Occasionally, someone (thanks, Mom) asks where to find it. So, here it is …

BACH, BUBBA, AND THE BLUES BROTHERS: THE SINGING SAVIOR’S MANY VOICES

Spend a few years leading music in a church or seminary setting, and you will eventually hear all of the following. I have.

“We’re going to do happening music in the 8:30 service, and if the geriatrics don’t like it, they can go to the 11:00 service.”

“To put it bluntly: Bach is simply better music, and if people can’t handle a superior aesthetic in worship, well, there are plenty of other churches in town.”

“I’m so glad this church doesn’t do all that boring music from the past. We’re singing ‘a new song.’ As for the old stuff, Jesus said: ‘Let the dead bury their own dead.’ End of discussion.”

“No way will we use so-called contemporary worship music in my church. Its roots are in rock ‘n roll, so it’s inevitably associated with the wrong kind of people. Using that music in church would suggest we approve of immoral lifestyles.”

“I guess I can stomach my church’s worship OK, but it’s really too tame for me. The ‘worldly’ music I listen to on the radio at least has intensity. It gets to your gut and fires your imagination. What we do in my church — you know — the hymns and stuff, is just too safe musically. It puts my spirit to sleep.”

“Well, everybody knows that music with the beat on 2 and 4 comes from Africa, which, unfortunately, is still steeped in primitive tribalism — the music carries overtones of Satan-worship and the occult. So, Christians have no business going near that stuff.”

“Thanks for the suggestion, Reg, but sorry, that song sounds too much like the 70s, and we’re a new millennium kind of church. Know what I mean?”

Call me Rodney King, but I continually ask myself, “Why can’t we all just get along?” In the Spring 1998 Reformed Quarterly, RTS/Orlando Professor Mike Glodo wrote eloquently of the beauty of the Singing Savior of Psalm 22, of the fact that Jesus sang once and for all Israel’s lament of abandonment (the first half of Psalm 22), so we could sing the victory chant of redemption (the second half of Psalm 22).

I, too, am captivated by the vision of Christ now leading worship in the church, fulfilling the promise of Psalm 22:22: “I will declare Your name to my brothers; in the midst of the assembly I will sing a hymn to you” (see Hebrews 2:12). Maybe it is simply because I know how hard it is for certain kinds of people to consider singing alongside certain other kinds of people, but I am especially taken with the fact that it is specifically “in the assembly” that the psalmist locates the Savior’s singing.

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WHOSE SONG SHOULD WE SING?

What stands out about the exaltation of the Singing Savior in the second half of Psalm 22 is the description of the “great assembly” (v. 25) in which the Former Sufferer sings His hymn to the God who answers His cry for help. Having once been surrounded in His agony by a band of evildoers, now the Singer is surrounded by both Jew (v. 23) and Gentile (v. 27), by both poor (v. 26) and rich (v. 29a), and by both generations past (v. 29b) and generations to come (vv. 30-31). In place of God’s abandonment is His renewed gaze and listening ear (v. 24), and in place of the scoffers and torturers is a vast and variegated assembly.

Isn’t it remarkable that this is the answer to Messiah’s loneliness on the cross? The promise of the Singing Savior’s reveling in the company of a naturally disparate but now gathered people is a large part of “the joy set before Him” and which enabled Him to endure the shame of the cross (Hebrews 12:2). “Descendants of Jacob glorify Him … All the families of the earth worship you” (Psalm 22:23b, 27b). “The afflicted poor eat and are satisfied…The rich ones of the earth will eat and worship” (vv. 26a, 29a). Because His death and resurrection, as William Billings penned, “burst the bonds of death,” Jesus’ community does not recognize the boundary of death itself. Jesus leads even the dead and the unborn in their worship of the Father:

All those who go down to the dust bow before Him,
Even he who cannot keep his soul alive.
A seed will serve Him;
It will be told to a coming generation.
They will come and declare His righteousness
To a people who will be born, that He has done this (vv. 29b-31).

The presence of so many different kinds of worshipers in the Singing Savior’s great assembly cannot help but raise pressing questions about what — or better, whose — aesthetic governs their worship.

