bleeding out loud

As Aaron describes it, the idea for a new liturgy was birthed at the end of a really bad day. It grew out of the need to be pastored in the midst of a dark moment. And it has done just that in our home. Here’s what I mean.

Lately, things have been very hard in our house. In September, our five year old started kindergarten; five days a week, all day long. She’s pretty exhausted by the whole thing and has become an innovator at being cranky. Meanwhile, our two year old has recently begun testing us. All that talk about being great parents, forget it. Most of the time, we’re just trying to make it through the day. Loving your kids well is not easy.

Then a few months ago, Trisha sent me an email on a Wednesday afternoon. The kids had put her over the edge, and she didn’t know how much more she could take. Would I please pray for her? When I got home, I could see why. The oldest was arguing while the youngest had attached herself like a koala bear to Trisha’s ankle, whining louder and louder to keep pace with the escalating volume of the argument. Dinner was boiling over on the stove. I needed to create a diversion.

“Girls, come here I want to show you something that I got today.” I went over and sat on the kitchen floor and pulled out my laptop.

“What is it?” our five year old asked?

“Music,” I said. “My friend Aaron gave me this new music that he wrote. You might recognize it. We sing some of these songs at church.” I hit play. By now, the two year old had released Trisha’s leg from her kung fu grip and had joined us at the foot of the stove.

Soon the music was building, and it had a driving beat with big bass drums thumping. Boom, boom, boom. They both started bouncing and giggling, and I got them playing air drums. We were keeping the beat and they started trying to dance in place while keeping the air drums going. The chorus started through the second time and I tried to get them to sing the words with me:

“Oh, you love your children. Love your children. Every daughter, every son. Oh, you love your children. All your children. Help us see you in each one.”

Then through the dancing chaos, I noticed that Trisha was kneeling down watching us from the other end of the room with tears in her eyes. “You love your children. All your children. Help us see you in each one.” It was one of those holy moments that you happen upon by accident in the most ordinary times and places. We hadn’t laughed and delighted in one another’s presence like that in a while.

In the span of a song we were apprehended by something beyond ourselves and became aware that the ground we were standing on, impatient and absent of grace as it seemed, was holy and full of God’s buoyant love.

First, a caveat. I don’t like the phrase Christian or church music. Labeling it Christian is to make a distinction between Christian/secular, and I think that’s unhelpful. Jay-Z has been prophetic for me. David Bazan has deepened my faith. Tom Waits has essentially physically assaulted me with truth. All truth is God’s truth, and anytime music is done well, I think there is something of God in it.

Sometimes a song becomes more than a song. It turns into a manifesto for an entirely new way of seeing and living in the world. It becomes the arms that hold you up in the midst of bad times. It’s the thing that gives you the words or the prayer that you couldn’t find or utter on your own. It becomes the driving, pulsating thing that pulls you out of depression or complacency and plants joy down deep in your bones. My friend Troy got married a few weeks ago, and his 80′s cover band Pleasure Towne did the reception. It was so stunningly joyous. Everyone was on the dance floor singing themselves hoarse and dancing. My wife broke a sweat. My wife. I had to run to the store the next morning and could still feel the bounce in my step and the joy reverberating in my chest cavity.

So this year I’ve come across some musicians who’ve made music for the Church that has me believing again that it’s possible the Church could be the first place in town people would look to find music like that.

My friend Aaron Niequist immediately comes to mind. He’s been working this year on what he calls A New Liturgy. The video below describes some of the angst that I think a lot of people feel about music for the Church. So Aaron has been collaborating with friends, creating these liturgical musical sets around themes like the Love of God or Blessed to be a Blessing. The music weaves in and out of prayers and readings and spoken word. I find myself saying to everyone, “I’ve got this friend, you’ve got to hear what he’s doing.”

