Evensong 6 Easter B 2012 St Paul’s Cathedral 6.00pm
Many of you will know that before St Paul’s Cathedral was
built there was, on this site, a substantial stone church also
called St Paul’s which had been built in the early days of the
settlement of Melbourne. In those early days an American
merchant named George Train settled briefly in Melbourne
and took an active part in its life. George Train was a
Methodist but he attended the newly opened St Paul’s
Church on one occasion in 1853 - I suspect only one because
he wrote afterwards that he had never in his life attended so
wearisome a service, over two hours in length, and that he
found the constant repetition of prayer for Queen Victoria,
Prince Albert and the Royal Family especially off putting.
Poor George! Apart from the fact that the frequent references
to British royalty must have grated on his Republican
consciousness I think there would have been two factors that
made the worship more tedious than it should have been,
not just for him but everyone.
First– length and repetition; in those days it was the custom
in the Anglican Church for the separate services we know as
Morning Prayer or Mattins, the Litany and the Communion
Service to be joined into one long act of worship which was
very wordy and involved much repetition, with prayers for
the Queen and royal family occurring twice in each of them.
Second; the long and wordy service would have been almost
entirely said. There would have been very little music to
relieve the stream of spoken words. The Bishop of
Melbourne at that time was very strongly opposed to the
singing of services and did his best to forbid it happening in
Melbourne’s early churches.
The Bishop, Charles Perry, who was Melbourne’s first
bishop, was certainly a devoted, hard working and far
seeing servant of God.
Confronted with the enormous task of laying a foundation
for the Church in a colony whose population was exploding
as a result of the Gold Rush, Bishop Perry travelled tirelessly
founding new parishes across Victoria and persuading
clergy to come from England to fill them - which was no
easy task.
Confronted with intellectual challenges to the faith raised by
advances in biological, geological and historical sciences he
responded in as capable a manner as was possible for him at
the time. He was intelligent and a good scholar – first class
honours graduate in Mathematices from Cambridge
University.
Confronted with the need to set up an organizational
structure for the Church he chose the democratic model of a
synod comprising two elected lay representatives for each
clergyman - a first in the British Empire what has become the
Anglican pattern of diocesan organization everywhere.
But confronted with a robed choir singing the Magnificat or
a priest singing the Collects he would go bananas, reacting
in a negative, emotional and authoritarian way that was
quite out of keeping with his usual rational approach to
things.
Music, he claimed, distracted people from the meaning of
the words so that the service was reduced to the level of a
secular concert. So insistent was he in laying down his
strictures on what could and could not be done musically in
church that the St Paul’s Church choirmaster George Allen
(founder of the well known Allen’s Music stores - still in
existence) on one occasion resigned in protest along with the
whole of the choir.
Even after Perry had retired and returned to England, to be
replaced by the much more tolerant Bishop James
Moorhouse, his influence continued through some clergy.
Just before St Paul’s Church was due to be demolished to
make way for the Cathedral the choir and organist once
again resigned en masse. By then, however, a decision had
been made that a special choir would be formed for the new
Cathedral. Members for the future St Paul’s Cathedral Choir
had been auditioned and were practising for three years
before the Cathedral was completed so that they could sing
at its opening - which they did on January 22nd 1891.
So to those boys who were admitted to membership, or an
office of special responsibility, in the choir tonight,
remember that You have become part of a choir which sang
at the first service held in the Cathedral and has continued
an unbroken history of singing over the 121 years since. You
have become a part of that long history and have taken upon
yourselves the task of keeping up its standards in our time.
But of course the use of music in worship goes back much
further than the 121 year history of St Paul’s Choir and the
revival of choral church music in the mid nineteenth century
in which St Paul’s choir was a participant, not just a passive
product. It goes back through the hymns of the eighteenth
century Methodists - John and Charles Wesley - and
Evangelicals like John Newton and others, to the great
Lutheran hymns and chorales of the Reformation to
renaissance polyphony; and then through centuries of
mediaeval monks chanting plainsong, back to the lesser
known chants of the Byzantine period, some of which were
performed in a concert here last night by the Melbourne
Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir.
We know that Jesus and the disciples sang together as part
of their worship of God. The Gospel of St Mark tells us that
after Jesus had taken the bread and wine at the Last Supper,
declared them his body and blood and commanded the
disciples to continue this act, they sang a hymn before going
out to the Mount of Olives. St Paul, in his letters to Christian
communities, speaks of them singing hymns, psalms and
spiritual songs in their gatherings for worship.
In the period just after the New Testament around the year
120 CE Pliny the Younger, Roman Governor of Pontus, the
region near the Black Sea, wrote a report to the Emperor
Trajan on the sect of the Christians in his region.
