The Gospel According to Metallica

(The conclusion of a 4-part series)

Many communities have some kind of small, classifieds-only newspaper designed to offer want ads or job postings to people in their city.   For a long time one such paper in the Los Angeles area has been the Recycler.   In early 1981 a teen named Lars Ulrich posted an ad in the Recycler looking for other musicians who were interested in jamming with him.  Guitarist James Hetfield and another musician responded to the ad, and that first jam session eventually resulted in the group we know as Metallica.  

By the mid-eighties Lars and James, along with Kirk Hammett and Cliff Burton had helped create a new genre of rock music known as “thrash metal”.   In the eyes (and ears) of many, thrash metal offered a refreshing alternative to the spandex-makeup-and-big-hair that had begun to define mainstream rock.  Thrash metal artists like Metallica played louder, faster and with a sharper sense of defiance than most artists dared portray.  Their combination of tremendous technical skill and raw fury touched something inside listeners that groups like Kiss or Aerosmith could never reach.  Metallica brought rage into the world of popular music industry. 

Why would a Christian listen to Metallica? 

Many Christians tend to shy away from artists like Metallica.  We assume that anyone venting that much rage couldn’t possibly have much to offer towards a biblical worldview.  A few years ago a pastor friend of mine, John Van Sloten, presented a sermon on the gospel according to Metallica, which began to tip my worldview in this area. 

I’m finding that taking artists like Metallica seriously can help us dig more deeply into some easily overlooked themes in the scriptures.  You might be surprised what we can discover in the Gospel when it’s refracted through Metallica.

Typically we tend to shy away from some of the more gruesome parts of the Bible, hoping to sanitize it into a form more appropriate for religious greeting cards.  A God who would release deadly plagues on the nation of Egypt, arbitrarily killing a nation’s generation of first-born children, seems shockingly out of place in most bible story books.   But somehow that vindictive rage shown by God seems a little less fundamentalist when described by Metallica:  “Die by my hand, I creep across the land, killing first-born man.  Die by my hand…”  (from Creeping Death).

But why would someone want to revel in that kind of ugliness?  Sure these scenes are in the Bible, but what’s the benefit in dwelling on them? 

Artists like Metallica can help us come to terms with the fact that some things in life just aren’t right.  We live in a world that’s not like it’s supposed to be.

We were told this, to be fair.  Way back in the Garden of Eden God warned us that if we rejected him life in our world would begin to unravel, and we’ve been dealing with this twistedness ever since.  In our world if you’re born poor or with the “wrong” skin color you’ll find that you’ve drawn “The Shortest Straw”.   You don’t have to get very far into “And Justice For All” to pick up Metallica’s protest to the blatant unfairness that has soaked into our way of life.   “Justice is raped…”

And God looks down from heaven and says…YES!   

While we stare at him in disbelief He immediately points us to the Minor Prophets where He’s been unsuccessfully to get his people to protest like that for years.  

“For I know how many are your offenses and how great your sins.  You oppress the righteous and take bribes and you deprive the poor of justice in the courts.” (Amos 5:12)

No one calls for justice; no one pleads his case with integrity.  They rely on empty arguments and speak lies.  They conceive trouble and give birth to evil.  (Isaiah 59:3-4)

There is a conspiracy of her princes within her like a roaring lion  Her officials within her are like wolves tearing their prey; they shed blood and kill people to make unjust gain. The people of the land practice extortion and commit robbery; they oppress the poor and needy and mistreat the alien, denying them justice. (Ezekiel 22:25, 27, 29)

“But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like an never-failing stream!” (Amos 5:24)

But the suffering in scripture isn’t limited to the impersonal pain of far-off victims.  The Bible is filled with the stories of real people experiencing real pain—the same kinds of pain we experience.  The members of Metallica are no different than us in that regard.  In interviews the various band members tells stories of a father who never came back from a business trip, of a mother who died young of a preventable cause, of parents whose marriage was scarred by a father’s abuse.  The entire band reeled from the death of Cliff Burton, their first bassist, whose death threw the rest of the band off-balance for more than a decade. 

Life is painful:  not just for the anonymous people behind the headlines, but for people like us.  That’s what led the prophet Jeremiah to burst out:

“Curse the day I was born! The day my mother bore me, a curse on it, I say!    And curse the man who delivered the news to my father:  "You've got a new baby--a boy baby!"  (How happy it made him.)   Let that birth notice be blacked out,  deleted from the records, And the man who brought it haunted to his death with the bad news he brought.   He should have killed me before I was born, with that womb as my tomb, My mother pregnant for the rest of her life with a baby dead in her womb. Why, oh why, did I ever leave that womb?  Life's been nothing but trouble and tears, and what's coming is more of the same.” (Jeremiah 20:14-18, The Message).

