The Morning Stars Sang in Chorus
Preacher: Revd Prof Ian Bradley, Author, God is Green
Readings: Job 38:1-7; Matthew 11:16-19
St Andrews Voices Sermon
Job 38.7 Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the Sons of God shouted for joy?
The Old Testament lesson set for this morning in the lectionary has Job repeatedly voicing the central human concern about the prevalence of seemingly unfair and arbitrary suffering, to which God frustratingly responds not with any answers but with a series of unanswerable questions about the creation of the world – ‘Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
What is particularly striking about this response is the way in which God portrays the creation of the world as taking place against a backdrop of singing. Who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the Sons of God shouted for joy?
Perhaps the singing of the morning stars was not so much the backdrop to creation but a central part of the act which brought it into being. Astronomers have recorded the harmonic notes which rang out like a bell in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang. These minute ripples of sound became the seed of matter, eventually leading to the formation of stars, galaxies and planets.
The phenomenon known as cosmic background radiation suggests that the whole universe started with sound waves compressing and rarefying matter and light. Everything has its origin in vibration, in sound. It does, indeed, seem to be the case that in the beginning was not so much the word as the hum. Did that hum come from God singing the world into existence, sounding out that first, deep harmonic note, the vibration which is the source of all matter.
In his Chronicles of Narnia C.S.Lewis portrays Aslan, often taken to represent God or Christ in his role as Logos or Creator, doing exactly that. This is how he describes it in The Magician’s Nephew:
In the darkness something was happening. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes it was coming out of the earth. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth itself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise ever heard.
Then two wonders happened at the same moment – one was that the voice was suddenly joined by other voices, more voices than you could possibly count. They were in harmony with it but far higher up the scale. The second wonder was that the blackness overhead, all at once, was blazing with stars. The new stars and the new voices began at exactly the same time. If you had seen and heard it, you would have felt quite certain that it was the stars themselves which were singing, and that it was the first voice, the deep one, which had made them appear and made them sing!
Aslan goes on to sing the sun, the mountains, the hills, the plants and animals into existence – everything seemed to be coming out of the lions head. When you listened to his song you heard the things he was making up: when you looked round you, you saw them.
Seen in this perspective, singing has deep primal cosmic significance – the morning stars did indeed join in a chorus echoing the primal song of their creator. The heavens are indeed telling the glory of God, as so wonderfully depicted in Haydn’s Creation. The American Unitarian John Chadwick wrote of ‘the Eternal Ruler of the ceaseless round of ceasless round of circling planets singing on their way’. The closing stanza of Joseph Addison’s great hymn ‘The spacious firmament on high’ says of the stars and planets:
In reason’s ear they all rejoice,
And utter forth a glorious voice,
Forever singing as they shine,
“The hand that made us is divine.”
So does all creation echo that original singing which perhaps brought the world into being? Well in a very literal sense, yes. Quantum physics tells us that all matter is vibrating energy, that we humans, and indeed everything else, are made up of pulsating subatomic particles and quarks. The whole universe is indeed permanently singing and dancing just like the morning stars.
And individually every species on earth is singing its own song which is part of this great cosmic symphony of nature. The first note known to have been sounded by any creature was an E natural, produced some 165 million years ago – so long before we were around – by a katydid, a kind of cricket, rubbing its wings together. Scientists have deduced this from the remains of one preserved in amber. A tone lower, D natural, is the note produced by a male mosquito when he wishes to attract a mate, buzzing his wings at a frequency of 600 Hertz. The normal pitch of the female wings is 400 Hertz or G natural. Just prior to sex, however, male and female harmonise at 1200 Hertz, an ecstatic octave above the male’s D – and as Michael Spitzer puts it in his book The musical human: a history of life on earth ‘everything we sing is just a footnote to that’.
Singing is indeed all around us. It’s there in the singing of the sea, as described by Algernon Swinburne in his poem ‘At a Month’s End’:
With chafe and change of surges chiming,
The clashing channels rocked and rang
Large music, wave to wild wave timing,
And all the choral water sang.
It was those lines that inspired the Scottish artist William McTaggart’s magnificent painting of the tide breaking on the sands of Macrahanish on the Kintyre peninsula which appears on the cover of today’s order of service and which you can see in the McManus Gallery in Dundee.
Then there is the sound of the breeze rustling through the trees:
Sighing softly to the river, comes the loving breeze,
Setting nature all a quiver, rustling through the trees.
That’s my trademark Gilbert and Sullivan reference out of the way – and you may be relieved to hear it may be the only bit of singing that you’ll get in this sermon. Last time I preached at a St Andrews Voices service, I burst into snatches of Les Mis, Phantom and even some of ‘The Lonely Goatherd’ from the Sound of Music but on this occasion, unless the Spirit unexpectedly comes over me, that’s your lot.
The Bible is full of evocations of nature singing, as in Isaiah’s wonderful promise:
You shall go out with joy and be led forth in peace.
The mountains and the hills before you shall break forth into singing
and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
We could sing that of course and clap our hands, just as we could sing of the Circle of Life from The Lion King with its distinctly ecological message, or even indeed of that darkest and most mysterious music of all, the music of the night. But let’s stick to the song of other natural species with whom we share this beautiful, fragile and overcrowded planet.
