sermons
Summer of Community
What I’ve Learned from Singing in a Choir
Steve Watson
May 31, 2026
This morning I’m in my uniform for the Renaissance choir I sing in. Because I’ve got a concert today. And because I’ve learned a lot about God, about what matters most in life, and how we show up together to do something beautiful through singing in choirs.
And I want to share about that today.
Two Bible passages today. The first is from a book called Exodus, because the first 24 chapters of the book tell the story of ancient Israel’s exodus out of slavery in Egypt and the beginnings of how they’re learning to live as a free people.
But then the last 16 chapters of the book are about how to build the tabernacle – the portable sanctuary where the people will worship God.
And this bit about professional artists comes in the middle of that temple-building section.
Exodus 31 1:6 (Common English Bible)
31 The Lord spoke to Moses:
2 Look, I have chosen Bezalel, Uri’s son and Hur’s grandson from the tribe of Judah.
3 I have filled him with the divine spirit, with skill, ability, and knowledge for every kind of work.
4 He will be able to create designs; do metalwork in gold, silver, and copper;
5 cut stones for setting; carve wood; and do every kind of work.
6 I have also appointed with him Oholiab, Ahisamach’s son from the tribe of Dan. To all who are skillful, I have given the skill to make everything that I have commanded you
Thirty years ago, I wanted to join Bezalel and Oholiab as a professional artist, in my case a professional musician. I had been singing classical music for a few years. I liked studying music, I liked practicing, I liked performing, and I was getting a lot of encouragement to give it a go as a career.
Until one summer, I gave up and quit music entirely.
I had two big reasons. Funny enough, neither of them were the reason you might assume. I feel like most people give up on their ambitions in the arts because they decide it’s impractical. It takes a lot of time, it’s very competitive, it can be hard to make a living.
But when I quit music, none of that had really sunk in yet. And my two big reasons basically boiled down to not thinking a life in music was important enough.
I wanted to do things that made a big impact in the world and that were aligned with the things that matter most to God. And I couldn’t see how teaching voice, and conducting choirs, and singing in concerts could really matter all that much to God.
I remember trying to explain this to some of my mentors and backers in music – my voice teacher who had invested so much in me as a singer, my professor who offered to support me for two years as a benefactor. I tried to tell them why I thought my faith required that I quit the arts and it made no sense to them. At the time, I thought it was because they just lacked faith themselves.
But years later, I’m on their side, and I think I’m the one that lacked good sense.
This passage is one of many, many places in our sacred scriptures and in our experiences that teaches us that the arts and all beauty matter to God.
One of the first things the Spirit of God inspires in ancient Israel as a free people is to build this tabernacle. And the plans in the Bible are detailed and extravagant!
On the one hand it seems really random. I mean, the back third of Exodus is one of those sections of the Bible that make most people give up on reading the thing. There’s the exact kind of wood used to hold this special cupboard, and the number of cubits in length for the golden cover on top of it. Patterns for the priests’ robes, descriptions of the lamp stands and candles.
Why do we care?
And why do people who have just escaped from slavery, learning how to be a free people, need to spend so much time and money building a house of worship?
Maybe it’s because beauty matters.
When we think about the work on earth that matters most to God – your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven kind of stuff for God – the Hebrew scriptures use the language of God anointing people to do that work. God setting people apart, equipping them spiritually/internally, and also helping them to develop special skills to partner with God in accomplishing what matters most.
And that language gets used for kings and priests and prophets. I had imagination for that as a young adult, that God could call people and equip them for religious work – like the priests and the prophets. Or God could call people for world-changing work of leadership and service – like the kings.
But here that very same language is used for artists, and craftspeople. Bezalel and Oholian are filled with divine spirit, with skill, ability, and knowledge – this is calling and equipping language – people being prepared for holy, important work that matters to God.
And for Bezalel and Oholion, this work has to do with jewelry making and wood carving, and metal sculpture. They’re lead artisans on the temple project, responsible for its beauty.
Beauty matters because it matters to God – God loves beauty.
And beauty matters because it matters to us.
I was talking the other week with a friend of our community, Stephanie Acker Housemann. She was a social work intern at this church around 20 years ago and stayed on staff with us for a little bit as we were a new church in the neighborhood, and her job was to help us learn to love our neighbors in North Cambridge and be good neighbors to this community.
