Love. Love will keep us together. Think of me babe whenever some sweet girl comes along singing a song. Don’t mess around you just gotta be strong. Just stop. Cause I’m thinking of you. Stop. Cause I’m thinking of you. Look in my heart and let love keep us together. Whatever. I will. I will. I will be there forever...

What The Memory of Captain & Tennille Has To Teach Us About Liturgy

Do you have an iPod – one of those tiny little devices to which people hook up earphones so they can listen to music?  If not, then I feel safe wagering that somebody in your family has one – maybe your child – maybe your grandchild.  The iPod is a super popular personal music device.  I bet it’s a lot more popular than the Sony Walkman ever was.  I was quick to get my first Walkman years ago.  I wasn’t so quick this time around.  I didn’t get an iPod until about a year and a half ago.

I’m not one of those habitual iPod users you see who constantly have wires running out of their ears and who can’t hear a thing going on around them.  Still, I use mine.  I download songs off of the Internet and listen to my iPod upstairs over a pair of speakers for this purpose.  At Christmas I downloaded all sorts of Christmas music – traditional secular songs, hymns and all sorts of sacred music.  It really is amazing to have a good deal of the world’s music available at your fingertips.

Not too long ago, I downloaded a list of songs which had been popular in the 1970s.  The titles of these songs all sounded familiar, but it had been years and years since I had listened to music from that era.  Just the other day, I was playing those songs.  Hits by Andy Gibb, Barry Manilow, Captain & Tennille.  It occurred to me, that even though I had not listened to these songs for perhaps decades, as soon as one began playing, everything rushed back to me.  The lyrics.  The doo-wop.  All of the “yeah, yeah, yeah”s in the right place.  Isn’t it amazing all that is stored on the hard discs of our brains?  There is all sorts of stuff we don’t even realize is there.

I mentioned this to my Mother not long after, and she recounted a similar story.  She and my Dad were driving across the country when they turned on a satellite radio station which played hits from the 1950s.  She said she could remember the words to almost every one of the songs they heard.

Now – ask me to recite the many verses from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar which I memorized in ninth grade.  At one time I knew entire sections.  The only thing I can recall now is, “Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears.  I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.”  I have no idea what comes after that.  I wonder, what if those verses of poetry had been set to music?  Would I remember them more clearly today?  I have no doubt that the answer is yes.  Remembering words which are set to music is far easier than trying to memorize straight text.  Humans have known this for a long time – even longer than we’ve been writing things down.

Did you ever notice how much of the Bible appears to be written in verse?  Look at many of the books of the prophets: Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah.  And what about the Song of Solomon, the Psalms and Proverbs?  They’re all written in verse.  There’s a reason for that.  When there are stories to tell about your people and their interaction with God, it is important to remember them.  Without the printing press, typewriters, copy machines, tape recorders or video cameras, information had to be stored in our minds for transmission from one generation to another.  Our ancestors found that the easiest way to keep a story straight and to remember all of its details over time they needed to set the story to music.  Words set to musical verse greatly improve the human mind’s ability to store and recall them.  All sorts of tests and studies have been done demonstrating this fact.

So, you ask, what does this have to do with the liturgy?  It has lots to do with the liturgy.  People frequently ask me why we do certain things a certain way.  One question regards why we sing the service sometimes.  Why do we do that?  The obvious answer is that we sing the service (including the sursum corda and the Lord’s Prayer) on special occasions.  To most people, singing is more special than simply speaking if for no other reason than we tend to sing far less often than we speak.  Many believe that the addition of music to a service makes it more beautiful.  Most of the time I agree.  The use of music in the liturgy pre-dates the Bible.  Using music in association with words and verses is functional, practical.  It serves a purpose, it helps us remember.