When the descendants of Jacob/Israel join the Savior’s song and “glorify” God and express their “awe” of Him (v. 23), what musical language do they use? When “all the ends of the earth” and “all the families of the earth” hear in the Savior’s song a remembrance of the image they were made to bear (v. 27), and thus turn to the Lord, with what musical tongue do they worship?

When the poor who seek the Lord eat alongside the rich at the Lord’s table (vv. 26,29), with whose tongue do they offer their common praise and worship? And when those who have already gone to the dust bow before the One whose death has secured their resurrection (v. 29), do they sing the same song in the same way as the people who are yet to be born but who will nonetheless themselves hear of the accomplishment of the same righteousness for them (vv. 30-31)?

Let me suggest that every group brings its own voice, but no group brings the official voice. One Voice sings above them all, and this Voice sings in all their voices, excluding none. His singular voice is distributed among a plurality of people. Just because there are so many dimensions to His own being, the multiplicity of their voices amplifies His song.

WHAT SONGS DOES JESUS SING?

Jesus sings the Hebrew songs of covenant faithfulness, giving “the Israel of God” the right, at long last, to name the name latent in the old covenant’s psalms of anticipation. Jesus is the True Vine — that is to say, He is True Israel. It is His death for sin that Israel’s and Judah’s exiles had pictured.

It is His resurrection and ascension that their homecomings had forecast. The theme “from shame to glory” is not just the story of Psalm 22. It is the story of the Psalter itself, moving as it does from Book 1’s plaintive songs of David in the wilderness (Psalms 1-41) to Book 5’s songs celebrating in advance an ultimate and final Davidic rule, that of Messiah (Psalms 107-150). “From shame to glory” is Israel’s and Judah’s career because it is Jesus’ career.

That is why on a number of occasions New Testament writers can summarize the whole of the Old Testament story as a foreshadowing of the sufferings and resurrection of Messiah (Luke 24:27,44-47; Acts 26:22-23; 1 Peter 1:10-12). In the church, Jesus sings the sweet song of salvation, the song of God’s faithfulness to His promises to bring His people home by way of His own suffering for them.

Jesus also sings folk idioms from “all the families of the earth,” purging the idolatrous and focusing the yearning for redemption that shows up wherever the imago Dei bears the kiss of common grace. From the very start, Jesus’ ministry displayed an outwardboundness that was scandalous to His own kin. He had the nations in view from start to finish — that is who He is: God’s heart for all the families of the earth.

What I believe we have seen in twenty centuries of church music is Christ calling forth His song from every culture His gospel has touched. Even when believers attempt distinctly “Christian” music, their music invariably bears the marks of their social world, and indeed would be incomprehensible without those marks. Elizabeth I could mock “Geneva jigs” precisely because many of the psalm settings emanating from Calvin’s church sounded like the dance songs for which Continental European troubadours were famous. Jesus sings God’s covenantal faithfulness and the width of His mercy in as many musical dialects as there are peoples who embrace Him.

Jesus sings with the voice of the refined, the illuminati, the cultured — “the rich,” who tend to be the sponsors of any society’s “high art.” The very Logos of God and agent of creation, Jesus Himself vastly outstrips the most elegant, the most intellectually rigorous and challenging — and the most passionately romantic — aesthetic expressions of worship imaginable.

Jesus loves Bach’s music, of this I am certain. I am equally sure, however, that he finds Bach’s (and all his aesthetic kin’s) most elevated and demanding stuff to be but nursery tunes. I even suspect that he Himself prompts the children of Jubal (see Genesis 4:21), the mad geniuses outside the believing community — the Beethovens, the Wagners, the Mahlers, the Bernsteins — to push the musical frontiers further out so the church can follow and learn new textures, tone colors, rhythms, harmonic combinations, and melodic possibilities.

Jesus sings with all the grit and earthiness, with all the directness and rhythms of the “working poor” (this is how the Greek Old Testament translates Psalm 22:26). Though His lineage was royal, Jesus’ upbringing was anything but that. He grew up in Galilee, a region with, at least by the standards of the refined Jerusalem elite, an embarrassingly high “Bubba-factor.” He was raised in an artisan’s home, and His parables depicted God’s kingdom in terms that debtors, day laborers, fishermen, and prostitutes could follow. When His disciples became leaders of the Jerusalem church, they were treated as country bumpkins (Acts 4:13). Paul, though himself a man of some upbringing (Acts 21:39; 22:3,27,28), despised the social snobbery of the relatively affluent Corinthian church (1 Corinthians 1:26-29).

