If I told you that as a result of COVID we have been staying
home more and watching more football and more movies, I would be lying. We
stayed home before COVID and watched quite a bit of football and our fair share
of movies. We even have a Netflix series,
Longmire,
that I have watched in its entirety and am watching a second time with my
bride. She is the one that has gotten me into staying home and she knows who’s
playing and at what times before I do. She even loves
Longmire now. Don’t get me wrong. She is not lazy. She works hard
and is very productive outside of her work. So am I. We just like to stay home.
I guess we’re called homebodies.
One of her favorite movies of all time is the 1976 remake of
a remake of
A Star Is Born, the winner
of 4 Academy Awards, including Best Original Song, 5 Golden Globe Awards,
including Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, and 1 Grammy award for Best
Original Score. The movie stars Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, with
music composed by Streisand and singer, songwriter, actor, and author Paul
Williams, among others. Both Streisand and Williams are Oscar, Golden Globe,
and Grammy award winners. They composed the Oscar-winning song “Evergreen (Love
Theme from
A Star Is Born).”
It was time for her to take the risk and watch the 4
th
remake of this classic musical romantic drama directed by Bradley Cooper (in
his directorial debut) and starring Cooper and Singer Lady Gaga. This 2018 contemporary
version received 5 Golden Globe nominations, including Best Motion Picture –
Drama, and 8 Academy Award nominations, inducing Best Picture and received the
Oscar for Best Original Song for “Shallow.” As in the 1976 version, the lead
actress, Gaga, composed some of the music and collaborated with lead actor and
director, Cooper on “Shallow,” inviting the songwriting talents of various other artists to contribute to the soundtrack as well.
We loved the movie and this post is not going to be a review
of the film. I encourage you to watch this deeply moving portrayal of one
singer’s rise to fame, true love, and tragic addiction. What I want to do is to
draw your attention to 4 short sentences that keep floating around in my mind
since Friday night. “Music is essentially 12 notes between any octave. Twelve
notes and the octave repeats. It’s the same story told over and over. All the
artist can offer the world is how they see those 12 notes.” Packed away in
these lines, delivered by supporting actor Sam Shepard, are so many truths
about life and potential and achievement, that I was having trouble knowing
where to begin. That is until I noticed what the title of our pastor’s talk was
for today; “Drive for Greatness.” So let’s start with a bit of music history.
Aristoxenus in the 4th century BC invented the 12 tones
between octaves in an attempt to use the same ratio between each note. This is
the 12 note scale referred to in the quote. The Greeks were first to figure out
the math that occurs naturally in the harmonic overtones created by horns and
other wind instruments. They applied the same mathematical ratios to stringed
instruments. Pythagoras (remember his theorem to solve for the hypotenuse),
invented the tuning of perfect fifths and octaves, followed again by the Greek's
invention of 7 modal scales based on Pythagorean tuning. All this to say that
since the 4th century BC the vast majority of music composed simply uses 12
notes over and over again in a different order and different rhythm, but 12 and
only 12 notes. The exponential options are seemingly unlimited. Within the
limits of 12 notes, the art form of musical composition has continued with no
end in sight to its creative potential.
With the seemingly finite limit that 12 single notes put on
a composer, how is it that over the centuries artists are still able to create
not only new musical ideas and expressions but compositions that move us to categorize
some as the pentacle of greatness? “Evergreen” in 1976 and “Shallow” in 2018 are
award-winning songs, the very best related to film in their given year among
who knows how many songs composed for films in their given year. 15 scores are
typically shortlisted before 5 nominations are typically announced. How is
musical greatness defined when it is entirely subjective to the listener’s
tastes.
A Star Is Born…or
is a star “made?” What does it take to have the competitive edge to become a
star, to be the best, to reach number 1? What is it that transcends the
subjective ear to raise a composition to award-winning greatness? How did
Patrick Mahomes and Tom Brady get to be, arguably, two of the very best
quarterbacks in the National Football League? Mahomes, in his 4
th
year in the NFL actually has the cumulative edge in statistics against Brady (drafted
in 2000 and is 43 years of age), in the games where they have met each other.
Why do we idolize athletes who are competitive and then look to people in our
own little world and criticize their competitive nature, particularly if those
people are Christians? As a Christian community, we shine a spotlight on
Christian actors, Christian politicians, Christian musicians, and Christian
athletes and then accept mediocrity from those right around us. We even go so
far as to expect less of one another and place less value on what people right
around us do well. I was once told that a church musician should not be paid,
regardless of their level of skill.
Many Christians believe that Jesus was not competitive, that
He was “chill” in the words of my pastor today. However, Jesus did not arrange any
of the “Twelve notes and the octave..” in an order ever perceived by humankind.
His was not “…the same story told over and over.” The way He calls us to see “…those
12 notes” is contrary and scandalous. But somehow, lesson after lesson taught
us that as Christians we cannot strive to be like Jesus and have the ambition
to be number 1 in anything, and so we learned to give up ambition. How far from
the truth can this be? In fact, Jesus taught the exact opposite.
