Texts: Deuteronomy 18:15-20; Mark 1: 21-28

Long after I had stopped believing the fundamental religion preached by my Southern Baptist Church, Miss Watson was the reason I continued to attend there. She was the idol of my life when I was sixteen – she was my choir director. It's strange how certain things grab you and hold you into a community even when you feel disconnected from it. For me it was the music.

I could separate the great old gospel hymns from their terrible theology because may of the old hymnodists who wrote them had a special talent of putting music and words together. Sometimes the lyricists collaborated with others, such as Fanny Crosby; sometimes, like James M. Black, they put words and music together in such a way that both caught your spirit that they could be sung even by the budding doubting Thomas that I was at that time.

Music has been central to religious observances and worship since the dawn of time. Historical records and archaeological evidence indicate the presence of instruments in mourning the deaths of kings and queens as well as the celebration of victories and temple worship. Many of David's Psalms that we now read were actually sung. Scripture tells us that the early Christians sang in worship. Music has been central to worship because it is central to our lives.

There are times that music speaks to us more than words. Prior to Isaac Watts, music in Puritan worship consisted of chanted responses to Psalms that were read to the congregation. Instruments were not used in worship because the use of instruments was considered to be “papish.” Watts began writing what could be considered as paraphrases of Psalms. Writing more than 800 hymns, he created a new approach to the role of music in worship. The actual music was written mostly by others. On the Continent, of course, music had already been integrated into worship. Music, through the Gregorian chant and its progeny, had long been part of the Mass. Every major composer fom Palestrina through Aarvo Part has created music for Christian worship.

We have been raised up by others, not just as a community of faith where worship is important, but also in terms of our approach to living our faith in the world. Our present is tied into our past, not jut as this congregation, as this community, but in the wider community of those who confess Jesus as Lord – the presenter of a new vision of God enabling us to live faithfully and with hope.

In some ways, we face a new and different kind of challenge than did our ancestors, but in other ways those challenges are much the same. Living faithfully is the challenge that never changes; how we do it in this time and place only constitute the details of what needs to be done. Building on the past for the future is what people always do. The question is how we should do it.

Both the church and people of faith have always had choices. I speak of them separately here because they are not necessarily one and the same. They are rather like concentric circles, overlapping but with different interests, different concerns. One of the primary concerns of the institutional church is, quite frankly, self preservation. Makes sense. Institutions want to preserve themselves. However, what is the primary concern of people of faith or a community of faith? It's not self preservation.

The question for us and for any community of faith is how merged the concentric circles of institutional preservation and faithful living are. One of the chief causes of the Protestant Reformation was the demand by people of faith that the institutional church more closely reflect the faithful living to which the community of faith had been called. The question for us as a community of faith is how concentric our circles are. It's not just an issue we face once a year at our annual meeting but a question we face every day. The people of faith – our community – cannot really exist apart from the church as institution; we just need to make the circles as concentric as possible. No easy task, to be sure.

Just eight days ago we both as a community of faith and as a church have suffered a grievous loss in Evelyn's passing. She represented the institution in a way that none of us could even begin to approximate. The direct descendant of the Stour family, founders of the old Middletown Baptist Church and of the Rev. David Stout, one of the leaders of the temperance movement in these parts, she carried a history within her as well as serving the community since 1941 – before Pearl Harbor.

But she served more than the church as institution. She served the community of faith in her way of living faithfully. Her way was through music – teaching children and young people, sharing her special gifts through concerts and musical programs, and directing choirs over the years. Always generous with her time and energy, she herself was a gift. She loved this church but even more than her love for the institution was her love for the community of faith exemplified by faithful living. She stayed through church fights, through tough decisions to be faithful witnesses to the demands of the Gospel, through good times and lean times. And through it all, she gave us music, marvelous music.

On the wall at 411/Conover is a framed piece of calligraphy which reads: Bach gave us God's word; Mozart gave us God's laughter; Beethoven gave us God's fire. God gave us music so we could pray without words.

As we consider our role as institution and as community, may God's grace embrace us as God's grace surely embraced Evelyn. Let us live faithfully as we face the challenges of the coming year and may we think of Evelyn when we hear music. Amen.