Psalm 80:1-7
When I was in high school, our Presbyterian Church youth group took a Sunday afternoon drive from Connecticut down to New York City. We went in several cars. It was our Advent project to deliver boxes of food and clothing to a small Presbyterian Church in Chinatown. It took about an hour to drive to lower Manhattan, in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. I couldn’t believe how small that church was, compared to our large congregation back home, it didn’t even have a parking lot, you had to park along the street. The Church of the Sea and Land it was called, and I guess it had been founded originally as a faith haven for sailors in port far from home, but now it was a small, racially diverse congregation holding on in a poor neighborhood. It was my first experience of a church whose poverty was its dominant feature. I had never seen anything like it. It helped me rethink the meaning of church. It was an eye-opener.
Afterwards, as a special treat, we drove up Broadway to St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in midtown Manhattan to do something else that I’d never done before: attend a Jazz church service. It was a weekly Sunday 5:00 PM vespers service, with a printed bulletin, scripture readings, and a sermon, but the music was all jazz. Instead of someone like Liz pounding out the familiar old Christmas hymns on the organ, at Jazz Vespers there was a stand up bass, a piano, a guitar and the music was all jazz. There were no vocals, just the sound of the instruments.
The pastor of that church was really into it that afternoon. As the musicians started to find their groove, he was tapping his foot and snapping his fingers. Lots of people were into it. As the bass player got more energetic in plucking the strings, someone in the congregation shouted out “Go, man, go!” I had never heard anything like that in a church service. It was an ear-opener. If you’re wondering about what it would sound like, here’s a brief bit of jazz for us to enjoy. Give it a listen … from Stan Getz, a famous tenor sax player, “Serenade in Blue” …
“Serenade in Blue” … the jazz we heard that afternoon pulled us deep down into the blues. Back at our home church we were singing all of the familiar happy Christmas carols. That morning in our church we had sung “Away in a Manger” and “O Little Town of Bethlehem”. But I was sitting right behind Jane Getz, the piano player at Jazz Vespers. I still remember her name after all these years. I always wondered if she was related to Stan Getz, a famous jazz musician. (I looked it up yesterday – no relation). Anyway, there wasn’t any sheet music in front of her or the other musicians. Each tune seemed to start from the deep soulful plucking of the bass player, and then the piano and guitarist would join in. I was close enough to watch Jane’s fingers dance over the white and black keys. It sounded experimental, risky, sometimes a little crazy, lots of sad blue notes, and I still don’t know how they knew when to stop playing, maybe just a quick glance between them signaled the end of each piece?
It was nothing like what we’d heard that morning in our church, not only the sound of the instruments, but especially how the music felt, well, blue. But maybe that kind of bluesy jazz is the most appropriate form of music for Advent. After all Advent is a time of waiting, and the blues are all about people waiting and waiting and waiting: for lost love to return, for a second chance after striking out, for a way out when stuck in too many dead-ends, for a taste of justice after an eternity of evil, hoping an irrational hope when it seems like everything has been dashed to pieces. This is what it felt like as the instruments played, though not a word was sung.
There is a certain kind of praise you can offer to musicians who play music like this, when the music touches your soul with honesty and power. You don’t say “hey, great music, man!” You don’t say, “that was a cool guitar solo, brother!”. Instead, you say something like this, “sister, you know where I’ve been, you know where I live”.
The music that day was discordant, the notes didn’t fit the familiar major chords that characterized most of the music I’d ever heard or played. But then again the whole day had been discordant for me, having an experience of a large prosperous suburban church in Connecticut that morning and an experience of a poor church in Chinatown that afternoon. Things didn’t fit, I didn’t have an explanation that could put those two opposite experiences together, but somehow the blues were honest about it like nothing else that day. The blues I heard at jazz vespers named the discordance out of which I was eventually able to feel a call to try to do my best to challenge poverty in all the years since.
If you listen carefully, the words of Psalm 80, our text for the first Sunday of Advent, have that bluesy quality. Things just haven’t been working out well, there’s a list of what’s been going wrong, lots of tears and scorn, punctuated by a plea from the heart: “Rescue us, God! Help us, God! Restore us, God!” The songs were sad, lost, discordant, but profoundly honest, testifying to an emptiness that only God can fill. So much of the preparation for Christmas in our culture involves adding more and more and more to the celebration ... more decorations, more goodies, more toys, more advertisements, more excitement, more expectations. Beginning with the blues gets me thinking about approaching this season in a very different way: emptying myself ... emptying myself, not as a punishment, not as a trial, not as self-denial, but to leave more room for God to enter in, to leave more room for God in my life. The Christmas Carol “Joy to the World” captures this, saying “Let every heart prepare him room”. What an insight it has been to me that we can’t just squeeze God into our regular lives and call that preparation. Advent preparation begins with feeling sad, lost, confused, feeling the blues. Advent preparation begins with an empty place that God begins to fill with abundance in Jesus Christ. We can’t just squeeze him in alongside everything else and expect that anything will change.
The day I’ve described from forty years ago was an eye-opener as I visited a poor church for the first time. It was an ear-opener as I listened to church music that I’d never heard before. And finally it was a heart-opener, as I have reflected on it over all these years, that preparing for the coming of Jesus Christ is best accomplished by being honest about the empty places, and trusting that God can and will fill them. The blues are sad, but they are honest, and they can open our hearts towards God. In Advent we begin with our emptiness, darkness and longing. What is your longing? What does your emptiness feel like? How do you experience the darkness? Do not fear the longing, the emptiness, the darkness - because these are the places into which God is about to come! I think whoever wrote Psalm 80 would have liked the blues.
The blues are a dark sound, heard in a dark place. But how much more we appreciate the coming light. The blues are not at all without hope, but express that hope with a rare honesty about the presence of darkness in the world. The Psalmist spoke the sadness and lostness of the blues when he said that the world is not right, people have been down in the depths for a long time, but then from those dark depths he proclaims the coming light – God is going to rescue, help and restore us. I’m hearing a new music take shape, can you hear it? Oh yes, God is going to restore us in a way that will absolutely amaze you, in a way that will knock your socks off, that before you know you’ll be shouting, “Go, God, Go!”
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