Swingin' in the Pocket

Back in January, when AnnaMaria told the choir that she wanted to do a month of Jazz, it made me think, “What does jazz have to do with the Gospel?” So later that night, I googled “jazz gospel” which gave me lots of different links to particular gospel music sites. Then I added the word “theology” into my search, and found a blog called Reflections of a Jazz Theologian written by a pastor in Colorado named Robert Gelinas. He wrote, also quoting Brad Braxton:

“The beauty of a jazz musician, lies in their ability not simply to hit a musical note exactly, but to move around the 'margins' of a note, thereby increasing the vibrato and resonance of the sound...When one too precisely hits a note or too accurately defines a reality in black and white, some of the color that captivates and motivates may be lost."

Gelinas concludes, “I believe that to know God is to embrace tension, not necessarily resolve it. Classical theology seeks precision, jazz theology lives and thrives in the ambiguity.”

Less than 36 hours later, at the Bi-District Leadership Training Day, Tim Craig had with him a book called Blue Like Jazz: Non-religious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality, by Donald Miller. I picked it up and read the author’s note at the beginning:

“I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve. But I was outside the Baghdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for 15 minutes and he never opened his eyes.

After that I liked jazz music.

Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.

I used to not like God because God didn’t resolve. But that was before any of this happened.”

This did not feel like a coincidence, but a God-incidence. So I have begun to explore the connection between Jazz and the Gospel--not that U2 has been displaced from my favorites list by any means. But I have discovered that jazz is not just a particular genre of music; it is a style of approaching the art of making music. Within the boundaries of jazz, the music can sound very different, so different that you didn’t even know it was in the same genre. Isn’t that similar to our Christian life? Within each person of faith beats not only a physical heart, but also the heartbeat of God. It is this heartbeat in a sense that binds us together, but the lives empowered by that heartbeat certainly don’t look like the same from person to person.

When we were trying to figure out what to call this series, I asked AnnaMaria to talk about some of the terms used in Jazz. That’s when I discovered “in the pocket.” Almost off-handedly she said, “you know what that means,” and started to move on. But no, I didn’t know what that meant, so I asked.

“In the pocket” means that you’ve got the beat right; that you’ve got the time almost in your bones. Maybe all the rest of you already knew that in jazz the time is actually very strict. But I didn’t. Jazz always seemed so free flowing, so improvisational, so offbeat, as it were. But no, the time, the beat provides the base for all the improvisation to happen. When jazz musicians play “in the pocket,” they are united at the very base, at the beat, so that they can play their own instrument to help create the whole piece.

And that’s what it is like in living the Gospel as well. The heartbeat of God provides the base for all the different improvisations in individual lives. When we live “in the pocket,” we are united in the heart of God so that we can live and use our own gifts to be a part of the whole Body of Christ.

Evelyn Underhill, a 20th century Christian writer, said that “a spiritual life is simply a life in which all that we do comes from the centre, where we are anchored in God: a life soaked through and through by a sense of [divine] reality and claim, and self-given to the great movement of God’s will.”

Augustine of Hippo, a Christian from the 4th-5th centuries, wrote that “we humans, who are a due part of your creation, long to praise you….You arouse us so that praising you may bring us joy, because you have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is unquiet until it rests in you.”

The closer we walk to the heartbeat of God, the more we live “in the pocket.” But how can we find ourselves walking and living close to the heartbeat of God? By keeping close company with the Incarnation of God, Jesus, and allowing his Spirit to infuse our own hearts and lives.

The Apostle Paul prayed for the Christians in Ephesus, and we take this prayer to our own hearts as well:
“For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love.”

Being rooted and grounded in the love of Christ is being connected to the very heartbeat of God which beats so deep that our bones, our very fiber vibrate to this love. This becomes our song, sung in glorious praise to the One who out of overwhelming love set all the Creation into motion.

Then Paul went on to pray “that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.”

The strings of a bass, or a guitar, or a violin, or a cello mean nothing when they are sitting idle in their case. The top skin of a drum means nothing as it sits idle. But when the fingers of the musician set them to work, they vibrate with the note and play the song.

It is when our lives begin to vibrate like those strings or the tautly stretched drum-head that the song begins to play. When we begin to vibrate with the deep-rooted love of God in Christ, the very fiber of our being sings out and the world becomes filled with the heartbeat of God. And our hearts and lives begin to look and act more like the heart and life of Jesus, “who though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross.”

As we live close to the heartbeat of God as revealed in Jesus the Christ, our lives truly begin to look more like his as we begin to live out and act out his love for the world. As our lives begin to vibrate with the very heartbeat of God, the song of love will begin to transform not only us, but the world.

This is living “in the pocket.”