Change A Note, Change The Chord--Victor Wooten

It's a pretty obvious statement at first glance.  Chords are made of up of certain notes, and every combination of notes forms a different chord. F-A-C-F form an F chord.  Change the A to  A-flat (Ab) and you have an A minor chord.  Change the F at the top of the chord to an Eb and now it's become an an F minor seventh (Fm7), and so on.  Each chord has a different sound, but also a different kind of "feel" or "mood."  If you play an F on the piano and play the E right next to it the notes will clash and sound irritating, but if you go back to that F chord and replace the top F with the E next to it, you'll have the lush sound of a major seventh chord (FM7) and it you play them one at a time you'll hear the recognizable opening notes of "Colour My World," by Chicago.

Each change of note changes the name of the chord, but far more importantly it changes the mood of the chord and how and where the chord might be used.  Minor chords sound dark and somber, while complex jazz chord may sound enticing or confusing, depending on the context and listener.  Learning how to listen to a wide variety of chords and find the beauty in them is a challenge for many of us, and everyone has his or her own preferences.  Still,  learning how to hear chords we find unfamiliar can be a wonderful growth edge for any of us.

Okay, enough music theory and music appreciation.  Here's the reason for writing this.  Bass genius, Victor Wooten swirls together music and life in his novel, The Music Lesson, causing me to think about how "Change One Note, Change The Chord" applies to life.  Change one person, one circumstance, one detail in my situation or yours and the "chord" of your life changes too.  Maybe the easiest way to think about it is to imagine a situation where as you add one cranky person, the "life-chord" becomes minor.  Remove the dark note and life is cheerier again.  An old song becomes new again.  This makes sense to me on many levels.  Can I be a note that adds richness to chords around me?  As I play the music of life can I listen to all the notes that are being played and hear the beauty?  Can I change the notes and hear something new, something vibrant?  If I hear a note that clashes with mine, can I find a new octave for mine, so that I hear something melodic?

Can I change one note and change the chord?

One more thought...Jesus, the most beautiful note of all, has changed the chord of humanity, bringing into our lives the heavenly harmony of the Great Composer.

This Hopeful Journey

Why would we take time out of our lives, six Wednesday nights, to enter this room in order to pursue a journey for the development of our spiritual lives?  To dive headlong into words of a Judean carpenter in a search for God?

We make this journey because we are in the midst of a search, a search for hope.

We hope that there is more to religious life than religion; more to Jesus than the lovely way he is often portrayed by artists who would rather that he looked like they did rather than how he really was.  We hope that the pursuit of a spiritual life will have impact in every area of our existence; that drawing closer to God will make life less overbearing and more bearable, that we might find meaning instead of madness, that our search of God will end well and that God will be as least as good as we have imagined.

We make the journey because we hope this story is true.  And that it has more gravitas for life than any other story we might hear, or than anyone or anything in which we might place our trust.

We hope for this because most of us, one time or another, have wondered if it could all be just some kind of cosmic charade or galactic game in which we would simply search the stars in vain for an omniscient, omnipotent anchor for our reality.  Perhaps, it formed in you as simply a nagging ache, a pestering rock in your spiritual shoe, that begged you to remove your shoe and give up the hopeful journey all together.  Or perhaps there was no living deity in your life, only a two-dimensional "flat" Jesus who was unable to reach beyond the flannel board and move into the real world.  It may have been anger or disappointment that caused a fog to enshroud your path, making travel next to impossible.

Whatever your misgivings, you've remained on this journey.  So here you are. You listen.  And you sing.  And together, you and I and the person next you, we hope, that God would search for us, too.  For surely, if this entire journey is an effort to uncover a God who prefers to remain unknown,  we are on a quest for something that will ultimately disappoint and leave us wanting and unsatisfied.

We hope for a God who searches the edges of that foggy trail, who checks the bushes and hillsides for us, knowing that we can be distracted and detoured with ease.
 
We hope that this searching Jesus is not "flat" but has three dimensions, and that one of those dimensions is the depth that can reach into our lives and claim us with his love.  That this searching Jesus can take our past hurts and our disappointments, the frailties, failings, and imperfections that have helped to define our journey, and redeem them with perfect love and acceptance.
This is the Jesus we are hoping for, and this is the Jesus who is here.
Jesus comes into your life with a promise to make all things new, to rebuild your life's brokenness, to love you with a never-failing love.  Jesus makes you this promise: he will search for you until he finds you, no matter where you wander, he will carry you home and he will rejoice because you are his forever.

This is our hopeful journey. 

In Luke 15, Jesus told them this parable: ‘Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbours, saying to them, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.”