{"id":3256,"date":"2021-11-28T11:00:21","date_gmt":"2021-11-28T16:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=3256"},"modified":"2021-12-06T15:40:30","modified_gmt":"2021-12-06T20:40:30","slug":"the-bach-experience-32","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2021\/11\/28\/the-bach-experience-32\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bach Experience"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

Due to technical difficulties a full recording of this service is unavailable.<\/p>\n

Luke 21:25\u201336<\/a><\/p>\n

Click here to hear just the sermon<\/a><\/p>\n

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.<\/em><\/p>\n

A conversation starts, somehow.\u00a0 A conversation travels, somewhere.\u00a0 A conversation ends, sometime.\u00a0 After months of screen, of zoom, of facetime, of text, of email, of distance, of attention to spaces, electronic spaces to which nuance, humor, personality, humanity, and connection so often go to die, we have this autumn been returned to the land of conversation.\u00a0 Praise God from whom all blessings flow.\u00a0 There is a robust magic in conversation, whereby John Wesley named conversation a means of grace, alongside prayer, Scripture, sacraments, and fasting.\u00a0 Conversation.\u00a0 One step in and toward faith begins with a regard for conversation.<\/p>\n

In our current Marsh Chapel ministry, on Bach Sundays, we engage a conversation.\u00a0 We model that conversation in two voice dialogue, Director and Dean.\u00a0 The conversation engages past with future, Scripture with music, wisdom with beauty, and Bach with experience.\u00a0 Our COVID time has muted conversation, to some degree, but has not squelched it, at least not yet.<\/p>\n

In conversation, there abides, or lurks, the lasting possibility of heart to heart communication, heart by heart communion.\u00a0 That potential seizes you, not the other way around.\u00a0\u00a0 You are longways, say, into a talk with an old dear friend, and of a sudden, you realize, you intuit, just how much that friendship means, a friendship planted and grown in conversation.\u00a0 You are gathered before dinner, and the children, coaxed, begin to sing the songs of memory, of history, of Zion, of nation, of upgrowing.\u00a0 The folksongs, the hymns, the partner songs, the spirituals, the camp fire rounds, multiple rounds, give off an invisible glow, a kind of verbal hearth.\u00a0 Or, there is a moment of difference. Some things, like some malignancies, you can never cure but you can manage.\u00a0 They are manageable but not curable.\u00a0 They can be managed, managed to ground, even though, unseen, the malignancy remains.\u00a0 In conversation, in the magic of conversation, such hard and dark and difficult truth can surface.\u00a0 You realize afterward, that one loved one, in one seemingly innocuous conversation, was trying to say something, something like, I am worried about this medical procedure\u2026<\/em>\u00a0 But the clues and hues and dues and schmooze are sometimes too indirect, too subtle, and you miss the marrow and meaning of the talk, only to recall it, only to get it<\/em>, later, much later, too late.\u00a0 You are in a meeting, and all of sudden the temperature shifts, and sunlight and warmth become cave darks, stalactites and stalagmites.\u00a0 And the conversation flickers, withers, and dies.\u00a0 Something is in there. \u00a0It would be utterly invisible and inaudible by zoom.\u00a0 But in conversation, in presence, with embodied silence, and incarnate body language, you see and hear.\u00a0\u00a0 She is really hurting.\u00a0 He is really angry.\u00a0 I am in over my head.\u00a0 They want something they can never have. <\/em>Somehow, conversation.<\/p>\n

Dr. Jarrett, what does the music and beauty of Bach bring us in conversation this morning?<\/p>\n

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music:<\/strong><\/p>\n

There is a healing power, a healing grace in conversation.<\/em> <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I have a friend and colleague, a musicologist and viola da gamba player, whose research focuses on what he calls \u201cPolyphonic Intimacy\u201d. The notion that western music, with it\u2019s subjects and counter-subjects, point with counter-point, strands of consonance and dissonance woven together, trace their roots in mirroring human conversation. Imagine one monk chanting the Te Deum. His neighbor in the cell next door, a plucky fellow he, decides it\u2019d be fun to sing along with his pious brother, but does so in what we\u2019d call today harmony. <\/em>A musical conversation is born. A point and counter-point. Harmony. A musical conversation. Better yet, a musical congruence, where I shape my conversation to yours. Or perhaps the kind of conversation where a couple can complete each other\u2019s sentences, or allow the conversation points to gather one on the other. There are unlimited possibilities. But the idea that music, making music, making music with others in community, can mirror societal discourse, modeling a path for our disparate voices to find commonality, unity, perhaps even fostering social cohesion.<\/p>\n

Could it be that music has such healing power, a healing grace in music\u2019s conversation?<\/em><\/p>\n

