Mark Bangert: thanks for the polyphony.

In his interdisciplinary study Bonhoeffer's Ethic of Discipleship, Kenneth Morris underscores the importance for Bonhoeffer of a musical term that he employed as a theological metaphor in his later writings. Morris notes that it brought Bonhoeffer joy because "it expressed better than anything else the simultaneous commitment to a God who is 'wholly other' and yet the social world in which [God's] Word is established," as well as the " 'multidimensionality' of the Christian life." (1)

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That musical term is polyphony, "a fugue in which a primary and unchanging melody (the cantus firmus) is progressively joined by counterpointed melodies which superficially oppose it but, taken as a whole, blend together into a powerful harmonic whole." (2) Eleven months before his execution Bonhoeffer wrote:

God wants us to love him eternally and with our whole hearts--not in such a way as to injure or weaken our earthly love, but to provide a kind of cantus firmus to which the other melodies of life provide the counterpoint .... Only a polyphony of this kind can give life a wholeness and at the same time assure us that nothing calamitous can happen so long as the cantus firmus is kept going. (3)

"Polyphony" seems a felicitous term for celebrating a musician's legacy, even if the particular musician being celebrated substituted a course in ethnomusicology for a required course in polyphonic notation when he studied musicology at the University of Minnesota! (4) But, following Bonhoeffer's lead, this brief tribute employs polyphony as a theological metaphor. The focus is thus not on Mark Bangert's extraordinary musical ability and contributions but on a particular treasure of the Lutheran tradition that he helped me appreciate more deeply, which seems integral to the cantus firmus of God's love and grace, to which Mark has given witness: The finite is capable of the infinite.

Augustana Chapel at LSTC, the dream Mark yearned for and worked with President Echols and others to help bring into existence, is not ornate. The simplicity of the space signals that "you don't need a lot of stuff to worship. Less is more--and less is just fine." (5) But certain material things loom large. No one can be with Mark for very long without noticing just how seriously he takes certain material "stuff"--font, water, bread, wine, word, table, cup, cross, oil, ashes, ambo, organ.

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Mark wanted the baptismal font to be a visible, powerful sign in the new chapel. Unless one's sight or hearing is impaired, one can hardly stand anywhere in Augustana Chapel without seeing the enormous baptismal font or hearing its splashing water. At first it was difficult to get used to the distraction of all that flowing water--a kind of cantus firmus in its own right, running underneath the singing, praying, and preaching; the giving and receiving of bread and wine. During the closing chapel service of the school year in Augustana Chapel, after months of baptismal reaffirmations and services accompanied by the sound of flowing water, participants are invited to take off their shoes and wade through the pool of water in the font toward ventures of which they cannot see the ending, through perils unknown. Hands are there to assist worshippers into and out of the pool without slipping. Emerging, feet wet and sometimes with faces smiling and wet with tears, friends in Christ wordlessly seem to recognize both the pain of imminent separation and the wondrous geography of the Spirit, which knows no bounds of region or synod, culture or nation, time or space, but only the Christ who is there in every flood and ford.

... the spiritual is intimately involved with the material, the truth about God inseparable from the ordinary, as inseparable as God was from humanity in Jesus. If these things are crutches, so be it. They will then "be for us the very "ford, bridge, door, ship, and stretcher" that Luther said we need. These things are for "every seeking soul." These things show us something about all things. (6)

Mark has witnessed to Christ's presence "in, with, and under" sacraments and their earthy, earthly signs, and taught us so much about the power and beauty of ritual through his presiding as well as his playing, his teaching as well as his conducting. There have been many moments when, together with him, we have stood on holy ground.

Of course, in the recognition of and reverence for what the finite is capable of bearing lies danger as well as promise. If what happens there does not nurture in us that faith that "Christ is everywhere, closer to everything created than these things are to themselves," (7) the treasured worship space can become an idol. The means through which grace comes can be confused with grace itself, dulling in us the wonder that the Spirit blows where it wills and is not, finally, governed by ecclesiastical management.

I have been helped by Mark's description of worship as keeping alive rather than resolving such necessary counterpoints, like a suspension bridge that spans two shores and needs tension in the wires to uphold it. (8) One can treasure earthly things without idolizing them, but not always easily.

This creative tension, this polyphony of voices and melodies of life together, all relating to cantus firmus in ways not always harmonic, is perhaps easier to trust in theory than in practice. One may yearn to reach terra firma, not live on a bridge; to hold onto the sounds and notes that are familiar and pleasing; to hurry to a chord that resolves dissonance rather than let the dissonance open up new musical possibilities. But the resolutions are not, finally, in our hands.

Mark Bangert--musician and conductor; presider and liturgical scholar; preacher and teacher--there are so many themes one could celebrate, and we celebrate them all. But perhaps the gift that I am most grateful for is Mark's faithfulness in reminding us, time and time again, that "in, with, and under" what we can touch and handle is the Christ whose grace and mercy are infinite, into whose song we are invited. Only that One has a score large enough to hold all songs of praise and lament, hope and despair, triumph and failure, and the power to resolve the broken chords and unfinished symphonies of life together. When such faith "speaks" in any limited human life, those who are touched by that faith are better able to hope, and better equipped to sing.

Kathleen D. Billman

Dean and Vice President for Academic Affairs Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago 

(1.) Kenneth Earl Morris, Bonhoeffer's Ethic of Discipleship: A Study in Social Psychology, Political Thought, and Religion (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986), 65.

(2.) Morris, Bonhoeffer's Ethic of Discipleship, 65.

(3.) Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, enlarged ed., trans. Reginald Fuller, Frank Clarke, et al., ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 303, quoted in Morris, 65.

(4.) Jan Boden, "Mark Bangert: Faith and Music," LSTC Epistle (Winter 2008), 12.

(5.) Boden, "Mark Bangert: Faith and Music," 12.

(6.) Gordon Lathrop, Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), 89. The quote from Luther is taken from "The Blessed Sacrament of the Holy and True Body of Christ," Luther's Works 35 (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1960): 48.

(7.) Vitor Westhelle, The Scandalous God: The Use and Abuse of the Cross (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006), 29; emphasis added.

(8.) Oral presentation by Mark Bangert at the pre-conference gathering of the 2008 LSTC Leadership Conference.