CREATIVITY

Psalm 40: 1-5

Isaiah 40: 28-31

2 Corinthians 5: 17

Dr. Matthew S. Brown

September 24, 2006

In the mid-1920s, a popular New Orleans band leader known as “King” Oliver wrote and recorded a simple little jazz tune celebrating a popular picnic area on the banks of Lake Ponchatrain called the West End. Just two months later a young former protege of “King” Oliver named Louis Armstrong went into a Chicago studio with a group called the Hot Five and together they offered their interpretation of the West End Blues. It may have been the same song, but Armstrong’s opening cadenza announced to the world that the landscape of American music would never be the same. (John Kan)

It has been called the most original, influential, and hardest to copy solo in all of jazz. One scholar said that every barrier - instrumental, linguistic, metric is transcended by Armstrong’s composition.

So new, so original was Armstrong, that when the group played the song in Europe, people responded in disbelief demanding to inspect Armstrong’s horn and mouthpiece because they thought he must be playing some kind of trick instrument. After playing West End Blues in one performance, the ecstatic crowd carried Armstrong off the stage in triumph.

Legendary singer Billie Holliday, speaking of Armstrong and the West End Blues, said that until this, she had never heard anyone sing without using any words. She said, “I listen to it one day and it makes me so sad, I cry up a storm. I listen to the same ... song the next day and it makes me so happy.”

Trumpeter Wendel Brunies said those first notes Armstrong played on West End Blues served as an announcement to the world. It was as if Armstrong was saying, “God has given me this thing, and I’m gonna share it with you.

Jazz historian Gunther Shuler said that like any innovative artistic expression, it summarized the past and predicted the future. In any case it was a vivid reminder that creation is not just something that happened in the distant past. There is always the possibility of something new under the sun. The Creator still creates. And sometimes the signs of God’s creating power are to be found in the most unlikely places.

Louis Armstrong was born into the lowest caste of society in the roughest part of town. Storyville was the red light district of New Orleans and Armstrong’s mother was a prostitute. As a young child Louis would try to earn coins singing on the street corner or working on a junk wagon. He would clean graves for tips. In fact, his first formal music education took place in the Colored Waif’s Home for Boys, where he was confined for a year and a half as punishment for allegedly firing blanks in the air on New Year’s Eve.

Seems a strange setting for God to place the closest thing to Gabriel that this world has ever seen. And yet, in Armstrong’s life we see such a clear witness to the psalmist’s song of praise: “He drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock . . . He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God.”

Genesis announces to us and Isaiah reminds us that God created the heavens and the earth. However easily we offer that affirmation, we tend to forget that creation is not just a historical fact but a continuing reality. The God who set the stars in the sky is still at work forming, shaping, creating in the midst of his creation.

Frederick Buechner says that “When God created the Creation he made something where before there had been nothing, and as the author of the Book of Job puts it, ‘the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy’ at the sheer and shimmering novelty of the thing. . .

Using the same old materials of earth, air, fire, and water, every twenty-four hours God creates something new out of them. If you think you’re seeing the same show all over again seven times a week, you’re crazy. Every morning you wake up to something that in all eternity never was before and never will be again. And the you that wakes up was never the same before and will never be the same again either.”

The light of the sun on the morning horizon, even when veiled by the clouds is a promise that today is a new day for you. Do you, can you perceive it?

We are certainly a species that appreciates routine. We want the morning paper to be in the driveway in the morning. We want the cereal to be a particular variety, preferably purchased with a coupon. We are dismayed by unforeseen delays in driving to our daily destinations.

Whether seeing patients, grading papers, reviewing loan applications, installing carburetors, or taking notes in class, we develop certain/particular/sometimes peculiar ways of doing things. There is safety, security, assurance built into the pattern of our days. There is a certain comfort in knowing that the receptionist will smile; the shoe will feel the same; the same colleague will make the same complaints; the sandwich will taste the way it did yesterday and the day before; the TV show will brighten the screen at its appointed time.

However, there is a downside to the habitual nature of our lives. Hope becomes expectation becomes routine becomes rut.

When a new day becomes just another day, week, year we lose touch with the vitality and originality of Creation. You cease to hold on to the possibility that you may just be the one through whom God will create something new. O, it happened for Abraham, for Moses, for Ruth, for Paul, for Mary Magdelene, but it’s just not in the cards to happen for you.

Could you, would you believe that God has a new purpose for your life? Can you, will you have hope for a new day and a new song, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary?

I know of a man who’s life seemed a continued series of failures interspersed with rare moments of recognition. If anyone had reason to doubt the possibility of a new day, a new creation, he did.

In ‘32 he lost his first job as a lowly store clerk and the next year he and a partner failed in their attempt to keep open a store of their own. At the same time he tried to run for office in a small regional election and lost. He placed eighth out of thirteen candidates. He managed to get a job with the Post Office where he achieved the lowest efficiency record in the county.

In ‘35 his sweetheart died and in ‘36 he had a nervous breakdown. In ‘43 he lost another election and in ‘49 was rejected for a job as a land officer. In ‘54 he lost another election, and in ‘56, he... lost another election. O, in ‘58... he lost another election. Was somebody trying to tell him something? A new day? A new creation? You’ve got to be kidding me!

I’ve heard of ruts, but this is ridiculous. He was even once heard to say in the face of yet another loss that he was too familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined.

It’s easy to lose hope for a new day, a new song, a new creation. But then, I guess it was in ‘60, that’s 1860 he was elected as the 16th President of the United States, and through the years Abraham Lincoln has come to be regarded among the greatest of leaders, in addition to being among the most theologically astute.

You can believe in a new day, a new hope, a new song, a new creation. Paul said that if “anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come.”

It is easy to become inured to dull routines and low expectations. But part of the hope of the Gospel is that our Lord can take the tired notes of our lives and transform them into imaginative songs of praise. “He lifted me from the pit . . . He put a new song in my mouth.” The Creator still creates. And doesn’t every life need a little jazz? Amen.

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