This worship service–about the Beatles and all of us human beings–was held in 2009:
PRELUDE
By 1969, the Beatles were already coming apart. The band was working on their next-to-last album, which would eventually be the last album released, Let It Be.
Paul McCartney has said that he wrote this song to his wife, Linda, and he may have even thought that, at the time; but it also sounds like a bittersweet farewell to his longtime writing partner, John Lennon: “Two of us, riding nowhere Spending someone’s hard-earned pay. You and me, Sunday driving, not arriving, on our way back home… You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead.”
May we ponder our own memories, and our road ahead, as we listen to some Beatles music, played by our own Sergeant Jeremy’s Open Hearts Club Band…
{music: Two of Us}
OPENING WORDS
Our opening words this morning come from George Harrison: “I look at you all see the love there that’s sleeping While my guitar gently weeps … I don’t know why nobody told you how to unfold your love I don’t know how someone controlled you they bought and sold you … With every mistake we must surely be learning.”
For the next sixty minutes, and for the rest of our lives, may we open to learning, and to awakening to the love that is inside us all.
So may we be.
STORY FOR ALL AGES
talk about octopi (tentacles ink yuck)—and that they keep gardens of pretty things
Ringo learned that while yachting with his family—the happiest thing he’d ever heard!
me & every friend I’ve known, however weird or sad, had beauty in /around them
Help me perform some of “Octopus’s Garden” by “Ringo Starr”
please say “in an octopus’s garden in the shade”
when I point my octopus-y tentacle at you:
I’d like to be under the sea
In an octopus’ garden in the shade
He’d let us in, knows where we’ve been
{point} In his octopus’ garden in the shade
…
Oh what joy for every girl and boy
Knowing they’re happy and they’re safe …
I’d like to be under the sea
{point} In an octopus’ garden with you.
MUSIC
“The wild and windy night That the rain washed away Has left a pool of tears Crying for the day,” wrote Paul McCartney. He might have been writing to a lover, hoping to revive a past relationship, or he may have been addressing a deeper concern: his song may have been an existential request for direction, a plea for a way to understand the crisis he and his bandmates were confronting.
He sang, “Why leave me standing here Let me know the way Many times I’ve been alone
And many times I’ve cried Any way you’ll never know The many ways I’ve tried But still they lead me back To the long winding road”
And now, Jamie and our orchestra will sing us along that winding road…
{music: Long and Winding Road }
OFFERING
Let me tell you how it will be—there’s one for you, nineteen for me. According to their song, the Beatles were required to pay 95% in taxes. It can be debated whether universal health care and other social benefits are worth such taxes. Our congregation does not require 95%—it doesn’t even require 5%—rather, we voluntarily give, in support of our church and its mission. Maintaining our church is the responsibility and privilege of our members and friends…
{collection; offertory=Across the Universe}
For your generosity—to each other, to our local community and to our world—
thank you.
JOYS & CONCERNS; PASTORAL PRAYER
{prayer}
MUSICAL RESPONSE
…And when the broken hearted people Living in the world agree, There will be an answer, let it be. For though they may be parted there is still a chance that they will see There will be an answer, let it be.
Our musical response will be sung by Marin. The congregation is invited to sing along on the chorus…
{music: Let It Be}
FIRST READING “Boy and Mom at the Nutcracker Ballet” by Naomi Shihab Nye
There’s no talking in this movie.
It’s not a movie! Just watch the dancers.
They tell you the story through their dancing.
Why is the nutcracker mean?
I think because the little boy broke him.
Did the little boy mean to?
Probably not.
Why did the nutcracker stab his sword through the mouse king?
I liked the mouse king.
So did I. I don’t know. I wish that part wasn’t in it.
You can see that girl’s underpants.
No, not underpants. It’s a costume called a “tutu”—same word
as “grandmother” in Hawaiian.
Are those real gems on their costumes?
Do they get to keep them?
Is that really snow coming down?
No, it can’t be, it would melt and their feet get wet.
I think it’s white paper.
Aren’t they beautiful?
They are very beautiful. But what do the dancers do
when we can’t see them, when they’re off the stage
and they’re not dancing?
Do you have any more pistachios in your purse?
MUSICAL TEXT
As they began recording the album, Abbey Road, the bandmates knew this would likely be their last record. They didn’t have enough finished songs to produce a whole album, so much of the second side is a sixteen-minute “suite” of short songs. The medley includes
the only drum solo that Ringo ever recorded as a Beatle, and it concludes with some of the wisest lyrics in rock-n-roll history. We’ll skip the first five songs in the medley, and begin with the sixth…
{music: “Golden Slumbers / Carry That Weight / The End” }
SERMON
On the night of October 9th, 1940, Nazi planes were bombing Liverpool, England, and Julia Lennon gave birth to a baby boy, whom she named John Winston Lennon, after his paternal grandfather and the leader of their nation, Winston Churchill. John’s aunt, Mimi, ran two miles through blacked-out streets to be with her sister, navigating by the light of the explosions of the air raid. John’s father, Alfred, was a merchant seaman in the war,
and sent home paychecks to support Julia and young John, until Alfred went AWOL in 1943. He returned in 1944, and offered to care for his wife and son, but Julia, pregnant with another man’s baby, refused.
