Friends,

In 2015, I met up with my three best friends in Alabama to go backpacking for a couple of nights. The trip was great, and that is a whole story within itself, but I want to talk to you about the trip back. I carpooled with a friend, who lived close by at the time, and he insisted that I listen to Hamilton, the extremely popular musical that was exploding into the mainstream. I told him that I didn’t really care for musicals, but he insisted. To my shock, I was completely enthralled before the end of the first act, and we were both in tears by the conclusion of this masterpiece. When I got back from the trip, I was obsessed. I was so obsessed that I annoyed my wife to the point that she refused to listen to it. It took waiting until she was trapped in a car with me for a road trip (much like I was that fateful day in Alabama) for me to compel her to listen to it all of the way through, and like me she was immediately taken away with the narrative. We cried all the way through the production at the Kennedy Center a few years later, and we still find ourselves singing the songs from the musical.

I like Hamilton for a number of reasons. Initially, I loved it because it got me to think about American history in new ways, reassess the major players that I stopped learning about in the 9th grade, and I was exposed to a type of music that I thought I simply did not like, specifically Broadway musicals and hip-hop. It seems like the whole country was taken with the musical the same time that I was, and I remember reading an article about how the creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, used music to subtly reveal the ideals of the characters. In the musical, the loyalists and reactionaries sung old-timey and overly formal songs, out of touch politicians sang showtunes, but the revolutionaries sang rap and hip-hop. Something new was happening among this group of radical colonists. Interwoven in the lyrics were subtle nods to early hip-hops artists, like Mobb Deep, who lyrics, “I’m only 19 but my mind is older” were borrowed to describe a young Alexander Hamilton. I didn’t like musicals or hip-hop, and I was ambivalent about the finer points of the American Revolution, but suddenly I was interested in all three, and I realized that I couldn’t be one of those basic white guys who says they listen to everything except for rap. Clearly, these genres had something to say that I was not willing to hear.

I started down this path slowly. I started with early hip-hop and rap and I worked my way forward, and at first, I could not get over the bits that made me cringe. The artists used language that I do not use, and initially that was all I could hear. The language was doing exactly what it was meant to, which was to be edgy and make strait-laced people like myself uncomfortable. Cultural cues were triggered that told my subconscious that that this was not for me. Eventually, I got into hip-hop instrumental albums, especially J Dilla’s album “Donuts”, and I moved back into other albums and found depth that I did not initially hear.

I did not like or agree with everything. There is one track on A Tribe Called Quest’s album “The Low End Theory” that tries to be progressive, but just perpetuates terrible gender stereotypes, and it should be consigned to oblivion, but the rest of the album is fun, engaging, and in the 1990’s, it was revolutionary. Even now, I hate bits and pieces of what I listen to, but I am not going to let Chance the Rapper’s moral blind spots ruin the good he has to say about the complexities of friendship and marriage, and being a father. Just because someone may be wrong in one arena does not mean that they don’t have something essential to tell you.

All of this happened not long after I graduated from Seminary. An unfortunate and unintended side effect of going to seminary is learning why we believe the things we believe and do the things that we do. I learned a lot about liturgy in Seminary, and I learned to cringe and even scoff at how worship works in megachurches. I learned about my convictions about the Anglican communion and how the Episcopal Church fits into that system, and like everyone else, I referred to the conservative breakaways as, “Angricans”, because they just always seemed angry about one thing or another. Along with learning who I was and who I wanted to be as a priest, I learned why everyone else was wrong, and I am still embarrassed with the amount of self-righteous indignation I carried.

I thought I didn’t like hip-hop because it was universally bad for society, and I made such a generalized judgement without even talking to someone who loved that type of music, and could explain to me why it moved them. I still think the conservatives should not have broken away from the Episcopal Church in 2003, and I think that schism is a moral failure, but I would not be foolish enough to not listen to how the liturgy or scripture moves them, because it moves me too. When we see the flags that people carry, whether it is about political party, which policies people feel strongly about, which Church they attend, what car they drive, or what music they listen to, we can be tempted to make our world small and orderly and stop listening the moment we are offended.

If you do find yourself offended, and you think that you’ve encountered one of “those” people, then you should live a Christ-like life and invite them over for dinner. Jesus did not condone tax collecting or prostitution, but he ate with tax collectors and prostitutes, and I doubt that he spent the whole time lecturing them. Break bread with those sinners, and who knows, maybe the world is more complicated, troubling and beautiful that you realized, and perhaps you’ll realize that you carried heaps of your own sins to the table as well.

Schism is so much more tragic than heresy, because it ends those sacred dinners where we can eat and feel normal with the people who we are convinced are just so wrong. We cannot always undo the divisions of the past, but in the place and in this time, we can be sure to not turn anyone away the moment we are offended, and instead welcome them to our table, because they might have something to tell us.

Blessings,

Nick