Music has this beautiful way of practically pulling our hearts out of our chest. Where emotions and identities that were hard to express, suddenly flow out of us effortlessly. Not necessarily in tears, although sometimes that might be the case, but in thought. All because a raw emotion is attached to a real melody, and you find yourself exhaling deeply in the freedom that music can offer.
Yet there also lies a great danger, as with any power, and I find music to be of great power. Words are already used to persuade, to justify, or even to manipulate. Music attached to them suddenly takes these temptations and makes them exquisite. A persuasive word, specifically one based on untruth, might be easily identified as false when spoken alone, but add an intoxicating melody or chest-pounding rhythm and you are suddenly lured into the bosom of emotion, where reason and conviction can all too easily be forgotten.
When I write a lyric and accompany it with a melody, I try to do so with poignancy, and yet with enough space to let the hearer attach their own story. I long to convey truth through the lens of my story, but in such a way that you can see yourself there too and thereby grow in your understanding of self and God as he intended creation.
Words always have the propensity to be misunderstood, but like a conversation in your living room, they can be clarified with further discourse. A song, however, is often sung, heard, and left. Whether in a concert hall or a church service, we hear, we even join in, and then we move on. Extracting what we wanted to hear. Music does that, and how beautiful it is when serving as an aid to putting tangible thought to otherwise scattered emotions and experiences. Beautiful, that is, until we take that beauty and use it to our advantage.
We hear what we want to hear. We don’t hear a challenge. We hear justification. We don’t hear self-correction. We hear self-worth. We place ourselves in the narrative in only the way that soothes us and not also in the way that humbles us.
I could easily dive into worship in the church here, an area I have seemed to keep falling into, and so have grown rather passionate about. I could go on about the ways we have used music as a way to attract, promote, or coddle to the cheap side of grace. I could recall lines from fellow worship leaders somewhere along the lines of “What are the songs that people will raise their hands on? Let’s sing those.” or “Music has emotional power. Use it.” I could expose how my desire to engage with the Psalms and prayer while singing, so as to give people context to the words coming out of their very own mouths, was discouraged by virtue of it not fitting the morning’s theme.
But I won’t.
Instead, I’ll pull from a song that we shared only just nights ago.
Living Room Conversations around racial reconciliation was quite a lovely evening. The interactions were honest. The insight enlightening. The talent ridiculous. Apart from the fact that we easily blew through our two hour window, there are so many moments for which I am thankful.
At the close of the evening Jordan and I sang Dig Deep. A song penned several years ago that speaks rather colorfully of each individuals inherent self worth. As I was scrubbing back through this portion of the evening, I noticed a color wheel of light in one of the artist’s backgrounds. A rainbow.
Just like a crystal’s rays there forms a prism glass stain.
Can you find me?
And like a canvas of white with prints of purple in sight.
Could that be me?
For when the colors combine, there forms a wondrous design.
I may be one soul but my heart paints plenty.
And when I’m doubting my worth I put the brush to my birth,
to find my palette is far from empty.
I will paint with the colors in me.
My unique design is just what it should be.
And when you hate what your skin has become.
Just dig real deep and know that you are loved.
You are loved, you are loved, you are loved.
Now granted, if I was to pick a visual for this song, it would be a prism. A rainbow of light by itself, although accurate in part, misses the source. But with a prism, you see how light moves into this blank, polished surface, and immediately begins to refract light, coursing through the prism itself until dispersing a spectrum of colors, akin to that of a rainbow. Although what we confuse is that our worth is not found in the colors themselves, or accomplishment, or even right-living that we produce. Our worth instead has its starting point as an expression of white light, in which all the colors are contained.
The value of our intrinsic design is forgotten when the light is forgotten, and so we have to dig rather deeply to unearth and remember its source.
A rainbow still worked. And I can’t imagine anyone had a prism lying around that they could maneuver into view for special effect. Although you are most likely well aware that the rainbow, or at least the colors themselves, have taken on a whole new breadth of meaning since Gilbert Baker’s inception of a flag to demonstrate gay pride in 1978. Though still even both now and prior to that, and we’re talking hundreds and thousands of years prior, the rainbow stood as a promise. A promise that no matter how far we strayed from the God that made us, no matter how we forgot Him, he would let us live on. Anger and confusion and hate and desperation and injustice were in essence permitted to find their way again, even though His heart was both broken and enraged by it all. Even though He longed for His creation to return to Him. The very promise that should have us prostrate on the ground instead has us desperately clinging to pride.
Seems like more of a curse to fear than a promise to celebrate. We want justice to consume the earth. We want love to absolve hatred. We don’t want room for evil, as it were. In this story of the rainbow, we are told that God saved the upright and wiped out the rest. That sounds pretty good, right? Why would he promise to never do that again? Is it not what we in reality hope for? To obliterate all inequity and oppression? Granted we might be hesitant to infer agreement over taking a life, let alone disperse that authority, even if to God himself. But we fight against injustice with our whole selves, in whatever way we see fit and whatever area our stories intersect, and would be happy if all that we see as unjust were obliterated. Would we not?
Yet, just like the interpreted words and rhythms of a song, both injustice and value have been adapted to our own experience of it.
The author may have penned the narrative, one of intrinsic design out of His image, but we have received it in whatever fashion caters to our heartbeat, and often at the expense of seeing the injustice in us.
We manipulate the original intent of God’s heart, and simultaneously blame him for allowing injustice to go on.
Perhaps then the blessing of the rainbow is truly that. Perhaps we would not be ready to know how far we have strayed from the heart of God. Perhaps we would be the ones immersed in the deep waters, for all the while we had forgotten the source of our colors… and we called it good.
EXPOSITION: Do you agree that we would presumably welcome God to reverse the promise of the rainbow? That we would be okay with, if not crying out for, injustice and malice and evil to be rid from the earth? Do we not have deep troubles reconciling a loving God with the presence of rampant evil? I can tell you that I have wrestled with this.
RISE: An ancient king described as “a man after God’s own heart” was the one that penned this lyric: “Search me oh God, and know my heart… See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” Even such a man committed adultery and murdered her husband to cover it up. Are we willing to recognize that the injustice we long to expose can be found in us?
DENOUEMENT:
So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them… God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. (Genesis)
“Look, he is coming with the clouds,” and “every eye will see him, even those who pierced him”; and all peoples on earth “will mourn because of him.” (Revelation)