Revelation 15.1-4 22 February 2009
“A SOUNDTRACK FOR LIVING”
In the early 90s, Kate Munger cared for a friend who was in a coma and dying of AIDS. She spent mornings doing his housework and afternoons singing for him. She would sing for him two hours at a time. “The contrast between morning and afternoon was profound…At the end of the day, I felt like I’d stumbled onto some-thing extraordinary.” So Kate founded an organization called the Threshold Choir.
They sing sacred songs at the bedside of the dying. Sometimes as they sing, the patient’s heartbeat steadies and breathing becomes less labored. “We think of these as lullabies for (people) on the way out,” says Munger. They began in the year 2000 and now have 35 chapters in 12 states, each chapter with 60 to 80 members. By invitation, they go out of two or three at a time to the bedside of the seriously ill, to those facing life’s final stages. Unaccompanied, they might sing anything from Ave Maria to Calling all Angels in a home, a hospital, or a hospice.
I tell you, spiritual genius is made of stuff like this. Taking a simple loving offering of oneself, allowing God to work through it, and letting it rise up to transform ones who give it and receive it. But let’s take this touching true story and turn it over. If the Threshold Choir provides a soundtrack for dying, what would be a sound-track for living? I think you might already know where I’m going with the question.
Jazz and gospel music are for me the soundtrack for living. Why is that so? Be-cause these traditions, marking our both suffering and joy, strike notes of cele-bration appropriate to the challenge of seizing the moment in the uproarious pos-sibilities of living day to day. Why jazz and gospel? Today I give three reasons, put forward by my friend Rodney Clapp, who was the editor of my first book.
First, in the playing and singing of jazz and gospel, we allow God to claim not just the thoughts of our minds and but also the deepest feelings buried in our bodies. Let’s face it, white folks worship and experience faith too much from the neck up. How often will our choirs stir us in worship until we can’t keep still. But as we start moving to the Spirit’s promptings, we find ourselves feeling geeky. Yes, we are touched and want to respond fully to what is unfolding. But we feel awkward. We might want to respond with our whole person, but our bodily gestures come clumsily and self-consciously. That’s how we know that we are worshipping too much with our heads and too little with our heart, body, soul, strength, and being.
But that is not what I saw during the prelude and opening hymns this Fat Sunday. I saw broad smiles without fear that our faces might shatter and fall to the floor. I saw swaying that was unselfconscious. I saw natural and rhythmic clapping. Did you ever hear the story about the person in the mainline church who raised her hands during worship one morning? They called 911 for fear she was having a heart attack. Rhythm, I tell you, is an intoxicating and transforming experience.
We were taught in school how Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am”. Thus, he split off into segments what God never meant to be put asunder. Jazz and gospel music work through complex changes of melody and chords that break down Descartes’ mind-body, or soul-body, or spirit-body divisions. The complex, irregu-larity of African based song with a beat holding together two different rhythms in counterpoint to one another allows God to grab our whole being. Can we confess today that it’s a good thing that God created, loves, and wants our whole being?
White Christians--at least this white Christian--can use help reclaiming our bodies spiritually, theologically, and worshipfully. Jazz is at once a delightful engager of the body and a challenge for the mind. It musically reintegrates divided selves. It makes us whole by embodying our faith while leaving room for our lofty thoughts.
A second area where the church needs help is how individuals and communities relate. As things are, this relationship is troubled, both in the world and within the church. Notice in church traditions where individualism is strong, like our own, individuals will treat the church as little more than an aggregate of individuals, as only the sum of its parts. Our self-spirit displaces the Holy Spirit, allowing the body of Christ no real claims upon us as God’s unique agent at work in the world. Notice in church traditions where community is strong, like Roman Catholicism, the community will disregard individual circumstance and personal context. It will trample and run roughshod over individual gifts. The institution crushes some. Can Christ’s church do better than this? We surely can! Maybe jazz can help us.
