{"id":1689,"date":"2017-11-19T11:00:12","date_gmt":"2017-11-19T16:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=1689"},"modified":"2020-02-11T16:01:13","modified_gmt":"2020-02-11T21:01:13","slug":"the-bach-experience-18","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2017\/11\/19\/the-bach-experience-18\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bach Experience"},"content":{"rendered":"

Click here to listen to the full service<\/a><\/p>\n

1 Thessalonians 5:1-11<\/a><\/p>\n

Matthew 25:14-30<\/a><\/p>\n

Click here to listen to the sermon only\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill <\/strong><\/p>\n

Preface<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Elie Wiesel said, \u2018He who hears a witness becomes a witness\u2019.\u00a0 He reminds us of who we are at Boston University.<\/p>\n

Martin Luther said, \u2018Here I stand, I can do no other, God help me\u2019.\u00a0 He reminds us of who we are in Religious Life.<\/p>\n

Thomas Merton said, \u2018Love is my true identity.\u00a0 Selflessness is my true self.\u00a0 Love is my true character.\u00a0 Love is my name\u2019.\u00a0 He reminds us who we are as Christian people.<\/p>\n

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, \u2018The moral arm of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice\u2019.\u00a0 He reminds us of who we are at Marsh Chapel.<\/p>\n

Come and join us! \u00a0Come and join us for this year in worship, fellowship, and discipleship.\u00a0 Come and join us in this season of remembrance!\u00a0 Come, especially today, amid the beauties of Bach and the rituals of Thanksgiving, to remember your humanity, fragility, mortality\u2026eternity.\u00a0 Death makes us mortal.\u00a0 Facing death makes us human.\u00a0 Bach today, and the Scripture every day, sing out to us:\u00a0 God is at work in the world to make and keep human life human.<\/em><\/p>\n

Longing<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0The desire of the moth for the star, of the night for the morrow, the devotion to something afar, from the sphere of our sorrow. The desire of the moth for the star, of the night for the morrow, the devotion to something afar, from the sphere of our sorrow. \u00a0So, Shelley.<\/p>\n

El anhelo de la inmortalidad. The longing for immortality. El anhelo de la inmortalidad. The longing for immortality. \u00a0So, Unamuno.<\/p>\n

Our cantata today sings of heaven.\u00a0 The cantata sings out for what lasts, matters, counts.<\/p>\n

Lao Tze wrote:\u00a0 The reality of the vessel is the shape of the void within it. The reality of the vessel is the shape of the void within it.<\/p>\n

At the heart of the human being there is a longing for God, for heaven, for eternity.<\/p>\n

Pause for a minute.\u00a0 Sometimes that longing has an overture in other forms of emptiness, of lack, of longing.<\/p>\n

One autumn, following a brief pastoral conversation, you could see lingering on the leaf pocked porch step, a woman at young middle age.\u00a0 For a variety of reasons, common enough, in her whole life she had really no real friends, until by grace in the years before, and by grace in the church of Christ, she had found a friend, made a friend, become a friend, been befriended by another woman her own age, with children of the same ages, husbands of the same baleful tempers, parents of the same haunting failings.\u00a0 She had a friend.\u00a0 If you have friend, one is a great number in a lifetime, then you know.\u00a0 But in June her friend moved a long way away.\u00a0\u00a0 Come November, there was that ache, that emptiness, that longing, that \u2018shape of the void within\u2019.\u00a0 To date, no other friend has come along to fill that void.<\/p>\n

And you? \u00a0Can you conjure your own such longing?\u00a0 If only I had finished my degree.\u00a0 If only I had fallen in love.\u00a0 If only I had really discerned a calling.\u00a0 If only I had kept that other job.\u00a0 If only I had more loving parents.\u00a0 If only I could put words to the pre-dawn presentiments of what I think is faith.\u00a0 If only someone would notice that I can be a good pal.\u00a0 If only I could shake off this daily anxiety.\u00a0 If only someone would publish my book.\u00a0 If only I could get the grace to forgive what he or she did to me.\u00a0 If only my parents would see my beloved as I see him.\u00a0 If I only I could wake once with a smile.\u00a0 If only he would see me as I really am.\u00a0 And you?\u00a0 Can you conjure your own such longing?<\/p>\n

The more proximate longings can prefigure the ultimate longing, in its own full way unspeakable but not for that reason any less real.<\/p>\n

The desire of the moth for the star, of the night for the morrow, the devotion to something afar, from the sphere of our sorrow. \u00a0El anhelo de la inmortalidad. The longing for immortality.<\/p>\n

