The Celestial Symphony

The Rev. Dr. Skip Ferguson

Manassas Presbyterian Church

Manassas, Virginia

May 13, 2012

The Celestial Symphony

Psalm 19:1-4

Long before the first word was uttered,

long before God’s command boomed across the heavens,

“Let there be light,”

there was sound,

sound that moved through the stars and dust

that was the universe,

sound that reverberated over the void that was earth.

It was the sound of creation,

sound coming from God’s Holy Spirit,

the sound of God breathing life into the emptiness,

the void,

bringing life to the lifeless.

The sound was music

the music of life,

the first notes of creation,

beginning with the low rumble of hydrogen ignited within a star,

the nuclear reaction giving off light and heat.

Then came the groan of land masses moving,

grinding into one another,

slow-motion collisions that pushed up mountains,

and carved out basins to catch water

that would become lakes and seas.

The author Alan Lightman imagines

God hearing these sounds and saying,

“The Void had always vibrated

with the music of my thoughts,

but before the existence of time

the totality of sounds occurred simultaneously,

 as if a thousand thousand notes were played all at once.

Now we could hear one note following another,

cascades of sound, …

We could hear melodies.

We could hear rhythms and metrical phrases

gather up time in lovely folds of sounds.

…we were transfixed by the most exquisite sounds,

the tender and melodic

and rapturous oscillations of the Void. …

In every place and in every moment,

we were wrapped and engulfed in music.

At times the music poured forth in fierce,

heaving swells.

At other times, it advanced in the softest little steps,

delicate as a fleeting veil in the Void.

Music clung to our beings….

Music went inside us.

I had created music,

but now music created;

it lifted and remade

and formed a completeness of being.”

(“Mr. g: A Novel About the Creation”)

What Lightman captures so lyrically is that

God was composing, writing unique notes

stopping to listen from time to time

to the music he was creating,

music only God could hear.

And it was good, so very good,

for it was a symphony composed in love.

It is a symphony that continues to be written,

for our earth,

for all the universe

God is forever creating, 

forever re-creating,

adding more music, more melody,

more harmony, more rhythm,

the Celestial Symphony eternally playing

yet forever unfinished.

Stop by a stand of pine trees –

not the scrub pines that we have around here,

but proper pine trees like you’d find on

the Green Mountains of Vermont,

the kind of pine tree we want in our homes at Christmas.

Listen to the sound of wind as it blows through the branches.

It isn’t the rattle of dried leaves

that have yet to fall from

the branches of a maple or an oak,

but a whoosh,

a solemn hiss,

as the wind is forced through the needles,

branches bending to the force,

but the needles standing firm, resolute,

combing the wind,

and in the process making music,

God’s music,

Creation music.

We humans love music.

Our hunger for melody and harmony

was evidenced long before Apple gave us

iTunes, the iPod and earbuds.

The first instrument was a bone hollowed out

and then drilled with a couple holes to make a flute.

What prompted a human to make such a thing,

to look at an animal’s bone and think to himself,

“if I hollow it, then put some holes in it,

and then blow through it,

I’ll be able to create sounds,

lovely sounds”?

That was 40,000 years ago

and we have been making music ever since.

In King David’s time

instruments were used regularly to help the faithful

worship the Lord God:

harp, lyre, cymbals, drums.

Many psalms have instructions that say,

“To the leader: with stringed instruments;”

Others say simply, “A Song”,

while some psalms are referred to as “maskils”,

a Hebrew term meaning “artful song”.

Psalm 150 calls all the faithful to pick up an instrument,

any instrument,

 and join in joyful song:

“Praise God with trumpet sound,

Praise him with lute and harp!

Praise him with tambourine and dance;

Praise him with strings and pipe!

Praise him with clanging cymbals;

Praise God with loud clashing cymbals!”

Music energizes us;

it teaches us,

it inspires us,

it lifts us;

Music also soothes us,

comforts us,

calms us,

gives us peace.

Music touches us individually,

and  music binds us together in community, as well.

Feel what happens in this very room,

when we take a 47-year-old song –

not even a hymn -

and let it fill us

let it cause our toes to tap,

our fingers to snap,

voices joined together…

 [Play “My Girl” by the Temptations”]

We sing so many wonderful songs together each Sunday;

They inspire us to bind our voices together

in sung prayers of praise, of adoration,

of confession, of thanksgiving,

songs that help us express our wonder,

our faith, our hope,

even our frustration,

 our sadness,

our grief,

our pain.

Music gives voice to all our emotions.

The hundreds of songs we have in our hymnals

are a mere fraction of the tens of thousands of songs

men and women have written to the glory of God

over the centuries.

We all have our favorites, of course,

and inevitably we each have hymns

we don’t care for all that much.  

Something always to keep in mind, though,

is that the hymn you may not care for,

is surely someone else’s favorite,

perhaps the favorite of the person standing next to you.

The composer of the hymn

we will sing in just a few moments,

“When in Our Music God is Glorified,”

was so right when he wrote,

“How often, making music, we have found

a new dimension in the world of sound,

as worship moves us to a more profound Alleluia.”

That’s what music does: it moves us,

moves us to more profound worship,

more profound prayer and praise,

truly, a more profound alleluia.

Every piece of music,

even the staid hymns of Isaac Watts or Fanny Crosby,

are at their essence spirituals,

for they move us spiritually,

as we listen,

as we sing,

as the melody, the words, the feeling

captures us,

drawing us in, mind and heart.

We don’t have to be musicians;

we don’t have to know how to read the notes on a staff,

or even sing on key;

all we have to do is open ourselves to the Spirit,

to let the breath of God move us to lift up our voices,

to become part of the celestial symphony

that has been playing since the beginning of time,

the music of ongoing creation,

re-creation,

by the Lord God, the master composer,

The heavens do tell the glory of God,

and the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork;

all as part of the symphony playing all around us,

God’s magnificent song, composed

“to give us faith to sing always: alleluia!”

AMEN