Soprano and Alto. Tenor with Bass. The \u201cI and Thou\u201d reflected each day in the Imago Dei. <\/em>And this Advent Sunday, the Christian Soul with Christ as Bridegroom, that long awaited restoration of Thou in me, Thou in you \u2014 conversation as dialectic. Music amplifies, augments, colludes, and collides with that conversation in powerful, yes even healing ways.<\/p>\n

Soar joyfully, ye voices, aloft to the sublime stars. Love draws nigh. Come quickly, Lord Jesus. Love and Faith prepare a place for you in my heart. Come, dwell within. <\/em><\/p>\n

Listen today for two virtuoso Oboes d\u2019amore in musical conversation with one another (No 6), or in No 2, doubling, and thereby musically affirming, their soprano and alto conversations partners. Each aria, singer with solo instrumentalist, modeling a musical conversation, whose features, parameters, and sights are given to us by Bach. A space to make sense of it all, a thoughtful interplay revealing a path to reconciliation and renewal, affirming Thou in me, Thou in you.<\/p>\n

There is a healing power in and through music, and, yes, a healing grace revealed in music\u2019s conversation.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Pastoral ministry, cut to the chase, is the dangerous and difficult pursuit \u00a0of an faithful 20-minute sermon a week, alongside 25 genuine conversations a week.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I and Thou.<\/em>\u00a0 There yet remain some circles of ministerial wisdom shared in conversation about\u2026conversation.\u00a0 Think of Seward Hiltner at Princeton, of Homer Jernigan at BU, of Henri Nowen at Yale, of Ann Belford Ulanov at Columbia and Union.\u00a0 They are not with us any longer, and not with us to remind us that the most the important things in ministry are the one-on-one things. Pastoral ministry is preaching.\u00a0 Pastoral ministry is conversation.\u00a0 Sit down and listen, listen, listen\u2026until\u2026 until the cows come home.<\/p>\n

With some exception, for the minister, <\/em>every hour spent on a machine, every hour spent with zoom, with text, with email, with computer, is an hour spent apart from conversation, and so apart from life itself.\u00a0 Here is a warning word for the minister. Walk with a friend.\u00a0 Sit for intercessory prayer.\u00a0 Call somebody on the phone.\u00a0 Set a lunch date.\u00a0 Offer a coffee.\u00a0 Take with happiness the unannounced visitor to your office.\u00a0 Steer the conversation, when you can, away from doing and out onto the broad meadow of being, out toward memory and view, on out to where heaven and earth pass away.\u00a0 Keep a journal.\u00a0 Write a sermon.\u00a0 Craft a poem.\u00a0 Design and experiment.\u00a0 All of us are so challenged, so called, for ministry emerges from baptism first, from ordination second.\u00a0 All the baptized have entered ministry.<\/p>\n

My grandmother grew up on a dairy farm near Cooperstown, NY.\u00a0 She graduated from Smith College in 1914.\u00a0 She taught school and married later in life, raising three daughters.\u00a0 She spent her later life in a modest Syracuse home, surrounded by piles of books, mounds of newspapers, and letters written or to be written and received, often long ago.\u00a0 She and her college roommate wrote each other once a week from graduation until death.\u00a0 She seemingly feared no conversation, and celebrated all conversation, no matter how middling or shallow or tiresome.\u00a0 Famously, she was thrilled, overjoyed, to have the Jehovah Witnesses come into her Methodist living room, on their mission.\u00a0 She loved to talk with them about the intricacies of Leviticus.\u00a0 She always wanted them to stay longer than they could stand to stay.\u00a0 They left worn out, bedraggled, dog tired, and exhausted. \u00a0She just smiled and put a roast in the oven. They had been engaged in real conversation.<\/p>\n

To listen is to love.\u00a0 To listen is to take one step in faith.\u00a0 People do not always know what they think and feel until they say it, until they say it to someone they know is listening, and really cares.\u00a0 This is not psychiatry, not psychotherapy, not formal counseling, nor any other of the\u2014very wonderful, soulfully salvific, and endlessly helpful\u2014forms of care.\u00a0 This is conversation, a means of grace.\u00a0 As a person of faith, it is yours, to receive and to give.<\/p>\n

A conversation starts, somehow.\u00a0 A conversation travels, somewhere.\u00a0 A conversation ends, sometime.\u00a0 Today is our first day, our first Sunday, in a year of conversation, with St. Luke: \u00a0<\/em><\/strong>Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. <\/em><\/p>\n

-Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Click here to hear the service Due to technical difficulties a full recording of this service is unavailable. Luke 21:25\u201336 Click here to hear just the sermon The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel: Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. A conversation starts, somehow.\u00a0 A […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2679,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[25,36,22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3256"}],"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=3256"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3265,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3256\/revisions\/3265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}