Isaiah 6:1-8; Psalm 29; Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-17
The Rev. Candice B. Frazer
It is said that music can move men to acts of love and to acts of war. I’m pretty sure there is a lot of truth in that. Music is a powerful motivator, and it speaks deeply to our souls. I was brought up listening to all kinds of music—from Beethoven to Deep Purple. Music was a language in our house—a way of expressing how you felt and who you were. We listened to music far more than we watched tv. There was something about the Caribbean beats and feel-good vibes of Bob Marley—that spoke to the depths of my teenage experience—a longing for freedom, not the freedom of liberation bandied about in the Selma post-Civil Rights experience of my high school years, but a freedom from suffering and angst, pain and anger and anxiety that seemed to grip the Selma I grew up in. I wanted to be free from worry and fear. I wanted to be free to love and to know joy. Bob Marley spoke that message. He communicated a compassion that I desired. He talked about One Love.
Though God is not simplistic, I believe that when we try to understand God in simpler terms, we discover a more relatable God—less object on a pedestal and more active, transformative, and viable to the life we lead as God-followers. In a lot of ways, that is what has inspired our celebration of the Eucharist today—this simple One Love.
Part of beginning to understand that love is in the understanding of God as relationship. Traditionally the Trinity highlights God as three in one and one in three—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Wars have been fought over this theology. Disagreements related to Trinitarian doctrine caused the first schism in the church and led to the split between western Christianity and Eastern orthodoxy. For two thousand years we’ve been arguing about the Trinity—in large part because we have focused on it as an object instead of a relationship. If we could stop thinking of the Trinity or God as a noun, we might discover something even richer and more valuable about our faith and about who God is.
Bob Marley loved music, he loved his country, and he loved God. He sang about God in the face of a country tearing itself apart over violent political factions. Two old white men were running for Prime Minister of a country that looked nothing like them and had less in common. Jamaica was independent of the British Empire but still possessed colonial values that were at odds with her island vibe. Though Bob Marley was famous both on and off the island and not a member of any particular gang or political parties, he was not exempt from the violence that had overtaken his island home. He was shot in an assassination attempt that he survived and he ended up fleeing Jamaica for England where he would write one of his most influential albums, Exodus.
In my high school years, I didn’t understand the nature of Jamaican politics, of any politics for that matter. I lived in an idealized 1980s America that was just beginning to wrestle with its own understandings of colonialism. I wasn’t relating to Bob Marley as a political figure, nor did I truly embrace his poetry as theology. I liked his music, the rhythm was good, and the words soothed my soul. It was not until years later and well after Bob Marley died, that I began to plumb the true depths of his music and the beauty of the world he envisioned. True, he might have worn dreadlocks, smoked marijuana, and made some life choices that you nor I would make, but that in no way diminishes his vision of the kingdom and all he did in service of a God who was not static but actively inspiring through love. Bob Marley used his voice to work toward a free Jamaica—free in terms of the violence and tyranny that held it captive. He wrote the album Exodus as his own love song to God and to his people. It wasn’t about making money or furthering a career, it was about healing and reconciling those who had been so afflicted by violence and pain. He knew no other way than to offer completely all that God had given him to his people, than to offer One Love.
That is the Trinity—One Love. Not an object but a glorification of how to be in the world. And though the questions Marley raises in the song One Love on how to be in the world help us to begin to embrace our own place in the Unity, it is his song Three Little Birds that offers an understanding of the Trinity that is simple, yet active and empowering. Those three little birds are his euphemism for the Trinity. They are right outside his doorstep in the rising sun, singing sweet songs—a melody pure and true—saying, this is my message to you. That message is a simple and yet powerful message of good news. It is sung over and over and over again in the chorus that maybe, it might just sink in through our thick skulls. It is one of the most hopeful lines ever written. To hear it and understand it in its context against a background of violence spinning out of control in the world around Bob Marley—a violence Marley had no hope of changing, a violence we know in our own world and feel we have no control over. It is a simple message to gladden our hearts for it is the message of the Holy Trinity, the truth of God, and the work of the kingdom. It is the true way we understand and worship God, not as an object to be deified, but as an action to be lived. It doesn’t give us purpose, but it offers us release so that we might absorb the purposes of God instead of always attempting to direct them. That message of good news is simple in tone and yet inspires our joy:
Don’t worry about a thing,
“Cause every little thing’s gonna be alright.
Political divisions, presidential elections, gun violence, gangs, crime—these are real, and they hold a host of real world problems—especially when you are directly impacted by them. In no way do I think that Bob Marley or this song tries to minimize any of that. Instead, I think the purpose of his reminder is to help us change our focus—quit obsessing about the problems and turn our attention to God who is the only solution. And that solution is found in the activity of the Trinity—its creative, sacrificial, regenerating love that we know as God. When we know that love, when we live that love, then our worries can cease because we will know with every atom of our beingness that “every little thing’s gonna be alright.”
Amen