What Would Jesus Sing at Karaoke?

Leanne Baker

Pastor, Brisbane City Wesleyan Church

(lbaker@citywesleyan.org)

They were happy pagans that night. We crowded together with them, shoulder to shoulder, at the bar and in the pool room of a nearby pub. With me were a number of out-of-towners came along for the ride. Actually they weren’t even from my country. We had been chosen as one of several overseas stops where they could see what mission looks like in a variety of contexts. This pub would give them a good idea of our mission field.

It was karaoke night at the local watering hole. Our visitors and I left home at around 9:00 pm to meet up with the others – some of our faith community and some other friends. Along the way, we exchanged a hello with a sex worker standing on the street corner. Arriving at the pub, I noticed a friend who lives in low income housing with assistance from the government. She’s on a pension and doesn’t have the resources to look after her eleven-year-old son so has lost custody. We hugged. My face was lost in her fuzzy semi-horizontal hair. She was with a group of friends so I moved on.

We found some seats at the bar and the karaoke kicked off. Soon a diminutive figure appeared on stage. He was small in stature but he had plenty of hair, long and tied back, and a couple days’ unshaven growth. We went back to our chatter. His confident singing began. Suddenly we stopped talking. What we heard didn’t really match what we saw. He held his pitch accurately . . . in a woman’s singing voice. Not falsetto . . . a woman’s voice for this song and the others that followed.

After some time we moved from the bar to a bigger table that became available. This put us close to a group of lesbians. On our other side were some indigenous guys. One of the girls chose a popular Australian song from the late 80s which calls for justice for Australian Aborigines. This inspired one of the guys to rise to his feet and sing along for the same need of justice and equality today, passionately pounding the air with his fist.

As the night went on, more locals came and went. My overseas friends became engaged in a conversation with a pair who, it turned out, live on the same street as I do. The sex worker from the street came inside. A transgender settled behind us, long bleached hair framing a face with masculine features. The bouncer jettisoned a patron who had become too intoxicated. And the singing continued.

This story doesn’t end with an amazing account of someone there that night coming to faith. In fact, if things had panned out in such a way that someone did want to accept Christ, I might have even slowed down the process. For someone about to lose his or her life (Matthew 10:39), I think it’s the least I can do to help that person understand what this entails.

I didn’t go to the pub that night with the intention of presenting the gospel to someone. I did go with the hope of finding God. Could I locate and trace God’s footsteps and see where the Spirit had sprinkled grace? Among the social misfits, addicts, and fractured sexuality, is it possible that Jesus was there among “the least of these?” And what would God’s Good News be for them? It might look quite different for each one. As might their repentance.

In Luke 3, we are given a sample of John’s preaching. He gets straight to the point of repentance: “prove by the way you live that you have really turned from your sins and turned to God” (v. 8). The crowd wants to know what this actually looks like. John obliges. Repentance has everything to do with ethics. For the crowd, repentance is sharing their wardrobe and pantry with the poor (v. 11). For the tax man, it was collecting only what the government required and not pocketing the extra he demanded (v. 13). For the military, repentance was not accusing people of things they didn’t do. They were to stop their extortion and be content with their pay (v. 14).

Now this is not exactly a clear-cut, one-size-fits-all kind of arrangement. I have often heard repentance explained as doing a 180 degree turn. For someone not acquainted with the Gospel, I’m not sure they would be sure of what this means. It seems rather general. Even vague. I’ve come across people who have gone forward at a meeting somewhere to repent and follow Jesus. On a certain day, they were converted and often have a card to prove it. I’m sure it changed the lives for some. But for too many it seems, no conversion takes place. I suspect that this gap between the commitment and the lack of change afterwards is directly linked to the way people hear the Gospel.

I was once taught how to present the Gospel using a five-point outline which could be unpacked to explain that Jesus came to save us from our sins so that we wouldn’t go to hell, but have eternity with Him in heaven. It was the Gospel in a nutshell – a concise and compact tool for guiding someone towards salvation. At the time, I had no questions about this method of evangelism. It didn’t occur to me to wonder how the sweeping epic of God’s dogged persistence with humanity could be reduced to such a thumbnail sketch. While there’s no doubt that summaries are helpful and can actually serve to recall the whole, problems come when the bigger picture isn’t addressed. Things – important things – are lost in translation.

The way we know about God is through each Person in the Trinity interacting with humanity and the cosmos. Scripture is full of those stories. How does God’s involvement throughout the scriptures get reduced to a five-point outline? Of all things to consistently truncate to make more digestible, the Gospel story surely should not be one of them, lest holy salvation become holey salvation. Without the entire Story, we lose the thread of God’s purposes which weave through every generation and every covenant. Without the Story, salvation can often be only in the realm of the spiritual, can often be a decision which is individualistic, or a decision made to escape hell.

When the Gospel is presented as forgiveness of sins and receiving eternal life, this falls short of the goal of salvation and therefore falls short of what God purposes. John Oswalt gets to the crux of this purpose. He states it as “the transformation of human behavior in this world with the consequent possibility of living with God through all eternity.”[1] The scope of God’s holiness encompasses all of life, and so “the kinds of things which He requires His people to do or not to do tell us a great deal about His character.”[2]

By looking at us -- the ways we interact, our lifestyles, the things we hold as important – others should be able to connect the dots from us to our God. This is nothing new. It’s the very reason why God called Israel to be His people, to be a light to the nations. Through Israel’s obedience in giving allegiance only to God and through caring about social justice, onlookers would get a glimpse of God. Mission is about God’s people going and being, not getting the world to come and see.

There may be times and places for events, courses and rallies, but I believe that God is best observed in the daily rhythms of the lives of his people. We may have something to learn from the Wesleyan heritage. The backbone of the Methodist movement was not the Sunday service, but the class meetings [or small groups], and “interestingly, the classes seem to also have been the place where the greater number of conversions occurred.”[3] In this context people could see what conversion would mean for them, as they watched individuals, in the context of a community and through the work of the Holy Spirit, grow in holiness.[4] Snyder marks this as important: “the Christian community itself, when it is the community of the Spirit, is the evangelist.”[5]

With Jesus being quite at home with people who made others raise eyebrows, I wouldn’t be surprised if He would have been a regular at our pub’s karaoke. And I wouldn’t be surprised if He would have stood with the indigenous Australian that night, singing along with a gay person about justice for the mistreated. Sometimes the ones who seem so far away are closer than we think.