A sermon outside the box – or at least outside language. Our sermon today was paint – lots of paint. And our sermon was music – Rhapsody in Blue to be exact. And our sermon was words – not spoken though, but on the screen. Thank you to an amazing congregation for having the courage to go along with it and the grace to be moved by it.
Gershwin, when he wrote Rhapsody in Blue was combining two wonderful genres – classical music and jazz styling. He took the fullness and wonder of a big orchestra with improvisational jazz ideas and combined them into Rhapsody in Blue. It seemed like a fitting piece to use for a work of art – not to mention it’s just about the right time. When we talk about the Spirit we talk about it a little bit like jazz. The Spirit listens and moves and responds and acts – just like a really good jazz player. We make sense of the work of the Spirit by rooted it in tradition. We look back and if we see similar themes we know that it must be at work. If the Spirit is prompting us to love, overturn empire and listen to the stranger, we are probably sensing it right. If we think the Spirit is prompting us to kill, hold on even tighter to our ideas and alienate then maybe we aren’t thinking of it quite right.