“Between Saturday Night and Sunday Morning: God Redeeming”

A sermon by Lanny Peters

Pastor, Oakhurst Baptist Church, Decatur Georgia

First Sunday in Lent, February 13, 2005

Matthew 4: 1-11

In the summer of 1979, Karen and I drove some 3000 miles in our old Chevy Malibu pulling behind a U-haul trailer from Greenville, North Carolina to California. After sensing a call to go to seminary, I had taken the advice of my friend and mentor Bob Clyde to get out of the south and away from Southern Baptists. Berkeley, California was about as far away as you could get, if not in miles, certainly in mindset.

It was an exciting time, but it was also a bit scary, as neither of us had ever lived outside North Carolina. On one of our first nights, word spread around the campus of Pacific School of Religion that somebody named Jorge was having a party, everyone was invited and if you wanted to bring a gift, he loved Willie Nelson. We were intrigued enough to go and when we showed up at the party, a rather large Hispanic man was leading a conga line winding through his house with Willie Nelson blaring on the stereo. We were dragged into the dancing line of people a bit reluctantly like many of you when we “break up Christmas” at Oakhurst.) Well, it turned out to be one fun party with good food, lively conversation, and lots of laughter with Jorge setting the pace. When the Willie Nelson album finished playing, Jorge would yell, “Somebody turn that record over.” (You parents may have to explain to the I-pod generation how these ancient music machines worked.) When that side of the record finished playing, Jorge would yell from somewhere in the house, “Somebody turn that record over.” After a couple of hours of this people began to complain, but Jorge said, “It’s my birthday, so turn that record over.” By the end of the evening, we practically knew every song by heart. And a bunch of strangers were beginning to taste the sense of community we would come to enjoy. When Jorge went to open his presents, about 90% of what he received were copies of the same Willie Nelson album that was playing. Still, he opened every one and laughed each time as if it was a total surprise. At the end of the evening, most of us went home with a gift from Jorge- our very own copy of the album.      

Jorge would turn out to be one of my favorite folks on campus, but then a lot of other folks would come to feel that way also. He was funny, tender, open, honest and vulnerable. He was a person who was quick to offer affirmation and affection, argue passionately when he disagreed, get his feelings hurt, and forgive easily. He had a big appetite for life and the shadow side of that was an eating disorder that kept him extremely overweight. He was hospitalized with it during our second year. When we left Berkeley and last saw him, he was in recovery, had lost a lot of weight, and looked good.

So we were stunned about a year later when we got word from his wife and daughter that Jorge had died suddenly of a heart attack. It had been some weeks after his funeral when they had the strength to locate and tell some of his friends from out of town. We were living in Washington, D.C. and I sat for a long time in our little condo not knowing what to do with my grief. Then, instinctively, I put on the Willie Nelson album. When Karen came home and I told her the sad news, she joined me in listening to Willie Nelson’s Stardust album and sharing Jorge stories.

As we listened, we laughed and remembered Jorge leading us all in singing,

Grab your coat and get your hat
Leave your worry on the doorstep
Just direct your feet
To the sunny side of the street

Can't you hear a pitter pat
And that happy tune is your step
Life can be so sweet
On the sunny side of the street

I used to walk in the shade
With those blues on parade
But I'm not afraid
This rover crossed over

If I never have a cent
I'll be rich as Rockefeller
Gold dust at my feet
On the sunny side of the street.

“On the Sunny Side of the Street;” D. Fields/J. McHugh

We listened to another song and wept.

Oh it's a long, long while from May to December
But the days grow short when you reach September
When the autumn weather turns leaves to flame
One hasn't got time for the waiting game
Oh the days dwindle down to a precious few
September November and these few precious days I'll spend with you
These precious days I'll spend with you
Oh the days dwindle down to a precious few
September November and these few precious days I'll spend with you. These precious days I'll spend with you.

“September Song;” M. Anderson/ K. Weill

I wrote Jorge’s wife and daughter and told them about this funeral we had for Jorge, and it meant a lot to them. This past week at the Ash Wednesday service we received the sign of ashes on our forehead with the words, “Remember that you are dust and to dust you will return.” Lent is a time that we are invited to remember our own mortality not to be morbid but to invite us to a season of repentance and change. The purpose, as Jesus said, is that we “might have life, and that abundantly.” Lent is a reminder to live each day as a precious day.

