Texts: Matthew 6: 7-15; James 1: 1-4
I Go On: The Lord’s Prayer Revisited
In the middle of the sermon there is a wonderful choral selection by Brian Cheney,
our Senior Choir Tenor section leader.
If I were a professor of homiletics, a teacher of the art of preaching, I would require every student to study the narrative moves and transitions of Bruce Springsteen’s recent run of Broadway shows, now captured for posterity for all of us on Netflix. It stands as one of the most powerful preachments I’ve encountered in a long time. Those of us who occupy pulpits can learn a lot about this craft from watching the master intersperse stories and songs into a performance that feels both personal and universal, that captures the details of a life while also placing them into what feels like a sacred arc. But it’s not only preachers who can learn from it. I have a hunch most of us could in one way or another, even if Springsteen himself isn’t a part of our aesthetic.
There’s one moment in particular that resonates deeply, at least for me. It forms the conclusion and finale of the performance. Springsteen speaks about revisiting the old New Jersey neighborhood where he grew up, and he talks about what it feels like to encounter all the ghosts and memories that now dwell there. It’s not what it was, and he misses those who have gone. It leaves him feeling a little ghostly himself. But then he catches sight of his old church, and he says that some old words, words he learned as a child, suddenly come back to him in the form of a benediction. He didn’t care for them as a kid, or even consider them really, but in the later stages of his adult life, they suddenly mean everything, even if he can’t remember it exactly right. He offers them to himself, and to his audience, as a way of sharing his heart. “Our Father, who art in heaven,” he says, “hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day, just give us this day…forgive us. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive others. And deliver us from evil, all of us, forever and ever, Amen.
It’s a powerfully heartfelt moment, and I’m confident I’m not the only one that feels moved when I encounter it. It has to do with the magic that Springsteen works throughout the performance, and it has to do with the story he tells. But it also has to do with the prayer, the words that I’ve known ever since I was a kid, words that we use to open our worship here in Old Lyme every single week, a practice dating back, as far as I can tell, nearly a hundred years, and probably a lot longer than that. They’re words that can sustain us and comfort us when we’re going through difficult times. They’re words that challenge our complacency. They’re words that undermine the idols that human beings are perennially drawn toward – things like money, or tribe, or nation – and they’re words that steady us in the assurance that God has not abandoned us – even when the ghost of loss gets into us, even when we lose our way, even when the days feel dark. Sometimes they’re just words. But sometimes they’re a whole lot more than that. Sometimes they’re what carry us into the day, or into the night, after the performance is over, confident that come what may, we’ll have the capacity to endure, the strength to go on.
Some months ago, I offered a series of sermons on the Lord’s Prayer, and it wasn’t long after that that Brian Cheney and I got to talking. We had been toying with the idea of sharing a sermon together for some time, an interplay between music and the spoken word. Now, I never take for granted that anyone ever listens to what I say in sermons, but lo and behold, it turns out Brian was listening. He had encountered Leonard Bernstein’s setting of the Lord’s Prayer, taken from Bernstein’s Mass, and had thought about those series of sermons, together with the work we’ve been engaged in over the past several years now. And so he floated the idea of using that song for a shared sermon. To which my response was, yeah…I don’t know…Are you kidding? I’d probably say yes to anything Brian proposed. We made our plans and then he sent me the music, which I knew instantly that I wanted you to hear as well. And then he told me a little more about Bernstein’s Mass, which was new to me. But I’m so glad for the introduction, because it’s a story well worth learning. Bernstein’s setting of the Lord’s Prayer, to say nothing of the entire Mass, has some striking parallels with Springsteen’s citation of the prayer in his Broadway Show.
The story is this. In 1970, when the Kennedy Center was nearing completion in Washington, D.C., Jacquie Kennedy contacted Bernstein to ask if he would compose a work for the dedication of the center. Bernstein had been the conductor of the New York Philharmonic, and he was a renowned composer, especially for the score to West Side Story, but he hadn’t written much for the previous decade. Still, he agreed to take on the project. Surprisingly, the form he chose was a Roman Catholic Mass. Bernstein was the son of Jewish immigrants, and he certainly hadn’t converted. But he sought a way to address the social upheavals the country had been through during the previous decade. More than that, he wished to address the growing sense that God had somehow fled the scene, seeming, to many, to be irrelevant at best, and entirely absent at worst. It was in 1969 that Time magazine ran its famous cover, with the words “Is God Dead?” written in large red letters against a black backdrop. A young President and his brother had been assassinated. So had MLK. The civil rights movement was fragmented. America was mired in an unpopular war, and had been confronted with images of its own depravity when details of the My Lai massacre were revealed. Students had been shot at Kent State. Activists and war resisters were being imprisoned, and for many, it felt like a hopeless moment. Bernstein wished to acknowledge that sense of loss and abandonment, without succumbing to it. And so he reached for an older form, the Mass, to contain and frame a dialogue between those feelings of frustration and despair, while also referencing that which maybe, just maybe, transcended that sense of alienation.
