They didn’t light the lamps this evening - not even the ones that aren’t broken. The streets are very dark. She’s soaked through. The rain is gentle, but constant. Everything is wet and slick.

The soldiers huddle and hunch behind whatever meagre shelter they can find. An overturned cart, a barrel, a doorway, the corner of a building.

They don’t see her. She makes her way along the secret paths of the strays - the dogs and cats and rats and children of the streets. Through a broken gate, over a wall. She’s at the barricade now, crouching in the shadows.

They’ve lit fires and torches - there’s flickering orange light beyond the barricade.

She climbs. Swiftly, keeping to the shadows. Silent. Don’t let them hear you! At the top now. Climbing over. Just for a moment she’s a silhouette against the light.

Someone shouts “There’s a boy climbing the barricades!” Why does everyone call her a boy? She’s not that small!

A mule kick to her chest. A flash of fire in the darkness. The crack of a musket.

She climbs - falls - down inside the barricade.

Lying on the cobbles, she feels strangely calm. Warm. When they lived at the inn she was kicked by a mule and it hurt for weeks afterward. She doesn’t feel anything now.

He’s here! He cradles her in his arms. He’s strong! He strokes her forehead, wiping away the rain and mud. He smells like wine.

She knows she’s dying - she can feel her life draining away onto the uncaring stones and into the mud and muck of the street. It feels like sinking into a warm bath.

She starts to sing…

Musicals are weird. Eponine, bleeding out from a gunshot wound in the rain on a cobblestone Parisian street, sings a tender, comforting song to her beloved Marius.

This is the most heartwrenching, tender scene in the whole two-plus hours of Les Miserables. Have you ever noticed what the bass player is doing?

My first experience of playing in a pit orchestra, and first experience of playing under a conductor, was a ‘pro-am’ production of Les Miserables at the Quarry Amphitheatre in 1994. The director told us that ours would be one of the first productions of Les Mis by an amateur company anywhere in the world. Previously the show had only been licensed to professional companies.

From memory, I don’t think there’s any electric bass part in A Little Fall of Rain, so what this bass player was likely doing was just enjoying being able to watch part of the show and not having to count bars.

Musicals are challenging music. In some places Les Mis changes time signature, key, tempo, and dynamic nearly every bar. One-two. One-two-three. Key change - two sharps. One-two-three-four. Two-two-three-four. Key change - five flats. And so on.

Jesus Christ Superstar is billed as a ‘rock musical’, but it has those sections in 7/8 which get progressively louder and faster. I remember struggling to count I Don’t Know How To Love Him in 5/4. It’s not easy music.

Pit musicians are expected to consistently play really challenging music to a very high standard. If they get it right you’ll enjoy the story, weep a little as Eponine breathes her last, and never notice them.

At the heart of the Western musical tradition is using music to help tell the most important story any of us will ever hear - the story of God the Rescuer, God the Ransom. Hundreds of years of craft and artistry and labour. A vast heritage of songs, hymns, chants, psalmody, mass settings, oratorios, and instrumental music. But barely enough to scratch the surface of eternity.

Works like Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion, Handel’s Messiah, or Mozart’s Requiem rightly stand as pinnacles towering over even the uplands of the musical landscape.

But with all this heritage, in our contemporary churches we worry that the music might be a distraction!

Does anyone seriously argue that the music of the St Matthew’s Passion is a distraction? Or that the music of the Hallelujah Chorus somehow diminishes the text?

So why are we afraid that our Sunday morning music might actually be good?

Many, many reasons. One, I think, is that in recent decades we’ve adopted the musical forms of secular popular music, and they’ve brought their cultural baggage with them. We don’t know quite what to do with that.

We call them “Worship Leaders” or somesuch, but churches have lead singers now.

The entire structure of contemporary music, the entire industry, zooms in on the performer and their performance. People don’t go to concert for Taylor Swift’s songs - they go to see Taylor perform them. A Taylor Swift tribute just wouldn’t be the same (But that said, if there was a Japanese artist named Suzuki with a tribute show called “Suzuki Swift”, I’d totally go see it!).

So it actually makes sense to be worried about the music becoming a distraction or the performer becoming the focus. Because in the musical forms we’ve adopted - because it’s right to use the spoken and musical language of our particular time and place - the focus on the performer and their performance is the whole point.

But it doesn’t have to be.

When I first heard Jesus Christ Superstar in the 1980s, the original cast recording on two vinyl albums (Thank you, John!), I thought it was wonderful and wildly radical and a real slap in the face to stuffy old church music. It’s really not.

Contemporary musical theatre actually traces its origins, in part, all the way back to medieval Passion plays and sacred oratorios. ‘Superstar’ was never something new at all - it’s a return to the source. It’s an oratorio for Holy Week, but with electric guitars and tie-dye and a drum kit.

Bach might not like it, but he’d recognise the form. Mozart would probably love it and be improvising the most fantastic synthesizer lines all the way through! Then he’d go home, write every part out from memory, and then improve on it.

So what if we approach our Sunday morning music differently?

What if we stop trying to convince ourselves and others that we’re not ‘performing’, stop fretting that excellence in our service might be a distraction, and think of ourselves as the Sunday morning pit orchestra? We’re absolutely performing. The quality of our work matters - the whole show rests on it! But it’s not about us - it’s about telling the story well.

It’s about just doing the work well.

And isn’t that the essence of service? To do the work well?

There’s a simplicity and a liberation in just doing the work well. Not thinking about ourselves or our place in things or how we might be perceived. I have my work, I’m going to do it well.

Just do the work well.