Whispering the lyrics

Jimmy Reed was a musician – a black musician. In the late 1950s and into the 60s, Reed was one of the most influential blues guitarists in the United States, a black man shaping the future of white music. One of Reed’s biographers draws attention to the fact that on recordings of his music there appears to be an unidentified voice, a voice so quiet as to be indistinguishable. While Jimmy Reed sings, another voice murmurs in the background.

There are a number of explanations for the mystery whisperer, but the most likely appears to be that it is the voice of his wife. You see, sometimes Jimmy Reed would become so caught up in his playing, so consumed by making music on his guitar, that he would forget the words to the song that he was singing; and his wife would have to stand beside him whispering the lyrics to remind him of what he had to sing next.

His wife was whispering the lyrics.

When I first heard this story I was struck by the power of that image. Whispering the lyrics… words that Jimmy Reed had sung a hundred times before, words that he himself had written, yet even so he needed someone to whisper the lyrics.

When Jesus tells his disciples, “the Father… will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever”, he is speaking of the coming of the Holy Spirit. In two weeks’ time, we will be celebrating the great feast of Pentecost. Pentecost – when we remember and rejoice in the gift of the very Spirit of God given to those who seek to walk the way of Jesus.

In some churches – the Pentecostal churches – much is made of the extraordinary powers of God’s Holy Spirit: powers to cure illness, to prophesy, to speak in unknown tongues. But the reality seems to be that, while the Pentecostal church focuses upon some manifestations of God’s Spirit, they seem to neglect the most significant and extraordinary gift of all: the Holy Spirit comes so that we might know that God is with us.

Can there possibly be a more important gift? What use is it to speak in the tongues of angels if we forget who it is of whom we speak? How can we dare to prophesy if we do not know the presence of God with us?

Jesus says to his friends, ”If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” How is it possible to love Jesus if we do not experience him with us day by day? And keeping his commandments is only possible if we are grounded in, immersed in the reality of the presence of God in our daily lives.

In Jesus’ time, one of the most unfortunate things that could happen to a person was to be an orphan. It wasn’t a particularly unusual thing to happen, after all life-expectancy was very short. But to be left an orphan was to be left without kin to care for you; to be left without a family to belong to at a time when families were the primary mechanism for the structuring of society. Honour and shame, status and privilege were all tied to family membership, and so to be an orphan was to be cut adrift in a hostile world.

But Jesus does not leave his followers orphaned. Instead there is a family to belong to: the body of Christ; and there is a parent to guide the children in the hostile world: the Spirit of God.

The vast, vast majority of the Christian Scriptures are all about helping the followers of Jesus to find their way, to live out their calling as disciples of the Christ. Where the Jews had the Book of the Law, the followers of the Way had the gospels and the writings of the apostles.

But there are some problems with being a follower of Jesus. Our problems are somewhat different from those of the early church: no-one is going to feed us to the lions for professing our faith; no-one is going to crucify us for not worshiping the gods of the world; we are unlikely to be persecuted just because we go to church on Sunday.

Our struggles are different. For us, we are surrounded by a world which offers us an easy way. We have food to eat, clothes on our backs, a level of security almost unheard of in Jesus’ time and still extraordinary for the vast majority of people in the world today. Our problem is not persecution but sublimation. We are far less likely to be persecuted than we are simply to forget that there is anything different about us as Christians.

Do you know what we need? Do you know what would be really, really helpful for us as we try to live out our faith in twenty-first century Australia? What would be best of all would be if we just had someone to go with us through our days whispering the lyrics of the gospel.

As we go about the daily business of our lives, we need to be reminded of the lyrics of our faith. When we are consumed with the ordinary tasks of day to day life we need to hear what it is we are really called to be doing. It is so easy to become entangled in the web of modern life that we forget who we belong to and how we are called to respond to our God. We are not so very different from Jimmy Reed lost in the moment; like him, we have the power and the opportunity to shape the world around us. But we cannot do that if we forget the song we are called to sing.

And God sends us another Advocate to whisper to us the lyrics of the gospel; to remind us of God’s love for us and God’s love for all the children of God; to sing to us of commandments of love – love of our God, love of our neighbour, love of ourselves, and even love of those who do not love us.

This is the Spirit of Truth, the Holy Presence whispering the lyrics of love. Amen.