Category Archives: Music
N T Wright Sings The Theology Of Creation And New Creation
It doesn’t get better than this for me. A great theologian – N T Wright – putting theology to music. Here, he sings ‘Genesis’ – words that he and Francis Collins, of the Human Genome Project put to the Beatles’ ‘Yesterday’.
(Originally featured at The Rabbit Room.)
Mistaken Identity
Can I just say, please? This is not me.
There are several vital differences. He’s good looking. I’m not. I wear glasses. He doesn’t.
Most importantly, he can sing. I can’t. When church audio-visual teams fit me up with a radio microphone, my first question is whether they will fade me down during the hymns.
I write this, because I am starting to get Twitter followers who think I am this singer. They will be disappointed.
It’s not the first case of mistaken identity I’ve had. In my late teens, when I wore NHS glasses, I was once mistaken outside HMV’s Oxford Street store for Elvis Costello. In my mid-twenties, I visited an evangelical church, only for some of the young adults there to think I was Clive Calver, then the general secretary of the Evangelical Alliance.
Like anyone, I have namesakes, and that seems to be the issue here. Believe those people are me, and I’ve had an interesting life. I was a member of Great Britain’s gold medal winning Olympic hockey team in 1984 and am now performance director for England Hockey. I was the lead singer of Aussie rock band the Hoodoo Gurus. I have been in politics, having led Newcastle City Council and head of highways for Flintshire County Council. I am a criminologist, which is ironic, given that I was also an American police officer, murdered in 1981. (Yes, I know that last one is ‘Daniel Faulkner’, but he seems to come high in Google if you search for my name. I’ve no idea why.)
Have you ever been mistaken for someone else? Are there any interesting stories out there?
The Passion Suite
Are you looking for something different to mark Holy Week this year? Come to St Paul’s Church Addlestone (directions here) on Monday night at 7:30 pm and hear the Kairos Ensemble, a band of four Christian jazz musicians, perform their piece The Passion Suite. Entrance is £5 – a bargain.
Here is another taster of their music:
Whitney Houston: Conflicted Soul?
My first thoughts upon reading this morning about Whitney Houston’s death at the age of just 48 were most unworthy of a Christian. I recalled a conversation with another young Christian at church when she was first famous. My friend Karen said, “Isn’t it great that Whitney Houston is a born-again Christian?” I gave her a withering reply. “Oh yes? ‘Saving All My Love For You‘ – that nice Christian song about adultery?”
I went on to think about her cover of George Benson‘s ‘The Greatest Love Of All‘. All the stuff about building up children’s self-esteem might be very well meant, but ultimately it’s pop psychobabble about self-love, closer to narcissism or idolatry.
And as for her cover of Dolly Parton‘s ‘I Will Always Love You‘ that substituted bombast for Parton’s delicacy, don’t get me started. For my money, Linda Ronstadt got the balance right:
To me, Whitney Houston took the soul out of soul music and prepared the ground for the horrors of Mariah Carey.
Like I said, not a very Christian reaction, however true, or however much I might feel I had legitimate arguments for these points of view. This was hardly taking seriously the sensitive social convention not to speak ill of the dead, even if I did so only in my own mind.
But then I found a link to a Christianity Today piece in 2009 (via Tony Watkins on Friendfeed) that spun off her then latest release, an album called ‘I Look To You’. It detailed her upbringing in gospel music. I knew that. It acknowledged her turbulent marriage to Bobby Brown and her crack cocaine addiction. I knew that, too. It set out her connections with the gospel singers BeBe and CeCe Winans. It talked about lyrics and interview comments that were by turn both opaque and transparent in terms of faith. Now it was showing me things about her of which I was ignorant.
And I wondered … you never can tell what is behind the smoke and mirrors of PR machines, but maybe she was someone who struggled when she made the stepped into the wider world from the church. Plenty of people do. They are people we are meant to help and support.
