Harmony
Romans 15:4-13
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The bulk of my summer when I was ten-years-old was spent attending the YMCA summer day camp. We would go swimming, or roller skating, driven here and there on big yellow school buses available from the local school district during summer vacation. But one morning in July, I came downstairs to find an ad that had been clipped from the newspaper sitting at my place on the breakfast table. It was an audition notice for the local professional dinner theater looking to cast children for its upcoming production of The Sound of Music. The year before, I’d made my stage debut as Winthrop in a local community production of The Music Man and my mom thought I might like the chance to audition for something professional. “It’ll be good experience,” she told me. And either explicitly or implicitly, I don’t remember, it was understood that I was unlikely to be cast. That’s because when one of the bigger theaters in town runs a casting notice in the middle of summer vacation, every child who can hold a tune and a few who couldn’t, come out for the audition. It was my introduction to the term, “cattle call.”
When we arrived at the theater in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week, the dark lobby was crammed with kids and their accompanying parents. In fact, so many kids showed up that they had to take us in in two separate groups because the theater only sat 400. When it was my turn, I got up, gave my music to the accompanist and belted out my signature tune, “Gary Indiana, Gary Indiana, Gary Indiana, let me say it once again.” You get the idea. Much to my and my mother’s surprise, I got a call back. It was a much smaller group, and the director wanted to know if we could sing harmony. Uh oh, I thought. I loved to sing, but I was used to belting out melody lines. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to sing alongside someone else without getting pulled to their part instead of my own. Harmony is a tricky thing.
In 1967, a virtually unknown 21-year-old singer-songwriter got the chance to become the new “girl singer,” on Porter Waggoner’s popular country music TV show. She was something less than an instant hit. People wanted to know what had happened to the singer she replaced. There were boos from the studio audience when she stepped up to sing. But Waggoner knew talent when he saw it, so the two began doing duets together to get her established with the audience. Quickly, they came around. Together the two had found something magical in the blend of their voices. Some harmonies are distinguished by how closely the voices sound to one another. Think of the Everly Brothers. But what Porter Wagoneer found with his new girl singer, Dolly Parton, was a harmony marked by how distinctive their voices sounded against one another. It was a style that lent itself to dialogue songs between the two voices. Five years later they were the most popular singing duo in country music. But harmony can be a tricky thing. Because as Dolly’s star was on the rise, Porter’s began to fade.
Toward the end of his lengthy letter to the church in Rome, the apostle Paul writes, “May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another.” Now that’s not just some pious Hallmark sentiment that Paul is offering them; a general statement about getting along with each other. No, these words are addressed directly to the tension that lies at the heart of this letter. It’s the same tension that was running through most early Christian communities in the decades following Jesus’ departure. Jesus was Jewish. The twelve were Jewish. Paul was Jewish. But they were religious minorities living in the midst of the dominant culture of the Roman empire. From early on Jesus signaled a willingness to cross borders and break with convention when it came to the people who lived on the social margins. He was someone who ate with tax collectors and welcomed them, who treated women with dignity, and touched people that others shunned and treated as untouchable. It’s no wonder then that their non-Jewish neighbors sat up and took notice of this movement. The wall that divided them from their Jewish neighbors was being torn down. They wanted in on this good news that spoke of the forgiveness of sins. They were eager to know more about the Way of Jesus and his disciples. That sounds great, in theory. The more the merrier. But in practice it was much trickier than that. Jewish identity was distinct in its time, and frequently distinguished in opposition to everything that was not Jewish, that is of the gentiles. Suddenly you have non-Jews showing up in the synagogues throughout the Roman empire, and these God-fearers- as they were called- wanted to be a part of the Jesus movement. How exactly were they supposed to do that? It was a Jewish movement, after all. Would they have to become Jews first? Enter into the rites of the covenant established with Abraham through circumcision? Ascribe to the dietary restrictions detailed in the covenant with Moses? How do two groups of people coming from different backgrounds, and regarding one another as not-one-of-us, find common cause, a common life, faith, hope and love? How do you learn to not just tolerate the other in your midst, but to harmonize with them, make music with them, become a part of the same song? It’s tricky, isn’t it?
Instead of dwelling on the details, Paul talks instead of the promises of scripture that point to the welcome of the Gentiles in God’s ultimate design. He wants them to know that whatever hope it is that we have in what God is doing, it isn’t the exclusive province of any one people, or way of doing things. If our hopes do not include the stranger, if they do not include the one we see as “not one of us,” then such hopes are not from God. They cannot be. They cannot be, because beyond these verses that Paul points to as instruction in our understanding and embrace of the other, the Psalmist instructs us as well that world is God’s and all that is in it. All means, well, all. Not just some. Not just the parts we like, or that benefit us personally. Not just the people we decide are deserving, or who say the magic words. It all belongs to God. This what the scriptures encourage us to hope for: a world in which our differences are not viewed as a problem to be solved through a process of elimination, but an opportunity to discover the richness that comes from living in harmony with one another.
This time of year, it is easy to fall victim to the earworm. Do you know the term? I think it comes from an old Star Trek movie in which people are driven to insanity by a worm that crawls in their ear and scrambles their brain. Outside the realm of science fiction, it’s how we talk about those songs that get stuck inside our heads that we can’t seem to get rid of. The loop of Christmas songs that play incessantly anywhere you go in the month of December make us particularly susceptible to the ear worm. It’s never the song that you like that gets stuck in your head. It’s always something annoyingly ubiquitous like Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas is You, or Wham’s Last Christmas. And it drives out everything but its own catchy melody line.
There a famous scene in the movie Casablanca, the German officers at Rick’s Café begin standing at the piano begin singing Die Wacht am Rhein. The residents of French Morocco shift uncomfortably in their seats. Freedom fighter Victor Lazlo steps to the bandstand and instructs the musicians there to begin playing the French national anthem, La Marseillaise and the people begin singing along until the Germans are eventually drown out. The players and circumstances may change, but the world continually seems to be acting out this scene. One anthem competing against another either in resistance, or for dominance. Each side belting out their melody lines, trying to drown out the other.
The harmony that we are hoping for in this season of Advent is something that transcends earworms and dueling anthems. One of the things I had to learn when it came to singing harmony as a Von Trapp child in The Sound of Music was that I couldn’t just stand there and belt out my part. In fact, over time I came to learn that if people could hear my specific voice, I wasn’t doing it right. One of our choir members shared with me this week that for her, harmony required confidence in what you were singing, knowing your part well enough to sing it against the other parts that might be singing different notes. It also requires knowing something about the whole of what you are singing and trusting the composer, because at times what you are singing may sound deliberately discordant in order to catch the listener’s attention. More than anything, whether it is singing, or living, to be in harmony means being able to listen to others, especially the ones who have a different part. If all we do is belt out our own part and drown out the others, we are not in harmony. By contrast, if we are unclear about our part and what we have to contribute to the whole, something critical will also be missing. We don’t have to sound so close to one another that one cannot be distinguished from the other like the Everly Brothers. It might just be that it’s the distinction and difference in our voices that allows for something like a dialogue to take place; one that allows us tells a more interesting story. Harmony certainly lends a richness that makes our lives more interesting, but it also makes them more complex.
To live in harmony with one another, then, means embracing the complexity of difference, the challenge of singing and living alongside people who may have a different part to play, or sing than we do. It means trusting the composer and finding hope in the fact that God is ultimately glorified when know ourselves in terms of the whole of all that belongs to God; in tune with God, and in tune with one another.