Sunday
April 28
The Bach Experience- April 2024
By Marsh Chapel
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The Bach Experience- April 28th, 2024
Cantata: O ewiges Feuer, o Ursprung der Liebe, BWV 34
Dean Hill:
Through this Easter season, Easter tide, you have perhaps noticed, noted, or winced to hear the letter of John, 1 John, amending, redacting, muting and amplifying the gospel of John. You are keen listeners, practiced and adroit, so you will have wondered a bit about this. Why does 1 John nip at the heels of John?
The two ‘books’, John and 1 John, were written by different authors, in different decades, in different circumstances, with different motives. The Gospel acclaims Spirit. The Letter adds in work, ethics, morals, community, tradition, leadership and judgment from on high, rather than judgment by belief and by believer. We may just have, it is important to say, the Gospel as part of the New Testament, with all its radicality, due to its brother named letter, vouching as it were for the sanity of the Gospel. The letter, like James Morrison Witherbee George Dupree, takes good care of its Gospel mother, the very cat’s mother, you see.
The Gospel in chapter 20 revealed the Spirit, elsewhere called Paraclete or Advocate, come upon us, received and with it received the forgiveness of sins. But at the heels, nipping, comes along 1 John in chapter 2, which names the Paraclete or Advocate not as Spirit but as Jesus Christ—the righteous—whose commandments all we are to keep, on pain of disobedience become lying, and truth taken flight. Both read on the same Sunday, within minutes of each other, even as they face each other, in loving disagreement.
The next Sunday, the letter in Chapter 3, on the qui vive and on the attack, spells out again in no uncertain terms that the righteous do the right, handsome is as handsome does. Both read on the same Sunday, within minutes of each other, even as they face each other in loving disagreement, maybe even at daggers drawn.
A week later, the Gospel in chapter 10 acclaimed the pastoral image of the Good Shepherd, whose one glorification on the cross is meant to obliterate the need of any other such, even as the Letter, worried, worried out in later chapter 3, a long and sorry recollection of Cain—Abel’s one-time brother—and the demands of love from one who laid down his life, and with whom and for whom we are then meant to do something of the same. ‘Let us not love in word and speech but in deed and in truth’, says 1 John 3, when the whole of the Gospel says simply ‘love’, says that words outlast deeds, and that speech, that of the glorious Risen, ever routs works. Both read on the same Sunday, within minutes of each other, even as they face each other in loving disagreement, a family row.
And now today, when and where our one Great Gospel, the Spiritual Gospel, counsels ‘abide’ and ‘remain’ in chapter 15, just here the letter of 1 John in chapter 4, fearing antinomial abandon, appends to his own most beautiful love poem, the charge again of lying, of lack of love of brother, of schism that surely created this letter, 1 John, as the spiritualists and the traditionalists, the Gnostics and the ethicists, parted company, one toward the free land of Montanus and Marcion, the other toward Rome and the emerging church, victorious, against which the Gospel was born, bred, written and preached. Both read on the same Sunday, within minutes of each other, even as they face off.
Of course, both are right. Or we would not still need or read them, let alone together. But you are right, too, to feel some neck pain, some whiplash, as Gospel soars and Letter deflates. It is as if the Song of Solomon were being sung by Obadiah.
Still. We are meant to live in Easter, not in Lent. All the disciplines of Lent, the forty and days the ten worship services of Holy Week, and the four of Triduum, and all, they are preparation for the real. The real is joy, the real is love, the real is Easter. Here our outstanding, Pentecostal cantata, inspires, guides and shapes us.
Dr Jarrett, tell us what to listen for and how, now in Easter, with our Sunday Cantata.
Dr. Jarrett:
Today’s Cantata was written for Pentecost, the Christian Holiday that celebrates the Coming of the Holy Spirit and is observed on the 50th Day of Easter, hence Pentecost. In the New Testament, we find record of the first Pentecost in Acts 2. The Holy Spirit arrives by the wind appearing as cloven tongues of fire. And despite the many and varied languages spoken by the early followers of Jesus assembled in Jerusalem, the expression or accent of the Holy Spirit was understood by each hearer according to his own tongue. The Tower of Babel rebuilt. The new Church, the new Body of Christ, of the risen Lord, was to be for all. In John 14, Jesus explains our family tree, so to speak, first by explaining that he himself is of the Father, and that though he will soon return to the Father, another Comforter, also of the Father, will be sent to indwell in hearts of all those who keep the commandment, the Word, and love one another. A radical new intimacy with the Father, through Christ Jesus, will connect the new Church, like vines and branches, as a Body of and in Christ. The Gospel reading for Pentecost that Bach was working with was John 14: 23-31, which culminates in two sayings of Jesus: “Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make. Our abode with him. (Verse 23) and”Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you” (verse 27).
