Kingdom's Keys Fellowship

Where God's Kingdom Meets Man's Heart.

Time to Rock and Role

Bill Haley and the comets created a social earthquake in the youth culture in 1955 when he introduced his hit ‘rock and roll’ song called Rock Around the Clock in the movie Blackboard Jungle. That movie actually galvanized the idea of an already thriving phenomenon, the street gang. It made a fortune for Haley and instigated a sharp rise in gang activity around the country. In the 50’s Leonard Bernstein sophisticated it with the iconic musical West Side Story. Much of the sentiment it carried was the midwife delivering the 1960’s social revolution with its multi-cause violent street demonstrations. Those causes caught the negative imagination of those who used them to vent self-dissatisfaction, dislike for authority and upset whatever they considered the ‘status quo.’ It was a new way to gain an identity, find meaning, purpose and action. Causes caused causable issues for anyone who felt a victim and insignificant because of gender, race, ethnicity, class and economic condition.

Out of these there arose a whole new driving principle---see me, the world owes me a living. Liberal politicians grabbed hold of it and built their platforms around it. The new ‘gangs’ now had political support and media jesters to agitate and push their antics as they performed at the feet of the new secular god. These new gangs were motivated by the same dynamics, personal unrest, lack of meaning, purpose and involvement. The old dressed in the new. It had its own music with anthems like “I Did It My Way” and “I Gotta Be Me” and “I Don’t Get No Satisfaction” which evolved into a new mindless gyrating impulse, Rock and Roll, with hippy rhythms and gutter lyrics, sung in mumbling fantasy, saturating the youth culture. Lost in its beat was the morality that built a nation as “Woodstock” became a lifestyle (or should we say ‘gutterstyle’) symbol of artificial freedom and fake love. Andy Warhol’s evaluation, that everybody is looking for their fifteen minutes of fame, became local fame in the personless drug culture that emerged. Reality? There is no rock, only shifting sand and there is no roll, only death’s toll.

So personal fulfillment is now ‘Find a cause and fill it.’ That’s the order of the day. The new gang has a strategy to accomplish its end: destabilize the existing order, destabilize the nation. Use the good to achieve the bad---noisy angry self-righteous public demonstration. Demonstrate and you can do two things, feel good about yourself and avoid dealing with moral, spiritual, personal and relational issues that are the real problem in everyone’s lives. But it’s not just demonstrating. It’s how you demonstrate. Be loud, boisterous, profane and violent. Spit on authority, any authority. Develop a spirit of hate and call it ‘my right.’ Be emotionally hostile. Whether it’s right or wrong makes no difference. Forget logic and discussion. It’s not about the mind and law and order and care and compassion. It’s making noise and breaking stuff. That gains attention. Media love it. They fuel it. They make money from it. Where’s the profit in nobility, kindness and ho-hum niceness and personal involvement with the poor, the homeless, the suffering and the lost? It doesn’t make the news! Got it? That stuff doesn’t sell!

After all, if you do something socially helpful, get personally involved with real problems, that should be satisfying. You’re too busy to get all worked up about issues you can’t personally solve. It makes you wonder if demonstrators have any real understanding of their own dissatisfaction and why? What is their real problem? Are they willing to face their internal reality? Are they really involved in their cause or is it just a vent for inner frustration with circumstance? Does anger, bitterness and foul language solve anything?

Of course there are noble causes and those who really mean well in them, but many times they are used, manipulated and fall prey to media wolves who thrive on conflict and stir the coals to spread the fire. TV talking heads spin, manipulate, distort truth and make millions doing it. They too use unresolved personal issues to spin an external issue to keep ‘cause pots’ boiling in order to justify their jobs. The more conflict, the more the income and self-righteous indignation. The growth of this disease has been magnified to gross proportions in the present social, national and international scene. Hiding behind the ‘freedom of the press’ platitude and the trite ‘public has a right to know,’ journalism has sunk to a new low. It is now ‘de jour nihilism.’ Wordsmiths juggle trigger words to ignite unrest and paid professional masked rioters, dressed in black, smash windows, cars and anything in their way. Angry crowds gather to create conflict, prevent discussion, stop speeches and disrupt meetings. The spirits of intolerance win the night.

One particular political party incites these negative reactions with one purpose, to destabilize the country and regain power. The problem is, if they continue their inflammatory rhetoric, other forces will step in to take control and replace them. ‘He who lives by the sword will die by it’ may be a fitting Scriptural warning.

What has been described above is the social earthquake that the evil one has incited. He has many willing accomplices who are so self-absorbed that they unwittingly take his banner and fly it in public. He is working hard to push at the Lord God and His Kingdom. But we have this one assurance from Him, “The gates of hell shall not prevail against it (Mt.16:18).”

Now we come to the real Rock and Role. Jesus is the Rock and being the Lord is His role. The condition of the world in which we live is real. “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son so that all who believe in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life (Jn.3:16).” But the world we live in is not new. It’s a world of sinful people like you and me, just dressed differently. There is a larger population, complex technology and changing demographics. It certainly is not Huxley’s Brave New World but rather an expanded form of the old one. Sin still prevails. The devil is still in the details of choices and agitating the temptation to make them our way. We are still persons, individuals, living in a specific locale with contacts that are limited to the mobility of our bodies in time and space. That is why Jesus chose to be born into a human body; to show what spiritual reality is lived like when it is localized personally and relationally.

Being local, thinking locally and acting locally, is what the Lord Jesus demonstrated and gave us as a very special insight. Our most important reality is the local one in which each of us live. The most important neighborhood is the one in which we have made our home. The most important people are those with whom and among whom we move. The most important events are those we take part in. The most important physical family is the one in which we were born and then the one we choose to make. The most important spiritual family we have is the one in which we worship together, share and find meaning and minister to one another. The people we run into while we are on our way, believers or unbelievers, are the most important objects of prayer and sharing. The most important choices we make are not based on what others want of us but those we choose by belief, trust and faith. Our most important perceptions are what we see, not with our eyes, but what we see with our mind, heart and spirit. It’s our spiritual sight, personally and relationally, that gives us both a deeper and broader view of reality right where we live. Therefore, the most important moments in our lives are the next ones, every next one. We are His rocks in the moment and His role in every next one.

Ultimate reality is spiritual, personal and relational. That reality is revealed in the Lord Jesus. He is the focal point because of what He did for every individual right where they are. That’s what makes Him the Rock and the Lord His role. He is the Rock and the Role, the real Rock and Role. Where rock and roll make us mindless, meaningless and motionless, Jesus makes each of us a rock where we are and a role to fulfill and be fulfilled while we are on the way in every next moment. When Jesus told Peter the disciple he was a rock, that gives every disciple a role, to be a disciple maker, to be a brother or sister in the Kingdom-family of God. So let’s rock and role in the world conditioned by rock and roll.