The Soundtrack of Salvation (sermon, Dec. 20, 2009)

Luke 1:39-55

The movie The Pianist tells the true story of the Polish composer and musician Wladyslaw Szpilman. Szpilman lived in Warsaw, Poland and happened to be Jewish. He was performing a Chopin piano concerto live on Radio Warsaw when the Germans began bombing the city at the start of World War II. By an incredible combination of circumstance, skill, and sheer luck, Szpilman survived life in the ghetto and months of hiding in an apartment right in the heart of German-occupied Warsaw.

By 1944, the entire city of Warsaw was nearly destroyed. The Polish people who remained were deported and the German soldiers fled from the approaching Soviet army. Szpilman was essentially the only person left in the ruined city. One day, while searching an abandoned house for food, he was discovered by a German soldier. The soldier questioned Szpilman and upon learning he was a pianist, the soldier lead Szpilman to a piano in the house and told him to play something. With bony, emaciated hands and surrounded by the devastation of war, Szpilman played a Chopin concerto on that battered, out of tune piano.

Afterward, the German soldier not only spared Szpilman’s life, he helped Szpilman find a hiding place and for months brought him food and other supplies that ultimately enabled him to survive the war. It wasn’t the only time that music had saved Szpilman’s life; when he lived in the Warsaw ghetto, playing music allowed him to earn enough money to buy food for his family. After his family was taken to a concentration camp, it was Szpilman’s former colleagues from Radio Warsaw who found him apartments in which to hide.

Music is not just a trivial part of life, there to entertain us when we grow bored of the sound of silence or the sound of our own voices. As Szpilman’s story shows, music is powerful. Music inspires us; it stirs powerful emotions in us; it triggers memories we thought were long forgotten; it helps us to express ideas and thoughts we couldn’t articulate any other way. Like light in the darkness, music offers us hope against silence. All this is true even for those who have no musical talent or can’t carry a tune. You don’t have to be able to play an instrument or sing on key to experience the effects of music. Think about how music is used in movies to manipulate emotions -- to indicate that a particular scene is supposed to make you feel uplifted, sad, or anxious about what’s going to happen next. If there had been no music in the movie Jaws, the scenes of people swimming in the ocean would probably have made us want to be the swimmers. But the music let us know, in no uncertain terms, that those swimmers weren’t safe, that something very bad was about to happen.

Daniel Levitin explains why music affects us so deeply in his book This is Your Brain on Music. He argues that the ability of the brain to remember and recognize music is remarkable. Think about a song that every American knows, like “Happy Birthday.” No matter how loudly, how quickly, or what key it is played in, our brains recognize that song after we hear just the first few notes. Not even a computer can identify a song with that level of accuracy.

According to Levitin, our musical preferences begin to form when we are children as our brains learn to recognize the common chord progressions in the music of our native cultures. There is even evidence that such preferences are formed when we are fetuses in our mother’s wombs. And on the other side of life, Levitin notes that many Alzheimer’s patients who have lost so much of their memories often remember their favorite songs from their teenage years. Music is powerful.

While we can certainly assume that biblical characters didn’t have a clue about the specific ways music affects the brain, obviously they knew the power of music. Over and over again in the midst of biblical stories, a long narrative suddenly stops, and you can almost sense the flood lights going down, you see the spotlight swing onto the main character of the moment, and the silence is suddenly filled with the sound of a full orchestra. And that’s when the main character bursts into song.

Can you think of some of these musical moments in the Bible?
Hannah sings of God’s power and faithfulness when she finally conceives a child.
Miriam breaks into song after God parted the Red Sea and led the Israelites safely out of Egypt.
Then of course, there is King David, who wrote all kinds of songs, many of which we now know as psalms -- songs of praise, songs of repentance, songs of despair, and song of deep faith and trust.

In the NT, there is the gospel of Luke. The opening chapters of Luke are a musical in which the characters use song to express their emotions and faith. Today we heard the song of Mary that is called “The Magnificat,” but Mary isn’t the only one with a singing role in Luke. Elizabeth’s husband, Zechariah, is rendered mute after he expresses disbelief that his elderly wife had finally conceived a son. After the son was born, Zechariah gets his voice back and he uses it to sing a song of praise and prophecy to the Lord.