Not that I knew her. (Obviously.) As a friend of mine called Matt Bird posted on Facebook this evening,
I will always remember Whitney Houston responding to a crowd of fans declaring their love for her. “How can you love me? You don’t even know me!”
Almost all of the commentary is guesswork, and maybe not all of it is appropriate. But I hope she found that grace was always there for her struggles and torments.
I think that’s a more worthy Christian response.
Etta James, R.I.P.
Soul and blues singer Etta James has died at the age of 73. She was rarely in the pop charts, although her biggest success – her cover of Muddy Waters‘ ‘I just want to make love to you’ – reached number 5 in Britain in 1996, but that was on the back of its inclusion in a Diet Coke advertisement:
Various reports around the web (including the BBC one to which I link above) give accounts of her life and music, so I won’t repeat that here. Suffice to say that she was born into disadvantage, like many early soul stars she began singing in church, she was only intermittently successful in her career and she had to conquer a long addiction to heroin. Not all her music was as brassy, bold and lustful as ‘I just want to make love to you.’ The song that became a wedding favourite, ‘At last’, was lush and gentle, with supper club overtones:
‘I’d rather go blind’ was poignant and melancholy, in the Southern Soul tradition:
Etta James was one who never reached superstardom. She flew just under the radar for much of her career. Occasionally she was recognised. In the last few years that happened in the wake of Beyoncé‘s portrayal of her in the 2008 film ‘Cadillac Records‘.
Most of us spend our lives flying under the radar, barely or fleetingly recognised. Fame and fortune are no ways to sustain life and self-esteem, but lack of affirmation can destroy it, too. I guess when Etta James was singing in her grandparents’ Baptist church, she heard a message about a God who loved her dearly. In the end, there is nothing better to sustain any of us than the knowledge that we are loved with an everlasting love. Even Jesus evidently needed to hear that message at his baptism.
So rest in peace, Ms James. You had soul. We heard it. You were loved. We all are.
Music For 2012
Bill Withers plus Terry Callier plus Richie Havens plus Nick Drake plus early John Martyn equals … Michael Kiwanuka. He’s appearing on many lists of those tipped for popularity this year, and deservedly so. He’s on the same record label as Mumford and Sons, but I prefer him.
His album Home Again is due for release in March, conveniently the month of my birthday, and I can’t wait. Here’s why:
A word, too, for torch singer Ren Harvieu. Recently heard singing the Rolling Stones’ Sister Morphine on a Mojo magazine cover CD, a song she relates to after major hospital treatment, she is a wonderful interpreter of song.
Her own stuff is pretty powerful, too:
Singing The Faith: A First Look
Singing The Faith is the first new official British Methodist hymn book for nearly thirty years, superseding the (in my opinion) deadly dull Hymns and Psalms. My copy arrived in the post on Friday, and I’ve been skimming through it for some first impressions.
Hymns and Psalms just had to go, and many churches were voting with their wallets. It had the misfortune to come out just before the explosion in contemporary worship music (twelve months too early even for Kendrick‘s ‘The Servant King’,
I seem to recall). But you got the feeling that even if it hadn’t, that stuff would probably not have been included. It was published around the high water tide of liberal antipathy to evangelical and charismatic Christianity in Methodism. Furthermore, the musical arrangements were, as one friend put it kindly, ‘for musicians by musicians, to interest musicians’. I can’t judge the truth of that as a non-musician, but it may explain why they were largely deadly dull to me.
It had its bright spots – and I think particularly of the additional verse it includes in ‘When I Survey The Wondrous Cross‘ (retained here) that I’ve never seen elsewhere, the scholarship applied to restoring original texts and the Scripture Index in the music edition.
Methodist Conference and the panel that put together Singing The Faith faced the implications of several cultural revolutions that have deeply affected how Christians, Methodists included, approach faith and sung worship. Revolutions in communications (especially the Internet), transport (you can more easily get to a church whose style you prefer) and ecumenism (people are exposed to other traditions more easily and frequently) mean that fewer Methodists will be easily satisfied with ‘what we already know’. Some would argue (myself included) that technological changes and the fact that churches had already bought all sorts of supplementary books, such as Songs Of Fellowship, Mission Praise and The Source, meant that a new hymn book probably wasn’t the answer, and another approach was needed. The moment of publication is the beginning of fossilisation today. However, Methodism is almost umbilically attached to hymn books, and so a new book it was.
