Over the past few years, I played bass guitar in a classic rock cover band called AJ and the Drifters. AJ had played lead and rhythm guitar and took point on the mic. His brother Joe held down the fort on the kit, and I sang back up vocal harmonies and noodled around on the bass. Occasionally I drifted onto the right notes at the right time. One of the songs I really loved playing was Kenny Shepherd’s “Blue on Black,” and occasionally that tune or some other will drift through my mind and I’ll be right back in it: up on stage in some venue in central Michigan pretending I’m not old alongside my 20-something buddies. Sure enough, as I was getting in the car on a cold Tuesday morning, I could hear Shepherd’s mellow voice and crank-shaft blues guitar, and dropped his classic album Trouble Is… onto the car stereo. The song after “Blue on Black” is “Everything is Broken,” and I realized that there was more going on in the music that just rhythm. There’s also blues:

Yeah, broken lives, broken strings
Broken threads, broken springs

Broken idols, broken heads
People sleeping in broken beds
Ain’t no use jivin’, ain’t no use jokin’
Yeah, everything is broken

Broken bottles, broken legs
Broken switches, broken gates
Broken dishes, broken parts
The streets are filled with broken hearts
Broken words, never meant to be spoken
Oh, everything is broken

It seems like every time I stop and turn around
Something else has just hit the ground…

Shepherd’s poetry may not share the exquisite cadences of John Keats, or George Herbert, or Emily Dickinson, or Dylan Thomas—but this blues tune does capture the reality of human life as all but the most fortunate know it: a bleak and hopeless agony of strife and consumption. And the genre of the blues also gives Shepherd’s lament a practicality… an “every day” sort of feel that speaks to my heart. Our world is not as the Creator intends it to be; it is broken. There are lots of reasons for that, and it remains worthwhile emotional labor to sort out the difference between that which has been done to us, and that which we’ve done to ourselves. But the bottom line is that we’re caught in the tragedy of a world that has either forgotten or never known the self-emptying LOVE who in the beginning says “Let there be light!” (Genesis 1:3) and at the last says, “I am with you always, to the end of the age!” (Matthew 28:20)

Human life—indeed, all earthly life—is broken in so many ways, but this darkness is what the Season of Advent is all about. In Advent, we hold the darkness of the world up to the light of Christ and in doing so we discover where the cracks are. Then in light of the Incarnate Living Word, we begin to see clearly how to mend what others merely throw away. We begin to respond to the Good News that the Creator hasn’t left us here to die.

Rev. Jonathan+