Living, Dying, Making Music and Christmas

If you're part of the MacGregor EMC congregation you likely received an email invitation this week to be part of a Christmas choir. If you didn't receive that invitation, if it slipped your mind or if you need help recording your part let me know and we can make it happen. If you are not a part of this congregation but would like to be in a Christmas choir we'd love to have you as well. Contact the church directly, leave a comment here, use the chat function, follow the church's Instagram or Facebook, or ask somebody you know who's part of the congregation and we will get you ready to go!

We will sing Silent Night together by assembling individually recorded voices into a full group. It will be part of our worship service on Christmas morning. It will take a bit of effort, especially this year, but it's worth it. Music is important, especially at Christmas, because it brings people together at the darkest time of year to grasp onto hope as we move into an uncertain future.

As Christian people, we specifically grasp onto the hope of God with us through Jesus. That hope spreads out through the rest of our lives as the God With Us enables us to live with faith hope and love in the middle of whatever darkness we find ourselves in.

As many people who have already sent in their recordings for the choir have noticed, when you sing along to the music and then listen to what you just sang separately from the whole group, it sounds bad. No choir is made up of soloists. What’s more, choirs made up completely of strong singers often struggle. The best choirs are made up of people who have no interest in having their own voices heard in isolation.

As we sing in a choir, we blend our voice with the voices around us. The result is beautiful not because of the perfection of each person’s voice but because of the imperfections of everyone. A beautiful choir voice sounds awkward and flawed without the rest of the choir but that awkwardness and those flaws blend in with the awkward flaws of all the other singers with them. The result is beautiful music that resonates with the delays and slight pitch shifts that come from each imperfection balancing off against the steadiness of the whole group. Guitar players, keyboard players and other musicians who play electric instruments spend careers and often fortunes trying to get the innate modulated and varied beauty of choirs in their own recordings. Reverb and chorus effects, vacuum tube amps, and layers of synthesizers try to do through electronics what choirs do naturally through their flaws, time delay, and the distortion of its members.

As far as I can tell there are only two (or possibly three) times in all of Scripture that the music of Heaven is heard on Earth. The first (again possibly), is in Isaiah 6 where the angels in God's presence call to one another. Maybe that's music and maybe not, the writer doesn't specifically say. The other two examples, though, are clearly singing. At the birth of Jesus, we read that a choir of angels sang to the shepherds. And, in the book of Revelation, we are told of angels around the throne of God singing songs that John, the writer of the book, was fortunate enough to listen in on.

In only one of these three examples of the choir of heaven making music is it for the benefit of people living on earth. In that example, the people who got to hear the music of heaven first hand were not music critics, pro players, pop stars, music educators or recording engineers. They were agricultural labourers working the night shift. If they had been a modern shift work labour crew they might have had '80s metal blaring through a busted boombox or old country cranked up on the radio of a pickup truck bed parked with the doors open; music that has internal tension and release. The notes of these styles are not perfectly in tune or sung with complete clarity. Sometimes the vocals are raspy and the harmonies are off. Sometimes the music is angry or sad as well as beautiful.

I recently saw a documentary about the country singer Johnny Cash. One of the motivations that pushed him through an often difficult career making music was the memory of his brother Jack who was killed in a workplace accident when they were both boys. Jack had been a big fan of Johnny's singing and Johnny felt like he needed to keep on bringing a message of both pain and hope for redemption to other people in Jack's memory. We sing at Christmas for the same reasons - to bring our painful experience to a place of hope and looking forward to the future.

The music that the shepherds heard was not a clear resonant trumpet call or the booming solo voice of the archangel Michael or the messenger angel Gabriel. It was the music they could relate to - choir music with it's flowing shifting wash of frequencies and time that is perfect in its whole because of the variability of its parts. I've been asking people to join our Christmas choir and quite a few people have declined because they say they can't sing well. I'm not asking you to participate because you sing well. I'm asking you to participate because you DON'T sing well and your imperfections will join together with mine and others to create a thing of beauty in the presence of God that is just like both our church and the church worldwide as well.

When my family started attending the MacGregor EMC congregation, my kids were small and they always hoped and looked forward to one particular group doing special music during the Sunday worship service. That group was the combination of two harmonicas and a guitar played by George Rodgers, Glenn Sawatzky, and Abe Rempel. My kids were happy every time they played and we'd talk about it on the way home and over lunch. They didn't enjoy it because it was perfectly polished or trendy or like the stuff they were listening to on Spotify and YouTube. They enjoyed it because it was so clearly obvious that George, Glenn, and Abe were there in the moment as they played, listening to each other, and working around each other’s strengths and weaknesses; they played as friends open to one another’s presence. The group walked up to the front as elders of the church, people my kids didn't know, and they walked down from the front as the grandpas of their friends in ways that they couldn't relate to. But when George, Glenn and Abe began to play that music, age and musical style fell away and my kids could see three old friends making real music together in ways that brought joy first to the players and then as a result to those who heard them as well.

As I write this, I learn that George has just passed away and now stands in the presence of God listening to the music of heaven in person. Maybe he's blowing his harp along with the band.  My guess is that what is beautiful about the music of heaven is the same thing that my kids enjoyed about hearing Glenn, George, and Abe play - the music is rich and full and flows out of a strong relationship of love and caring concern in the presence of God. It's the same thing that caught the attention of the shepherds and the same thing that you can participate in together with the rest of us singing Silent Night whether you sing or listen.