Segue: Jesus’ Call, and Our Response, to Make Music of Our Lives in the Twenty First Century

By Anthony Warren

What if Jesus were to write you a personal letter? How quickly would you read it? In Segue, learn that Jesus has indeed written to his followers living today, in the early decades of the twenty-first century. Through his introduction, critic, and counsel, Jesus speaks directly to you and me today.

Together, we explore the deeply stirring call God has issued to his children to think of our lives as pieces of music to be composed. Using music as a metaphor of our lives, you will learn how to develop a more intimate walk with Jesus. Today our lives sound more like machines chugging along our day-to-day routines rather than the expertly crafted instruments that God intended.

Segue is a musical term that means a seamless transition. All of our lives are songs that are being composed. What will be the quality of your sound? How would this outlook change our lives and the world?

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Oct 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781512761504

Anthony Warren

Anthony Warren is a student of both the Bible and culture. Encountered by God, in the person of Jesus, at age nine, he is passionate about finding the truth of life in the present moment and helping others to do the same. Anthony lives in Kansas City, Missouri, and loves to travel the world.

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CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Author’s Note

Introduction

MOVEMENT 1: INTRODUCTION

Part 1: Looking Back

Chapter 1:  The Venue: Purpose and Hope

Chapter 2:  The Song of Hercules

Chapter 3:  Jesus: Composer and Executive Producer of the The Sounds of Life

MOVEMENT 2: THE CRITIC

Chapter 4:  God Sick?

Chapter 5:  Our Deception

MOVEMENT 3: JESUS’S COUNCIL

Selah/the Retune

Part 2: Looking Forward

The Art of Making a Twenty-First Century Disciple

Chapter 6:  The Sound of the World to Come: Finding Inspiration, a Melody, and the Rhythm of Our Lives

Chapter 7:  God’s Festival of Life

Outro

Appendix A

PREFACE

All writers attempt to fill voids. Creative writers are trying to write that book they don’t see on the shelf. Nonfiction writers want to fill in some gap in knowledge or tell an untold or undertold story in history. The exact nature of the void that I am attempting to fill with this book has changed in the process of writing it. What began as a Bible study has morphed into something far broader and richer.

The purpose of a preface is to make any preliminary statements or acknowledgments that will help the reader better understand the content they are about to read. With that said, in the process of writing Segue I discovered that the void that I was attempting to fill actually had a shape; that is to say, that it has dimensions. There are three that I want to highlight. I discovered that these three are the essentials to understanding what lies ahead. So perhaps it is better to say that these three dimensions act much like the three primary colors from which all the other colors emerge. The power of a dimension, and if you think about a color, is that it is a unit of measurement. Dimensions help us to describe. Consequently they help us engage in the world in a way that is healthy. This leads us to the first dimension.

First, Segue is concerned with knowledge, which is the act of seeing things as they really are. The problem is that we are not exactly sure that that is possible anymore. A lot of careers have been made and maintained detailing this truth. The problem is that everything that matters revolves around knowledge, which is more than information or data points. It is the relationship between data points that forms patterns. We use the phrase bodies of knowledge precisely because those patterns imply movement. And continual movement suggests vitality and life.

I am suggesting that knowledge is the thing that keeps life on our little planet moving.

Even the most elementary survey of Western civilization will reveal how true this is for us humans. The fall of the Roman Empire—and consequently the loss of the ability to maintain the institutions that passed knowledge from one generation to the next—plunged Europe into almost a thousand years of darkness.

Segue is specifically about our knowledge of spiritual bodies of knowledge; to be more precise, our lack of knowledge, which leads me to the second dimension, the relationship between faith and reason. For a whole set of reasons, some of which we will discuss, we in the West separated faith and reason. Then we set them against each other. When we realized that got us nowhere, we did nothing to actually reconcile them. Part of that failure is that while we were separating faith from reason, we collectively decided that faith was a private matter, so most people are aware of the utility of reason in both private and public mattes. Yet the very thought of faith in the public sphere makes most people cringe. What I learned in writing this book was that faith and reason are two ways of seeing. The key is that they are not mutually exclusive. They can, and should, be done together. The problem is that few, including most Christians, are proficient in the act. We now are at a point where we can see the third dimension.