Given that fact, the new book, then, would need to embrace a diversity of musical and theological styles. Centralised or hierarchical control of doctrine may technically be still present in our system, but for many people it is long gone. There is therefore a huge question here of how Methodism maintains her doctrine in this central aspect of our piety, our singing. It may be that the forthcoming additional resource Singing The Faith Plus will act as some kind of clearing house to reflect on which of the newer material that is published from now on is consonant with Methodist doctrine, but we’ll see.
When it gets to the handling of theological diversity, there certainly is a spread in Singing The Faith. It embraces both the neo-Calvinist emphasis on the wrath of God at the Cross in Stuart Townend‘s ‘In Christ Alone’
and at the other end we have Marty Haugen‘s ‘Let Us Build A House (All Are Welcome)’
which some have criticised for allegedly extended the universal offer of salvation into universalism. So the issue of acceptable diversity is alive and well within the book!
It is also worth noting the considerable reduction in Charles Wesley hymns – very significant for Methodists, this. Hymns And Psalms was originally to be edited by an ecumenical committee, but when Methodist Conference insisted on at least two hundred Wesley hymns, the United Reformed Church pulled out. And for the URC to withdraw takes quite something! In the new book, at a quick count Wesley is down to seventy-nine contributions. Much as I love Wesleyan theology, I think this is the right move. Indeed, if many in our churches who have been most vocal about singing Wesley hymns had been as fervently aligned to his doctrine as to the music, Methodism might be more vibrant! Here is a prime example of the argument that allegiance to hymns, however central they are to Methodist spirituality, has not always maintained and fed our faith in the ways to which we might aspire.
Two more traditional-style contemporary Methodist hymn writers, Andrew Pratt and Marjorie Dobson, both participated in the STF committee, and both are represented in the final collection. Both have nine entries. With those numbers, I don’t think anyone can accuse the compilers of favouritism. I imagine the STF panel did what the HAP committee did, and required authors who were members of the group to vacate when their potential contributions were being discussed.
On, then, to think about those writers who have come more out of the explosion in contemporary worship styles. Matt Redman (also) features nine times, and the observation that interests me here is how it isn’t always his ‘hits’ that have been chosen. It looks to me like the committee has taken a real interest in what he writes about struggle and suffering. So as well as the popular ‘Blessèd Be Your Name’ we get ‘When We Were In The Darkest Night’ (‘God Of Our Yesterdays’)
and ‘We Have Nothing To Give’. No sign of ‘The Father’s Song’: one hopes that isn’t about avoiding male language for God, in the way that Fred Pratt Green‘s ‘For The Fruits Of His Creation’ has been altered to ‘For The Fruits Of All Creation’.
Having said that, the compilers are less confident that middle of the road Methodist congregations are ready for much by the late Delirious? Martin Smith and Stuart Garrard get in a couple each, but that’s it. This might be about some of the slightly unusual ways the band expressed itself lyrically, or it is about the more performance-oriented style, or possibly some other reason.
There is also evidence of taking into account the effect of contemporary worship trends on older hymns. It has become popular, particularly under so-called ‘Celtic’ influences, to sing the afore-mentioned ‘When I Survey The Wondrous Cross’ to the tune ‘O Waly Waly’ as well as ‘Rockingham’. This is recognised in Singing The Faith.
But beyond the contemporary worship movement, one area where I am particularly pleased to see innovation is in children’s worship songs. Mark and Helen Johnson of Out Of The Ark Music have been producing worship songs for primary schools for many years. Indeed, that is how I was introduced to them – by a primary head teacher. It’s a delight to see songs such as ‘Everywhere Around Me’
included, along with songs about the Incarnation and the Crucifixion (which actually doesn’t feature that often in their lyrics). Sadly, the wonderful ‘Harvest Samba’
isn’t in. Did it lose out because it has a middle eight, and that would confuse some older congregations? I wonder.
