Who is the work for?
Of course the work is ultimately for others. But it’s maker must first believe in it, and it must be an expression of the maker’s journey, the maker’s heart, the maker’s own best sense of what the work wants to be. In order for it to be worth giving away to others, it must first be for you. This isn’t selfishness, it is a deeply rooted and integrated self in the path of vocation.
The board of trustees was told by the sales dept that their advertising campaign was all wrong. “You guys made the advertisement the way you wanted it, and because of that you’re only going to reach people like you. If you want to reach the target audience you need to let us make the ad the customers want, not the ad you want.”
That is sound advice in that situation: work done in contract for others. But if we’re talking about someone’s life’s work? Such advice could be dangerous and destabilizing. There isn’t a one to one correlation between those two scenarios. An energy drink made by wealthy CEO’s in their 60’s for active male youths in their teens and 20’s should NOT have advertisements that appeal to wealthy businessmen. That much is clear. But the journey and process of the artist’s soul in pursuit of the highest good is a very different situation. In that case the question, “Who is the work for?” needs more precision.
Servants of the work. Ultimately the work is for others, but sometimes in the first stages of creation, the art is for the artist. And other times if you go even deeper, it’s more true to say that the artist is for the art. We become servants of the art and we do it’s bidding, allowing it to become what it wants to be, and listening to hear what it wants to say and watching to see how it wants to look and giving it time and space to grow and develop. Once that is done well, with integrity, then we will discover who else it is for. How to know who it is for is not the artists concern though in the early stages. The work knows more than we do about many things, and “who the work is for” is one of those things it knows better than we do.
Work from the depth. One reason the work must first be for you is that work done from the surface, work that only engages the skills of the artist, not the soul of the artist, ends up not containing soul either. So the work suffers. And on a deeper level, such work is not readily sustainable or life-giving. We talked about the flow state that musicians, athletes, anyone really, can get into where the skills and challenges and enjoyment of the task are aligned in such a way that time fades away and there is optimal creativity. Such work is renewing and orders the soul. When the work isn’t meaningful to the artist, it becomes tedious busy work. It becomes a job, not a calling. Working that way can feel at odds with integrity; some folk would call it “selling out.” Others would just call it “a job.”
Erik’s Jazz Band. However, there are pitfalls to going to the deep end. My friend Erik Kerr is a fantastic drummer and played in a really hot jazz band back in the day. He told me that the deeper they got into the idiosyncrasies of polyrhythms and atonal scales and the details that kept them challenged and inspired, the more difficult it became for their fanbase to understand and appreciate what they were doing. It wasn’t that they were intentionally making “bad” music to eschew popularity, it was that they were pushing themselves forward, but they had outpaced their audience. To make the music the fans loved was to hold back and not explore and press forward toward excellence. But to bring the fans along for the ride would’ve meant making some adjustments to create onramps for them.
Charlie Puth, a really skilled pop songwriter and singer, recently returned to Berklee College of Music where he studied before his career met with popular success. One of the fascinating things he told the students there is that they need to make their music accessible to the masses, but to also find ways to embellish it with flourishes like interesting chord choices, melodic detail, and arrangement that pushes the pop genre. He told them the rest of the world isn’t like them, wanting to live their lives in a music conservatory, but that doesn’t mean the high level excellence and detail they labor to put into the music won’t be heard and appreciated. They will be heard and felt, and it may even pull them further along into the deeper end of the artistic pool.
The artist’s tension. The tension is between what’s authentic to you, and what’s accessible to your audience so that you can bring them along for the ride. If you only do what’s accessible and what “sells,” you won’t be learning, growing, challenged, and inspired. If you only do what’s meaningful to you, you will find that not as many will be able to “get it.” The issue is not to dumb it down, but to slow down, backtrack and help us catch up. The path you’ve chartered needs some signs to help point the way. The ability to build these on ramps for others is itself both a gift and a skill.
Canadian rock band Rush was criticized by their fans for their changing sound as they continued to put out albums. I take for granted that as people move through life they learn, grow, and change. Change is one of the few constants in life. As they were criticized there was a theme: “You’ve changed.” Fans felt in some sense betrayed. “We gave you are hearts and learned your songs and came to your concerts and belonged to the family! How dare you change!” The story I heard from my high school art teacher was that Geddy Lee responded,
“We didn’t change; you just stayed the same.”
I love that quote! It has helped me for several decades now as I’ve faced similar criticisms over the years.
I haven’t changed, and that’s why I have changed. I don’t preach the exact same message as I did when I started out, but I do preach the same God with the same passion, and I’m on the same journey. In fact, the reason my preaching has changed is because my journey has remained and I’ve gone forward and learned and unlearned along the way. I didn’t change. And that’s why I can’t stay the same. If faith is about a doctrinal statement, then any change is heretical. But if faith is trust in a person who is leading us on a journey, then change is required if faith is authentic. And if our work or art is an expression of and avenue of our own love of goodness, beauty, and truth, then for our work to be authentic, it will involve the journey of discovery and exploration.
Go on your journey. If your work or art doesn’t seek to be an expression of the questions your soul is asking, I don’t really know what you are doing.