The hints the New Testament gives us of early Christians’ worship are not pretentious or ostentatious, or even artistically demanding. Musical historians, such as John S. Andrews in an article in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, suggest that early Christian music developed not from classical Greek music, but from more popular forms. It was poetic koine: “He was manifest in the flesh, vindicated in the Spirit, beheld by the angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory” (1 Timothy 3:16).

Most Christians that I know would probably think of themselves as musical “Bubbas,” of neither rarified tastes nor extraordinary ability. Know what? Jesus sings the simple songs — some of His best music is functional rather than pretty. It is enjoyed more from the inside than the outside, that is, in being done rather than in being listened to. And it points to God’s transcendence via simplicity rather than via complexity.

Jesus sings among the saints who have gone before, “the assembly of the first-born who are enrolled in heaven … and the spirits of just men made perfect” (Hebrews 12:23). His community is not limited by death, and neither is His song. The book of Revelation tells us that heaven’s current worship uses the same dynamic that we now know on earth. On the one hand, the martyrs cry out “How long, O Lord?” (Revelation 6:9-11), and on the other, they already (in my understanding) participate in “the first resurrection,” and rule and serve as priests alongside Christ during the present era of gospel victory (Revelation 20:4-6).

Some liturgies preserve the ancient prayer, “And so we join our voices … with all the company of heaven, who forever sing this hymn: Holy, holy, holy, God of power and might …” This expression of the living connection between the church in heaven and the church on earth is entirely correct. As G.K. Chesterton acutely observes, honoring tradition is how we give the dead their voice in our community. And that is important, because their voice is a part of Jesus’ voice.

Jesus sings among the yet-to-be born, those who will receive the word themselves, make it their own, give it their own voice, and then faithfully pass it to the generation following in their wake. In the 2nd century, an anonymous Roman Christian commended Jesus to a pagan friend named Diognetus. He told Diognetus that Jesus was “from of old,” but because He is alive now and is born in our hearts, He is also “forever young.”

In point of fact, Jesus came as the harbinger of a whole new creation. In His coming as the Second Adam — as the founder of a new human race — the future has invaded the present. Accordingly, Christ’s ongoing, eschatological presence in the church is necessarily fresh, intense, and unsettlingly forward-thrusting.

Every musical groove we establish is a potential rut. Every way of worshiping is a potential object of worship. And so every generation is like the Blues Brothers. Remember the movie? Jake and Elwood’s music was rooted in a heritage (soul music), but they were on a “mission from God” to save the orphanage in which they had been raised, that is, to take care of the next generation. In the process, they broke a lot of rules. Like them, we are called to do the best we can with the musical idioms we have inherited to help the next generation hear the Savior’s song and take up their own voice in response.

IT’S ABOUT HIS SONG, NOT OURS

When seen in the light of the person of Jesus, the church’s Lead Worshiper, our squabbles over how to do it right — which group’s aesthetic will be honored, and which group’s dishonored — take on their true measure: they are pathetically small-minded.

While we try to pare His song down to a manageable repertoire, He is expanding it. While we are doing market research to decide whom we want to reach and, therefore, to whose aesthetic tastes we want to pander, the Singing Savior is distributing His magnificent voice across an increasingly wide spectrum of musical idioms. While we are dividing congregations along age lines, He is blending the songs of generations and nations and families and tribes and tongues to make sweet harmony, precisely through the differences, to the Father.

The day has come for us to mute our provincial songs, and start listening for His voice, for it is “like the sound of many waters” (Revelation 1:15), as rich and complex as the constitution of His people.

Jesus’ voice is what counts, not ours. And His is the voice of the Jew and the Gentile, the poor and the rich, those who have already had their say and those who have not yet even come into being. There is a unity and diversity in the voices of His assembly which we may not be able to hold together on our own, but which the Risen Christ, because He is literally and vibrantly present among us, can.

This article originally appeared in the RTS Reformed Quarterly, Summer 1999

Well, no.

