It was one of the singular instructive moments in my life as a learning adult when I took a morning course with my brother-in-law, who teaches at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and is himself an excellent, doctoral geophysicist. He taught a seminar called: The Physics of the Organ. It just so happens that my brother-in-law is also a capable organist. It brought the physics and his love for the organ together as he takes the students through the ways in which an organ actually makes sound, and describes them in natural and mathematical terms. It was incredible! Apart from the fact that for a few embarrassing moments climbing in the back of the organ I got stuck and couldn’t get out because of my girth, it was really one of the most instructive things that I have witnessed in many years.
What I discovered in the study of the physics of the organ was a few things, most notably that an organ is dependent on where it is situated. What had happened to the organ at Phillips Academy was quite staggering really. In 1927, they had built a magnificent Casavant organ in one of the great halls, but somebody, deluded I think, decided to move this great organ into the much smaller chapel. They put the pipes behind walls. They covered up most of the instrument, they perched it on an edge, and the poor Casavant organ was terrible, so-much-so that Casavant didn’t even want it to go in there at all. It didn’t last, and in the 1980s they removed it and replaced it with an organ by the Andover Organ Company: smaller, still magnificent, still a great way to learn what an organ does. But the Casavant was removed, ended up in a barn somewhere, and now finally has been reclaimed by a church in Minnesota.
What Peter was pointing out was quite simply that you can’t take an instrument like a Casavant organ and place it in a small space and expect it to make the same sound; an organ is dependent on location. There is something else that I learned from him as well, namely that while physics might explain how an organ makes sounds, and while we might be able to define it in physical terms, it requires the touch of an artist, the touch of a caring person to be able to turn it into something beautiful and meaningful. The physics of the organ might tell us one thing, but only in the hands of somebody who really loves the instrument does it become something else.
We here at Timothy Eaton Memorial Church have enjoyed a hundred years of this organ. I think it is time for us to think about the dynamics of the relationship that we have with this instrument. To think that it was installed during the dark shadows of World War I, that it was placed in here as a source of joy and inspiration and uplift in a time of darkness says a great deal about the people who put it here. They must have had some hope in the future. They must have seen the importance of it. While it has developed and grown and changed and matured and adapted to our times and to changing technology, nevertheless it is essentially the great Casavant organ that was here then.
What I find fascinating about it is that it is a living relationship. The relationship between the organ and its people is a vital thing, it is a dynamic thing, and it is an ongoing thing. While I am prepared to acknowledge that the organ can be a very secular instrument in certain places, such as concert halls or hockey arenas or even during the 1920s in the silent movies, the organ can be used in places that are not necessarily religious. However, it is in places of worship, places such as this that the organ comes to life as something that draws people in and lifts them up.
The history of the organ is rich. From its origins in third century Greece before Christ to the sixth century where it developed into the instrument that we know now with the advent of bellows, it was in the seventeenth century when it really came alive in cathedrals and churches and chapels. Whether Roman Catholic or Reformed, it mattered not, the organ was the way the people of God praised God.
It was an instrument in God’s hands. So many of the great names that are associated with the organ arise from some of those contexts, from the Baroque period of the great Bach and Handel to the classical Mendelssohn to Widor and Saint Saëns, who we are going to hear this afternoon, to the magnificent of Gustav Holst, and we have already sung a piece put to his music this morning in the Doxology II of the great Vaughn Williams, to more recently Durufle and Howells, the organ has had compositions that have drawn from it and made out of it something powerful and stimulating and moving. There is no other instrument on earth that captures the complexity and the richness and the depth of sound of the organ.
In the 17th century it was considered the most complex thing that the human hand had made in the whole world, and it took hundreds of years before something equally as complex was created. It is something that has been made by human hands that is incredible! But where it really comes to life is not just played as an instrument in an empty cathedral or in an empty church, but when people sing with it, when it becomes the voice for the praise of God, when it become the accompaniment of a great choir, when it becomes an instrument that when played inspires us to heights, it is a living, vibrant relational thing, created by us, but used by God to lift us up.
