This evening as I was looking at my newsfeed on Facebook I noticed my friend Cathleen Falsani Possley posted a link with words from Leonard Sweet and she suggested reading all of Leonard's words before reading the article.
This is what he wrote:
I just found out Pete Seeger died yesterday. Is there a church in the US that hasn't heard these Seeger songs sung in its sanctuary? "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," "Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season)" and "If I Had a Hammer." Back in 2006 Eugene Peterson was interviewed about his friendship with Bono, but spent a great deal of the time talking about Pete Seeger's impact on his life and faith. When asked, "Have any popular musicians acted as prophets in your life?" he replied: "Probably the most pervasive one in my life is Pete Seeger. I think he's a prophet. I very much doubt whether he would call himself a Christian, but he spoke truth and called attention to the things the Christian faith is committed to in a way that nobody else could do during his time."
When asked what Seeger "called attention to," Peterson responded, "Social justice issues, economic things, racial issues, peace....But he was doing this, and continues to do it -- he's done it all his life -- not in ways that the Christian church wasn't doing it, but he was getting the ear of people who would never go to church, and maybe of a lot of those who do go to church because they hadn't heard it from their own pulpits."
Seeger coined a phrase: "Bible Libel." It described those who profess to live by the Bible, but whose lives libel their lips. I thank God today for Pete Seeger, and his celebration of the common life, the common good, and the common people.
And then he posted this link: http://www.atu2.com/news/bonos-prophetic-vox.html which speaks to the prophetic voice of musicians with thoughts from Eugene Peterson and Walter Bruegermann.
Much in this article I believe is germane to the conversation about prophets and the prophetic voice today and it cemented in my mind the place and significance of the prophetic voice in music - in Pete Seeger, Bono (U2) and Bruce Springsteen.
Bruce Springsteen before singing his song, The Ghost of Tom Joad (the character taken from Steinbeck's, Grapes of Wrath) on Seeger's 90th birthday said this, "At age 90, he remains a stealth dagger through the heart of our country's illusions about itself. Pete Seeger still sings all the verses all the time, and he reminds us of our immense failures as well as shining a light toward our better angels and the horizon where the country we've imagined and hold dear we hope awaits us."
Here is the full introduction:
And here is The Ghost of Tom Joad performance:
In the article, Bono's Prophetic Vox (http://www.atu2.com/news/bonos-prophetic-vox.html) Scott Calhoun writes, "The appreciation goes both ways, Peterson said. He's thankful for U2's remarkable work of spreading a message, calling people to forsake lives of selfish pursuits fueled by destructive delusions. In U2's songs, he hears the sound of truth and love. Peterson can hear, when Bono sings, the voice of the prophet in pop culture."
He continues:
In the foreword to Raewynne J. Whiteley and Beth Maynard's, Get Up Off Your Knees, Preaching the U2 Catalog, Peterson wrote:
"Is U2 a prophetic voice? I rather think so. And many of my friends think so. If they do not explicitly proclaim the Kingdom, they certainly prepare the way for that proclamation in much the same way that John the Baptist prepared the way for the kerygma of Jesus...Amos crafted poems, Jeremiah wept sermons, Isaiah alternately rebuked and comforted, Ezekiel did street theater. U2 writes songs and goes on tour, singing them."
Eugene Peterson comments:
Well, I don't know the world of rock and roll music at all, but songs like "Peace on Earth" and "Yahweh," I can't believe they could anticipate that people would like those songs. [The lyrics] are words that I use in the pulpit and classroom, not the common vocabulary of the extra-church crowd. But they are used in such a way, said and sung, so that their meaning is conveyed in a way that reveals their truth: they commune and not just communicate, they evoke a responsive intimacy that can't be extracted from a dictionary. This is what art does, it gets beneath or within essential aspects of our lives.
Peterson then quotes Brueggeman, "So I've used the word prophet for them. Walter Brueggemann describes prophets as uncredentialed spokesmen for God. Well, I think that fits them pretty well. They don't have any authority in the world of faith."
I believe the same could be said for Seeger and Springsteen. Their lyrics are infused with biblical imagery, creatively re-authoring, interpreting, imagining and remembering while energized with authenticity and commitment.
Again Peterson,
Maybe we shouldn't even be asking prophets questions. They are asking questions of us. Maybe the question we ask should be, "Is God using these words, this stance, to say something to me, to my society, to my neighborhood?" A prophet, almost by definition, doesn't fit into the categories you expect, which is what gives them bite, and clarity, and the sense of grabbing us by the scruff of our neck, and saying, "Listen to this: this is truth, this is what's going on." The whole authority of prophets comes not from what people say about them or the credentials that they have, it's from the truth of what they are saying. This is true of the Biblical prophets and of prophetic voices all through history. Often prophets use the name God but sometimes they don't. It is interesting to reflect that no Hebrew prophet ever was referred to as "messiah," but the pagan Persian king Cyrus was. God used him in what I would refer to as a prophetic way to free the Hebrews from their exile and return them to their homeland, but Cyrus had no idea that he was issuing edicts under the sovereignty of God. It is my job as a pastor and professor to speak the name of Jesus and proclaim the news of the gospel into whatever reality the prophets expose and call attention to. If they also do it, that's fine, but if they don't that doesn't mean that they aren't speaking/acting on God's behalf.
This I think is great by Peterson:
Prophets don't have anything that Christ hasn't given them. Some of them find a vocation that is apart from the visible Church, maybe by accident or maybe deliberately or maybe not intentionally. But they are following the Spirit in some unarticulated way.
Sometimes I think God has to find a person who isn't carrying a lot of baggage or bad religion with them. John the Baptist, for example, where did he come from? He didn't fit the categories of the first century. And that happens over and over and over again. Simone Weil, the French woman who sometimes called herself an atheist, was a very prophetic voice in a time when prophetic voices were very rare in France.
I believe there is a lot going on here and God moves how she wants to move and does what she wants to do and speaks in ways she wants to speak. I haven't processed all this or formulated the words to articulate what I think all this means. It will take more thinking, meditating, silence and poetry.
U2 performing Yahweh and 40 (lyrics from Psalm 40):
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