When the Music Stops/Starts
Photo by David Beale on Unsplash
As I write this, we are through the days of Advent and near the end of the Church’s short Christmas season. In these days, I have been pondering an irony that is quite clear in front of us. The Advent season is overrun with familiar Christmas music. The stores and malls can hardly wait for Thanksgiving to be over in order to begin a sustained offer of familiar carols, reckoning they are good for business; they make people feel generous! And then, at the end of Christmas Day, the Christmas music stops abruptly on the radio stations in Cincinnati and Traverse City to which I listen. We return to “normal” programming. By contrast, the church at its best holds off on Christmas music through Advent until Christmas Day. To be sure, we cheat a bit with early music programs plus a dearth of good Advent hymns. (How many times can we sing, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”?) It requires a brave pastor and/or a resolved choir master to hold back Christmas music through the Advent season.
The church begins its joyous singing on Christmas Day. We sing of the birth of the baby, of the song of the angels, of the visit of the shepherds, and eventually of the coming of the wise men. And once the church starts singing of Jesus, it does not stop. It sings through the season of Epiphany and his baptism, and then his life, his wonders, his suffering, and his execution at the hands of the Roman Empire. By the end of that Good Friday night, we have spent ourselves in singing as we arrive at grief for his death. And then, three days later, on Sunday morning, we take up the song again. We sing:
Lift high the cross, the love of Christ proclaim
till all the world adore his sacred name.
(“Lift High the Cross,” Glory to God, 826).
What had been a defeat by the power of death has become a way of mocking the futility of the empire in its inability to prevail over the power of God and God’s will for life. We sing in joy, in resolve, and in defiance. It turns out that our singing is nothing like the innocuous elevator music of carols in the commercial domain. We sing of nothing less than a counter-world over which God presides that is “at hand.” In the moment of such singing, we are prepared to relinquish the old world of fear and despair in order to receive his world of new gifts and possibilities. We sing in glad welcome, unlike the commercial world that is eager to return to business as usual. In our singing, there is no such return to the old world.
This odd irony between the singing of the world and the singing of the church set me to thinking about parallels in other parts of our practice when the church picks up after civic society has mostly had its say. In addition to music and singing, I could readily think of three other contrasts of the way of the church and the way of civic society.
- Consider neighborliness. At its best, civic neighborliness consists in respect and regard for the presence, rights, and needs of other people in the community. Neighborliness is an effort to reach across the chasms of money and power to affirm the legitimacy of those who are unlike us in appearance, or faith commitments, or economic capacity. To be sure, there are civic initiatives at such neighborliness; my impression, concerning my hometown, is that such welcome civic initiatives are, for the most part, propelled precisely by members of the civic community who are well grounded in faith traditions and commitments. That faith spills over into the public domain. Such initiatives in health, housing, and the elemental recognition of persons in need are no small matter and are to be vigorously affirmed. Such civic neighborliness, however, has important limitations precisely because the primary business of the civic community may be in monetary matters, and no amount of neighborly concern can be allowed to disrupt legitimate money-making processes and preoccupations.
By way of contrast, neighborliness in the church is not an add-on or incidental function. It is rather a defining feature of lively faith. Moses had already heard the commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18). Moses, moreover, finishes the Decalog with a three-fold accent on the neighbor:
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor (Exodus 20:17).
And Jesus reiterates the divine command from Moses (Mark 12:31). But Jesus goes farther in his parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). He was asked to identify “my neighbor.” In response, we get the parable. Jesus spells out the matter in narrative form so clearly that his questioner can draw the exact conclusion: the neighbor is “the one who showed him mercy” (v. 37). In the civic community, neighborliness is often formulated in a quid pro quo logic, so that there are limits to concern for the other. By contrast, under the rule of God, the imperative to “mercy” is without limit or condition. This neighborliness specifies giving one’s self for the sake of the other. It is running the risk of self-expenditure, so that the neighbor may heal and return to a full life. We may be glad for every trace of such neighborliness that occurs in the civic community. It is clear, nonetheless, that neighborliness in gospel horizon picks up just where civic neighborliness may end. It is for that reason that Jesus invested his energy and his authority exactly among those who were no longer “qualified” for life in the civic community:
Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them (Luke 7:22).
It is no wonder that in the next verse Jesus warns about being “scandalized” by his radical attention to the disqualified (v. 23). His practice of neighborliness defies every residue of quid pro quo leverage. As the church’s music starts when the music of civic society ends, so the church’s embrace of neighborliness picks up energy and momentum exactly where civic society may conclude that it has done more than enough for helpless, hopeless neighbors. Civic neighborliness can eventually conclude that some are hopeless disqualified persons who are not welcome in “our neighborhood.” Thus communities of wealth and privilege keep busy purging the disqualified from their neighborhoods and regard them as quite “dispensable” persons. Such communities come to regard such persons as unworthy, unacceptable risks to the well-being of a properly ordered community. How odd and how urgent to learn from the lips and gestures of Jesus that these “least” will be “first” in the new governance. The church meets regularly to remember what it has been taught, even when we are at regular risk of forgetting his instruction. The gospel, to the contrary, insists that such persons are full members of the community.
- Consider generosity. The civic community is capable of the practice of generosity. At Thanksgiving, we regularly contribute turkeys and baskets of food to those who lack such a bird. In the Christmas season, we make mighty gestures of generosity toward “the 100 neediest cases.” We may indeed legislate provisions for those without resources. But such generosity has its limits, and there is always an ongoing effort to impose “means tests” on needy people to make sure that nobody gets a free lunch. Such civic generosity tends to stop at the limit of what is convenient and respectable, with a keen eye of limit for the “undeserving.”