Setting side the brilliant opening movement of today’s cantata, the other four movement are structured around these two sayings of Jesus: Recit No 2 around the idea of Indwelling, with the only aria of the cantata a pastoral rumination of how glorious this will be – Eden restored in each of us. The second recit, No. 4, broadens the indwelling to the new church, with the sign of Peace. The whole of the new church interrupts the baritone’s recitative to take up the new greeting shared by all who choose Love: Peace be with you.
Music of the high Baroque is much like a Swiss clock – there is extraordinary beauty in the clock itself – face and casing – but admiration becomes awe when the extraordinary number of component and moving parts are found to create such clarity and beauty. As an aural guide for Cantata 34, listen for how Bach sets the word Ewiges – or eternal, and at the same time the flickering, darting line sing for the word Feuer – or fire. Notice how Bach sets the word for ‘ignite’ – entzünde – you can almost feel the music spark each time the choir sings it. The trumpet signals the arrival of Christ, as bride-groom, of this most royal of weddings.
The central movement of the cantata, focuses on the rapture of the individual whose body becomes Christ’s Holy Temple. There is a perfection and naturalness of beauty here – directly from the sublimity of Eden’s garden.
The cantata ends in thanks and praise, but not without significant emphasis on Christ’s pronouncement, ‘Peace upon Israel.’
Today we observe two masters whose musical settings give voice to Christ’s wedding invitation. An invitation to all, without amendment or exclusion.
We prepare ourselves for cantata and covenant, in wonder and vulnerability and self-awareness…
Dean Hill:
There may well come a discreet time, for you, as a person of faith, to say something or do something, a time when some somewhat risky and uncomfortable mode of social involvement, or existential engagement, will beckon you.
After 40 years not just 40 days, such has come I believe to my beloved Methodist church, now in General Conference in Charlotte. There is a great whoosh of new life, coming into a church formerly fraught with conflict, and a great excitement of love to love and include ALL. It is the first such quadrennial gathering I have not attended with one exception since 1992. And the most successful. Maybe you just need the right people in the room and outside the room! Maybe it was my fault!
With this cantata, Methodism, at its best, built into the walls of Marsh Chapel, is love divine all loves excelling. Memorize the lines from 1 John 4: 7-12 today.
We once went to preach in a little church high in the Adirondacks, Mountainview UMC. It was one of the churches in the string served by a lone itinerant preacher. Listen to the names. Chasm Falls. Owls Head. Wolf Pond. Mountainview. My, my… (Owls Head, the ice box of the north, is where the New York Times for decades found the coldest temperature on record each winter). Reality squared, just in the names. A story, an old Methodist story, a Pentecostal cantata story, from the 1930’s comes, if memory serves, from Mountainview, a little town at the end of the rail line, where the locomotive turned around to head back downhill. Some farmers, a teacher or three, the druggist, some retirees, a small but loving congregation. They had been saving for ten years to build a new church building to replace their old one, and were just about able to break ground. But after Easter, as annually they did, they had a missionary come, this time from China. He was a gentle spirit, in the manner of Pearl Buck and others. He simply but directly told the Mountainview folk what he had seen in China of sheer poverty, of abject need, of kindness in the face of suffering, of living on nothing, and, too, of the difference faith can make. Over three days, with meals, and sugar on snow for dessert with the last marks of winter, with three days of conversation, something happened. After the missionary went to bed, the folks sat in the twilight, in silence. You don’t have to say much in a small town anyway because everyone knows what everyone thinks already. Finally, a farmer with gnarled hands, who would be milking at 4 in the morning, leaned in and said, Well. I sure would love a new church. We have waited a long time. But…but…this fellow and his people need that money a whole lot more than we do. Let’s draw out the building money and give him a check before the train leaves tomorrow. We can make do with this place another decade.
Let us live in Easter, let us love one another!
The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music
