The Flatpicking Pilgrim's Progress

An empathic reaction is a knot in the stomach, tears, unexplained emotion unrelated to what I am rationally thinking. Sympathy, of course, is related to empathy, else you could dismiss a tragic story or the hurt someone is describing. It is more helpful for me to think of sympathy and empathy being connected by a line, so we might never have one without a bit of the other. We should be far more worried about the opposites--apathy and antipathy, if you will.

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Walter Brueggemann once wrote that before Israel in ancient times could hear God’s word, they had to grieve in order to understand what they had lost. Forgetting 9-11 dishonors that day. It was a terrible day, not in the way the deluded anarchists intended, but a day that caused the world to stop and consider itself. We should never forget the dead, one or three thousand. They have much to tell us, if we will listen.

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The blues can teach us to have a sense of moral seriousness, a steely ethical and spiritual backbone that continues to hope without collapsing into a giddy, almost pre-teen naivete about spiritual matters, in which all is victory, glory, and joy, which requires a selective, edited memory of ourselves and each other that the world around us scorn as hypocrisy that remembers your sins and forgets mine.  

The final episode in this series, "Feeling the Blues," originally given in 2009.

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 These little boys were in the daycare that I would go to every now and then; we had a member of the church that ran this little daycare, it was just called Miss Henrietta's. And I went down to Miss Henrietta's one day and the little boys came home, Justin and Luke—I don't know which one said it—but they ran home and said, "Mama, guess what? God came to see us at Miss Henrietta's today!" Well, that's about the highest compliment I've ever gotten. 

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"Son House was a Baptist preacher that lost his way. Fact is, I've been doing these sermons, I've been very disturbed at how many Baptist preachers turned into blues people. Or they were children of Baptist preachers who went bad. I don't know what to make of all of that. But hard times are that place where we have the temptation to fall into despair of life—to give up on life—instead of finding genuine trust."

From a 2009 series, "Feeling the Blues."  Thank you to supporters Alyson Sears and Mark Ashworth. Their support makes this podcast possible for everyone.

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As a part of the 2009 series at Vestavia Hills Baptist Church, Dr. Beth McGinnis, Assistant Minister of Music at the Church and Professor of Music at Samford University, led a conversation with church members to better understand the connections the blues have and what it can help us to better understand about our own humanity and its relevance to faith.

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"Don’t ever say to anyone who has lost someone, “This is God’s will” or “I know God has something wonderful in this.”  Let them have their loss.  Do not put a band aid on a deep wound.  What God has in this, God does not need your anxiety to show them.  Just be there.  Sing the song with them.  Lament, weep, and wait."  Sermon 2 from my 2009 series, "Feeling the Blues"

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A sermon preached in 2009, a series about the blues. We were in the midst of enormous economic distress, if you remember, and it seemed fitting to revisit these words about blues music and troubled lives at the intersection of the stories of the Bible. David, Jeremiah, and Robert Johnson in conversation with the reality of human existence.

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Julia Ward Howe, who wrote the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," asked Senator Charles Sumner to come to the aid of a needy citizen.  When Sumner turned her down with the excuse that he had grown too busy to concern himself with individuals, Howe replied, "Charles, that's remarkable.  Even God hasn't reached that stage yet."

The problem with our sense of “where the problem is” is that we are like the people of Gadara.  When you ask, “Where is evil?” they would point to “that man over there.”  We’re pretty sure the problem is “out there” somewhere—bad people, bad institutions, bad laws, bad luck. But Jesus in the gospels knew the truth—if evil lives out through our social structures, it is birthed in the human heart.  

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The problem with our sense of “where the problem is” is that we are like the people of Gadara.  When you ask, “Where is evil?” they would point to “that man over there.”  We’re pretty sure the problem is “out there” somewhere—bad people, bad institutions, bad laws, bad luck.  But Jesus in the gospels knew the truth—if evil lives out through our social structures, it is birthed in the human heart.  Evil, as Walter Wink puts it, has no existence apart from dwelling within and among us humans.

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