“A Quiet Alleluia”
Philippians 4:4-11
Rev. Dr. Deborah L. Clark
November 22, 2015
The music was late. The concert was to be July 8. The chorus was ready to rehearse early in the week, but the commissioned piece had not yet arrived. Nothing on July 5th. Nothing on the 6th or the 7th. Forty-five minutes before the concert was to begin, it finally arrived. As the story goes, the conductor, Woody Woodworth, looked at the score and said to the anxious chorus, “Well, text at least is one thing we won’t have to worry about.” The a capella piece had only two words: Alleluia, and then a final “Amen.”
The music was late and it was also a surprise. Months earlier, composer Randall Thompson had been commissioned, by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, to produce a choral piece for the grand opening of Tanglewood, the Berkshire Music Center, in 1940. It was to be a grand event. The Director of the new center, Serge Koussevitzky, had asked for a fanfare–something big and bold, triumphant and joyful.
Instead, the chorus received a score marked “Lento”–to be performed slowly. Thompson himself described it as “a very sad piece. The word Alleluia,” he continued, “has so many possible interpretations. The music in my particular Alleluia cannot be made so sound joyous. It is a slow, sad piece….Here it is comparable to the Book of Job, where it is written, ‘The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.’”
Randall Thompson wrote his Alleluia during the second World War, right after the fall of France to the Nazis. The “Lento” marking reflects a time of grief and fear, a time when it was surely a struggle to find a reason to sing “Alleluia”–a Hebrew word which means simply Praise God.
I looked up Randall Thompson’s Alleluia at the suggestion of Rob Delossa, who emailed me on the day after the terrorist attack in Paris. He thought of this striking piece of music in response to the tragedy in France–this time an act not of Nazi soldiers but Isis-inspired terrorists.
I read about Thompson’s Alleluia before I actually listened to it. By the time I finally clicked on a youtube video of the Oklahoma University Chorus’s performance, I was expecting something somber, morose, even depressing.
The music started quietly, reflectively, a little mournful perhaps. And then it built. As the voices began to soar, I felt my spirit begin to soar. While still reflective, the music was inspiring, uplifting, glorious.
This unusual alleluia, without the fanfare generally associated with the word, has become Randall Thompson’s most famous work. It is sung every year at the opening of Tanglewood. It is considered one of the great pieces of choral music.
Thompson’s Alleluia endures because it resonates with our human experience. It speaks to our anguished spiritual struggles in times of crisis and grief. It touches our deep need to express praise and gratitude at the times we feel the least like giving thanks.
It certainly resonates, for me, with the season of Thanksgiving this year. The terrorist attack in Paris leaves me stunned and grieving. The recognition that the attacks the day before in Beirut got so little of my attention disturbs me. The videos warning of attacks to come in our own nation terrify me. The impact fear is having on the prospects for refugee resettlement makes me angry and deeply, deeply sad. A cheerful alleluia chorus feels out of place, and yet I know that in the hardest time I desperately need to reclaim my faith in God’s goodness, my faith in the ultimate power of God’s love.
It is striking to me that when Randall Thompson described his Alleluia, he quoted from the book of Job. The line he quoted is an agonizing one, with troubling theological assumptions. Job is struggling to make sense of a series of tragedies that have overwhelmed his life. He has lost his fortune and much worse, he has lost people he loves. He is tempted, by his remaining family and friends, to blame himself or to curse God. He refuses to do either, instead proclaiming, “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Embedded in his conclusion is an assumption I reject–that God is up in heaven deciding to take people away from us, that God is somehow orchestrating horrific tragedies or even terrorist attacks. I don’t believe that. That is not the work of a God of love.
Many years ago, when I took Hebrew Bible in seminary, we studied the book of Job, reading scholarly analyses of the text and the historical context. Our professor, Frank Cross, proposed his own theory. The book of Job, he suggested, was originally written as an exploration of that profound unanswerable spiritual question: if God is good, why do awful things happen? In this first incarnation, Cross argued, the book of Job asked the question and explored possible responses, rejecting each of them as ultimately unsatisfying. The original version, if Cross was right, gave no answers but honored the questions even as it affirmed the goodness of God.
A later editor, Cross believed, was too uncomfortable with the ambiguity, so rewrote the book giving an answer to the unanswerable question. For me the power of the book of Job is found when we read it imagining its original form: letting go of the answers, honoring the sacredness of our human spiritual struggle, and celebrating the power of our choice to proclaim “Blessed be the name of our God,” even when we don’t understand.
We live in a culture that is finely attuned to hypocrisy. If we don’t feel thankful, we think, then we shouldn’t be singing songs of thanks. I’m all for being true to ourselves and our feelings. But the suggestion that we should only give thanks when we feel thankful ignores the transformative power of gratitude. When we choose to give thanks, we open an window to a new way of experiencing our world. When we choose to sing praise to the God of love, we uncover the hidden ways God’s love is at work in our lives and our world. Our alleluias may start quietly, even tentatively, but if we keep singing them they will soar into a glorious proclamation of the power of God’s love.
As is true in much choral music, in Thompson’s piece the alleluias move between the different parts. Sometimes it is the sopranos. Sometimes it is the tenors. Sometimes the voices weave in and out of each other, until they all come together. The music lifts up a truth about community. There are times in each of our lives when we simply cannot get the words out, when we are so far from experiencing God’s goodness and love that we can’t bring ourselves to speak words of praise. In those times, we rely on the other voices to praise God on our behalf, around us, beside us, until we are finally able to join the chorus and sustain the alleluias for someone else.
In the end, our holiday of thanksgiving is not just about singing or speaking or even about eating turkey; it is about what we do and how we live. Even more transformative than our sung alleluias are our lived alleluias. When we act with love, compassion and courage in a hate-filled and frightening world, we live our faith in the power of God’s love–and we empower God’s love. God rejoices in our sung Alleluias, and God needs our lived Alleluias.
Today our prayer time will be Thompson’s Alleluia. As it begins softly, I will invite you to call out your prayers–celebrations and concerns mixed together, names, places, communities for whom you wish to pray. I won’t try to repeat each one. Instead we will trust that God hears them and that we can pray for one another’s concerns whether or not we can hear all the details.
I invite you to allow the music to be your prayer–a prayer of lamentation, a prayer for healing, a prayer of gratitude, sung alleluias that lead to lived alleluias. Amen.