In their song Fixxer, the band throws out the same complaint:

But tell me

Can you heal what father’s done?

Or fix this hole in mother’s son?

Can you heal the broken worlds within?

Can you strip away so we may start again?

That’s anger.  Anger for a reason.

But you can’t hold anger forever.  Eventually something’s got to give:  your health, your relationships, your sanity.  Sooner or later it seems that the irresistible force of anger ultimately crumbles every immovable object we might place in its path.  You can hear that in Metallica’s music.  It’s hard to imagine anyone putting more raw passion into any one song.  Eventually something’s got to give.

And finally it did.  Suddenly the scene switches to a hill outside Jerusalem where Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is ripped from his Father by the force of a wrath that we’d never even imagined before.  If you’ve seen the movie “The Passion of the Christ” you can probably form a picture of the scene.  What you’re seeing is the wrath of God coming down like a city bus on an unsuspecting pedestrian.

You can sense that tragedy on Golgotha in The God That Failed :

I see faith in your eyes

Never you hear the discouraging lies

I hear faith in your cries

Broken is the promise, betrayal

The healing hand held back by the deepened nail

Follow the god that failed…

Trust you gave, a child to save

Left you cold and him in grave…

But wait a minute—was that scene really a failure?  We sometimes twist this story into a narrow, judgmental caricature of a God who doesn’t like to be crossed.  But if you look at how God presents this event you find something surprising:  an anger even greater than that of Metallica.  Not simply the anger of irritation or wounded pride.  Not even the anger of injustice or abuse.   This is the anger of a Creator who knows better than any of us just how right  this world was created to be, and just how wrong it has now become since Genesis 3 spoiled everything.

Yes, eventually something has to give. 

But suddenly the scene switches again.  Now we see the risen Jesus Christ appearing in John’s vision in Revelation 21.  Surveying the final arrival of his Kingdom He states it simply:  I am making everything new (Rev. 21:5). God says HERE is where you can point your anger.  Let your anger surface, grieve mourn and wail as it ripens into a longing for the world that we were made for, the one we ache for in our bones.

Sounds like gospel to me. 

Yes, strangely enough, Metallica leads me to Jesus.  Not that the band members themselves have discovered that yet.  It appears that they haven’t, at least so far.  But here’s what I’m learning:  readers of the Bible need to understand voices like Metallica’s to read the Bible more vividly, just as listeners of Metallica need to turn to the Bible to find somewhere they can go with their rage.  Each side needs the other.

If you’ve stuck with me all the way to the end of this blog post, chances are that you can feel some of what Metallica voices so powerfully.  You get it.   Maybe you have lived with some of the same kinds of pain that members of the band have experienced. 

But then let me ask you:  where do you go with your anger, with whatever particular cocktail of hurt and brokenness life has mixed in your heart?  Do you shake your fist at Heaven, giving voice to your frustration?  Or do you try your best to give God the silent treatment?  (not a small feat, given His omniscience).  And how do you picture God responding?  Maybe, like many, you sense God wrinkling His nose in irritation at your bitterness.  Maybe you wonder if He even notices at all.

If God were oblivious to our suffering, then it would seem that He has wasted a lot of valuable space in the Bible to include all those laments and protests that he packed into there.  Why in the world would He include all that ugly stuff if He only wanted us to make nice?  On the contrary, God goads us on in our protests, even giving us some good lines to throw back at Him. 

God is serious about our protests, because the more we feel just how wrong life still is, the more we begin to realize just how right his redemption will be.  If your world only needs a little tweaking to make it right, you’ll only look for a little help from God.  But when we discover a little more of just how twisted God’s creations has become we’re able to make room for a much bigger, deeper, more powerful kind of redemption.   The kind that doesn’t simply make things a little better, but makes things new.

Chances are God has raised the stakes for you, forcing you to look for a redemption that’s real enough to change a world like yours.  He’s goading you on, looking to finally do some business with you as you creep towards redemption.

What are you waiting for?

The Gospel According to Michael Jackson ("Is This It?")

(#2 in a series of 4)

It’s a long ways from Gary, IN to Neverland Ranch.  When I was a boy I lived close enough to Gary to smell it.  The community where my family and I were safely tucked away was only about 15 miles from Gary;  I would look at the interstate frontage as we drove to visit family in Michigan for holidays.  Like most of my neighbors, though, I never actually set foot in Gary.  It was a certain kind of town for only certain kinds of people.  Through no merit of my own, I wasn’t one of those people.