By contrast, generosity in the church at its best has no such limit. It has no such limit because we regularly confess that we ourselves are undeserving, and that the abundance of our own lives is given by the generous God who enacts wellbeing for the “just and the unjust.” The claim of gospel is that the abundance of God is not given on the basis of merit or qualification, but on the will of the gift-giver that there should be abundance for all creatures, including all of our brothers and sisters in the human community. The church is a body of practitioners of generosity that runs all the way from the ancient practice of alms to the more recent building of hospitals to leadership in public housing, to advocacy of health care for all. The generosity willed by God is reiterated by the human practice of generosity that knows greed and hoarding cannot add a day to our lives. Anxious accumulation adds nothing of lasting substance to our lives in a world governed by the goodness of God. Thus the church is summoned to generosity of a bottomless kind that picks up just when the interactive generosity of the civic community reaches its limit.
- Consider imagination, the capacity to entertain a world other than the one that is in front of us. It turns out that most of our imagination is well and fully contained within the dominant ideology of our culture. Thus in the United States, our imagination of the possible is contained in the limits and contours of capitalism. (In other cultures, it may be a different ideology.) As a consequence, our best hope and our most generous reasoning and planning are defined by the limits of capitalism, and our best efforts to “do good” are contained in the limits of our imagination. In the first volume of his mighty Church Dogmatics, Karl Barth boldly affirms to the contrary that we cannot in faith settle for what is “possible,” but we must begin with “reality” grounded in the character of God through whom all things are possible. Thus when the church can remember its true character, it is not finally determined by our notion of the possible, but by the abundant overflow of the goodness and generosity of God. Much of the church has become an exercise in “the possible.” But when the gospel is fully and faithfully proclaimed, we may break the limits of the possible through the power of hope and obedience.
Among the most electrifying instances of such generative imagination is the narrative of II Kings 6:8-24. The Syrian army has surrounded the home of Elisha who is seen as a great threat to Syrian power. The servant of Elisha—who sees with normal eyes and who responds with normal emotion—is frightened at the appearance of the Syrian army:
Alas, master! What shall we do? (v. 15)
Unperturbed in his inexplicable power, Elisha counters the fear of his servant. First he reassures the servant:
Do not be afraid, for there are more with us than there are with them (v. 16).
Then he prays that his servant may see reality to which he is blinded by his fear:
O Lord, please open his eyes that he may see (v. 17).
The servant has imagined quite normally. But now he discovers that reality is not limited to or bound by
Realpolitik. The narrative attests that with his emancipated imagination, reality turns out to be very different from what the servant had assumed.
Thus we may consider that on all counts, our faith is an invitation to run boldly beyond the perceptions and assumptions of our society:
Just when our civic music stops, the music of faith begins.
Just when calculated neighborliness reaches its limit, we are empowered to a more generous neighborliness.
Just when the bargaining generosity of society is spent, our generosity in the church breaks out in ways that the world can only regard as foolish.
Just when we reach the limit and capacity of our imagination, we are led by God’s generative Spirit to move beyond the possible to the real that is grounded in the unfettered capacity of God.
We in the church are bound together in our shared resolve to refuse the limits of the world because our lives are differently grounded. To be sure, we are too often seduced by the limits of the world. But we meet again, that is, regularly. And when we meet we often receive a world that shatters the boundaries and assumptions of the world around us. When we meet, we watch as the bread is broken and the wine poured out, and we are stunned, yet again, by the self-giving of God that has no limit but that spills in surplus offers of many baskets of bread for the world.
It turns out that our baptized lives are not grounded in or governed by the calculus of our society:
We do not stop singing when the civic music ends;
We do not stop loving our neighbors because we think our neighbors must fend for themselves;
We do not count on our own generosity just because in our weariness, we are wont to say, “enough already”;
We do not permit our imagination to be curbed or bounded by the scarcity of our fearful, greedy economy.
We refuse such characterizations. The reason we can sustain our emancipated imagination and refuse the limits imposed by our society is that we meet together regularly in the presence of the Holy One who breaks open our timid characterizations of reality. We listen as our certitudes are broken open by good news. We watch as the bread is broken and multiplied. We drink the wine of the coming kingdom and sign on, yet again, for a counter-world. It is in response to the cadences of our listening, eating, and drinking that we sing, always again in amazement:
Praise God from whom all blessing flow,
Praise him all creatures here below.
Praise him above, ye heavenly host;
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.
We sing in self-abandonment before the God of all blessing, and we do it in the rhetoric of the old “three-storied universe.” We appeal to such imagery only because we do not know a better way to portray our location in the realm of God. We imagine that in our singing we are joined by “all creatures here below,” that is, by all sorts and conditions of men and women, and by rabbits, and radishes, and alligators. We dare to think we are joined in singing by the “heavenly host” of angels, archangels, ministers, and messengers. It is an astonishing spectacle in which we join. All of us together sing; we sing together to the Father who presides, to the Son who saves, to the Spirit who emancipates. We pause over gender questions and then we voice our most treasured cadences. After all of that, however, we remain in the zone of the uncertain and the hidden. It is no wonder that our music never stops, as we do our best surrendering:
nor does our neighborliness ever stop;
nor does our generosity ever stop;
nor does our imagination ever wind down.
These habits never stop because we are enveloped in a goodness that defies all of our measurements and calculations. So we sing, and love and give and imagine in both gladness and in defiance.
