Sermon afterthoughts: The Deceptiveness of Light

What came into being in him was life, and that life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

--John 1: 3-5 (NRSV) 

"Very well then, we must corrupt it. No doubt you often practice transforming into an angel of light as a parade ground exercise, now is the time to do it in the face of the Enemy."

-Screwtape to Wormwood, The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis

My sermon on John 1 today got hijacked along the way by the sentences above quoted from verses 3-5. Mostly this was because, as noted early in the sermon itself, I found myself wondering a lot about the particular ritual that closes so many Christmas Eve services involving the congregation holding up lighted candles in a darkened sanctuary. As written there, in cold hard computer-screen text, it doesn't look very impressive, does it? In practice, people tend to be transfixed. If other pastors are like me, they might worry that nothing else from the service will stay with anyone in the congregation once that's all over.

I couldn't let the sermon pass without noting how that light/dark dichotomy gets misused to treat, say, darkness of skin (or any other darkness) as tantamount to darkness of spirit or absence of light. There's a long history of that, behind justifying slavery and a whole lot of other civil rights abuses. What I didn't have time to get to, on the other hand, is the observation that the opposite can also be true; lightness of skin (or any other kind of lightness) as automatically good or perfect or right or holy. And goodness knows, that's just not true.

The quote lifted above from The Screwtape Letters riffs on Paul's admonition to the Corinthians about false teachers and deceivers. Goodness knows there's enough of that among us in the church, frankly pointing supposed followers of Christ towards all manner of falsehood and wrong theology and frankly evil-doing. We're only four days away from the anniversary of one of the most egregious and grotesque examples of such falseness in the 'Christian nationalism' that drove many participants in the attack on the Capitol.

'Christian nationalism' is particularly pernicious at the moment, but it is hardly the only false light luring people away from genuine faith, is it? The prosperity gospel has been eroding the church for decades. The strictures of "biblical manhood" and "biblical womanhood" have been breaking lives and hearts for at least as long if not longer. (Mandatory plug for Kristin Kobes du Mez's Jesus and John Wayne and Beth Allison Barr's The Making of Biblical Womanhood on those subjects.) The false lights, and the fake angels of light pushing people towards those false lights, are thick on the ground these days, and some of them are mistaken for real followers of Christ way too easily.

Light, indeed, can be deceiving, even without such false prophets and wrongdoers posing as angels of light. To bring in my favorite bit of Christmas-season public theology, A Charlie Brown Christmas, where do the brightest lights appear in that little parable? I think one might have to point to CB and Linus's journey to the Christmas tree lot, the one with all the big shiny aluminum Christmas trees. Remember the big spotlights that led the two to the spot? 

Or one might think of the brightly lit stage with all the kids dancing in lieu of rehearsing for the Christmas play:

This one stands out most in contrast to that same stage when Linus finally steps up with Luke 2 in answer to Charlie Brown's desperation:

John's seemingly simple dichotomy masks the much more demanding task of discernment that we face: which light is the true light? Seeking the "true light" as John calls it in verse 9 requires sorting out a lot of fake or artificial light. John doesn't really address that so much, outside of course of spending his entire gospel trying to portray that Light.

Maybe the difference is that the "true light" is the one that actually does shine in the darkness, that isn't unplugged or turned off so easily. The "true light" is the one that the darkness did not, could not, cannot extinguish.When other false lights have shorted out or burned away, the true light still shines. 

One of my former seminary professors, when the occasion arose, frequently (OK, almost always) pronounced a benediction that included something along the lines of this: "and may light, love's own crucified, risen, incarnate light guide each and everyone of us out of every darkness and all the way home." What does a "crucified, risen, incarnate Light" look like? Maybe more to the point: what does a "crucified, risen, incarnate Light" not look like? Perhaps in the end this is the thing that points us towards the true light and away from all the parade-ground devils practicing their transformation-tricks on gullible souls.

Sermon afterthoughts: Childish

The week was spent preparing a sermon on Ephesians 4:1-16. Two verses in particular from the text just kept jumping out at me all week, to the point of almost preventing a sermon from happening. Check out verses 14-15, here as in the Common English Bible:

 As a result, we aren't supposed to be infants any longer who can be tossed and blown around by every wind that comes from teaching with deceitful scheming and the tricks people play to mislead others. Instead, by speaking the truth with love, let's grow in every way into Christ...

