First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

Matthew 2
“I Could be Elvis”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

December 30, 2007

I love rock-n-roll. This is confession time. Thought I would start the New Year with wiping a corner of the slate. I can’t say I like pop music or rock music; I love rock n roll.

There has been a long attempt to understand what this means. It may be that the baby boomers who hyper analyze every part of their life created this introspection for rock n roll, but it may just be that we’ve seen the cycle play itself out so many times and there has been so much money that it begs for attention- why do we love this?

The rock n roll cycle generally starts in a garage or the basement of some awkward suburban kid. Here a group of friends find a voice, generally find three chords, and away they go. They play for nothing but the feeling of power, the idea that someone might listen to something they could barely hear themselves. It’s hard to imagine that you can’t hear what someone is saying when they are shouting into a microphone, but rock n roll always seems to start when someone says something, plays something that just explodes in us.

From the garage or basement a group of teens, young men and women who have never had a dime, never left town, take the next step in the cycle: they are thrown into a series of places and deals and money. The initial freedom and boundlessness fuels their music for a time, the new world opens up just enough in them that they believe they can do anything.

Then comes the booze, the drugs, the fans and things start getting weird. Friends, who were just playing in a basement trying to see what would happen, start to argue, start talking about artistic purity and their poetic license. Egos emerge, and alter egos, and then emptiness. It is not a stretch that a twenty three year old kid with no boundaries fills the emptiness with more and more drugs and alcohol.

It is at this point the band unravels, people say things that can’t be taken back, and everyone parts ways. Then it hits them that the money, which flowed so freely, was really just a kind of grease from the record label that kept things rolling, and as soon as the music stopped so did the money.

And then the last part of the cycle emerges- rehab. The people who just wanted to make rock n roll get sober, get clean and get back together. This time they read the contract, they negotiate the creative process before they start, and they travel with their wife and kids instead of forgetting to call them from the road.

It must have been about twenty years ago that VH1, a television music channel, chronicled this cycle. I can remember watching the hour-long programs they put together on all the music I listened to as a teen and was just amazed. Every band followed this pattern: everyone had this meteoric rise, crash and burn, and then resurrection. We watched these documentaries like a car accident, you wanted to look away, but you just couldn’t.

I am not one of those people who believe rock n roll can change the world, or can feed the world, or needs to be anything for anyone. I love rock n roll because it is what it is. It is a kind of transparent image of our self-destruction. And the people, who made the music, embody this and live this. It is a glimpse into the soul where we just have to fall apart.

And the fall, if it’s rock n roll, is from the highest moment. The Greeks called this hubris, and by hubris they mean those who believe they can strive with gods always fall hard. A number of years ago there was a great movie about this called Almost Famous. It was as if the writers of the movie were typing as they watched all the documentaries on VH1. It is the story of a group of friends who go from grassroots to fame to self-destruction and then try to rediscover what it was that made them feel powerful.

The twist in the movie is a teenager who connives Rolling Stone magazine into believing he was a journalist and they hire him to write a story about this rock n roll band at just the moment where fame destroys them, where they self-destruct. The beauty of the movie is that the teenager is the image of the innocent whose heart is moved by the music, he is the one who is listening. Of course the band follows the cycle and ends up betraying the youth as they betray each other.

You know this from the beginning. There is no part of me as I started to watch this movie that thought, it would all work out. No. This is rock-n-roll: it must self-destruct, as it is our innate self-destructiveness. At some point the music must collapse on itself, the artist must sabotage their craft. I don’t love self-destruction, but I do love how clear rock-n-roll makes this for all to see.

For millennia we have talked about our depravity, our weakness, our sinful proclivities and so on. We’ve argued it was innate, that it was a choice, that we have no choice, that it was all Eve’s fault. No matter what though we have tried to describe the way we seem to self-destruct. And we do self-destruct. We all have heard a voice in us saying, “Don’t do this, this is a bad idea, a smart person would walk away” and we don’t. We keep going. And often the results are catastrophic. We burn everything to the ground.

The great thing about rock-n-roll is that it makes our self-destruction so transparent that all can see. I was reading an interview of Bob Dylan given in 2004. Dylan had just finished an autobiography that does a great job of showing the way rock-n-roll has a kind of self-destruct button that seems to be pressed as soon as people really like you. As soon as people like what you do all you can imagine is burning everything and starting again. Struggling with the notion of fame he says, people wanted me to be a prophet or savior.

"It was like being in an Edgar Allan Poe story. And you're just not that person everybody thinks you are, though they call you that all the time," says Dylan. "'You're the prophet. You're the savior.' I never wanted to be a prophet or savior. Elvis maybe. I could easily see myself becoming him. But prophet? No."

I could see myself becoming Elvis. Is there any greater image of the way rock-n-roll must self-destruct than Elvis? Remember he was 42 when he died and he looked like he had died a long time ago; he was not yet 40 and making his big comeback in Las Vegas.

There is a great documentary where the new Elvis, Bono, pays a visit to Graceland- the home of Elvis. As he is walking through the grounds with the other members of U2 there is a kind of creepy, eerie moment where Bono seems to be looking ahead. People are going to be walking through my house trying to conjure my ghost. This is going to be my house. There was a sense of flash forward and it was fate, it was a question already answered. This is you man. This is you.

For many years now I have successfully avoided the story of the innocents. It may be that I have been able to avoid our Gospel lesson for all these years because I tend take the week off after Christmas. It may be that there are plenty of other sermons to preach without this terrible, awful story of Herod and the innocents. Yet, this is what I believe it is: I have never had a good answer to this story- why did the innocents die.

