I suppose it has slipped into a Brown family inside joke. Some celebrity name will come up and I guess I’ve asked – “didn’t they die?” – enough that Ellen makes fun of me because they are not usually dead. The flip side of this is Ellen coming home and informing me that so and so died, and me asking “who is so and so?” I’ll do the same thing with “so and so from a completely different cause of celebrity” and Ellen will ask back, “Who?” I guess we keep different death pool lists. But the death of Brian Wilson was the rare common celebrity.
Now if you care, you have probably read or heard enough about Brian Wilson in the time since. And if you don’t care, you’ve heard too much. I’m hope not going to add to the pile. Honestly I was too young for the Beach Boys to be a thing while I was growing up. They were on the “oldies station” already. (I know, stab me again. When did Motley Crue become classic rock?) Any time it would come on you were instantly transported to 1960’s Southern California. Even if you had never been there, as this prairie son had never been, those songs made it real. But you also realized that those early songs about girls, cars and surfing were about a California that no longer existed, and which now is even further away. Summer isn’t eternal. Wilson was the rare artist that while never really changing his style – all his songs are a blissed out melancholy summer – they grew in maturity and depth. But Brian Wilson was first under his abusive father, and then under an abusive shrink, and at one point he wondered if he needed the abuse to be creative. His story doesn’t really have a second creative act. When the muse is gone, it is gone. But he does have a second act of love. His 2nd wife more or less rescued him and together they adopted and raised five kids. If you have never seen the movie Love and Mercy it is well worth a couple of hours.
Brian Wilson’s story came to mind while I was reading the epistle lesson for this week – Galatians 3:23-4:7. Paul reflects on the law throughout the passage as being “our guardian” or “being held captive under the law” or “when we were children, we were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world.” The reflection on the law becoming more severe: guardian to enslaver. And if one is raised in a certain way, the law can inspire great acts. And I suppose I should expand that, everyone has some type of law. You can’t escape it. Which is why Paul calls it the “elementary principles of the world.” The only difference is if you have a revealed law, or just the intuitive one. And for each type, there are always kids who will run through brick walls if the Father figure tells them to. Brian Wilson seemed to have been one of those. But if our salvation is by the law, when we can no longer run through brick walls, when the muse no longer stops by, where are we? Brian’s Dad owned those early songs and sold them for pennies because he thought his son was washed up. What surely started out as appropriate instruction becomes abuse. “We are enslaved to the elementary principles of the world.” Instead of having a love of the law of God which is a lamp for our feet and a guide to our path, we learn to hate it, and are defeated by it. Our guardian becomes our tormentor. Especially if we have come of age.
“But we are no longer under a guardian.” The law is not our means of salvation. “The law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith.” Because in faith we are not slaves, but we are sons. Like Brian meeting his second wife who created a secure place of love for him, in Christ we have that place of love. In Christ we can know the Father rightly. Not as a slave driver, but as “Abba! Father!” who gives us his Spirit freely. And we no longer have to worry about being turned out or used up. Because in Christ by faith we are heirs, heirs of the promise. God only know what we’d be without.