However, overall, as you will gather, for someone who stays on the fringes of the Methodist establishment, and who is usually quite uncomfortable about it, I greatly welcome Singing The Faith. I still think a new book wasn’t the right approach in a fast-moving creative and digital world, but given that the decision was made, I think what has been produced is far better than many of us might have hoped.
Sermon: The Spirit Of Adoption
I’m back after holiday to preach tomorrow morning for the first time in three weeks. Here goes:
When I was in my early years at secondary school, the girls used to debate who was the dreamiest pop star. Was it Donny Osmond, Michael Jackson, Les McKeown from the Bay City Rollers, or was it David Cassidy?
In David Cassidy’s case, they would sing along with a glazed look in their eyes:
How can I be sure
In a world that’s constantly changing?
That others, such as the Young Rascals and Dusty Springfield, had charted before him with the song, was immaterial. It was David Cassidy singing ‘How can I be sure’.
While I’m not trying to suggest that we boys were too superior, given that the music wars for us at that age were between Slade and Gary Glitter, I do want to concentrate on that question: ‘How can I be sure?’
It’s a question that has been asked in many ways by many people over the ages. In particular, Christians have asked it this way: how can I be sure that God loves me? Catholics would point to the sacraments as a sign. Calvinists would talk about the promises of God in Scripture – except then someone would say, but how do I know they apply to me as one of the elect, not one of the damned? So some moved on to other supposed signs of divine favour, such as wealth and prosperity.
Into this debate came John Wesley, with his particular doctrine of assurance. One thing Wesley stressed (along with such things as the promises of Scripture) was the work of the Spirit in assuring us we are children of God. And the classic passage about the Spirit revealing to us that we are children of a heavenly Father is this one in Romans 8.
So, then: in what ways does the Spirit affirm and strengthen our knowledge that we are sons and daughters of God?
Firstly, it’s a matter of being led by the Spirit:
those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God (verse 14)
Let’s be careful here: language of being ‘led by the Spirit’ has been horribly debased in the church. ‘I feel led’ gets reduced to the most trivial of forms: ‘I feel led to eat a Mars bar’; ‘I feel led to wear blue jeans’, and so on. No: Paul’s point about being led by the Spirit is altogether more serious, and far removed from the frivolous use of the language sometimes found in Christian circles. For what precedes is this:
For if you live according to the sinful nature, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live (verse 13)
We are led by the Spirit in order to be Christlike. The Spirit enables us to resemble the family likeness.
Most of you have noticed how much Mark looks like a redheaded version of me. When he was born, a church member jokingly told me never to take a paternity case to court, because the judge would take one look at me, one look at Mark, and throw the case out with laughter. On the other hand, when I was born, someone next to my mother in the maternity hospital looked at me and said to her, “He doesn’t look like you, he doesn’t look like your husband – what does your milkman look like?”
We expect children in some way or another to display a family likeness. One of the ways we know we are children of God is that over a period of time, we start to behave more like Jesus than we did before.
This is not to say it is easy. Nor is it to expect instant miracles. For ourselves, we may find it hard to detect the changes. I find that the key more often is that others notice the changes in us.
The story is told of a pupil at a school whose behaviour was so bad and so disruptive that the staff no longer knew what to do with him. One sanction after another had been tried. Every punishment and every incentive failed to bring about any change in him. He was as dreadful as ever.
Eventually, the Head Teacher called the boy into his office one day. He said to the young man, “We are at the end of our tether with you. There is only one thing I can think of to try, if you and your parents will agree. I want to adopt you as my own son. You will come and live with me. You will take my surname. Every time you are in trouble, it will be my name that is dragged through the mud.”
