Chapter Twelve--Jazz
Chapter Twelve
Jazz
har·mo·ni·ous: suitable and fitting; existing together in correspondence with others
The bottom line: God calls us to the vertically interactive lifestyle of living in moment-by-moment harmony with him.
I will never forget that night. I had gone with my brother Tedd to the University of Toledo’s field hall to hear my first jazz concert. It was the Ramsey Lewis Trio. They were the hot jazz group of the moment. I simply was not prepared for what I was going to experience that night. Musically, that night changed my life!
The night started out with Ramsey Lewis on the piano, playing a song that was familiar to everyone in the audience. I must admit I was a bit disappointed. I had never heard the Ramsey Lewis Trio before, and Tedd had given them quite a buildup. We had paid a lot of money for the tickets.
As Ramsey Lewis was making his way through the first pass of this familiar tune, I kept thinking, This is it? This is what all that big buildup was about? I could have heard this on almost any local radio station! Then all of the sudden, as the trio launched into its second pass through the piece, something amazing happened. The three members of the group all seemed to move in a different direction. Although they were still playing the song, it didn’t sound like the song anymore. But it wasn’t dissonant, chaotic, or discordant; it worked! Somehow, even though they were each doing their own individual thing, they were playing together. It sounded amazing, fresh, and creative, but also harmonious.
You see, they hadn’t rebelled against or abandoned the song. They were committed to that unified theme, and that made the music work. There was something each of them was zealous to do, and that kept what they were playing from degenerating into individualistic musical chaos. Even though it looked like it, they were not doing their own thing. They were committed to playing jazz. And it was this commitment, which each of them applied to their instrument in a different way, that kept the music intricate and unpredictable, but beautiful at the same time. Jazz isn’t about completely trashing the rules and making up your own along the way. What makes great jazz work is that it is gloriously unpredictable and creative, while at the same time submitting itself to a set of rules.
There was a defined musical structure, a set of rules you might say, which each of the members of the trio was committed to play within. Though they were not following all of the markings on a sheet of music, they all stayed within the structure of the song (key signature, time signature, etc.), making their combined efforts unified and exhilarating. Yes, they were free to be creative, to wander, to make their own individual application of the structure to their particular instrument—as long as they stayed within the musical parameters of the song.
The night was a mind-expanding experience of the intersection of form and freedom. It was the most freeing, soaring, in-the-moment music I had ever experienced, because it submitted to a form that made it work. What I didn’t get that night and sadly discovered decades later, was that what I experienced in the field hall of the University of Toledo had everything to do with the kingdom of God.
The Musical Kingdom
God is the ultimate musician. His music transforms your life. The notes of redemption rearrange your heart and restore your life. His songs of forgiveness, grace, reconciliation, truth, hope, sovereignty, and love give you back your humanity and restore your identity. But he has ordained not to play his music alone. He calls each of us to be players in his great redemptive band. He calls each of us to play and sing the notes of hope, faith, forgiveness, and love as well. He calls for each of us to put down our music and to take up his. He calls each of us to quit composing and to start submitting. He calls us to play his music in harmony with him, and when we do this the kingdom has come into our lives.
He isn’t committed to endorsing our compositions. He isn’t looking for ways to help us to be happy with our own music. He isn’t excited by the novel things that we may find musically fulfilling. He knows that there is one fatal flaw in the music that each of us plays. It is written by us! Our music falls apart and never reaches the heights that it was designed to reach, and for one reason. It is played outside of his structure. And so our music harms and does not heal, it divides and does not reconcile, it condemns and does not forgive, and it makes war even against the composer, the Prince of Peace.
But God doesn’t rip the instrument out of our hands and throw us in a place where the music has died. By his grace, he forgives our delusionally grandiose individualism and actually invites us to make music with him. And his grace gives us the ability to play as we have never played before.
The music we now play is more beautiful than any we have ever made. It is so beautiful that it is as if he, with all his creativity and skill, is playing through us.
But with all our delight at being part of the band of redemption, we still fall into daydreaming of being the composer. Even in the face of the glory of the music of redemption, where we have played with others in ways that we wouldn’t have thought possible, we still run off with our God-given instruments and play the discordant notes of autonomy and selfish desire. We still give way to playing the notes that we have written, just the way we want to play them. There are times when our ears really do get tricked, and we think that our music is more beautiful than his. There our times when we tire of the songs of redemption and crave to hear our own notes. There are times when it seems so fulfilling just to pick up our instrument and blare whatever we want to blare.
