“The aim and final end of all music should be none else other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.” – J.S. Bach

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Many individuals over the years have asked me who my favorite composer is and I have always answered them I really do not have one – I have many!  However, one composer stands out as a mentor for myself as well as most serious church musicians – a composer who millions of people know and is arguably the most famous and gifted of all composers past and present in the entire western world.  Since the year of his death in 1750, Johann Sebastian Bach’s music lifts the heart and energizes the soul.

However, many do not know that behind the facade of this brilliant composer was a theologian whose heart was after God, only God!  In fact, Bach believed that music was a “refreshment of spirit.”  He studied the Bible rigorously.  At the age of 48, Bach acquired Luther’s three-volume translation of the Bible.  He underlined passages, inserted missing words, and made notes in the margin.  He was also known as “the Fifth Evangelist” who had an extraordinary influence leading countless lives to Christ.

One Bible passage that received Bach’s special attention was 1 Chronicles 25, the chapter that describes how King David appointed 288 musicians to serve at the tabernacle.  Bach wrote in the margin: “Note well: this chapter is the true foundation of all God-pleasing church music”.  Bach was right.   David’s example shows that music is at the very heart of worship that pleases God.  It is right and good to employ skilled musicians to lead the worship of God.  The function of a church musician is to proclaim the Word of God. 

Few musicians have ever understood this more completely than Johann Sebastian Bach, who dedicated his life to music in the service of Christ.  This is our approach to music at Pinnacle.  Like the sermon, our worship music aims to proclaim the Word of God.  Scripture instructs us to “Let the word of Christ richly dwell in us as we teach and admonish one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.”  The reason worship music has this teaching function in the church is because what we sing is the Word of God.

Bach was an extraordinary gifted musician.  But his basic commitment is something that every Christian can emulate.  It is well known that Bach often signed his compositions with the letters “s.D.g”: soli Deo Gloria, or “glory to God alone.”  The glory of God is the chief end of music because it is the chief end of man.  Whatever we do, we should do it as well as we possibly can, so as to glorify God.

Election season is approaching full momentum and it has become more intriguing than any reality show on TV. The recent interchange between the Pope and one particular candidate exemplified the stakes of the campaign trail. Somewhere in the criticisms a very valid point was lost. We should, indeed, be building bridges instead of walls. I agree that from a political perspective one could debate the effect of such an approach (our country does need a strong defense and walls do help to provide it). But, philosophically and theologically one could not argue with the concept of bridges. Christ very clearly tells us to build bridges in His greatest commandments, to love your neighbor as yourself. He even takes it a step further and tells us to love our enemies. But don’t worry. If you are into walls, the Bible provides some sound advice on that topic as well.

Like a city whose walls are broken through, is a person who lacks self-control. (Proverbs 25:28, NIV)

The children studied this scripture passage for the month of January and we discovered that there are many different ways to build walls around ourselves. Walls protect us from the negative forces of the world.  Walls help contain us into a safe space, even providing shelter from our own selves. Walls take on so many forms, but essentially walls represent the choices we make.   

So, I have a little advice for our aspiring Presidential candidates as well as those who have landed in the middle of the all the banter. They could learn a lot from what our children said about self-control in Church School last month:

1. Choose what you should do and not what you want to do. Choose the things that God prioritizes and not what society applauds.
2. It’s better to be patient than to fight. Sometimes restraint can be a more powerful position than belligerent and thoughtless attacks.
3. Select your words carefully. Remember that a carefully chosen word, or two, is more dignified and convincing than judgmental and demeaning words.
4. Press pause…give yourself time to think about what you do before you do it.

In a world where society tends to mistake the loudest voice in the room as the leaders’ voice, I wish we could take a step back and focus our efforts, both as voters and as candidates. Amidst the mud-slinging and personal attacks, we seem to learn less and less about the candidates, beyond their ability to be noisy, thoughtless, and mean. And, we mistake this as a sign of strength. In my mind, self-control takes more strength and leadership than most of the behaviors on display during this campaign trail. Maybe our candidates should spend a little more time in Sunday School so they can start to rebuild some walls around themselves.