I could, however, smell the town when the wind blew from the right direction.  Whenever the breeze shifted to the northeast the industrial stench from the steel mills in Gary would drift over Lansing IL, and for a few hours that distant world clouded my own.  When that happened I was forced to go inside and enjoy the air conditioning.

During those same years a crane operator at one of those steel mills was doing what he could to earn a living for his wife and 9 children.  Feeding all those growing children was tough, and so Joseph Jackson did what he could to moonlight in an R-and-B band.  As his sons grew he discovered that they shared his love of music.  He helped his sons form a group, eventually called the Jackson 5.  They even had little Jermaine and Michael singing back-ups and working their tambourines. 

Eventually the little guys worked their way to the front.  And after that the littlest guy, Michael, became the solo front singer for their group.  And they were amazing.  Polished, singing with an ease and maturity beyond their years.  (Check out their videos on Youtube sometime.  I’ve been to a lot of elementary school music programs;  trust me, they didn’t look anything like that!)   They didn’t look at all like Gary, they looked like Hollywood.

What no one knew at the time was that behind those practiced smiles was a domineering father who supervised the endless rehearsals with his belt ready to enforce his authority.  As various family members have explained in interviews, if you made mistakes you “got your butt tore up pretty good”.

Over time Michael Jackson moved from the front singer to THE singer, launching his solo career as the groups star began to decline.  He emerged on the scene just about the time a new music-video network was getting established:  MTV.   Michael and MTV fit like a marriage made in Neverland.    Before Michael Jackson MTV videos were mostly promotional footage for bands, showing concert footage and studio shenanigans of long-haired musicians.   But Michael reinvented the music video, shaping it into a form of cinema in its own right.  Billie Jean translated the classic detective movie into a musical form, Beat It re-invented West Side Story, and Thriller blew everyone away as the ghouls quietly emerged from their graves, clearly showing “the soul for getting down”. 

In all of these, Michael was amazing.  He could chase away the bad guys, he could reconcile rival street gangs, he could tame the dreaded ghouls from the graveyard…just by dancing!   He could fly loops around the globe faster than you could say “Black or White”.

And it wasn’t just that he was good.  Michael Jackson’s ability transcended whatever limitations mere mortals like you and me had to live with.  Gravity didn’t seem to hold him, the basic laws of physics were no more than mere guidelines as he moonwalked across the stage, sliding and bending in ways that only cartoon characters can hope for.

He made it look easy.   That was the thing, really—watching Michael Jackson made you think you could be cool.  For a few minutes even a heavy-footed, Midwest white boy could imagine gliding and sliding gracefully, every move just perfect.  A few weeks ago I watched “This Is It”, the tribute movie hastily thrown together for Michael Jackson.  It was fascinating to watch him:  a relentless perfectionist, working very hard making it look that easy.

Unfortunately Michael Jackson’s videos all ended after 5 or 10 minutes, only to leave me disappointingly aware that this middle-aged preacher wasn’t going to dance that smoothly any more than he was going to juggle chainsaws.

Of course, I knew that would happen…it happens every time.  But still…something inside me can’t shake the idea that I was meant to be awesome.  

And it’s at this point that God looks down on me from heaven and says…“You think?”

It’s right about then that I’m driven to Gen. 3 where I’m told that things were created to be awesome, that life was intended to be elegant and powerful and nothing was supposed to feel bleak or heavy or clumsy.  And once again I’m driven to realize that even though you can take people out of Eden, you can’t quite take the Eden out of people.

C.S. Lewis once wrote: "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. … Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing."

Michael Jackson’s smoothness made us ache to get past the clumsiness of this life that we consider “real”.  We ache to moonwalk our way from our individual Gary, Indianas, to whatever Neverland might be waiting for us in the pleasant hills of Santa Barbara.    We ache for that…only to find that we can’t get there from here.

And, of course, the media have always made it very clear that not even Michael Jackson was actually as cool as Michael Jackson seemed to be.  The signs of an unsatisfied longing were obvious: the compulsive plastic surgery (reportedly spurred by his father’s verbal abuse accusing him of being ugly, having a big nose, etc.).  The various rumors and sexual charges that, at the very least, proved some serious eccentricity.  In fact, the man just seemed…bizarre, even before he dangled his child off that balcony.

Michael Jackson presented something that he probably didn’t have a whole lot of himself:  hope.  The hope of escaping the heavy drudgery which turns our loving into conflict, our creativity into mere day jobs and the creation itself into a series of environmental crises.

