“I am certain that the Lord has still more truth and light to break forth from the Holy Word.” That quote – which we in the United Church of Christ have reworked into the contemporary “God is STILL speaking” campaign – comes from Pastor John Robinson who first shared it as he stood with his congregation on the Mayflower in 1620.
• Robinson was the first ordained pastor in our tradition: once a professor at Cambridge, he left to be married and lead St. Andrew’s Church in Norwich, England.
• When the rules of worship conformity enforced by King James I became too oppressive, he resigned the Anglican Church in 1606 and eventually took up with the non-conformists in the nearby village of Scrooby.
• Religious intolerance increased, however, and the early founders of the Congregational Way felt they must leave England to practice freedom of religion. So in 1609 they moved to Leyden, Holland and in time cast their fate in the New World in 1620.
So, one of the key challenges to God’s people in every generation is to ask: “Do we have ears to hear?” You see, from time to time the Lord God raises up a unique group of people known as prophets: they have been inspired – literally filled or breathed-into with the Spirit – to help the rest of us discern, hear and act upon what our still speaking God is saying to the creation.
Think of Isaiah chapter 6: In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Master sitting on a throne—high, exalted!—and the train of his robes filled the Temple. Angel-seraphs hovered above him, each with six wings. With two wings they covered their faces, with two their feet, and with two they flew. And they called back and forth one to the other, “Holy, Holy, Holy is God-of-the-Angel-Armies. His bright glory fills the whole earth.”
Or Jeremiah 1: In the days of King Jehoiakim son of Josiah of Judah – and until the end of the eleventh year of King Zedekiah son of Josiah of Judah, until the captivity of Jerusalem in the fifth month… the word of the Lord came over me saying: Before I formed you in your mother’s womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you… appointed you as a prophet to the nations. (And the young Jeremiah said, “Lord I am only a child, I don’t know how to speak for the Lord. “ But God said, “Do not fear… you shall go out to all I send you and shall speak whatever I command of you… for I have put my words in your mouth.”
And don’t forget Micah in 6:8: You KNOW what the Lord has already told you about what is good and required: DO justice, SHARE compassion and WALK and LIVE with humility before your God.
• Jeremiah stood in the public market place and pulled out his beard to express God’s exasperation with the stubbornness and sin of the people.
• St. John on the Island of Patmos in the book of Revelation – and St. Paul the travelling Apostle - sent letters to be read in the churches they loved and served.
• John Wesley took to the open streets to preach a prophetic and healing word to the people of his day. Martin Luther King, Jr. brought massive public demonstrations to Washington, DC and knew how to exploit television.
• It is my most profound conviction – and experience – that not only is God still speaking to culture and people and politics in the 21st century, but that God’s still speaking voice can be heard most powerfully through the art of our generation.
• The Bible is still important – and the symbols of faith are profound – but fewer and fewer people know what they mean. So does that mean that God’s voice stops speaking just because people quit going to worship?
I don’t think so: I believe that the Creator’s voice of compassion and challenge is filled with creativity and is inter-woven throughout culture. You see, I am of that small but stubborn school of theologians like Paul Tillich and Harvey Cox, who sense that truth, beauty and goodness are too often domesticated by the institutional church. We play it safe and become slaves and debtors to the status quo.
• Rather the Lord finds new ways to share Christ’s light with the world – often through our artists.
Now let’s be clear: I’m not saying this is true of all artists because some make kitsch and trinkets that distract and reinforce sentimentality rather that beauty. But there are artists who sense deep within their souls the spirit of the age and try to give it expression.
Tillich – one of my theological mentors – came of age in the First World War where he served as a chaplain in the German army. There he saw firsthand the brutality and stupidity of that horror and wondered where God’s prophetic voice for justice and peace was being expressed in his culture.
Clearly it was not happening in the churches of postwar Germany where pious sentimentality was the order of the day. And it wasn’t happening in the theology of the academy either where abstract thinking was all too normative. So Tillich went on a search for a way to understand the horror and confusion – the alienation and fear – of his era and discovered in the painting of the Abstract Expressionists something of God’s prophetic presence.