It doesn't take a whole lot of effort to find in your average batch of weekly headlines a slew of examples of folks who present themselves as "Christians," for whom the scare quotes seem especially necessary when viewed in the light of this passage (or, say, Philippians 4:8, or 1 Corinthians 13, or Galatians 5:22-23, or most anything about Jesus in any of the gospels). There isn't a whole lot of good witness in the behavior of such leaders as the pastor who threatened to throw out anyone wearing a mask in *his* church (emphasis on his). 

It is, in short, childish - a childishness made all the worse by its continued insistence on posturing as "masculine" or "manly" or some such business. It is whining posturing as leadership. It is those who "teach with deceitful scheming" preying upon infants who can be tossed and blown around by all the wind. And frankly, it is gross. 

I suppose the confluence of headlines and lectionary scripture have pushed this one forward in my mind, but it checks out nonetheless. The "Christianity" that preys upon our headlines and draws attention to itself (as opposed to, oh, I don't know, Jesus?) is a culturally shaped "Christianity" that has no spiritual maturity about it, that demands benefits and privileges for itself and its chosen few, with the rest of the world either ignored or actively vilified. 

I have in the past argued that the word "Christian" should be abolished as an adjective. Four years later, I'm more convinced of this than ever. What I'm seeing more and more is how much of this usage of the word seems to be deeply bogged down in a rampant spiritual childishness laced with heavy doses of fear, fear of "the other," fear of losing one's status and privilege and power, fear of anything that challenges our comfort and splendid isolation and imagined benevolence toward the lesser people around "us" (this one got totally ramped up by the pandemic).  

The aforementioned 1 Corinthians 13 contains, besides all the description and exaltation of love, this telling bit in verse 11: 

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a adult, I put an end to childish ways.

It's telling indeed, and yet how many have not put aside such childish ways? What might be some "childish" ways that need to be put aside? Things like selfishness ("if you have enough, then I can't have everything I want" is a pretty good summary), name-calling (have you had enough of the word "socialism" these days?), projection (accusing others of that of which you are guilty - every sibling has experienced that even if they don't realize it), avoiding responsibility ("it's not my fault if those people are [something they are actually not]"); it's a long list, and an awful lot of public-facing self-identified "Christians" indulge these and too many other traits of childishness with little pushback from, well, anybody. 

The title of the sermon that eventually resulted from the week's wrestling with these verses was "Grow Up." You'll see an amusing illustration with it (also reproduced it here - if anyone knows who created it I'd love to give them credit and maybe buy them dinner, even if it might be slightly unfair to a lot of adolescents I know). The illustration isn't limited to the church, to be sure, but boy howdy does it apply here. 

Of course, part of being able to avoid being tossed and blown around by the deceivers is being well-rooted enough to spot deception when you hear or see it. Being grounded in scripture would be a good start, but how many adults at your church have any tolerance for doing Sunday school? In addition, I'm going to list a few books at the end of this blog for getting acquainted with how the deceivers among the church get traction; two of them lay out in stark detail how powergrabbers replace genuine Christlike teaching with deeply unchristlike cultural norms prettied up with a thin veneer of churchy talk, while the third helps demonstrate how those norms-disguised-as-faith get spread around so profusely. The mainline church of which I am a part has a tall task ahead of undoing the damage done, but the task can't be avoided or brushed off no matter how much such churches seek to do justice and practice righteousness. The childish church is eventually going to have to be named and called out, no matter how unpleasant it will be, or else God's gonna have to tear it all up, roots and everything, and plant anew. 

Or maybe that's already happening.

Suggested reading:

Du Mez, Kristin Kobes. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. 

Barr, Beth Allison. The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth.

Vaca, Daniel. Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America.

What (or who) am I not listening to?

After that last post on "what am I listening to", I have been reminded this week of the opposite extreme in my listening practices. There is in fact one musical category I have been deliberately avoiding, for a full year in fact. I could not have gotten away with such avoidance in my previous career, especially for this past year, but in my current life it was relatively easy to do.

Yep, I'm one of those people who has been avoiding, deliberately, the music of Ludwig van Beethoven. 