Then when angels announce to the shepherds the birth of the Messiah in Luke’s gospel, the angels too burst into song: “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!” Finally, an old man named Simeon who had been told by an angel that he would live to see the Messiah, sings a song of thanksgiving to God after seeing the infant Jesus in the temple.

Certainly in Luke but also throughout the whole Bible, the story of how God cares for Israel and all the world is told, not just through narrative, commandments, laws, gospels, prayers and letters, but in song, the very thing that has the power to trigger emotions and memories in the human beings God created.

In today’s reading, before Mary bursts into song, there is an intimate scene between these two improbably pregnant women: Elizabeth, pregnant in her old age after years of barrenness, and Mary, a young and unwed girl, pregnant after a miraculous encounter with the Holy Spirit. Their meeting takes place not in any of the famous cities like Bethlehem, Nazareth, or Jerusalem, but in an unnamed town in the hills of Judea. It would be like the mother of our Lord and the mother of his cousin meeting in a farmhouse in Holmes County, Ohio. No one who saw them would have ever suspected that their wombs carried both God’s messenger and God’s message (1). They would have seen instead the kind of scene most of us long for at Christmas: just two relatives sitting together, sharing a cup of tea and catching up, making the most of lost time.

What proves to us that Mary and Elizabeth’s meeting was more than that is first, Elizabeth’s declaration and second, Mary’s song.

Elizabeth would have had no way of knowing about the angel Gabriel’s visit to Mary, or that Mary was pregnant. Yet as soon as Elizabeth sees her young cousin and hears her voice she is overcome with a prophetic awareness. The words then tumble from her as involuntarily as John the Baptist’s in utero leap: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb...blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”

Can you imagine what it must have meant to Mary to have a trusted family member confirm what must have felt like a bizarre dream? Apparently, Mary wasn’t going crazy after all. If Elizabeth could have a baby after all this time, and if she could know what had happened to Mary just by looking at her, then what the angel Gabriel had told Mary must certainly be true: Nothing is impossible with God.

And how does Mary respond? With a song.

Mary’s song begins with a focus on what God has done for her: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant...”

But then, the song takes a surprising turn. Suddenly this is not just a song about Mary, this is a song about what God has done for all God’s people: “He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”

Mary’s song isn’t just the sweet tune of a faithful young girl, humbled at having been singled out by God: it is a powerful prophecy. Mary sings in the past tense about things that will happen in the future, which seems strange until we realize that she is singing about God’s character, God’s very nature. Mary’s song reminds us that we shouldn’t be surprised that God is coming to earth as a helpless infant because it has always been God’s nature to reach out to God’s people, especially the poor and lowly and oppressed, to stand with them and give them hope. The Israelite slaves who escaped from the powerful Pharaoh; the poor, barren women like Sarah and Hannah who conceived children who grew up to play major roles in Israel’s history; David, the young shepherd boy tapped by God to be king.

Mary knew all those stories, but now, with this confirmation from Elizabeth, those stories have become her story, now their song becomes her song, a song she sings to give hope to all who have known, at one time or another, what it is to be poor, to be weak, to be hungry, to desperately need God.

Music is powerful, there is no denying that. It is also a crucial way we participate in God’s story, the story in which the downtrodden and oppressed are lifted up and the powerful are brought down. From the Civil Rights Movement in this country to the musicians like Szpilman who played their music even in the terrible conditions of the Holocaust to the German people twenty years ago who gathered to sing songs of hope and protest which eventually brought down the Berlin Wall -- in every one of these cases the power of music allowed oppressed people to proclaim that God’s love and justice would ultimately prevail.

During Advent and Christmas, music is as important as prayer and candlelight. For when we sing the songs of the season, we join with Mary and with all people in proclaiming that the gospel story is our story. We sing for ourselves and for all those who, this Christmas, are still waiting for the promises of God to come true for them. When we lift up our voices in song we join all the faithful in heaven and on earth in praise of the One who loves us enough to become one of us so that all of us, no matter what our circumstances, can live with hope. Amen.

Endnotes:
1. Cooper, Steven, Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 1. David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, eds., Westminster John Knox Press, 2009, p. 93.