In today’s passage, one of the most glorious passages in the whole of Scripture, we have the opposite of what we had last week. Last week, on Remembrance Day was the great Lamentation, the great pain, the great agony of suffering as expressed by Jeremiah. Now, however, we have Isaiah 65 which is the great joy, the great ecstasy of a new heaven and a new Earth. Isaiah writes that this new heaven and this new Earth will manifest in ways that the people of God could hardly imagine, for they had lived in exile, they had lived in penury, they had been servants and workers, and everything that they did had been done for someone else. But now there is this vision of them returning home, returning to Jerusalem and there will be no more infant mortality, and that people who lived to a hundred years will mean nothing really, because you will live to a hundred years. “The things that you have built will give you joy. The vineyards that you plant will give you wine. The houses that you build you will live in. In other words, God will give a blessing and a hope and a new life to you, a new heaven and a new Earth, where the things that you have made will bring you joy.”
Later on, drawing on the New Testament, people like Irenaeus and Justin, and more recently today, Richard Bauckham, have argued that what we see in Isaiah 65 is a foretaste of the ministry of Jesus, the foretaste of the end of death and the resurrection to new life, the hope of eternity: the things for which we wait that Christ has delivered. This is the new heaven and Earth, and in the new heaven and Earth the things that we have made we will enjoy. I think one of the things that we have created that gives us joy is the very gift of the organ itself. It is a way of pointing to the new heaven and Earth. Its grandeur reminds us of the new heaven and Earth. It takes us from where we are to where God wants us to be and there are few things in this world that have been made by human beings that come close to the sound of an organ lifting up God’s people. It is the relationship between God and music. God speaks through it. God announces God’s glory through it, and we in turn praise God because of it.
This wonderful thing, this glorious instrument really transforms science into art. It is one thing to look at the complexity of the organ and its various sounds and levels and stops and instruments. Christopher Dawes, our organist, has a wonderful pamphlet on that very nature of our own organ and how complex it is. Yet the complexity pales compared to the artistic power of those who play it and turn it into something more than science. Science has a richness of its own. Science reveals things about nature and humanity and about the creation and the order and the structure of things. Science is a glorious thing, but science without art, science without imagination, is soulless. It is in the hands of those who love the science that it becomes an instrument of God and we see it in the organ.
Some years ago, as somebody here intimately knows, I travelled to Santiago, Chile and visited a Monsignor in the Catholic Church, a man who had opposed Pinochet and who had suffered because of it. The church adjacent to the offices was tiny really. You could hardly see it from the road. Yet in this little church many had gathered to pray for change in Chile during the dark days. They would gather in this church, and there is a little organ – not a Casavant like ours – a tiny organ, but over it are the words engraved in Spanish Nuestro Dios es alegre – “Our God is joyful!” In stark contrast to everything that must have been going on around them, Nuestro Dios es alegre is there for all to see, right above of all things, the organ! I thought to myself, “What an incredible symbol of what an organ really should be! What a powerful testimony it is to what faith and music should do!”
Praise and music and the power of the organ lift us above the discordant notes that are around us and give us a harmonious one on which to praise God. For the things that have been made by our hands are joyful and rewarding and lift us up. I thought of this church and of the many funerals that have been conducted here and how in the midst of it all, the organ has been played, and in the moments of death and discord and darkness, the beautiful tones of the organ have been heard.
Writing from prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote these words – and how fitting for a man in jail who was about to die! He said: “Music will help dissolve your perplexities and purify your character and sensibilities. And in time of care and sorrow, will keep a fountain of joy alive in you.” One of the few things in prison that he found uplifting was the singing of hymns and the music of the organ and the music of the Church is precisely that in the moments of what he called “care and sorrow” they become “the fountain of joy.” They become a fountain of joy when a bride walks down aisle to Pachelbel’s Canon at her wedding or goes out to Toccata by Widor. What else could capture a moment like that but an instrument like that?
When people for a hundred years have gathered in this place to care about and be concerned about the world, when they have gone through World Wars and poverty and disasters, when we’ve landed on the moon and when planes have flown into buildings or soldiers have been killed in Ottawa, still the Word of God seems to be heard even in the midst of the music. The music plays, and the chords are sounded, and the melody goes forth, because the things that our hands have made give glory and praise to God. Nuestro Dios es alegre! My God is joyful! And, the organ has been a part of that here for a hundred years! May it continue! Amen.