August 12, 2004

I’M WITH THE BAND

The Reverend Dr. Lillian Daniel

April 29, 2007

First Congregational Church, Glen Ellyn, Illinois, UCC

www.firstconge.org

630-469-3096

Scripture: Revelation 21:1-6

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.” Then he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.”

Sermon:

Have you ever been to a wedding reception where the bride sang in her own wedding band? Musicians do things differently. The wedding reception was held upon the stage of a grand old theater in Buffalo, New York. Elegantly set tables with crisp white cloths and bright crystal were scattered across the wooden floor, with its stage markings and piles of ropes, velvet curtains swagged casually aside.

We, the wedding guests, ate our wedding banquet up on that stage and looked out at hundreds of plush empty seats; we were a show with no audience.

Yet on the stage full of tables, there was a smaller stage, for the wedding band. This was a revolving door of musicians, who, according to a carefully planned set list, would get up from their guest tables at the appropriate song, and wander up to join the band, for one song or maybe two. In between each song, one guitarist might hand his instrument to another, or a drummer might stand and make room for drummer number four of the evening. The lead singers changed, as different wedding guests took their turn at the mike.

Thankfully, this was not a karaoke affair, where amateurs torture one another with spur of the moment song choices and alcohol induced confidence, nearly always misplaced. No, this was a carefully choreographed, yet minimally rehearsed, set list that took experienced and gifted musicians from many bands and pulled them together in odd combinations.

Some of the musicians were former band mates to one another, now moved on to be lawyers, and mothers and business people. But many of these wedding guests were still in the music business, playing in bands that record and play shows. Some had been in bands together that were now broken up into new combinations and adventures. All of them wandered forward to sing the songs to celebrate the wedding of the bride, a singer, songwriter, guitar player, and punk rock music activist, and the groom, a journalist who loves music, thank God.

When punk rockers grow up and get married, the celebration is bound to be a little different. Two decades of friendship and musical history crossed the stage that night, as musical memories drew us into a wedding banquet like no other.

As a minister, I have learned that wedding receptions reflect the best and worst of people’s pasts. Here, the past and the present of the gathered community, of the couple and their friends, was present in the setting itself, a huge theater. These were people who were comfortable on stages, either on them as performers, or in front of them as fans, or behind them, as crew, sound and support. So to have the wedding celebration take place there was only natural – as natural as the bride taking her turn at the mike to sing a few numbers with her old friends at her own wedding reception.

The Christian wedding ceremony had taken place in the theater’s lobby. That lobby was ornate, with nooks and crannies for guests to sit on gilt chairs beautifully restored as so many old theaters in cities have been in recent decades. The bride and groom had processed up a winding staircase, to a high alcove where they could look down to see all their guests – who looked like elegantly dressed theater patrons, frozen in the middle of intermission to look upwards at something remarkable, in this case, the wedding.

To get up the stairs, the couple had passed a smaller group of musicians on the landing. They were playing songs the bride had played herself or chosen, as the notes of her past and the people of her past lifted her up into her new life with her husband. There I waited as the minister to perform the wedding of my friend Jenna. It had been over twenty years since she and I had first met, in high school, and it had been sixteen years since we had been locked inside another old theater, in another place and another time.

Sixteen years earlier, long before I was a performer of wedding ceremonies, I was a bass player in a punk rock band where Jenna was the singer and song writer, David played guitar, and Stephan was on drums. Sixteen summers ago, we had been on tour. It was in some ways our first big break, a trek of several weeks, and many shows, across the United States, with two other bands. This big tour would also be our last, for that was the summer before I started my masters of divinity degree at Yale Divinity School.

Not many bands can say that they broke up because the bass player went to seminary, but there you have it. I broke up the band when I followed my call to the ministry.

In the book of Revelation, there are many fantastic images. In the one I conjure up today, a bride and groom appear as signs of what heaven may be. “And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”[1] I thought of Jenna, coming up those bridal stairs so beautifully dressed, in a vintage style white lace gown, her red hair cut into a soft bob, when sixteen years ago it had been a wild mass of dreadlocks.

In life, we are constantly moving back and forth in time, back and forth between what was, and was is and what might be. The writer of Revelation never lets you get stuck in only one time zone. He follows that image of the bride with these words: And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘See, the home of God is among mortals.’ In other words, God’s right here, in the middle of ordinary life, no matter where you are – or where you were.

Sixteen years ago, in the weeks before divinity school, and what would become a ministry of three churches, and an old friend’s wedding, life had seemed very different. If God’s home is among the mortals, we mortals were leading very different lives back then.

The tour of the bands had started in Ashville, North Carolina, where drunken men had shouted at us to play softer so they could continue to have meaningful conversation. But you know, it’s hard to play electric guitars softly, particularly in that genre. The three men left the place annoyed, and we were left with no audience, but given that it was the first night of the tour, we were so excited all three bands played full sets to a single bemused North Carolina bartender.