So we regularly need the Great Composer to silence our playing for a moment so that our ears can hear with wisdom how the notes we have been playing lack beauty and harmony. And he forgives us once again, inviting us to play the sweet notes of redemption, making harmonious music with him.
The Jazz Kingdom
Earlier I commented that what I experienced listening to the Ramsey Lewis Trio had everything to do with the kingdom of God. Expanding your life to the size of God’s kingdom has everything to do with the same form and freedom principles that the trio so deftly applied that evening. It is at the intersection of these principles that we tend to misunderstand what kingdom living actually looks like.
You do not have to obsess over what form your life will take if you expand everything in your life to the size of God’s kingdom, because God has provided the form and structure for you. The form is his Word.
Scripture provides the parameters in which we live out the kingdom of God during our days here on earth. God knows that if we are going to make harmonious music with him we need to know who he is, who we are, what life is about. We need to know how we are to do all that we have been ordained to do, and what the goal of it all is. The narratives, principles, propositions, commands, and promises of Scripture are given by God to provide the structure in which you and I are called to live. We will only ever be what we were created to be, experience what we were created to experience, and enjoy what we were designed to enjoy when we submit to the structure of his revelation. The song of Scripture provides the musical structure for all the little kingdom songs that he equips us to play in our friendships, families, churches, and communities. And when we do this, the kingdom of God, in all of its glorious harmony, comes to that place.
Though we are made in his image and so are creatures with amazing gifts, we were not made to write our own musical form. No, we are called to exercise our dexterity within the form that he has so lovingly provided for us in his Word. And, like the trio that evening, being committed to playing within the structure of God’s revelation doesn’t crush our creativity. Rather, it becomes the context in which our creativity can soar to heights previously unimagined.
Our kingdom calling is to live out of a dedicated, disciplined, and persevering daily commitment to only make music that is in harmony with the Composer, because it lives within the structure of his revelation. When we do this, our thoughts, desires, words, and actions, like his, have the power to help, restore, reconcile, and give hope. When we play music with him, what we do and say actually has the power to transform individual lives and whole communities. You see, it is only the music of redemption that can ever do the work of restoration that this broken world so desperately needs. It is only the strains of grace that are able to make all things new.
When we are playing his music, our notes are the notes of justice, mercy, peace, love, and hope. These notes embrace the poor and the rich, the young and the old, men and women, and boys and girls. They are not restricted to a certain geographic, economic, ethnic, language, or historical setting. The notes of redemption are universal in their application and global in their power. And when we play them, our lives transcend the narrow confines of our claustrophobic hopes and dreams. When we make harmonious music with him, we become part of the eternal song. This song was written before the foundation of the earth was laid, and it will still be played a trillion years after time is no more! When we make music within the form that he has laid down, our lives transcend the boundaries of our lives and become part of something that is huge and significant. When we do this, we live for a greater glory than the sound of our own notes, and in so doing get back our humanity.
The Noise of Disharmony
Joey had gotten to the place where he hated to go home after work. The acrimony between him and Emma was so intense it took his breath away. Driving up their street toward home, he could feel the nervous tension build as his grip tightened on the steering wheel. He just knew that there would be something—something he said or something he forgot to do— and it would be the match to light another explosion.
It hadn’t always been this way. There had been a time when he and Emma loved to be together, when they hung on one another’s words. But the surface harmony of those first few months of marriage was short lived. Joey and Emma didn’t know it, but they were writing and playing their own individual pieces of music. Each had had a dream of what their marriage would be like. Each had expectations for the other. And each was disappointed and angry at how far their marriage was from what they had dreamed it would be.
The difficulty started with little moments of disharmony. But those little moments of disharmony had grown so discordant that their relationship was more like the chaotic noise of traffic than a well-written and well-played duet. Here were two people living together who wanted their own way and who refused to give way. The tension they experienced, they had created. The disharmony they hated, they made. They could be playing the kind of music that is only fully experienced when the notes you play are in harmony with the Great Composer. Joey and Emma do not have to live this way. There is grace for just this kind of disharmonious relationship. There is hope for Joey and Emma, but to experience it, they must be willing to give up their own music.
