First Parish Sermon

REMARKS

By now it must be obvious that music, especially music in churches is something that is important to me and that I think that music is an all important part of worship in our churches. When I was the soprano soloist at the First Parish in Concord for some years, our minister there, Gary Smith, would occasionally tell the congregation that when you sing a hymn or recite some words in a reading that you might not agree with, you should realize that you may be giving a great gift to someone else in the sanctuary for whom a particular hymn, melody or set of words have great meaning. Often those times may come up during the holidays when we robustly sing songs with concepts and words in them we wouldn’t touch during the rest of the year. I have been in congregations which have a regular practice of a yearly hymn sing, when folks request old favorite hymns, Unitarian Universalist or otherwise. There are always requests for songs like In the Garden, or Rock of Ages, hymns which congregation members sang as children or they remember their parents singing. This, I believe, is an example of Kathleen Norris’ valuing music and story over systematic theology. These songs and others like them speak directly to the heart, in some fashion that is hard to articulate. But they can be a challenge.

I grew up singing the great gospel and spiritual songs of the African American tradition, in addition to receiving classical training. Today I am singing a mix of songs from both the African American and from what is called the white gospel tradition. White gospel songs come primarily from southern, mountain and revivalist origins. As with the African American spirituals, their influence continues to contemporary times. Furthermore, the African American and white traditions have mixed to a great degree, each borrowing from the other, both being part of the hymn repertory since at least the early nineteenth century. In our faith tradition, some spiritual songs or gospel hymns were included in the older Universalist hymnals, but the Unitarian hymnists in the first part of this century considered them too emotional or sentimental for inclusion.

The tune of our final hymn today comes from William Walker’s Southern Harmony. In fact, our hymnal includes twelve hymns which use tunes from Southern Harmony. In the 1800s, Walker and others collected folk tunes from the oral tradition and published them in shape note tunebooks. This was a method of musical notation which was meant to simplify music reading to make it accessible to more people. Because of their origins in oral, folk traditions, there are a large number of variants of these songs. Folk songs can be sung in highly distinctive ways by different persons, especially when the singers come from different cultures. These melodies mostly came from secular folk song traditions brought by our earliest settlers, primarily those from Great Britain. 

Folk hymns were widely circulated in the pre-Civil War era, especially in the rural South and midwest. Aside from Walker’s Southern Harmony, three other shape note books were in widespread use: Kentucky Harmony, which was the first one published in 1816, Missouri Harmony in 1820, and The Sacred Harp in 1850. Rural white folks, such as our Universalist forebears, grew up singing these tunes.

At this same time, the camp meeting revival movement was booming throughout rural areas and on the frontiers. Hymns were an important means of expressing the emotional fervor of these revival meetings. It is interesting to note that “Even though white spirituals were published in shape-note tunebooks two decades before (black) spirituals began to appear in print, both bodies of congregational folk song existed side by side in the pre-Civil War period. It is clear that these bodies of song intermingled and influenced each other.” ⁽ⁱ⁾

HOMILY

This music is emotional, as you have experienced both while singing it and listening to it this morning. That emotionalism may be why some Unitarian Universalists have trouble with it. We do pride ourselves on our rational thinking and our individualism. It is part of our heritage, and I don’t think we want to stop thinking, discerning, and discussing. But that unrestrained fervor and passion may be one reason why it has taken so long to have the African-American spirituals represented in our hymnal. The strength of music can be as feared as it is praised. Could it be that some Unitarian Universalists’ tension about singing has less to do with discomforting words -- oh, the controversies over words! -- than with unwelcome feelings. The wince on some faces when certain old hymns are sung may have less to do with taste and more to do with the hard stories wed by memory to that tune.^(iv)  But sometimes -- in my view, many times, the profound engaging of our feelings in this music -- or any music -- can be a balm.