Beginning in the early 1920s and continuing through his death in 1965, Tillich sought to discern and interpret the prophetic presence of God’s still speaking voice in the art of his day. He did this mostly with visual art but also explored poetry and literature, too. And, if it hasn’t yet become clear to you by now, I am indebted to his work – and that of Harvey Cox as well – for they invite me (and all of us) to listen for and discover the still speaking voice of the Lord through the symbols, songs, poetry, art, movies, television programming and drama of our culture.
• In a word, they teach us that God’s light may be obscured from time to time, but never extinguished if we are open to creativity.
• Is that clear? And do you sense why I believe this quest for the light is so important?
I am not – you will notice – asking if you agree with me. That is another conversation entirely; and I am not saying that popular music is the ONLY place to hear our stillspeaking God. That would be reductionist and absurd, ok? Rather all I am asking is have I been clear with you about why I sense it is vital to explore popular culture for the still speaking voice and light of the Lord?
• First is the prophetic presence – which I’ll consider today – using three contemporary musical artists.
• And second is the invitation to imagination – which I’ll explore next week – in the music of U2.
And that leads to my second insight for today: the prophetic presence of the Living God is often uniquely and powerfully expressed in the music of popular culture. Specifically, the prophetic presence in popular culture offers us three ways to encounter something of the sacred:
1. The God of solidarity: that is the Lord of compassion and healing embrace.
2. The God of challenge: the Lord of justice who seeks to destroy alienation and sin.
3. And the God of poetry: the sacred presence of paradox breaking through our black and white thinking to invite us into mystery and grace.
Now let me give you an example of each of these categories and share a few thoughts about why I consider these songs spiritually significant.
I, the Lord your God, have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt. I have heard their cry… and I know their sufferings and now I have come down to deliver them from their oppressors… into the land of milk and honey. (Exodus 3: 7-12)
Here is the first testimony in scripture that God seeks to be in harmony with the human experience: God aches when we hurt and shares the trauma of our wounds. So in a profound act of sacred solidarity with humanity God raises up a prophetic voice to help soothe and liberate a broken people.
That’s what the reading today from Ezekiel is all about, too: it tells us that within human history – the 13th year of the fourth month and the 5th day of Israel’s exile in Babylon by the River Chebar – the once hot shot priest, Ezekiel, saw a vision of God. He had hoped to get a Temple in the suburbs; he was one of the best and brightest and was looking forward to the GOOD life of serving God and enjoying the blessings of the holy… only to wake up by the waters of Babylon.
• Remember Psalm 137? By the rivers of Babylon – that is by the River Chebar – there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion.
• What happened: We hung up our instruments on the willows when our captors and tormentors demeaned and humiliated us by asking, “Sing one of the songs of Zion now, you losers!”
God's heart is breaking along with the faithful hearts of Israel - and I hear some of this happening in Springsteen’s sad lament as he takes the ancient story and makes it new. Two things are going on in this song: one comes from the voice of a firefighter going into the Twin Towers on September 11th after the terrorist planes have attacked. He is carrying the Cross of his calling - voluntarily going into the valley of the shadow of death - in solidarity with those he loves. How did Jesus once put it? "What greater love is there than this that you lay down your life for those you love?" That is the first part of the song.
And the second involves a shift in time and emphasis – maybe it is the same day or maybe it is eternity – but that same fire fighter is now dead and looking back upon the people who gathered by the waters of Babylon and the rubble. Somehow – from within the pain - this soul can see something of God’s sacred presence amidst the tears in what I can only call grace.
• Like the first ancient lament, “By the Waters of Babylon", in this song Springsteen invites us to feel how our own hearts broke on September 11th. At the same time he wants us to know that God is embracing us in solidarity - God is with us just as God was with Jesus on the Cross - as a presence reaching out from within even the valley of the shadow of death.
• This song is a prophetic prayer, beloved, sometehing of the ancient voice of God’s presence coming to us over our computer’s speakers…
The God of solidarity is one part of the prophetic presence found in popular music. Another is the God of challenge – sometimes snarky, sometimes absurd and sometimes provocative – but always calling into question the different ways we human beings turn our back on God’s covenant and justice.Today’s text from Isaiah makes the challenge clear: why do we keep giving our time and energy to things that do not satisfy and nourish? This text is nearly 3,000 years old but it is as vital to our well being as anything on NPR. For here God comes to us, says the prophet Isaiah, offering a feast of wine, milk and honey – and we go off looking for junk food:
Seek the Lord while he may be found… and learn about God’s ways because God’s thoughts are not your thoughts and God’s ways are deeper and more healing than your ways.
