Songs of freedom.
God’s word of promise is the provision of absolution despite our incapacity and weakness.
This article was originally written for Mockingbird.
Unless you’ve spent a good deal of time in church Sunday school rooms or confirmation classes, broaching such topics as faith, repentance, and baptism can seem rather foreign. The average conversation surrounding such things is perhaps only done as you nostalgically remember your religious upbringing. But beyond the wistful sentimentality of memory (or for many, the cringe ignorance of youth) theology can often have little to do with the here and now. I’d wager that most people (i.e. those not employed by a church) don’t spend their free time pondering the everyday significance of their baptism.
But most people do listen to music: while they drive, work out, wash dishes, or type emails. For thousands of hours a year, we hum the melodies and tap the beats of whatever the artists who share their struggles, triumphs, heartbreaks, you name it. Preachers get 30 minutes of airplay a week; musicians get the rest. Bridging this gap has long been the mission of Christian music, but much of it is, well . . . redundant, blasé, and vapid.
One exception to the rule? Freedom Lessons, a new record from the creative and theological minds of 1517 Music and Grammy-nominated artist, Flame, is what you get when you throw elements of folk and funk music, along with hip-hop, into a blender, with a generous dash of Martin Luther’s Small Catechism in for good measure. A Venn diagram of all these ingredients would likely reveal the slimmest of overlap between them. And yet, even still, Freedom Lessons remains an engaging and accessible album that invites the listener to think critically about their faith, God’s word of promise, the elements of the Lord’s Supper, and what their baptism means, all in less than thirty minutes. In that way, Freedom Lessons is a breezy yet thoughtful exploration of the gospel itself, working as a primer for deeper odysseys into not only Luther’s theological oeuvre but also scriptural theology as well.
The record opens with the acapella voice of 1517 Music frontman, Blake Flattley declaring, “This is the story of abject freedom,” before a pulsing beat unmistakably signals the album’s beginning. The abject freedom to which Blake and others allude is precisely the freedom of the gospel that will be teased out over the next seven cues. This story, of course, is the story of how the lost are found, the dead are made alive, and the sinful are made holy. It is the story of the gospel, which, as Blake says, “all begins with a promise.” We could rightly say that Scripture itself is God’s Word of Promise, throughout which God himself is “painting for us a picture.” This inspired mural, if you will, details the lengths to which the Father will go in order to reconcile the world to himself. As it turns out, he will go all the way to the cross, “all so that we might know we are loved.”
The second track, entitled, “The Promise,” begins with an uneasy albeit familiar question: “Can you keep your promise to me when I am unfaithful?” This, in the aggregate, is the inquiry that pervades the pages of Scripture, perhaps even spilling into your own experience, too. It is a question both of God’s ability and interest in keeping his word to those who are consistent at nothing but breaking theirs. This is not a long-gestating theme in God’s inspired Word. From the earliest Edenic beginnings, humanity has been confronted with its incapacity to keep the commands of God. What happens when I fall, when I fail? “Can you keep your promise to me then?” “Can you forgive?” These are affecting questions likely because we’ve asked them for ourselves at one point or another. This brings us back to Luther and that which is often credited to him — namely, the Protestant Reformation.
At the heart of this movement, of course, was a recovery of the article of justification by faith, which, pragmatically speaking, was a recovery of the doctrine of assurance for everyday sinners. What drove Luther’s hammer, so to speak, was nothing less than the good news that sinners can be assured of who they are in Christ since he himself is the substance of God’s promise. Though we don’t deserve a crumb of grace, God has lavished it upon the world through the incarnation and passion of his Son. He is the light that overwhelms the darkness of sin and death by subsuming both in himself. The promise, then, is the provision of absolution despite our incapacity and weakness. As the third track on Freedom Lessons reminds us, God’s word of promise concerns the drowning of the old Adam in the waters baptism. The graphic imagery of the old man being drowned so that the new man can be raised to walk “in newness of life” (Rom. 6:4) is pulled straight from Luther’s Catechism. Our lived experience, though, likely tells us that this drowning has to happen daily.
What makes the track “Old Man New Man” so significant is its depiction of each of these voices pushing and pulling on the soul. It is reminiscent of the apostle Paul’s tug-of-war with himself in Romans 7, as he struggles to not do the things he doesn’t want to do, while at the same time, he strives to do the things he knows he ought to do. This conflict is all too familiar to every sinner-saint who has been “baptized into Christ” (Gal. 2:27). It is readily apparent that though we deserve death and hell, according to the promise, we’ve been made alive because of God’s grace. This represents the heart of our confession, which is further unfurled to encompass tracks 4, 6, 7, and 8, that is, “Apostles’ Creed,” “Means of Grace,” “Table of Duties,” and “The Blessing,” respectively. The exuberance of “Means of Grace” is especially poignant since the very ordinary elements of Word, Water, Bread, and Wine are coincidentally not ordinary at all. They are vehicles by which we are introduced to our Savior over and over again.
The fifth track, “Can You Hear Me?” once again invites us into that vulnerable space wherein we are confronted with our own frequent bouts of inadequacy or what Dave Zahl refers to as “doubleness.” Although the threads that comprise the tapestry of God’s promise might be familiar to us, we are still accosted by fear and doubt. We are prone to doubling back in the face of pressure and perplexity, which is when our faith becomes foggy, prompting the question, “Are you really there?” Did God really say? I won’t belabor the point, but needless to say, there are reasons in droves to become dismayed or disillusioned. To imbibe the words of a certain comic book villain, “like gravity, all it takes is a little push” before a discomfiting sense of anxiety overwhelms our thoughts. What stabilizes frail and fickle sinners in the midst of that is the word of God’s promise announced on repeat.
Freedom Lessons is a thoughtful reminder that this promise was not only put into action by the Father but has come down to us, wrapped in flesh and blood, and dying in sinless perfection. However thick the fog may be, however often we find ourselves in the ditch again, it is God’s word of promise that calls out to us, calling us by name and reminding us we’re free.