Good Friday and "the sounds of solace"

Today is Good Friday - our kids are coming back from a Holy Week vacation in Quebec City - and Di and I are preparing for this evening's liturgy: The Sounds of Solace. I just got back from setting up the hall - stones, candles, power point visuals - and will return soon for a sound check. Who knows, the lighting might actually work so that we can film it?

At any rate, these Good Friday experiments have become one of my deepest prayers - and artistic creations - over the past 10 years. And because we will be deviating and amplify the ancient sacred story tonight with contemporary readings and ideas, here's what I've come up with as my opening remarks and welcome. If you are in the area, please stop by at 7 pm...

Tonight we are going to ask you to participate in a creative liturgy we call “Sounds of Solace” – and I’d like to give you a context for what we are attempting so that you can join in more fully.

• First of all, this is liturgy – literally the “work of the people” – and that means there is a three-way communication taking place involving the artists, the congregation and God’s Holy Spirit. So, we really need you to enter into this partnership, ok? There are prayers to speak – there are songs to lift up – and there is active listening, too.

• Because this is not a performance – it is liturgy – experimental and creative, to be sure – but liturgy nonetheless: and part of authentic liturgy trusts that those who gather will listen carefully as much as they will sing and speak.

• Sometimes people forget this: church people often think that if what is happening isn’t in a traditional sanctuary, then it is a show; and people who aren’t familiar with worship might think this is a performance art gig. But it is worship – liturgy – the work of the people – where silence and listening are just as important as the sounds we make and movements we share.

Second, tonight’s liturgy take another stop on a journey some of us began 10 years ago when we first started to experiment with how the old, old story of Christ’s passion – his suffering and death upon the Cross – might also be discerned in popular culture. What we first started to do was simply tell the ancient story and replace the traditional songs with new ones – contemporary songs – rock and roll and jazz and everything in-between. Because, you see, if the old, old story really was timeless and essential to the soul of humankind, then it could take on new expressions.

• And we began to discover that artists – and musicians – who weren’t necessarily of the Christian faith found great truth in power in Christ’s story.

• What’s more, we found that the story of Christ’ journey to death on the Cross kept popping up in music like Nine Inch Nails’ song, “Hurt” – or Green Day’s “Are We the Waiting “ – Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock,” Ricki Lee Jones has done two whole improvised CDs using the words of the Sermon on the Mount and the Rolling Stone’s anguished lament “Gimme Shelter” is as much sacred as it is secular.

This year, however, we decided to push the envelope a little further and trust that if Jesus’ song/prayer from the Cross – Father why hast thou forsaken me – is universally part of God’s cry in creation – and you should know that Christ’s words come from Psalm 22 which is both a lament and a prayer of courage and hope – if all this was true…

• Then maybe the songs that we have found to help us go through the dessert of suffering might also be sacred songs of solace – even if they come from the Beatles or Meatloaf or Leonard Cohen. Are you with me, here?

• So that’s what we’ve done tonight: we’ve come up with songs – sacred and secular – that have been sounds of solace for us – and hopefully for you, too – and we’ve mixed them with some words from the Bible as well as some poetry and prose from the likes of Annie Lamott, Douglas Copland and Dianne De Mott.

There will be jazz and spirituals, rock and roll and songs of praise as well as traditional hymns an original by Brian Staubach and even something from Broadway. There will also be a chance for us all to respond to God’s Spirit this liturgy matures so… And with that I give thanks to God for these artists – and all of you – and let us open our hearts together.