Music as Triune Landscape

The latest issue of Liturgy (30, no.1) is focused on “Trinity & Liturgy” as its theme. Music, as Paul Westermeyer writes in this issue is a primary means by which we enter into the relationship between the Three in One.

Westermeyer offers what he calls a roomy, a capacious, landscape created by presuppositions and implications about the Trinity found in our communal song and in other sacred music.

Here is some of what Westermeyer has to say – to whet your appetite for more.

The liturgy, the service of word and table that characterizes the Lord's Day, is replete with trinitarian references. This is true not only in the Gloria in Excelsis and the Credo, where the three persons are named, but also in hymnody that pushes to the lesser doxology, which names them. It is true by implication in the tripartite structures of the Kyrie eleison, the Agnus Dei, and the cries of “Holy” in the Sanctus. . .

 Composers have sometimes hidden trinitarian references in music that has no text and no direct connection to the liturgy. The prime example is J. S. Bach's Prelude and Fugue in E Flat major from the Clavier-Übung. . .  (the fugue called ST. ANNE because its subject begins like the hymn tune of that name). It contains what some see as multiple references to the Trinity—three flats, three themes in the Prelude, three related fugue subjects, and numbers of measures divisible by three. . .

 The room God makes “is our created time,” says [Robert] Jenson. “The opening of that room is the act of creation.”

How, then, does worship song fill our lives with a roomy landscape? What does it give to worshippers? Westermeyer makes a number of key points. Here are just the first of them:

A song to sing: With the coming of the Holy Three in word, water, bread, and wine in the liturgy, we receive a song to sing. The music comes from the song of the God we know as Three in One and One in Three. There never is silence in eternity, as Jenson indicates. The Holy Three is always singing. We get to double that song. As Luther knew, and Jenson suggests, in the capaciousness that God shares with us, music is God's gift to creation. 

 Creation and time. With the gift of creation comes time. The liturgy takes time, music takes time,  and music articulates time. Music is about “establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the co-ordination between humanity and time.” It is no accident that the Psalms have been sung. They concern the order, or coordination, of all of humanity's life in time before God. The liturgy spins out this ordering in an inverted new life . . . as the true order. These matters bear heavily on the church musician's vocation to be considered below.

 Health and wholeness. The music of the church is about health and wholeness. Where these are impeded, the body of Christ suffers as its voice is silenced or twisted into sickness. Rape and its brutal physical or mental relatives literally silence individuals. Attacks on communities silence communities. The song is therefore not without lament. It is honest about what is broken, hurting, and bleeding. With the Psalms it cries out, groans, moans, and screams. Singers can be struck dumb. However, as Fred Gaiser says, life in its fullness “is virtually synonymous with praise,” and “laments move to praise.” 5 To be human is to sing, and to be is to sing the trinitarian doxological song around word, font, and table. 26 

Paul Westermeyer is Emeritus Professor of Church Music, Cantor, and Director of Master of Sacred Music with St. Olaf College, Luther Seminary, St. Paul, Minnesota. 

Paul Westermeyer, “The Trinity and Liturgy: Music,” Liturgy 30, no. 1 (2015): 42-49.

Trinitarian Preaching

Jennifer Lord’s essay, “Preaching and the Holy Trinity: Dwelling in God,” in the latest issue of Liturgy on Trinity and Liturgy, focuses on the preacher’s task to make present the Trinity rather than to speak about the triune God. She binds her remarks to Henri Nouwen’s reflections on iconic representations of the Trinity that visually depict what it is to live in “the house of love, where God resides.” Vital to the sermon’s manifestation of this house of love is the need for all three “persons” of the Trinity to find a home in the sermon.

It is always a good thing for those of us who preach to immerse ourselves in history and theology and refresh our thinking on doctrinal matters. This review helps us know that theologies of the Holy Trinity are complex but indispensable because they underscore that it is not enough, in Christian preaching, to speak of one person of the Trinity. There might be exceptions but they should never be the rule. If sermons only speak of God or Jesus or the Spirit, a great imbalance is communicated. A quick cautionary list includes sermons emphasizing God as creator in a way that describes a god who is distant and uninterested in our daily lives. Jesus can be preached in such a way that we have no need of God who names him the beloved Son, or of the presence of the Spirit of the risen Christ, or any understanding that his titles, like Messiah and Lord, take their meanings from the Old Testament. The Holy Spirit can devolve into one of many spirits, spirituality without relation to creation, covenant, death, and resurrection. The ways we tell the names and stories and actions of God in our sermons demonstrate the eternal interrelatedness of God in three persons. Of course we can't preach everything in one sermon. But we can review our preaching with some helpful questions: Even if we prioritize one name for God, are we speaking the fullness of the Trinity? Do our sermons over time proclaim the nature, work, and purposes of God the Holy One, Holy Three? 

 I want preachers to think of trinitarian preaching more broadly than preaching that is about the Trinity. It is not enough to think we only preach the Trinity once a year, on Trinity Sunday. Every Sunday, whether it is a feast day (holiday) or a standard (ordinary time) Sunday, is not just about the theme of the day but about the theme in relation to the paschal mystery, the entire revelation of God in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Who is this triune God? It is the God we know in the Crucified-Risen One. It is the God who created the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry land, and who gathered a covenant people. It is the Spirit of God who is a treasury of blessings, ever life-giving for the healing of the nations.   . . .

When emphasis on one of the three overshadows the other two, the house of love, we might say, is out of kilter. The author encourages preachers to consider the triune God in all fullness so that the assembly is given the opportunity to regularly ponder this rich identity, mysterious imagery, of God.

Preachers pay attention to what names we use for God and what we say theologically by the choice of names. Preachers work to keep perspective, holding together present angst, confusion, and grief with the merciful presence and promise of God for the whole world. Preachers honestly name both houses but preach the truth that keeps and protects us all. Preaching, alongside reading and praying, washing and eating, continually invites us to life in the Holy Trinity. It invites us again and again to see that we are kept and protected by God the Three in One. 

In addition to Prof. Lord’s advice to preachers, the essays in this issue on Trinity and Liturgy set help us to see how and where liturgical practice itself invites the assembly into the life of the triune God. The essays cover the language we use for the Holy Three, the trinitarian focus of the baptismal creed, Orthodox use of water to depict life in the Trinity, the Holy Spirit’s role in worship focusing on God rather than on the assembly, how music expresses the Trinity, how gender issues shape trinitarian conceptions, and the roles of each member of the Trinity in deepening liturgical practice.

Jennifer L. Lord, “Preaching and the Holy Trinity: Dwelling in God,” Liturgy 30, no. 1 (2015): 11-17.

Jennifer Lord is the Dorothy B. Vickery professor of homiletics and liturgical studies at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary and a teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church (USA).