A while back, Allegra shared a speech with me that she gave for work event. With her permission I want to raise up something she said in that speech. She described how she went from being a kid in love with the cello to being a young adult working her butt off to become a professional musician. She said, “As I got better, I got incredibly self-critical. I started to notice, and obsess, over all the little mistakes, and started to lose sight of what my music was doing for other people.” She realized that if she wanted music-making to be life-giving again, she would need to “value connection over perfection.”

Today’s text from the letter to the Ephesians is full of dualism. Light versus darkness, fruitful and unfruitful, secret shame or exposure and visibility, wise versus unwise. There’s a real sense of danger and discomfort. The text pushes us to take sides, saying: “The days are evil.” In those days, many followers of Jesus still identified as Jewish, even as they faced opposition within the synagogues. And anyone, of any ethnicity, who claimed the name of Christ risked violent persecution at the hands of the Romans because the way Jesus taught undermined the authority of empire. Meals, scripture and conversation, prayer and song, brought people together across hardened divisions of class, gender, and culture and cultivated space for mutual support and sharing. So this passage offers clarity about what is at stake. Following Jesus takes us across a threshold. Dying and rising with Christ, our loyalties change. We answer to community, not to empire. We value connection over perfection. Yes, we will continue to struggle with the pull of oppressive powers. If we give grace to ourselves and others, humbly returning to the path when we stray, then this clarity need not harden into self-righteousness and hostility.

I love the way this passage ends, because it’s a little bit surprising. Just like the poet’s head-scratching conversations with the grasses, the sun, the tree, the field mouse, the hare, the bee, the songthrush, and the mountain. Just like that prodigal: happiness. The method by which we learn to embody transformation is not hard, not burdensome, not overly serious. It’s beautiful and inviting. It’s spirited in a wild sort of way; it might be mistaken for debauchery.

Living into the values of God instead of the values of empire begins with singing, with music-making, with kids playing kazoos. Because music is an act of mutuality, a practice which allows us to be subject to each other, to serve each other. “Sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs to one another.” Music-making is not an extra or an afterthought. It’s the heart of the matter—the heart of discipleship, the heart of hope and change, the heart of the Spirit’s gift of resurrection life. Amen.