1 Peter 1 talks about the “inexpressible and glorious joy” that can be ours through Christ.  Not because we can finally Beat It, but because Christ himself will someday wipe every tear from our eyes, restoring the glory that we ache to see here in Gary Indiana. 

I can almost—but not quite—get used to living in the bleakness of life after Eden.  But when I see magic set to music something inside me is roused to eager expectation, if only for a few minutes. 

The man may have had flaws, but he helped us ache past our own.

The Gospel According to The Beatles ("All You Need is...What?")

(First in a four-part series.)

If you’ve ever gotten truly filthy, you know how good it can feel to get cleaned up.  Maybe it’s a long day landscaping, or a really good mud football game, or a long-distance run in the rain.  Once you get inside there’s nothing like the feeling of a long, hot shower and the chance to slip into some clean, dry clothes.  You start to feel human again.

I can imagine how that feeling must have swept across Britain after the horrors of World War 2.  After the endless years of air raid sirens, gutted buildings and children sent away to hide in the country it must have felt wonderful to simply settle down again.  To get cleaned up once again.  It’s not surprising, then, that the years following the war on both sides of the Atlantic were marked by an exaggerated sense of tidiness:  the “Leave It To Beaver” era. 

But it was during these years of tidiness that a new wave of children were entering their parents’ world—the Baby Boom.   They arrived untouched by the grime of their parents’ nightmares; they just wanted to have fun.   What had felt snug and secure to their parents began to feel sterile and confining to them.  Soon voices of protest began to emerge.

One of the first of these voices came from a group of young boys from the working-class town of Liverpool, in England.  They were crude, but clever, and they gained a following by gently poking fun of their parents’ generation.  Eventually they were discovered by a record shop owner who offered to serve as their manager, and they were whisked off to Hamburg Germany where they served as a non-stop opening act for various all-night strip clubs there.  After several months of (amphetamine-boosted) marathon performances they returned to England, exhausted.  Eventually this trial by fire forged The Beatles.

Despite their humble start, The Beatles’ creativity rattled English society, like a shot of tequila at tea-time.  They only stayed together 9 years, yet in less than a decade they changed everything musically. 

How?   They expressed an ache that many Baby Boomers had been feeling but couldn’t quite express.   Whether in the cute romance of I Saw Her Standing There, the melancholy grieving of She’s Leaving Home or the wistful longing for community in Yellow Submarine, The Beatles’ music somehow made it easier to believe that there was more to life than dear old dad and mum might ever imagine.   All you need is love, right?

Really? 

The problem, of course, was to figure out just what they were actually longing for.   Albums like the landmark Sgt. Pepper sharpened and deepened that desire, without pointing towards a clear remedy.  The group wandered in and out of a variety of world-view alternatives, including Eastern religions, without finding something credible to hang their spiritual hats on.   And ironically, it was during the years of this search that the Beatles themselves began to unravel in some very unloving ways.  By the time their two final albums were released the band members were facing each other in court, squabbling over everything from money to creative differences.  All you need is love…and a bigger share of the groups’ royalties.

The Beatles had a point—there is more to life than material possessions.  At the same time, The Beatles were ultimately pointless—they had no idea what might present a better alternative.  And they apparently didn’t know that they didn’t know that.

In the Beatitudes Jesus encouraged us to grieve our inability to straighten out our worlds.  “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted,” he said in the Sermon on the Mount, urging us to recognize the futility of creating our own “Octupus’ Gardens, in the shade.”  

Furthermore, the Bible makes it clear that there is only one place to turn to get things straightened out in life.  In Col. 1:15-23 we’re told that Christ is the only one who can reconcile that which is ruined.  To discover the gospel involves grieving our complete inability to fix things in order to cling tightly to the One who can.

We can’t do this on our own.  Left to our own devices we will pendulum-swing from one disaster to another.  The 60’s “free love” led to the STD’s of the 80’s and the broken families of the 90’s and the hopelessness marked by the children of those generations. 

The Beatles helped us ache for that “long and winding road” that might lead us to healing.  What they didn’t realize was that that path was actually straight and narrow.

Discovering the Gospel in Rock Music

I’ve been thinking about popular music a lot lately, as our church has just finished a series of services looking at the topic. I’m going to use my next series of blog posts to reflect on that.  For more on the series, visit www.gatheringchurch.org.

A generation or two ago most Christians were keeping their distance from the disturbing new music known as “Rock ‘n’ Roll”.  There were enough concerns about Elvis (“the Pelvis”) Presley and others of his ilk to convince most decent church folk to keep their distance.   It just didn’t seem normal and it certainly wasn’t godly.

