I'm With the Band - Christianity Today

When punk rockers grow up and get married in their forties, the celebration is bound to be a little different. The wedding reception was held upon the stage of a grand old theater in Buffalo, New York. Stylishly set tables with crisp white clothes and bright crystal were scattered across the wooden floor, with its stage markings and piles of ropes and velvet curtains swagged casually aside. We, the wedding guests, ate our wedding banquet up on that stage and looked out at hundreds of plush empty seats; we were a show with no audience.

On the stage full of tables there was a smaller stage for the wedding band. This was a revolving door of musicians who would get up from their guest tables at the appropriate song and wander up to join the band, for one number or maybe two. In between, one guitarist might hand her instrument to another, or a drummer might stand to make room for drummer number four of the evening. The lead singers changed as different wedding guests took their turn at the mic. Two decades of friendship and musical history crossed the stage that night, as musical memories drew us into a wedding banquet like no other.

Thankfully, this was not a karaoke affair, where amateurs torture one another with spur of the moment song choices and alcohol induced confidence, nearly always misplaced. No, this was a carefully choreographed set list that took experienced and gifted musicians from many bands and pulled them together in odd combinations.

Some of the musicians were former band mates now moved on to be lawyers and mothers and business people. But many of these wedding guests were still in the music business and playing in bands that record and play shows. Some had been in bands together that were now broken up and gathered into new combinations and adventures. But all of them wandered forward to perform and to celebrate the wedding of the bride, a singer, songwriter, guitar player, and punk rock music activist; and the groom, a journalist who loves music, thank God.

Ghost of Identity Past

As a minister, I have learned that wedding receptions reflect the best and worst of people’s pasts. Here the past and the present of the gathered community—the couple and their friends—was present in the venue itself, a huge theater. These were people who were comfortable on stages: either on them as performers, or in front of them as fans, or behind them, as crew, sound, and support. So to have the wedding celebration there was only natural. As natural as the bride taking her turn at the mic to sing a few numbers at her own wedding reception.

The Christian wedding ceremony had taken place in the theater’s lobby. That lobby was ornate, with nooks and crannies where guests sat on gilt chairs beautifully restored, as so many old American theaters have been in recent decades. The bride and groom had processed up a winding stair case to a high alcove where they could look down to see all their guests, who looked like elegantly dressed theater patrons frozen in the middle of intermission to look upwards at something remarkable—in this case the wedding.

There at the top of the stairs, I waited as the minister to perform my friend Jenny’s wedding. It had been more than 20 years since she and I first met in high school, and it had been 16 years since we had been locked inside another old theater, in another place and another time.

Sixteen years earlier, long before I was a performer of wedding ceremonies, I was a bass player in a punk rock band. Jenny was the singer, Derek played guitar, and Steve was on drums. Sixteen summers ago, we had been on tour. It was in some ways our first big break, a trek of several weeks and many shows across the United States, with two other bands: Seaweed from Seattle, and Super Chunk from Chapel Hill. Our band was called Geek. And this big tour would also be our last, for that was the summer before I started my masters of divinity degree at Yale Divinity School.

Not many bands can say that they broke up because the bass player went to seminary, but there you have it.

In the book of Revelation, a bride and groom appear as signs of what heaven may be, stretching our imaginations with an iconic image. “And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Rev. 21:2, NRSV). I thought of Jenny, coming up those bridal stairs so beautifully dressed, in a vintage-style white lace gown, her red hair cut into a soft bob, when 16 years ago it had been a wild mass of waist long dreadlocks.

In life, we are constantly moving back and forth in time, back and forth between what was and what is and what might be. But the writer of Revelation never lets you get stuck in one time zone. After the bride, come these words: “And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,’See, the home of God is among mortals'” (Rev. 21:3). God is right here in the middle of ordinary life, no matter where you are. Or where you were.

Sixteen years ago, in the weeks before divinity school, life had seemed very different.

Dancing to Spite Decay

The tour of the bands had started in Asheville, North Carolina, where drunken men had shouted at us to play softer so they could continue their conversation. But it’s hard to play electric guitars softly, particularly in our genre. The three men left the place annoyed, and we were left with no audience. But given that it was the first night of the tour, we were so excited that all three bands played full sets to a single bemused bartender.

The crowds picked up when we played in New York City at a famous club, where meaningful conversation was not on the agenda. But during that show, my car was broken into and all my clothes were stolen. That explains why in almost every picture from that summer, I am wearing the same tee shirt. It said “bagel eater,” and it was all I had to remember a New Yorker who gave it to me out of pity at 3 a.m. as I picked through the smashed glass from my windshield.

Later we drove to Madison, Wisconsin, where along the highway two guitars fell off the top of one of the cars, so that we had to turn all the vehicles around and search for wreckage on the other side. Remarkably we found them, still safe in their cases on the side of the road about forty-five minutes back. Losing all your clothes was one thing, but losing your guitars—that would be a disaster.

And finally came Flint, Michigan, where we gasped to discover our venue: an enormous old theater that seated thousands, right in the center of town. Could this be right?

Punk rockers didn’t usually play in venues that size. We played in crowded basement clubs, with black walls and grottos that rarely had any actual seats. When we had to sleep—if we weren’t tripling up in the very cheapest motels, splitting Subway sandwiches and 7/11 burritos—we were on the sofas of fans we had never met before, and who politely inquired if we were vegan.

