Making Music Together

Well, good morning Twin Lakes community. It's so good to be with you. René and I have been friends and colleagues for a long time and have gotten to work together at Mount Herman, and I've gotten to be with you and to be a guest. While I'm preaching for you virtually, René is also preaching for us at Peachtree Church, and so we're able to do this without having to get on an airplane. It's not the same thing as being able to be among you and with you, but it is an incredible privilege for me to get to go to the Garden of God's Word and to share this message that I believe that God has put on my heart for you and for all of us as we go through these challenging and difficult seasons.

I want to begin kind of in a silly place. I want to tell you that when I was in the seventh grade, I decided to pick up an instrument after kind of being a solo artist on the piano for all of my childhood. I was the kind of guy that ran track and played tennis. I pretty much did all whether sports or music on my own, but in the seventh grade, I decided to join the junior high band and I picked up the trombone for the first time. I want to show you a picture of that right now. Look at this guy rocking his bowl cut and with my leisure outfit right there.

I'm telling you that playing the trombone, I discovered that you don't often get to play the melody. You have to kind of play a support role. We were absolutely awful, terrible. The sound that came out from this little junior high band was absolutely abysmal, and I'm embarrassed when I can still hear the echo of that in my very mind. We played incredible songs of the '80s like 25, 6 to 4, Easy Lover. The last time I was preaching with you, there was a guy who was leading worship with a keytar. This is a congregation that I know that appreciates the values of 1980s rock music. This is what we were all about.

After a while, after the semester went on and we were getting closer to our concert, we got to the point where we started knowing the notes and we were able to play in tune. But as we were getting ready for the performance, our band instructor, a saint by the name of Mr. Fletcher, because I have no idea how in his long suffering he endured and put up with the racket that we were making. At one point, he stopped the whole band and he set aside his soprano saxophone, and I'll never forget this. He put his head in his hands and then he said this: the difference between making noise and music is playing together.

He said, you guys know the notes now, you know the tune, you know the melody, but if you're not going to play together, it's just going to be a bunch of noise. That was a message that has stayed with me for a long time, and when I reflect on our society and our churches even today, do you think we're making more noise or do you think we're actually making music? I think we live in a very noisy age, and what we need to realize is that God wants us to play together.

We're not the first people to ever struggle with this. The Apostle Paul, when he was writing his letter to the church at Corinth, was writing to a divided and a decadent group of people. In the 12th chapter of his lengthy letter to them, he wrote these words: Just as the body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one spirit so as to form one body, whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free, and we were all given the same spirit to drink. Even so, the body is not made up of one part, but of many.

Now if the foot should say, Because I'm not a hand, I don't belong to the body, it would not, for that reason, stop being part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? And if the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact, God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts of the body that are not in the body, but in fact, God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, as it is, there are many parts, but one body.

And so the eye cannot say to the hand, I don't need you, and the head cannot say to the feet, I don't need you. On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable, we treat with special honor, and the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has put the parts of the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts would have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it. If one part is honored, every part rejoices with it. Now, you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.

I want you to imagine that for a moment, that there would be no division in the body, that there would be no division in our society, that there would be no division in your marriage, there would be no division in your family, that there would be no division within your own psyche, within your own soul. Today, I want to talk about a vision for no division, and the audacious and provocative image that the Apostle Paul uses for this is the image of a body.

Now, in modern society today, but particularly in California, we're rather fond of our bodies. We adore them, we take care of them, we worship them. We're the kind of people that get pedicures, not me personally, but I know of people who do. And we take care of our bodies, and we think that all of our parts of the body are valuable. That was not true for the ancient Greeks. I want to show you some statues of the Elgin Marbles from the famous British Museum. While the Greeks had an idealized view of the body, they actually philosophically saw the body as an empty shell, a container for the soul. They saw it as kind of a disposable thing.

And so, yes, in contest of sport and in art, they thought of the body as this idealized thing, but in reality, the way that they treated their bodies, the way they thought of their bodies, was as a very lowly, temporary kind of thing. You get the convergence in a place like the Corinthian church of the Middle Eastern influence as well as the Greek influence. And one of the things that you need to know from the Middle Eastern influence was a guy by the name of Ken Bailey, who's a scholar, says that foot, at that point in time, was basically a four-letter word.

