Post-Christmas Procrastination

Having just come back from a week of vacation in tropical paradise (from which I seriously considered never returning), I'm doing the only rational thing one can do at this point: completely procrastinating getting back into the swing of things. Though I did experience a very brief surge of "re-charged-ness" immediately upon my return, I think that must have just been the jetlag (which I've yet to shake off and instead am staying up until midnight every night watching TV and doing other useless projects and dragging myself out of bed around 10.) All this means that I've spent more than my usual alloted time surfing the web this week and now have finally come around to blogging as a last resort back-door to productivity. (Were I to be asked for an accounting of my time this week, I would label this part "sermon preparation.")  But you'll be happy to know that my web surfing has not been completely fruitless.  In fact is has included both an exhaustive search of cheap tropical vacation packages (it's never too soon to continue to rejuvenate, right?!) and also catching up on a variety of holiday you-tube videos that I missed while, you know, preparing to celebrate the birth of Christ and then laying on a beach for a week to recover.

One thing I did find that was worth sharing was the following video which my dad actually sent to me. It's a flashmob* of a choir singing the hallelujah chorus in a mall food court. It has all the typical flashmob elements (surprise, confused bystanders, a guy holding up a "WET FLOOR" sign in triumph while singing and wearing a slightly suspect fake janitor's uniform), but I found this one particularly powerful given the content. Now I recognize that music is a strange and powerful thing, in that it allows messages to be expressed that might not be received in normal speech. In other words, I think we will usually tolerate song lyrics that include ideas and feelings which we could not (or would not) tolerate were they simply spoken. This can be bad (in that it allows me to have fun while belting out somewhat misogynistic gansta rap lyrics in the car driving to church) or good (in that it allows a truly powerful message to be heard as more benign than it is). Think for a moment (and when you are watching this, if you do) about the actual lyrics** of the Hallelujah chorus (repetitions here eliminated for the sake of brevity and clarity):

Hallelujah! For the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth. Hallelujah!

The kingdom of this world is become

the kingdom of our Lord, and of His Christ.

And He shall reign for ever and ever,

King of kings, and Lord of lords, and He shall reign forever and ever. Hallelujah!

Now I'm not sure about you, but this is pretty powerful stuff. In the middle of a mall during the holiday season  in which the gospel of over-consumption is being preached at every turn making you feel as though if you don't go home with an IPad you will have failed at life, here are 50 people belting out "The Kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ".  Intense, right?

Now I'm not meaning to imply that any of these folks are doing this as a religious demonstration, but still, I find it sort of subversive. Can you imagine, for instance, if they had just walked into the mall and started shouting "The Lord God Omnipotent Reigneth"? Do you think for a second that they wouldn't have been thrown out immediately by a few mall cops on Segways? Saying this stuff a few thousand years ago (or even a few hundred) would have gotten you killed (Jesus, for instance). But here it is, thanks to Handel, stopping people in their tracks in the mall, Arby's BBQ sauce running down their chins, listening for a moment to the gospel. Crazy, right? See what you think:

*Have I ever mentioned here my complete obsession with flash mobs? I preached a sermon about flash mobs about a month ago. Not sure how it was received, but for my part I thought it was awesome! 
**Are you aware that almost all the lyrics from Handel's messiah are direct quotations from scripture? Mostly from the Hebrew Prophets, but some (such as those in the Hallelujah Chorus) from the New Testament (in this case the Revelation to John.)