comes from depths in us even deeper than poetry which is said.  Music assists us in our praise of God.  This being the case, it’s only fitting that we recognize someone who was musically gifted above all others.

(ii)  In the second place Mozart’s music is known for its structure, its order.  The order of his music reminds us that our world remains ordered by God’s providence and God’s mercy.  To be sure, in the wake of the Fall the world is disordered; not superficially disordered, but profoundly disordered.  Sunday by Sunday worshippers hear me illustrate and analyse the world’s disorder and also hear me point, I trust, to its recovery in Jesus Christ.  Disordered as the world is, however, it’s never as disordered as it could be.  It’s never disordered entirely.  If it were, existence would be impossible.  

   Everyone knows that life is impossible amidst chaos.  A completely chaotic world would be an uninhabitable world.  Scripture insists over and over that humankind’s wickedness imparts an element of chaos into human existence.  Then as one generation’s wickedness is added to another’s, why doesn’t chaos mount until it overtakes us and life becomes impossible?  Because God himself, in his goodness and patience and mercy, constantly keeps chaos at bay as he preserves order enough to let us live.

   The Hebrew mind always thinks concretely.  When it thinks of chaos it envisages water, torrents of water, both coming down from above and welling up from below.  When the two waters meet, chaos overtakes the world and life is impossible.  It is the testimony of scripture that God, by his goodness, patience and mercy, holds the “waters” back and preserves order, order enough to let us live and work.

   When I hear Mozart’s music, with its marvellous structure, its exquisite order, I know it to be a reflection of that order by which God preserves the world in his mercy.   However fallen the world is, however tarnished, weakened and vicious it might be, it is never this entirely; if the world were this entirely, it would no longer be good.  But God created it good and pronounced it good.  Its goodness remains even in the wake of the Fall, for otherwise it couldn’t be the theatre of God’s glory.

   Mozart’s music embodies an order, intricately worked out, subtle to be sure, yet always balanced and elemental.  His music is a token of that order by which God preserves a world which, if left to itself, could only collapse into chaos.  World?  Your life and mine: left to itself, without God’s preservation — it too could only collapse into chaos.

(iii)  Lastly, Mozart’s music is to be received with thanksgiving simply because it’s a thing of beauty.  Beauty is a gift of God.  Not the gift (Jesus Christ, with all that he does for us and in us, is the gift); but a gift nonetheless, and a glorious gift.

  Think for a minute of the Lord’s Prayer.  We are commanded to pray for daily bread.  Daily bread is not the bread of life.  (Our Lord is this.)  But to say that daily bread isn’t the bread of life isn’t to say that daily bread is unimportant.  Indeed, so important is daily bread that we can’t live without it, and must ask God for it without ceasing.

   Just as bread is food for the stomach so music is food for the mind and heart.  Music too is a kind of “bread” that humankind needs and for which we are to thank God.

   Do you ever think about the cloak which our Lord wore?  It wasn’t a potato sack.  It was beautiful, so beautiful that the soldiers who stripped him didn’t throw it aside.  Instead they gambled for it, each one wanting to be the lucky fellow to take it home.

   Do you recall what Mozart wrote in his notebook about the bird that could chirp a few notes of his music?  “That was beautiful.”  How much more beautiful was the gift of the man whose piano-playing resembled “flowing oil” and whose compositions are without peer.

At one point Mozart’s father, exasperated with his son, wrote to Wolfgang, “It’s always too much or too little with you, never the middle of the road.”  The older man was correct on one thing: for Wolfgang it was never the middle of the road.  But he was wrong when he said that with Wolfgang Amadeus it was always either too much or too little.  It was certainly never too little.  Then was it ever too much?  There can’t be too much of Mozart’s gift.

There can’t be too much of the gift; there can’t be too much of the love our Lord poured out upon us at the cross and continues to pour out.  There can’t be too much of the love we must pour out upon him and upon one another.  Love, like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart himself, is always a spendthrift.

Victor Shepherd   Updated July 2014