Last week I spent one week at a retreat asking the age old question…Why do we do what we do in worship?  Why do we say the prayer of confession, sing hymns, and pray?  What is the purpose of taking an offering, listening to sermons and participating in baptisms and communion?  Basically asking the question, what is the point? 

As a worship leader, I can tell you that each individual piece of liturgy is significant for a reason.  For example, we sing to hear the story of our faith and say Thank You Lord.  We listen to a sermon so we can hear the words of God proclaimed to us.  We give our offering because we recognize all that God gives us and we respond with a gift back.  I could go on, but you get the picture each piece of worship has a purpose in helping us to be in relationship with God.

But what was interesting about asking this question again while reading some of the theological greats of our tradition is what John Calvin said about the point of worship.  He said that worship is a public gathering and what happens in it (the prayer of confession, sermon, prayers, sacraments etc.) concerns the whole nation.  This is an intriguing point about worship because it is says that we show up to worship each Sunday not only for our relationship with God to grow or for our relationships with church family to be nourished.  The point of worship is that it changes the whole world. 

This seems like an unbelievable purpose, to think that our particular presence at worship this coming Sunday is going to change the world.  Think about it for a second.  Calvin is saying that your prayer of confession, your voice as we sing together, your prayers, your listening, responding, and giving in worship will change the world.

I have been marveling about how we changed the world because of our attendance in worship this past Sunday.  Did we change the world because we chose to forgive the person were we angry at, because God chose to forgive us?  Was it was when we recognized the sunset as gift from God and gave thanks.  Or perhaps it was the smile and kind words given to the cashier in grocery store, the hug we gave to a friend, and the prayer we prayed when we sent our kids off at school.  Or possibly it was when we heard God’s voice speaking and we were comforted, compelled and challenged to do His work.  Or maybe it was the moment we listened for God’s answer to our dilemma whether small or large.

We change the world when we worship, because it is in worship that we hear God speak, we remember God’s presence and we live as God’s beloved children wherever we go.  I don’t think I will ever see the simple pieces of worship the same.  Thanks be to God!

I'm always grateful to my friend Bill Smith who sends a daily quote to his circle of followers, always timey and often personal. Recently, he quoted up a 2005 Kenyon College Commencement speech by the late novelist David Foster Wallace that has "gone viral" this graduation season. It's gone viral in part because an LA production company pushed it out. Manuscripts and a video are still being passed around.

I've excerpted it even more, for a little taste of something I want to comment on this week: 

…in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship....

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

...The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. 

That is real freedom...

If you have a second, read it again. Then indulge me to add a thought.

Wallace faced his own set of struggles in life, yearnings for freedom that took their toll, but in this address he touches on a deep and lasting truth. The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber once said that believing in the Infinite, in God, is not simply believing in something bigger than what we believe in for day to day freedom in an ordinary world. Believing in God transforms belief itself. It's a different kind of belief, not just a different object of belief. It's different because it's not a harnessing or a comprehension of the Infinite. It's a letting go into the Infinite, an acceptance of relationship, a moving into mystery, and an inarticulate realizing that belief in God will lead to more unknowing than knowing as it grows from understanding to understanding. It is also a receiving of a way of living that issues from this kind of believing—a way of love, moving self from the center and letting the presence and needs of others become a part of our being. 

This kind of believing becomes a kind of trusting, which in turn becomes life- and freedom-giving, not life- or freedom-controlling. It sometimes begins in a switching of the objects of our trust­, from penultimate to ultimate things. But it can't be left there. For it eventually does change how, not just what, we trust.

So Wallace was right, I think. But in light of what I've added here, I also think he advocated an impossibility. For I can't in the end make myself believe in an ultimate way. I can only turn my face in that direction, confess the less than ultimate things in which I put my daily trust, and ask that the Ultimate—who I can't help but call God—might reveal itself (Godself) in ways known to it (God) and so also give me ability, will, sensation, inclination, courage, confidence, grace—ah, grace—to trust it (God). And ask it (God) to provide the grace and the community in which it (God) might be trusted in God-congruent ways—to believe in God in a God-offered, God-given, God-appropriate way...

The Foster speech (with thanks to William Smith):
Text: http://www.metastatic.org/text/This%20is%20Water.pdf