Today things have changed greatly; for better or for worse.  In most Christian families children listen to a variety of popular music stations without hesitation, and their parents may have their own blend of classic, heavy metal, or light rock artists.  Most believers rarely question the fact that all these hours of listening time are devoted to secular music, any more than they might question all the hours they spend watching secular TV.  After all, who would seriously consider watching only Christian TV? 

Clearly our idea of normal has shifted, along with our listening habits.  Is that a good thing?

Right about this point this conversation usually veers directly into questioning the lifestyles of various rock artists, their dubious credibility as role models, etc.  While these are valid questions, Christians have generally found a way to separate the music of their artists from their lifestyles.  Spend a little time reading up on the personal lives of Mozart, for example, (much less Tchaikovsky) to be reminded of God’s ability to inspire amazing art from flawed individuals. 

This blog is not intended to pursue that conversation, as it has already gotten enough column inches during the past several decades.  Instead, I believe there is a far more important conversation that’s been generally neglected: finding hints of the Gospel in rock music.  Throughout the astonishing breath of the popular music industry one can find hints and urges that, if followed, can lead us directly to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

(Now that sounds like a gimmicky seeker-friendly way to try to lure people into your church!   Why not just preach the gospel rather than going all Hollywood about it?  If we’re not careful we could lose our bearings!)

If you read Acts 17 sometime you may be surprised to see the Apostle Paul losing his bearings in the city of Athens.  As any decent Jewish Christ-follower could tell you, Athens was dangerous.  In a first-century world where people collected false gods and goddesses as a hobby, Athens was one of the destinations of choice for someone who really wanted to get serious about it.   Athens was for idolaters what Las Vegas is for problem gamblers.

Paul found himself with time to kill in Athens.  He’d run into trouble in another city and had to leave town quickly.  His supporters brought him to Athens where he would then wait for Silas and Timothy to join him later.   Before long, Paul had found the Jewish synagogue and had begun challenging folks with the news of Jesus Christ.  One thing led to another and before long he’d gotten sucked into the whole “pantheon of gods” scene.  Before you could say “abomination” he found himself talking face to face with some of the big names in idol worship. 

The Greek idolaters seemed to get a kick out of Paul.  They kept goading him with questions and challenges.  Eventually Paul hit pay dirt.   Pointing to the Altar of the Unknown God (their catch-all for whatever deity they may have failed to invent along the way) Paul looked them in the eyes and made his pitch:  I know about this mystery god.  Let me tell you about the god you’re already worshipping.

There was a method in Paul’s madness.  Although in most Jewish eyes he probably seemed to be compromising in his efforts to recruit followers of Jesus Christ, he was actually making surgical strike in a spiritual hot-spot in their world.  Instead of lobbing the gospel at the Athenians from the outside, bellowing condemnation like Jonah in Nineveh, he found something they were already looking for and joined them in their search.   He came alongside of them, respectfully but with full integrity, and helped them with the search they were already on.

There’s a lot that we can learn from Paul’s approach.  Often we approach evangelism as if everyone “out there” were spiritually tone-deaf and needed to be rebuked into the gospel faith.  While rebellion has indeed spread throughout humanity like a spiritual H1N1 virus, the fact is that many people around us are longing for Christ’s redemption, but may not know it yet.

In Romans 8 Paul explained that there’s an ache inside each one of us:  a deep-seated sense that life could be, should be more that what it is—but isn’t.  Rom. 8:22 assures this that this is real.  All creation, we’re told, groans in expectation waiting for God’s redemption to be fully ushered in.   But sometimes we can get so used to this nagging ache that we lose our sense of it.  When we lose our ability to ache we lose our sense of redemption and our awareness of the gospel.  

One of the reasons why it can be important for Christians to follow popular music is that popular artists often have an instinctive way of tapping into this chronic ache.  Let’s face it, when an artist is able to sell millions of albums he or she is clearly offering a lot more than a catchy melody or rhythm line.   Somehow, on a deep level, that artist has been able to connect with something that a lot of potential fans are feeling.   A best-selling artist is able to, in some way, provide listeners with a shock of recognition:  “yes, I feel like that, too!”  

Thoughtful listening to popular music can go a long way in helping us rediscover the human ache for God and the redemption He offers us.   The particular artists may or may not have anything helpful to offer to help with this ache, but they can undo a lot of the numbness that the followers of Jesus can sometimes develop.  

In the next four posts on this blog I’d like to share some reflections on how this ache for God can be seen in the music of The Beatles, Michael Jackson (yes, that Michael Jackson), U2 and Metallica. 

These four artists each speak to the inner ache many of us would just as soon avoid.  By exploring the significance of their voices we can re-discover important aspects of the gospel.