Listen to how this band or any jazz band worth its salt plays. Observe what they model. The nature of jazz is dynamic. I mean, in jazz you can hardly write down on a musical score what has been played. It is spontaneous, improvisational, and interactive. The musicians are not only playing off melody, harmony, and rhythm, they play off each other, individually and as a whole ensemble. They not only play off of each other individually and as a group, but they play off listeners, also.
Something like call and response is happening between all three of these parties. This improvisational interplay between the group, the soloists, and the listeners is jazz’s deep signature. Jazz wants everyone not as observers but as participants, absorbing its energy and feeding it back from all sides. Martha Bayles describes the jazz soloist as having a priestly role. Individual musicianship is not roman-ticized as a super personal genius, but “chiefly as the conduit for expression of communal emotion and experience.” Jazz isn’t the music of isolated individuals. Jazz is the music of group-engaged players who become who they are by de-voting themselves to a higher good of making music within a greater community.
Did you ever hear someone say of worship, or even the church’s whole ministry, “This isn’t meeting my individual needs.” Jazz illustrates how that is beside the point--meeting individual needs apart from our shared experience of God. As jazz lives in greater service to creating music, so our greater service is pleasing God. It’s not our place to cater to individuals stuck on their agenda over remaking the world in the shape of the Cross. What if we learned to play the music of ministry like jazz, the self in service to greater shared goals, but the community ever mindful of the individual? The world would beat a path to our doors in droves. For we would heal rather than extend raw divisions between self and community.
But there is a third way that jazz and gospel speaks to us as Christian people. The first was the false duality between mind and body. The second was the troubled duality between individual and community. The third way is the painful duality of radically separating heaven and earth. Let me tell you what that means.
The church, in all its human frailty, can talk convincingly about Jesus saving us from our sins and what happens to us after we die. That is the heaven side. Or the church speaks passionately about political structures and peace with justice. That is the earth side. But the church seems unable to discuss both in the same breath! Yes, some gifted leaders can do so. We heard Tony Robinson do that last Sunday, if you remember. He fluently wove the old, old story of Christ saving our souls and redeeming the lost as he described the scandals of financial in-stitutions and the corruption of a peanut factory. Then again, Tony is a rare spirit.
By radically separating heaven and earth conservative Christians are defeated before going out to transform the world. Here affairs of state and world must be left as they are. The world is sinful and fallen. God will take care of it in a sweet by and by. A sweet by and by this cynical world calls the church’s “pie in the sky”. In this mindset the church ends up pining after some era like the Ward and June Cleaver 1950s, a restoration of a pure, innocent, and wholesome
Of course, liberal Christians sense the need for social and political involvement. But by radically separating heaven and earth they become secular agents of a social agenda more than witness of a risen Christ. They abandon the church and make national politics their new faith. This is no less wrong, no less unsatisfying.
How can jazz and gospel help us here? Well, Maggie and I chose the hymns right before and after my sermon for a specific reason. They mysteriously and superbly bring heaven and earth back together in a healthy and dynamic tension. For when “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” talks about “a band of angels comin’ after me, coming for to carry me home,” it refers not only to heavenly messengers with wings but also the conductors of the Underground Railroad taking people North. The hymn is “double-voiced”, referring to God’s saving and saving just agents, sung right under the noses of the captors. Our next hymn, “Steal Away to Jesus” refers to seeking Jesus or sneaking into the woods for secret slave meetings.
So through gospel and jazz we find devout belief in heaven and as deep belief in the rising of a just new order here within our lifetime. They expect a new world ushered in by Christ the King yet also God’s justice at work in the here and now.
I’ve said enough, probably too much, about why gospel and jazz are my sound-track for living. For they resolve opposites sitting across a wide ugly ditch, only making enemies. Opposites that spiritually aren’t opposites at all. Jazz creatively takes tensions that devour us and finds joy in the struggle as it reconciles them. Enough talking. Let’s get back to singing. Let’s experience spiritual wholeness. Amen.
