If Broadway feeds our souls, why do we still need the Gospel?

When did you last eat? Something is surely strange in your life if you cannot answer that question. We are quite accustomed to the idea that we must regularly eat and drink to survive. Yet often the most foundational facts about our humanity are overlooked simply because they are too basic to be easily noted. They are the backdrop of life. To be human is to rely on what is outside of ourselves—in this case, nourishment—in order to be human. We are dependent.

Theologically, we call ourselves creatures. It is our acknowledgment that our origin, our destiny and our sustenance lies beyond us. If circumstances were different—something we can easily imagine even if we would prefer not to—even the wealthiest among us would die without being able to receive and to absorb food and water.

So our bodies are dependent; we cannot exist without drawing nourishment from outside ourselves. The same is true of our souls. We are spiritually dependent. We draw significance, we find sustenance, from our surrounding worlds. Put another way, we grow into who we are by what we learn, by what we experience. We need inspiration and meaning to survive. We may well live confused and conflicted lives, but we cannot live without some sense of purpose. We cannot stop searching for what is meaningful because our spirits depend upon meaning as surely as our bodies feed upon food.

We may well live confused and conflicted lives, but we cannot live without some sense of purpose.

All of this would still be true even if Christ had never lived, even if the Father had never sent him into our world. In feeding the multitudes, Christ reveals one reality by means of another. Calling himself the Bread of Life, Christ claims that he is the nourishing center of our spiritual creaturehood. All that is deeply, truly meaningful for us he draws into himself. He does not cancel our worlds of meaning; Christ crowns them. One might say that in him all that is best in the secular becomes truly sacred. Everything that inspires, illumines and extends human life, Christ calls into himself.

Think of how many men and women have drawn strength from a secular song, such as that produced by the legendary Broadway team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. They may not call themselves Christians; they may not recognize the deepest truth about themselves—that they are creatures dependent upon the one whom we call the creator—yet when they open their spirits, even to something as secular as a Broadway tune, by the work of the Spirit, they open themselves to the Father and the savior whom he sent into the world.

Our spirits depend upon meaning as surely as our bodies feed upon food.

In “Carousel,” when Julie’s deeply flawed lover Billie dies, her cousin Nettie sings to her:

When you walk through a storm
Hold your head up high
And don’t be afraid of the dark
At the end of the storm
There’s a golden sky
And the sweet silver song of a lark.
Walk on through the wind,
Walk on in the rain,
Though your dreams be tossed and blown,
Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart,
And you’ll never walk alone!
You’ll never walk alone.

A lot of folk have found that song very meaningful. They have found nourishment for their souls in it.

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Believers and non-believers need to understand something about each other. The believer needs to see that the grace that we Christians proclaim exists in the world beyond the church. It must exist there because of who Christ is, because of who the Father willed him to be: savior of the world. The very nature of the church is to gather in the grace that the Spirit sows in the world. So, when Rodgers and Hammerstein tell us “Don’t be afraid of the dark” and “You’ll never walk alone,” they set to music Gospel messages such as “The Lord be with you” or “Your sins are forgiven.” Through the work of the Holy Spirit, we Christians celebrate in word and sacrament the nourishing nature of the world that God the Father created for us, that God the Son redeemed for us.

And the unbeliever should realize that, like Broadway, the Gospel corresponds to the deepest desires of the human heart. To borrow again from Rodgers and Hammerstein—this time from the Fairy Godmother in “Cinderella”—some might consider Broadway a place

Full of zanies and fools
Who don’t believe in sensible rules,
And won’t believe what sensible people say,
And because these daft and dewy eyed
Dopes keep building up
Impossible hopes
Impossible things are happening
Every day.

But if Broadway feeds our souls, does that make the proclamation of the Gospel and the celebration of its sacraments superfluous? Far from it. Yes, Broadway speaks to our deeply human desires. The unbeliever wishes that the world was like that—maybe even hopes that the world is like that. The believer knows that is how the world is because the believer knows Christ. The Gospel validates and guarantees our hopes for the world and our lives within it. We believe that Christ fulfills what Broadway promises. He is the center of history, who draws all of it into himself. So, it may be a secular promise, but we believe Christ has made of it something sacred:

At the end of the storm
There’s a golden sky
And the sweet silver song of the lark.

Readings: 2 Kings 4:42-40 Ephesians 4:1-6 John 6:1-15