I first began the journey that has culminated in this book around September 11, 2001. What I have learned is that the great divide between the Western and Eastern worlds was put on full display that day. The schism between us is about a thousand years old. The story is wonderfully complex and messy; that is to say, human. It has all the drama of Game of Thrones. It has politics, power plays, sex, war, all the good stuff. As usually happens when antagonists meet, each brings out a list of grievances. After two wars, the stall of the democracies birthed during the Arab Spring, and the rise of ISIS, let’s just say the relationship between East and West could be described as … tense. Thankfully! As usually happens when antagonists meet, there are a few wise souls around who are looking for a way to reconcile.

When we look closely, one of the main things that I learned is that in the East, they never separated faith and reason. They never let go of the spiritual knowledge as revealed by the spiritual geniuses of Karen Armstrong’s Great Transformation. Now let’s be clear; this divergence in our traditions has created a difference in our realities. Materially, our standards of living are far better than theirs. Yet according to the World Health Organization, psychologically they are far healthier than we are. My point in the text that follows is that God intended for all of us to have both.

These three dimensions, along with others, converge and curve together to outline the shape of the void that I am seeking to fill. It is the shape of an embodied, engaged, fully realized person, living in today’s world. Again, this text began in a very narrow place, where I fancied myself pursuing God, only to find out that he was pursuing me in a very interesting way. His pursuing was guiding. I found myself led into a vision of a people of God living in the twenty-first century and beyond. It doesn’t look the way I thought it would, but isn’t that the way it should be?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First to Andrew and Joyce Warren, my mother and father, thank you for supporting your very eccentric child. I want to thank Jeff Adam, Allen Shelby, and above all others Janet Cross for teaching me to love God and his word.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

All scripture references in this book are from the King James Authorized Version (KJV) 1611. There are many fine translations of the Bible in English. I use the KJV because the translators were attempting to render more than just an accurate translation. They were concerned with producing a work of art.

When the KJV was commissioned, the baroque art style was in vogue. At the time all across Europe, beautiful buildings were being produced in this style. Baroque is a European style of architecture, music, and art that is characterized by ornate detail. It uses the technique of exaggerated motion to express themes in easily understandable images, which brings us to England, where you don’t find any architecture from this period that could be characterized as baroque.

The great achievement of the baroque era in England was the KJV.¹ We have to keep in mind that the KJV was translated to be read aloud into the ears of the same crowds that clamored to experience the plays of Shakespeare. The British were moved much more by a combination of visual, sonic, architectural pageantry than by buildings alone. For example, the Greek word pneuma is translated both as ghost and spirit. I grew up in churches that used the KJV and always wondered why in some passages the Holy Spirit was a spirit and in others he was a ghost. The simple answer is rooted in our present discussion. Pneuma is mostly translated spirit. However, in climactic, dramatic, scenes such as John 13–17, the translators render it ghost to inform the hearer that this is an important moment. Shakespeare does the same thing when he says the ghost of Hamlet’s father came to him, rather than his spirit. Why? Because the appearing of the ghost of Hamlet’s father is a critical point in the play. After their discussion, Hamlet must make the most critical decision of his life. This was the energy at play during the translation of the KJV.

INTRODUCTION

We are now well into the twenty-first century, and nothing is as we thought it would be. I remember as a child hearing the adults talk about the coming century like a live action Jetsons episode. Visions of homes in the sky, moving sidewalks, and problems easily solved in thirty minutes have been dispelled. Having experienced what former Prime Minister Gordon Brown calls the first global crisis, the reality of twenty-first century life is anything but ideal and so easily managed.

One of the surprising ways the world is different is in the realm of religion and spirituality. The fact is that most educated people in the early twentieth century predicated the demise of religion. However, like in the excellent animated television show The Legend of Korra, spirit portals have opened up all around us. In the last twenty to thirty years, interest in spirituality has increased exponentially. So much so that many media outlets have begun producing spiritually oriented content—most notably the founding of the OWN network by media mogul Oprah Winfrey.

