“At the Midnight Hour”

Acts 16:16-34

A sermon preached by the Rev. Douglas M. Donley

May 20, 2007

University Baptist Church

Minneapolis, MN

 

            Thanks for sharing that music with us Prairie.  I got the chance to experience the Missa Campesina in Nicaragua and hear people young and old, mostly poor being transported by music that was fresh, alive and theirs.  If you notice, the words to the Missa lift up God’s preferential option for the poor—such a refreshing set of texts that are too often missing from contemporary church music.  I remember the joy on their faces and the power of their witness.  It was a powerful testimony to what happens when music is relevant to the people.  It’s a way of subverting the normal ways of doing things and connecting in a tangible and powerful manner with God.

            That’s what music is supposed to do.  It’s both a gift from God and an expression of God each time we sing.  Church is the only place where we get to sing anymore on a regular basis.  Sure, we might sing along to the radio, but church is the place where we join together with sisters and brothers and venture forth into song.  What a great gift that is.  I’m spoiled by UBC’s tradition of powerful singing.  When I visit other churches and sing with my UBC voice, people start staring because I’m making too much noise.  This is not a slight on Catholics, but I remember going to a service at a Catholic church and the closing hymn was that great five-verse hymn “God of Grace and God of Glory.”  The cantor got to the microphone to lead the singing and by the end of the second verse the sanctuary was empty.  What a shame.

            I’ve entitled this sermon “at the midnight hour.”  Of course, I’m reminded of the Wilson Picket/ Buddy Guy hit with the same title:

I'm gonna wait 'till the midnight hour
That's when my love comes tumbling down
I'm gonna wait 'till the midnight hour
I'm gonna take you girl and hold you
Do all things I told you in the midnight hour

            Think about what happens at midnight.   It’s dark.  You don’t quite know what’s going on.  Things go bump in the night.   Aside from the lovers doing their thing as Wilson Picket pines, it’s supposed to be a time when people are asleep.  We are supposed to be dreaming

            But midnight is also the turning point of the night.  It’s when one day ends and another begins.  The midnight hour is a creative hour.  The midnight hour is when fervent private prayers happen, where people wrestle with their own private demons.  There is a safety in the cover of darkness.  You can privately tell your deepest truth—confront your deepest fears.  At the midnight hour, strange sounds come from outside—seldom bring comfort, and almost always bringing a surprise that disturbs our sleep. 

            These past few weeks, we have been enjoying sleeping with our windows open.  At the midnight hour a few nights ago, we heard the sounds of critters chirping, fighting and moaning.  Our whole family woke up.  We half expected to find carcasses along with the morning dew.  Luckily we didn’t.  But it disturbed our sleep.

            There will soon be an influx of people in our community that are veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Many of these people will have visible wounds in the form of physical wounds.  For others, the wounds will be more psychological.  There will be the effects of PTSD.  These people have lived with the expectation that they are not safe, that every sound or movement is a potential threat.  Hearing things go bump in the night will send them back to the horror-filled midnights of combat.  As these people come back, we need to welcome them back with compassion and a bit of understanding that our world is foreign to them.  The things that happened in their midnight hours haunt them in the daytime.

Paul and Silas were bound in jail.  It was nighttime.  At night is when the guards often come and terrorize the inmates.  They have the cover of darkness and the cloud of anonymity.   It’s easy to curse the darkness when you’re in a situation like that.  We long for the morning where things can become clearer in the light of day.

Many of us have been in that dark, bleak place where we don’t know which way to go, where we don’t know whether the voices that invade our solitude are for our greatest good or our gravest ill.  In this place we curse our sorry lot in life, we curse God.  We can’t wait until the morning comes to give us some clarity.

