Chuck Berry's Gospel--February 4, 2021

Chuck Berry's Gospel--February 4, 2021

"Do not let anyone disqualify you, insisting on self-abasement and worship of angels, dwelling on visions, puffed up without cause by a human way of thinking, and not holding fast to the head, from whom the whole body, nourished and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows with a growth that is from God." [Colossians 2:18-19]

A lot of my childhood was lived to the soundtrack of my father's car radio, such that whatever his FM dial was tuned to became the background music for my life.  And often, that meant rides in the car were accompanied by the local station that played the best of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, including a good dose of the Beatles and the Beach Boys, the Righteous Brothers, Sam Cooke, and of course Chuck Berry.

So I can't really remember a time in my life when I didn't know these lyrics:

"Just let me hear some of that rock-and-roll music, any old time you choose it
It's got a back-beat, you can't lose it, any old time you use it.
Gotta be rock-and-roll music, if you wanna dance with me."

That song, with the piano pounding in the background and the rhythm of the guitar, is ingrained in my memory.  Maybe yours, too. And if you found yourself tapping your feet and humming along, too, as you read those words, then you also know later in the song how Berry sings that he doesn't want his beloved rock music tainted with other styles--don't make it sound like a symphony, don't play a tango, don't make it into a congo, and so on.  None of those other kinds of music hold the clarity, the simplicity, of what Chuck Berry has in mind as rock-and-roll.  That blend of R&B and blues, the sound of drums, guitar, bass, and piano, the unpretentious 4/4 time and basic chord progressions, it's, well, it's invigorating.  You can dance to it--it moves you.  The smooth jazz in the dentist's office waiting room may calm you down before your check-up, and the mathematical intricacies of a Mozart sonata may impress you as you listen, but Chuck Berry's classic rock-and-roll sound has a way of just making you feel more alive, and of making you want to move to the beat.  He knew it--that's why he sang about it.

It's in that same vein that the letter to the Colossians talks about holding onto Christ, and disregarding anybody who insists on other spiritual-sounding things that just ain't Jesus.  You have to figure that the things the apostle mentions here: "self-abasement," "worship of angels," "dwelling on visions," and such, were live options back then--that there were other religious voices around focusing on those other things.  And the apostle just says, "No--those aren't Christ!  Just keep it simple, and keep it focused on Christ!"  Anything else turns the Good News into an exercise in jumping-through-religious-hoops.  You can almost hear the guitar and piano in the background, telling us that it's not the time for a tango or a symphony--we need the clarity of a simple tune with a backbeat you can't lose.  We need Christ--he's the one who gets us moving and brings us to life.

And honestly, that's just it: if our understanding of God requires us to beat ourselves up (whether physically or verbally) in order to get God's attention or appease an angry deity, that sure ain't Jesus.  And if our piety steers us away from Christ to some other pantheon of lesser beings (angels, saints, Big Names in Theology, or whatever), it's worth asking why we are letting ourselves get distracted from Christ himself, then.  Same thing with getting focused on people's visions, predictions, or prophecies--if it doesn't fit with the character of Christ, it's not worth centering your life on.  We have just come through a time when a surprising number of Respectable Religious Folks claimed to be giving prophecies and predictions about current events and how they would turn out, and when they didn't come true, doubled-down on being right in spite of reality rather than saying, "You know what?  I strayed from sticking with Christ--Christ won't let me down, but I got it wrong and I'm going to try to listen more closely to the way of Jesus himself, rather than what I want Jesus to be like."  Colossians has been telling us for a very long time to be skeptical of folks claiming to have a vision or a prediction from the Lord but who don't sound anything like the self-giving love and relentless goodness of Jesus.  It's not that God can't reach someone with a vision or that angels are bad--it's just that when we let anything other than Jesus himself take center stage in our hearts, we end up turning faith into religious-hoop-jumping.  And that just ain't rock-and-roll.

It's worth the time and effort periodically to check in with ourselves--or better yet, to open ourselves up to the insights of others we trust who can see in our blind-spots--for where we have let other things take center stage in our minds, especially when we don't realize that we have ended up conflating them with Jesus.  We do it with our politics all the time--letting some candidate or party co-opt our faith in Christ such that we can't see where they don't line up.  We do it with our money--assuming that Jesus wants me to be successful on the world's terms and therefore wants me to be rich and therefore is always in favor of anything that increases my profits and is opposed to anything that would decrease my disposable income.  We do it with our cultural likes, business interests, customs and traditions, our patriotism, and even our church traditions, too--letting things that may be all well and good in and of themselves take the central spot in our focus and attention, and then we start losing sight of where Jesus would have us go.  And when that happens, before long we've lost the back-beat and have stopped dancing.

Let's take this moment to look at ourselves, our priorities, our loves, and the things we allow to shape us--and to ask again whether Jesus is the one giving us a song to move our feet to.

Lord Jesus, be the melody that moves us--today and always.