There’s also The Brilliance. Someone gave me their self titled cd, and I put it in while my wife and I were working around the house. It wasn’t long before we were standing in front of the ipod station just kind of looking at the floor. “Are you hearing this?” My wife asked. They’re singing the prayers of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Patrick with a string quartet. It’s gorgeous music, but the words are rooted and feel fresh in a way that makes you think, “Man, that’s my life.” Their most recent cd is an Advent Volume with some really compelling songs on light and a great song about Mary.

Crystal Davy is a musician from Lincoln Nebraska that I’ve had the privilege of getting to know over the last year. She’s a mother of two, and she’s got soul and some serious pipes. I remember walking into the shed at Mars Hill on a Sunday morning during rehearsal and thinking, “What is that sound?” Nobody in the building could seem to get ready for the service because they just stood there listening, transfixed. She and her band did a version of Pierce Pettis’ That Kind of Love that was really powerful. Crystal recently released a cd, Immigrants and Strangers, and the first song, The Length of It, is like a prayer from a parent to a child about making it in a broken world. Here’s a clip of another song on her album.

Brie Stoner is a Grand Rapidian who makes really beautiful music. She recently wrote a song called Spirit Speak that I’ll listen to several times in a week. It’s based on the passage in the Bible that says the Spirit groans in prayer on our behalf. As such the chorus’ are wordless. Here’s a rough demo of the song.

Spirit Speak

Ken and Wendy Kebrdle and their daughter Madi live in an RV.
On purpose.

I met them last year at Church of Hope in Ocala, Florida. Pastor Mark Cummins was giving me a quick tour of the church. “This family back here,” he said pointing to an RV parked in the rear lot, “they live in that RV and drive around the Southern U.S. serving the homeless.”

My first thought was, “They live in an RV? With a teenager?” Back in 2009, the Kebrdle’s were doing their best to get by just like any of us. That’s when something hit them.

“Our family was living this lifestyle. Always trying to upgrade our things; car, furniture, landscaping, etc. We found that we were spending 60 hours a week in an office, 30 hours a week maintaining (cleaning the pool and house, mowing, weeding, trimming, fixing up, re-arranging, decorating, and entertaining), blah, blah, blah….

Is this the life that God intended for us? There are only 168 hours in a week. Were we really supposed to be spending over half our week working to maintain this lifestyle? The “quality time” we spent with our kids was usually while we worked in the yard or did other chores together. And whatever we had left, that tiny bit of energy at the end of the week, we would give to God on Sunday morning. Woo-hoo. How could we possibly sing those hymns on Sunday morning: “Here am I, all for Thee, take my life, it’s all for Thee?” We were giving the Lord our leftovers. He is worthy of all our first and best! In November of 2009 we sold everything and moved into an RV, our ministry command post. This lifestyle change enables us to move and serve at His will. Now, without the distractions of maintaining that suburban lifestyle we now find time to hit the streets and serve wherever needed. We work food pantries, clothing distribution, interfaith kitchens, International missions, child care facilities, nursing homes and with local groups to better serve their communities.”

In addition to driving around serving in whatever way they can, the Kebrdle’s became Dignity Serves instructors. Dignity Serves is 6 week study aimed at helping churches understand the heart of service; seeing the inherent dignity in those they mean to help and then finding ways to encourage the servant in them rather than simply meeting needs.

For Ken, Wendy, and Madi, this is about way more than trying to “give back to the community.” This is about engaging people in meaningful relationships where they’re at and reminding them that something good already exists: Them. A person’s goodness might get buried beneath years of bad choices or addictions, but the beauty and the dignity are there waiting to be called out. In other words, things like poverty and homelessness aren’t just social problems. They’re identity problems, and not just for those living in poverty but also for those of us who live with the knowledge that there are others living in poverty.

What the Kebrdle’s are doing is more than just an interesting social experiment. They’re embodying a sub-version of the American dream. One of my favorite writers and theologians is a guy named Walter Brueggemann. In his book Deep Memory, Exuberant Hope he describes this “sub-version of reality (as) an alternative version of reality that says another way of life in the world is not only possible but is peculiarly mandated and peculiarly valid.” Such a life “is a subversion because we must fly low, stay under the radar, and hope not to be detected too soon, a sub-version, because it does indeed intend to sub-vert the dominant version and to empower a community of sub-versives who are determined to practice their lives according to a different way of imagining.”

