Reflection for Music Sunday
Arlo Guthrie tells a story about performing with Pete Seeger at a three day folk festival in Denmark, in the early years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. 30,000 people from both sides of the former Iron Curtain showed up, many of them drawn by the novelty of being able to travel where they wanted to travel, even across national borders. It was all going along just fine, Guthrie says, until Seeger told him it was his turn to sing and lead a song. Pete had already sung all the songs Arlo thought the beer drinking crowd knew–songs, in his words, “that used to be important in this country a couple of decades ago, all those We Shall Overcome type songs.”
So, with all those folk standards already performed, Arlo introduced a song by the famous American folk singer, Elvis Presley–I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You. And 30, 000 Europeans sang along to every word. They all knew it. Western Europeans and those who’d grown up in countries that had done their often cruel best to prevent them from experiencing, let alone learning, western folk music or pop music or ballads from the king of rock and roll. They all sang along to I Can't Help Falling in Love With You.
I recommend looking up the video of Guthrie himself telling this story, with Seeger lounging on the edge of the stage reacting to the telling. It’s vastly more entertaining than my retelling of it. I’m not showing it to you, because this morning is about the marvelous music we make here, in this congregation. But I’m telling you about it because the point of Guthrie’s story is the same one underpinning this music Sunday so carefully crafted by David, our choir and our other musicians: that music at its best extends a welcome to all who hear it, and draws us into community.
By “at its best” I don’t mean vocal perfection or technical excellence or sublime harmonies or intricate instrumentation. When I say “music at its best,” I mean music that blows away the rules that say Elvis wasn’t a folk singer and the Grateful Dead didn’t write church music. I mean music that proclaims Yo-Yo Ma belongs at the border wall and on Sesame Street and in the great music halls of the world. I mean old white Protestant hymn tunes with astonishing, liberatory lyrics that combine to allow refugees from other faiths a degree of comforting familiarity within which to discover the possibilities of our faith. And I mean new and unfamiliar hymn tunes that call us to rise to the challenge of unfamiliar rhythms and languages, and reward us with expanded hearts and the impulse to dance. I mean music such as we create here together, every Sunday, with a choir that refuses no one admittance, worship leaders who are always responding to someone’s musical preference even though they can’t simultaneously respond to everyone’s musical preference, and congregants who sing and congregants who listens, all of whom, in ways beyond understanding, call into being the music of the hour and the community of a lifetime.
This is music at its best. We are music at its best. Extending a welcome to all and drawing the circle of community ever wider. Amen