Christmas 2008
Is. 53.ff/Lk. 2.1-20.
MLC – Dennis Township NJ
Hartmut Fege, D.Min.
If we were in our new building, I might (thanks to Vince’s
participation in the design), I might be able to use a power point presentation
and you could hear and see the orchestra perform “Jauchzet Frohlocket” from JS
Bach’s Xmas Oratorio.
So the best I CAN do is translate the lyrics from Bach’s
robust German: Shout ye exultant this day of Salvation, Glory to God in the Highest today! Fear ye no longer, forsake lamentation, Sing ye with gladness, exultant and gay. Worship the Master and bow ye before him, Come all ye faithful and sing to adore him.
Christmas is a time for song, of poetry, mystery… and
dreams. I don’t mean the kind of song we have heard since before Thanksgiving in
every mall and every public square
The cacophony that assaults the sense and sensibly of the
soul.
I’m talking about the music of angels – of Bach, Beethoven
and Mozart…
Martin Luther once said that the all the angels in heaven
were signing that night and there are as many angels as there are blades of
grass on the earth”
One of the most beautiful songs to pour forth from the
creative mind of Andrew Lloyd Weber and Charles Hart, which celebrates human
love and longing, is “Music of the Night”. With a little imagination it can
serve to celebrate the love story we are about tonight…
It is called “Music of the Night” from the Broadway
Musical Phantom of the Opera is based on the French novel by Gaston
Leroux first published in 1909…
If you can, just for tonight use your imagination and see
the music and the words of this hauntingly beautiful love song as love song of
nativity..
After all the incarnation is God’s love song for us and
our world..
How well it fits our dark and troubled time.. which is not
too different from the time of Bethlehem..
Instead of the yearning of a disfigured musical genius in
love with a beautiful Soprano in the Opera House….
Imagine the yearning of a God in love with his creation –
obsessed with its redemption … His possession once as it was before Eden.
Our God is a cosmic lover, who after many love letters, “we
call them Prophets” decides to join his creation in the birth of child…
As for the disfigurement of the lover -
There is an obscure passage in Is. 53. 2ff. For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others; A man of suffering and acquainted with
infirmity; And one whom others Hid their faces…
(Play
“Music of the Night”)
Those lyrics speak of a darker side that may trouble some
of you..
but Isaiah, Carl Young and more recently Sister Teresa,
who is up for sainthood,
as well as some not so notables have given us good reason
to pay attention to that dark side of our psyches..
Until we have touched the dark side of our souls, most
often surfaced in our dreams and in the acting out of the unconscious,
we have not begun to understand who we are and who God is.
So on this Holy Night – this enchanted evening, the night
of music and nativity-
“Let your mind start a journey through a
strange new world! Leave all thoughts of the world you knew
before! Let you Soul take you where you long to be! Only then can you belong to me. You alone can make my song take flight. Help me make the
music of the night”
What we are celebrating is not an evening or an hour.
It is not a barren couple of Sr. Citizens giving birth to
John the Baptist.
Nor a single girl engaged to Joseph – giving birth to
Jesus.
What we are celebrating are not angels or shepherds or wise
men..
No, this is not why we are here tonight!
One bombastic minister used the nature of our celebration
in a sermon titled -
“Away with the Manger”
A little impudent maybe.
But even impudence can be a channel of God’s word.
What we are celebrating is the coming of God in the flesh
of Jesus of Nazareth.
What we are celebrating is His coming and His doing.
This is what enchants, ensongs (if I can make verb out of a
noun), and fills us… with the music of the night. The night of Nativity – the
music of the night!
amen.