Alll of which leads, of course, to St. Bob Dylan – and while a lot of his songs would fit into the prophetic challenge category - the clear winner is “Everything Is Broken.” And let me tell you why:
• As a person of faith, and Dylan IS a faithful person, he looks at the world as it is and senses God’s grief. He looks at the greed and the fear – the lust and the violence – the lies and all the rest and asks us to look at it, too.
• See what you have done to the air – to your children – to sex and commerce and law: look at it all he demands. But NOT to rub our noses in it – or to evoke more cynicism – but rather so that we might conclude: I think I am sick and tired of being totally broken – malunourished by all the junk - there has GOT to be a better way…
First, the prophetic presence is expressed as solidarity; second it is given sound as challenge to the status quo; and third it comes to us as rock and roll poetry. Maybe paradox or mystery is a better way to say this, but the point is the same: words cannot express the fullness of God’s grace. We need images and symbols and feelings to help us grasp what cannot be named by analysis alone.
• I think that was part of what Jesus was saying in today’s gospel: you are so wise and aware of the physical things all around you but you can’t grasp the deeper wisdom of God’s love?
• I see the poetic presence of God in popular music as an antidote to black and white thinking where we divide the world into winners and losers – insiders and outsiders – those who have it all together and those destined to fail - for you know that religion is notorious for demonizing some and giving others a total pass especially in hard economic times, right?
Last week, Susan Thistlethwaite of the Chicago Theological Seminary, wrote a column for the Washington Post making the observation that not only are we making the same economic mistakes in 2011 that gave rise to the stock market crash of 1929, we are making the same religious mistakes, too. She said that:
In the 1930s, most people failed failed to heed the depth of prophetic critique that Reinhold Niebuhr made of both the economy and religion (and we're doing it again.)During the Great Depression, "the only sector of American Protestantism that actually grew was the sectarian type that emphasized individual conversion and the imminent return of Jesus in a Rapture... end times religion prospered during the Great Depression... And that is of course, exactly what is happening now... as Governor Rick Perry's recent Texas prayer event makes clear.
At this rally, she noted: "a host of problems from poverty to division in families and nation were decried, but very little was actually done in terms of social justice to correct these conditions." Because, just as Niebuhr once told us, these problems are bigger than charity. They are more complicated than a simple-minded application of the teachings of Jesus can solve because these problems are systemic not merely flaws of individual morality.
Nobody reads Niebuhr any more. Nobody knows about his unique insights into the American dilemma - "the enduring conflict between human self-interest and human compassion and cooperation - and we are all poorer for this loss. But I contend that it is precisely into such an abyss that God's musical and poetic prophet often enters bearing a poetic presence that encourages complex thinking. And no one does this better than Leonard Cohen. A practicing Orthodox Jew with a whole lotta Zen wisdom going on his song, “Anthem,” he brings the heart and soul of Niebuhr as well as the entire prophetic presence of solidarity, challenge and poetry together in under four minutes...
Listening for God’s word of prophetic presence in popular culture is an act of faithful resistance to sinful status quo. It is not only one of the ways we can hear our still speaking God, it is a way of nourish the light in the darkness.
• It empowers us to hear the Lord within the schlock and fear of our generation.
• It equips us with the tools to challenge what is broken.
• And it gives us the poetic resources of paradox and mystery so that we don't sell God's grace out for short-term or simple minded solutions.
And to my way of praying and thinking and discerning: that is the good news for today.
credits:
1) http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/reviews/proyen/proyen11-15-05_detail.asp?picnum=9
2) http://arteest.org/abstract-expressionism.htm
3) http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/pollock/
4) http://www.thousandislandslife.com/BackIssues/Archive/tabid/393/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/54/Viva-Hoffmann-A-Thousand-Islands-Painter.aspx
5) http://artartistsart.blogspot.com/2010/04/hans-hofmann.html
6) http://en.artoffer.com/Peter-Feichter/Image-Large-View/?imagenr=90629
7)http://en.artoffer.com/Peter-Feichter/Image-Large-View/?imagenr=90629
8) http://www.magold.eu/
9) http://aesthetic.gregcookland.com/2009/08/hyman-bloom-has-died-at-96.html
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