The boy agreed. His desperate parents agreed. This was the turning point in the boy’s life. Not that he became perfect, but he knew he was loved and wanted as an adopted son. For it isn’t just the fact that we take on the family likeness as evidence that we are adopted children of God, it’s also that spiritual adoption changes us. It works both ways. Being led by the Spirit is the evidence of adoption, and adoption entices us to be led by the Spirit.
All of which leads to the second strand I want to share with you this morning. If the Spirit reveals to us that we are adopted children of God, then that means we are loved by the Father. Hence Paul says in verse 15,
For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by him we cry, Abba, Father.
The Holy Spirit not only changes us in holiness more into the family image of Christ, nor only does the impartation of grace motivate us to live differently, the Spirit also enables us to call God, Abba, Father. Not merely reverence, but closeness: you will have heard many preachers tell you that ‘Abba’ is the word a Jewish child used to address their father in tenderness and trust. No wonder Paul goes onto say in verse 16,
The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.
Not only in the pages of Scripture but also written on our hearts is the knowledge that we are children of God, dearly beloved children who can address him as Abba.
I have a favourite story I love to tell about this. Several years before I met Debbie, I once went out a few times with a girl whom I used to meet in London. We would have a meal and see a film together. On one occasion, she told me over the meal before the film that she had something serious to tell me. I went into pastoral mode and she said, “I’m an adopted child.”
Endeavouring to be sensitive, I adopted an expression of concern.
“No,” she said, noticing my response, “you don’t need to worry. I’m glad I was adopted. It means I know I was wanted.”
Those words have stayed with me. ‘I know I was wanted.’ I believe we can see our status as adopted children of God the same way. Being adopted into the family of God means we know we are wanted. When the Holy Spirit whispers into our hearts that we are God’s sons and daughters and that we can tenderly call him Abba, we know we are wanted. After all, God set out on a mission of love to draw us into his family. In Christ he even took on human flesh and later died for us. How much does God want us? Jesus opens his arms wide on the Cross and says, “This much.”
What does that do for us? Does it not give us the most amazing sense of security in the love of God? We do not have to be like the girl in a field pulling petals off a flower, saying, “He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not.” The Spirit’s testimony to our adoption through Christ as God’s beloved children gives us a rock solid hope in the love God has for us. Let us never allow ourselves to think that God only begrudgingly has us in his kingdom because Jesus won him around through the Cross. Yes, Jesus died for our sins, but all that he did for us came from the Father’s heart of love for his created beings.
This wonderful love of God, then, is not only meant to be a ‘safe space’ for us, it’s more. The safety that God’s love gives us is then the jumping-off point from which we can leap into great risks of faith for him.
And that takes me neatly into the third and final point I want to make about the Spirit’s witness to our adoption into the family of God. It’s about our inheritance as God’s children. Verse 17:
Now if we are children, then we are heirs— heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.
Parents who care for their children will make provision for their future, as much as they reasonably can. Our wills lay that out for Rebekah and Mark, not only financially, but also we considered their care, should we die before they reach the age of majority. All being well, they will have an inheritance.
The curious thing for the children of God, though, is that we have an inheritance, even though there is no remote possibility of our heavenly Father dying! We shall inherit the glory of a resurrection body (verse 23) along with our great elder brother, Jesus. It will be our inheritance to reign with him in God’s new creation.
And that knowledge holds us in good stead now. For while the certainty of God’s love for us enables us to dare great things for him, we also know that daredevil faith leads to suffering, just as it did for Christ. Just as Christ suffered, so shall we. But just as Christ had an inheritance to anticipate and it kept him going, the same is true for us. As children of God, we have an inheritance with Christ. We have an eternal destiny in the purposes of God, and so when difficulty or opposition comes our way now, we need not keep our eyes fixed purely on the trials of the present: we can look into God’s great future and remember what our heavenly Father has willed for us – a will we inherit not when he dies (which he won’t) but when we die.
