The Gospel Story in Conversation with Kendrick Lamar

A little while ago, I took my three-year old daughter to a story time at our local library. The librarian leading the story time began by encouraging all of us parents to regularly read stories to our children. Reading is undoubtedly beneficial for child development, and it’s good advice. However, in a broader sense, all of us, not just our children, are regularly exposed to stories. These stories are being told to us through the people we are regularly around, the media we engage with and consume, and the places in which we spend most of our time. In these stories we hear different views on what matters most in life, what we should give our time and attention to, and how best to live our lives. 

The gospel, of course, is also a story. The Bible communicates the story of gospel in a way that shows it to be over and above all the stories that the people, media, and places around us are telling us. Sometimes the gospel will affirm what is being said in these stories. Sometimes it will critique. Always it will call for us to see how the gospel is ultimately the one true story that best and most fully reveals reality and how best way to live within that reality. 

This framework, sometimes referred to as contextualization, is helpful for us as we consider and evaluate what is being said through popular mediums like television, film, and music. We should ask ourselves when consuming content from these mediums what stories about the world they are telling, what are the primary messages and values highlighted within these stories, and how the gospel helps us best interpret and guide us through all of it. 

Let’s try this out with one of the most gifted musical artists we have right now, Kendrick Lamar, and in particular by taking another look at his memorable Super Bowl halftime show from last year. 

For those unfamiliar with him, Lamar is rightly considered one of the best rap artists alive right now. He’s won multiple Grammy Awards, as well as the Pulitzer Prize for music. He’s especially known for the storytelling in his lyrics and his creativity in communicating significant ideas and messages.

All his talent and creativity were on display in that halftime show. Lamar was deliberate in his choices and choreography, telling a story of celebration, struggle, confrontation, defiance, and victory. Within his performance, two messages stood out to me. These messages are prevalent in popular culture and mass media. Lamar shared these messages, naming the tensions and offering his solutions. I want to demonstrate how from the Christian perspective, the gospel is best at interpreting and understanding these messages. The gospel is uniquely able to recognize and affirm the truths in these messages. The gospel ultimately provides the most satisfying answers to the questions and concerns they raise.  

We need change and we need it now

At the beginning of his performance, Lamar says, “The revolution about to be televised. You picked the right time but the wrong guy." 

This begs the question, who is the “wrong guy” he is referring to? It could be President Trump, who was in attendance at last year’s Superbowl. Or it could be that Lamar was referring to himself. 

Regardless of who the person is, the more fundamental message Lamar is saying throughout the performance is that now is the right time for radical change. Now is the time for confrontation and disruption of the status quo. From Lamar’s perspective, things in the world have gone awry and what will put things right is nothing less than a revolution.

His message of upheaval is one with which many people today resonate. Many people feel that things have gone deeply awry and we need big answers and big changes.

But how will this revolution come about? This is where the answers diverge. Some say it must happen through violence and aggression (there are certainly parts of Lamar’s last album that suggest this as a possible path). Others are looking to political leaders, while others say it will happen through gaining more cultural relevance or building bigger public platforms or taking over existing institutions. 

Amidst our culture’s longing for change, here is a great space for Christians to step in and show how Jesus and the church (at its best) offers a more compelling solution. We can demonstrate how the gospel can best diagnose what is wrong in the world right now and how it brings about the kind of revolution and change that people are looking for. 

How can the gospel do that? It starts by agreeing that things aren’t as they should be. We can affirm that, yes, things in our world are not okay. And we can explain why they are not okay––we live in a broken, fallen world (Gen. 3). From the very beginning of the world to today, things in the world have always tended in the direction of death, decay, and disorder. 

The gospel resonates with our culture’s desire to confront the broken and fallen realities of the world. We need revolution. We need revival and renewal. But how do we get there? Here’s where all the other options being offered eventually fall short. Violence works until eventually someone stronger and more violent than you comes along. Cultural relevance can bring change, but only in the short term, and eventually you will be unable to keep up as cultural patterns and trends shift more and more rapidly and leave you behind. 