When we attempt to write and play our own music, bad things happen. Our self-focus, self-pleasing notes result in division and disharmony. They damage souls and crush hearts. They destroy hope. They lead to violence and despair. They break up families and leave communities in crumbled ruins. They pervert justice and leave government corrupt. They weaken the body of Christ and make all of us lame. When everyone in a family, friendship, or community is writing his own music or playing her own notes, that place will be a place of brokenness, division, intolerance, anger recrimination, discouragement, fear. When we do this, all of the healing communities that God has designed (family, church, government) become so diseased that they are able to provide healing for no one. When we write our own music, the kingdom of self comes to that place, interfering with the sweet music of shalom that the Great Composer so wonderfully wrote.
But It’s Jazz!
The harmonious music of the kingdom that God calls us to play with him is not just about form; it is about freedom as well. Think about it: the revelation of God in his Word is not like sheet music. That is, God doesn’t give you every note on the page that you are to play, as if all you have to do is to play them. The Bible simply doesn’t address every specific situation or relationship in which you may find yourself. God hasn’t pre-scripted every conversation for you or pre-made all of your decisions. If that’s true, you may be asking, what has God given us in his Word? What we have been given in the pages of Scripture is a key signature and a time signature. As long as we stay within those divinely composed parameters, we are free to improvise with him.
You can’t reduce the great historical moments, the great narrative themes, the instructional wisdom, and the great principles and commands of the Bible to sheet music. They just don’t function that way.
Consider, for example, that you can list out all the direct commands that God makes to moms and dads about parenting their children on two sides of a sheet of notebook paper. You aren’t given a script for the conversation with your toddler who is refusing to eat, or a script for solving that sibling rivalry, or a script for helping a self-absorbed teenager see his heart. What you are given are very important parameters for each of those conversations, and you are invited by the Great Composer to make redemptive jazz inside of that structure. When you stay within the structure, your creativity is redemptive, resulting in long-term personal benefit.
There is something more to be said about our freedom to improvise inside of the composer’s form. The jazz lifestyle of the kingdom of God is a communal freedom. Jazz musicians make harmonious music, not just because they stay inside an agreed upon musical structure, but because they play in community with one another. Good jazz musicians are not just good players; they are also very skilled listeners. Their jazz is always an interaction with what is going on around them. God hasn’t given us sheet music. He has composed a structure that liberates us to improvise within the structure, and all while listening intently to one another and to him. What is he doing in and through my brothers and sisters in this moment? How can I make music that is harmonious with what God is intending, and with what others need? These are the questions of the communal freedom of the kingdom of God.
Jazz with a Purpose
Now you may be asking, “Why would God, the source of ultimate wisdom, not give us the complete sheet music for everyone’s life in every situation and relationship they will ever encounter? He knows what is going to happen in every second of our existence. Wouldn’t this have been phenomenally easier?” Consider the question for a moment. Why does this idea of utter predictability tend to be so attractive to us? Is it not because what our sinful hearts really long for is comfort, ease, success, and control? These desires are not wrong in and of themselves, but their danger is that they tend to compete with the one thing we were created to pursue and enjoy. The dangerous dependency of creative and harmonious music-making with God is the only place we will ever become truly and fully human.
You see, God has designed his Word and his kingdom in such a way that they both drive us to him in moment-by-moment dependency. What he wants for us and from us is much more than dogged obedience to a set of standards. What he wants is us! He wants to be the treasure of our hearts and the joy of our souls. He wants to know the same community with us that he has known with himself in the Trinity. He is after relationship with us! So, he gives us just what we need. We know the key that we are to play, and he has revealed to us what the time signature is, but he has not told us exactly what to do and say in all the moments of life where we will be making music with him. And he does this because he wants us to seek him, pray to him, and rely on him as we are improvising our way through life.
He wants us to be spontaneous and creative. He wants each new moment to be a fresh experience of faith and grace. He wants us to exercise the full range of the gifts that he has given us. He wants us to transcend the boundaries of our shrink-wrapped little worlds. He wants us to be connected to what is holy, infinite, and eternal. He wants us to be as fully human as his image-bearers were meant to be. But he wants all of these things to be the harmonious result of intimate, responsive, dependent, and joyful community with him. That’s why he hasn’t given us sheet music and sent us off on our own. He has called us to the unsettling freedom of a lifestyle of redemptive improvisational jazz. And this jazz lifestyle only works when we are paying careful attention to what he has composed and to what he is playing at the moment.
Every time you make creative, interactive, and harmonious jazz with your Redeemer, whether in your home, friendships, community, church, or at work, while staying inside of his parameters, you are expanding what you touch to the size of God’s kingdom.
The final question: where in your life are you tempted to write your own music rather than making harmonious music with the king?