Faith Like Jazz

I love jazz music. One of my favorite albums (of any kind of music) is Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue."

I will also be quick to say that I don't totally get jazz. I know there are a lot of interesting things going on in jazz that trained musicians can pick up on and dissect. Some jazz gets really experimental and ... unique. That's not the jazz I love.

Instead, I love the Miles David/John Coltrane style of jazz. The kind of jazz you imagine in a smoky bar with a three- or four-piece group providing the background to conversations between people in fedoras and boas. (Which is where I've heard some of the best jazz in my life.)

What I love about jazz is the improvisation. I love listening to the way the band will take a riff and play around with it for several measures, trying different things each time. Or the way one of the instruments will go on a solo, pouring out sounds that are more like emotions than notes while the others maintain a regular rhythm to hold her/him on a path. In jazz there is both creativity and freedom, and there is a kind of restraint because all the parts are working together toward a common goal.

I love jazz.

I also love Jesus. And I think following Jesus should be a lot like jazz.

When I was growing up, a lot of Christian teaching made me think there was a specific way to follow Jesus. There was a set of rules to follow and a certain way to act and dress and if you followed all of them, you were Christian. If you didn't, well, thanks for playing.

In my music analogy, it would be like saying, "To follow Jesus, you need to play the piano and play 'Moonlight Sonata' perfectly."

But I think that's too narrow a view. Especially today. Life rarely follows a neat, clear path where every action has a predictable reaction. And every person in the church doesn't have the same gifts or passions or reasons for being in church. Instead, I think living a life of faith is like playing jazz music.

You have a group (church or fellow Christians) who have different instruments (talents) and you're all working together to make a beautiful piece of music (bring God's life to earth). But you're also improvising, repeating common themes (love, forgiveness, mercy) in different ways to create new sounds and ideas. The members are doing their own thing, but working together, being creative and free, but following certain patterns that are familiar to all participants.

This is much more like faith as I've experienced it than "Here's a piece of music. Memorize it." It's also what the church needs to be today.

We are in a time when technology and globalism are changing things constantly. We are in a time where we live with many differences in generations, ethnicity, gender identity, and more, even within one neighborhood.

In order to adapt, to love everyone, we need to improvise. We need to play around with familiar riffs in new ways. We need to work with the other members of the band to avoid chaos. We need to have a sense of playfulness and imagination, following the path of grace and love, but creating something new on the way.

This is why the church has been so different over the ages in a variety of cultures and eras, but still grounded in the same truths.

Faith is like jazz. Follow along.

From the Gray,
Pastor Ari

"Oh my life will be here waiting for you, my love, to find your way back home to me." -Sophie Milman, "Back Home to Me"

When Broken Isn't Really Broken

One of the classrooms at my son's school likes to post a "Quote of the Week" on its bulletin board. Earlier this year, the quote was "Broken crayons still color."

As I passed it daily, it seemed to me like a description of resurrection, of Easter, of the kind of eternal life Jesus says we have now.

God used a lot of broken crayons to mark the shape of God's reality, shade the world with love, and draw a picture of hope for today.

If you feel broken, keep adding your color to the world. It's part of the picture.

From the Gray,
Pastor Ari

“We just want the fire in our bones.” -Emperors, “Be Ready When I Say Go”

"The Lego Movie" is a Model for Being A Christian

One of my favorite movies from this past year was "The Lego Movie." There are a lot of things to like about the movie -- a fun premise, sharp humor, great animation, a heart-warming ending, and LEGOS! -- but I was reflecting this week (watching my kids build with Legos) that the movie also offers a model for discipleship as Christians.

For those who haven't seen the movie, the basic story is that a Lego villain named Lord Business wants to make a perfect world by gluing all Legos in place forever and a simple guy named Emmett is anointed the "special" who will save the world by the Master Builders who oppose Lord Business. In the movie, the Master Builders stand for creativity, freedom, and individuality while Lord Business promotes uniformity and following the rules.

Now normally when a movie sets up a difference like that, the final message is something like: Be yourself no matter what and everything will be fine. But that's NOT what "The Lego Movie" does. Lord Business is clearly the villain, but the Master Builders' sense of freedom has problems, too. They are so individualistic (and self-important?) that they have trouble working together and in one emergency they are so bad at listening to each other that the escape craft they build doesn't work. Without giving too much away, it's only when they use their individual talents as a team that they are able to succeed.