Here’s another Berkeley memory. Karen and I went to hear Joan Baez and friends in a concert in an outdoor stadium. It was called Bread and Roses and was a benefit for prisons to provide a few little extra niceties for people incarcerated, a special meal occasionally and flowers to brighten things up. It was a combination of fun songs, protest and civil rights movement songs, with an occasional gospel song thrown in. At one point as Joan Baez sang a quiet and touching song, a flock of birds flew over. To everyone’s surprise, they then began circling the stadium, closer and closer to the stage. It was stunning as we listened and watched them almost as if they were in synch with the music, as if the birds were listening. When she finished the song, mysteriously they moved back into formation and flew away.

No one applauded as Joan Baez and the musicians on stage silently watched them fly away and the entire audience also sat in complete silence mesmerized. I can’t recall if she said it or I thought it afterwards, but it was as if the Holy Spirit had descended upon us.  Lying on the floor grieving and listening to Willie Nelson was worship for us. A folk concert in a stadium remembering those in prison seemed blessed as worship as well.

I just finished reading and enjoying a book by Emily and Don Saliers called, A Song to Live, a Life to Sing: Reflections on Music as Spiritual Practice. Jossey Bass, 2005. Don is a professor of theology and worship at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University and organist for the community that worships at Cannon Chapel. Emily is a member of the folk rock duo known as the Indigo Girls. They are both long-time friends of Oakhurst; Don has played and spoken at our church on a number of special occasions. Emily once participated in a benefit concert for the Oakhurst Recovery Program organized by Sue Witty. The last time Emily was at Oakhurst was for Sarah Woolf’s memorial service on March 17, 2002. That day, she sang one of the songs the Indigo Girls sang for Sarah by her bedside not long before she died, a favorite of Sarah’s called “Southland in the Springtime.”

In their book, Emily recalls sitting in the front pew with Don and waiting to sing. “I really wondered how I would get through ‘Southland in the Springtime.’ Somehow I did… and with the song as a witness, we sang a loved one home.” (p.123) That service had all kinds of other music in it, such as Amy Greene and Katie Woolf singing, “I’ll Fly Away” to the final flute piece which was the piece Sarah played (successfully) for her Governor’s honors audition the last day she was able to stand. It serves as a fine example of a central question in the Saliers book, “What is secular and what is sacred?”

Don reflects:

(When helping religious communities think about music for worship) The first thing I often say is that music can evoke the divine and not necessarily mention God all the time. Not all music with religious import needs to be explicitly liturgical, that is, addressed to God. Of course, in worship the assembly prays and sings to God. At the same time, any music that explores human life in all its range of extremity and ordinariness can evoke the presence (or the absence) of God. Music that moves toward the good, the true, the just, and the beautiful often brings a sense of transcendence to hearers. The plain fact is that the church can often hide from God simply by uttering the words of unreflective piety. The appearance of religious words is no guarantee of authentic praise. Some nonchurch music that truly expresses the heart’s torment, the soul’s lament, or the ecstatic joy we experience within the beauty of creation may be more religious than hymns with poor theology sung without conviction.   (P. 165)

Emily reflects

What is secular, and what is sacred? Singing in church choirs as a very young girl, I was introduced to the woven harmonies and canons and counterpoints that directly influenced my folk music arrangements later on. The tremendous power and poetry of biblical images have landed comfortably in many an Indigo Girls song. I have felt the intensity of sacred music not only in the hallowed halls of church but also in the smoky bars of Atlanta, where all the “freaky people” (as musician Michael Franti says) gather night after night to sing together, prop each other up through tragedy and joy, and cry an implicit prayer with all their hearts. One place smells of incense and candles, the other of cigarette smoke and beer. I can’t say one experience is more deeply spiritual than the other.

Saturday night morphs into Sunday morning as I sit down with my father and talk about how those two days and two ways are not really so separate. We speak of how music can deepen human life beyond measure and bring us closer to the truth of what it means to be human and to the transcendent power of love beyond our understanding. Music, we keep saying, is some kind of mysterious mediator between us and the God we seek. (P. 4-5)

