Sermon Bach Vespers 27 July 2008

Cantata 105, Luke 16:1-9

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

You may well be very relieved to hear that this is going to be a very short sermon. In a sense, as is often the case, Bach does it for us – the Cantata we are about to hear is one of his very greatest in terms of music. But it is also wonderfully made in a theological sense, and there’s not really all that much that a humble preacher can add to it.

 The basic premise of the text, by an unknown author, is that the soul is restless and agonised, tortured by knowledge of its own sinfulness, until it finds faith and rests in God.

As Saint Augustine says at the beginning of his famous Confessions:

“Great are you, O Lord, and exceedingly worthy of praise; your power is immense, and your wisdom beyond reckoning. And so we men, who are a due part of your creation, long to praise you – we also carry our mortality about with us, carry the evidence of our sin and with it the proof that you thwart the proud. You arouse us so that praising you may bring us joy, because you have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is unquiet until it rests in you.”

Sin is all around us, as both our reading from 1 Corinthians and the Gospel pointed out. People – me, you, the Archbishop of Canterbury, St Augustine – are sinful; that’s just how it is. But God has given us the remedy for that in his Son, Jesus, because He is faithful, and will not let us be tested beyond our strength. He welcomes us home, and longs to soothe and still our worried souls.

And Bach points to this truth in various ways: in the soprano aria – How the thoughts of the sinner tremble and waver – the strings tremble; and there is no bass line, no continuo – very unusual for Bach. One of the few other places where this happens is the famous aria, also for soprano, from the St. Matthew Passion, "Aus liebe." There the lack of continuo represents Christ hanging on the cross without support from his disciples, and with nothing but the nails holding him. Here it seems to represent the soul, wavering, struggling, trembling, without the support of faith –faith which is the base/bass/basis of life, without which there is no foundation to build on. And in the last movement, which starts out with the same wavering motif in the strings, the rhythm gradually settles from agitated semiquavers to triplets to quavers and crotchets, ending on a held semibreve, which symbolises the soul finally reaching home, and finding there the serenity of faith. Once again, Bach shows us that he is almost as good a theologian as he is a composer, and that the combination in him is unique.

Over these last eight years people have occasionally said to me that Bach Vespers is a bit of an anachronism, and that the church might spend its time, energy and resources better in pursuing its mission in the midst of this very contemporary, fractured world. Should we, rather than performing music that is hundreds of years old (285 in the case of this Cantata) be turning ourselves to worship groups and rock music to address people better, to reach out to young people more effectively. This cantata gives one very powerful reason for our continued ministry through music, in the way that we do it now and have done for 25 years. There are other churches that have different sorts of music, and do that very well and effectively. But for us it seems that the message that Bach, the 5th Evangelist, carries, is so powerful, and so contemporary in its timelessness, that it seems both important and valuable to continue to bring it to congregations, here in the City of London, now, in the 21st century.

Now, I know, You shall quiet in me
my conscience which gnaws at me.
Your faithful love will fulfill
what You Yourself have said:
that upon this wide earth
no one shall be lost,
rather shall live forever,
if only he is filled with faith.

Amen.