Julia’s sister Mimi did not like the way Julia was raising John, and she forced Julia to turn his care over to her. That went well enough for a couple years, but in July of 1946, Mimi allowed John’s father to take him home with him. Julia somehow discovered his plot to move to New Zealand, and confronted her ex-husband. Alfred made five-year-old John choose which parent he wanted to live with. John chose his father, but then began to cry and ran to his mother as she walked away…
The rest of his childhood, he lived with his Aunt Mimi, visited by his mother almost every day. Julia taught John to play a banjo, and later guitar, even though Mimi discouraged his fantasies that he would one day be a famous musician.
By the time he was 16, John had already formed a band, with a high-school chum, which they called The Quarrymen. A year later, his mother, Julia, was struck by a car and killed.
This helped him bond with a younger boy he met at the Quarrymen’s second concert—Paul McCartney had lost his mother to breast cancer a year earlier. Lennon and McCartney immediately began writing songs together.
Paul convinced John to let George Harrison join the band, a year later, even though John thought George was too young. They played with several different drummers, and one other bass player, briefly, under several different names, before they finally settled on “The Beatles.” Pete Best played drums for the Beatles, from 1960 until 1962, when he was fired by their manager for, among other things, refusing to wear the same mod hairstyle as the other three band members. Richard Starkey, who went by the stage name “Ringo Starr,” joined the band, and they went on to change history.
In October of ’62, they were featured on a television program, shown live from Manchester, and they soon had their first #1 hit. They quickly became extremely popular,
with fans screaming for them, almost in a frenzy. The press called this phenomenon “Beatlemania.”
One of the first times a Beatles record was played in the U.S. was on the TV show American Bandstand, where it did not get great reviews—and the reviewing teens laughed at the band’s haircuts. Later, when CBS news ran a story on “Beatlemania” in Britain, a disk jockey in Washington, D.C., ordered some of the band’s music, and Beatlemania spread to our continent. Their single, “I Want To Hold Your Hand” was certified #1 on January 23rd, 1964, the first of twenty number-one singles they would have here.
Everywhere the band went, they were mobbed by screaming fans. Many of their live recordings from that period are awful—the fans were screaming so loudly that the band could not harmonize with each other. Years later, the Beatles would mention that they felt bad for Elvis Presley. Within the pressure cooker of great fame, they, at least, had each other, to keep themselves grounded. Elvis was alone in the middle of it all.
Even if they did have each other, fame put pressure on their relationships, and it put pressure on the individual young men in the band. John’s song “Help!” was another #1 hit, and it was a real plea for assistance with life as an icon.
Ken Kesey wrote about watching the Beatles perform. It was apparent that they did not know what to do with their power—every time one of them would shake a hip, or throw out an arm, the crowd would ripple out from that point, and an even louder shriek would go up, and the energy in the arena would climb higher. It was clear to Kesey that the Beatles could incite the energy, but they could not control it.
In March of 1966, Lennon was interviewed by the London Evening Standard newspaper.
He told Maureen Cleave that “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I do not know what will go first, rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity…we’re more popular than Jesus now.” Several months later, that was picked up by the American press, and the backlash was significant. A radio station in Birmingham jokingly suggested burning their records,
but the joke was taken for real, and their records *were* burned in many small towns.
John eventually apologized, and the Pope forgave him, noting that he was a young man, trying to grapple with sudden fame.
The hits kept coming, but so did the pressure. They tried to cope, with transcendental meditation—they spent time with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India, in early 1968. John and George, especially, were affected by the wisdom they learned there, and they and Paul wrote a lot of music while in India. They returned to England to record that music, making what is known as “the White Album,” but the divisions among the band members kept growing.
The band decided to get back to their roots, and make a record of “stripped-down” simple live rock ‘n’ roll. They also decided to film the making of this album, which they were then calling Get Back. As part of that effort, they played what would be their last live performance, from the roof of the building that housed their record company, on January 30th, 1969.
The band’s disagreements grew, and they finally shelved work on Get Back. Sensing the end was near, they agreed to put aside their differences and make one last record, to be named Abbey Road. The last time that all four of them were in the studio together was August 20, 1969. One month later, they agreed to dissolve the band, although they also agreed to postpone any public statement.
Although Abbey Road was the last time they worked together, they still had the music from their Get Back sessions. In 1970, they gave the tapes to Phil Specter, who made it a much more lavishly produced record, and changed its name to Let It Be and released it as the final non-compilation Beatles album.
Over the course of their not-quite-ten-year career, the Beatles followed a path similar to that of most human beings: at first, they were most concerned with sex and fun—that *is* why most people join rock bands, after all—and then they were concerned with their careers, in particular, wanting to excel at their chosen craft, and finally, they were concerned with their legacy, and giving back to their world.