Don and Emily also have a helpful chapter on how music can divide us. At times, we experience that in this community. Even within the confines of what we would agree is religious music, old familiar hymns and new hymns often have a polarizing effect. Certainly, when we expand that conversation to include secular music it has the potential to get even touchier. Yet many of our hymns began as music outside the church. Don points out that, “There is a long history of putting sacred texts to popular non church melodies in order to speak to a wider audience. A good example is the tune of the Holy Week hymn, ‘O Sacred Head Now Wounded.’” Every year we at Oakhurst join millions of Christians singing this hymn harmonized by Bach and known as the “Passion Chorale.” But the tune originally was a love song with these words- “Confused are all my feelings. A tender maids the cause.” (P. 159)

Near the end of the book, Emily and Don conclude, “The two of us believe that if we practice attentiveness, with open ears and open hearts, we may hear the divine voice calling to us though music, on Saturday night as well as on Sunday morning.” (P. 180)

Something else they said stayed with me, “The more one sounds the depths of human experience, the more one finds the mystery of God unfolding.” (P. 16)

Which brings me to the scripture read just before I began: Matthew’s account of Jesus’ time in the wilderness. (4:1-11) This occurs immediately after Jesus’ baptism when “just as he came up out from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened up to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending on him like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

Here Matthew declares his belief in the divinity of Jesus. But no sooner than we hear those words, we are told then Jesus was led into the wilderness where he would spend forty days and nights alone without food. And amazingly, it was the very same spirit of God that had alighted on him after his baptism that led him into the wilderness.

Matthew wants us to see that Jesus was also fully human, experiencing the same hungers and temptations as well as the “Compulsive fear within our being which fuels our addiction for the world’s offer of power, riches, and prestige….In Matthew's gospel, Jesus refuses to step outside of the confines of humanity. No matter what good ends are dangled in front of him, he resists displays of might, choosing to draw people to him by remaining faithful to his full identification with us.”  (Wendy Miller)

Through Jesus, God will plumb the depths of what it means to be human, forever bridging the secular and sacred, the profane and the holy, Saturday night, and Sunday morning, life and even death. Jesus will be God’s beloved son, fully divine, and will also be fully human, a mystery the church can proclaim though not fully explain.

So I invite you on our Lenten journey this year to join me in exploring how God can use most any human medium to speak truth and deepen our spiritual journey with God. I am having a delightful conversation with my son Thomas about rap music, a lot of which I find offensive. From his vast collection of rap music, he made me a CD of rap songs that raise spiritual issues. So this week I have also been listening to 2 Pac and Scarface and Field Mob and Pastor Troy and “tear de club up thugs” rap about such things as “Jesus Walks” and  “Faith” and “Only God” and “What you Gonna do when God calls Time Out,” and “Heaven” and “Make your Peace.”

I was amused to see that Don and Emily have had conversations about their different views on rap music, which Emily says, “provide some of the deepest insights into the social realities of black urban life, with all its beauty, pain, and hardship.” (P. 104)

They mention a center called Appalshop in Kentucky “which is developing a program called from the ‘Holler to the Hood.’ Working with poets and musicians, some of which are in prison, to bring hip-hop and Appalachian artists together to write music. This seems to be one of those places where true understanding of one another’s culture does open up, as wildly different communities of musician begin to create new and challenging song. Anything is possible when people come together with open minds, to listen and grow by taking in the cultures other than their won. Music offers access to these precious things When shared is such a way, rather than causing a battle, music makes possible an opening up of identity.” (p. 104)

I invite you to join me this Lent in exploring the link between the secular and sacred, the profane and the holy, Saturday night, and Sunday morning, life and death. Ponder the season of Lent and its invitation to enter a wilderness time where we strip away the trappings in order to get to what it means to be truly human and God’s beloved as well.

Read the lectionary texts and meditate upon them, perhaps in the way of lectio divina that we practiced a couple of weeks ago on Covenant Sunday. Perhaps a poem of your own or another might come to mind. A scene recalled from a movie might illuminate the text. Create a dance. Use them for your own personal reflection or share them with me for possible use in worship. We may not be able to use all of this in one season but it could provide seeds for months to come.

And remember: “The more one sounds the depths of human experience, the more one finds the mystery of God unfolding.”

The hymn we are about to sing, “How Can I Keep From Singing,” is one that bridges the secular sacred gap. It was published in 1869 and attributed to Robert Lowry but some of the words may have come from other nineteenth century poets. This version has a third stanza written by Doris Plenn in the1950’s when her friends were imprisoned during the McCarthy era. Pete Seeger used to sing it in his concerts. I would like it sung at my funeral to help sing me home. That and something by Judy Collins, perhaps “Who Knows Where the Time Goes.”