Our Spiritual Link prayer services do not have homilies, for our emphasis in these services is on prayer more than preaching. Our purpose is to concentrate our time and our focus in corporate meditation and intercessory prayer. However some comments on the lections of the day are perhaps in order. 

Modern readers may find texts such as the one from Isaiah jarring and uncomfortable. Texts exalting bloody battles, and the triumphalist mentality they seem to invite, are distasteful to many people of faith. They flinch at the picture of the deity as a war god, too colorful and appealing in a martial-arts-movie sort of way, smiting and smashing assorted nefarious foes all over the place.

The sacred texts are not easy.

With good reason we are nervous around ascriptions of glory to God for conquest by violence. But without going into too much exegetical detail, nor becoming too metaphorical, perhaps we can make a few general observations pertinent to our celebration of Pennsylvania Pro Musica.

While the verses of Psalm 33 lift us to a heaven’s-eye view: 

The LORD looks down from heaven; he sees all humankind. 
From where he sits enthroned he watches all the inhabitants of the earth
— he who fashions the hearts of them all, and observes all their deeds. 

and from this perspective rightly assesses the impotence of what we, perversely, regard as most powerful: 

A king is not saved by his great army;  
a warrior is not delivered by his great strength. 
The war horse is a vain hope for victory,
and by its great might it cannot save.

Still, the words from Isaiah remind us that we live in a fallen world where the wrath of God is not the capricious ire of a temperamental, anthropomorphic disciplinarian. We are very much embattled here and now. Prophetic judgment is pronounced on very real evil that works to our very real destruction. Empires, here and now in Philadelphia, contend for territory. 

Lest such claims seem melodramatic, call to mind some of the ways we are under siege: 

Material poverty as well as spiritual poverty with their symptoms of drug use and drug dealing, violence, and despair invade every corner of our city, threatening and often succeeding in, making of us a society of the undead. 

On the opposing side, we have such forces as Pennsylvania Pro Musica, whose gift of music in concert gathers us from aesthetic exile, and whose educational outreach delivers children from the paralyzing grip of economic and educational systems that have failed them.

Philip, a thin little boy, a child of the urban ghetto, is one of a dozen given a recorder to learn to play. With instruction tailored to his needs, he is soon playing skillfully in the newly-formed school orchestra. He falls in love with the instrument and takes it home. He sleeps with it in place of his teddy bear.  When he plays Brahms’ lullaby, his face is radiant. 

Two twelve-year old girls sit in the back of the room, regressed, sucking their thumbs. In two short weeks’ time, the two are in front, in the chorus, their expressions transfigured in joy as they sing the lush harmonies of "Deep River," and they are no longer sucking their thumbs.

Multiply the joy of these three by the 73 children in the chorus and orchestra, then magnify it exponentially in the community: soon school staff, parents and neighbors are enthusiastically pouring out in numbers too great to be accommodated in the performance hall, to hear the children in a program that ranges from Mozart to Broadway show tunes.  A light has pierced the darkness.  A route to learning and achievement has been carved out of a maze of dead ends.  A pure joy, a joy for which human beings were intended, has overtaken some of the gloom. 

For those for whom these sometimes difficult scripture texts are canonical, we can perhaps appreciate how the they speak quite powerfully in the present. 

The "Assyrian" -- for us the palpably evil forces of exclusion, the cycle of poverty, deprivation, racism, forces that oppress, enslave and dehumanize, always the true foe, in whatever form-- "will be terror-stricken at the voice of the LORD, when he strikes with his rod." 

We can be grateful that God is the fierce and mighty adversary of all that is hurtful to us. "Every stroke of the staff of punishment that the LORD lays upon him will be to the sound of timbrels and lyres; battling with brandished arm he will fight with him. 

The music of Pro Musica is not just decorative, a mere accessory of the privileged. It is what is prophesied: a weapon with which the Lord subdues our enemies. 

Ought we not, then, to wield it well, and to enable and sustain those who do? Pennsylvania Pro Musica should be able to count on the support of those whose faith traditions entail such values.

In the Epistle text, Paul admonishes the congregation at Corinth regarding the practice of glossolalia. It is sacred, ecstatic speech, but it is neither an interruption nor departure from rationality. Paul insists that the exotic experience of speaking in tongues must always be accompanied by interpretation, instruction, reflection. 

Separation of the life of the mind from the life of the spirit is not only artificial, but unhealthy. A good analogy for this natural integration is good music. It is inherently intelligent, and intelligible, but not necessarily therefore automatically accessible. Those sacred tongues, of the finest music of which we are capable, and likewise of ecstatic speech, are properly partnered by interpretation and education. 

The spiritual, the sensual and the rational are not three detached faculties, but are all part of a larger continuum. For Paul and for those for whom these texts are authoritative, this is a profound insight into the deep structures of Creation. Nothing could be more rational, more disciplined, more mathematical than the kind of music in which Pro Musica specializes. How strange that it should also be so stunningly spiritual and ecstatic. 