What he created was a powerful mélange of musical styles, part American vernacular, part classical European, but all of it reflecting an ecumenical opening toward, and embrace of, a multitude of cultural traditions. He hired Stephen Swartz to create the libretto, which pairs the traditional text of the Mass with songs that reflect the spiritual yearning that Bernstein sought to dramatize. To assist with that, he enlisted Daniel Berrigan, a priest and a person of deep moral conscience. Berrigan, you’ll remember, made the FBI’s most wanted list when he and several others broke into a draft board office in Catonsville, Maryland, hauling draft cards out to the parking lot, dousing them with a batch of homemade napalm, and burning them. Better paper than the bodies of children, Berrigan later wrote. Word of Bernstein’s consultation with Berrigan reached the FBI, who then warned President Nixon that Bernstein was mounting a plot to embarrass the United States government. He wasn’t, but Nixon was notably absent on the evening of its premier. Had he been there, he would have witnessed a complex work of art and religion, one that used the language of mercy, praise, confession, and heartfelt appeal to speak into the hurt of the moment, suggesting that God was still somehow present.
That’s exactly what’s at work in the piece that Brian is performing this morning. In visual terms, it performs a diptych, with two complementary but different moments that speak to one another. In philosophical terms, it forms a dialectic, where two contrasting positions address one another, neither of them canceling the other out. The Lord’s Prayer is performed a cappella, suggesting the singularity of the singer’s plea to God, while what follows, I Go On, suggests, at least to me, the resolution that arises as a result of returning to those familiar words. But better to let you hear it for yourself, from a voice far more eloquent than what I can muster.
Brian Cheney – The Lord’s Prayer/I Go On
As I was preparing this sermon earlier this week, I received a difficult message, one having to do with our immigration work. As you know, we’ve been working with the Torres family, to bring Glenda, the wife of Miguel, and the mother of Nathaly and Keneth, home to the United States after being deported this past August. We’re working toward a humanitarian parole, but in the meantime, we hoped to move her from Honduras, where she’s living in one of the most violent cities in the world, to Mexico City, where she would take up residence with the Benedictine Sisters that we came to know this past September. We had pulled together all the pieces that she would need to apply for a visa, so that she could remain in Mexico while we worked on her case. This past Thursday, we learned that her visa was denied, because of her deportation. We also learned that crossing into Mexico on foot was no longer an option, for visas were no longer being offered in that way either. It was a heartbreaking moment, for Glenda, for Miguel and his children, for the Sisters who had prepared to receive her – and for us. It was also a symbolic moment, one more demonstration of the inhumanity of our cultural moment. It’s painful to witness. It’s even more excruciating if you’re forced to undergo it.
Bernstein’s Mass spoke to me in that moment. His setting of the Lord’s Prayer, followed by “I Go On,” reached me. Strengthened by the foundation of that prayer, we will go on, even though the way feels dark. We’ll continue to reach out to Glenda in Honduras, and we’ll continue to support Miguel and his children. We’ll go on, and we’ll help them to go on, as we build the case to bring Glenda home.
But you know what? Bernstein’s work speaks to each of our realities. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote of how each of us receives moments of clarity, when the reality of the beauty, peace, and power of God are made available to us. They’re often infrequent, and can also be brief. But they do happen. Those constitute an event, and faith constitutes loyalty to that event. Such loyalty can be hard. It can be hard to trust that something we’ve glimpsed – a moment of goodness, an instance of kindness, a gesture of sacrifice or courage – is enough to live by. Sometimes it’s hard to remain loyal to the God-events that have occurred in our lives. It’s hard to trust that we ought to work toward the impossible. It’s hard to believe that lives can be oriented around justice or compassion. It’s hard to trust that there is a long arc of justice flowing through the world, or that there’s a small beating heart at the center of things, loving us fervently, despite everything.
Still, we go on. If our courage crumbles, if we feel confused or frail; if our spirits falter on decaying alters, and our illusions fade…we go on then. We go on again. We go on to say that we will celebrate another day. Laudate. Praise. We go on.
God isn’t through with us yet. God isn’t through with the world. Strengthened by that prayer…We go on.