The work is an expression of you. You are in the work, and it must be that way! I don’t mean that all work should be autobiographical, about or referring to you, not at all! I just mean that if your process has integrity, you are fully involved and laid bare in the work. You can’t stay out of it, even if you try. Your voice gets in there whether you want it to or not. Your handwriting is, like your voice and your fingerprint, uniquely you. You can pretend to be another person, but until you learn how to be yourself, your work won’t really maximize its purpose in the world. And because human experiences are universal, and people are really really good at finding points of connection, I find that overexplaining is a waste of words and insulting to the audience. If enough of the artist makes it into the work, the audience will connect with it. If the spark of longing that called to the artist is allowed to have it’s way, that longing will find the audience as well, even if they lack the tools to grasp it all, they may at least say,
“I like it! What is it?”
Boring is a sin. If the artist is bored and disengaged, expect us to be bored and disengaged too. And if the artist hates doing the work, something has broken down in the integrity of the process. Boring preaching is as serious of a sin as heretical preaching, in fact, it is heretical because it communicates the lie that God is boring and life isn’t a beautiful, awe inspiring gift. If you are bored…
- step aside
- check your pulse
- find your soul
- get back to the authentic journey
- be silent until you do
Then say something once you have something to say that you actually mean. Until then, be silent. When your soul is silent it’s time for you to be silent. Something important happens in those silences. In music it’s called playing the rests. What you don’t play is as important as what you do.
The Soul’s Quest for Book Sales. I remember reading a book back in 1998 titled something really appealing: “The Soul’s Quest for God.” With a title like that I expected that the book would actually be about our human yearning for God, how to respond to that yearning, what that yearning entails, what the quest is, what it’s like, how to walk it, and who is this God we yearn for. I expected and longed for something as sweeping and awe-inspiring as El Capitan or the Giant Redwood forest, and yet as calm as a pine needle covered path in a quiet wood. Something as peaceful as a sunny summer morning with the dew on the grass and the bugs flitting in the sun. You know. I expected something that spoke to that energy and life that animates every living cell in the universe. I wanted a treatise to both feed and deepen the hunger in my soul and I expected it to have a measure of poetic expressiveness to it. That’s a tall order, I know, but the title implied all of that!
But what did I get instead? I got a dusty and dry Bible teacher talking in the same old tired theological terms about John chapter four where Jesus meets a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well. I LOVE that passage of Scripture and it is full of deep meaning. But it seemed like the title of the book was false advertising. I was promised existentialism and all I got was religion. How disappointing. Mainly because the author’s own quest for God didn’t seem to find its way into the pages. It stung because I hungered for God.
At that point I didn’t have words for what I wanted, but what I’ve learned along the way is that the insufficient words used to clumsily express longing are often more eloquent and clear than the well reasoned words we use to dissect and over-explain in order to remove the mystery. I don’t want to remove the mystery. I’m not looking for an answer or an explanation. I’m trying to find words to give expression to what is inside that wants out.
Is that even allowed in church? I’ve noticed that I feel the tension I’ve described between the artist and the audience’s desires. If I preach what I think people expect from me, I would actually just preach the standard “yet another explanation of a familiar Bible passage using the usual terms and concepts that our particular social group has deemed appropriate.” And sometimes I’ve been slow to preach the sermons I want to hear because they feel so intensely particular to my journey and interests and hobbies that I fear it will be in some way overly self-indulgent or myopic or even deemed too secular. Those who know me may be surprised to hear this since my messages over the years have included lots of unusual topics and came from observations on Movie Scripts, Video Games, Deep Sea Exploration, and a whole host of other seemingly non-churchy subject matter.
Macguffins and Zombies. The responses have not always been positive. Several years ago I spent forty five minutes talking about Zombies, narrative macguffins in Hitchcock films, and what constitutes a good story. It was very gospel-centered! I remember I also offered a few nuggets of political critique. As I listened back in my kitchen I and , “That was the most important sermon I’ve preached in five years. I need to re-listen to that until it seeps into my bones and becomes a part of who I am.”
Then I opened my email and received a note from friends who said that the very same sermon that challenged and inspired me was, for them, a bridge too far and they’re leaving the church because, among other things, that’s too many movie references. I’m just “too secular.” Their leaving grieved me deeply…But it was a great sermon. And if I can’t preach sermons like that in the church I lead, then I probably am at the wrong church, because sermons like that are not “a thing I did in my immaturity, but shouldn’t have.” They are an expression of who I am in Christ when I’m fully alive.
Make what you long for. It’s really important to preach the sermons you long to hear. That’s an assignment I would give any preacher or artist:
What work does your soul crave right now? Go make that. If you’re a musician, write the song you long to sing. Are you a builder? Build the home you want to live in. Are you searching for a quote that expresses a thought that’s been nourishing your soul lately? Write that quote.
Paul knew about this tension. Paul didn’t just go out and study culture and do focus groups and do market research to find out what people wanted to believe and tell them that. On the contrary. Paul’s process had integrity. It starts with the artist finding and following the truth. Paul encountered Jesus and found life in those encounters and through them he both unlearned and relearned everything he thought he knew. And those experiences created the content that brought him life. The truth Paul experienced that brought him life was the content of his preaching.
