Music and Hospitality

Just got back in yesterday from two and a half weeks of traveling sharing songs and stories with my great friend and sister Katie Heckel. We had a wonderful time visiting with folks, making new friends, and singing and storytelling.

Katie is a great singer/songwriter and worship leader. I love to write and record with her. We finished a CD called "The Isaiah Project" to raise funds for Rafiki Orphanage which Katie supports. She'll be heading back there July 11th for a month of brainstorming and planning for future ministry. And I am hoping to get over there maybe next Summer to deepen my own participation.

Music has the potential to work best in small settings as a way to create room where participants can enter into the stories together through song and sharing. Something I've been thinking about more this past month as we were traveling is the idea of music as a form of hospitality. I am not terribly interested in 'making it' in the music industry or drawing big crowds. I am interested in connecting to personal stories and together with those people connecting (or re-membering) to God's Story.

Some of my favorite times of music sharing have been with less than ten people in someone's living room. The best large concerts I've been to were the ones that felt small in spite of their size.

If music can become a place where people can be welcomed to share their stories and where God himself meets us and integrates us into His Story, then we may have a real point of contact in the home to honor the dignity and 'common sense' of following Jesus as a thing accessible to everyone, not just the professionals.

One last story. I remember someone telling me about agrarian cultures where a family would spend their precious time, energy, and resources to farm the land, to cultivate nearly every aspect of their livelihood by pouring out their lives to put food on their table. So when the family would invite you to sit at their table they were really saying "Come take my very life into yourself. All this family's energy, time, sweat, and blood." The table was where you entered into the result of their life and joined yourself to them.

When Jesus hosts the last supper with his disciples, he lifts up the bread and cup as his very body and blood and invites them to take his own life down into the very core of themselves. In this way, they are being joined to the new covenant life, this transforming and fulfilling Kingdom life. The culmination of Jesus' labour is this act of invitation, of hospitality and incorporation of their lives into His great life, story, and work.

I pray that any music I make, and any time of music sharing might somehow incarnate again that act of divine hospitality. I pray that my whole life, in fact, would be an ongoing act of hospitality where Jesus' invitation to repentance and acceptance of his mighty acts of salvation would dwell and make a Living Room where the weary can find rest.

Duke Summer Institute pt 2: Lament

Ah, my dear angry Lord,
Since thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.

I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve;
And all my sour-sweet days
I will lament and love.

-Bitter-sweet by George Herbert

This afternoon I let my own face carry the wet and the salt of lament till it made little red roads down from my eyes and spread across my lips and salted my tongue. I watched a middle-aged Sudanese priest put his face to the floor in tears while praying for the middle east, where Muslims, like those persecuting Christians in his homeland, live apart from the peace of Jesus Christ.

I sat amazed at the table with two African American women as they listened to Bob Dylan sing about Medgar Evers' killer and the senseless murder of Hattie Carol. There is pain that doesn't fit my understanding, or my manageable categorizing. I am convicted by the words of Dylan that I have "philosophized disgrace". There is a time for tears.

Phileena Heuertz, from Word Made Flesh, told of what she has been learning among the poorest of the poor around the world. That God is breaking her from her habit of wishing to fix people. Instead, like Jesus, she is learning to enter into brokenness and lament in order to love. We go with the broken, ourselves broken. Like Psalm 126 says, we

go out weeping,
carrying seed to sow,
and return with songs of joy,
carrying sheaves with us.

I saw paintings, heard poems, listened to songs all created from places of deep grief and lament today. All exhaled into stunned and somehow hideously happy societies, laments carrying seeds to sow. I say 'hideously happy' because when there was hurt that needed to be grieved or suffering that needed to met... the gravesites were paved over and an amusement park built on top. The word 'hide' is in hideous. Jeremiah speaks:

They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. 'Peace, peace,' they say, when there is no peace.

Jesus entered into our brokenness, he wept, he bled. He did not ignore or belittle. Jesus is not embarrassed.

Let's not be afraid to let our hearts break. To call evil what it is, to name the pain. May our tears be seeds sown in the tired, trampled ground. And when the weeping is done, Oh Lord, when the fallow-rest has been enough, let the ground birth laughter - Light and Breath playing through the leaves of the Tree of Life.

Duke Summer Institute pt 1

I left Oxford Sunday night and drove till about 3am. I slept for a few hours in my car and then finished out the trip on Monday, arriving at Duke University around 4pm. I was tired from the driving but today was so full that I've barely had time to be attend to the weariness. I also drank coffee.

This week is all about the ministry of reconciliation that has been given to us from God (see 2 Corinthians 4 & 5). In morning worship the speaker made the observation that the scriptures say that "God made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him".

It doesn't say " so that we might proclaim the righteousness of God" or "so that we might know the righteousness of God" or "so that we might have..." It says, "so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him".

We become, we embody, we incarnate His righteousness in this world. We are a new creation. And we carry on his mission of calling people back into peaceful union with God through Jesus Christ.

Later in the day, I attended our small group discussion for this week, which is led by Malcolm Guite. He is an Anglican priest, poet, and singer/songwriter. The track I'm in is called, "The Shaping Spirit of Imagination; the Arts and Reconciliation." It was fantastic. I can't wait to get back there tomorrow for more!

Malcolm is wonderful. I've already enjoyed one book of his poems called "Saying the Names" which I stole from the coffee table of Abbye and Jeff Pates several months ago. I'm sure that by the end of this week I will be frustrated to have left with as small of an encounter with him as I will have had.

One point that stood out from the small group time was (and I'm pulling just one little thing among so many wonderful things) the need for 'making' over and against 'un-making'. Malcolm told us of a book written about Amnesty International's archives. A book about the de-humanizing effects of torture on both the victims and the perpetrators. The torture was enacted to 'un-make' the victim's humanity, and in various ways the work of evil in this world is to unmake what God has made and called good. To pervert. To mar. The redemptive work of God is remaking, making new.

Our call is to creatively re-invest in the world so that people who have been un-made by evil can be re-made by the creative, dignity-restoring, love of Jesus. In fact, Jesus came to us as a human to restore us to humanness. Sin un-makes humanity. God re-makes humanity. Jesus shows us what it looks like to be human again.

And there are many many other things I'd like to write, instead I'll wait and sit on your couch or at your table. I'll hopefully be near enough to speak quietly, to hear what you aren't saying, and to wonder with you why sighs given in trust and oceans lulling against sand-shores seem to come from the same depths, both oceans, both mysteries, both attended by the Spirit of the God of new birth.