Rejoice in the Lamb
At the sesquicentennial celebration
of the Cathedral Church of the Nativity
Friday, November 2, 2012
First, a word for those of you not familiar with Evensong. There is no more appropriate way to begin these sesquicentennial celebrations than with choral evensong. Since 1549, Anglicanism’s unique contribution to protestant life has been daily morning prayer and daily evensong with sermon. In many churches, especially in England and Africa, this tradition lives, and you still find it in many North American and Antipodean cities and in traditional churches everywhere. Just across the river from us, Trinity, Bethlehem, prays the office day-in and day-out, with a goodly congregation. Clergy and many lay people mark their day with these two services. Masterpiece Theatre fans know evening prayer is the core of the day at Oxford and Cambridge.
Morning and evening prayer are our backbone way marking the day as lived with God. Yet these services are very simple stuff, a bit of the psalms, lessons and canticles, and prayers. There can be a hymn added at the end. The optional addition, in Cranmer’s immemorial words, is that “in quires and places where they sing” there can be an anthem. And tonight we are grateful to have one of our region’s great and historic choirs sing the service and add an anthem in this hallowed place, adding a moment of exceptional beauty to a form of daily worship most of us know privately or in small groups.
Easily the worst aspect of theatre or music in the some parts of the country, besides unearned standing ovations, is the playing of the serious for laughs--a kind of aesthetic blasphemy in the name of amusing the groundlings.
So I want to assure you solemnly, that when Kit Smart wrote of “my cat Joeffrey,” he was not inviting knowing chuckle or laughter from cat fanciers. He was invoking his only companion in solitary confinement in fashioning the praise of God. He wanted every creature, in fact, every letter of the alphabet, assembled in that praise.
Not that he was always in prision. Christopher Smart, who wrote several of the hymns now in our hymnal, spent most of his life as a well-recognized poet, was the mainstay of two magazines, winner of multiple awards at Cambridge, translator of ancient texts, and so on. “And so on,” includes devoted high Church Christian. He died in debtors prison in 1771. Most of his works were well known, but the 32 manuscript pages, Jubliate Agno, from which a tiny selection we know as “Rejoice in the Lamb,” were published only in 1939. Much of them were written in what we would euphemistically term a mental hospital.
That is, late in his life Smart suffered from something between bi-polar disorder and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, either one of which our age would treat with meds, and he spent some time in solitary in a hospital that makes Nurse Ratchett look like Florence Nightingale. There he wrote much of Julbilate Agno, and it is easily worth your time to look the whole thing up on Google because it asks a big question. It asks a question that reaffirms our gathering in worship and provides our anthem something more profound than program notes. It asks, how do you keep it together when your mind is tortured?
Our anthem was commissioned by a parish priest for the fiftieth anniversary of his parish, a priest who went on to commission other important music, architecture, and sculpture.
Why an anniversary piece from the near-ravings of an Obsessive-Compulsive?
Benjamin Britten was, as we know from pieces like his War Requiem, on the side of the outsider, but I think there was more
First, I think, the text puts us to shame. Most of us don’t know the Bible well enough get most of the text’s allusions, let alone to assemble a prayer-rave like Smart’s. When Smart fell ill, he had something to fall back on. When Muslims call us people of the book, it’s an exaggerated compliment. Smart had the resources to summon Biblical figures to surround him like angels, archangels, all the company of heaven in the time when he needed company the most. If all the heroes you can recall are the starting pitchers of the Phillies for the last fourteen years when you are tormented, Christopher Smart is your man when you want to turn insomnia into prayer. It's All Saints—get to known them and invoke their prayers. It is never too late to learn the story in the Book that shapes our language and civilization.
Let’s come back to Cat Joeffrey. In context, he appears with all the creatures of God summoned to praise their maker. But there is drama, too. In the next lines, Joeffrey has attacked a little lady mouse, and her mate stands defiantly between Joeffrey and his prey, and Smart praises his valour, too. The entire order of nature is invoked to praise God. For the sake of his own sanity, Smart has found a way of seeing the world.
All of this is to say that Smart shows the Christian soul how to be mad, or at least, how to endure the mad moment. Who of us has not known racing thoughts, insomnia, the occasional obsession about an upcoming wedding? What if, on those moments we called together everything that we know, everything that has breath and everything that doesn’t -- to praise the Lord.
Ultimately Smart finds refuge in identifying with Jesus, who was also judged, rejected, and considered mad. Smart knew well the Bible’s claim that we have in Jesus a high priest who can truly sympathize with us, and relied on that.
Kit Smart lived in the world of Isaac Newton, so his imaginative possibilities were limited by modern standards. We who live in a post-Einstein, post-Heisenberg, Post-Steve Jobs and even Post-Harry Potter world have minds inhabited by so many dimensions, so many characters, so many possibilities. What would be our comforts, our solace in our waking and sleeping hours if like the Song of the Three Young Men or Smart’s raving we collected from all that populates our mind the voices that praise God and in doing so give us the courage to go on? Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord: Praise ye the Lord.
My one wish for Nativity is that it remains a house where all people can praise God while they have their being, with whatever voice God gives them.