The crowds picked up when we played in New York City at a famous club, where meaningful conversation was not on the agenda. During that show, my car was broken into and all my clothes were stolen. That explains why in almost every picture from that summer, I am wearing the same tee shirt. It said “bagel eater,” and it was all I had to remember a New Yorker who gave it to me out of pity at 3 a.m. as I picked up the smashed glass from my windshield.

Later we drove to Madison, Wisconsin, where along the highway, two guitars fell off the top of one of the cars. We had to turn all the vehicles around and search for wreckage on the other side. Remarkably we found them, still safe in their cases on the side of the road about forty-five minutes back. Losing all your clothes was one thing, but losing your guitars, that would be a disaster.

We finally arrived in Flint, Michigan, where we gasped to discover our venue, an enormous old theater that seated thousands, right in the center of town. Could this be right? For punk rockers didn’t usually play in venues that size. We played in crowded basement clubs, with black walls and grottos, rarely any actual seats. When we had to sleep, if we weren’t tripling up in the very cheapest motels, splitting subway sandwiches and 7/11 burritos, we were on the sofas of fans we had never met before, who usually fed us something vegan.

So for our motley caravan to pull up at this massive old theater was like the Beverly Hillbillies pulling up in their Appalachian jalopy to the California mansion. We could hardly believe this theater was for us.

Flint, Michigan had fallen on hard times. Auto jobs had left the area, and the people struggled to support the meager industries that remained. This was the time Michael Moore had made the documentary “Roger and Me.”

As we got closer, we saw that the theater was clearly in bad shape. Seeing our band’s name on the marquee had been exciting, but thick chains on the main doors did not bode well. We saw people waiting to see us at a side door. We were ushered in, not to the theater, but to the lobby, which had been set up with a few folding chairs, plugs to use, and a stench that indicated no cleaning in years. The lobby was our venue. As for the main theater, we were told it had been condemned.

So poor were the kids in Flint Michigan, that many of them could not afford the show, and listened from outside, until we insisted they just come in. We saw no hotels around us. No one invited us over to their house that night, but when it was time to sleep, we were told we were staying in the old theater. Apparently this was how they handled hospitality for all the bands. They simply turned off the lights and locked you in. We did not sleep easily that night. Some of us snuggled near the door, at least wanting to see who might burst in from the street, while others snuck into the condemned theater itself, and ran around on the main stage imagining an audience in the dark and grim decay.

I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,’ See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.’

It was that vision that would call me to leave this life and pursue another. In the midst of a depressed city, artists danced around on a condemned stage, with all the joy that musicians can bring to an impossible situation. In music, we transcend the reality, don’t we? In music and art, we imagine a better world, and imagine, in an empty condemned theater, a show that will rock the world. That’s also what we do in the life of faith, is it not?

When I arrived at Yale Divinity School a few weeks later, I had no idea what to expect, only that it would be different. Different it was. From the bagel eater tee shirt punk rock tour of America’s dirtiest places, I now found myself at the new student orientation picnic at Yale, where we sat on perfectly manicured green, surrounded by “preppiness,” and where, I kid you not, we were being led in song by a throng of bad guitar players, urging us to sing, I kid you not, “Kum Ba Yah.” It was like a Saturday Night Live skit of that seminary. Think “Revenge of the Nerds” meets church camp meets folk music 101. “I’ve made a horrible decision,” I thought to myself. “I’m surrounded by geeks, who will suck me into their geeky world, and I’ll never be cool again.” And I wasn’t. Part of following a calling is giving up stuff like that. I came to divinity school that summer carrying a boatful of ego, attitude and judgmentalism, and insecurity. In other words, all the things that, in the life of faith, Jesus calls us to work on. I left with the same list. After all, when you enter into a life of faith, you’re graduating, you’re matriculating. As surely as these new members today are not crossing the finish line, but merely beginning a new lap of a race.

Later, as I had the privilege of performing my old friends’ wedding, the lead singer of our band, I remembered the days when we had been on that tour, and how now the lines between cool and uncool seemed so much blurrier. Today Jenna was singing in her own wedding band, but she and her new husband had also started attending church, and I was reunited with friends from the old days, and it was easy.

I realized that sometimes in our lives, we think there are these breaks, these moments when we make a big change. We join a new church, we make a move, we form a new relationship, we pick a new path. Looking back, we were always playing the same song, just different variations.

I thought about how being a bass player is a lot like being a minister. You lay down the beat, trying to keep it solid and true, but allowing others to shine, to sing, to play, to dance, as God wants. For really, in music, the heart of it, the mystery that draws us into the music we love the most, is that we know it’s not just about us. The notes and sounds come together, the different people play their roles, and yet what is produced is somehow so much better. A lot like the church – where you join a band that is better than you are, and the tour is always just beginning.