Getting It

Getting It--September 13, 2017

And Jesus said, "Let anyone with ears to hear listen!" [Mark 4:9]

So the Beatles did something clever.

Well, they often did clever things musically.  I can remember sitting with my first guitar teacher, years and years ago, and I would bring him songs from the Fab Four's catalog and ask him to help me figure out the chords.  Sometimes, when he would be stumped for a moment with some strange musical move that Lennon and McCartney had made, he would realize what they had done, and just shake his head smiling and say, "Look what they did!" and then show me some unexpected chord progression or harmonic innovation that explained the song.

But in particular today as I write, I'm thinking about the clever thing the Beatles did on the song, "Paperback Writer."  (If you don't know it, go ahead now and Google it... I'll wait.)

So, toward the end of the song, when the final verse comes up, you'll hear a new line added above the melody--higher pitched and slower moving, like a descant.  And at first, maybe all you'll notice is that there is a new layer of music, this new voice, but it's not singing the same lyrics as the lead.  But then, you realize that the added line is actually singing the words and notes to "Frere Jacques," the children's song.  And then you realize that they built a whole pop song, one that went to Number 1 on the charts, not simply on the children's song we call, "Are You Sleeping?" but that it is almost entirely built melodically around a single chord--G major.

Well, now that I know to listen for "Frere Jacques" when the song "Paperback Writer" comes up on the radio, or on my Beatles' playlist, I can't not hear it.  It was there all along, and now I'm a bit sheepish to admit that it took me decades of listening before I ever realized it was there, but now I cannot not hear George Harrison and John Lennon singing, "Frere Jacques" there on the third verse.

Now, think for a moment with me about what had been happening for, oh, say, the first twenty years of my life, any time the Beatles' song was on and I didn't realize what was being sung.  It's not that the music was any different.  It's not that I had only ever heard some draft version of the song, some earlier mix without the extra vocals, until I was an adult.  And my ears were working fine all that time.  But there was a disconnect between the sound hitting my ears and my brain putting together what the notes and words were that I was hearing. There was a difference, you could say, between the passive act of hearing the music, and listening to understand and recognize what was happening within the music. 

Or, just to put it simply, I didn't get it.

Jesus makes the same distinction when he talks about hearing his own words.  It is possible for us to hear Jesus' words and not get it.  It is possible for us to hear a lifetime's worth of Bible verses, and still not get it.  It is possible to let the familiarity of Jesus' teachings and words and life pass over our ear drums and still not register with our actual lives.  It is possible to have heard individual sayings, or stories, or teachings of Jesus, and still to miss the simple structure they are all hung on, like G-major chord, even though it has been there all along, singing out to us from the pages of our Bibles.  It is terribly easy not to get it, despite the fact that we may think of ourselves as "experts" at this Christianity thing.

 

And to be honest, that is frightening to me.

That means that I could be confident that I am on board with Jesus' vision and way of life, that I could think I am totally in sync with the Reign of God that Jesus announces, simply because I know a lot of Bible verses, or maybe can even recite some from memory, but still not "get" what Jesus is really all about.  It is possible to have been hearing Jesus' words for a long, long time, but still not to hear that he and George Harrison have been singing "Frere Jacques" in the background.

Jesus' way of saying it is, "If you've got ears to hear, then how about actually listening?"

It is bitterly sad, for example, how often we religious folks--people who name the name of Jesus--all talk (or fuss and fume on social media) about how much we wish people would read the Bible more... but then we seem to miss how much the Bible has to say about caring for the poor, providing for those who are most vulnerable, and welcoming the stranger.  It's ironic and tragic, really, to see us church-going, Bible-carrying believers, lamenting how "some people" have taken the Bible out of the public square... when we have taken the Bible's clear call to love enemies out of our theology, or the Bible's clear teaching about the reckless, audacious grace of God... when we have found new and tragic ways of making God sound like a cosmic bean-counter who capriciously doles out lightning bolts to the people we would put on our personal "unacceptable" list.

All of that is to say, so often, Jesus has been singing "Frere Jacques" and we have missed so much of what was entering our ears but never registering in our hearts.  We have this way, don't we, of taming Jesus (whether we realize we are doing it or not is perhaps another question) by slowly dulling our ears to the things he says that we don't like.  We have a way of editing out, or not letting it register, when Jesus says things that scandalize us, or would overturn our cookie-cutter lifestyles, or would push us out of our comfort zones.  We have a way of hearing without listening, when Jesus says, "Take up your cross daily..." or "The last shall be first, and the first shall be last..." or "Do good to those who persecute you, because your Father in heaven is kind to the ungrateful and wicked."  And we certainly don't like the way Jesus unequivocally identifies himself with the prisoner and the alien in our midst; "I was hungry and you fed me..." maybe, "sick and you visited me..." sure, even "naked and you clothed me..." but we don't like the idea of Jesus pointing us to people we deem "unworthy" to find his own face there.