In this, we have something that not everybody has. The story is told that during Jim Callaghan’s tenure of 10 Downing Street in the 1970s, he had one particularly tortuous meeting about the Troubles in Northern Ireland with Ian Paisley. Callaghan and Paisley could not agree about anything in their conversation. Eventually, exasperated, Callaghan said, “Surely we can agree that we are all children of God?”
“No,” thundered Paisley, “we are all children of wrath.”
To our ears, that may seem a typically severe Ian Paisley statement, and in one sense it is. But Paisley was right that not everyone is a child of God. While we are all God’s offspring in the sense that we owe our existence to him, not all are adopted into his family. That happens by his grace to those who entrust their lives to him in Christ.
And when we do that, we receive the love God has been longing to pour out on all (which may be obscured by a term like ‘children of wrath’). We are adopted, because he so wants us in his family and not outside, and we can take risks because we have that great security. And we are guaranteed an inheritance that means we can cope with the setbacks and the resistance to our faithful living, because we know what the Father in his love has for us.
This is what the Spirit of adoption does, in revealing the Father’s boundless love to our hearts.
Contrasting Amy Winehouse And Danniella Westbrook
Last night, my friend Dave Clemo made a contrast between Amy Winehouse and Danniella Westbrook on his Facebook page. Referring to Winehouse’ death and Westbrook’s conversion, he wrote:
Amy Winehouse & Daniella Westbrook. Both were young and famous. Both had serious drug addictions. One died, the other survived and has been clean for ten years. One is dead, the other is born again. That’s the reality of faith in the Lord Jesus.
While I share Christian faith with Dave I would put it slightly differently, since Westbrook had been clean for drugs for about eight years before she found faith in Christ. However, there is certainly a poignant contrast to be made between these two famous young women who consumed vast quantities of narcotics. In addition to Dave’s words, I received this afternoon the weekly email from The Word Magazine, in which the lead quote was from Winehouse:
I don’t need help because if I can’t help myself I can’t be helped.
How tragic is that? Westbrook sought help – first to be rid of her addiction, second in faith. Winehouse ruled out the possibility. Some criticise Christianity for being a ‘crutch’, but what if we all have broken legs, so to speak? While there are certain forms of dependency that are immature, to deny the need of dependence upon others is dangerously foolish, as Winehouse’s words show.
Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not writing this to join in some pious post-mortem condemnation of Winehouse. I hope and pray that whatever went on in her final hours and days, the God of mercy was reaching out to her. But perhaps an age that talks of either not needing help or only of self-help needs to hear again that a true mark of maturity is knowing when and where to seek help.
Life and eternity depends on it.
The Imagination Of God: An Address For Addlestone Arts Festival
Yann Martel is the Canadian author who won the Man Booker Prize in 2002 for his novel ‘The Life of Pi’. In 2007, he was invited, along with forty-nine other distinguished Canadian contributors to the arts, to the Visitors’ Gallery of the House of Commons in Canada, where they would celebrate fifty years of the Canada Council for the Arts, the equivalent to our Arts Council. One artist for each of the fifty years that this body had been making grants to aspiring artists. Martel himself had received a grant from them when he was beginning as a novelist.
The Arts Minister, Bev Oda, stood up and gave a speech of less than five minutes. The Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, spent the time shuffling his papers and did not even acknowledge the artists with eye contact. After the speech, it was all over. There had been a reception the day before, when only twenty-five of the 306 MPs had attended.
Martel was devastated. What could he do? Doubtless these people, the Prime Minister, especially, were busy people. But they still needed stillness, and they needed something to stimulate their imaginations in that stillness.
He made a plan. He would send the Prime Minister a book, every other Monday, in the hope that he might read it. During an election period, he even sent an audio book instead, so Mr Harper could hear the book while travelling.