They are living a great story. A compelling story, and I’m inspired by the fact that Madi is a part of it. Imagine what she’s seen. Imagine what she’s had the privilege of being a part of. I have to believe that she possesses a wisdom and depth of knowledge and compassion that most adults don’t. We stereotype students and teens believing that they’re self interested and moody (thus my first thought when I say the Kebrdle RV). But Madi shatters that stereotype, and is a picture of possibility to her peers that the world can be imagined differently, that a better way is not only possible but necessary.

Here are a few short videos of folks Ken, Wendy, and Madi have had the chance to interact with. To learn more about the Kebrdle’s RV journey of awesomeness, visit their website Weargloves.org.

Having devoured Bazan’s “Curse Your Branches,” I couldn’t wait to get into his latest effort “Strange Negotiations.”

Here’s how new music works on me. I like most new music for 3-4 weeks. I listen to it like crazy and then forget about it for a few years. But every so often, I get some new music that I’m not sure about at first. I’m captivated by it, but I don’t listen to it much. It’s like there’s a sixth sense at work telling me, “I know you don’t particularly like this now, but trust this little intuition, there’s something big here and you need to keep working at it.” When I get that intuition, it usually means I’ve stumbled onto music that is about to blow my mind and change the way I see the world.

That is consistently the way I feel about David Bazan. Lyrics will get stuck in my head and fester for days at a time. The process I’ve just described happened to me this week with Bazan’s song “People.”

Check out these words:

“But now you’re selfish and mean, your eyes glued to a screen,
and what titillates you is depraved and obscene.
And I know that it’s dangerous to judge,
But you’ve got to find the truth and when you find that truth don’t budge,
until the truth you’ve found begins to change
And it does, I know, I know.

When you love the truth enough you start to tell it all the time.
When it gets you into trouble, you discover you don’t mind.
Cos’ if good is finally gonna trump then man you’ve gotta take stock
and you’ve gotta take your lumps or else they trickle down
into someone else’s cup below, you know.”

Here’s why I love this: When he sings, “I know that it’s dangerous to judge but you’ve got to find the truth and when you find that truth don’t budge,” I’m immediately turned off. Truth is one of those things that I don’t believe any of us ever gets the corner on fully and finally. We only ever see truth from our own unique perspective, as through a glass darkly. Which leads me to a second conviction which is that because we never have the corner on truth, we ought to hold to our interpretation of truth with loads of grace, generosity, and room for other perspectives. In other words, I notice that I care just as much about how someone holds to his or her truth as I do the content of that truth.

But what Bazan does in the next line is genius. He continues, “Until the truth you’ve found begins to change, and it does, I know, I know.”

I love this idea that truth moves on you. You can’t pin it down. At just the moment you think you’ve got it figured out, it surprises you and pushes you to imagine the world differently than you had until now. It goes to work on you. You’re not the one holding truth, truth is the one holding you.

A lot of people I know think of the Bible as containing truth, and the way they read it is as a book of truths to be wielded against the world. They look to the language of the Bible as “a hammer that shatters the rock” or as God’s words which are “sharper than a double edged sword.” And then they take these images farther and think of themselves as the hand holding the hammer of truth, or the hand wielding the sword of truth. But, the way I read it, the crippling brilliance of these metaphors is that the hammer shatters us, the sword pierces us and forever changes us. You’re not holding the truth, the truth is holding you.

Whenever I think of truth, I think of Pontius Pilate’s famous question from the Gospel of John, “What is truth?” It strikes me that Pilate isn’t asking about the truth of Jesus’ situation and the crimes he was being accused of. It seems like he’s asking about truth in a cosmic sense. The truth. What is it?

One of the troubles with reading the Bible is that we don’t often do justice to the silences. We skip from one verse right to the next without entering the spaces between the words and entering into the drama of what must have been going on in those moments. In response to Pilate’s question Jesus doesn’t say a thing, and I think his silence is loud.

