Meherrin Presbyterian Church
July 27, 2014
Ordinary 17A
Too Deep For Words
What do you do
when you hear music without words?
Maybe you’re the
particularly blessed type, who can simply listen and let the music take its
course through your soul.
Probably, though
(if you’re like most people), you try, consciously or not, to “fill in the
blank.”
Your mind starts
to create a story to go with the music.
Or perhaps it begins to invent a poem, in which the words fit to the
tune you hear. Or possibly, if
you’re a more visual type, your mind begins to imagine a picture or scene that
plays out as the music moves along, with scene as illustration of music or
maybe vice versa.
Either way, we
modern-day humans have a sharply defined inability (or most of us do, anyway)
to let the music simply be music. We somehow develop the idea, perhaps
unspoken but no less powerful, that the music has to mean something, something that we can somehow encapsulate in words
or maybe in pictures.
Felix Mendelssohn
begs to differ with you.
Some very specific ideas on music and words
Mendelssohn was of
course one of the outstanding composers of the nineteenth century. What you’re hearing is by him, an
example of a “Song without words,” a piano work that was something of a
specialty of his. As you can hear,
in many ways it sounds like a song you might expect to hear someone sing; it
only lacks words, and a singer to sing them.
Mendelssohn wrote
at least four dozen such “songs without words” in his brief lifetime. A few of them have descriptive labels
attached to them; for example, some are labeled as “Venetian gondola songs”
because they so strongly resemble the songs sung by the gondola drivers in the
canals of Venice. Most of them
have no title, as Mendelssohn so presented them. A few were given labels after their publication, in some
cases even after Mendelssohn’s death, by editors or critics or others who felt
that the music had to mean something,
something that could be captured in words. (In fact, some editor decided that the piece you've just heard needed the title "Belief.")
In a letter to a
former student Mendelssohn very specifically denied this. As he put it, he believed that words
were insufficient to the task of capturing what music meant: to him, words many or few were “so ambiguous, so vague, so
subject to misunderstanding when compared with true music, which fills the soul
with a thousand better things than words.” He continued, “The thoughts that are expressed to me by the
music I love are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary,
too definite…this, however, is not your fault, but the fault of words, which
cannot do better… .”
I can’t help but
suspect that the Apostle Paul (who was, coincidentally, the subject of one of
Mendelssohn’s oratorios) might have at least nodded knowingly at this idea that
Mendelssohn expresses here. At the
very least he might have acknowledged that Mendelssohn’s idea that the music he
loved was “too definite” for words sounded a lot like what Paul himself writes
here in verse 26 of this eighth chapter of Romans:
Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to
pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.
(NRSV)
I admit that
phrase – “sighs too deep for words” has haunted me most of my life, probably
since some sermon I heard as a child.
Back then I wondered what that could possibly mean; being a wordy little
kid I couldn’t really imagine how something could be “too deep for words.” If you couldn’t say it, how could it be
real?
I’ve grown up
since then and I have at least some small idea of just how silly that childish
thought was, even before I ever read Mendelssohn’s own description of his view
of music. Oftentimes this sense,
this deep-rooted wordless sighing has been a part of my life in times of
trouble; the death of my mother, later the death of one of my sisters, or my
own diagnosis of cancer just a couple of years ago. Occasionally it has been experienced in more joyful times;
our wedding day, for example, or a particularly profound musical
experience. Sometimes it has come
in moments of struggle or uncertainty; the period of time when I was considering
giving up the teaching career I loved to jump off the cliff into seminary
stands out there.
Only this week the
experience was visited upon me again.
Word came that a former seminary classmate, a woman a few years older
than I who had started at Union the year after I did, had been moved into
hospice care. After her first year
of school she had gone for an exam for persistent headaches, an exam which
revealed tumors on her brain. She
returned home for treatment, but nothing was able to turn back the destructiveness
of the cancer.
Indeed, sighs too
deep for words. Even when my soul
tried to fit words into my feelings, their insufficiency and inferiority became
painfully clear. Why does this happen? Why did I get cancer that I could
survive, and she didn’t? The
words collapse on their own uselessness.
Sighs too deep for words.
I suspect you can
search your own lives for times when you’ve known that experience of sorrow, or
joy, or struggle, or uncertainty, or relief for which words could not be found
or did not even exist. It’s one
thing to know the experience of that kind of experience, one “beyond words.”
But it’s a whole
other thought to know that the Holy Spirit does that for us.
For indeed that is
what Paul tells us right here in verse 26: “that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” When we cannot find the words to pray
rightly, whether in our joy or sorrow or need, it isn’t that the Spirit gives
us words to say. No, it is that
the Spirit steps in for us with its own wordless, unspeakable sighing.
Just a few verses
earlier, starting in verse 22, Paul writes of all of creation “groaning in labor pains” and not only
creation, but we ourselves, “groan
inwardly” while we wait for the adoption God has promised to each of us, of
which Paul spoke in verse 15. Paul
has also already spoken of the Spirit bearing witness with us, in our times of
crying out to God, even as simple a cry as “Abba! Father!” In our
unfinished spiritual state, when we cry out for we know not what or even when
we cannot cry out, the Holy Spirit, the Comforter and Advocate Jesus promised
us to send after he was gone, is at work in us and with us and for us, bringing
our petitions before God even when we cannot rightly articulate them or even
know what they are.
And it is from
this knowledge, this promise of a Spirit that intercedes for us beyond our
capacity to know or understand, that Paul can exult throughout the rest of this
chapter in the unspeakable love of God.
The God whose Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words is
the God who pulls all that happens to us into working together for our good,
not eliminating suffering or pain from our lives but blessing and sustaining us
through the suffering and pain; this is the God who created us and made us to
be part of the family of God, heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ,
brothers and sisters in a great unbounded worldwide family; this is the God
who, even though we could be charged with all of the corruption and weakness
sin can muster, instead intercedes for us, not even withholding God’s own Son,
that we would be reconciled and restored; this is the God who justifies, who
saves, who redeems and restores; this is the God who loved us and loves us and
will love us so profoundly and so unspeakably that Paul can practically sing
out in joy that nothing – not death
or life or angels or rulers or dark powers, nothing
can separate us from that love.
God meets our sighs too deep for words with love too deep for words.
For that, dear
brothers and sisters, even though the words themselves are painfully
insufficient, let us never fail to say, Thanks
be to God. Amen.
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