A Wild, Heroic Ride

Charles Edward Ives is considered as one of the first American classical composers of international significance. He was not a widely known musician during his life, but he was a very successful in the insurance business. He was once asked how he could justify selling insurance instead of pursuing his art full time, “If one has a nice wife and some nice children, how can he let the children starve on his dissonances?” Eventually Ives would be regarded as an American original, combining American folk music with the classics.

Darrryl Tippens tells of Ives being with his father when they heard a stone mason singing church music while he was working. He was singing enthusiastically, but “irritatingly off key.” Ives’ father told him something he would never forget—

Watch him closely and reverently and hear the music of the ages. Don’t pay too much attention to the sounds—for if you do, you may miss the music. You won’t get a wild, heroic ride to heaven on pretty little sounds.

I wonder if we ever get too wrapped up in the “pretty little sounds” and miss the “wild, heroic ride to heaven?” Can we find ourselves focused more on the traditional or the technical than on the theological? For example, I once played a 2 minute video clip from the Matthew video to make a point in the sermon. One person complained because the video had an instrumental track playing in the background, and that has to be wrong. Someone else complained that the actor playing Jesus just didn’t look Jewish enough. Somehow I think both of them missed the point… and perhaps missed coming to see God more clearly.

We can become so obsessed with the mechanics of worship that we miss the One to whom worship points. We can focus on the fact that the worship is too draggy, too spirited, too contemporary, too traditional... We can focus on "the pretty, little sounds" andf miss the “wild, heroic ride to heaven.”