If you enjoy rock 'n' roll, you know that Chuck Berry died last week.  Dynamic and creative, Berry pioneered the sound that eventually grew into the plethora of rock music we hear today.  Dozens of musicians, all, ironically, white, owe their sounds to him.  His influence is immeasurable.

     Some of us love rock, some of us do not.  Some of us think rock is evil, most of us, I daresay, do not.  Many of us lament how rock's ethos of rebellion ensnared millions of young people in the Sixties and Seventies, and all of us should mourn the passing of many a musician before he or she turned thirty, felled, in most cases, by the patterns of the life he or she led.
     Regardless, if God is there, and I believe he is, we can view rock--and Chuck Berry--in a very wide lens.  Culture, however it is expressed, is the fruit of a humanity made with purpose, the outpouring of a creativity born in beings made in the image of God.  Though we may not like or appreciate all the culture we see, we can certainly agree that God can use it all.
     And he has.  As we ponder Chuck Berry's passing, we also consider the profound changes that rock wrought in so many millions of people, changes that, in many cases, helped them to see, in the compass of human creativity and imagination, that there is indeed a God.
     Solely chemical beings, it seems to me, will never create.