Coda

So often in life, there's some extra bit that needs to be done after you thought the project was completed.

Hence, the coda.

Christmas Concert - Worship on a Grand Scale

I am sharing the following at the opening of this season's SEU Christmas concerts.

As you might have seen on our schedule of arts events or gathered from our Facebook posts, this concert is about “worship on a grand scale.” In the next two hours you will hear the voices and the instruments of our department united in musical prayers and in the proclamation of the coming of Christ. In addition to those sacred expressions, you will also hear themes from famous movies and ballets, as well as romantic songs of the season. While it is occasionally our impulse to criticize these more secular expressions for missing the reason for the season, I invite you to hear them differently tonight. I invite you to engage with them not so much as entertainment but as signs of the coming of Christ out beyond the walls of the church. I invite you to receive them as the vibrations in human culture of the reality of Jesus becoming one of us 2000 years ago. For when we sing of sleigh rides in winter wonderlands I think we reveal humanity’s longing for a path of joy and peace; and when sugarplum fairies dance in our heads and across our stages we begin to open our hearts just a little bit to the possibility of the truly extraordinary. When we celebrate the giving of gifts and the warmth of home, we echo the miraculous provision of that first family of Christmas in Bethlehem. And when Santa flashes across the big screen - the grandest forum in American life - we remember that, as songwriter Kyle Matthews puts it, “Everything Santa knows, he learned from Jesus like how the finest gifts we give, we give in secret  - like sneaking in on Christmas Eve in ways we’d never dream, putting little children first. Everything Santa knows, he learned from Jesus long ago.”

Click here for Kyle's full song and a very nice fan video.