Specifically, avoiding Beethoven's music during the year leading up to the 250th anniversary of his birth, which you might have heard was yesterday. 

It should be noted that this is actually one thing that was enabled by the ongoing curtailment of activities due to the pandemic. Last week or last month or some time I'd likely have been compelled to attend a big choral concert of one of his larger works, because my wife would have been singing in it. So, a narrow miss there.

Yes, it was a deliberate choice. Yes, it was somewhat encouraged by the anniversary. No, I'm not the only person. 

Why?

Because there was no need for music organizations to spend the last year or the next year bingeing on Beethoven music.

Why? Because music organizations, for the most part, already spend a great deal of their time and energy bingeing on Beethoven music.

This is especially true of instrumental groups, symphonies most of all. But choral groups will jump in on a Ninth Symphony whenever possible, and in a year like this other works were going to get a workout. But on the instrumental side, it's a pretty strong likelihood that any orchestra that put forth a Beethoven cycle (or had planned to) for last season or this had already done a Beethoven cycle (or some limited form thereof) some time in the past decade. Aside from certain specialty organizations, it's hard to imagine such a group going a full season without a Beethoven something. (And in the interest of full disclosure, I did participate in the Beethovenism, to the degree that one of my few public recitals was devoted to LvB's string trios, even though I was no Beethoven scholar.)

Perhaps even more pervasive is the presence of Beethoven music on such classical radio as exists these days. I'm not going to spend a full twenty-four hour period listening to a classical radio outlet (I need sleep), but it's hard to imagine such an outlet going a full twenty-four hours with no Ludwig. There may be a handful of others who get such treatment (Mozart or Bach might come to mind), but not many. 

The one exception I have made in the past twelve months is to let pass the fleeting bars of "Für Elise" that Schroeder tries to pass as "Beethoven Christmas music" in A Charlie Brown Christmas. Even that example points to the depth of the phenomenon. Mozart or Bach never got that pop-culture kind of treatment, nor others. (To be fair, Schroeder doesn't use his Beethoven fanaticism to demean the music of other composers, as the strip below shows.)

Interestingly, many of the names on that list Lucy spits out spent much of their careers laboring under the shadow of Beethoven, whether self-imposed or as part of a musical establishment in which LvB was increasingly idolized (I use that word more literally than I usually do on a non-religious subject). 

So, for me as a no-longer-music-professional, I simply didn't see any reason to support the Beethoven Binge with such funds as I had at my disposal. 

But not listening to Beethoven wasn't enough; something else needed to fill the musical void.

I ended up, as slightly alluded in the previous post, finding out just how much I had underappreciated Franz Schubert.

I rekindled my affection for the composers of late-19th and early-20th century composers of the US who had been my principal scholarly pursuit back in academia. 

I happily indulged in music of composers such as Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, William Levi Dawson (and I'm not referring to his choral arrangements of spirituals), William Grant Still, and others who committed the unforgivable crime of composing while Black. 

I remembered how much I liked jazz. I actually went to some jazz shows, both local and more national, before the pandemic shut down most concert life, and picked up some online shows in the meantime. 

I also put out feelers into other musical genres I hadn't indulged in much in a while. I ended up picking up some Broadway I wasn't familiar with and trying to find some of the classical music of India that had fleetingly passed through my life at least two decades ago.

And I discovered I liked hearing those things. 

So, with the term of avoidance technically over as of yesterday's big anniversary blowouts (such as they were), I have to admit that I honestly don't know whether that avoidance will continue or be dropped. 

I'm still obsessing over those Schubert piano sonatas. Still absorbed by that Chrismas Cantata by Daniel Pinkham. The presence of what might be called "classical Chrismas music" on one outlet I have available is helping pass the time. I still am waiting for Margaret Bonds to get the public recovery that Florence Price has been getting. (Listen to this and this if you wonder why.)

And one other thing: I'm not sure that "greatness" is enough of a reason to be force-fed one guy's music to the inevitable exclusion of some other composer's work. Call me a heretic if you like. It wouldn't be my first time.

So I have no idea what I'll do the next time LvB pops up in front of me anywhere other than from Schroeder's piano. Eventually I might spend some time with it. But I'm in no hurry. There's a lot of other stuff I need to hear.

??? Who knows what I'll do...