The perfect obedience Christ offered for us he offered because he was human. Jesus Christ came as the Last Adam, the “Son of God, the Son of Adam,” who undid in a wilderness and on a cross the harm done in a garden and by the eating of forbidden fruit (see 1 Corinthians 15:45; Romans 5:12-19; and Luke 3:38-4:13). To offer perfect obedience was why Jesus Christ had to be human.

My puzzlement at the potential ordinand’s stumbling over the necessity of our Savior’s divinity sent me back to Robert Webber’s cogent discussion of the incarnation in his Ancient Future Faith. Even as I write, my late-in-life friend battles terminal cancer, and I find myself especially prizing the economy with which he says profound things.

Webber notes that the early church settled on (or perhaps groped towards) two axioms:

One: “only God can save.” The other: “only that which God becomes is healed.”

The first axiom comes from Athanasius (d. 373). “Only God can save” explains our salvation from above. It is a response to those Christologies (e.g., Arianism) that would not allow the full divinity of our Savior. If God himself has not come for us, but merely (as in Arianism) has sent a sub-divine surrogate, then we do not have a champion adequate to the task. As Ezekiel had prophesied: “I myself will shepherd them” (Ezekiel 34:11). Or in Isaiah’s terms: “Behold, the Lord God will come with might, with his arm ruling for him … Like a shepherd he will tend his flock, in his arm he will gather the lambs…” (Isaiah 40:10-11). It was — and had to be — God himself who had taken our humanity to himself, sympathized with us, bled for us, and risen for us. It was the only way to break the yoke of Satan’s oppression, to unbend the warp that the Fall introduced into God’s good creation. The full reclamation of all that was lost in the Garden is guaranteed because, in Christ, God himself has taken the field.

The second axiom was pressed by the Cappadocian Fathers (Basil the Great and the two Gregories — all three younger contemporaries of Athanasius). “Only that which God becomes is healed” explains our salvation from below. It is a response to those Christologies that denied the full humanity of our Savior. If God hasn’t become completely one of us, then we are left not fully reclaimed, not fully redeemed. We needed one who was like us in all things “except sin.” Only such a one could be our High Priest. Only such a one could touch — and in touching, heal — that which is deeply broken and dead in us. So it really was — and really had to be — that it was as one of us that Jesus was born, lived, obeyed, suffered, died, and was raised. And it is as one who has united himself to us that he still intercedes at the right hand of the Father.

This Advent Season I give thanks for that great line of saints in the early church who — taking their bearings especially from John and Paul and the writer to the Hebrews — understood what was at stake in defending and articulating what Chesterton would eventually call “the romance of orthodoxy.”

This Advent Season I give thanks for Robert Webber and his winsome challenge to the postmodern church to reacquaint itself those early orthodox saints who had become so dear to him. If, despite our pleas to the contrary, the Lord should be pleased to add Bob to the great “cloud of witnesses,” we who still remain below can console ourselves in the knowledge that Bob will be in familiar company.

Finally, this Advent Season I give thanks for a fully incarnate Jesus — strong enough to save and near enough to heal.

So what happens is that we (hunting party of 3, plus 2 guys running the airboat) hit the water at 7:30 this past Tues. night … it doesn’t get dark till 8:30, when you can start hunting. I’m up front with my harpoon (think: Captain Ahab looking for Moby Dick).

The idea is to get a gator’s reflective eyes in a high powered spotlight, run up on him in the airboat as fast as you can before he can dive under, harpoon him, chase down the buoy connected to the rope connected to the harpoon tip in his back, then reel him in, dispatch him with a 45 caliber “bang stick,” pull him aboard, tape his mouth shut (“just in case”), and take care of his spinal nerve (at which point you assume he’s probably actually dead).

By 9:00, after about 5 or 6 unsuccessful runs, but increasingly good harpoon thrusts (it takes a while to realize you have to thrust the harpoon, not throw it), I’ve harpooned a 7-footer (good size for tasty meat). What a man-rush! Entirely primordial.