From hits like “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “Please Please Me,” they moved on,
to demonstrate more sophisticated songwriting, and playing, and they continued to push the boundaries of technology, helping create newer and better recording processes, and exploring the possibilities of new sound effects.
The Beatles were among the first to use psychedelic effects in their music, and they were one of the first bands to make a “concept album.” Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
is widely considered one of the best albums ever made. It was perhaps the peak of the band’s mature, artistic excellence.
In addition to the ways they had advanced the craft of music recording, and the art of rock music in general, they also wanted to leave a legacy with their fans. With Abbey Road,
they wanted to leave a final word of wisdom, one last meaningful gift to the millions of people who bought their music.
Now, as it turns out, the side-two medley was not the final cut on the finished album. A frugal engineer found a piece of tape, a song called Her Majesty, which had been cut out from the middle of the medley. Just in case they might ever want it, he spliced it on to the end of the rest of the Abbey Road tape. Another engineer did not notice the well-marked splice, and cut the master tape with Her Majesty on the end. The band may have found it funny, or may have just wanted to move on with their lives, and they allowed the album to be pressed and released that way.
Nevertheless, they had intended that the very last lyrics to the very last song on the very last album they would every make together to be “and in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”
What a nice benediction to their career.
Of course, their lives did not end when the band did. They all continued to make music,
and they all continued to demonstrate the wisdom they had learned.
Almost immediately, George Harrison put together the Concert for Bangladesh, with his friend, Ravi Shankar, to raise money for the flood-plagued, impoverished and starving people of Bangladesh. John Lennon and Yoko Ono held “Bed-Ins” for peace, and he played at the “Free John Sinclair” concert in Ann Arbor, in 1971. John was such an outspoken advocate for peace that President Nixon tried to have him deported.
Sir Paul McCartney is still a spokesperson for animal rights, vegetarianism and music education; he is active in campaigns against landmines, seal hunting, and Third World debt. His philanthropy is partly why he was knighted in 1997.
The only former Beatle not known for his activism is Ringo. That may be because he does it more quietly, or it may be that Ringo simply isn’t as engaged as his bandmates. His contribution to Abbey Road was “Octopus’s Garden,” which contains the lyrics “We would be warm below the storm / In our little hideaway beneath the waves” and “Oh what joy for every girl and boy / Knowing they’re happy and they’re safe” which is a nice story for children, but most adults know that we are *not* safe, that we cannot always hide from the storm.
…well, most of us know that, and many of us try to deny it, or distract ourselves from it.
We avoid thinking about the great suffering in the world…and the fact that one day all of us will die.
In our reading this morning, a mom and her son go out for a nice time at the ballet, a nice break from the vicissitudes of life, but they find death and violence there, too. As the mother says, “I wish that part wasn’t in it.”
We buy things, and travel, and join groups and entertain each other to distract ourselves from the facts that there is suffering, and death, in the world.
With their money and power, the Beatles could easily have filled their lives with pleasant distractions, but instead, most of them faced the unpleasant truth, and acted on it.
My sister, Kathy, spent part of this last week volunteering as a proctor for the Ohio Achievement Tests for the 6th graders in her city. She was telling me about one of her favorites, a pre-teen boy whose vision is so impaired that he is legally blind. Because of this, he gets away with more than the other kids, and he wears a mischievous smile much of the time.
Kathy told the teacher that was also proctoring the exam how much she liked the boy.
The teacher asked her if she wanted to know more about him, then she told my sister
that, as a toddler, the little boy had been rented out to strangers by his crack-addicted mother. It took a moment for my sister to process this, then she was overcome by a powerful rush of love, and she wanted to run to him, to hold him in her arms and tell him
that she would never let anybody hurt him, ever again.
And she knew that she could not make that promise.
When the teacher said that the last volunteer mother to hear that story had quit volunteering, Kathy understood, but said it only made her want to work harder to help such kids.
It is only natural to want to turn away from such horror, to deny that such misery and evil exists in our world.
And it is only natural—at our best, it is natural—to not deny the facts, but instead face them. We know we cannot solve the world’s ills by ourselves, but we also know we must do our part.
Movies and TV and rock concerts and sports all distract us, make us forget such things for a while; some religions preach that justice will be served in a future heaven; other religions preach that this is all illusion anyway; some New Age leaders offer easy answers and wish fulfillment.
This congregation does not deny the suffering in the world; we do not expect that some supernatural deity will take care of the world for us; we attempt to *face* the evil and the good in the world, and we help each other to cope with the suffering that we see and feel.
Our congregation is, and must continue to be, like the boy in the poem. We appreciate the beauty around us, but we are not distracted by it. We focus on the real: do you have any more pistachios? Do you have any more justice?
The world needed the music and the actions of the Beatles; the world needs our message,
and our actions. Let us live up to our promise.
So may we be.
CLOSING HYMN
It *has* been a long cold lonely winter, but if we work together, we will be able to say “here comes the sun.” Please rise as you are willing and able and join us in singing Here Comes the Sun
{singing}
BENEDICTION
Let’s give one last round of applause for all our musicians
{applause}
And in the end—to which we all come eventually—
“And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make”.
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