He says this: When Saddam Hussein's statue was pulled to the ground in Baghdad in 2003, many of the Iraqis present beat on the statue with their shoes. In February of 2011, Egyptians in Cairo held up their shoes as a sign of their total rejection of then-President Mubarak. Ethiopian Orthodox Christians remove their shoes outside the door of the church as they enter. Across the Arabic-speaking Middle East, the very words "foot" and "shoes" are four-letter words. A speaker must apologize to an audience before pronouncing them. It is not by accident that Paul opens his parable with a speech given by an unclean foot.

And so as we enter into this famous parable by Paul to be able to pull people together for there to be a vision of no division, for them to make music together, we need to hear the audacious nature of what he is saying. In order to do that, I want us to pay attention to three things in order to make music. I want to demonstrate it this way. I want us to see the parts and not just the whole. I want us to see the whole and not just the parts. And I want you to do your part to make things whole.

See the parts and not just the whole. That means that we are going to have to pay attention to diversity. We're going to see not just the whole, but the parts of the whole. The way that the Apostle Paul talks about that is he talks about it this way: Even so, the body is not made up of one part, but of many. When my wife Kelly and I were pregnant with our first daughter Danica, somebody gave us this book. It was a pregnancy journal. And it not only had places in it for you to be able to kind of write your reflections of going through that particular journey, it also had opportunities for you to learn about what was happening in the womb as you were going through that incredible journey of pregnancy.

And so each night Kelly and I would curl up and we would read out of that journal. And it would say amazing things like, Today your baby got fingernails. And I would walk around and proclaim to anybody at the office who would listen to me, My baby girl has fingernails as of today. Or, My baby girl has this as of today. Each day was like a celebration of a different part. And that journey of paying attention to the parts helped me to appreciate and adore the whole in a way that I had never fully appreciated before.

You see, until we are willing to acknowledge the beauty that is found in diversity, we will never fully appreciate what it means to be human and to be fully alive. The way that the Apostle Paul talks about it is like this: But in fact God has placed the parts of the body, every one of them, just as he wanted it to be. God doesn't make accidents. And the diversity that he has woven into creation is by design. And until we can get to the point of not just intellectually affirming, but praising the beauty of that diversity, we truly will not be able to understand what God has done in creating the universe.

And so as you go about your day, appreciate the incredible variety of everything from like flowers to different aromas to different tastes to different textures, and all of that together is a part of the diversity that is what it means to be human. And that diversity is woven into the fabric of humanity as well, the different cultures and the different languages. One of the special things about Christianity in comparison to other world religions is most world religions attempt to take a culture and to say that that culture is dominant, whereas the gospel is different in the sense that it appropriately adapts to each culture because culture is a gift from God.

And so in order to be able to get to a vision and no division, the first thing that we're going to need to do is to be able to see the parts and not just the whole. We're going to need to be able to embrace and understand the beauty that is in diversity. But secondly, we're also going to need to be able to see the whole and not just the parts. In other words, it's not just about diversity, it's also about unity. The Apostle Paul talks about it this way: There are many parts, but there is one body. So even though there is this diversity, there is a unity within that diversity. It's not uniformity, it's not sameness, but there is something that holds it together nonetheless.

The way that we see unity torn apart in the different speeches that are dealt with in today's parable is that we hear two different speeches, a phrase that says, I don't belong, and also a phrase that says, I don't need you. I don't belong is a place of insecurity or inferiority, and the phrase, I don't need you is a phrase of superiority. And either insecurity or superiority will tear down the unity that's supposed to be present within the body of Christ. In another letter, the Apostle Paul says that we're to make every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace.

But in order to do that, that means that we're going to need some humility to get past our superiority and our inferiority. Not too long after I'd become a pastor, one of my best friends from college had gotten engaged. I had helped him with his engagement and was so happy for him, and he and his bride-to-be had asked me to play a significant role in helping them in their wedding and to facilitate their wedding. So I was basically going to co-officiate the wedding with her childhood pastor in her small little church in Iowa.

