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Fleming Rutledge is a preacher and teacher known throughout the mainline Protestant denominations of the US, Canada and parts of the UK. She is the author of seven books and has received a grant from the Louisville Foundation to complete a book about the meaning of the Crucifixion.
One of the first women to be ordained to the priesthood of the Episcopal Church, she served for fourteen years on the clergy staff at Grace Church on Lower Broadway at Tenth Street, New York City. Fleming and her husband celebrate their 50th anniversary in 2009 and have two daughters and two grandchildren. She is a native of Franklin, Virginia.
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A sermon on the music of J. S. Bach, "the fifth evangelist"Bach Vespers at UNIVERSAL BACH, UNIVERSAL GOSPEL Sermon by Fleming Rutledge The
Feast of the Presentation of the Lord 2009 Texts: Luke 2:28-32
and Cantata BWV 83, Erfreute Zeit im
neuen Bunde ****************************************** Johann Sebastian Bach belongs to
the world. As Bach-lover Otto Bettman, founder of the Bettman Archive, has
said, “[Bach] is popular in Indeed, Bach belongs to the universe. When Lewis Thomas, often called the “poet-philosopher of medicine,” was asked how he would approach the discovery of a new inhabited planet, this is what he said: I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again We would be bragging of course but it is surely excusable to put the best possible face on at the beginning of such an acquaintance. We can tell the harder truths later.” [2] Put briefly, Bach is the best of what we are as a human race. Bach belongs to everyone of every race and religion or no religion at all. But Bach also belongs to the Church. That is the special glory of Bach Vespers here at Holy Trinity. It is no diminishment of Bach’s universality to experience his music in a setting similar to that for which it was originally designed, and to pay attention to the words and their meaning. As you can imagine, there’s an ongoing debate about how much to emphasize text in relation to music in Bach’s vocal works. A corresponding discussion arises about the role of Christian faith in regard to them. Maasaki Suzuki, the Japanese conductor who is recording all of Bach’s works, is an ardent Christian, but he is quick to say that Bach can be magnificently performed by an unbeliever and poorly performed by an believer. [3] Perhaps we can agree, though, that one of the greatest of all joys of being a Christian believer is to hear these cantatas with the faith that the composer shared and expressed with his surpassing musical genius. For Bach’s cantatas are designed as direct address to the congregation in the church. They’re not like opera, which works upon audiences indirectly as the singers on stage address one another. On the contrary: when the tenor sings in tonight’s cantata, “Hasten, heart, full of joyousness” (Eile, Herz, voll Freudigkeit), we are ourselves directly summoned to receive God’s grace and mercy in a most personal way.[4] To be sure, some of the characteristics of Bach’s faith are more congenial for us today than others. When his singers seem to long for death, that’s strange to us[5] This yearning for death needs to be understood in the context of German Pietism. In this version of Protestantism, a primary theme was the union of the believer with the risen Christ in eternal life.[6] John Updike, who shocked us all by dying last week, would have understood—it is often thought that he was preoccupied with sex when what he was really haunted by was the dread of death (timor mortis perturbat me). Tonight’s cantata is written for the comfort of all who live under this shadow. [7] Actual longing for death is present in some of the cantatas, but that isn’t a biblical theme, and it is at odds with the extraordinarily joyful love of life so evident in much of Bach’s work. Even though the tenor tonight will sing of “grief-stricken times,” Bach cannot restrain his buoyancy as he summons the soul to come boldly (kräftig beten) before the throne of grace (Gnadenstuhl). The major focus of this sermon and
the cantata tonight is Bach’s celebration of . the Presentation of the Lord in
the The story of the Presentation in
the Gospel of Luke is wonderfully suffused with the atmosphere of first-century
Jewish piety. It is tragic that there was a time when Christians had forgotten
that Jesus was Jewish. Today, after all that has happened in the last century,
it’s urgent to remember that Jesus was born into, and raised by, a devout
Jewish family. In the first three chapters of Luke’s Gospel, his Gentile
readers are shown that the Savior emerges from the very heart of Hebrew history
and life. Mary and Joseph bring their
infant son to the Luke introduces two characters,
Simeon and Anna, who are the highest exemplars of faithful Judaism.[11]
These two old people have been waiting all their lives for the redemption of We don’t have time tonight to consider this beautiful portion of Scripture in all its detail.[13] We’ll focus on the part that Bach quotes. In the first two lines of the bass aria and then again in the final chorale, the words are the same as the words of Simeon in the Bible. The old man takes the baby in his arms; it is the moment of recognition.[14] It is he! I have been waiting all my life to see him! Now I can die in peace, with joy! Simeon’s words have long been known in Christian tradition as the Nunc Dimittis: Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word; for mine eyes have seen thy salvation… a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people It is hard to put into sufficient words the radicality of this message. A light to the Gentiles? What is the purpose of being God’s holy chosen people if he’s going to ask us to share his glory with the godless masses? We need to make a little transposition in our minds here. Don’t think of Jews and Gentiles. Think rather of the godly and the ungodly, the righteous and the unrighteous, our kind and the other kind. That’s the point. From deep within the tradition of ancient Israel there arose a message that was often ignored but never forgotten, that through Abraham and his descendants all the families of the earth would be blessed, that when God’s full salvation arrived all the nations of the earth would come streaming into Jerusalem to participate fully in the glory of the Lord.[16] When Simeon bears his witness to
