The Sound of Music

A sermon about what can happen while you’re making other plans

A few years ago while touring Austria, I got a glimpse of the von Trapp family home in Salzburg—a large, gracious mansion made famous through the Broadway musical, The Sound of Music. Perhaps you recall the true story of a young teacher named Maria who is determined to be a nun, despite her irrepressible spirit that raises eyebrows around the convent. When a local widower calls seeking a tutor for his daughter, the mother superior seizes the opportunity to get Maria out of the house for awhile.

Soon after moving into the von Trapp household Maria so leavens daily life that first the children, and then their father, fall in love with her. The mother superior persuades Maria to take this as a sign from God that she is really called to be a mother rather than a nun, and thus is born the singing von Trapp family who first buck the Nazis, then escape them by night train, and finally emigrate to America.

Composers Rodgers and Hammerstein tell how they travel back to the convent and interview nuns who have known Maria, so they can capture her spirit in song. Here are the lyrics they come up with:
How do you solve a problem like Maria?
How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?
How do you find a word that means Maria?
A flibbertijibbet! A will-o'-the wisp! A clown!
Many a thing you know you'd like to tell her
Many a thing she ought to understand
But how do you make her stay
And listen to all you say
How do you keep a wave upon the sand
Oh, how do you solve a problem like Maria?
How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?


Recently as I was reading about Peter’s experience in today’s Gospel, these lyrics kept singing in my head. Why on earth was that? I pondered what the association might be between Peter’s situation and Maria’s, and bit by bit I put it together. Here Peter is, set to live out a predictable and responsible life—in this case catching fish in the local lake. It’s not terribly exciting or profitable, but it’s respectable, and keeps a roof over his family’s head and food on the table.

Like Maria, one day he’s pressed into duty on a temporary assignment that takes him away from his work. An itinerant preacher is having trouble being heard amidst the clanging and shouting along the lake, and he asks Peter to do him a favor: row him out a few feet, so his voice can carry over the water. Now this side trip isn’t in Peter’s plans—he’s been out fishing all night and wants to clean up and go home. But as with Maria, so with Peter: life is what happens while he’s making other plans.

Soon enough Jesus finishes his talk. Peter prepares to head back, but instead Jesus persuades him to row in the opposite direction, and take up the very endeavor he’s already written off as pointless—all night, no fish! The miraculous result of his letting himself be led reveals that he really is called to be a preacher rather than a fisherman. God really is calling him to net people and pull them toward Christ.

Although both Maria and Peter are allowing themselves to be led, they are being led in opposite directions. How strange this life with God is! At the start Maria assumes she is on track as she vows to withdraw from the world and dedicate her life to God. Peter assumes he is on track as he heads down to the lake and sets sail. Then one day each of them is diverted onto a detour, in seemingly chance and unsought circumstances where they reverse their original directions: Maria will experiment with everyday life in the world, and Peter will experiment with making discipleship his day job. This switch puts both of them on unfamiliar turf, ad libbing as they go, until suddenly they find themselves living by a whole new script which they find incredibly exciting and fulfilling.

That is how Christians through the centuries have described the experience of call and conversion, the unbidden but growing conviction that life is changing and beginning again on a new footing, at God’s instigation. Maria might cover her ears and dig in her heels and refuse, Peter might do the same, but blessedly they both go with God’s bewildering flow, and that makes all the difference.

Rodgers & Hammerstein get a handle on this human responding to God’s call as they ask the nuns in Maria’s old convent, “What makes her so special?” They are told about Maria’s breath-of-life attitude that takes chance detours and welcomes surprises as potential gateways to new life. To spend time with Maria, they say, is
Like glimpsing a cloud that can never be pinned down
Like feeling a desire that defies all understanding
Like watching a wave washing over everything you know
Like seeing a moonbeam that lights up your empty hand…

It is much better sung than said, but under the right circumstances, given a strong enough sense of bidding, Maria’s searching and hope-filled outlook will allow her to attempt things otherwise unthinkable—just as Peter does when he follows Jesus out of the boat, and steps upon the water. Such a searching and hope-filled outlook on what is possible is never to be contained, or defined, or directed, or grasped, only to be experienced in awe and wonder.

Have you ever felt this way? Under the right circumstances, have you ever experienced a strong enough sense of bidding to go there or stay here, to do this or decline that, a strong enough sense that you had trouble sticking with your original plans? A sense you couldn’t put your finger on, which filled you with awe and wonder?

Then you’ve already heard what today’s Gospel is trying to tell us: what it’s like to hear this sound of music in your life. Amen.

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