As we got closer to the wedding, all of a sudden I got this awkward phone call from my friend who said, "I hate to do this, but we basically have to uninvite you from helping at our wedding." And I'm like, "What are you talking about? What did I do?" And he's like, "Well, the pastor that's a part of this tradition, this denomination, where they won't co-officiate with anybody because they don't have the assurance of your orthodoxy." I'm like, "My orthodoxy? Come on, give me a test. Give me a conversation, whatever it is." He's like, "I'm sorry. It's just their rules."

He's like, "I'd love for you to be a groomsman, so stand with me. Be a groomsman, but you can't stand up front and help to lead the service." I'm like, "Are you serious? I can't read a scripture? I can't do a prayer?" He's like, "No, they won't let you do anything." If you want to see me get angry, tell me what I can't do. And even though Drew had asked me to be a groomsman, internally I was seething inside and couldn't wait to get my hands on this pastor from Iowa. This was a small town in the middle of nowhere, and we go out to the little church, and we're having the rehearsal.

I'm not proud of this moment, but I'm standing next to the pastor, and he doesn't know who I am or any of this. I just started asking some questions. I'm like, "Well, did you go to seminary?" He's like, "Yeah, I went to seminary." I'm like, "What seminary did you go to?" He named the seminary. I'm like, "Oh, I've never heard of it. Did they have books at your seminary?" And he just kind of looked at me, and then I just started leaning into him and started talking about a variety of things, and the whole time that he's doing the rehearsal, and later, the whole time he's doing the wedding, I'm like, "Oh, you should have done it that way. It would have been better if you'd have done it this way." I mean, I am on my high horse with this guy. I am so frustrated with him.

We go through the wedding. We get to the reception. The reception is at the Holiday Inn, which is basically the biggest room in that county. And we go to the Holiday Inn, and Drew comes up to me, and he says, "Listen, we totally forgot to ask somebody to do the prayer for this service, and I think you're outside the jurisdiction of that particular denomination. I think you can do it." And so I get up to go do the prayer, and as I get up to go over to the microphone where the DJ is to do the prayer, I see that pastor get up from the other side of the room. And we stare at each other like two people at the OK Corral.

He's closer to the microphone, but I'm younger and scrappier, and I'm pushing like pregnant women and children out of the way as I'm making my way through the dance floor over to the microphone in order to do the prayer. And he gets to that microphone first, and he says, Let us pray. And I'm standing in the middle of an empty dance floor, and everybody in that room bows their head to pray for the meal except for me. And I'm just glaring at him. But I'll never forget his prayer. He talked about, Lord, how our lives are filled with simple things, and that our hearts explode with gratitude from the food that's on our table to the blessings that we receive every day, and they help us to not miss it. That little prayer pierced my soul, and I had to walk out of the reception and lean against the wall.

And I put my own head in hands. And I remember thinking, I am at my best friend's wedding, and I'm missing it. All because of my insecurity, and all because of my superiority. I couldn't participate in the unity of that celebration because it was all about me. And so it will take incredible self-examination and humility for us to be able to say, I belong, but I also need you in order for us to be able to find a unity that we can work with.

And so to have a vision for no division, we're going to need to see the parts and not just the whole, but we're also going to need to be able to see the whole and not just the parts. And then we need to do our part to make things whole. Every one of us has a role to play. There's a wonderful African-American preacher in Charlotte who has a phrase that I adore drawing off of this story, and I want to put up an image reflecting that of the Good Samaritan, is that we have to move beyond sympathy into solidarity. We have to move beyond just feeling something, to being willing to stand with someone.

When I was a pastor in Southern California, one of my favorite ministries that I would participate in was Teen Challenge International, and they would have every once in a while these kind of tent revivals that would take place where they would pull all the chapters of the Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation Center together, and we would worship and we would praise and we would sing, and I loved preaching in that moment. People were so responsive. Dallas Willard says, I can give you God's address. He is always found at the end of your rope. And these were people who, without pretense and without pretending, knew how much they needed Christ.