Now that my partner’s looking for his gator, I’m able to sit back and enjoy the ride, pretty much enamored with the notion of masculinity. You know: being a hunter-gatherer and all, which, of course, the theologian in me can’t help but put in terms of, “Here’s a whole new dimension of ‘taking dominion’ … this part of ‘bearing the image of God’ is pretty cool.” (Of course, as we all know, before the Fall, gators frolicked with dogs & children, and in the Peaceable Kingdom species-concord will return, “the gator will lie with the puppy.” Until then, though, we’ve got to do what we can to make the world safe for Fido and “the little ears” — not to mention for joggers).

Back to our gator tale. In such a state of mind, even the cigarette smoke and the “mf this” & “mf that” of Sean & Ray our, um, rustic airboat drivers seem right. Oh, yeah, there’s finally the conversation between Sean & Ray, on the one hand, and our threesome, on the other, during a lull:

SEAN or RAY: So what do you mf-ers do?

BUDDY 1: I’m a firefighter.

BUDDY 2: I edit TV shows about hunting & stuff.

SEAN or RAY: (to me): What about you?

BUDDY 1 or 2: Oh, well, he’s a musician & stuff.

ME: You don’t want to know what I do.

RAY: Really? What?

ME: I train people to minister the gospel.

(general pause)

SEAN: Well, I guess somebody has to.

(Murmers of general agreement, and finally, from somebody, “Let’s go find us one more gator.”)

By 11:00 my partner has his gator too (his is a 6-footer, which should be even tastier than mine … plus this gator has a beautifully mottled hide). By 11:30 we’re back at camp skinning them. Yeah, skinning them. Normally suburbanites will take their recently-deceased gators to a meat processing plant. But for my buddies (one of whom is a trapper, and both of whom hunt everything, all the time, together [seriously, their conversation is like the nonstop repartee between Raymond’s parents in “Everybody Loves Raymond” ... all I can do all night is offer marriage counseling]) … where was I? Oh yeah, but for my buddies, skinning is vital to the experience. We figure we have a good head for mounting out of mine, a really fine skin and head from the other, and some excellent meat to divide among us from both (jaw meat’s the best, then tail meat … leg & just-outside-the-chest-cavity meat is pretty much “grinder” stuff you’d make into jerky & stew).

By 3:30am we’re done … meat’s on ice, carcass has been returned to nature, my buddies are headed for the showers (they’re camping), and I’m headed home for a couple of hours of sleep. And at 8:00, I’m in class, which I survive with the aid of an “if anything doesn’t sound quite right today…” disclaimer. Decent nap in the afternoon, and since we bagged our limit on the first night, we don’t have to go out for a second. So I’m sound and mannishly contentedly asleep on the couch in front of the Little League World Series by 9:00pm.

It was a good day.

The predominant lesson is one I’ve ruminated about before: the “way” of submission I’ve seen in my Scottish-bred, Key West-born sensei. He doesn’t cut corners. He has given himself in humility to learn what his Japanese sensei wants him to know. He has no patience with “know it alls” and self-promoters. He’s learned a power of greatness that comes from taking the lowly path. For my son and me, what we learned from testing is something we already knew: testing isn’t the deal — making progress in the art of the sword is.

A second lesson has to do with the cumulative power of little acts of obedience when combined with a master teacher’s powers of observation and timely guidance. It has only been since the spring that the sword thing has become enjoyable. That’s because there have been several “breakthroughs” for me recently — that is, finally “getting it” about certain mechanics of the discipline.
What it’s taken to finally understand things I’d merely heard for months was a combination of my doing the best I could over and over and over again even though I was doing things wrong, and my sensei’s sensing the timely moment when an individualized word could be heard — that is, his recognizing “teachable moments”:

“Throw the tip of the sword as though you were casting a fishing rod, like this….”

“Keep the pad of your left palm on the sword all the time, like this ….”

“On the left-to-right side cut, keep the right wrist cocked, like this….”

At long last, when I do my forms, I don’t feel like a klutz, and when I approach a tatami to cut it, I expect to cut it cleanly and with an angle that’s at least close. I’ve had to do mongo-numerific repetitions, but sensei had to offer timely corrections, otherwise I’d still just be doing things wrong.

By my daily practice, I put myself in the line of fire for illumination. By his attentiveness, my sensei metes out his best instruction when it can be heard. The whole dynamic is, for me, a window into the way God relates to those he’s adopted into his family through Jesus.