That’s the thing about the liturgy.  If something doesn’t have a purpose, it shouldn’t be in the liturgy.  There are many reasons we sing parts of the liturgy.  It is pretty and we use it to glorify God in our worship.  It helps us remember the words we say.  It is our tradition to make a joyful noise unto the Lord.  I am sure Carol Taylor could help me immensely with the length of that list.

You know, what we believe shapes the way we worship … and the way we worship shapes what we believe.  As much as we come to church to worship and glorify God, we are also there teaching and being taught about what we believe.  For example, we believe that Christ was both God and human.  As a symbol of that belief, while the table is being prepared for the Holy Eucharist, a splash of water is mixed with the wine in the chalice as a symbol of the mixture of man and divinity in Christ.

When we use incense in our worship service, it provides a way for us to visualize prayers being lifted to heaven.  The priest walks at the end of the procession because of what Christ taught about the first being the last and the last being the first.  The loaf of bread (or the wafer) is literally broken during the celebration of communion as a symbol of Christ’s body which was literally broken on the cross for us.  There is a Latin phrase which says lex orandi, lex crendi and literally means: the way you pray is the way you believe.  We break the bread because we believe Christ’s body was broken for our salvation and that the bread in communion is the body of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

We use the seasons of the church year (Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost) to teach ourselves over and over again about our history with God and the history of Christ’s life, death and resurrection.  When we are praying things and when we are doing things in the liturgy, we are teaching ourselves about what we believe.  We believe that the season of Lent is a penitential season marked by special prayers, fasting and alms-giving.  One of the things we do in Lent is say (or sing) The Great Litany, a special set of prayers seeking God’s forgiveness for the multitude of our misdeeds.  Other things we do in Lent, more than at any other time, is kneel during prayers and at reception of the sacraments.  This teaches us about the humility which is required when we come before God as penitents.  We stop saying “Alleluia” and we refrain from over-indulgence of our many desires.  We know we have, among many things, been selfish and greedy.  We evidence our remorse in our behavior.  Our actions reflect our belief and our beliefs reflect our actions.

The same is true on Easter and throughout the season of Easter.  We believe that through our kinship with Christ, there is some of us in Christ (our humanity) and there is some of Christ (his divinity) in us.  We are all children of God.  Along with Christ, we have been born of a human mother, we have hungered, thirsted and been tempted.  Many of our ancestors have died.  Christ also died, but not forever.  We believe Christ gave up his life for us on the cross.  Through that act he overcame death and bondage to sin.  He is the first among us resurrected to eternal life.  At our baptism, at Easter, in the forgiveness of sins, we participate with Christ in his resurrection.  In worship, we come together to learn about this and to celebrate it.  In the liturgy of our worship we take part in re-enacting important parts of the Bible to teach us about what we believe.  On Easter, as we are celebrating the risen Christ, and we are also celebrating our redemption.  Through his sacrifice, Christ has saved us from death and brings us to everlasting life.  We stand during the prayers and during the reception of Holy Communion in the Easter season as a way of teaching ourselves that we are part of what happened on the cross and later at the tomb.  With Christ, we stand as His brothers and sisters.  With Christ, we believe, we stand with him – risen from the grave to eternal life.  We learn and celebrate this every year at Eastertide.

As I said, and as many a liturgical professor before me has said, there is a reason for everything we do in the liturgy.  If there isn’t a reason for doing something, we should seriously consider why we are doing it at all.  Our curiosity about why we do things a certain way provides us with many opportunities to learn more about what we believe.  Our posture, whether kneeling or standing, is one of the ways we teach ourselves and it is a reflection of what we believe.  If you find you’re doing something in church and you don’t know why, I encourage you to ask.  If something happens during the liturgy that you’ve always wondered about, I encourage you to find out about it.  The more you understand what we do, the more you’ll understand what we believe – and the other way around.  Then, if you find yourself whistling the tune of a hymn during the week, you’ll understand again why we use music in our worship.  Music, and its lyrics,  stay with us.  Christ’s love stays with us.

Peace, Dawn +