Music in Worship. A sermon for a Choral Festival.

"I will sing with the Spirit, and I will sing with the understanding also." (1 Cor 14:15).

Music has always had a special place in the life and witness of the Church throughout the ages. We can trace it back through plainsong, psalms and hymns to the pages of the New Testament and beyond.

Music accompanied the birth of our Lord. The Angel song "Glory to God in the highest".

When the disciples met in the upper room and Jesus took the bread and wine, their last act before going out to the Mount of Olives was to sing a Passover hymn - perhaps the Psalms 113-118.

We think of Paul and Silas in jail at Phillipi and the song they sang at midnight.

And elsewhere, of Paul’s words "I will sing with the Spirit and I will sing with the understanding also" (1 Cor 14:15).

Music is firmly grounded in the worship of the Church. It is both and aid to worship and a means of worship.

The Psalmist wrote: "Praise him with trumpets, Praise him with harps and lyres, Praise him with drums and dancing, Praise him with harps and flutes." (Psalm 150) And today we would add "Praise him with steel band, bohran and violin."

As an aid to worship: There is the use of organ, piano and orchestral instruments. - Music that requires instruction and that is for the congregation to listen to.

On the Eighth Sunday before Christmas in the APB Lectionary the theme is "The Fall of Man." (In one parish) the organ voluntary carefully chosen by the organist was "Adam’s Fall." May I ask why the organ voluntary should always come at the end of the service with people walking out during it? Would there not be room to have it sometime in place of an anthem or in Presbyterian fashion at the Offertory? Or perhaps we should encourage the congregation to remain in their seats until the voluntary is over.

As a means of worship: The hymns, psalms and chants that are for everyone to join in. No matter how great the ability of the choir we must not deprive the people of the parts of the service that belong to them. The job of the choir is to give a lead to the people, not to exclude them from worship. A proper balance is what is required.

Music that is suitable for worship is not confined to one particular style. Of course we need to honour, play and sing the great music of the past, but also we need to be open to the music (and art) of the present and the future. For example: The work of Brian Foley, Michael Hodgetts, Elizabeth Poston, Edmund Rubbra, Lennox Berkeley and Fred Pratt Green to name but a few, - Do these feature at all in our yearly programme of work? Is our musical repertoire continuing to expand, or did it die 50 years ago?

Hymn books: The present Church Hymnal was produced in 1961, before the era of change in music and liturgy. In our choice of hymns most of us use about one third of those in the book (usually the minister’s favourites). The hymns we use should be chosen monthly on a planned basis, rather than the ad hoc choice and repetition of the same 30 "popular" hymns. There are also a lot of new hymns to be discovered and introduced to our people. The new supplement Irish Church Praise helps to widen our range of choice a little bit, but is still rather limited in its scope, as is the nature of any small publication. It remains to be seen whether the proposed New Church Hymnal planned for Autumn 2000 will be the equal of what is already available on the ecumenical musical scene. Books like Hymns for Today’s Church (1987), With One Voice (The Australian Hymnbook), Hymns and Psalms (1983) or The New Catholic Hymnal (1971).

Children’s Hymns are more of a problem. We have been aware of that for the past 35 years, although we do not seem to have done very much about it! Children in church should be both seen and heard. We need to recognise that children are used to singing bright, lively hymns in day school, yet, unless your parish is very different from mine, when they come to Church are they faced with the same dreadfully dull range of Victorian hymns in the children’s section of our standard hymn book. One remedy is to use Sing to God, Junior Praise, or some other modern collection of children’s hymns. Another is to use an overhead projector to display the words, not forgetting of course to subscribe to the church music licensing scheme. I would hope that such modest innovation would not raise too many protests from those who are always ready to object to change on behalf of the elderly and the very young.

I want to refer briefly to the place of Anthems and Canticles. It may be self-evident but these too should not be chosen simply on an ad-hoc basis. They must be planned as carefully as the readings, hymns and prayers and relate to what comes before or after them. Even for choirs with small resources, there is life beyond the Alexander no. 3 Hymnbook and Redemption Songs which some of us know and love.

We are coming to appreciate the variety of the additional new canticles available since 1973, where they have been introduced. The "new" services have been around for 27 years. There is a wider range of music available for them now, but if you still can’t find something to suit you can always write your own.

One of the developments of recent years is our understanding and appreciation of the heritage of others: e.g. both the Metrical and Gelineau Psalms and the Taize style of psalm singing. For me one of the most moving spiritual experiences was to hear Palestrina’s Mass Aeterna Christi Munera in the setting for which it was written, as part of the action of the liturgy, incense and all.

I have kept my word for the choir to the end. You are the most important organisation in the Church. Membership requires total dedication and hard work. May I say how much we as Clergy appreciate the time, effort and hard work that you put in week by week to ensure the offering of your very best in the worship of Almighty God.

Psalm 145: or Psalm 93 Eph. 5:15-20. Prayer 1607 Parish Prayers.