{"id":3232,"date":"2023-12-08T07:36:17","date_gmt":"2023-12-08T12:36:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=3232"},"modified":"2023-12-08T07:37:14","modified_gmt":"2023-12-08T12:37:14","slug":"faces-in-the-crowd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2023\/12\/08\/faces-in-the-crowd\/","title":{"rendered":"Faces in the Crowd"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,<\/em> click here<\/a>
 
Before Sgt. Pepper\u2019s Lonely Hearts Club Band<\/em> hit stores in 1967, rock music albums were typically collections of stand-alone songs. 
 
But the eighth studio album of the Beatles broke new ground.  Music historians identity it as an early \u201cconcept album\u201d \u2013 an attempt to establish a running theme linking both sides of an LP. 
 
In this case, the theme was the brainchild of Paul McCartney.  What if he and his three bandmates, tongue in cheek, pretended to be an old-fashioned Edwardian military band \u2013 the kind their parents might have listened to?  Their \u201cconcert\u201d would be anything but traditional, however.  It turned out to be a collage of the Beatles\u2019 latest explorations of cultural issues accompanied by novel instrumentation, including allusions to psychedelic drugs. 
 
Those associated with the project suspected it would become a global sensation.  They were right.
 
A novel album needed a novel jacket.  What Sgt. Pepper<\/em> delivered, according to musicologist Brian Southall, \u201cblew the hinges off traditional album covers.\u201d 
 
A pair of artists, Jann Haworth and Peter Blake, accepted the assignment of creating a concept cover for the concept album.  Blake asked the Beatles a provocative question:  If your pretend band had just finished playing a pretend concert in a local park, and you posed for a pretend picture at the end, what people, living or dead, would you want to be standing in the crowd just behind you? 
 
McCartney and John Lennon both produced long lists.  George Harrison suggested a half dozen Hindu gurus.  Ringo Starr said he would be happy with everyone else\u2019s choices. 
 
Some of the proposed faces in the crowd were considered too controversial.  Gandhi was omitted, since citizens of India revered him as a holy man and would not approve of his image on a rock album.  Nor did Jesus make the cut, since the band was still suffering the after-effects of Lennon\u2019s unfortunate assertion in 1966 that the Beatles were \u201cmore popular than Jesus now.\u201d  Hitler was also suggested, but everyone agreed \u2013 then and now \u2013 that that would have been a serious misstep. 
 
It was also agreed that if a living person\u2019s face was going to appear, that person had to grant permission.  Actress Mae West said \u201cNo way\u201d \u2013 but changed her mind after she received handwritten pleas from each of the Beatles. 
 
In the end, there were 71 images in the shoot.  Four of them, at center stage, are the band members themselves, wearing elaborate military costumes.  Standing to their right are life-size models of John, Paul, George, and Ringo, borrowed from Madame Tussaud\u2019s wax museum.
 
The photo-luminaries include Bob Dylan, Fred Astaire, Edgar Alan Poe, Marilyn Monroe, Laurel & Hardy, and Lawrence of Arabia.  Someone even included a hairdresser\u2019s wax dummy. 
 
In our present age of digital photoshopping, we need to keep in mind that this was a single picture, not a composite.  It was hard work to create life-size photos of dozens of people, then paste them onto hardboard planks.  Getting just the right shot took about three hours on March 30, 1967.
 
The final product won major awards, was hailed as a bridge between art, history, and pop culture, and is widely regarded as the most significant album cover of all time. 
 
Interestingly, the band\u2019s greatest hero was never seriously considered for inclusion in the crowd.  McCartney later reflected that Elvis Presley \u201cwas too important, too far above the rest even to mention.  He was more than merely a pop singer.  He was Elvis the King.\u201d
 
Which brings us to another occasion \u2013 not an imaginary affair this time, but an historical event that also drew a crowd (albeit a small one). 
 
Let\u2019s frame things once again with a question: If you could welcome anyone to the arrival of the long-awaited Messiah, God\u2019s own entrance into the world as a human being, who would you invite?
 
God didn\u2019t invite the famous, the beautiful, and the important.  He gathered a motley crew of the unexpected, unwanted, and unimaginable. 
 
The shepherds who were summoned by the angels to visit Bethlehem wore the bluest of blue collars in Judea.  Imagine waving to the Waste Management guys collecting trash in your neighborhood and saying, \u201cHey, we just had our baby!  How would you like to come in and hold him?\u201d  First century shepherds were assumed to be morally compromised.  Their courtroom testimony was widely regarded as untrustworthy. 
 
Yet they were the ones God chose to be witnesses to this hinge-point in spiritual history.
 
The Magi who appear later in the infancy narratives \u2013 Jesus may well have been two years old by this time, based on Herod\u2019s maniacal decision to exterminate all the two-year-olds in the vicinity of Bethlehem (Matthew 2:16) \u2013 were outsiders both racially (Gentiles) and professionally (astrologers). 
 
Faithful Jews had a word for astrologers: idolaters<\/em>.  Anyone who looked to the stars for direction \u2013 something created instead of the Creator himself \u2013 simply had to be deceived.  \u201cMagi\u201d and \u201cmagician\u201d share a common root.  God\u2019s people wrote off such pagans the way a modern theologian might dismiss someone captivated by crystals. 
 
Yet the Magi received grace.  God provided a star.  They chose to follow it, which is why they became known as \u201cwise men\u201d \u2013 a term that doesn\u2019t appear in scripture. 
 
Even though they were outsiders, the Magi arrived at the right place at the right time to meet the Messiah \u2013 something the self-proclaimed \u201cwise people\u201d in Jerusalem somehow missed.
 
God is like that.  He welcomes outsiders, sometimes even providing front-row seats to the biggest moments in history. 
 
Then there\u2019s the couple at the center of everything.  We know just enough about Mary and Joseph to conclude that they were almost certainly nobody special.  They were young.  Mary may not have been old enough to get a job at McDonald\u2019s, and Joseph was presumably in his late teens or early twenties, perhaps just beginning his journey as an independent craftsman. 
 
No one can say for sure how their friends and family reacted to the news that Mary was expecting a child.  But it couldn\u2019t have been easy for them.
 
We know that certain rabbinical writings in the second century cast shame on anyone following \u201cthat bastard.\u201d  Presumably that was a reference to Jesus.  It seems likely that this family\u2019s life was always under a cloud of moral suspicion. 
 
Yet God invited Joseph and Mary to play the central roles in the drama of Jesus\u2019 birth.  And she \u2013 this young, wrongly judged woman, a nobody from Nowheresville called Nazareth \u2013 would be called \u201chighly favored by God\u201d and \u201cblessed among women\u201d (Luke 1:30, 42). 
 
When you study the creche in the middle of your Christmas decorations, you\u2019re gazing at the crowd that God decided would be part of his Big Event.
 
He invited the unwanted, the unexpected, and the unimaginable. 
 
Most amazing of all, God\u2019s invitations are still going out.   
 
We get to be in the picture, too \u2013 right alongside Jesus, the true King.   <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here Before Sgt. Pepper\u2019s Lonely Hearts Club Band hit stores in 1967, rock music albums were typically collections of stand-alone songs.  But the eighth studio album of the Beatles broke new ground.  Music historians identity it as an early \u201cconcept album\u201d \u2013 an attempt to establish a running theme linking both sides of an… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3233,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[662,119,663],"class_list":["post-3232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-beatles","tag-christmas","tag-mary-and-joseph"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3232"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3235,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3232\/revisions\/3235"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}