The Bible is clear about the teaching of Christ. He did
teach that we should be careful who you are competing against and why you are
striving to be the best. Ecclesiastes 4:4-6 warns us about envying our
neighbors. Galatians 6:4 tells us we don’t need to compare ourselves to other
people. Philippians 2:3-4 tells us to be humble, not conceited. Romans 12:2
tells us to look carefully at our behavior and to be transformed by God. The
Word of God warns us against jealousy, selfishness, boasting, lying, provoking
others, and taking the glory for ourselves. But if Jesus did not want us to
strive for greatness, then His expectation of us, as Pastor Erwin McManus said
today “…would be to reduce ourselves to the lowest common denominator.” Then
nobody would be number 1, everyone would be the winner and the loser, and
everyone and no one would receive an “award.”
In Matthew 20 verses 26 thru 29, Jesus had a chance to put us
all in our place and tell us there will be no “stars” in His kingdom; nobody
will be #1. Instead, He said that if you want to be great you are going to have
to be something even more difficult than being great. You are going to have to
be a servant. He didn’t tell his disciples not to try to be first, #1, the
best. He told them to be a slave. He offered Himself as an example, telling
them, and us, that He didn’t come to be served, but to serve; to go so far as
to give His life to save many. Jesus didn’t tell us to give up ambition because
we want to follow Him. He told us that greatness equals sacrifice. Just because
we “take up our cross,” doing the very hard things as a Christ-follower, doesn’t
mean we don’t want to achieve #1 status in what we are called to do and who we
are called to be. So I have the word SERVANT stuck to my monitor so that I see
it every day. Because wanting to serve is hard.
Brady and Mahomes make greatness look easy. Next Sunday as
we watch them in their element on the gridiron, they will perform with relative
ease compared to the sacrifice, determination, dedication, and hard work it
took them to get to the Big Game. They have been slaves to the game; Brady for
over 20 years and Mahomes, a mere 4 years in the NFL. Both started playing the
game as children, just like we did. Jesus, Himself, claimed greatness above any
other man that ever lived. He reveals the One, True, Invisible God. The Bible
says He rules over all of creation and in fact, everything was created through
Him. He is actually holding creation together right now. He’s the head of the
Church. He reigns over death. Jesus said that He is fully God, that He has the
power to save; that He is THE way, THE truth, and THE life. Not only is Jesus the
only one that can save us, but He also wants to save us. He wants to save you! *
AT&T recently ran a series of commercials “Just OK is
not OK.” Things like “It’s not OK to be a just OK tax professional; for
carnival safety measures to be just OK; a just OK skydiver; being a boy band
without dancing. In other words, AT&T was not settling to be just OK. My
daughter wants to be a great violinist. Never will I ever tell her to settle on
just being OK on the instrument. I will forever encourage her to do everything
she can to be the best violin player there is. My son and daughter-in-law have allowed
my sweet, adorable granddaughter, Adeline, to be a hair-bow model. Maybe it
will lead her to model other fashion items and accessories. I will never say
that I hope she will be an OK looking model. I want her to be the cutest
toddler model there is. Jesus didn’t say that we should strive to be 2
nd,
or 3
rd, or mediocre. He said “whoever wants to be first…” In other
words, if you want to be 2
nd, what I’m about to say doesn’t apply to
you. It doesn’t take sacrifice to be mediocre. You can hit that goal by sitting
on the couch. The formula Jesus gives us to be #1, to be the greatest, is to
get off of the couch and sacrifice yourself and become a slave to the goal of
being like Christ Himself.
This weekend I thought quite a bit about the fact that great
music is created by those who have sacrificed themselves, their time, and their
energy, to arranging those 12 notes in an order that makes sense to them and
hopefully to someone else. They want to be great and they want to create great
things so they become a slave, a slave to the craft of composition. They did
not even always have the purest of motives. It has been said that Handel
composed
The Messiah because he
needed the money. Even so, God allows us into the creative process with Him.
Imagine that. But that’s a blog post for another day.
What are you and I willing to do to be great? I want to be a
great husband, but I don’t want to unload the dishwasher and put the dishes
away. You want to lose weight, but you don’t want to change your eating habits
and go to the gym regularly. She wants to excel at her job, but she doesn't want
to get to work on time or put in a full day’s worth of focus and energy. There
are 12 notes and an infinite way to arrange them. I can put them together in a
way that will sound like something that has been heard since infancy and will
not move anyone, will not excite a soul, will not make people want to listen to
it over and over again. Or....I can do the hard, sacrificial work of
orchestrating those 12 notes into a symphony from my heart that rivals the
greatest compositions ever written. It will take becoming a slave to the
process, but it could earn me a Grammy, an Oscar, a “Well done, my good and
faithful servant.”
Nothing in the Bible leads me to believe that God is content
with mediocrity. We are good at reciting clichés that justify our lack of
ambition, our desire to stay on the couch and not unload the dishwasher. “It’s
the same story told over and over. All the artist can offer the world is how
they see those 12 notes.” How are you going to arrange the notes? What mark do
you want to make on the world? Hear these words of an early Christ-follower.
“Isn’t it obvious that all runners on the racetrack keep
on running to win, but only one receives the victor’s prize? Yet each one of
you must run the race to be victorious. A true athlete will be disciplined
in every respect, practicing constant self-control in order to win a laurel
wreath that quickly withers. But we run our race to win a victor’s crown that
will last forever. – 1 Corinthians 9:24-25 TPT
Thanks for reading,
*https://www.pursuegod.org/10-facts-the-prove-the-supremacy-of-christ/
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