For that matter, we really really don't know what to do with Jesus' mother (something of an important figure, no matter what branch of the Christian family tree one belongs to) singing joyfully about how God "fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty."  That doesn't fit with our presumptions that God's "job" is to make me healthy and wealthy and happy, or with our way of equating poverty with moral failure.  We don't know what to do with an early church in Jerusalem that sold all their possessions freely and happily so that they could take care of people who didn't have anyone to provide for or protect them, because that sounds subversive and disruptive to our patterns of acquisition and avarice.  And we have no clue what to do with an ordinary Christian named Philip stopping the chariot to baptize a foreign eunuch headed the wrong direction and, without official proper church clearance or policy or council or decree, just acting like God's love really did include him, too... even when all the official religious rules on the books said he was unacceptable.

But Jesus sees all of these moments, along with his own announcement of God's Reign, as part of the same simple melody, riffing off of the same one harmony, and the same basic chord.  We have missed so much of these things, or decided to push them to the margins or the dusty recesses of our minds, because we didn't know what to do with them.  But Jesus has been singing it all along, this radical grace of God's Reign--and we just didn't realize it was there.

All of this is to say that there is a deeper, more basic, more elemental melody around which Jesus has built his whole message, and in fact the whole Reign of God, and we have a way of over-religifying it.  We have a way of turning Jesus into some kind of religious door-to-door salesman who offers a product called "Heaven" if we will only ascribe to the correct facts, hold the correct political party, and pray the correct prayer to make us respectable religious people on the Fast Track to glory... when in actuality, all of Jesus' talk of repenting, being born again, and believing in him are all caught up with his vision of a life lived in the radical, all-pervading mercy of God that includes strangers and aliens and prisoners and sick people and naked people and rich people and poor people and insiders and outsiders and people with 2.5 kids and people who will never have kids and everybody else.  The whole of Jesus' message has been composed around daring to believe that the universe was meant to be ordered around unending, unlimited, unconditional divine love... and we have missed that in and among all the other layers we have added, from candles and incense to jargon about "getting saved" or "finding Jesus" (like he was lost), to slick-haired TV Preachers promising the American dream in exchange for a simple initial offering, to political agendas that never seemed like they quite fit with Jesus' character or social company anyhow. 

It's like we have been listening to "Paperback Writer," and even if we can recite the lyrics, we have missed that the words and music and instrumentation have all been hung on a structure as elemental as a G-major chord and the children's nursery rhyme, "Frere Jacques."  We have this way of missing the beating heart of Jesus' message and movement because we can hear his words without listening to them as though they applied to us, too.

But notice that Jesus has not closed the door on us, dense and thick-headed hearers that we are.  Even though we have this way of secretly selecting out the things from Jesus' message that we like, or pretending we do not hear the parts that would force us to see our neighbors, strangers, and enemies differently, Jesus doesn't say the moment has passed.  He keeps making the invitation, "Let anyone with ears to hear... listen!" 

Let anyone who has been just letting the uncomfortable words go in one ear and out the other without landing in the head or heart, finally come around and get it.

Let anyone who has been missing the simplicity, the beauty, and the elegance of the Reign of God finally pause and hear what has been calling out to us from underneath verse numbers and chapter headings in the pages of our Bibles.

Let anyone dismayed by the sad disconnect between the life and way of Jesus and the bloated hypocrisy of so many of us who wear his name casually finally hear that part of the Gospel of grace is that Jesus even makes room for bloated hypocrites like me at his table.

It is all of one piece, the Message of Jesus, this Reign of God, this Movement of Mercy--it is all about the infinitely wide and unfathomably deep Love that runs the universe in the end. 

If we have missed that this is what it was all about, all along, this Love at the heart of all things, this Love in the beginning and end of creation, this Love that includes you in all of your you-ness and me in all of my me-ness and a whole world full of everybody else's (whether I approve of them or not), if we have missed that all of the universe is a song whose melody is composed around that G-major chord, well this is the moment to hear what has been singing out to us all along.

Let anyone with ears to hear... listen.

O, Lord Jesus, forgive our dull ears and keep singing out to us in all your surprising simplicity, so that we will listen and join in the song of your Mercy.