Galatians 1:12 “I did not receive it from any man; nor was I taught it. Rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.”
Paul didn’t preach what others wanted to hear. He preached what he was compelled to share. And because it brought him life, it came from him with the same Spirit that it came to him; the same creative forces which revealed it to him in secret were upon him as he shared it in public; the deep that once called to his deep now has opportunity to call to others of like yearnings.
In fact, Paul was so fully engaged in his work that he told his people…
2 Corinthians 10:11 “What we are in our letters when absent we will be in our actions when present.”
Living heart first. Talk about being invested in the process and fully engaged in your art/work! Imagine saying, “Don’t you realize that what I am in my music on the headphones when I’m absent I will be in my actions when I’m present in the room.” Or “What I am in the painting I will be in the flesh in the room.” This is living heart-first, with radical engagement and vulnerability. Living heart first is something I think artists struggle with because it’s the call, but it’s also terrifying. It’s terrifying because if your work is an expression of you, and then you put it out there…it can either be received or rejected. Paul would adamantly point out that Paul is NOT the message. Jesus is the message but Paul’s life (and work) is the medium. The art is an extension of the artist.
Onramps for others to see what you see. To bring people along we have to start where they are because the way to wherever we’re going ALWAYS starts where we are now. Paul learned that packaging his message in culturally sensitive methods was required. He used the Charlie Puth approach! Give em something they can sing, but throw those major 7’s, dominant 13’s, and minor 9’s in there!
1 Corinthians 9:22b “I have become all things to all people so that by all possible mean I might save some.”
So the message came from revelation but the shape it took was flexible because it needed to be understandable and accessible for others to get in on the life that Paul was in on. Paul wasn’t for sale, and truth is never for sale, but because we care about the audience, we try to find ways to communicate in language they can receive.
However, that’s not always possible. Not everyone is your audience.
1 Corinthians 1:18, 23 “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God…We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.”
This brings up the same question I began with, “Who is the work for? Who is your audience?” For Paul, it was not everyone who was in the crowd listening, but only those who responded and gathered to hear more. This brings up a concept I want to explore a little bit more from a phrase Jesus used repeatedly…
Jesus, against the grain. Jesus was consistently out of rhythm with his contemporaries.
- When they loved him, he frustrated their expectations
- When they gathered in huge crowds, he drove them away with hard to understand sayings
- When they tried to find him, he was alone praying and immediately announced he’s leaving
- When they tried to make him king by force, he escaped incognito
- When they asked a direct question, he evaded and reframed the guiding assumptions
- He almost never spoke plainly, and almost never explained
Where the Rabbis of his time constantly footnoted their teachings by showing what human tradition of biblical interpretation they were leaning on for their assertions, Jesus simply started with his own affirmation of his teachings. “Amen, Amen,” he said at the outset, whereas custom was that phrase is only reserved for the end as a way of saying what has been said or prayed checks out. Jesus is the only historical figure we know of who did this, and it was totally surprising at the time. He wasn’t quoting scholars. He was declaring, as fact, what he learned in his mystical union with God. No one ever heard anyone speak with authority like that. He marched by the beat of his own drum and then he ended many of his little talks by saying, “Let those who have ears, hear.”
“Focus on those with ears to hear.” Years ago I was struggling with discouragement over people who were hostile to the direction of my life reflected in my preaching. The Lord spoke to me and said,
“You’re focused on 100% of the crowd and you’re setting yourself up for trouble. Instead you need to focus on the 15% who have ears to hear. ”
Parables, Hide and Seek. Jesus intentionally spoke in parables to hide the secrets of the kingdom FROM those who lacked the proper heart orientation, and to hide them FOR those whose hearts had the same hunger and thirst by which Jesus’ heart was led. To the Pharisees he said, “How CAN you believe when you accept glory from each other but not the glory that comes from God?” (Jn 5:44) His point?
“You get what they seek, and your decoder rings are all misaligned.”
Seven times we have record of Jesus ending his parables by saying, “Let the person with ears to hear…hear.” Not everyone in the crowd was really Jesus’ audience. And not everyone who hears your soundwaves with their ears or reads your words with their eyes is really your audience…
So who is your audience? You, and those who have ears to hear. But this raises the final point of this chapter, and it’s a very important one, if you are ever to reach those who have ears to hear, you need to have a voice to speak. And finding your voice is actually a result of you first having an ear to hear the work, and listen to it, and let it speak, and become it’s servant.
Find your voice, find your audience. If you find the voice the crowd wants, it will ring hollow. If you find your voice and your audience, there’s an understanding and a reciprocal relationship of alignment that flows in a way that is irreplaceable. It actually causes acceleration in the pursuit itself. You rise higher together.
So how do you find your voice? You have to first develop your ears to hear. In Matthew 10:24 Jesus said,
“What is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roof.”
The way to be more beneficial to others in public is to become more available to God’s Spirit in private.