Lectionary Devotions. Not unrelated to the above has been my use of the lectionary for personal devotions. For years I’ve done Bible reading on a “read through” basis, trying to get through the whole Bible in English every year and through the Greek NT once a year too. The latter’s been fairly consistent, the former pretty spotty.

A few months ago I changed over to following the Presbyterian Church (USA) lectionary, where the typical daily pattern is: a psalm or two, an Old Testament passage, a paragraph or so from a New Testament epistle, and a Gospel pericope. In recent years, I’ve picked up more friends from a liturgical tradition, and I’ve been intrigued, first, by how much more actual reading of Scripture there is in their Sunday worship services (a topic for another day!), and, second, by what an oddly satisfying thing it seems to be to them to be reading Scripture daily in concert with a vast number of fellow believers around the world. They seem to have a keener sense than I of being caught up in a shared story with a worldwide, heaven-and-earth-transcending communion.

At any rate, I’m giving myself to the daily lectionary readings for now. To facilitate that for myself and anybody else who cares to join in, I’ve posted an RSS link to the daily lectionary from my website (in the left hand column of this page).

A few observations.

Every day I have at least one psalm to meditate on (I usually use the chants from the Book of Common Worship). The psalms — especially as sung — sort of force a more personal engagement, and remind me that Scripture promotes doxology and authenticity. Lex canendi, lex credendi. Sing praise. Understanding will follow.

Old Testament stories come in smaller bits. Following the lectionary, I’ll read about half a chapter a day instead of, like, three chapters in the annual “read through” track. That means the stories unfold a bit more leisurely, suspense building from day to day. Tracking Samson’s sorry tale over the course of several days, for instance, is quite a different matter than running through it in a day. You come back to him each morning waiting for him to wake up from his spiritual stupor and ethical torpor — but he doesn’t, until his days on this earth are spent. You see yourself in a mirror, and you cry out, “Lord, have mercy!” The Old Testament has suddenly become more like what it actually is, the poignantly dramatic unfolding of God’s story of his reclamation of this out-of-control planet he nonetheless loves.

No matter what, in the lectionary you always end with a gospel reading — that means (like any good children’s sermon) you always end up with Jesus. In the Protestant tradition that has shaped me, we prize the epistles (especially Paul’s), where the implications of Jesus’s coming — his death, his resurrection, and his guidance via the Holy Spirit — are spelled out. But the actual person — the one Martin Kaehler liked to refer to as the “historic Christ” of the gospel accounts — can go relatively unattended in our tradition.

It takes far more intuition and imagination on your part and far more illumining work from the Holy Spirit’s side, to go daily to the gospel accounts and get your bearings from Jesus. Today, for instance, I was reminded that it isn’t in Scripture as such that “eternal life” resides (we’re a religion “of the book,” so to speak — but the book isn’t the religion); rather, “it is they (the Scriptures) that bear witness to me. And you aren’t willing to come to me to get that life” (John 5:39-40). I realize the gospel writers are no less mediators of the “actual Jesus” than are the epistle writers. Nonetheless, through them I’m being reminded more directly my Jesus’s meddlesomeness, not to mention his refusal to be refashioned in my likeness.

From our first class to the time we were allowed to handle sharp swords and cut tatami (reed floor mats rolled up, rubberbanded, and soaked), it was six months. Six months of tutelage in how to take a dull sword out of its sheath and put it back in without losing a finger. Six months of trying to do “forms” that require our bodies to move in stylized, ritualistic, awkwardly Japanese ways. And then another year before being deemed ready to try to earn our first rank. In all, eighteen months of waiting to do “the good stuff.”

Our sensei’s attitude? “We’re not interested in students of the sword who are not students of ‘the way.’” He’s made it clear that if you’re going to be exasperated at “a long obedience in the same direction,” you’d be better off elsewhere.

Really, though, it’s been remarkably easy to submit to a man who himself has submitted to another.

Our sword teacher doesn’t come by his finesse with the samurai sword any more naturally than my son and I do. We share our sensei’s Scottish descent, as well as his deference-deprived Florida upbringing. For heaven’s sake, our sword master hails from the Conch Republic (Key West, to non-Floridians), which makes my Miami Vice South Florida seem positively Stepfordesque.