She co-founded our Soccer Nights program, which we will run every year. And she helped our community groups find ways to serve and connect in the neighborhood together as well.
Steph has moved on in her career. These days, she lives in Europe and works on issues related to international refugees and others who are displaced from home. And she has started a new initiative called everyplace, which partners with refugee and displacement-affected communities to reimagine shelter and housing as places of beauty, dignity, and belonging, using art, design, storytelling, and community-led practice.
The research and experience behind this is that when displaced people are robbed of their agency, and structures are built for them. And money is spent on them, and plans are made for them, it is all super-utilitarian and functional. And often ugly and demeaning to the people involved.
But when people can exercise their own agency in the design and improvement of their home – even if that home is in a shantytown or a refugee shelter – they often spend time and energy and resources on making it more beautiful.
- Because beauty matters to people.
- Beauty helps us inhabit our homes and our lives with more pleasure, purpose, and peace.
- Beauty helps us smile. It helps us love.
And this is not just a thing for middle class and wealthy folks in highly developed societies, who are looking to get back in touch with their artistic selves. Steph’s work honors that beauty matters to all people.
Back to my own middle class, middle aged self, with a tiny bit more time on my hands now that my kids are grown, I can’t tell you what it’s meant to me the past year and a half to have started singing in choir again. I go to a rehearsal one night a week most of the year, and I’ll spend part of my afternoon today at a concert in Brookline, with the sole purpose of joining 15 other singers in making something beautiful together.
And doing this not only makes me smile wider and breathe deeper, it makes me feel whole, in a way. Coming back to singing the past couple years, I feel like I got back a part of myself I’d lost. And I’m grateful for that.
Some of us make beauty in traditional arts like me, or Bezalel or Oholian, in music or acting or painting or photography or pottery or whatever. And some of us make beauty and elegance we try to bring to management or parenting or teaching or any number of other creative endeavors.
As people made in the image of God, creativity is part of our birthright, and to make beauty is part of what brings us and keeps us alive.
Beauty matters. That’s one thing I’ve learned singing in a choir.
And the other thing is this.
There is no “I” in team, but there is an “m” and an “e.”
I know, it’s a cheezy cliche, but it’s true, there is no “I” in team, but there is an “m” and an “e.”
I learned in choir that the most important things we do almost never happen by ourselves. They take community and partnership, and that takes leading but it also takes a lot of following. It takes joining and submitting to other people’s vision and good ideas and initiative, not just our own. No “I” in team.
But it also matters that we show up with our bodies and our wholehearted yes. Our presence, our unique voice and gifts and contributions matter. There is an “m” and an “e” in team. We matter.
One more scripture to help us get there.
Mark 3:13-19 (Common English Bible)
13 Jesus went up on a mountain and called those he wanted, and they came to him.
14 He appointed twelve and called them apostles. He appointed them to be with him, to be sent out to preach,
15 and to have authority to throw out demons.
16 He appointed twelve: Peter, a name he gave Simon;
17 James and John, Zebedee’s sons, whom he nicknamed Boanerges, which means “sons of Thunder”;
18 and Andrew; Philip; Bartholomew; Matthew; Thomas; James, Alphaeus’ son; Thaddaeus; Simon the Cananaean;
19 and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus.
The gospels teach us that even Jesus Christ did almost nothing by himself. In many ways his primary work was to organize little communities of people to walk and grow and learn together and to be God’s hands and feet in the world.
An author named Andy Crouch, in a book he wrote years ago called Culture making, writes about this. He calls it the 3 – 12 – 120 principle of community.
Jesus famously had 12 named disciples that were in training with him. They were hardly the dream team, though. Even in the naming of them, the tradition remembers that one’s betrayal played a part in his death, and what looked like it was going to be the end of everything.
Anything important takes a team of people big enough to do something good, small enough so everyone knows each others’ name and styles and strengths and weaknesses. It’s never perfect. It’s usually not a dream team, but it is a team. That’s the 12.
Beyond this circle, there was a larger circle of community of students and helpers and participants – men and women, many of whose names we don’t know. At one point, there are 72 that Jesus sends out. After Jesus’ death and resurrection, there are 120 left at the beginning of what comes next.
All ventures that grow need a larger group involved at some point, where not everyone knows each other, but at some level, they are there for the same reason and purpose. That’s the 120.
