Easter 3, Year C – April 22, 2007 (Jazz Eucharist, 10:15)

Acts 9:1-19a, John 21:1-14

St. Giles Church, Northbrook IL – The Rev. Cynthia J. Hallas

In order to play jazz, several things are needed.  The first is rhythm – you need a good, strong beat to keep you going.  In jazz, that beat may not be real straightforward and even – it’s far more likely to be syncopated, with the emphasis where we might not expect it – on what we call the ‘off beat’. 

A second thing that needed for jazz is harmony.  You need an underlying structure of chords and moving parts that add some depth and ‘color’ to the music you’re playing.  In jazz, not unlike other contemporary musical idioms, those chords and moving parts tend to ‘stretch’ the conventional definitions of harmony; sometimes they sound dissonant.  Put more simply, if you’re used to listening to more traditional forms of music, you may hear some notes that sound like they don’t quite belong – but they do!  To a jazz musician, dissonance is still harmony – one of the reasons this works is because the musicians have learned to listen to one another.

But rhythm and harmony don’t make much sense, even in a colorful jazz piece, without one more crucial element; and that element is melody.  Without a melody, a recognizable tune, the rhythm and harmony have no reason to exist.  Melody is what we start with.  But of course in jazz, it’s never just the straightforward melody verse after verse of a song.  And that brings us to one more very important element of jazz: improvisation.  When jazz musicians are able to spread their wings and fly, musically speaking, to get away from the notes written on the page, the original melodic structure, we hear notes played that we never expected, and wonderful, exciting things happen.  But make no mistake: no matter how far away from the melody it may sound like s/he has wandered, the jazz artist is always guided by that melody, and the jazz artist always comes home.  Ending up back in the original structure of the musical piece is part of playing good jazz.

When I take stock of all these elements that make up jazz: rhythm, harmony, melody, improvisation - I can’t help but compare them to the elements of faithful living. 

Let’s start with rhythm: I would say that the rhythm of Christian living is found in the basics of our faith.  For those of us who are Anglican

Episcopalians, those basics would be scripture, tradition, and reason.  These three legs of Richard Hooker’s ‘stool’ stand as the foundation of all that we practice and believe:

our sacred texts – scripture - as found in the Bible;

the tradition of the Church (and by tradition we mean those practices and elements of Christian community and worship that have been consistent through the ages and are not dependent on local and/or relatively recent practice); and

reason – God has given us brains and intellect, as well as the ability to discern and to interpret the use of the other two.

Those things make up the rhythm of our lives as Christians.

Harmony: comes from living in community and worshipping together as the body of Christ.  This is a challenge – there’s no way around it, and no way to make nice about saying it: existing in Christian community is often neither pleasant nor easy.  The gospels tell us tales of disagreements among the disciples.  The book of Acts tells us tales of tension in the early Church.  Christian history tells us tales of factions, fracture, schism, and worse; some of us here this morning probably have our own tales to tell.  Some disagreement among the faithful – dissonance – is to be expected.  It bothers/scares us.  Sometimes things don’t sound quite right, or they don’t sound the way we’d like them to sound.  But maybe we can take a lesson from jazz, a lesson that helps us understand that dissonance, properly handled, can not only be harmonic, it can make that harmony of communal living much richer and fuller, provided we have learned to listen to one another.

I would use melody as a metaphor to reflect the ways in which we live our individual lives: the talents, vocations, and gifts we possess; the ministries we’re called to, the things that make us who we are.  All those things contribute to the melody we sing to God and to each other.  But sometimes the melody goes a little stale; too much repetition renders it ineffective; we can’t keep singing/playing it the same way – it no longer works for us.  We may have to change direction, or focus, or method, we may have to do things we never expected to do, in order to continue to accomplish what we want to do and to live the lives we’re called to live.  We Christians call that being open to new directions from God, being open to the Spirit; and such openness almost always involves improvisation. 

That’s what happens in our gospel passage this morning.  The evangelist starts right off by telling us that the resurrected Jesus is showing himself to his disciples yet again – we know that; evidently, they don’t.   Seven of them have gathered on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias: Simon Peter; Thomas the Twin, a week late with the resurrection evidence but finally on board with that; Nathanael (we don’t hear all that much about Nathanael); the sons of Zebedee, James and John; and two others, whose names the evangelist either forgot or didn’t see fit to give us.  They’re all there, and Peter decides to go fishing – after all, that’s what he knows best, that’s what he’s been doing for most of his life.  The others decide to join him.  They fish all night long – casting that net in the water just as they are used to doing - and they catch nothing.  Just as day is dawning they’re all coming in exhausted from their efforts, and there’s a stranger on the beach who seems to recognize their lack of success.  They’ve all seen the risen Lord at least once, most of them twice, but it’s still a little dark and they’re tired and they don’t recognize him as Jesus.  “No,” they answer, maybe a little embarrassed, a little ashamed.  They have to admit, they haven’t caught anything.  The night has been a complete failure.  Then Jesus tells them, “Cast the net to the right side of the boat….”  They get so many fish they can’t haul in the net, and that’s when one of them finally recognizes this stranger on the beach for who he is: “It is the Lord!”  And when they get the net to shore, there is Jesus, cooking them breakfast, feeding them with bread and fish.

“Cast the net to the right side of the boat….” Jesus tells his disciples; in other words, Jesus says improvise.  Do something a little different; try some variations on your theme; don’t be afraid to change your method, your focus, your direction: try something new, improvise.  You’re not getting what you need, so do something else.  The disciples had the rhythm of their experience of following Jesus (from the earliest days through his death and resurrection); they had the harmony of their life together (sometimes dissonant, as when they argued whom among them was the greatest, and yet here they are gathered on the beach and when one decides to go fishing the others all join him); they had the melody of the experience and skill of fishing.  And when they needed to, they discovered they could improvise, and the rewards, the results, the ‘catch’, was more than they could ever have hoped to imagine. 

Jesus knew that post-resurrection life would be very different for his disciples.  They would no longer have his immediate presence; they would have the Holy Spirit to guide them.  They would have to learn new ways to ‘fish for people’, casting their nets in new and different places.  And it’s that way in every time and place.  We have such a wonderful richness to share as Christians – the rhythm of our tradition, the harmony of our community, the melody of the lives we live and dedicate to God - and we have the message of resurrection and hope – the Good News of Christ – to share with the world.  And sometimes, in order to share that message, we have to do something new, something different, something bold – we have to improvise.