In the Silence of God's Music
Texts:  Psalm 150; Revelation 14.1-3; Luke 19. 37-40 

There are two essential modes by which human beings offer their praise to God.  The first expresses itself with words profound, and with works of the imagination, and with an active life of love towards one’s neighbour.  The medievals called it the via positiva, the way of fullness.  The Uniting Church knows a great deal about this way.  Most of us are ON that way, because it is a way we understand.  We understand words.  We understand preaching. We understand simple signs and pictures, which yield their meaning easily. We understand pastoral care and social advocacy. 

But there is another way to praise God, a way that the medieval doctors called the via negativa, the way of emptiness.  This way is more difficult to explain, and more difficult to do, because it is not really about doing anything at all.  It is more like the space left vacant by the absence of action.  The via negativa  is not so much about words, but about the silence between words.  It is not so much about imagining and creating, as about the point where creativity ends and contemplation begins.  It is not so much about the active love of neighbour, as about becoming aware of God’s neighbourly love of us.  In my experience, his kind of praise is not well understood in the Uniting Church.

It is often very difficult for people who praise in these two very different ways to understand each other.  The activists accuse the contemplatives of being too heavenly minded to be of any earthly use.  The contemplatives shake their heads at the fury of activity with which people fill their lives.  'Where is the still, small voice of God in all of that?' they ask.  The contemplative would like to sit with a bible and a candle all day long, while the activist asks 'what about the poor?  What about the young people, and the people who are ill? What about the leaking roof'? 

Many of you will have noticed that your minister is a contemplative trying to find a way to be relevant in an essentially activist denomination!  And making a bit of a mess of it!

But which of these ways of praising God is the most praiseworthy?  Which of these ways does God prefer?  Well, I'm not sure that's the right question to ask.  It's like asking which is most essential to the wonderful sound of waves breaking on the beach—the breaking itself, or the moments of silence between.  And tell me this!  What is it that makes the sound of music so beautiful—the sounding of the instrument as it plays each note, or the spaces of silence between each note, each phrase, each movement?

Let me suggest to you that music, the sound of music, is the most powerful language that human beings possess for the praising of God.  In music, you see, the ways of fullness and of emptiness are combined in a wonderful dance of opposites.  On the one hand is the sublime sounding of notes.  On the other is the sublime sound of silence, which surfuses and orders the sounds in their difference, without which the harmony of diversely sounding notes would not come to be.  On the one hand is the creative activity of the composer and the musician.  But on the other the divine music of that which makes such creation possible in the first place, the silently sounding voice of God, inspiration and muse for all musicians.

Luke's gospel creates for us the wonderful scene of Jesus entering Jerusalem to be crucified.  As he approaches the gates, the disciples line the road and sing a traditional song of messianic invocation:  'Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord.  Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven'.  The Pharisees are consumed with resentment.  'Stop your disciples from singing' they say, 'It's not right that they greet you as king and messiah!'.  But Jesus replies, "I tell you the truth.  If these were silent, even the stones which lie on this road would cry out in praise!'

Here we have the two ways represented again.  The via positiva of human voices.  But underlying that, the silent music of the created order, which praises God day and night, whether we are listening or not. 

As you entered the church this morning, you will have heard the wonderful music of Gregorian chant.  Arising in the tenth century, the chant is the peculiar cadence of the monastic orders, as they praise God in the language of the Psalms.  One monk of the Carthusian order, explains the meaning of the chant like this:

In the word of God, expressed in our chanting of the divine office, total silence and jubilation are one.  Heaven can be conceived as a place where the hymn of angels and saints does not merely co-exist with the silence of God, but actually depends on, and gives expression to, that silence . . .   Our sounds create a temporary boundary around the silence of contemplation, and that boundary creates a point of access for human beings into the presence of God.  But it is important to note that our sounds to not envelop the silence.  The silence envelops us.

Music heals us, and even saves us, because music is from the very heart of God.  The Benedictine Abbess, Hildegard of Bingen, said this in the 12^th century, and it is still true:

The song of rejoicing softens hard hearts, and draws forth from them the tears of compunction, and invokes the Holy Spirit . . .  for jubilant praises, offered in simple harmony and clarity, lead the faithful to that consonance in which there is no discord, and makes those still alive on earth sigh with heart and voice for the heavenly reward.

In the name of God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—as it was in the beginning, so now and forever, world without end.  Amen.

Garry J. Deverell