It was dark in the prison where Paul and Silas were held.  I can imagine that it was a scary time.  So, in order to pass the time or to think about something else, they started to sing.  I can imagine that the songs were tentative at first.  But as they gathered courage and confidence, I imagine the songs getting stronger.  I imagine Paul and Silas teaching their fellow inmates the songs of their faith, budding music therapists that they were.  I don’t know what they were singing.  Maybe it was version of

 

            Blessed Assurance, Jesus is mine, Oh what a foretaste of glory divine…

            This is my story this is my song, praising my savior all the day long.

 

Maybe it was something like,

 

            When tyrants tremble sick with fear and hear their death knells ringing

            When Friends rejoice both far and near, how can I keep from singing?

            In prison cell and dungeon vile our thoughts to them are clinging.

            When Friends by shame are undefiled, how can I keep from singing?

 

Something happens to us when we sing.  Something happens to us when we are engulfed and transported by music.  We lose our sense of time.  We lose our sense of decorum.  We start out living in the confines of rhythm and verse.  And then we venture off into that improvisational place.  There we play with rhythm, we play with melody, and we play with harmony.  I call this the jazz factor.  The jazz factor takes over and we pour out our souls in song.

            That’s what I imagine happened to Paul and Silas and the people in the jail.  They were getting into the music.  They were listening to the stories that the music gave them.  They were doing something that made it impossible to become defined by the bars of the prison.  It was the jazz factor at the midnight hour.  It was a time when they connected to something great and beautiful.

            There’s a scene in the movie The Shawshank Redemption which speaks to this.    Andy DuFrane has been pestering libraries to send him books for the inmates.  In order to shut him up they send a crate of books and included in it is a few records.  Andy, who has befriended the guards takes out a record and hooks it up to the PA system of the prison.  Two women sing a duet from an opera and the prison freezes.  Beauty invaded their hopeless lives and they were transfixed.  Once the guards saw how the prisoners were reacting, they started to threaten Andy.  He looked at them through the glass of the locked door, smiled and turned up the volume.

            Paul and Silas were singing at the midnight hour, that fulcrum when night begins to become day. 

            They were singing and remembering who they were. 

            They were remembering that a power greater than themselves can restore them to sanity. 

            They were remembering that Jesus was also imprisoned on trumped up charges. 

            They remembered that each of their fellow prisoners needed hope, too. 

            At the midnight hour, the music that they shared with each other and with the guards and with God reminded them that their purpose was not to curse the darkness, but to witness to the power of God which is all about the morning.  The power of God is more powerful than prison walls, more powerful than fear, more powerful than confusion, more powerful than isolation, more powerful than even violence.  It was the music that gave them the bridge to hope.  It came at the midnight hour, when they needed it most.

            We give thanks for the great music that we have here at UBC, whether it’s handbells or horns, or organ, or piano, or guitar or fiddle or clarinet, whether it’s sung music by the choir or Sacred Harp music sung with raw emotion or the great congregational singing which is our bread and butter at UBC, we experience music in order to help us make it through the midnight hours of our lives.  Music is one of God’s unique mystical languages. 

            When you get caught in one of those dark nights of the soul, I hope you will take a cue from Paul and Silas.  Sing a song.  Let it engulf and comfort you.  Let it be part of God’s language that speaks to you.  Who knows, sometime at the midnight hour, you might have some clarity, some more sense of power, or at least peace.  When we can live with peace, power and clarity, then there is no telling what we might come up with.  We may set some prisoners free.  And we may well be some of those very prisoners bound for too long and yearning to taste the sweet nectar of freedom.

Sisters and brothers, embrace the jazz factor of God.  In the dark nights of the soul, sing the songs of lament, the songs that express truth. The songs that give you hope.  Join the chorus and remember that your isolation is an illusion.  For hope, joy, challenging change and freedom come at the midnight hour.

 

            My life flows on in endless song above earth’s lamentation

            I hear the real though far-off hymn that hails the new creation

            Through all the tumult and the strife I hear that music ringing

            It sounds an echo in my soul.  How can I keep from singing?