Frederick Buechner points out that we often speak as forcefully with our silence as we do with our words. Buechner interprets Jesus’ silence as an answer, as if he means to say, “You’re looking at truth. The truth, the cosmic, holding the world together truth that you’re looking for is a person, and you’re looking that person in the face.”

I’m not smart enough to wrestle through all the implications of truth being a person, but I gather that I’ve bet my life on the fact that it’s true, and that Jesus is that person. And Jesus keeps surprising me, but what surprises me most is that he didn’t defend himself. Jesus didn’t seem at all interested in being defended, and after he was dead and raised again, his followers didn’t seem all that interested in defending themselves either.

They “took stock.” They “took their lumps.” They “loved the truth enough that they told it all the time, and when it got them into trouble, they discovered they didn’t mind.” In fact, they rejoiced.

Lately I’ve been listening to David Bazan. As usual, I’m late to the party on his music which seems to be a mixture of a fairly ugly split with God and a desperate and deep search for truth.

In 2009, Bazan released Curse Your Branches with lines like these:

Wait just a minute, you expect me to believe
that all this misbehaving came from one enchanted tree?
And helpless to fight it, we should all be satisfied
with this magical explanation of why the living die,
and why it’s hard to be, hard to be,
hard to be a decent human being. (from Hard to Be)

or

Digging up the root of my confusion
If no one planted it, how does it grow?
Why are some hell bent upon there being an answer,
While some are quite content to answer “I don’t know?”
All fallen leaves should curse their branches
for not letting them decide where they should fall
And not letting them refuse to fall at all. (from Curse Your Branches)

or

God knows if you notice the millions of small holes
and ponder the weight of an apple compared to the trouble we’re in
then a grown man might be tempted to question his birthright
in front of his kids and devout wife causing the doubt to begin
to spread like original sin. (from Harmless Sparks)

or

When you set the table, when you chose the scale
Did you write a riddle that you knew they would fail
Did you make them tremble so they would tell the tale
Did you push us when we fell?
You knew what would happen and made us just the same
and you my Lord can take the blame.
(from When we Fell)

or

You used to sound like a prophet.
Everyone wanted to know, how you could tell the truth
without losing that soft glow.
But now you feel like a salesman closing another deal
Or some drunk ship captain raging after the white whale.
(from Lost my Shape)

or

When Job asked you the question you responded, “Who are you,
to challenge your creator?” Well if that one part is true
It makes you sound defensive, like you had not thought it thru
enough to have an answer, or you might have bit off more
than you could chew.
(from In Stitches)

Bazan knows his Bible, and this entire album makes me think of Jacob wrestling with God in Genesis 32. For some Christians, these lines feel like repeated blows to the head. It’s clear that Bazan is wrestling for his life in his search for truth. He’s got a chip on his shoulder, and he’s taking swings.

The thing is, most people I know can’t get enough of his music. People seem to resonate with the doubts and anger he’s voicing. In some ways I think Bazan is lamenting. He’s processing his anguish and anger out loud, and there is a long tradition of that within the Bible. I’m regularly disturbed by the absence of music that expresses the full range of human emotion in churches. The Psalms, the book of Job, the prophet Jeremiah, and the book of Lamentations all bear witness to the fact that naming, expressing, and addressing anger and anguish to God are part of the life of faith.

And while I don’t think Bazan’s laments are rooted in the trust that God is ultimately faithful, they are inspiring nevertheless. If we can stay open, they’ll lead us into the kinds of conversations that many of us wouldn’t ever let ourselves get into. They’ll help us find language to explore and express our own doubts and anger. They’ll help us learn the spiritual practice of asking and living our questions. They will “expand the realm of the talkaboutable,” as David Dark would say.

It’s in facing and naming our fears and doubts that we rob them of their power over us and help us to imagine the world anew. For example, I think Bazan’s song “Bearing Witness” is a more fitting description of Jesus’ Beatitudes than anything you’ll find in a Bible commentary.