It is the nature of mystical languages to belong to a higher and lucid rationality, while exciting the deepest, most passionate emotions. That the senses are not a dividing barrier but an integral channel, a meeting place of the spiritual and material, of the rational and emotional, is surprising to those with a puritanical notion of Christianity. In fact, it is a logical entailment of the doctrine of the Incarnation. Christians have a theological mandate for support of the fine arts, and organizations such as Pennsylvania Pro Musica, who can keep us alive in a language in which, more than any other, reason, passion, and senses are one.

About

Pennsylvania Pro Musica

History and Artistic Mission

Pennsylvania Pro Musica, founded in 1968 by Dr. Franklin B. Zimmerman, is at present the oldest fully professional choral and orchestral organization in Pennsylvania. Beginning as a logical and practical outgrowth of research in musicology, it specialized in enlightened and stylistically authentic Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque and Classical musical performances. As Pro Musica explored this then new musical territory, it brought musicological expertise to bear on cultural, educational and out-reach activities, seeking to enlighten audiences intellectually, whether in concert halls, schools, or universities, even as it entertained them musically.

In the process, during the late sixties and early seventies, it brought to light forgotten masterpieces with premieres of such works as Machaut's La Messe de Notre Dame, Cavalieri's Rappresentazione di anima; Carissimi's Jeptha, Marenzio's and Monteverdi's "Petrarch" madrigals, the villanççicos of Juan del Encina, and Handel's Acis and Galatea. Dr. Zimmerman also prepared new editions of Monteverdi's Orfeo and Vespers of 1610, along with numerous newly discovered works by Henry Purcell, Domenico Scarlatti, Alessandro Scarlatti, and G.F. Handel. A new edition of Haydn's Creation, with a new English translation had served as center-piece for several seasons. On principle, Pro Musica sought to broaden its audiences' interests in the impressive repertory of music that musicology has brought to light during the course of the last half century.

During its existence, Pro Musica has fostered several significant out-reach programs. During the first ten years of its existence, it performed numerous Pre-Concert Lecture Recitals in schools, high schools, colleges and universities throughout the Delaware Valley, and performed numerous charitable events, including Red-Cross drives, and a widely supported, momentous African Famine benefit in league with the City of Philadelphia. Also in league with the City of Philadelphia, it brought sixteen free Epic oratorio performances to historic church buildings in the area, numerous summer events uniting authentic Baroque fire-works music and choreographed pyro-technical displays, and performed a world premiere of Roland Baumgartner's Missa Pacis, and of Haydn's Creation in the Academy of Music, the latter with Dr. Zimmerman's new English translation. 

Perhaps its most successful outreach effort for schools came about through participation in the Cigna Partnership Program. Under the aegis of the Cigna Corporation Pro Musica conducted a six-weeks course in music and music appreciation at Durham Child Center. At the end of this course, 73 students sight read sol-fa pieces in public concerts, 19 performed on recorder, 12 performed on keyboard, and 12 performed on violin. The interest was so great that two performances had to be scheduled.

Pro Musica also created for its audiences authentic stylistic interpretations of well-known masterpieces such as Handel's Messiah, or Purcell's Dido & Aeneas, for the first time since its original production incorporating all seventeen dances in staged performances, or the Bach Passions, or the above-mentioned Handel and Haydn oratorios, which greatly increased general understanding of these works, and brought enthusiastic interest in their performance. Pro Musica's success in these endeavors, whereby it sought to instruct even as it entertained and inspired its audiences, sprang from Dr. Zimmerman's allegiance to Beethoven's credo that "music should strike fire in man's mind," and his humorous allegiance as well to Thomas Morley's punning aphorism, "Music is a ladder (scale) to the knowledge of higher things." 

In the process of developing the above-mentioned repertory, which soon extended to the classical age, Pro Musica established several annual traditions. First each year came a BaroqueFest, dedicated to a new principal composer, to open each annual season in September.

So far, Pro Musica has explored in depth the works of Monteverdi, Purcell, Carissimi, Charpentier, Handel, Bach, Alessandro Scarlatti, and Heinrich Schüütz. On or about November 22 each season, Pro Musica celebrates St. Cecilia's Day, dedicated to this patroness of music, with compositions written in her honor, or in the cause of fine music. These St. Cecilia celebrations are intended to draw music-lovers together for annual gatherings honoring music and some of its most effective and influential practitioners in the Philadelphia area. Each Spring for more than thirty years, Pro Musica has traditionally performed one or two major oratorios.

In addition, Pro Musica offers to its public special pre-concert lectures and a series of lecture-recitals called "Great Pioneers of Music," designed to further the dual mission described above. This year it will mount a series of mid-day concerts under the general banner, "Pro Musica at Noon."

Recently, Pennsylvania Pro Musica has been working with Visible Music SoundScapes, a newly invented, user-friendly musical notation, which is intended to enhance and deepen appreciation of fine music as a humanistic, indeed, very human art. By joining forces with this new notational invention, which makes visible the invisible art of music, we of Pro Musica hope that the number of those who truly and fully understand this universal but little understood language will increase measurably with each passing year. Nowhere could it be truer that by living up to the musical light you have, you always get more.

Pennsylvania Pro Musica

 Lutheran Church of the Holy Communion

The Center City Lutheran Church of the Holy Communion

The                                           
Alethia Foundation