Jesus draws his followers’ attention to the birds of the air whom he commends when reminding them not to get anxious and worried. Their song is of course a veritable symphony, a symphony of praise, which has been one of the main inspirations for human song. The earliest known singing in Scotland was based on birdsong, specifically the Gaelic Caione (pr.cairn) pi-li-li-liu which the musicologist John Purser has convincingly argued probably derived from pre Christian lament and almost certainly had its ultimate origin in birdsong, specifically the call of the redshank which it closely mirrors. The Gaelic word for music Ceol (pr.kiol) means the sound that birds make.
There is a long Highland and Hebridean tradition of seeing birdsong as an expression of praise to God, part of that great song of creation in which we are invited to join. As a young woman from Moidart, Catherine Maclennan told the folksong collector, Alexander Carmichael in the 1880s:
My mother would be asking us to sing our morning song to God down in the garden as Mary’s lark was singing up in the clouds and as christ’s Mavis was singing it Yonder in the tree, giving glory to the God of the creatures for the repose of the night, for the light of day, and for the joy of life. She would tell us that every creature on the earth here below and in the ocean beneath and in the air above was giving glory to the great God of the creatures and the worlds, of the virtues and blessings and would we be dumb?
Or to put it another way, let’s all sing like the birdies sing.
When Jesus tells us to be more like the birds, just as when he tells us to emulate the lilies of the field, he is reminding us of our place as part of the whole pleroma or fullness of creation, and not necessarily the most important part. And he is telling us to listen to the singing of the rest of creation, to listen and to learn from it.
In today’s New Testament lesson we heard Jesus likening himself to a musician and a singer who is seeking to elicit our rather reluctant response to his music. ‘We piped to you and you did not dance, we wailed and you did not mourn’. He presents himself here not just as the Lord of the Dance who calls us to take part in the dance of creation and salvation but also as the one who leads us into the heights and depths of human experience, mourning as well as rejoicing, through the medium of music. He is, indeed, the one who sings us into life in all its fullness, in its most profound and authentic aspects, if we will just respond to his call and his voice and join in with it.
So we need to tune into the voice and the song of the Cosmic Christ, the one who is with the wild beasts in the desert, who stills the storm and who walks on the water, who sings with his disciples at the Last Supper and who cries out in anguish and despair on the Cross when, in Matthew’s words, the earth shook and the rocks split. Several Christian mystics, including Julian of Norwich and Marjory Kempe, pictured all creatures joining in that terrible cry of anguish on the Cross when Jesus suffered and died not just for humans but for all creation – John’s Gospel is clear that God sent his only Son because God so loved the world, cosmos in Greek, not just the human part of it.
So our singing is part of something much bigger and more profound. It links with the singing by which God brought the world into existence, with the singing of all creation in response, thanksgiving and praise, and with the voice of the cosmic Christ who lures us with his music and saves us with his crying.
Song may indeed be a key to saving the planet, averting climate change, combating global warming and reversing the disastrous loss of species and habitats. How so?
Well, first if we listen to the song of the rest of creation, to the choral waters, the breeze in the trees, the mountains and the fields, the birds and the crickets, if we really listen and realise that their song is just as important and primal and matters just as much to God as our song, we may perhaps stop exploiting and demeaning and lording it over them.
And if we listen, really listen, to the joyful, exuberant singing of the birds as Jesus tells us to, we may just realise that their happiness does not come from being acquisitive and greedy and gathering things into barns but from lives of simplicity and instinctiveness, trust and gratitude. We might listen and we might learn.
And if we listen to and align ourselves with the music of the spheres and the circling planets singing on their way, with their order and harmony, we may perhaps learn to tread more lightly on earth, to sing and dance our way through the world rather than clomp around on it heavily and harshly. There is a wonderful sixteenth century poem called ‘Orchestra, or a poem of Dancing’ which brings us back to those morning stars singing together in chorus at the dawn of creation and portrays God as the conductor of a great cosmic orchestra. For its author, John Davies, creation is based on dance rather than song- but the two are intertwined and inseparable – we are back to the vibration, not just of our human vocal chords but of all creatures and all matter – in tune with God, the cosmic dancing master and Christ the Lord of the Dance. Let me end with part of this poem – substitute singing for dancing as I read it if you like, but note its central message that every part of creation has value and must be accorded its space and that it is Love that governs all:
Dancing, bright lady, then began to be,
When the first seeds whereof the world did spring,
The fire, air, earth, and water, did agree
By Love’s persuasion, nature’s mighty king,
To leave their first discorded combating,
And in a dance such measure to observe,
As all the world their motion should preserve.
Since when they still are carried in a round,
And changing come one in another’s place;
Yet do they neither mingle nor confound,
But every one doth keep the bounded space
Wherein the dance doth bid it turn or trace.
This wondrous miracle did Love devise,
For dancing is love’s proper exercise.
How was this goodly architecture wrought?
Or by what means were they together brought?
They err that say they did concur by chance;
Love made them meet in a well-ordered dance!