Herod, realizing he has been deceived and that a child with royal potential has been born, kills all the children under the age of two in Bethlehem. This delightful tale is the reason why associate pastors resent preaching the Sunday after Christmas. (And true to form I had originally passed this date to Matt, but he had some lame excuse about a child or something.) This is a tough one. This is like Psalm 137 where the beautiful images of singing by the waters of Babylon and the dream of a Zion restored are all whisked away when the psalmist exposes the real hope of the exiles: in that day we will dash your children against the stones. Oh! Ouch. It may be true, but it is hard to preach, hard to find good news in that.

And besides just being hard, you know, come on, it’s still Christmas. Kathy hasn’t taken the tree down yet. Bing Crosby still echoes in the house, and the remnants of fudge and cookies can still be found in tins of ever decreasing sizes. We can get back to the real world, but not so fast, not so soon. One day it’s Christmas and the next thing I read is this story? Not cool. I felt that way reading the headlines of Bhutto’s assassination. Back to the real world, Christmas is over.

Yet, I have come to believe that this story is not an image of how little we could keep things nice after Christmas. Nor do I believe there is a kind of theological truth here. That is what I came to this year. It has taken many years of rumination, but I have finally got the Herod and the innocents’ story.

Again, I avoided this story as I didn’t have a good answer to why would God allow something like this, what is the point? And the idea that people would have to be sacrificed for the savior to come just doesn’t fit with the notion of the innocents. And mostly I disdained the idea that it was a kind of prophetic image of what was to come on the cross. These are the obvious interpretations of the story. While I don’t like these interpretations, I didn’t have a good one to offer instead. I didn’t until I remembered those awful VH1 stories, and Bono walking around Graceland and Bob Dylan saying with as much irony as possible, I could be Elvis.

The story of Herod and the innocents is not about the necessity of evil, or the limit of God’s freedom, or a kind of fulfillment of required events; the story of Herod and his choice to kill the innocents is about who we are, how we must self-destruct, how power and fame and glory, when placed in us, leads to some really spectacular and awful things.

Matthew records the story of Herod killing the innocents to give witness to what God was getting himself into by sending his son. And this we can relate to. How often have we seen a friend a child a co-worker a sibling who has pressed the self-destruct button and we pull back, say things like, I am not getting involved with this. And what it means to get involved is that you will, by necessity, get dragged down; you will get hurt trying to help- that goes without saying. Herod killing the innocents is a moment of pure self-destruction, pure hubris and a transparent glimpse at how little good comes of fame and fortune; and it was a vision of what it means for God to come to us, who we are.

At the end of the documentary about Bono at Graceland he reads a poem about Elvis. It’s a great poem; it’s called “The American David”. Line after line is followed by Bono writing the name Elvis. In philosophy we would say he is making an ontological claim, he is trying to say, this is what it is, this is essence, the nature of being. Yet with each brief line about Elvis it was as if he was dissolving, falling apart just as he came into being- self-destructing.

It starts, “Elvis son of Tupelo; Elvis mama’s boy; Elvis the twin brother of Jesse who died at birth and was buried in a shoe box.” It goes on like this until Bono writes, “Elvis was the most famous singer in the world since King David.” The poem drifts into the insanity Elvis became: Elvis wore a cape to the White House when he was presenting Nixon with two silver pistols . . . dyed his hair black to look like Valentino . . . dressed black long before he wore black.” And then, in a flash that is rock n roll, he writes, “Elvis achieved world domination from a small town . . . had pharaoh-like potential . . . was made by America so America could remake itself.”

That is why I love rock-n-roll. It uncovers the Achilles heel of our human condition: we must be undone to be more, we must take life apart to make it better, we must die in order to live. It is a kind of fate, a kind of unavoidable end. And this is what Herod is-destroying to live, killing to stay alive, undoing life in order to gain it. He is a raw, awful glimpse in the mirror. Herod is an image of what we are and what the Son of God had stepped into- what it means to be human.

I can’t say there is good news in the story of Herod and the innocents except to say the story doesn’t end there. Thus the good news is that Herod need not be our fate. Now if you really want to be Elvis the chances are good you will experience the powerful temptation that lurks in us, is ready to overwhelm us. Bono’s poem struggles with the fate of Elvis and the inevitability of his own destruction. It is not surprising he showed up at Bob Dylan’s house a few years ago, late at night, trying to find an answer to this. I am not sure if he felt a lot of comfort with Dylan saying, “I could be Elvis.”

In the same way there is no comfort in our story. The story of Herod and the innocents is just hard. The authors of the Chicken Soup books will never include this story in their tomes of inspiration and simple joy. But that is all right. I love rock-n-roll, but I don’t want to be Elvis.

I want to find the peace of Christ that passed through temptation- that was not about fame, but humility. Herod is what he is and rock n roll makes it clear for all to hear and see. Fate is when we don’t have a choice and so it was with Herod. The innocents died because Herod believed it must be so. We live trusting, believing not in fate, but in grace. That when we die it is not the glory of our days that are remembered or enshrined; when we die it is the Christ who his born in us.

Herod believed it must be so. And into this kind of world, this self-destruction the Christ was born. Perhaps Matthew records this story to simply say just that. Jesus- born of Nazareth; Jesus- son of Mary; Jesus- Son of God; Jesus- have mercy on us; Jesus- make us more than fate; Jesus- fleeing to Egypt come again. Amen.