I remember finishing preaching this one time, and the music kicked back up again, and I wandered towards the back before we were going to have our time of inviting people to come forward to pray, and there was a man close to the back row of that tent revival who didn't look like he belonged. He was older. He was kind of hunched over, and he was staring forward at the group of young men and men who were singing and praising and dancing. I pulled up next to him and I asked him about his story, why he was there. He pointed to a young woman who was up close to the front, and he said, Do you see her? And I said, Yeah. He said, That's my daughter. And I don't know if she wants to be with me or see me, but I come here to be close to her to show her that I'm with her, that I'm for her as she goes through this restoration and treatment. And so I come every day of these worship revivals to pray for her, to be close to her.

I looked at those young people up front and realized that my own two children were not that far away in age from the people who are up front and who had struggled so mightily with addiction. My heart broke in a whole new way, and I sat next to him and I said, Can I just sit with you and pray with you as you pray for your daughter? And he not only said, Yes. He said, There isn't anything I'd want more.

My friends, we find ourselves in a remarkable chapter in our country's history, in the battles for civil rights, in the pain that's been expressed through recent protests. As a follower of Jesus Christ, I want to not put a political take but a theological take on what has been going on. And that is to say is that we will not grow through this conflict, through this pain, until we move beyond sympathy and into solidarity. In other words, we're going to have to be able to say, That's my daughter. That's my son. In claiming the image of God that is present in all people. And until we're able to live out of that reality, we will not be able to move forward.

The Apostle Paul puts it this way: But that its part should have equal concern for each other. We've got to become the kind of people for whom when one part suffers, we all suffer with it. And when one part rejoices, we all rejoice with it. Amidst all of the hard news and the injustice of the recent months, I want to show you something that's happened in our community. This is a picture of a young officer, a woman by the name of Erica. And in April, there came a moment in the line of duty where there was a three-month-old infant whose airway had become blocked.

And because of her attentiveness, because of her service, because of her training, Erica was able to unblock that airway and that child is alive and well right now. In a time when people are chanting and tweeting, I can't breathe, we need to be reminded that it is all of our calls in the line of duty and service to Christ to help one another to have the oxygen, to breathe. That this is what solidarity looks like. One part suffering, every part suffering with it. One part rejoicing, every part rejoicing with it. We must be together.

Last year there were two brothers that I got to meet for the first time. That is Kyle and Brent Peace. They are remarkable. Kyle was born with cerebral palsy and over time really struggled in the paralysis of that disease. His brothers were always fast friends. And they took on some incredible challenges together. In fact, they decided to do the Kona triathlon Ironman together. If you know anything about that, that is like running a marathon. It is also doing a 111-mile bike ride and it is a two-mile swim. All in one race. But the different thing for Brent and for Kyle is that they are together. And Brent is pulling Kyle, pushing Kyle, guiding Kyle through that whole journey.

When I got to meet them, it was a part of a gathering, and there was a woman after they had finished speaking together. There was a woman who asked how hard it really was for Brent. How difficult was it to do that? And Brent shook his head and said, You don't get it. He is not heavy. He is my brother. He is not heavy. He is my brother. We are looking at today's challenges and we are asking how can we do it? How hard is it going to be? The only way through that is through the lens, the theological lens of solidarity, of being able to see one another through the eyes of faith, through the eyes of Christ. That we are not burdens. We are blessings.

I started off this message by talking about the difference between making noise and making music. The reason that I did this is because chapter 12, ironically, is right before chapter 13 in the Bible in 1 Corinthians. Chapter 13 is famous and starts out: If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging symbol. In other words, if we can't find a way to participate in God's love, we are not going to make music. It is going to be a bunch of noise. In order to do that, we need a vision for no division. A vision of diversity and unity and solidarity. That all of this has to go together in order for us to be together, to become the body of Christ where everyone belongs and we recognize that we need one another.

So let's pray. Our good and gracious Father, I am incredibly grateful for the partnership in the gospel that we have across the miles in this country that we can discover the sisterhood and the brotherhood of what we have in the family of faith across denominations and across state lines. And that we belong to you. Lord, I pray for the peace, for the shalom and the witness of the Twin Lakes community. I ask Father that you will empower them with a commitment to diversity and unity and solidarity. That you will inspire them by the sacrifice of your son and our savior, and we look to you as our great musical director. And that you will conduct us in the way for us to be able to make music for all the world to sing. And we pray these things in Jesus Christ's name. Amen.