Death makes us mortal.\u00a0 Facing death makes us human.\u00a0 Pastoral experience in the main shows that most of us most of the time do not fear death, but we do fear.\u00a0 What we fear is the death of our loved ones and the death of our dreams. What we fear is the death of our loved ones and the death of our dreams.\u00a0 Maybe something like that is behind Matthew\u2019s rendering of the inherited parable today, his anger, his burning mean-spirited dyspepsia.\u00a0 Said a faithful Anglican a few weeks ago: \u2018How much longer do we hear from Matthew and the dark side?\u2019 Not long, not long. \u00a0Yet Matthew\u2019s recognition of the human failures in the human condition we do recognize in our own years of humiliation. The longing, that heaven shaped soul emptiness, that desire\u2014anhelo\u2014abides.\u00a0 How does Bach sing this today?<\/p>\n

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett<\/strong><\/p>\n

Singing<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

In this year\u2019s Bach Experience, we have been focusing on cantatas Bach composed in his first weeks in Leipzig as cantor at St. Thomas. His task was to provide a musical explication of the day\u2019s lessons alongside the sermon. These cantatas, comprising solo arias, recitatives, choruses, and chorales, with librettos using both scripture and free poetic texts, typically last about 20 \u2013 30 minutes. In this context, it was Bach\u2019s task to work through the theological ideas at hand. Each cantata is masterpiece in miniature, and we continue to marvel at the astonishing invention, creativity, and complexity revealed note by note.<\/p>\n

Cantata 95, \u2018Christus, der ist mein Leben\u2019, takes up one of the most difficult but ubiquitous themes of Bach\u2019s day: how to reconcile and countenance our mortality. Our program annotator writes: Consider that pre-Enlightenment Germany saw death and devastation in the Thirty Years\u2019 War unknown to Europe since the fourteenth century, and that Bach himself was orphaned at age ten and lost his first wife and ten of his twenty children. Death was all around; the promise of immediate salvation cultivated a cultural longing for it and served as a powerful call to faith.\u201d<\/p>\n

Serving to teach, remind, and also comfort, Bach drew on four different familiar hymns or chorales that serve as the foundation for this seven-movement cantata. These tunes and texts serve as a beacon to the believer \u2014 a tuneful and memorable transmission of theology: Christ, He is my Life, To die is my gain; To it do I surrender myself, With joy I go yonder. \/ With peace and joy I go there according to the Will of God. Death has become my sleep. \/ I would bid you farewell, You evil, false world. In heaven it is good to dwell. \/ Since Christ is arisen from the dead, I will not remain in the grave; Your last Word is my ascension, Death\u2019s dear You can drive away. For where You are, there do I come, That I may always live and be with You; Therefore I depart with joy.<\/p>\n

These chorales establish the orthodoxy around which the believer can begin to reconcile his own personal response and call. Musically, the four chorale setting also offer a composition guide to the possibilities of setting chorale tunes. The first is set as an orchestral chorale fantasia with each phrase of the chorale set off by exuberant motives from the oboes and strings in G major. The second, heard as the concluding section of the first movement, casts the chorus in counterpoint with the oboes and and horn set over a more rhythmic, walking bass line. The soprano soloist takes up the third chorale, in a little aria that becomes a sweet devotional song with two oboes d\u2019amore in unison encouraging her song. The cantata concludes with a four part setting of the fourth chorale in an expected way, with the notable additional of a fifth voice as descant in the fist violin part.<\/p>\n

The most remarkable music of the cantata is reserved for the tenor soloist, who, through his clarity of faith, teaches Bach\u2019s congregants a possibility of their personal attitudes toward mortality. His music in the central aria is sung almost in spite of the music of the instruments, which seem to proceed on their own clock. The aural image here is one of funeral bells, or a glockenspiel in a bell tower. The strings play entirely pizzicato, or plucked, throughout, and the organ remains silent. You can imagine this sound as the inner workings of the clock played in precise and regular patterns and rhythms. On two, the two oboes play their melody in parallels. The missing third note of their chords is obscured in the pizzicatos of the first violin part. And, to my ear, this further contributes to the \u2018mechanized\u2019 sound of this music \u2013 a Leichenglock or funeral bells. The tenor joins up musically with the instruments every time he sings the words \u201cblessed hour\u201d, singing the third or missing note in the oboe pattern. There are so many choices here from the composer revealing a musical reality the likes of which only a Johann Sebastian Bach could imagine.<\/p>\n