But he recognized that when his (Japanese) sensei came into his life sixteen years ago, the man’s claims on him were total. The Japanese sensei knew everything, the American student knew nothing. As obvious as that was on the first day, now that the student has himself become a sensei, he believes and acts and teaches as though it were still true that he knows nothing. That’s why his teaching is so commanding, his bearing so arresting.

I ask myself, “Isn’t this the power of Another who taught “as with authority”? What penetrating insight into the true state of things there is in the first-century Roman centurion’s words, “I am not worthy to have you come under my roof. Only say the word and my servant will be healed. For I am a man under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to my slave, ‘Do this,’ and he does it” (Mt 8:8-9; see also Lk 7:6-8). This representative of an occupying power recognized that in this lowly rabbi he was dealing with Someone who himself had learned an obedience unto lordship.

A little while back — and well enough into our apprenticeship to appreciate what we were seeing — my son and I got to help out at a competition meet. There we watched various sensei and their students from all over the country. The difference between groups where teaching and learning had been done out of a posture of submission and those where “self” was in charge was palpable.

It was at that event that my sensei was promoted to some preposterously high rank in the Japanese version of our U.S. sword association. It was a big deal (though the ceremony was sort of hard to follow, since it was conducted, appropriately enough, in Japanese). During the proceedings, one of our senior students whispered to me: “You know what this means, don’t you? They now count him one of them — they consider him Japanese.”

Here’s to the day when everything about me breathes the atmosphere of the City of God. Here’s to the day when people will look at my life and see nothing but the Master who has mastered me. It all seems so far off — still, I count on the promise of the “Son who learned obedience through what he suffered, and being made perfect became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him” (Heb 5:8-9). And I’m grateful for such a vivid picture of that promise in as unexpected a place as a samurai sword class.

What I wish for each of those who come into the orb of my life and ministry, perhaps especially for those who come to my seminary to train to do ministry, is a “coming under” someone like my sensei. All these aspiring servants of that other Kingdom are as much citizens of our submission-bereft, obedience-challenged world as I am. What I covet for them is the chance to be shaped by the power of a self-abnegation like my sword master’s. Everybody could use a sensei.

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(This post first appeared at Common Grounds Online)

Recently and unexpectedly, God allowed me a special hearing of each of those voices.

• Bach’s Voice: The Gloriae Dei Cantores
• Bubba’s Voice: “Life is Like a Mountain Railroad”
• The Blues Brothers’ Voice: U2’s Vertigo Tour

A few Saturday nights ago, the Gloriae Dei Cantores, (GDC) offered a free concert at 1st Presbyterian Church in downtown Orlando (sponsored by United Arts of Central FL [UACFL], and others). The Gloriae Dei Cantores (= “Singers to the Glory of God”) are a splendid sacred music choir from Cape Cod, MA. High points of the GDC program were pieces by composers new to me: Samuel Adler’s “Psalm 146” (Oh, did Ps 146 dance!), Bruce Neswick’s “I Will Set His Dominion in the Sea” (powerful organ, soaring voices), and William Matthias’s suite Rex Gloriae (”Sing praise with joy, you mountains, for our Lord will come, and he will be merciful to his poor”).

In With One Voice, I write about the way “Bach’s voice” (classical music in service of Christ) promotes, what, in the spirit of Aristotle, I call “greatness of soul” and, in the spirit of Paul, “the weight of glory.” That night in Orlando , I heard Jesus singing “Bach’s voice” full-throated, and I felt greatness of soul.

That same night the Doobie Brothers were giving a free open air concert a couple of blocks away — there’s a sermon somewhere in that juxtaposition! I walked out of the building onto a street reverberating with the Doobie Brothers’ question: “Without love, where would you be right now?” Indeed, without the Savior’s love, where? And without brothers and sisters like the members of the Gloriae Dei Cantores, how could we hear his splendid song of love?

