Sunday, August 18 - Music

This sermon was preached for Sunday, August 18, 2024 for the thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in East Longmeadow. The texts for this sermon were: 

Who knows the song Mr. Brightside by the British band The Killers? Raise your hand.

Those who don't - I apologize for forcing some of my generation’s pop culture on you. For those who do - is probably because it's one of the most popular songs ever made. The dance-pop single has set the record for the longest time on UK top 100 singles charts - almost 8 years and counting. It’s the second most streamed song from before 2010 on the streaming platform Spotify. It’s been a staple of party playlists for two decades now. 

I never really thought much about why this song is so good and so popular until I stumbled across a music theory analysis of the song by YouTuber 12tone. On its surface, the song tells a story - a true one, recounting the moment when the lead singer discovered his lover’s infidelity and all the conflicting, jumbled-up emotions that followed. What I didn't realize was how the song tells a story with more than just words. 

In one fascinating twenty-minute video, 12tone presents this whole theory for how all the elements of the song - the instruments, rhythms, melodies, chords, vocals, rhyme scheme and sentence structure - all collude to bring out certain emotions in the listener. Unresolved chords and rhymes especially build up the tension throughout the song - a nervous, anxious energy that doesn’t really go anywhere - not until the end, when the singer decides to let go and move on - to be the so-called Mr. Brightside. The poetry and the music both let us into what it feels like to have your world shattered in a moment, to obsessively spiral in jealousy, to long for closure and healing but never really get there - not yet. His emotions become our emotions and they are layered over each other like the musical tracks - the bass, the guitar, the vocals, the drums. The feelings happen all at once on a level below our direct conscience - in the level of our beating hearts and rhythmic breaths and dancing feet. 

Language without words.

In Ephesians, St. Paul gives us this advice for making the most of our time together in this life: “be filled with the Spirit, as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts, giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” 

Make melody to the Lord in your hearts. Even in what St. Paul calls evil days. Perhaps especially in evil days. 

I found it interesting that St. Paul equates foolishness with drunken carelessness, but wisdom here is spirit-filled, musical, and in our hearts. Wisdom, it turns out, isn’t just about dispassionate decision-making. True wisdom embraces the complexity of human feeling - not just what we experience in our hearts, or think in our heads, but what rests in pits of our stomachs, what we carry in our shoulders, and what catches in our throats. We need time to feel it, to express it, to literally allow our bodies to metabolize it. 

Music can help do that for us. Music stirs and shifts our emotions because it has such a powerful effect on our bodies. A song can sync up the breaths and heartbeats of a whole group of people. It can get our toes tapping and hands clapping and our tears flowing. Music has such a powerful effect on our bodies and hearts that some sects, denominations, and whole religions forbid music from being used in worship. But not ours. 

Not ours, because this is the scandal of the Christian faith: our God became flesh and blood. Our savior is embodied; our faith is embodied; our worship is centered around consuming the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. In this Gospel and in next week’s, we hear the revulsion of the crowd around Jesus - bread of life, okay, sure, but how can he talk of eating his flesh? Flesh is visceral, vile; bodies are pretty gross - yet Jesus’ incarnation makes them sacred. Yet God’s experience on earth, God’s solidarity with humankind took place on the level of sinew, muscle, nerves, breath, sweat, and blood. It had to.

What does it mean to have life within you? To have life within us means to be one with the flesh of our Lord, to take the body of Christ into our bodies. Living a full Christian life means we are no longer at war within ourselves: spirit vs. body, mind vs. heart, thoughts vs. emotion, divinity vs. humanity. We are to be fully integrated - spirit-filled human beings. In tune with the sensations of our bodies, intuition, and conscious thoughts, but not controlled by them, not careless. True wisdom is integrated, emotional maturity. 

Moments of uncertainty and times of transition require emotional maturity most of all. Particularly our capacity to feel and be in touch with multiple, layered feelings at once. It can be tempting to focus only on the positive, hopeful, exciting parts of a transition. But when we sidestep the deeper emotions, when we try to declare ourselves Mr. Brightside too hastily, you’d better believe the grief, anger, and confusion will push through and bubble up in all sorts of inconvenient ways. 

Consider how people cry at weddings. No matter how beautiful and joyful the love in front of us is, no matter how happy it makes us, there are always unexpressed griefs and longings underneath the joy: the ending of a special parent-child bond, a deeply-felt absence, the pang of broken promises, and bittersweet memories. There is always grief at a wedding. There is always some small sense of relief at every funeral, too. As priests, we are trained to look for it: to make space for the complicated, conflicting emotions. And yet it can be so hard for us to see it in ourselves. And when the transition or grief involves or is because of us, it’s even harder to acknowledge. 

So as I’m navigating the next month ahead, I’ve turned to priests - and deacons - far wiser than I for advice. Here’s what they’ve said over and over: It is vitally important for the all the complicated feelings surrounding my departure to be felt and acknowledged. To name them: my sadness to be leaving you and for the endings that lie ahead of us in these next few weeks. My regret for things done and left undone. My gratitude for all that you and God have done for me in this time. And my hope for what this parish is becoming, what I see God is doing in each of your stories. 

But words keep not feeling like enough. 

This is why God gave us music. This is why God invites us to make melodies in our hearts. 

This is why I advise every couple I marry to incorporate some musical interlude into their ceremony - to give room for the tears and time people sink into their joy. It’s why I’m grateful Sue Matsui comes early to our musicless 8am service so that she can ease us into worship with a piano meditation. It’s also why people falling in love make mixtapes for each other. This, this song is how I feel.

When I left my sponsoring parish, my first real Episcopal parish that felt like home, Grace Church in Medford, I found a hymn that really captured my journey there with them: Come thou Fount of every blessing. “Jesus sought me when a stranger, wandering from the fold of God,” goes the hymn. And then this line: “O to grace how great a debtor, daily I’m constrained to be.” Whenever I hear that hymn, I remember Grace Church and I am brought back to how it felt to be a part of them. 

I wonder if you have songs like that - that bring you back to a moment in time. Maybe the first dance song at your wedding. The song that was playing on the radio on that one drive away from somewhere special. The lullabye you sang to your children at bedtime, or the one that was sung to you. 

Melodies let us empathize with one another. But they also let us process what's happening in our own hearts and bodies. Lyrics carry us through a story that resonates with our own lives. Beats, chords, and rhymes build up tension, measure by measure, bar by bar, then release it. In the song Mr. Brightside, the singer sings his way from a place of chaos and pain to a place of healing and composure. That’s what Paul is talking about here, too, he’s talking about finding our way to gratitude and praise to God no matter what’s going on. 

Music can take us there. 

I’m still searching for what that hymn will be for St. Mark’s, the one I will carry with me when I go. The one that whenever I sing it, I will let myself feel how I miss you, how grateful I am for you, and what you taught me about God.

I don’t pretend to imagine that your priest leaving is the most important problem in your life right now, or what’s got your own heart tied up in knots or your soul unmoored. But whatever that actually is for you right now, I wonder if there is a song that meets you here, in this moment. A melody that says everything you can’t put words to. 

In his letter to the church in Ephesus, Paul urges us to “make the most of the time” in these days. My prayer is that my sadness and gratitude will continue to embolden me to make the most of the time I have with you. I pray, too, that you will let me hear the melodies of your hearts.