“Singing at the Throne of God”

June 19,2005

Scripture Readings:   Revelations:4-5

                         Romans 6

Rev. Dr. Carol L. Kerr

Blue Point Congregational Church

 

This sermon is about the importance of music in our ministry.  It starts with a congregational reading of the book of Revelations, and the singing of angels and saints at the throne of God.   I then turn to the individual soul, each person, as he or she becomes aware of God as a mystical illumination of the divine in all things.  Then the sermon ends with a concrete example of how one person, Anne Lamott, simply sitting in the pews of her Presbyterian church and  being transported and converted by the singing in her church.

The throne of God is encrusted with flaming gems and ringed by an emerald halo.  Lightening flashes and thunder booms from the divine pulse.  Before the throne torches blaze with the spirit of God.  Under the throne is a crystal clear sea as deep as time itself. 

Around the throne of God there are four animals.  One is a lion.  One is an ox.  One is an eagle.  One has a human face.  They each have six wings and each have eyes all over their bodies.  With these eyes they look for the truth constantly and forever.  They look everywhere and see everything.  They see everything and everywhere without and they see everything and everywhere within.  They chant day and night, Holy, holy, holy is God our Master.  Sovereign and Strong – the Was, the Is, and the Coming.

Let us do that now.  (Here the congregations chants in a four part round “Holy, holy, holy is God our Master… each part starts after ‘Holy, holy, holy…’”)

The four beasts prowling around the throne of God chanted and did not sing.  This is because their all seeing eyes could see the past, what was, and the present, what is, but they could not see the future, what is to be.  They understood the truth of creation only as a fragment of the great plan.  They understood the mind of the holy One on the throne only partially.  They needed to know the future.

The future was written in a scroll held by the right hand of God sitting on the throne.  The scroll revealed the fixed purposes of God.  It revealed the very mind of God.  Yet it was sealed with seven seals.  All heaven anticipated what was in the scroll.  An angel boomed above the chanting noise, Is there anyone who can open the scroll, who can break its seals?

There was no one.  There was no one from heaven and no one from earth and no one from the underworld who was able to break the seals and read it.  The four beasts despaired.  The chanting endlessly throbbed through heaven when no one answered the call.   Nowhere could a melody be found.

Suddenly there appeared before the throne a lamb that had been slaughtered.  The lamb had seven horns and seven eyes which revealed the manifold energies of God.  These were wisdom, understanding, counsel, might, knowledge, fear, and piety.  He was the one who had been slain.  He alone was the one worthy to read the scroll.  Approaching the throne the lamb passed down through the depths of the sea upon which the throne sat.  The lamb rose up again from the sea.  It climbed past the lightening and thunder no more than a soft breeze to it.  It reached for the scroll from the right hand of the One who was seated on the throne.

Let us all chant together:  Worthy!  Take the scroll.  Open its seals.  Slain!  Paying in blood, you bought men and women.  You bought them back from all over the earth. you bought them back for God.  Then you made them a Kingdom, Priests for our God, Priest-kings to rule over the earth.

At that moment the prayers of thousands of saints scented the air like roses.  As the scroll was opened all of heaven listened.  As the glory of what God had in mind unfolded before their all searching eyes, themes emerged more wonderful than they could have imagined.  The splendor of the future, indeed, the very end of time amazed the beasts, and the angels and all the saints of the earth.  So the chanting for the first time stopped.   All bowed before the throne and were silent with awe.  (Silence.)

From the deep center of this silence a beautiful melody was heard peeling like great bells of practiced thunder, infiltrating all of creation with its truth.   (At this point the organ plays the melody of “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee” without any harmony.)

All:      The slain Lamb is worthy!  Take the power, the wealth, the wisdom, the strength!  Take the honor, the glory, the blessing!

Then there appeared angels around the throne.  More and more angels.  Ten thousand times ten thousand of their number.  Thousand after thousand after thousand.  They turned into countless choirs singing with pipes, trumpets, harps and organs.  They began singing the melody of God.  Their voiced arose with endless interchanging harmonies.  The music passed beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights of heaven itself.  Heaven was filled to overflowing with the great music form the mind of God.  Such was the glory of the purposes of God as revealed by the Lamb of God, the only one who could open the scroll of the future.  To the One on the Throne!  To the Lamb!  The blessing, the honor, the glory, the strength for age after age after age. 

Let us all stand and sing, “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee”  #8

            Joyful, joyful, we adore thee, God of glory, Lord of love;

            Hearts unfold like flowers before thee, opening to the sun above.

            Melt the clouds of sin and sadness, drive the dark of doubt away;

            Giver of immortal gladness, fill us with the light of day.

 

            All thy works with joy surround thee, earth and heaven reflect thy rays,

            Stars and angels sing around thee, center of unbroken praise.