Not long after that, I took my 80 something year old mother to East Tennessee to visit my father’s burial site. Hosting us was my favorite cousin, Frank Kidd, retired educator and lover of Jesus. He was ebullient about his recent trek to Greenville , SC , for the Southern Gospel awards ceremony. I think our relationship went to a new plateau on this trip, because he played me two recordings of his all-time favorite hymn, “Life is like a mountain railroad, with an Engineer that’s brave” — one version by Patsy Cline, the other by Burl Ives. I had no idea this earthy sort of music touched my cousin’s spirit so. It was unimaginably endearing — his love for the song and for the way it made him love more earnestly the brave Engineer of his soul — well, it was irresistible. Jesus grew up in Palestine ‘s equivalent of East Tennessee . He was an artisan’s son who got dirt under his fingernails — and he’s not above the simplest of songs. I rejoiced to hear Him sing Bubba to my cousin’s soul.

And then, just to round out some sort of cosmic dance and thanks to my friend Greg Davis , I unexpectedly got to take in U2’s Vertigo Tour in Miami last week. A transcendent experience in many respects. Adam (bass) and Larry (drums) lay down such a solid, tight foundation — though he might never warm up to the idiom, Bach would appreciate the language. The Edge plays a lead/rhythm guitar that to me is the rock equivalent of Arvo Pärt’s chiming “tintinabulli” — ethereal and soul-piercing all at once.

Bono embodies his own musings about David being “the Elvis of the bible” [sic]: “unlike most rock stars, he had the humility of one who knew his gift worked harder than he ever would.”

F-bombs aside, here’s a voice that knows it’s been given a gift, and has accepted the gift as a stewardship and a call to service. So Bono’s not afraid to say thanks to folks “for standing in line, and giving us such a great life.” And rather than using his platform to glorify Ego or Bacchus, he calls a generation (actually, a couple of generations) to live for something more, and to unite around things that should concern people “in coliseums and churches — rock stars and preachers, right and left.”

Remarkably, “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” isn’t just Ireland ‘s song; in a world of suicide bombers, it’s America ‘s (and Iraq ‘s and Israel ‘s?) song. And with slave trafficking in Asia and AIDS in Africa, “Love and Peace or Else” and “Miss Sarajevo” aren’t just America ‘s songs, they’re the world’s. I wish churches — for Christ’s sake! — could tap into the eagerness U2 senses in their audience to have more than Ego or Bacchus to live for. Here’s Jesus’s Blues Brothers voice (popular music in the service of Christ) — music that’s rooted simultaneously in a larger, ancient story and in its own culture.

Yeah, OK, I was hoping for the concert to end with the prayer songs “Yahweh” and “40” (as happens often on the Vertigo tour, and as captured on the Chicago DVD). Still, when the band walked off after (a drop dead gorgeous acoustic version of) “Walk On” and “Bad,” leaving the crowd chanting “People got the power,” I still felt like I could hear “a real though far off song that hails a new creation.”

My whole life I’ve worked hard to avoid just such circumstances. The lowly place doesn’t become me. I don’t like feeling people are looking at me thinking, “Loser.” I’m a lot more comfortable in my own classroom where students ask me questions to which I generally have at least a half-educated guess. I don’t especially care to be on the other end of the learning curve: having to figure out if my next question is going be so inane as to get nothing but a shrug and a sigh in reply.

I realized how good the sword class is for me a couple of weeks ago, however. I was watching my seminary students do a footwashing service in a worship class. (Click here for a footwashing liturgy.) There’s just no slick way to wash somebody’s feet. It’s not even functional in our culture, especially when it’s been planned for, and everybody’s wearing clean socks! But even at this cultural remove, it’s easy to understand Peter’s incredulous protest: “Lord, you’re washing my feet?! … Never!!” There was something upside down about what Jesus was doing. And Peter instinctively felt ashamed to allow it to be done to him.

As John recounts the footwashing scene in the 13th chapter of his gospel, the scandal of the Bible’s lead storyline leaps off the page. The footwashing embodies the amazing parabola of redemption that Paul unforgettably narrates in his letter to the Philippians (ch. 2) —the pre-existing, majestic Son of God not only clothed himself with the fragility of our humanity, but endured the utter abasement of a Roman cross, only then to be raised to an even greater glory than was his in the first place. And all that for us.

It’s one thing, though, to see it on the page. Somehow we seem to have to go out of our way to get it pressed into our lives. That’s why footwashing is a good exercise. And that’s why I’ll keep letting my son keep me in a discipline that makes me look so bad.