Epiphany 2

Mothers are fond of telling their loquacious children: “God gave you two ears and one mouth. That means you’re supposed to listen twice as much as you talk!” Perhaps that truism has been forgotten. It’s not as though there’s a dearth of auditory signals that stream hourly through the cochlea. In fact, one can hear voices everywhere. Elevators announce the floor; greeting cards speak their message; the answering machine tells us who’s calling.

Nearly three centuries ago, Soren Kierkegaard said that if he were a doctor and were allowed to prescribe just one remedy for all the ills of the modern world, he would prescribe silence. For even if the Word of God were proclaimed, Kierkegaard said, it would neither be heard nor heeded.

Ever since the smart phone replaced the “boob tube” which replaced the “squawk box” as our favorite form of entertainment, we have increasingly made hearing a second-rate sense. “Seeing” is believing. “Look” before you leap. “Watch” your back.

These are the messages we trust. The church in the West was initially slow to jump on the glittering bandwagon that placed the seen image over the heard message. Sacred sound was as important as sacred time, sacred space and sacred image. The sonic realm of spirituality was manifest in the West in the Gregorian chant of the early church, the Jesus Prayer chant of the Eastern Orthodox Church, hymns in Protestantism and Martin Luther’s insistence that God is a deus loquens – a “speaking God.”

By and large, however, Western philosophy and even the church have been more interested in the phenomenology of space and time than in sound. But we need to go beyond rational and visual approaches to theology and embrace the sonic dimensions of theology.

The biblical way forward is not one that “looks” before it leaps. It is, rather, one that listens that “you may live,” as Isaiah said (55:3). The ears are indeed “the gateway to the soul.”

Why is hearing so important? Paul said in Romans 10:17 that “faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ.”

The sounds of God have revealed the most about the divine. We have only to open to Genesis 1 to find that God is sound. Creation was a speech event. Creation is sound. “And God said . . .” brings all of creation into being. Only after God had spoken and the listening void was filled did God see that it was good. The biblical account of Creation suggests that all matter had to “listen up” to God’s creative voice in order to take on the form and function intended by the Creator.

God created the world from sound. The world sounds back praises to God. Psalm 29 makes this explicit: “The voice of the LORD is over the waters; the God of glory thunders,. . . The voice of the LORD is powerful; the voice of the LORD is full of majesty” (3,4).

Today, cellular biologists find themselves concurring with this ancient idea. As biological beings, basically you and I are “dancing energy.” Not only does all of creation around us hum with the sounds of life, your genes, your liver, your brain waves, every one of your cells vibrates. The laws of resonance apply: Anything that vibrates sympathetically responds to vibrations, even the most infinitesimal vibrations we have yet to measure. Cosmic vibrations are everywhere.

Music is at base a set of vibrations called the harmonic series – so argued composer/ conductor Leonard Bernstein. Certain harmonic forms create and connect with certain emotions and moods and personalities. For example: People feel they are “in tune with each other”; “on the same wavelength”; “harmonious.”

Have you ever had another person’s name and face come to mind? You can’t get him or her out of your thoughts? You dial the person up and ask, “Is everything okay? I can’t stop thinking about you and praying for you. Are you all right?” And the person replies, “How did you know? I’m so glad you called. You have no idea what I’ve been going through.” That’s picking up good vibrations, vibrations at a level much higher than what the Beach Boys were singing about back in 1966.

Here’s another example: The electron shell of the carbon atom, physicists tell us, follows the laws of harmonics, producing the tone scale C-D-E-F-G-A. As German philosopher and jazz musician Joachim-Ernst Berendt first pointed out, this is the hexachord of Gregorian chant. Could it be that all carbon-based life is actually built on Gregorian chant? Could it be that music makes us before we make music? Could it be that to sing is a sound thing to do? Literally?

The church can present a more biblically based witness to the world if it stresses listening at least as hard as it stresses looking; encourages vibrational leadership as much as it stresses visionary leadership. Instead of squinting at the future, the church should keep its ears cocked, trying to pick up the soundtrack God is playing for the church’s 21st century mission. We have to hear better before we can see better. We have to move from vision to vibration.

Novalis, the 18th century German philosopher, was right: “Every disease is a musical problem.” Disease occurs when the vibrations of one’s being are out of harmony with oneself, with others, with God. The discord that jars our culture is a symptom of the greatest disease we currently suffer – the most serious epidemic we now face, Covid-19 notwithstanding. This disease is “harmonic clash” – a condition we experience when we find the rhythm of our souls out of harmony with the resonance of God’s universe.

Getting in tune with God and with each other is the real challenge that confronts the 21st-century Christian. We don’t need to “see” any more clearly or to “envision” any new pathways. What we need is to use the acute sense of hearing so divinely developed within every cell of our being to listen to each other.

The “ear-gate” – so much more developed and sensitive than our “eye-gate” – has been created to act as the natural conduit of connection between the Creator and all creation. Our sense of hearing, our listening ability, was designed so that human beings may get in tune with the divine.

It took both Eli and Samuel, both the experienced and the inexperienced servants of God, three times before they were able to sit and hear God’s Word. Listen before you speak.

In today’s Gospel, Nathaniel cynically asks the newly called disciple Philip, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:46) Yet when Nathaniel stops his own commentary long enough to listen and experience Jesus’ message, Nathaniel declares, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God!” (v.49).

John’s Gospel identifies Jesus as the Logos, the Word, that which must be heard. Jesus as Logos acts as a tuning fork to the Creator, the Eternal. If we would seek to get our own lives back in tune with God, it must be through listening to Christ’s frequencies and matching the resonance of our actions and attitudes to Jesus’ pitch. Jesus is God’s perfect pitch. Any chance the world may have of achieving a new state of harmony depends on our willingness to “hear into speech” first Christ and then each other.

Or as Fanny Crosby put it long ago in her hymn Rescue the Perishing:

Down in the human heart, crushed by the tempter. Feelings lie buried that grace can restore. Touched by a loving heart, wakened by kindness. Chords that are broken will vibrate once more.