He had found by examination, he wrote, that the members
of this sect met early in the morning on an appointed day to
sing a hymn antiphonally to Christ as to a God and to meet
later in the day to take food together. (Antiphonally means
each side singing in turn as if answering the other, a kind of
singing or saying of the psalms or other pieces still practiced
in worship today). Pliny also reported that the ‘contagion of
this superstition’ had spread not only in the cities but in the
towns and rural regions as well
Christianity grew in large measure because it had a faith
based on a flesh and blood saviour rather than a figure of
mythology; because it taught, and its members practised, an
unselfish moral code; and because its worship engendered a
strong sense of solidarity among its members. Communal
meals and a musical tradition, both inherited from the
parent Jewish body, and referred to in Pliny’s letter
contributed to this solidarity. As years and centuries passed,
and the Gospel message spread ever more widely among the
nations, flexibility and the ability to draw upon various
cultural traditions played an important part also.
In particular, at all stages of the development of the musical
tradition of the Church, from its Old Testament Jewish roots
right down to the present, the Church has drawn upon the
musical traditions of the cultures in which it has found itself
- this often to an extent unrealized.
People have debated whether or not there is something
uniquely different about the music of worship that
distinguishes it absolutely from secular music; whether, in
other words, there is a special kind of music which alone is
capable of supporting worship. The answer seems to be No that the context, the way it is sung and appropriate words
can enable any music that is capable of moving the human
heart to assist religious devotion also - whether reflection,
penitence, praise or commitment. The same music in another
context, might stir the heart to feelings of romantic love or
patriotism.
A familiar example would be the hymn “Glorious things of
thee are spoken, Zion City of our God” a hymn which, with
the same tune and different words, was the national anthem
of the Austrian empire and later of Germany.
So, something else for the choir boys to keep in mind. The
music you sing has much in common with the classical
music tradition in general and so the training you receive in
church music, will serve you as a good general education in
music. It is noticeable how many celebrity vocalists say that
they began by singing in a church choir.
A good church choir in a setting like St Paul’s is an asset to
any city - witness the tourists and people seeking a time of
reflection and inspiration, who come into the Cathedral on
weekday evenings when the choir sings Evensong, the daily
evening prayer of the Church offered to God in Anglican
churches and cathedrals around the world. It is a pity that
the number falls away a bit in winter as I think the service
acquires a subtle beauty and a deeper meaning in these
darker times of the year than in the bright extended daylight
of summer evenings.
It is a good thing that music can draw people into the church
who otherwise would not attend, but that cannot be the
conscious purpose of the music. If it is, it will be self
defeating. It is the atmosphere of worship, of reflection and
inspiration to which the music contributes, and not just the
music alone, that can make the atheist declare him or herself
publicly a fan of Choral Evensong - something which
happened last year in Melbourne. Choir members, you
make a necessary contribution to that atmosphere which
distinguishes our worship from the same music sung
elsewhere. That is why we always stand quietly in the
corridor and pray briefly before we move process into
church. And we proceed in peace (as we say in our prayer) peace of mind, peace of body and peace with each other in
order that our singing may be worship and not simply
performance.
The distinction comes out clearly at Christmas. In the weeks
leading up to Christmas each year most of us get sick and
tired of hearing Christmas carols every which way we turn
our ears but, despite all that saturation overlay, the crowds
still turn up here (and in other churches) in great numbers
on Christmas Eve to hear the authentic thing - the carols
sung in worship. I know people who experienced, for the
first time, in a Christmas Carol Service here, a spiritual
awakening which led to further enquiries, to instruction and
to baptism at Easter.
Worship, with its music, its words and its ceremonial, is an
end in itself - an act directed to God - an act involving
reflection, learning, penitence and abasement, exhilaration,
praise, thanksgiving and offering, offering of self and, in a
Christian context, the supreme privilege of bringing to the
divine remembrance the sacrifice of Christ for the sins of the
world, a sacrifice which brings all other acts of worship into
itself and gives them a value that no human offering could
ever match, with or without music.
And church music is ecumenical. We use music from just
about all Christian traditions - Eucharistic settings by
Roman Catholic as well as Anglican musicians, hymns from
just about every tradition you could name; and conversely
Anglican music is used widely in other churches. A bit of
Vatican gossip I picked up only today from an English
newspaper is that Pope Benedict XVI , who is very musical,
was very impressed with the ceremony and music in
Westminster Abbey on his recent visit to England and has
been acquiring CDs of English choral music.
Of course prayer and the offering of the Eucharist or
Evening or Morning Prayer are all fully authentic without
music. Most worship and most prayer is in fact offered
without the benefit of music, but it was well said by St
Augustine in the fourth century “Who sings, prays twice.”
Qui cantat bis orat. And if those who sing pray twice then
those whom their singing inspires, although silent, assuredly
pray better. What a privilege then to be in a church choir - to
offer one’s voice as well as one’s mind and body to God, in
an earthly anticipation of what will be the joy of heaven
itself, and to lead and inspire others in the joy of worship
through music “the greatest good that mortals know, and all
of heaven we have below.”
Let us thank God for the gift of music and for the music we
enjoy in our worship, praying that it may indeed tune our
souls to the melodies of heaven. Amen.