After sending the hundredth book, he gave up. Never had Harper acknowledged him. Only five times did he receive a three-line reply from the Prime Minister’s staff. In an interview with The Independent newspaper in February, Martel said,
“I can’t understand how a man who seems never to read imaginative writing of any kind (novels, poetry, short stories, high-brow, middle-brow, low-brow, anything) can understand life, people, the world,” … “I don’t care if ordinary people read or not. It’s not for me to say how people should live. But people who have power over me? I want them to read because their limited, impoverished dreams may become my nightmares.”[2]
We are celebrating the end of Addlestone Arts Festival. We have enjoyed music, crafts, poetry and even valuation of antiques – although I confess I’m at something of a loss to understand how Bingo fits into an arts week! I imagine that many of our contributors have seen their art as more than entertainment. They have been glad to entertain us, I am sure. But I suspect many had a bigger vision than merely entertainment.
For example – we’ve had two Disney events. Don’t the Disney films try to take you into a particular world, and see life a certain way? Poetry – don’t poets want to engage our imagination to hear the world with fresh ears? The music about royalty encourages a certain understanding of national life. And so on.
So what does a Christian minister like me have to do with this? I had a failed attempt to learn the guitar some years ago. I can’t sing – although a friend of mine swears he could teach me. My art doesn’t get much beyond matchstick men, and I am embarrassed into inferiority by my eight-year-old daughter. I used to write the odd bit of poetry and song lyrics, but they tended to head in the pretentious/Sixth Form direction.
Where does that leave me? To advocate the historical position the Christian churches had as patrons of the arts? No – because we don’t have the money any more! Although when we did so, it reflected our belief in a good Creator.
It leaves me offering you something that I believe is rich beyond measure. In this year when we mark the four hundredth anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible, think about the Bible as a work of art. It’s a compendium of sixty-six books, representing a wide range of literary styles, not only history and poetry but also some literary forms rarely seen any more. It tells of a God who not only speaks, but who sings, dances and tells stories. All these things combine to tell one great story, spread over centuries, if not aeons, that invites our imaginations to see the world differently from the culture in which we live.
So whereas Richard Dawkins urges us to see a universe that is pitiless, indifferent and lacking any basis for morality, the biblical story invites us to see a creation rooted in the work of a good, loving and purposeful God.
Or take the way our culture thinks that the leopard can’t change its spots. We see broken people causing damage and pain to others, and we say they can’t change. Yet the biblical story invites us into a kingdom where people are forgiven and transformed.
We live in a society where dreadful things happen to people and they say, “That’s unforgivable. I could never forgive them.” Yet the Bible invites us into a story where the one who was on the receiving end of the greatest injustice of all prayed, “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing.”
Or how do we view the future? As ending in death? As the chaos of environmental destruction? As something that science will solve, despite the fact that for all the advances it gives us, it also hands us other gifts such as the ability to cause mass destruction? Or do we think all our troubles will be alleviated by the next hot consumer product? The Bible invites us to imagine something much bigger, with a universe made new and freed from suffering.
A couple of minutes ago, I disparaged my artistic abilities. In truth, there are one or two artistic pursuits I enjoy. One – when I have the time – is photography. Another is writing. I belong to a group of writers who are Christians. Like most novelists, we know the truth of one telling approach about getting our message over:
Show, don’t tell.
In other words, don’t in your story tell people the message you want them to hear. Show it instead, by the nature of the tale. Now the Bible has its ‘tell’ moments, to be sure, but a surprising amount of it is more like ‘showing’ than ‘telling’. Jesus tells stories, like the parable we heard Ben read, and he invites us to see where we fit in the story. Who are we? Are we those who are ludicrously self-obsessed that the invitation to a banquet – yes, a banquet – means nothing? Or are we the people on the margins, not the folk you’d normally expect to be associated with God and religion, but to whom Jesus throws open the doors? Might there even be jazz musicians in the kingdom of God?
So at the end of this year’s festival, I thank God for the artists of all types who have both entertained us and also given us an illuminated commentary on life.
And I also commend to you the greatest Artist of them all, the One who invites us to improvise within his general script, the One who invites each of us to take a rôle in his story.
[1] This address owes much to two books: Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination and Steve Turner, Imagine: A Vision for Christians and the Arts.
[2] I found this story and quotation through Tools For Talks (subscription required).