So for our motley caravan to pull up at this massive old theater was like the Beverly Hillbillies pulling up in their Appalachian jalopy at the California mansion. We could hardly believe this theater was for us.

Flint, Michigan, had fallen on hard times. Auto jobs had left the area, and the people struggled to support themselves on the industries that remained. This was about the time Michael Moore made the documentary Roger and Me, about corporate greed and the decline of that city.

As we got closer, we saw that the theater was clearly in bad shape. Seeing our bands’ names on the marquee had been exciting, but thick chains on the main doors did not bode well. We saw people waiting to see us at a side door and we were ushered in there, not to the theater, but to the lobby, which had been set up with a few folding chairs, electrical outlets, and a stench that indicated no cleaning in years. The lobby was our venue. As for the main theater, we were told it had been condemned.

So poor were the kids in Flint, Michigan, that many of them could not afford the show. So they listened from outside, until we insisted they just come in. There were no hotels around. No one invited us over to their house that night. When it was time to sleep, we were told we were staying in the old theater.

Apparently this was how they handled hospitality for all the bands. They simply turned off the lights and locked you inside.

We did not sleep easy that night. Some of us settled near the lobby door, at least wanting to see who might burst in from the street, as we imagined our appropriately edgy end. (Killed in a condemned theater in Flint, Michigan? Sad, yes. But that’s so punk rock.) The optimists snuck into the condemned theater itself, and ran around on the main stage, dancing, singing and imagining an audience in the dark and grim decay.

“I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his people, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away'” (Rev. 21:3-4, NRSV).

It was that vision that would call me to leave this life and pursue another, and yet still sense God in the one I had left behind. In the midst of a depressed city, artists danced around on a stage condemned with all the joy that musicians can bring to an impossible situation. In music, we transcend reality. In music, we imagine a better world. It’s also what we do in the life of faith. We imagine in an empty condemned theater a show that will rock the world.

A Journey of Beginnings

When I arrived at Yale Divinity School a few weeks later, I had no idea what to expect, only that it would be different. And different it was. From the “bagel eater” tee shirt punk rock tour of America’s dirtiest places, I now found myself at the new student orientation picnic at Yale, on a little green surrounded by Georgian cloisters and peppy preppiness. We were being led in song by a throng of sincere, yet ultimately bad, guitar players. They were urging us to sing (I kid you not) “Kum Ba Yah.”

It was a like a Saturday Night Live skit of what seminary must be like. Think Revenge of the Nerds meets church camp.

I’ve made a horrible decision, I thought to myself. I’m surrounded by geeks, who will suck me into their geeky world, and I’ll never be cool again.

And I wasn’t.

Because, of course, part of following a calling is giving up stuff like that. I came to divinity school that summer carrying a boatful of ego and attitude and judgmentalism and insecurity (In other words, all the things that in the life of faith, Jesus calls us to work on). So naturally I left divinity school with the same list.

But my feelings from that first day of divinity school, my fear of giving up one self-image for another that’s equally shaky, stay with me as a rebuking gift. The haunting words, I’ll never be cool again, remind me today, as a pastor, how hard it is for people to step into our churches.

I remember to tell people what I always needed to hear myself, that when we enter into a community of faith, we’re not graduating; we’re matriculating. In the journey of faith, we don’t cross the finish line at the new members class or the seminary graduation or the installation at the new church. We are always merely beginning a new lap of a race. The throne is always out of reach (“You mean, we never were cool to begin with?”), which makes me particularly grateful for the reminder, “See, the home of God is among mortals.”

Sometimes your job is to keep the beat steady enough to allow others to shine. Other times you make it funky and add a needed surprise.

Back among mortals, 16 years after the band’s big tour, my own spiritual tour took me to a place I could never have imagined. Now I had the privilege of performing my old friend’s wedding, the lead singer of our band. Back in the days when we had been on that tour, the lines between cool and uncool seemed so much clearer, and what I was leaving to do put me into a social Siberia that made me wonder if I would ever see those music friends again. But today Jenny was in a white dress singing in her own wedding band and, on top of it all, she and her new husband had started attending church.

“So you’re a minister now?” someone said, adding words that sixteen years ago, I could not have imagined hearing. “That’s really cool.”

Sometimes in our lives, we think there are these breaks, these moments when we make a big change. We move to a new church, we make a move to a new denomination, we form a new relationship, or we pick a new path. But looking back, we were always playing the same song, just different variations, and in different combos.

From the stage at the wedding banquet, I thought about how being a bass player is a lot like being a minister. You lay down the beat, trying to keep it solid and true. Sometimes your job is to keep it steady enough to allow others to shine, to sing, to play, and to dance, as God wants us to. Other times, it’s the bass that makes it funky and adds a needed surprise. But the bass is just one part of the band, and alone, it doesn’t sound like much.

For people who are drawn to music, the mystery that draws us into the bands we love the most, is that we know it’s not just about the one. The notes and sounds come together, the different people play their roles, and yet what is produced transcends all that. It’s like when you become a member of the body of Christ—you join a band that is way better than you are, and the next tour is always just beginning.

Lillian Daniel is Senior Minister of First Congregational Church (United Church of Christ) in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.