Just when you think the movie is going to say, "Be yourself," it adds on, "...but remember that you still need others." It's this both/and that I found interesting and think is a great example of being a Christian.

As a Christian, I believe that I am uniquely created, called, gifted, and set free by the Triune God.  At the same time, I believe I am called to love and serve others and have to live in community and relationship with them. Like in "The Lego Movie," I am a special and creative individual, but if I am only an individual and can't share my talents as part of a community, there can be just as much discord and trouble as oppressive uniformity.

I see both extremes expressed at times in the church. Some act as if God is Lord Business, demanding loyalty and uniformity in order to enforce a perfect world. Others see God as a Master Builder who says, "You're special and unique. You don't need anyone else." The church says neither.

Paul explains this in 1 Corinthians when he writes, "Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts make one body, so it is with Christ... You (plural) are the body of Christ and each of you is a part of it." He explains that everyone has special gifts, but those gifts aren't meant to divide us, but unite us by seeing our talents as part of a greater whole. Or, as one pastor I know was fond of saying, "Faith is personal, but not individualistic."

Martin Luther once summed up this paradox by writing, "A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all." Who would have thought that the heart of his message would show up in a fun kids' movie? And yet "The Lego Movie" provides a great metaphor for building up Christian disciples, brick by brick.

“I'd rather be a functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me.” -Fleet Foxes, "Helplessness Blues"

Biblical Creativity

The way we learn to read the Bible is wrong.

Wait, let me go back a bit...  I was thinking this week about the topic of creativity and education. There have been many articles (like this one), speeches (like this), etc. in recent years bemoaning the loss of creativity in the American population and many place the fault at the feet of our education system. I'm not going to dive into why that is (educational theory, standardized testing, and core requirements are complex topics I can't speak to with any authority), but suffice it to say, (a) I believe creativity is an important part of education and (b) much of my own education was built on teaching facts more than encouraging creative thought. For many of my classes, the implicit idea was that every question had one correct answer and I was to memorize and regurgitate that answer on command.

What struck me this past week was that much of my Sunday school education was identical to my secular education. For every Bible story, there was one answer as to what it meant, such as "The Parable of the Good Samaritan means be nice to others." Ideas were often dealt with in absolutes like always, never, sacred, and evil.

The problem is that the more I read the Bible, the less those prove to be true. Very rarely does a text mean just one thing. Depending on my mood, my current situation in life, or what I watched on TV last night, I can often come up with many lessons from a single text. For example, I generally preach using the texts appointed by the Revised Common Lectionary, which uses the same texts every three years. I've gone back to read old sermons from three or six years ago and found I've preached radically different sermons on the same text (though still sound and meaningful). I've used Psalm 23 ("The Lord is my shepherd...") to preach comfort in grief, loving our enemies, and God's relentless pursuit of us. (Or try reading Jewish Talmud or Midrash! I read a Midrash on Genesis once where the rabbi offered dozens of ideas as to why the first letter of the Bible is bet [Hebrew for B]. Sounds strange, but it was fascinating.)

If we are taught from an early age that those possibilities are wrong, that reading the Bible is about finding short, pat answers to complicated life questions, then the Bible loses its vibrancy. This book hasn't stuck around for thousands of years because it was a well organized how-to manual; it has been important because it records stories and poems about complicated people who had complicated relationships with a complicated God and we've continued to say, "Hey! I can relate to that."

What if we treated Sunday school not as a way to get kids to memorize facts about God, but invited them to explore the stories? What if we taught kids to use the Bible to find good questions, not just answers? What if we all approached the stories asking, "Where do I fit in this story? How is this about me?" (One excellent model is Godly Play, which you can see in action here.)

The opposite result is what I saw once when I was leading a Bible study with some high schoolers and I asked them an open ended question that was something like, "What do you think Jesus meant when he said that?" I honestly don't remember the exact question I asked, but I do remember the response. After about 10 uncomfortable seconds of silence, one of the students said, "Can't you just tell us the answer?" The thing is that I wasn't looking for "the" answer. It was (meant to be) an open-ended question: "What do you think?" But the students had learned that there was one answer and their fear of being wrong was stronger than their interest in the story.

If we can't read the Bible with a supple and open mind, it becomes a solid, stale block. Like a tree, faith grows better in soft soil than in set concrete.

“As if there wasn’t anything to say about the justice and the mystery.” -Jars of Clay, “Good Monsters”