            Field and forest, vale and mountain, flowery meadow, flashing sea,

            Chanting bird and flowing fountain, call us to rejoice in thee.

 

            Thou art giving and forgiving, every blessing every blest,

            Well spring of the joy of living, ocean depth of happy rest!

            Thou our Father, Christ our Brother, all who live in love are thin;

            Teach us how to love each other, lift us to the joy divine.

Our souls here on earth spend a life time trying to find God.  It is like we are rowing in the fog, we cannot see and we do not have many eyes like the four beasts at the throne of God.  But, we have heard that there is beautiful music on an island called heaven and so we spend our lives rowing trying to get there.  We are not sure where the island is so we follow our hunches, we watch for clues in the patterns of the waves, we feel the direction of the wind.  Most of all we listen for the bells on the buoys that other people left who had traveled the same way.  Some of the bells ring once.  Some ring twice.  Some have silence inbetween  and others repeat themselves quickly.  Some are low and some are high.  Did the bell come from in front of us?  Did we hear one far off behind us?  We continually row with blisters on our hands that have broken and healed.  With muscles that ache.  Finally some of us get there.  We get out of the boat and on the island, there is a choir singing the most  beautiful melody.  Through the music reality itself becomes clear to us.  We achieve consciousness of a world of love that was always there but we didn’t know it.  Even the bells of the buoys we listened to find our way were also part of the marvelous song, on in brief fragments which we didn’t recognize. 

When we are on the island we realize that it is not an island at all, but in fact is the main land.  That there has been this vast continent of wonder and awe and great melody just off our shore the whole time.   We are illuminated by the beauty and wonder and knowledge of God.  As Walt Whitman wrote:  The World is charged with the grandeur of God; It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.  And we join in with the choir singing the great melody.

Many people think of sin as doing bad things.  They think of it as stealing or lying or cheating.   People think of sin as moral failure or a mistake.  However, the apostle Paul has a different idea.  Paul’s letter to the Romans is the first and perhaps greatest Christian theological treatise there is.  In it Paul argues that sin is not a failure of action and a moral lapse.  Rather, for Paul sin is the refusal to acknowledge God as our creator and foundation of our existence.  It is the attitude that we are the only show and town and that we are free agents and can do whatever we want.  We are not able and are not willing to respond to God.  We are not responsible to anyone but ourselves.  Sin is the belief that the little island we live on is the main continent of reality.  Sin is making up your own little tunes and not joining in with the melody of creation. 

Without God our tunes are only discord.  They are loud vain and endlessly repeated.  There is little harmony.  And a clamorous braying with not many notes.  The violence of the tunes we make up drowns out all other music.

Paul thinks that the opposite of sin is not particularly good deeds.  Rather the opposite of sin is faith.  It is through the faith of Jesus that we are saved.  Jesus never turned away from God, even when it meant his crucifixion.  He was willing to empty himself completely of his own tunes and enter completely into the divine melody.  This is true wherever that melody would lead him.  That is why the lamb of God was the only one worthy to read the scroll of God and break open the seals for us. 

Today we are celebrating (again!) the ministry of music in our church.  In this sermon I have been speaking of music in highly mystical terms.  The way music is used in the book of Revelations.  They way mystics have spoken of the souls illumination as a divine choir singing praises to God.  But, lest you think I am only speaking in poetic terms or symbolic terms or sentimental terms let me say that music as a pathway for the soul to God is very very real.   It is as if there truly is a divine melody sung in heaven.  The music we sing here reminds our soul of it.  The music here opens us up to listen to God’s music everywhere.  Music is a shortcut to God.   Let me end with a testimony by Anne Lamott in her book Traveling Mercies:

And one week later, when I went back to church, I as so hungover that I couldn’t stand up for the songs, and this time I stayed for the sermon, which I just thought was so ridiculous, like someone trying to convince me of the existence of extraterrestrials, but the last song was so deep and raw and pure that I could not escape.  It was as if the people were singing in between the notes, weeping and joyful at the same time, and I felt like their voices or something was rocking me in its bosom, holding me like a scared kid, and I opened up to that feeling – and it washed over me.

 

I began to cry and left before the benediction, and I raced home and felt the little cat (this was her urge to become Christian) running along at my heels, and I walked down the dock past dozens of potted flowers, under a sky as blue as one of God’s own dreams, and I opened the door to my houseboat, and I stood there a minute, and then I hung my head and said, “I quit.”  I took a long deep breath and said out loud, “All right You can come in.”

So this was my beautiful moment of conversion.

All sing:          Mortals join the happy chorus which the morning stars began;

                        Father love is reigning o’er us, brother love binds man to man.

                        Ever singing, march we onward, Victors in the midst of strife,

                        Joyful music leads us sunward in the triumph song of life.