The Gospel According to Mick Jagger

The Gospel According to Mick Jagger—June 14, 2019

“Yes, and I will continue to rejoice, for I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my deliverance. It is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be put to shame in any way, but that by my speaking with all boldness, Christ will be exalted now as always in my body, whether by life or by death.” [Philippians 1:18b-20]
This is going to sound weird, but the Rolling Stones are teaching me about the Holy Spirit.

And Mick Jagger is teaching me about Christ’s way of giving us… enough—enough, even when it doesn’t look like what we wanted or predicted or imagined.

In fact, sometimes, even the most faithful, devout people of God, earnestly calling out to the Spirit of God for help don’t get the thing they were asking for—and yet, the Spirit is present and working nonetheless. Even in what looks like failure. Even in what looks like defeat.

These ancient words of Paul’s from his letter to the Philippians say as much—but it took me a while to let the unexpected wisdom from a track off of 1969’s Let It Bleed by the Rolling Stones for me to get what Paul was going through… and maybe what all of us go through, even when we are calling on the Spirit of God to act in the world.

But before we get to the Gospel according to Mick Jagger, let me back up. Several centuries before Paul’s lifetime, in fact, to a story in the book of Daniel. Somewhere along the way I bet you have heard the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace. The wicked (and also arrogant, pompous, and amoral) Babylonian king has a law that everyone must worship his golden statue, and those three good faithful Jewish young men refuse. The penalty is that they must be thrown into the fiery furnace—heated extra hot just for them—and presumably, they will be burnt to a crisp. But Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego say something striking in response to their sentence from the king. They say, “If our God whom we serve is able to deliver us, he will deliver us from out of the furnace of blazing fire and out of your hand, O king. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods and we will not worship the gold statue that you have set up.”

That’s a rather odd thing to say, isn’t it? It is a defiantly faithful statement: we trust in our God to deliver us… and even if he doesn’t deliver us by saving our lives the way we expect, we still won’t serve other gods! So there!

It’s a confidence that God will prove faithful, and then it comes with an expectation of what that will look like, followed at last by the assertion that even if we’re wrong about how God will turn out to be faithful, God will still prove trustworthy and strong to save in the end.

That’s the thing: sometimes we don’t know what God’s faithfulness will look like. We may have a picture of what we would like God to do in our situation—we may even say we are expectant. And sometimes our guess is right on the money. But sometimes God turns out to be faithful to us in a way we did not expect. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were expecting that God would prove faithful by preserving their lives through the fire, but they were also ready to accept the possibility that God might not do it that way, and that somehow God could still vindicate them even if they died in the fire (even if they wouldn’t have talked about that in terms of “going to heaven” the way we might).

Or in other words—and this is where the Rolling Stones come in—“you can’t always get what you want… but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.”

Not to be too glib about it, but this is very much Paul’s posture as he looks at his situation in prison. There are things he knows, things he hopes for, and things he still will know, even if the things he hopes for don’t happen the way he wants. He is confident—enough to “rejoice” and keep on rejoicing—that God will vindicate him. He says he is sure that by the prayers of his friends in Philippi and the “help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ,” his current predicament will all work out. At the time Paul wrote, he was under house arrest, with a Roman soldier keeping watch on him at all time, and he was awaiting trial before Caesar.

And—spoiler alert!—the best evidence we have historically, and from Paul’s letters, is that Paul was shortly afterward executed by the Empire for crimes against the state—for treason and sedition. In other words, it is most probable that Paul wasn’t delivered out of this difficult situation—at least, not in the sense of being release from prison and set free to live his life. That may have been what Paul wanted… but then things didn’t happen the way Paul had planned.

It’s a Shadrach moment—or, a Mick Jagger moment, if you like. Paul mostly likely didn’t get the outcome he wanted; but he is still convinced that the Spirit will give him what he needs. Paul knows deep in his bones that God is faithful, and God will not abandon him. Paul hopes that will mean that as he keeps witnessing for Christ, somehow that will lead to him being set free. But whether that freedom comes from a guard unlocking his jail cell and shooing him out the door, or from God’s resurrecting power to raise him up to eternal life even if he is executed, Paul is prepared for either possibility. And he is sure that God will be faithful, and that Christ will be exalted no matter what, either way, “whether by life or by death.”

Paul knows that he may not get what he wants, but he is confident that he will be given what he needs. You can hear the echoes of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in Paul’s words: if there’s any way for God to deliver us, God will deliver us. But even if he doesn’t do it the way everyone expects, and we still end up dying, we will still trust God to have an ace up the divine sleeve even then. That’s Paul—putting all his money on a God who always has an ace up the ol’ divine sleeve, even if Paul is expecting clubs and it turns out to be hearts.

And that’s really the Christian life. We can be confident… and humble… and confident again about how God will be at work in our lives. We can stake our lives on God’s strong love. No doubt about it. But we cannot pretend that means God owes it to us to do everything we wish God would do in our lives. God didn’t have to do things Paul’s way and spring him from prison—in fact, most likely, he didn’t get sprung from prison. And God is not obligated to find a way for me to make rent, or give me an A on a test when I didn’t study at all, or give me all green lights on the way to work, or cure the sickness the way I would like it to be cured. 

Look, here’s the deal: sometimes life doesn’t go according to Plan A. In fact, most of the time it doesn’t. We get to Plan B or C by breakfast, or even before you’re out of the shower. Sometimes the big life events don’t go the way we had planned for them to go. Sometimes we wish and hope and pray that X will happen, only for Y, Z, and Q to happen instead. Sometimes we can be sure that the thing we want and pray for is good and noble and pure, and we find ourselves mouthing Paul’s confidence: “I just know the Holy Spirit will come through for me on this one.”  Sometimes we share the Facebook meme that promises a financial miracle within 48 hours of posting... we pray all the prayers in the hymnal... we do all the right "religious" things... and still don't "get" the thing we were wishing for.

And the Spirit will come through… but in the Spirit’s way, not mine. Paul prayed to be delivered, and all signs suggest that he lost his trial and was put to death. And yet ahead of time Paul offered up the possibility that he could die… and yet, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, he would still trust in God to vindicate him over against the power of the empire. Sometimes in this life, we don’t get the thing we prayed for. It doesn’t mean we were praying wrong or that the Spirit failed; it means that even if “you can’t always get what you want… you just might find you get what you need.”

What God in Christ has committed himself to is to be faithful to me, to bring me through life and death in his strong grip no matter what, and to raise me up in some way or another. I am not promised that God will give me whatever I want. And neither are you.

But we are promised that we can confident—and even rejoice—that our faithful God, whose Spirit abides with us now, whether in this life or in the life to come, will give us what we need. That much we can be certain of—that much, we can be sure, will by the end of the story, be all right.

Lord Jesus, let us be confident in you today without putting our wish-lists in your mouth, and instead make us to trust that you will provide for us what we need, whether by life, or by death, or by your Easter surprise that waits through the other side of death.