Sunday, May 22, 2022
/The Sixth Sunday of Easter
The Rev. Clint Brown
Most people are unaware that, during his lifetime, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) was not the well-respected composer that he is today. During his lifetime he was much better known as an organist rather than a composer. Remarkable as it seems to us, if someone in Bach’s day had struck up a conversation about him at the local Kaffeehaus in Leipzig, they would probably have ignored his compositions completely and swapped stories about his going head-to-head and besting the celebrated Buxtehude or Pachelbel, or some other preeminent organist, like a kind of eighteenth century American Idol. If you did press them about Bach’s music, they would likely have said that it was embarrassingly old-fashioned and out of touch, much like the man himself they would chuckle. But I’d wager that if we weren’t so accustomed to being told that Bach is a musical genius, we would probably pass much the same judgment. You see, most of the reasons for saying that Bach is great are difficult to explain and appreciate because they require a great deal of technical knowledge about how music works, and, for most of us, that will just always be just beyond our grasp, but it all boils down to something called polyphony.
Bach was and is the absolute master of polyphony, which, in music, is the term for putting multiple lines of music together at the same time. Perhaps you have heard of the term “fugue?” Fugue is the most highly developed and rigorous of the forms of polyphony, and I say “rigorous” because fugue is not just the holding together of musical lines, not just doing so in a pleasing and harmonious way, but doing it while following the strictest set of rules – rules which must be obeyed or else what you have can be called something but not a fugue. And this, the experts tell us, is the place where Bach’s star shines brighter than any other in the musical firmament. It is not just that he creates skillfully and tastefully, not just that he captivates us with delightful sounds, but that he does so within enormous, self-imposed constraints. Even as we feel ourselves tugged by the beauty and power of this music, Bach has submitted himself, far below our level of comprehension and even awareness, to the exacting and strict requirements of law and order. So expert is he in this disguise of his tremendous labor, that this is the reason we say he is the perfect composer. We can enjoy the art without necessarily discerning the craft.
Toward the end of his life, Bach set himself the task of composing a thorough treatment, or, as he put it, a “chapter of instruction” on fugue writing. He called it The Art of Fugue, and the challenge he set himself was to subject a single theme to every possible fugal technique imaginable. It was to be an encyclopedic composition, a compendium of all that he knew, of all that was then possible, and as such a lasting testament to his ability. Towards the end of this work, which he unfortunately left unfinished at the time of his death, there is a remarkable moment. As the third and last subject of the final fugue begins, we hear the notes of Bach’s name. In the German musical alphabet, you see, B is B-flat, and A and C are like ours, and H stands for B-natural, so in the name of Bach we have a sequence of four notes: B-flat, A, C, and B-natural. BACH. It is, in other words, a musical autograph and now, at the climactic moment of the crowning achievement of his life, Bach writes his name, as if to say, “I am here.” I am here in this moment of creation, at this the most complex and technically challenging moment. I am here. Bach is here.
“Let us make humankind in our own image” (Genesis 1:26). The book of Genesis tells us that we must create. Bach creates. Michelangelo creates. Shakespeare creates. You and I create. The capacity to create is there in our nature in much the same way that Bach put his name in the fugue. God creates and, therefore, so do we. It is God’s nature written upon us. We here at St. Andrew’s are being called at this moment to our own creative effort, a capital campaign that we are calling “Our Hope, Our Vision, Our Legacy.” It is a moment meant to stretch us, meant to challenge us, meant to humble us with the thought that this church is not for our benefit alone but for the many generations we will never meet. The poet Rilke writes:
You must give birth to your images.
They are the future waiting to be born.
Fear not the strangeness you feel.
The future must enter you long before it happens.
In the story of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in the Heights, we have our own chapter to write, our own part to play, our own melody to spin in a much larger symphony, and in this bold work we are promised the gift of the Holy Spirit. “And I will ask the Father, and he will send you another [Helper], to be with you forever” (John 14:16). Jesus reminds us today that we are not alone in this work. It is not all on us nor is it a work for which we are meant to congratulate ourselves. This is the Spirit’s work among us, and it is but a part of a much greater work that has spanned decades and will continue long after us. In this time and place, in this day and hour, our task is simply to be led forward in a new act of creation … to greater hope, greater vision, greater legacy. Amen.