I had my first “Oh my God, I just had a religious experience” experience while listening to Jazz. I was driving home a little too late from a friends house and I pulled out onto A1A in Cocoa Beach. I was the only one on the road. It was that kind of ride where you know that all you have to do is keep the car on the pavement. As long as you keep the wheels straight you can disappear. You can sink back into the machine and just be for a bit. We don’t get many moments like that here in Atlanta.
The boardwalk lights were dead. The port had shut down for the night, and the bars surrounding it were getting ready to turn off the neon. I was listening to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, not with any attention, until the first chords to Blue in Green started playing. I leaned back in my chair, and then sank into the dashboard lights, little blurs of orange and green letting me know that the one job I had was still being done. I suddenly felt cared for. Loved. Not like an immense ecstatic love, but like there was some cosmic presence drawing me from the periphery of existence into direct view. Like God was focusing in on me in my 92 Toyota Celica and saying, “Here’s looking at you, kid.”
It only lasted as long the time it takes to blow a note through a muted trumpet, but something was changed in me. Something was awakened, and I spent the rest of the ride home trying to figure out what it was.
I thought it had something to do with the song. After all, we all know that if Jesus listens to anything on his heavenly iPod its Miles Davis. I kept listening to Blue in Green, I kept trying to recreate that experience, and it wasn’t happening. I was convinced there was something about that combination of notes, that chord progression something in there triggered it. It had to have been the song.
I went to Barnes and Noble the next day. I was an aspiring Jazz guitarist at the time (something I have only barely held onto) and I could read the music well enough to get further in touch with whatever tonal concoction Mr. Davis wrote that so affected me. I bought a book that had the sheet music to the song, ran out to my car and opened it, furiously turning to Blue in Green. Furiously looking for the secret to my divine encounter the night before. I finally found the page, and it hit me like wall.
There were only two lines on the page. Only 12 bars of music and the skeleton of a melody.
I had no clue where to jump into it. I had no idea where to go from there. Blue in Green is a six-minute song, and this book was only giving me 12 bars that would fill half a minute at best if I took the song at tempo. I had no way in. There was too much improvisation, too much extemporaneous beauty. The text itself wasn’t going to be enough.
We can come to the Bible like this too. We have those texts that make us feel overjoyed to be worshiping such a loving, just and compassionate God. We have texts that sing to us off the page, and while we are encountering them we feel embraced in that all loving presence. Then we close our Bibles, go about our lives only to return, opening the text that gave us so much joy, and we see those 12 impenetrable bars staring us in the face. We have no way in.
The first 12 verses of Matthew’s 23 Chapter came to me like this, and not without good reason. These twelve verses we read today make the highlight reel of verses that have inspired virulent anti-semitism throughout Christian history. The make it far too easy for us to look at the “scribes and Pharisees” and write of the entirety of Judaism as legalistic hypocrisy. For much of our history this passage has caused Christians to look at Jewish prayer shawls and wrapping teffelim (the practice of binding passages of Torah to the arms and forehead) as clear signs that this nation of God had missed the boat, and we could supplant them and end their blatant hypocrisy in violent ways. Ways that made we Christians the hypocrites. For far too much of our history we proclaimed God’s unlimited love all the while proclaiming that the actions of a people deserved unlimited condemnation.
We have some confessing to do when we think about everything that this text carries with it. Especially when we as Christians take on many of the same behaviors condemned in the passage. It’s a laundry list of common practice. And it should give us pause. We have all heard stories of those unduly burdened in the pews as those placing the yoke walk away easy. We all know the crowds where the phrase “Good Christian Man, or Good Christian Woman” instantly grants one a place of honor, if not at the dinner table, then it at least privileges us over others who are conversely “good for nothing.” And there we find ourselves. There is nothing new under the sun.
So there it is. 12 verses hitting us like a wall. And, on the face of things, it seems like we’re lacking a way in.
The longer I looked at the Miles Davis piece, the more I listened to the recordings and fumbled my way through those 12 bars the more I realized what it took. I needed to improvise. The way to move past the limits of the page, the way to produce the sound that so moved me on that empty highway did not lie between the lines, it lay outside them.
It is precisely for this reason that I have come to cringe at the phrase “Bible-believing Christian.” We are not bound to a text; we are bound to the risen and living Lord. We come to this building and to this table encountering a God who was and is still with us. We encounter God in a very real way. A way that lets us improvise. We have 12 bars and a melody; It’s up to us to fill it out. To make it sing, to get it to the point that it connects with ourselves and those around us in a way that makes us sink into our seats and feel cared for, feel loved.
The life of faith is a life improvised.
This is not to say we don’t have roots. This is not to say that we can go anywhere with it. The blessing of the text is that we have the limits of a melody, we have a chord progression to follow, we have stories and sayings that we can connect to That we can use to guide and shape our lives together. It’s a blessing, but only if we treat it as such.
The Gospel reading for the day, this problematic, troubling passage, leaves us with one of the most beautiful lines in scripture. “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.” There comes a point in every musicians life where they realize that they are doing something that is entirely beyond them they break free from the page, and their fingers move, and they find themselves in the presence of a music that is more than ever could have been put to paper. This is holy improvisation. As we prepare ourselves to come to the table I pray that we would have that same experience, that we would kneel at the rail and find ourselves in the presence of something that is entirely beyond the text. This too, is a holy improvisation. This is the life of faith. Amen.
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