...If It Ain't Got That Swing--August 3, 2023

...If It Ain't Got That Swing--August 3, 2023

"For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything; the only thing that counts is faith working through love." [Galatians 5:6]

Maybe there was no other way to say it than Duke Ellington's:  it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.  

That song, now a standard of jazz and swing music, became both a hit and a classic, and you almost can't hear the words or tune without tapping along to the beat.  Ellington's song has "that swing," and of course as the words remind us, you can have everything else technically "correct" in a piece of music, but if it doesn't have the rhythm to move you along with it, it's sort of a waste.  Ellington once said that "swing" was "Harlem for rhythm," and you get the sense that he'd say you could compose a symphony with complexity and precision and still miss the point of everything if it didn't draw listeners into the sway of its pulse.  If your piece of music is just an academic exercise or maximally-marketable pop-culture confection but doesn't actually move people, well... as the lyric goes, "it don't mean a thing."  And even if that phrasing isn't the King's English, I suspect that you know exactly what Duke Ellington is trying to get across. Music that doesn't move you in its groove can feel like a homework assignment to listen to; music that swings has a way of pulling you into its motion.

I get the same vibe from Paul, honestly, when he talks about what really matters in our lives as the people of God.  After having spent an awful lot of his letter to the Galatians making the point that God was not interested in making people fit into neat little categories like "Jew" or "Gentile," "free" or "enslaved," or even "male and female," (check it out--that's literally right out of Galatians 3:28), Paul now gets to what really does matter to God.  "In Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncirmcumcision (the physical markers of being Jewish or Gentile) count for anything," he says.  And instead, "the only thing that counts is faith working through love."  Maybe if the apostle had sat in with Duke Ellington and company, he might have said, "I don't mean a thing if it ain't about faith energizing love." You get the same feel from Paul as from the jazz lyric: you can get all the externals technically right, and you can maybe even make yourself a religion that's popular and marketable--but if it isn't about faith embodied into love, "it don't mean a thing."

Church folk, to be sure, have historically had a way of majoring in minors and focusing on the stuff that ultimately "don't mean a thing."  We disagree about the color of the carpet in the new building project.  We complain when they try out a new hymnal.  We get upset over the right way to celebrate Communion--the moment in which the followers of Jesus should theoretically be most bound together in unity--and end up splitting ourselves up from one another over who's right and who's wrong. We can't even all agree on when to celebrate Easter, it turns out.  But throughout it all, the voice of the apostle keeps saying loud and clear, "If the things you're getting hung up on aren't ultimately about faith expressing itself in love, well, they don't mean a thing."  

I think we need that reminder, not just as a way to sift out what not to make a fuss about, and what to keep in focus, but also because Paul is telling us that faith is more than an idea in our heads and love is more than a feeling in our hearts.  It's easy to treat love as merely an amorphous feeling--just a vague niceness, or that feeling of butterflies in your stomach when the ones you love are in the room.  But because Paul keeps faith and love connected, almost like faith is the wind in the sails of love, there is direction and energy given to love.  And because for Christians that faith is always connected to the particularity of Jesus--the way he lives, the way he treats people, the things Jesus values, and the way Jesus overcomes death with resurrection life--our love as Christians is always more substantive than flighty feelings or ephemeral emotions.  Love that is informed (literally, "formed from the inside out") by faith in Jesus will always take shape in action, in a particular way of moving in the world--maybe, you could even say, echoing Jesus' cadence, or dancing in Jesus' kind of groove.  Christians, in other words, are not simply people who subscribe to certain facts about Jesus or God or heaven, but people whose trust in Jesus leads us to move like him in the world--that is, with his love... his grace... his swing.

Where our faith has stopped connecting to the ways we live and move and love in the world, maybe it's time to ask, "Does this mean anything anymore?" or at the very least, to ask ourselves, "What difference is this going to make in how I live and love others in this day?" And maybe where we start asking that again, we'll find a new energy in the course of our days--maybe even an unexpected swing we had been missing.

Lord Jesus, animate our actions into love that is formed by our faith in who you are.