What am I listening to?

 The title question popped up on Facebook a couple of days ago (I think?), from a colleague/friend asking what music others were listening to right now. I did not answer at the moment, being a bit busy and distracted (my default state these days). When I had a moment to stop and check myself I didn't answer either. I still haven't, mostly because when I finally put my finger on the music that was most occupying my ears and my mind right now, neither of them seemed to be a "jam," and the question did ask what was one's "current jam." Making a currant jelly joke seemed a reach, so I left it.

In fact there are two things that have been lodging themselves on my sonic devices in particular - one which has been occupying my mind for quite a while, and the other coming to the fore more recently, apparently tied to the advent of the Advent/Christmas cycle now upon the church. 

When last I darkened the door of this blog I confessed to an ongoing obsession with the late piano sonatas of Franz Schubert. At that time his penultimate sonata, no. 20, was foremost in my ear and mind. Since then my listening has broadened...all the way to his last sonata, no. 21. In particular the second movement has taken hold. (Fair warning: this movement itself is about ten minutes long, although obviously I consider such minutes to be well spent.)

You will note that this movement ...  is ... slow. Now this is not itself so odd; your average Classic/Romantic era piano sonata has a slow movement. What's odd here is that in this particular case, the first movement of Schubert's sonata is also rather slow, and two slow movements back-to-back is less typical.

Also, this movement is not only slow, it is quite spare, for lack of a better word. Aside from the slightly faster and somewhat fuller middle section, this movement is joltingly spacious in its texture. Rather than being spun out in a line (a not-atypical way to talk about musical melodies or motives), these notes and figures seem almost suspended in empty space. Laden with the burden of pandemic time, it almost sounds as if the notes are socially distanced.

Even when things seem to get busier, the musical activity often consists of repeated notes or figures, which manages to sound busy without necessarily sounding full, at least as Schubert deploys them. And even then, after what passes for great agitation in this movement, the music ultimately returns to the arrestingly spare sonic space of the first section, with slight tweaks of harmony and rhythm,  the emptiness of notes and motifs hanging from gently swaying mobiles in a darkened room. It is not the sound of silence - that is Simon & Garfunkel's territory - but perhaps it is the sound of quiet - quiet in the way Frederick Buechner describes a room where people are not speaking; the room is darkened, perhaps, but not empty. 

I hesitate to guess why this movement has latched on to me of late. Maybe in the deafening emptiness of pandemic-tide the genuine quiet of the movement provides sanctuary. Maybe I'm just really geeked by Mitsuko Uchida's interpretation of the sonata. Maybe it's just the pleasure of ten minutes that invite me not to be overwhelmed or ragged or confronted with the endless rounds of I don't know how to do this that constitute so many of my days in this time. Or maybe it simply invites me in the direction of mystery, and some part of me that is normally shouted down and drowned out sneaks into my consciousness through it.

The second, more recent, more seasonal, and shorter fascination of late is a more modern composition, by an American named Daniel Pinkham. It is the second movement of his Christmas Cantata, a setting of the ancient text "O magnum mysterium." You might notice some similarities to the sonata movement among the obvious differences. 

I have had the intense pleasure of singing this work a couple of times. "Spare" and "spacious" are fitting adjectives here also, and the hints of medievalism add to the effect. This is a movement to tax the breath control of the finest choral singers and brass players, and the sheer length of notes makes more space rather than filling it. 

The effect is, to be sure, deepened by those initial words of the text - O magnum mysterium, "o great mystery." The hearer is led directly into that contemplation, in this case the mystery of the Nativity and Incarnation. The mystery does not avoid the seemingly ludicrous; barn animals the first witnesses of the infant Messiah. There is a thickening of the music as the Blessed Virgin gets her shout-out, a build to a volume climax spiced with discordant intervals and the long sustained notes underneath it all interrupted for a fraction of a moment, and yet at the last it all collapses in slow motion back into the space, the quiet, repeated motifs from the brass and organ strung together and fading away, to one last unresolving chord. 

It is a text for the Nativity, but musically it is all Advent - waiting, quiet, unbearable anticipation. It is much shorter than the Schubert sonata movement, but it is still music that demands time. Somehow, I guess this is something I need in some way or other. 

Anyway, that's what I'm listening to.