What is so interesting is that for the last two or three centuries, we have been taught, and encouraged, to live life in a particular way; that is, solely with our senses. In technical language, this is called scientism, which is using the scientific method as a philosophy of life. And it paid off. In the West, we used it to increase the material standard of living for most people living in our nations.

The measurable increase in spiritual interest is evidence that while this method of living has proven its utility, it has also proven its limitations. Life has simply shown us that there are facets of itself that lie beyond our capacities to fully understand or remedy using the scientific method. For example, after World War II, there were full-blown inquiries into the causes of the world wars.² At issue was how could a set of reason-oriented, sophisticated, thoroughly cosmopolitan societies lead the world into the most devastating war in human history, and then in less than a generation do it all over again?

What became of all this inquiry? We developed and implemented a whole set of institutions such as the UN, the World Bank, and Health Organization designed to mediate the disputes, provide financial aid, and monitor the health of the global community. The world community adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. With an affirmation of common human dignity and a host of structures erected to ensure that dignity, the world heralded a new era. Yet in the nearly seventy years since, we have seen the same old geopolitical and socioeconomic issues plague us. What is clear is that the root causes of our ills must include, but go beyond, our physical realities.

The Cold War provided the world with a sufficiently enthralling drama to distract the majority of people from noticing that they were spiritually hungry. It is no coincidence that after the fall of the Berlin Wall and end of the Soviet Union that you see interest in the spiritual building toward a critical mass.³ Around the turn of the twenty-first century, it became impossible to ignore. It became common to hear things such as, people aren’t becoming less religious but differently religious. The trends pointed to a need to decentralize the religious experience: moving the heart of worship from the place of worship—church, temple, and mosque—into the everyday life experience of the individual.⁴

JESUS OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY?

While this was happening, I was beginning to ask my own questions. It was on a typical Sunday morning, and Pastor was beginning his message. His text was Jesus’s letter to the Laodicean church, as recorded in Revelation 3:14–22. As he began his introduction, I became frustrated. I had been attending this church for several years. In that time, I heard about a million sermons out of this passage. Yet I really didn’t have a grasp of it. I didn’t know what Jesus meant by it. The pastors would spend most of their time proving the prophetic nature of the text; that is to say, they would link the conditions and dilemmas of the city, and church, of Laodicea to you and me today. Yet I was often left wanting, even yearning, to learn how to draw out meaning from the text for my life.

So I began a study of the letter for myself. What I found, at first, was that the pastors were right in terms of the form, the mood, and the prophetic links to our times. The passage is noir—shadowy and looming, like London fog. Jesus is indeed expressing his displeasure with the condition of the Laodicean church, and prophetically with the twenty-first century church in the West. He goes so far as to say that we make him sick to the point he wants to throw up. The language is strong, and the imagery is disturbing. Yet behind all of it, I also heard the call to reconciliation. Jesus through this passage is presenting himself as a contemporary figure genuinely interested in a relationship with us, addressing the issues of our times. So much was still unclear, but the process was already started. The journey had begun. How was any of this possible?

THE AESTHETICS OF LIFE

The challenge begins with how Jesus is viewed. At best, Jesus is presented by Christians in the West exclusively as a first century teacher. That he could in real ways be hip to the latest apps for our smart phones or know anything about the exciting new era of space travel we are entering is impossible to imagine for most of us. Yet I could not deny that this was the direction in which his letter was pointing.

Jesus begins the adventure by using language that we can understand—consumer language. The Lord established his community of followers to serve as his representatives in this world. Consequently, our fulfillment or lack of fulfillment of that purpose invokes in him certain feelings. He is experiencing us in the same way we experience our cell phones or computers. Of course, the analogy eventually breaks down, but it points us in the right direction. When our devices work, we don’t even think about why or how they function. Yet when they stop working, everything stops until we get them back up and running.

