Rev. Don Erickson

  Okay, today, for the 3 rd installment of what I’m dubbing “finding the spirit in pop songs,” we turn to 1978 and the Frank Sinatra album, Trilogy: Past, Present, and Future . The big hit from this album was the “Theme from New York, New York.” You know the song… “start spreading the news. I’m leaving today…” The B-side of this iconic tune was our song for today, “That’s What God Looks Like to Me.”  If you don’t know what a B-side is, ask me later… The song was composed by Lan O’Kun, known mostly as a screenwriter. He wrote episodes for popular shows like The Love Boat, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Highway to Heaven , and The Twilight Zone . The lyrics were written by Stan Irwin, who was known mostly as a talent manager and TV producer. Irwin wrote the poem as a gift to Sinatra after Ol Blue Eye’s mother died.  So, two people in the business, known for other things, got together and wrote this beautiful song, rich in its spirituality.  What I’d like to do is go ...

Like last week, I’m going to use a popular song to point to some spiritual truths this morning. Today, we look at the 1984 smash hit “I Want to Know What Love Is” by the hugely successful band Foreigner. The song would be Foreigner’s biggest hit. The song comes from the middle of the 1980’s, the greed is good, the decade of decadence generation. Here are some hit songs then on the radio that give us a flavor of that glam-gilded decade: -           2 songs titled “Jump” -           Karma Chameleon -           Girls Just Want to Have Fun -           Ghostbusters -           Footloose -           What’s Love Got to Do with It -           Glamorous Life Waiting in the wings to be a hit in 1985, Material Girl, a song epitomizing the materialism of the decade. Amid the “it’s all about fun and materialism” era, comes thi...

  “Lost on the road.” Have you been there? That’s a rhetorical question. Of course, who hasn’t felt lost on the road, lost along the journey, lost and nowhere to go?  Somewhere between the mountains reaching high, where a soul is closer to God, and the sea sinking low, where a soul is far from God, somewhere in the valleys of life feeling lost, a soul prays in the morning. “I prayed for you this morning.” There’s a couple ways to interpret this, right? I can pray for you in general like I do every day, pray for your well-being. Here, I’m praying for your sake.  But another way to pray for someone is to pray for someone to come to you. Here, prayer is a sort of beckoning. I need you to be here and so I pray that God sends you to me to help. This prayer for help is for my sake, for you to help me.  It’s not clear which way the narrator prays for this someone. Maybe it’s a little of both. He prays for the person that he or she will be well. And at the same time, in pra...

The prophetic critique is a recurring theme in the Old Testament that is taken up by Jesus and the early church. The prophets, messengers of God, critiqued their religious institution. Writing God’s words, they said God doesn’t want fancy worship replete with expensive offerings and sacrifices. God doesn’t want performative stuff only the rich can afford. God doesn’t want displays of wealth and power. God wants compassion, mercy, justice. God wants care for the poor, the orphaned, the widowed. God wants the liberation of the oppressed. The religious niceties, God can do without. We see this critique throughout the Prophetic books in the Old Testament. Here’s a passage from Isaiah (1:11-17) that epitomizes the prophetic critique: What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls or of lambs or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who asked this from yo...