Ch-Ch-Changes

This is the message given in the Wheatland Parish on Sunday, July 1, 2012.  The scripture is Ecclesiastes 1:4-10.

            I grew up in the 1970s in the seventies.  What that means is that, when I was a teenager, the musical groups I was listening to were groups like Three Dog Night, ELO, and ABBA.  Now, by today’s standards, that’s all pretty tame stuff, but I remember that at the time, my parents did not like the fact that I was listening to that kind of music at all.  Not only did they not like it, they did not understand it.  They could not understand why I did not enjoy the big band music that they grew up with, bands led by people like Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman and, of course, Lawrence Welk.  And I’m sure my grandpa, who loved the old cowboy singers like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, could not understand why my parents would like that big band stuff.  And on and on it goes.

           

It can be easy, when we don’t like a particular style of music, for us to just dismiss it out of hand.  It’s easy, but it’s probably not a very wise thing to do.  Because, as we conclude our sermon series, “Stone Tablets in a Wireless World”, one of the things that constantly changes in our society is popular styles of music.

           

I’ve heard people say music is the universal language, but I don’t think that’s true.  I think music is a lot of languages.  Hearing a type of music we’re not familiar with is kind of like hearing a language we’re not familiar with.  When we first hear it, it just sounds like noise.  The only way it can make sense to us is if we spend enough time with it to get familiar with it.

           

Think about the traditional church hymns we use.  Now, I don’t want anyone to take this the wrong way, because I love a lot of those traditional hymns.  One of the favorite parts of my week is when I go out to Oahe Manor on Tuesday morning and spend a half hour playing the piano and singing those hymns with the folks out there.

           

Here’s the thing, though.  I was born in 1958, and I’ve been singing those traditional hymns all my life.  But music has changed a lot since 1958.  Those traditional hymns sound nothing like the popular music of today.

           

It was not always that way.  When people like Martin Luther and Charles Wesley were writing what now are our traditional hymns, they very often used the popular tunes of the day.  They just put Christian words to them.  The songs people sang in church sounded just like the songs they sang in other places.  Now, they don’t.  And to people who are not used to “churchy” music, it sounds foreign.  It sounds just as foreign as if we were speaking in a foreign language.

           

The reason people like Luther and Wesley used the music of their day to give people a Christian message is that music is a very powerful thing.  It evokes images.  It evokes emotions.  It evokes memories.  Songs get connected in our minds with certain events.  I’ve seen people cry while listening to a song, not because the song is particularly sad, but because it reminded them of something sad that happened when they heard it.  And I’ve seen people smile when they hear a song, again not because of the song itself, but because of a happy memory that they’ve connected to that song in their mind.  Music is something that is extremely powerful.

And music sticks with us.  It’s probably easier to memorize music than anything else.  I can hear a song that was popular when I was in high school, and even if I have not heard it for twenty or thirty years, I can still remember all the words.  I’ll bet there are songs you can do that with, too.  That’s how powerful music is.

           

Because music is so powerful, music is something we can use to reach people who might not be reached by listening to a sermon on Sunday morning.  That’s true no matter how wonderful and brilliant these sermons you hear on Sunday morning are.  Again, music sticks with us.  I’ve been going to church all my life, but there are very few sermons I’ve heard that I can remember.  I can remember lots of songs about faith, though.

           

As you know, we’re doing a contemporary song in our worship services now.  In our Wednesday night services in Gettysburg, we’ve been using more contemporary music.  It’s not that contemporary music is inherently better or worse than traditional hymns, but it is more like the music you hear on the radio.  That means contemporary music is less of a foreign language to people who are not used to traditional hymns.

           

What’s interesting, though, is that while styles of music have changed, the things songs are written about have really not changed all that much.  The reason for that is that people have not changed all that much.  We still have the same basic human needs—food, clothing, shelter.  We still have the same basic emotional needs, too—respect, love, feeling that we make a difference.  Each generation thinks it’s creating the world over again, but in many ways the world stays pretty much the same from one generation to the next.

           

The author of Ecclesiastes recognized that.  He tells us that even though we may think things are new and different, they’re really not.  He tells us that no matter what happens, “The sun rises and the sun goes down…The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north.”  We may think we’re experiencing things no one has ever experienced, or feeling things no one has ever felt, but in fact, he says, “There is nothing new under the sun.”  If we see a thing and think it’s new, he says, “It has already been in the ages before us.”

           

That may seem kind of depressing, in a way.  It may make us feel bad to realize that, despite all the ways the world has changed, we’re really not all that special, after all.  Everything we’re experiencing has been experienced by others.  We think we’re creating all this stuff that’s new and different, but all we’re really doing is fiddling around at the margins.  We change the technology, we make it easier to communicate and to travel, but we don’t do anything to change human nature. We may not like to think about that.  It can make us sad to think that, at the end of our lives, nothing about the world will be fundamentally different, that, as the author of Ecclesiastes says, “A generation goes, and a generation comes,” but nothing much actually changes.

           

But in another way, that can be comforting.  What it means is that, despite the changes we’ve talked about in this sermon series, God created a world that is pretty stable.  I mean, think about it:  it would be a pretty fragile world if one generation could come along and totally change everything about it, right?  Human nature would be pretty weak and unstable if it could be made totally different from one generation to the next.  If it was easy to change the world for the good, it would be just as easy to change it for the bad.  The fact that human nature does stay the same, that our human needs, whether physical or emotional, stay the same, that the world as a whole does not change easily, and that it has never has changed easily in all the years of human existence, shows that God wants it that way.

           

There’s another thing that’s comforting about this, too.  And that is that, while human nature may not change, God’s nature also does not change.  God is the same God today that was thousands of years in the past, and God is the same God that will be thousands of years in the future.  God’s love never changes.  God’s mercy never changes.  God’s grace and forgiveness never change.  Music may change, fashions may change, hair styles may change, technology may change, but God never changes.  God is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

           

There’s one more thing that does not change, too, and that’s God’s promises to us.  God promised, through Jesus, that our sins would be forgiven if we believe in him.  God promised that if we believe in Jesus, we will have everlasting life in heaven.  And God promised to send the Holy Spirit to enter our hearts and increase our faith, so we can feel God’s presence with us here on earth.  God promised all these things to us, and those promises will never change.  God is always faithful to God’s promises.

           

Music may change, technology may change, but God does not change.  When we feel a little unsettled at all the changes in society, we can remember that we’re not the first generation to feel that way, and we won’t be the last.  And we can remember that, no matter what happens, the sun will continue to rise and set, the wind will continue to blow, and God will continue to be God.  God will continue to love us.  And God will continue to offer eternal life to all of us, young or old, through our faith in Jesus Christ.  That’s the message of those old stone tablets, and it still applies, even in a wireless world.