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill<\/strong><\/p>\n

Praying<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Some of you have been reading again the Confessions of St. Augustine, in Sarah Ruden\u2019s new translation.\u00a0 Like the music of Bach, the music of his poetic prose, his prosaic poetry, lasts and matters and counts.\u00a0 Augustine lifts our eyes from earth to heaven, from the visible to the invisible, from the daily to the divine.\u00a0 Bach does the same.\u00a0 Augustine in powerful particularity, teaches us again to pray.\u00a0 In a word, for him, prayer is thanksgiving.\u00a0 All right, in four words, prayer is grace, courtesy, respect, and gratitude.\u00a0 Prayer is not a spiritual hockey puck, hit by slap-shot toward the masked goalie God.\u00a0 Prayer is being thankful, giving thanks, bespeaking gratitude.\u00a0 Howard Thurman knew this so well.\u00a0 As the student choir Morehouse College sang, to honor Thurman\u2019s birthday, in prayer, we give thanks.\u00a0 So, each year, at Marsh Chapel, on this Sunday, so close to his birthdate, on this Sunday, so close to our nation\u2019s holiday, on this Sunday, so set apart to honor the grateful, we offer Thurman\u2019s Thanksgiving prayer.\u00a0 You may, by the way, take it from the website to your own Thanksgiving table, should you want need or like. Count it our annual public service!<\/p>\n

Today, I make my Sacrament of Thanksgiving.<\/p>\n

I begin with the simple things of my days:<\/p>\n

Fresh air to breathe,<\/p>\n

Cool water to drink,<\/p>\n

The taste of food,<\/p>\n

The protection of houses and clothes,<\/p>\n

The comforts of home.<\/p>\n

For all these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day!<\/p>\n

I bring to mind all the warmth of humankind that I have known:<\/p>\n

My mother\u2019s arms,<\/p>\n

The strength of my father<\/p>\n

The playmates of my childhood,<\/p>\n

The wonderful stories brought to me from the lives<\/p>\n

Of many who talked of days gone by when fairies<\/p>\n

And giants and all kinds of magic held sway;<\/p>\n

The tears I have shed, the tears I have seen;<\/p>\n

The excitement of laughter and the twinkle in the<\/p>\n

Eye with its reminder that life is good.<\/p>\n

For all these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day<\/p>\n

I finger on by one the messages of hope that awaited me at the crossroads:<\/p>\n

The smile of approval from those who held in their hands the reins of my security;<\/p>\n

The tightening of the grip in a simple handshake when I<\/p>\n

Feared the step before me in darkness;<\/p>\n

The whisper in my heart when the temptation was fiercest<\/p>\n

And the claims of appetite were not to be denied;<\/p>\n

The crucial word said, the simple sentence from an open<\/p>\n

Page when my decision hung in the balance.<\/p>\n

For all these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day.<\/p>\n

I pass before me the main springs of my heritage:<\/p>\n

The fruits of labors of countless generations who lived before me,<\/p>\n

Without whom my own life would have no meaning;<\/p>\n

The seers who saw visions and dreamed dreams;<\/p>\n

The prophets who sensed a truth greater than the mind could grasp<\/p>\n

And whose words would only find fulfillment<\/p>\n

In the years which they would never see;<\/p>\n

The workers whose sweat has watered the trees,<\/p>\n

The leaves of which are for the healing of the nations;<\/p>\n

The pilgrims who set their sails for lands beyond all horizons,<\/p>\n

Whose courage made paths into new worlds and far off places;<\/p>\n

The saviors whose blood was shed with a recklessness that only a dream<\/p>\n

Could inspire and God could command.<\/p>\n

For all this I make an act of Thanksgiving this day.<\/p>\n

I linger over the meaning of my own life and the commitment<\/p>\n

To which I give the loyalty of my heart and mind:<\/p>\n

The little purposes in which I have shared my loves,<\/p>\n

My desires, my gifts;<\/p>\n

The restlessness which bottoms all I do with its stark insistence<\/p>\n

That I have never done my best, I have never dared<\/p>\n

To reach for the highest;<\/p>\n

The big hope that never quite deserts me, that I and my kind<\/p>\n

Will study war no more, that love and tenderness and all the<\/p>\n

inner graces of Almighty affection will cover the life of the<\/p>\n

children of God as the waters cover the sea.<\/p>\n

All these and more than mind can think and heart can feel,<\/p>\n

I make as my sacrament of Thanksgiving to Thee,<\/p>\n

Our Father, in humbleness of mind and simplicity of heart.<\/p>\n

– The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.\u00a0<\/i><\/span>& Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Click here to listen to the full service 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11 Matthew 25:14-30 Click here to listen to the sermon only\u00a0 The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill Preface Elie Wiesel said, \u2018He who hears a witness becomes a witness\u2019.\u00a0 He reminds us of who we are at Boston University. Martin Luther said, \u2018Here I stand, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2679,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[25,36,22],"tags":[11,6,10],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1689"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2679"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1689"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1689\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1830,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1689\/revisions\/1830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}