the Messiah in the biblical story, it’s a direct call to the believer to yield
in faith to the same thrill of recognition and fulfilment that Simeon
experiences. Bach has structured his cantata so that we will see how the
promise to END. Quotations from Bach’s
cantata 83 are from an English translation by Tobin === [1] Quoted by Naomi Bliven, “Bettman’s Bach,” in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, date? I have changed the order of the two sentences for rhetorical purposes. [2]Lewis
Thomas, “poet-philosopher of medicine,” president of [3] Bernard
D. Sherman, “Coming to Fresh Terms with the Sacred in Bach,” The [4] Jaroslav Pelikan argues similarly, writing that whereas Handel’s oratorios (which were performed in theatres) as well as operas engage us emotionally, they “[do] not demand of us that we respond with an existential decision for or against the claims of the story…For that reason, the natural habitat for Bach’s Passions [and cantatas] is still the church.” Pelikan, Bach Among the Theologians, 78. [5] Director Peter Sellars’ reaction to this strangeness was to dress Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in a hospital gown and hook her up to tubes, with the intent of explaining why she would long for death (Ich habe genug—as if she were saying, “I’ve had enough!”). This seems a travesty of Bach’s intention, but then, Bach belongs to Sellars too. [6] The background here is the Thirty Years War in which the European population was reduced from sixteen million to less than six, followed by successive epidemics of plague. In the aftermath of these calamities, it is not so strange that Christians longed to hear the message of union with Christ in his Resurrection as supreme consolation to the individual for whom intimate contact with death was part of daily life. [7] New Testament theologian Paul Minear writes, “ Bach believed that the biblical text was designed to release within the reader an intense kind of spiritual activity. The interpreter must therefore help the text produce in his own audience an emotional action appropriate to the text at hand. He should give priority not to the axis between the Gospel and other ancient books, nor between each successive sentence and the biblical author’s conscious and literal intent, but to that [axis] between the events narrated and the contemporary audience whose members are called on to respond to those event in unqualified immediacy and with their whole being.” Paul S. Minear, “J. S. Bach and J. A. Ernesti: A Case Study in Theological and Exegetical Conflict,” in John Deschner and others, eds., Our Common History as Christians: Essays in Honor of Albert C. Outler, Oxford University Press, 1975, 131-55. Quoted by Jaroslav Pelikan, Bach Among the Theologians, 39. [8]The Presentation of our Lord, as it is called in the
West, has been observed since the fourth century. It celebrates the event
described in Luke 2:22-40. In the Greek Church, the feast day is called “The
Meeting of the Lord” (Hypapante Kuriou), because
it commemorates the meeting of the infant Jesus with Simeon and Anna, who as
representatives of God’s people [9] His [10] The
required rite is described in Leviticus 12:6-8. Actually, Luke has conflated
two separate Israelite customs. One was the presentation and consecration of
the firstborn male child to the service of the Lord. A Levite child would
remain in the service of the [11]In the story of the Purification/ Presentation, Luke is telling us that the Law (Mary observes the Law) and the Prophets (Simeon and Anna are both prophets) are both fulfilled in Jesus. [12] “The
redemption of [13] This beautiful
story belongs to the Epiphany season with its theme of manifestation. But the New Testament and the Church give us hints
of Lent even in the midst of rejoicing. After the consoling Nunc Dimittis, Simeon has something more
to say, something more disturbing. He tells Mary: “Behold, this child is set
for the fall and rising of many in [14] This
moment of recognition is unforgettably portrayed in Rembrandt’s painting of the
Presentation (which hangs in the Hague museum). The vast [15] The scope of this sermon and this cantata do not allow
for further exposition of additional important and interesting points from
Luke’s narrative of the Presentation. The second part of Simeon’s utterance is
a prophetic oracle. Looking into the future by the power of the Spirit, he sees
that the Messiah will grow up, not to be a nationalist hero, but a “sign of
contradiction” who will wield a sword of discernment and division (“falling and
rising”) that will result in his crucifixion— and even his own mother will be expected to
pass through that testing (“a sword will pass through your heart also”). In
Luke, Mary fails the test of discernment at first, not recognizing who her son
is (Luke 2:48-9; see also 8:19-21 and 11:28)—Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX
(Garden City: Doubleday, 1981), 430; see also Brown, 462-5. [16] Raymond E. Brown, in his magisterial survey of the
infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke, notes the universalist trajectory of
the many passages from Isaiah 40-66 that lie behind the Nunc Dimittis. (To give just one example, “The Lord has revealed
his holy arm in the sight of all the Gentiles, and all the ends of the earth
will see the salvation of our God”—Isaiah 52:10). However, he observes, it is a
“subordinate universalism,” for the Gentiles are to come to [17] This is
a reference to events recently occurring in the outer boroughs of Related: |
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