A Hit Off the New Album

A Hit Off the New Album--September 9, 2016

"Thus says the LORD, who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters, who brings out chariot and horse, army and warrior; they lie down, they cannot rise, they are extinguished, quenched like a wick: Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert." [Isaiah 43:16-19]

Look, I'll just level with you: there's only so many times I can stand to hear, "We Built This City on Rock and Roll" before my brain just shuts down.

A few years ago, just maybe four or five years actually, we went to go see the band Starship in concert.  Yes, the same band Starship of "We Built This City" fame, the same band that had at one point been Jefferson Starship, and before that had been Jefferson Airplane.  So the same band that has "White Rabbit" and "Somebody to Love" in its catalog, too, and which had gone through several name changes, member changes, and substitutions... as well as forty years of aging to vocal chords, was performing its greatest hits.

And sure, there's a certain nostalgia to hearing a classic hit from the 1970s played live in the room instead of through the crackle of your AM radio.  But there's also a certain... I don't know... sadness, I guess, to see the same old set of tunes milked for another round of applause.  As the old line from the Austin Powers movie goes, "There's nothing more pathetic than an aging hipster."  And so there is something a little disappointing in hearing "the band" who had those hits sing them again, but without many of the original singers, or without the range they used to have.  Somehow it makes the list of greatest hits less than great.

And yet, of course, if the concert that night had featured some no-name band that nobody had ever heard of, well, I doubt I would have gone at all, because I wouldn't have known what kind of music they would have played or if I would have liked them at all.  On the one hand, you want something more than just the same old songs trotted out with lower and lower quality as the years go by, and on the other hand, you want to hear someone whose sound you know, someone reliable whose tunes you know you can count on, even if it's one you've never heard of. This is, of course, part of what makes 'the greats' truly great--they could keep reinventing themselves without feeling like they had sold out, and you could count on them to do something that "fit" with who they always were, and yet blazed new trails, too.  That's part of what made, say, the Beatles amazing--they didn't just keep re-recording variations on "Love Me Do," because it had been a hit.  And yet, even when they would do something daring and new, you could hear the same counterpoint and harmony between John Lennon and Paul McCartney's voices and lyrical styles; you could always hear some clever bit of composition that pushed the music beyond three chords and a drum track. Miles Davis and John Coltrane were the same--always pushing in new directions rather than relying on nostalgia for just the old hits. You get the sense that Mozart was the same, or Beethoven: threads of continuity, but never just rehashing the same old stuff.

No disrespect to Jefferson Airplane--but when you hear the greatest of the great, you know you are going to be surprised with something new that still somehow fits with the music you have come to love.  Somehow there is something inside us that needs to be led into new directions without feeling like we don't know who is on the journey with us.

Maybe it sounds funny to say this, but God has had a long enough track record with us--and with the children of Israel before us--that there came to be a sort of worry with God at some points:  Was God just the source of legendary "greatest hits" from the distant past, like the parting of the Red Sea and the Passover?  Was God a one-hit wonder who never did anything to top the rescue from slavery in Egypt or the stone in David's sling that slayed Goliath?  There came a point in the life of the people in Israel--especially when they found themselves centuries later in exile under the rule of the authoritarian empire of Babylon and its obnoxious pompous blowhard of a king Nebuchadnezzar--when they started asking, "Is God just a memory of old stories and greatest hits from the past?"  And some even started to wonder if they could still call out on the faithful God they had always known, or if they should give in and put their hopes on the pantheon of the Babylonian gods.  And basically, the question was this: is the God of our ancestors--the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob--still alive and working and doing wonders with the same holy surprise and power as in the great moments of our past, or is God just trotting out the memory of the hits of an earlier era?

So God answers... with something off the new album.

God says, "I am doing a new thing--don't you perceive it yet?  Haven't you heard?"  And even though the words of Isaiah 43 insist that this is the same faithful God who had parted the sea and demolished Pharaoh's army in the distant past, the prophet also says that God has something new and wonderful up the old divine sleeve.  God is starting over with the people.  There is hope on the other side of exile, not just a sort of pathetic nostalgia for the good old days and the old hits.  And yet, the God who is singing a new song to them still has the chops and the voice that sound familiar to our listening hearts.  God is faithful and familiar, but heading into the new with us.

That is always how it is with the real and living God.  Of course, sometimes WE are the ones too afraid to venture a listen to a track of the new album, and sometimes WE are the ones who wistfully long for just a recitation of the old greatest hits.  We end up looking only backward. We end up wishing for some way to go "back" to how things "used to be," or criticizing everybody and everything around us for not being like "the good old days."  We end up trying in futility to make everything "go back to like it WAS," to make things as great as we remember them being, and we end up missing that the Spirit is singing a new tune, but in the same familiar voice as in all the times we have come through before.  But if we are going to hear that new tune, we are going to have to allow the possibility that the living God will say to us, "Do not remember the former things--I am doing a new thing now!" instead of getting out our lighters and jean jackets and asking to hear "We Built This City" for the eleventh time tonight.

Look, here's the lesson I have learned from Isaiah 43 and Jefferson Airplane/Starship: it is, at best, understandable but misguided to want to go back to whatever time period of the past had all the greatest hits in your memory.  And at worst, it is just pathetic and futile to want to recreate some vague sense of how things were "great" before and can be "great again." That doesn't mean there is not greatness ahead--but it does mean that the greatness is not within OUR power to rekindle by dusting off the old hits, but rather that God creates the new greatness by doing... well, new things.  It is always a bit scary to leave that in God's hands, and of course we would always rather hold onto control of what is coming in the future... and the only way we have to do that is to limit the playlist to the songs we already know, rather than risking letting our hearts listen and our eyes see what new thing our faithful God is doing.  But that's what God is offering: a new thing that will be more than just a traveling greatest hits album.

Today, know that the same God is at work singing a new song in your and my world, and in this day, the invitation is to let God sing a track off the new album.  What new tunes will captivate your heart on this day?  What new thing is God doing in your world today? Where will things start over in your world today?

Lord God, sing a new song to us, and let us see the new thing you are doing among us.