October 28, 2007
Isaiah 58:6-9

The Rev. David A. Davis
“Claimed By God's Glory””

            The members of the choir have the advantage today. Most Sundays the choir has the advantage, actually. When they’re wearing robes, they don’t have to think much about what to wear to church. When they sit way up there in the loft, and the sermon’s not quite up to snuff, they don’t have to worry about the preacher catching them falling asleep. To be fair, receiving communion for the choir is always an adventure and they surely don’t have the safest, most accessible seats in the house. But there are advantages. For instance, the liturgical seasons always expand for members of the choir. They work on Advent and Christmas music way early. The same with Lent and Easter. Easter’s not a morning. Its weeks of rehearsals when you sing in the choir. Choir members get an appetizer of resurrection and it comes amid the dull winter doldrums of Lent. 
            When it comes to Bach’s Cantata #39, the choir has the advantage this morning. They figured out a long time ago how the music in Movement #1 bursts forth just as the words of the prophet Isaiah rise in the text; “Then shall your light break forth like the dawn.” With the help of their leader, they have noticed how there in that first movement, Bach introduces the feel of a dance, a festive celebration. Just as the destitute are brought into the house, a party breaks out. The dance comes after the dissonant sounds that the choir sings as they voice a repeated reference to those who are suffering. Indeed, early on Noel had the choir hearing the breaking of bread in the very first notes of the orchestra. Cantata 39. “Break bread with the hungry.”
            I have spent a whole lot more time in the pulpit than I have in the choir loft. But still, I often associate biblical texts with a tune in my ear. II Kings 19:12, the still small voice that came to Elijah? I hear a soprano line from Mendelssohn. When I read “Every valley shall be exalted, every mountain made low” from Isaiah 40, I still hear the anthem sung when I was in the high school church choir. My guess is that when anyone in the choir comes upon these words from the prophet Isaiah, when they read them, when they hear them read, when a member of the choir thinks of Isaiah and the “fast that I choose” says the Lord, when they hear the prophet ask “Is it not to break bread with the hungry”, they are not going to just hear the words. They will hear Bach, too!  The prophetic Word of the Lord and the beauty of Bach!
            Beauty; an apt term for the morning of a Bach Cantata. Lou Mitchell, a friend and colleague over at the First Presbyterian Church of Cranbury, is a Jonathan Edwards scholar. When Edwards, the Puritan Theologian of the 18th century, was the President of the University next door, he would have been the preacher to Presbyterians here in Princeton. Lou Mitchell introduced me some time ago to Jonathan Edwards’ work on beauty, how beauty rests at the core of Edwards understanding of the religious experience. Jonathan Edwards suggested that humankind comprehends beauty through a “new sense”, not one of the five (sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell) but a new sense, the “sense of the heart.”
Edwards used a metaphor to describe the “sense of the heart”. He wrote about how a person comes to know the sweetness of honey. A person can know in their head that honey is sweet. But there is difference between the rationale judgment that honey is sweet and “having a sense of its sweetness.” The sense of sweetness only comes with knowing how honey tastes. Sweetness comes with experience, and in the experience some bit of sweetness is passed on in the one who knows now that honey is sweet!
Sense knowledge. Heart knowledge. For Edwards, the sense of the heart is the means by which God’s glory, God’s beauty can be apprehended, approached, comprehended. And when tasting of God’s beauty with the sense of the heart, something of that beauty is imparted, passed on to the one experiencing, the one receiving, the one being claimed by God’s glory.
            The glory of the Lord shall claim you. “Then shall your light break forth like the dawn, and your health shall swiftly grow, and your righteousness shall go before you, and the glory of the Lord shall claim you.” That’s a close translation of the German text utilized by Bach in Cantata 39. A more familiar English translation of the Isaiah quote comes in what I read to you, “The glory of the Lord shall be your read guard” The Hebrew text, the particular supports either translation. A military connotation of protection or an agricultural connotation of harvesting. God’s glory has your back. Or the glory of the Lord shall gather you, shall draw you in, shall pluck and harvest you. The beauty of the Lord shall claim you.