I want to think with you for a few more moments this morning about the power of music, something that I am prone to do, as I concentrate much of my work on building community through music, especially with elders. As I said earlier, one of the things I do is direct an elder chorus of nearly sixty men and women which has a busy rehearsal and performance schedule.- But right now I want to  think about the particular power of spirituals and of gospel music and of their place even here in our intellectual and rational Unitarian Universalist places of worship. Music in church is an essential channel for worship, a different way to explore our search for meaning, one that uses our whole body. When we sing as a congregation, we breathe together. We make each of our separate voices one together in song. This nourishes us spiritually. We are that interconnected web we so love to talk about when we sing together. There are times when we sing together that we are really in sync- we are on the same musical wavelength. You get “in the zone”. You tap into the flow. It is very hard to intellectualize about that place. For me, getting in that place is a spiritual experience: a place of focus, a place of joy, a place that lifts me out of the ordinary and into a place of communion and compassion. 

It is my conviction that how we include music in our churches is an important part of the work we are doing to work against racism and to increase our diversity. We talk a lot about diversity, we Unitarian Universalists. But look around you in the pews at most of our suburban New England churches! We have anti-racism initiatives and many celebrate being Welcoming Congregations to affirm our gay, lesbian and transgender members and friends. These are good things and we have done hard work -- sometimes very hard work -- looking at ourselves and our institutions. But in most cases, especially here in New England, what we do within these walls on a Sunday morning has not changed much. Our orders of service are much the same as ever -- two or three hymns, an anthem or two, a couple of readings and a sermon. Out the door in sixty minutes! Not to say that there isn’t a certain beauty in that. 

At my home church in Wayland, the beautiful old white colonial church building is located in the center of town, directly across from the fire station. If the minister doesn’t time everything out perfectly or if the choir anthems go on too long, promptly without fail, the fire whistle blares right at noon! Not much room for improvisation! Robert Neville who is a professor and dean at Boston University’s School of Theology is specializing these days on how to energize churches -- help them “tackle the challenges ... of a growing immigrant population, the weakening hold of organized religion on younger generations, and a growing responsibility to tend to the needy.” He believes that “too many churches are stuck in old ways of doing things -- singing traditional hymns, saying traditional prayers, and offering staid sermons.”  Hey, don’t get me wrong -- there is a place for traditional hymns and traditional prayers, just as there is a place for Bach, Mozart, and the traditional choir anthems we love. I’m not so sure about the staid sermons ... but perhaps, even then, there is a place for the thoughtful, intellectual sermon. But I truly believe we will never achieve diversity in our pews unless we stretch a bit and include new forms of worship with the old stand-bys. And experiment with other forms of music, even if they feel uncomfortable at times. After all, it is often on that uncomfortable edge that we learn the most.

I have felt very lucky in my life that I have been exposed to all kinds of music. My mother was a former concert pianist. I grew up with the liturgy and music of the Anglican tradition which has its certain beauty, for sure. I studied and continue to study classical voice and I continue to make part of my living singing that wonderful music. There is nothing I enjoy more than getting the chance to sing Handel’s Let the Bright Seraphim at someone’s wedding with organ and trumpet! So I was certainly exposed to and studied the music of our great Western tradition. But  in the summer there was Charlie King! For Charlie, singing was a full body activity and I will never forget his enthusiasm and love for all of us of all ages and different denominations as we came together in song. If You Love and You Know It, Clap Your Hands!    He’s Got the Whole World In His Hands!    And probably the song that has stayed with me the most and has formed my gut theology -- This Little Light of Mine. That’s how a little ol’ white gal like me learned how to sing this music, and it has stood me in good stead. My theology has changed since those days with Charlie, and I became one of those intellectual Unitarian Universalists.... but I retain a healthy respect for those songs, their power to bring people together and to express deep feelings. I have not and cannot leave those songs behind. And I truly believe those songs along with a lot of hard work can help us on the way to the diversity we value so highly. Yes, let us weave the fabric of diversity and journey toward wholeness, but let us do that with awareness of our built in prejudices against certain forms of worship and exclusions of song that essentially may not leave room for that diversity we so highly prize. May we keep on working toward that goal.

Notes
 

i	Eskew, Hugh and Harry McElrath, Sing With Understanding.
ii	Funk and Wagnall’s.
iii	McClain, William B. (1990). Come Sunday: The Liturgy of Zion- A Companion to the Songs of Zion. Nashville: Abbingdon, 106.
iv	UUA, Hymnbook Commission.
v	Ribadeneira, Diego. The Boston Globe, 1-23-99, B2.