But smaller than all that, at the heart of most important things are deep partnerships and trust between a very small number of people. For Jesus, within his circle of 12, there were three who were alone with him at the most important moments – Peter, James, and John. They are always named first in the lists of disciples, usually with their nicknames. They weren’t necessarily the best, just the closest, the ones most at the heart of Jesus’ time and trust and particular venture.
Almost anything important takes close partnership between a small number of people – founders of a company, the parents or caregivers in a family. This is the three.
This is true for Jesus, and it’s true for making anything. We don’t do it alone. Whether we are perceived as a leader or a co-leader or a follower or whatever, pretty much anything beautiful or important humans do, we do alongside a small number of other people.
We’re meant to make beautiful things together.
In a choir, you learn a lot about this.
A choir is all about togetherness.
When you join a choir, you join a group of people – and you probably wouldn’t have chosen them all as a friends, but there you are, to figure out how to do something beautiful together. Work is like that, family is like that, church is like that. A good life takes joining with people and sticking with people that you don’t choose.
A choir is also all about listening more than speaking or singing. Our former music director at Reservoir, Matt Henderson, was great about valuing this and teaching this. When you make music with others, the first thing you need to do is listen. Because no matter how skilled or talented you are, if you’re not listening, you can’t do something beautiful together.
Work is like that, family is like that, church is like that – hanging well with other people, doing something beautiful together takes a lot of listening, asking questions, getting outside our own heads and getting curious about what’s going on in someone else’s.
A choir, I’m continually learning, is also one where your unique voice really matters, but where the community voice matters more. For a choir to make really beautiful music, especially a small choir like mine, where we’re 15 people, often singing five, six, seven part harmonies, everyone has to sing their lines a little like a soloist – thoughtful about our breath, and phrasing, and sound quality.
But unlike opera or a lead singer in a band, you can’t just do your thing and let it rip. You have to blend in one voice with the group. And that takes listening, it takes paying attention to what your neighbors are doing and blending with them. Yesterday, before our concert, our choir director was just begging us to look at our music less and look at each other more while we sang. For this reason. And she was like: I dare you, look at each other while you sing. I’d rather have you look and make beautiful music with a mistake here and there, then to not look and make no mistakes, but do nothing beautiful.
Jesus took the risk of doing something beautiful in a community of flawed, messy, sometimes disastrously bad relationships between people. Because he didn’t have a choice. None of us do. If we want to do anything beautiful, anything that really matters, we’re mostly going to have to do that together.
There’s no “I” in team – it’s never just about our preferences, our choices, our needs, our directions. Good things are made in team. But there is an “m” and an “e” in team. Teams need us – our time, our talent, our joining in , our offering of our special and wonderful and unique selves, whether or not we’re the ones setting the pace or leading the way. Work is like this, families and friend groups are like this, church is like this, because life is like this.
I want to end with a pitch to you friends, an invitation to do something beautiful together as a church. This program that our friend Stephanie co-founded nearly 20 years ago, Soccer Nights, is one of the more beautiful things Reservoir does. A week-long, free, evening soccer camp in the neighborhood after school gets out.
It’s one of the things we’re known for best in Cambridge. It’s one of the things we’re loved for most. A beautiful week of 250 kids, a hundred volunteers, families throughout the neighborhood of so many cultures and languages sharing a beautiful summer evening together.
You may or may not love soccer. You may or may not be super-experienced with kids. Honestly, you may or may not feel like you can show up three nights or five nights in North Cambridge and volunteer during the last week in June. But it’s a way that this neighborhood and this church need you. And it’s a way to join in and make something beautiful together, something that takes a team.
Increasingly, the volunteer base of this program is made up of teenage volunteers from the neighborhood who grew up participating in soccer nights. But for a bunch of teens to be successful and happy as volunteers, they need a bunch of adults to do it alongside them, and kind of keep things steady and cool and safe and on target.
Truth be told, I don’t like soccer very much. And some years, showing up on the field for five nights in early summer has been fun and convenient, and some years it’s been an inconvenience for me. But for just about every year, the past 17 years, I’ve been on the team. Because I believe in making beautiful things together.
And I believe in being part of what my church does that’s most important. And over time, it’s been really rewarding to be part of something so, so beautiful that I could never lead and that I certainly could never do by itself.
Pretty much every week, there’s someone in the dome after church that can talk to you about volunteering at soccer nights and help you sign up. I’ll be there today. And friends, I’d really love to see you there at the end of June.