Advent Hip Hop Mashup

It may be irreverent to mix these metaphors, but let’s just call it taking some creative theological license for the moment. Advent is a season of waiting, a reflective time of expectation and hope. In anticipation of God’s arrival in the person of Jesus, the church must remember not only its own longing for deliverance, but also its solidarity with those who suffer in their waiting.

“Undun,” a new concept album from The Roots, tells the story of “Redford Stephens,” an urban archetype of the disenfranchised black male. Redford is “neither victim nor hero,” but he represents the life and experience of many for whom Advent, in its traditional sense, has little meaning.

Hip hop–at its best–opens a window into the lives of those whose waiting is not a seasonal celebration marked by candle lighting and nativity scenes. Rather, their waiting is a more desperate, melancholy acceptance of having to choose between lesser evils.

Homicide or suicide
Heads or Tails
Some think life is a living hell
Some live life just living well
I live life trying to tip the scale
My Way, my way

Yo, I’m always early
I never take off cause I got a job
Rob Peter to pay Paul
Now I realize it’s the winner that takes all
Do what I gotta do because I can’t take loss
Picture me living life as if I’m some animal
That consumes its own dreams like I’m a cannibal
I won’t accept failure unless it’s mechanical
But still the alcohol mixed with the botanical
I guess I be referred to the owners manual full of loaners
Full of all the homeless throwaways and the stoners
Soldiers of the streets with 8th grade diplomas
And the world awaiting their shoulders as a bonus
Look, let he without sin live without sin
Until then, I’ll be doing dirty jobs like swamp men
Counting the faces of those that might have been
It’s like living that life but I won’t live that life again

It is for these that Jesus was born into the gutter. The Christ arrives not in dignity and power, but in weakness, “born between urine and feces.” This entrance into frail, fleshly existence is the essence of “God with us.“

So as the church remembers and anticipates its Savior yet again this Advent, may its celebration never eclipse its missional responsibility to remember in a such a way as to identify with those who are waiting–on the corner, in the gutter, invisible–for a light to dawn on their dark existence in the here and now.