{"id":3650,"date":"2024-04-28T11:00:22","date_gmt":"2024-04-28T15:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=3650"},"modified":"2024-05-21T12:11:50","modified_gmt":"2024-05-21T16:11:50","slug":"the-bach-experience-april-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2024\/04\/28\/the-bach-experience-april-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bach Experience- April 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

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

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John 15:1\u20138<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Click here to hear just the Sermon and Cantata<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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The Bach Experience- April 28th, 2024<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Cantata: O ewiges Feuer, o Ursprung der Liebe, BWV 34\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Dean Hill:<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 You are keen listeners, practiced and adroit, so you will have wondered a bit about this.\u00a0Why does 1 John nip at the heels of John?<\/p>\n

The two \u2018books\u2019, John and 1 John, were written by different authors, in different decades, in different circumstances, with different motives.\u00a0 The Gospel acclaims Spirit.\u00a0 The Letter adds in work, ethics, morals, community, tradition, leadership and judgment from on high, rather than judgment by belief and by believer.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The letter, like James Morrison Witherbee George Dupree, takes good care of its Gospel mother, the very cat\u2019s mother, you see.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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<\/em>\u2014the righteous\u2014whose commandments all we are to keep, on pain of disobedience become lying, and truth taken flight.\u00a0 Both read on the same Sunday, within minutes of each other, even as they face each other, in loving disagreement.<\/p>\n

The next Sunday, the letter in Chapter 3, on the qui vive<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2014Abel\u2019s one-time brother\u2014and 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.\u00a0 \u2018Let us not love in word and speech but in deed and in truth\u2019<\/em>, says 1 John 3, when the whole of the Gospel says simply \u2018love\u2019, 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.<\/p>\n

And now today, when and where our one Great Gospel, the Spiritual Gospel, counsels \u2018abide\u2019 and \u2018remain\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

Of course, both are right.\u00a0 Or we would not still need or read them, let alone together.\u00a0 But you are right, too, to feel some neck pain, some whiplash, as Gospel soars and Letter deflates.\u00a0 It is as if the Song of Solomon were being sung by Obadiah.<\/p>\n

Still.\u00a0 We are meant to live in Easter, not in Lent.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The real is joy, the real is love, the real is Easter.\u00a0 Here our outstanding, Pentecostal cantata, inspires, guides and shapes us.<\/p>\n

Dr Jarrett, tell us what to listen for and how, now in Easter, with our Sunday Cantata.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Dr. Jarrett:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Today\u2019s Cantata was written for Pentecost, the Christian Holiday that celebrates the Coming of the Holy Spirit and is observed on the 50th<\/sup>\u00a0<\/span>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\u00a0<\/span>all.\u00a0<\/span><\/em>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\u00a0<\/span>love one another.\u00a0<\/span><\/em>\u00a0A 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:\u00a0<\/span>\u201cWhoever 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)\u00a0<\/span><\/em>and\u201dPeace I leave with you, my peace I give to you\u201d (verse 27).\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Setting side the brilliant opening movement of today\u2019s 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 \u2013 Eden restored in each of us. The second recit, No. 4,\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0broadens the indwelling to the new church, with the sign of Peace. The whole of the new church interrupts the baritone\u2019s recitative to take up the new greeting shared by all who choose Love:\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Peace be with you.<\/em><\/p>\n

Music of the high Baroque is much like a Swiss clock \u2013 there is extraordinary beauty in the clock itself \u2013 face and casing \u2013 but admiration becomes awe when the extraordinary number of component and moving parts are found to create such clarity and beauty.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>As an aural guide for Cantata 34, listen for how Bach sets the word Ewiges \u2013 or eternal, and at the same time the flickering, darting line sing for the word Feuer \u2013 or fire. Notice how Bach sets the word for \u2018ignite\u2019 \u2013 entz\u00fcnde \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

The central movement of the cantata, focuses on the rapture of the individual whose body becomes Christ\u2019s Holy Temple. There is a perfection and naturalness of beauty here \u2013 directly from the sublimity of Eden\u2019s garden.<\/p>\n

The cantata ends in thanks and praise, but not without significant emphasis on Christ\u2019s pronouncement, \u2018Peace upon Israel.\u2019<\/p>\n

Today we observe two masters whose musical settings give voice to Christ\u2019s wedding invitation. An invitation to all, without amendment or exclusion.<\/p>\n

We prepare ourselves for cantata and covenant, in wonder and vulnerability and self-awareness\u2026<\/p>\n

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Dean Hill:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

After 40 years not just 40 days, such has come I believe to my beloved Methodist church, now in General Conference in Charlotte.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It is the first such quadrennial gathering I have not attended with one exception since 1992.\u00a0 And the most successful.\u00a0 Maybe you just need the right people in the room and outside the room!\u00a0 Maybe it was my fault!<\/p>\n

With this cantata, Methodism, at its best, built into the walls of Marsh Chapel, is love divine all loves excelling.\u00a0 Memorize the lines from 1 John 4: 7-12 today.<\/p>\n

We once went to preach in a little church high in the Adirondacks, Mountainview UMC.\u00a0 It was one of the churches in the string served by a lone itinerant preacher.\u00a0 Listen to the names.\u00a0 Chasm Falls.\u00a0 Owls Head.\u00a0 Wolf Pond. Mountainview.\u00a0 My, my\u2026 (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.\u00a0 A story, an old Methodist story, a Pentecostal cantata story, from the 1930\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Some farmers, a teacher or three, the druggist, some retirees, a small but loving congregation.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But after Easter, as annually they did, they had a missionary come, this time from China.\u00a0 He was a gentle spirit, in the manner of Pearl Buck and others.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Over three days, with meals, and sugar on snow for dessert with the last marks of winter, with three days of conversation, something happened.\u00a0 After the missionary went to bed, the folks sat in the twilight, in silence.\u00a0 You don\u2019t have to say much in a small town anyway because everyone knows what everyone thinks already.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But\u2026but\u2026this fellow and his people need that money a whole lot more than we do.\u00a0 Let\u2019s draw out the building money and give him a check before the train leaves tomorrow. We can make do with this place another decade.<\/em><\/p>\n

Let us live in Easter, let us love one another!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

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

Click here to hear the full service Click here to watch the full service John 15:1\u20138 Click here to hear just the Sermon and Cantata The Bach Experience- April 28th, 2024 Cantata: O ewiges Feuer, o Ursprung der Liebe, BWV 34\u00a0 Dean Hill: Through this Easter season, Easter tide, you have perhaps noticed, noted, or […]<\/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\/3650"}],"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=3650"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3650\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3651,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3650\/revisions\/3651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}