Through the works of Francis Schaffer and Cornel West, I gained the insight that unlocked the passage. They demonstrate powerfully that a culture’s products—its food, clothing, buildings, tools, literature—are expressions of who the people of that society are.⁵ Schaffer’s cultural analysis is general in scope while West most eloquently focuses on music. West notes in particular the black invention of the blues as an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically. The blues was one of the alternatives created by blacks in the face of the horrific violence visited upon them after Reconstruction and into the Jim Crow era. Rather than respond in kind to the terrorist acts inflicted upon them, blacks responded by trying to hold on to their own humanity while trying to honor the humanity of others—creating art rather than weapons. West notes the rise of hip-hop as another sonic means by which black people have attempted to deal with the assaults on their dignity.

I began to realize that my understanding of Jesus’s letter to the Laodiceans was narrow and flat because I was trying to understand it simply as a text to be studied. First I thought how my understanding of the text might change if I read it out loud, as if Jesus was reading it to me. What if the letter was a spoken word piece? How does thinking of the letter as poetry change my understanding? That led me to the key. What if the passage was a song? How might my understanding of this passage change if I imagined it as a musical performance accompanied by a band? This revelation was further bolstered by the fact that almost all sacred texts were first delivered musically.⁶ I realized that if Revelation 3:14–22 had to be rendered into an art form, the most compelling would be music. Jesus is singing the blues in this passage. The people of the church of Laodicea are not following him the way he intended. He is, to say the least, not happy about it. Graciously he offers to help undergo what I am calling a segue, a transition made without pause or interruption,⁷ a technique used during concerts to make the movement from song to song seamless. It is a technique that gives the experience an ethereal, transcendent feel.

THE ALIENATION OF HERCULES

In the passage, I found Jesus suggesting that there is symmetry between my struggles to understand this passage and the persistent issues with which I began this introduction. Both the public and private are accurately captured by the oft used, but still useful, alienation, which is the persistent reality of all people living in the modern Western world. Alienation is the sense that we are not whole, that the very conditions that make our lives our lives have hindered us. In the text I refer to our state of disconnectedness as the spirit of Hercules. In the West, our lives have come to mirror the stories of the demigods of old. They were big, strong, and could do wonders, yet beyond the tales of their exploits there is sense of loneness.

A cursory study of mythologies across cultures tells us that the gods created humanity to tend to the world and maintain its order. When threats arose—war, famine, a ferocious creature threatens the village, and the like—it fell to the demigods to resolve the issue. Joseph Campbell powerfully demonstrates in his classic The Hero with a Thousand Faces the centrality of the hero’s journey to our understanding of ourselves. His PBS series Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers, helped gain him his widest audience, in which he began to popularize the idea of comparative mythology. Campbell argues that whether we talk about Gilgamesh, Achilles, Krishna, or Hercules, we are all telling the same story: the tale of a universal human archetype who undergoes an arduous journey and is transformed. In the end he reaps great rewards and gains glory for the struggle. It is important to note that Campbell includes contemporary examples of the hero’s journey, such as the enduring popularity of the Star Wars franchise. Our fascination with superheroes should not, and does not, go unnoticed.

What I argue is that the modern age has allowed Westerns to, in the words of Joseph Campbell, follow their bliss in unprecedented ways. At the same time the very conditions created by, and the history that led to, the modern age have not generated the intended consequences. In the modern age, we were promised Utopia if we allowed reason to have the pride of place. When that failed, postmodernism replaced reason with social justice. I intend to demonstrate that the problem is that we have come to believe that both pursuits could be achieved individually. From Newton’s discovery of gravity to Dr. Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, we love to imagine that the great achievements of human progress and enlightenment were solitary acts. However, a wealth of research, across fields, has developed in the last couple of decades that totally contradicts this notion. The problem is that we don’t know what to do about it.

MUSIC, THE SOUND OF SOULS

It is here that I began to understand the great wisdom in Jesus leading me to use a music motif as a way of understanding the content of his letter to us.