On Monday night at the 9:30 Club in Washington, I stood for three hours with roughly 800 other people to listen to three bands play live music. Once again I found God speaking in sacred ways all over the “secular” world.
Churches struggle unsuccessfully to gather together these very people on Sunday morning, and yet here we all were on a Monday night after work, congregating in over-warm, too close togetherness, waiting for transcendent experience. The bands were excellent performers, but no one was what I would call famous. This was not a celebrity event or even a social gathering, this was about the music.
Lisa Cole Smith
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My fellow congregants were anywhere from 19 to 65 years old and of various ethnicities. Women and men stood enraptured by sounds of guitars and drums and a woman’s strong, electric voice. We were there not just to listen, but to feel. To feel the music pump through our veins with our blood and feel resonance in every cavern of our bodies. To be swept away by sound and melody. To be moved to feel and to move in ways the ordinary day-to-day does not inspire. Even people like me who had never heard the music before felt a part of the music we were all creating together, led by this band which seemed to find so much joy in sharing this music with this audience—this audience so grateful for the gift of music.
Throughout the performance a banner with the name of the headlining band covered the back wall of the stage, serving as backdrop and some sort of triumphant declaration: The Joy Formidable. I don’t know what the band’s intent was in the naming. More often than not, a band’s name has no intended meaning, but for me it turned the night into a meditation on joy and music and the brilliancy of the concept of a formidable joy.
The formidable joy. What does it mean to have formidable joy? What is The Joy Formidable? Do I have that? Do I experience it? Throughout the night the questions circled in my head as the music swept and swelled carrying me along with it.
After the music ended, a man standing near me dressed in his still-fresh-from-work suit leaned close to his fiancé and said, “I feel new.” The music had washed away the reality of Monday and the work week still ahead, the resonance having shaken loose all tension and anxiety. At least for tonight the worries of the “real world” were lost in the shadow of the transcendence of music, the epic, the “more than me.”
“I feel new.” That is what I want to feel Easter morning. It is what I want my congregation to feel at least on Easter to remind us that it is possible every day. We talk about joy and expect ourselves to feel it—but do we and how? How can we experience that joy not just because we are saved from sin but because there is a God in whom lives pure joy and life? It seems to me The Joy, that joy, must be infinitely strong, infinitely stable, running in deep waters—a constant current despite dangerous seas and skies overhead. And I need it—a joy that will last, that will sustain.
For me having formidable joy means having joy that is planted so deeply it cannot be uprooted. When I find myself tired and discouraged from too much work and too little visible results; disappointed by people or saddened by having been the cause of disappointment; confused and anxious about the future and which direction to take; or just done—with ministry, myself, the world—I know the joy Christ offers must be quite formidable. Like the live music that gets inside and seems to want to beat in place of my heart—there is a joy in me that someone else must have planted there.
So, thanks to Monday night and The Joy Formidable, I am reminded of the faithfulness of God and his joy like a tree beside a flowing river that will not be uprooted. This is now the meditation in my heart for Easter. “Praise God of formidable joy! Praise Jesus Christ, deliverer of formidable joy! Praise the Holy Spirit, bringer of formidable joy! Joy that will last no matter what. Joy that will sustain through all of life’s storms. Joy that will overcome the grave because it already has.”
Who knew Monday night at the 9:30 Club would be a time of meditative worship for me? How many other opportunities for worship is God waiting to show me? I’m adding something to my Lenten practice this year. I’m going to listen to more music. God is speaking everywhere and I want to practice listening.
Lisa Cole Smith ([email protected]) is pastor of Convergence: a Creative Community of Faith, a Baptist congregation in Alexandria, Va.