What we ultimately need, in Lamar’s terms, is the “right guy,” the right person, to bring about the revolution and revival that’s needed. And according to the gospel, that right guy is Jesus. For Jesus alone shows us how to both strongly confront the things that are broken and bad in our world while at the same time have the compassion and love that can bring salvation and redemption from his confrontation. Jesus uniquely brings justice and mercy together in a way that leads to lasting transformation. The gospel of Jesus brings revolution and revival that is holistic; change for the better both “out there” but also “in here,” within our hearts and minds.

Be Real. Be Authentic. All You Fakers Out There?
We See You For Who You Really Are.

A recurring character throughout Lamar’s halftime show was Uncle Sam (played by Samuel L. Jackson), who appeared at different points to comment on what is going on. At one point, Jackson warns Lamar not to be “too loud, too reckless, too ghetto.” Uncle Sam wants to know if he can play the game, which looks like doing things that are nice and calm. And at first it seems Lamar accommodates this, doing his more mainstream song, “All the Stars.”

This makes Uncle Sam happy. He says, “Yeah! That’s what I’m talking about! That’s what America wants! Nice and calm.”

At one point in the performance, dancers form up around Lamar wearing clothes that, when viewed from above, make them look like an American flag. This image of black people in the form of an American flag, moving in sync with their backs to the sky, conveys the sense of black people being forced to accommodate, of having to give up their very bodies to build up our country and give the masses the America they want – a nice and calm America that keeps people in their place.

But then Uncle Sam is cut off as Lamar rebels against this and does his song, “Not Like Us.” This song is one of the greatest rap diss songs in music history. But it’s a song that has since transcended its origins. In an interview before the halftime show, Lamar said the song now speaks more broadly to being real and authentic, no matter what, especially against all the fakers and the people who continue to accommodate or be sell outs or worse. Being real and authentic is what it's all about today.

People today yearn for something that is real, that is true, that is authentic.

And in search of genuine authenticity, people will go in many different directions. Some try to attain it through expressing a different kind of sexuality or different gender. Others are convinced it will happen through more strongly affirming a particular ethnic, social, or national identity in contrast to other ethnic, social, or national identities. Still more think authenticity appears by being more blunt or being willing to be socially and politically incorrect. 

But are these answers truly satisfying? Once again, here is a space the gospel uniquely fills, because the gospel starts with yes, there is a real, true, authentic self out there for each of us, and yes, it’s a legitimate desire to discover it for yourself. However, the problem all of us face is that you need the right baseline, the right standard by which to judge what is truly authentic so that you end up not with just any “real” version of yourself, but the best version, the one that is most beautiful, most glorious, most lasting. And the gospel says that this version of you can only be found, not in your sexuality or in your career or in your ethnic or national identity, but in Christ.  The Christian story says that we were made by God, for God. We were made in his image to reflect his glory and be in relationship with him, and we are most ourselves when we recognize that and live into how God created us to be. 

But not only that, the gospel connects us into a community of people called the church. And it’s the church that uniquely provides the kind of gospel-centered community that leads to real and authentic relationships. It’s the church that, as its people regularly worship and serve together, creates the kind of transcendent experiences that bring us more in touch with reality than anything else. The church is uniquely the dwelling place of God (Eph. 2:22) and as such, the church can always be the place where we find our real selves and our lasting purpose.

The Opportunity the Gospel Story Gives Us

The affirmation-and-critique approach towards the stories our world is telling can be a means through which we can more easily share the gospel with others. The people we meet and with whom we regularly interact are all figuring out what matters to them in life. They all are consciously and subconsciously making choices that reveal what they believe about themselves and what they believe about what kind of life they should be living. They make these choices after being influenced by messages communicated in the stories told to them through their phones, their media consumption, their friends and family, and their schools. Arguably, people today have never been more inundated with ideas about how we should live than we are today. The result of this–– a more skeptical and disenchanted world––has not made us satisfied but more empty, desperate, and longing for more. 

But therein lies our hope: the gospel, now more than ever, stands out as the one narrative that can make sense of all that comes at us. The gospel gives us the means to affirm what is true, confront what is wrong, and then invites us to live into a story that actually works, a story that will lead us to the happy ending we all are searching for.