I experience many great joys here at Christ Church, but one of the great joys that stands out, to me that I enjoy week after week, is planning worship with Mark and Linda, and then to participate in worship with all the wonderful musicians who are here.  We have a variety of different styles of worship, different styles of music, but the quality of all of the music here at Christ Church, I think, is exceptional.  And I get along pretty well with all of the musicians here, I think.  I’m looking over here, and I don’t see any nods of approval on this statement.  I think I’ve always gotten along pretty well with the musicians of the churches I’ve served.  Which is not always true, the minister and the musicians, the organist, don’t always get along. 

For example, I heard about this one minister and organist who just did not get along.  I don’t know if it was more the minister’s fault or the organist, but they did not get along.  And, as in our church, it was the organist who chose all the hymns.  He was supposed to choose hymns that fit in with what the minister was preaching on, Mark is the master at this here, but this organist in my story didn’t do all that well at it, or else he was just being antagonistic toward the minister.  For example, this minister was preaching against gossip one Sunday, and this organist chose as the hymn, “I Love To Tell the Story”.  And when this minister preached on stewardship, on paying something back, this organist chose as the hymn, “Jesus Paid It All”.  And when this minister chose as his topic sitting and being quiet and reverent and still before the Lord, this organist chose “Stand Up, Stand Up, for Jesus” as the hymn.  You get the idea.           

Well eventually the minister had had enough, it wasn’t just the organist, mostly it was the organist, but it was other things too, and so one Sunday morning the minister told the congregation that he was considering resigning from the church.  Well the hymn the organist chose was “Oh Why Not Tonight?”  The next Sunday this minister said that he had indeed decided to resign from the church, that he felt Jesus was leading him to resign.  And the hymn that day was “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”.           

Music, the theme for today is music.  Music, I think, has a certain power over us.  Music can do things to us, if we let the wrong person choose the hymns, for example, and music can do things for us.  I read an article entitled “Music’s Surprising Power to Heal”.  There were many stories such as one in which a woman, who was severely injured in an automobile accident, lay in the operating room of a hospital.  She’d been hooked up, of course, to a computer monitor for her heart rate and brain waves.  But she had also been hooked up, by earphones, to a recording of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons.  During the operation, the surgical team listened to Mozart and Brahms.  The head surgeon, a pioneer in this, commented that “music reduces staff tension in the operating room, and also helps relax the patient.” 

The woman operated on later said, “The music was better than medication.  I remained calm before the operation, and didn’t need as much sedation.”  At home, she convalesced to music, and was even able to do without most of her prescribed painkillers.  “Music therapy”, as they call it, or “The Mozart Effect”, is proving effective in all sorts of medical areas, including the treatment of pain, anxiety and depression.  Music can relieve stress and tension.  It can give us energy.  I do some jogging.  I know it doesn’t look like it.  And it is almost unbelievable how much further I can go, how much faster I can be, if I’m tuned into something like the triumphal march from the opera Aida, or the theme song from the movie Rocky.  You know, . . . [hum the tune].           

Music has the ability to inspire and delight, to bring inspiration and excitement that you hadn’t even known was there before.  There is a “music of the spheres” that can bring into our lives something transcendent, a transforming moment.  Have you ever heard a choir or an organ or piano playing so beautifully that you knew in those moments that it was not just bringing you an earthly beauty, there was something of a heavenly beauty, a beauty yonder?           

There was an actor who died the other day, by the name of Paul Scofield.  He won a Tony Award on Broadway, and an Academy Award, for his role as Sir Thomas Moore in “A Man for All Seasons”.  And his performances apparently were so majestic, so ethereal, that one drama critic wrote that his performances “have something of the other world about them.”           

I think the best music has something of the other world about it.  This passage from Ephesians brings this point home.  There is something of another world, something spiritual, something of the Spirit of God, that inhabits our souls, and the power of music is that it continually reminds us of this.  Other things remind us of God, of course, but music is one of the more powerful reminders.  It brings home to us an experience of God almost, a kind of understanding of our need for God, our absolute dependence on God, how God can work through us and speak through us just as God speaks through beautiful music.           

I heard the story of a group of American prisoners of war during World War II.  The year was 1942, and they had been captured during the defense of the Philippine Islands, and had already survived the infamous Bataan Death March on which many of their fellow soldiers had already died.  Sometimes the prisoners were moved from camp to camp to thwart any escape attempts.  And during one of these moves, one American prisoner remembered the POWs being loaded into a crowded freight train.  They were hungry, thirsty, ill, many of them.  And they had pretty much given up all hope.  They were uncertain what would happen to them or where they were going.  Many of them were questioning whether the price they were paying for trying to help the people of the Philippines was really worth it.           

The train they were on had to make several stops along the way, and at one of these stops there were some Filipino children playing on the train platform.  The doors were opened on the train, allowing the POWs to see the children, and it also allowed the children to see the prisoners.  Soon these children began to hum a tune, a tune that was familiar to the POWs.  The children hummed the tune over and over.  They hummed it because if they had sung the words, the enemy soldiers probably would have shot them all.  The tune they were humming was “God Bless America”.           

This lifted the spirits of the men as they continued to travel to their destination.  They began to hum as they traveled, “God bless America, land that I love.”  And the rest of the journey was not nearly as rough as it might have been.  This “musical incident”, as the prisoners began to call it and remember it, had fortified their desire to live, to survive.  They heard a group of children singing, and their whole perspective changed, their lives were changed.