Mixing It All Together

From time to time people ask me – or wonder privately – why I am so committed to weaving contemporary secular music into the fabric of worship? The obvious answer (to me) is that popular music is how I have been hearing our still speaking God talk to an increasingly secular culture for over 45 years. Ever since my first youth band played the songs of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Frank Zappa in worship at First Congregational Church, UCC in Darien, CT. I have been listening for God’s voice in popular culture. In fact, after hearing Zappa and the Mothers of Invention at my first ever rock concert at the old Garrick Theatre in Greenwich Village in 1967 we did his "Trouble Comin' Everyday" in worship as our prayer for racial harmony.

(I love You Tube which had this clip from my very first prayer song from secular culture:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ_wSiUW2lM)

Another answer has to do with my radical understanding of the Incarnation: God becoming enfleshed in history. This did not simply happen one, discrete time in the body of the historic Jesus of Nazareth. Rather, it is an on-going and deep commitment from the One who is Holy to fill creation with God’s healing presence. Consequently, I search for signs both obvious and mysterious re: the living presence of our Living God and clearly experience and encounter them in music. Take, for example, this clip from Eric Clapton's tribute to his friend George Harrison: "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." Throughout the concert, Clapton is understated and gentle; but when he comes to Harrison's most passionate prayer/song at the end of the show - a song which Clapton played with the Beatles in 1968 amidst war, riots, fear and hatred - Brother Slowhand let's his guitar preach and pray a lament that is as holy as it is awesome. THIS is what makes secular music in sacred worship essential - the unity of real life and God's heart - and you have to experience it with all your senses. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC1EZcrZEIs And let's not stop at popular music (although that is an important arena as more people listen to rock, rap and country than classical) but let's embrace all forms of creative art from painting and dance to sculpture, poetry, prose and film in worship, too.

Yesterday, for example, I used the song “Change” written by Tracy Chapman (see below) to synthesize what a spirituality of repentance might mean - especially as understood as challenging the status quo. Born into a family of poverty in Cleveland, Ohio, Chapman was selected as a promising musical scholar by A Better Chance, the national resource charged with identifying and supporting academically gifted students of color. Chapman was awarded a Doctor of Fine Arts from Tufts University. Since 1988 she has been recording progressive, thoughtful songs that encourage repentance, integrity, racial/sexual justice and solidarity with the suffering of others. She has per-formed with Eric Clapton, Sting, Bruce Springsteen, B.B. King, the Lilith Fair team and Ziggy Marley; she has also served as an international spokesperson for Amnesty International. In 2005 she released “Change” which embraces the spirituality of repentance as a dramatic shift in the direction of our lives. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s448Vvx2J7w

If you knew you would die today,
If you saw the face of God and Love,
Would you change? Would you change?
If you knew that love can break your heart,
When you’re down so low you cannot fall,
Would you change? Would you change?

How bad, how good does it need to get?
How many losses, how much regret?
What chain reaction would cause an effect?
Makes you turn around, makes you try to explain,
Makes you forgive and forget makes you change?

If you knew that you would be alone,
Knowing right, being wrong,
Would you change? Would you change?
If you knew that you would find a truth,
That brings up pain, that can’t be soothed,
Would you change? Would you change?

How bad, how good does it need to get?
How many losses, how much regret?
What chain reaction would cause an effect?
Makes you turn around, makes you try to explain,
Makes you forgive and forget makes you change?

Are you so upright you can’t be bent?
If it comes to blows are you sure you won’t be crawling?
If not for good, why risk falling? Why risk falling?

If everything you think you know,
Makes your life unbearable,
Would you change? Would you change?
If you’d broken every rule and vow,
And hard times come to bring you down,
Would you change? Would you change?

If you knew that you would die today,
If you saw the face of God and Love
Would you change? Would you change?
Would you change? Would you change?

St. Paul wrote in his most tender voice: Do not be conformed, beloved, to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind so that you may discern what is the will of God - what is good and acceptable and mature. (Romans 12)