            Break bread with hungry. Bring the homeless poor into your house. Clothe the naked. Don’t hide yourself from your kin. Your own kin. As in the hungry, the homeless poor, the naked. Your own flesh and blood. Loose the bonds of injustice. Break the yokes of oppression. Don’t be all religious just to serve your own interest. Don’t look so holy on a fast day and then stomp all over your workers. Look! You fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting, such religious ritual, such apparently holy behavior will not make your voice heard on high. Will you call this fast, a day acceptable to the Lord? The Word of the Lord. Isaiah 58.
And “Blessed are they who out of mercy attend to the stranger’s affliction, are compassionate with the poor, and pray faithfully for them to God!” J.S. Bach. Cantata #39. Movement #7.  The beauty of Bach and the prophetic Word of the Lord!
            My wife Cathy and I have been leading one of our Disciple Bible Study Groups on Wednesday nights. The course is “An Invitation to the New Testament”. A few weeks ago we read Paul in Ephesians “that by grace you have saved through faith not by works lest anyone should boast” and we also read all of James; as in “faith without works is dead.” Trying to wrap our head around faith and works has now become something of a weekly discussion within our group. Faith and works. It is an appropriate theme for Reformation Sunday! The curriculum writers of our bible study did offer a nice way to neatly package faith and works and their complex relationship, tying them together with a nice theological bow. Despite their best efforts to make us all feel better about the apparent contradictions between Paul and James on faith and works, and to get beyond how Martin Luther wanted to cut James out of the canon, the group has pretty much concluded there is some necessary tension, a paradox when it comes to faith and works in the Christian life; like a choir singing harmonies that intentionally sound a bit harsh to the ear. A faith/works dissonance.
            But there’s really not much of that tension here in Isaiah…breaking bread with the hungry…light breaking forth like the dawn…..the glory of the Lord claiming you....claimed, gathered in, drawn to, captured by the beauty of God. Experiencing the beauty of God in such a way that just a bit of that beauty is imparted to you, it sinks in to your soul, it becomes a part of you. The beauty of God and your heart sense. It’s not the either/or of faith and works, it is the invitation, the gift of participating in God’s beauty. Being claimed by God’s glory and something of that glory then living in the one who has now had just a taste. God’s glory in the hungry being fed, and the homeless poor being housed, and the naked being clothed, and the oppressed being set free. Sharing in God’s beauty, offering your food to the hungry, satisfying the needs of the afflicted, bringing good news to the oppressed, binding up the brokenhearted, proclaiming liberty to the captives, release the prisoners, comforting all who mourn. A part of God’s glory imparted to God’s people. Or in the words of the prophet, “displaying God’s glory” (Is 61:3).
             This week Noel Werner pointed out something that was new to me. In all of the complexity and the texture and the rich harmony of a Bach Cantata, in that depth of a relationship between music and text, orchestra and choir, the kind of depth that reveals something new every time you encounter it, Bach always brought his cantata’s back to a chorale that was rather straightforward, simple may not be the word, but with a clarity of tune, a straightforward harmony in the voice. You will hear just such a chorale in a moment. Often those chorales were familiar hymn tunes. They would ring in the ear and strike a cord in the heart. Bach finished the cantata, so to speak, in the vernacular, with music that invited the listener to a certain restful conclusion, where there could be a sigh, a tune that would reach very deep, a heart song, a sense of the heart. Something of the beauty of Bach living on in the life of the hearer.
            Break your bread with the hungry. Bring the homeless poor into your house. Don’t hide yourself from your own flesh and blood. Work to end poverty everywhere. Advocate for fair and affordable housing. Speak up for accessible and reasonable healthcare care for all who are at risk. Teach those in prison how to read. Support the refugee. Be a voice for the wrongly imprisoned. Stand up to the use of torture. Lift up any who grieve. Walk along with the many who doubt. Welcome and embrace those turned away, shunned, excluded by the world, by the church. Pray for, work for, yearn for, cry out for peace and an end to war.
            Is not this the fast I choose? Break your bread with the hungry. It’s not just the beauty of Bach, is it? For when you’ve been claimed by God’s glory, when you’ve tasted something of the beauty of the Lord, the longing rests very deep within. A heart song. A tune that reaches very deep. A sense of the heart. A longing not just for your soul, but for the world, for the kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven. The kingdom. The beautiful, beautiful kingdom of God.

             

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