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Leonard Sweet â Living A Well-Played Song

By Gloria Gaither

April 1, 2014

Mar/Apr 2014   Leonard Sweet Leonard Sweet is one of those multifaceted, influential, gifted people who seems to have gone through the line several times when talents were doled out. Sweet — known to many as Len — is a theologian, scholar, professor, thinker, scientist, pastor, speaker, online-learning pioneer and prolific writer (50 books, 200 articles, 1,300- plus sermons) — not to mention husband and father. Sweet’s newest book is The Well-Played Life (Tyndale Momentum), in which he explores keys to experiencing God’s presence and pleasure in the hardscrabble ups-and-downs of everyday life. He’s no newcomer to the Homecoming family, having shared insights at several events, and he is set to be the Sunday speaker at Family Fest 2014 (May 23-25 in Gatlinburg). His previous book, Jesus: A Theography, was an Editor’s Pick in Homecoming last April. Voted “One of the 50 Most Influential Christians in America” twice, Sweet’s creatively crafted bio is worth quoting at length: He was …born of a mixed marriage: his mother was a fiery Pilgrim Holiness-ordained preacher from the mountains of West Virginia and his quiet father a Free Methodist lay leader from the Adirondacks of upstate New York. After a deconversion at 17, when Len set about less sowing wild oats than planting prairies, he became an atheist intellectual and scholar dedicated to exposing the nincompoopery and poppycockery, if not tomfoolery and skullduggery, of all religions. After this seven-year period of liminality, Len came back to the faith of his ancestors, where he has been ever since, exploring the “interstices” and “semiotics” of religion, culture and history. He uses two words to describe himself: semiotician and interstitial. In other words, he is obsessed with two questions: “Where have you been?” and “Where are you going?” Where Sweet is going in the following pages is on a wide-ranging conversational ride with Gloria Gaither, exploring the fascinating roots of God’s “singing” (hint: it involves both quantum physics and a Nazarene carpenter) and what it means to re-tune our lives to experience the song that Christ has designed us to sing.

GLORIA GAITHER: Thank you for talking to us today; I know we have covered you before in the magazine, but you’re just such a great resource — what can I say? We’re back again!

LEONARD SWEET: (Laughing) Thank you.

GLORIA: This issue we’re asking, “Does God sing?” and of course, you came to my mind immediately because of that amazing talk you did at Praise Gathering a long time ago called, “We are a Song.” We talk about the music of God everywhere —  music in the cosmos, music in the tiniest, minute things, the music in all of creation. And then, of course, I was thinking of the new research — and I know there is a lot of controversy about it — that the original form of matter was a song. I would like your take on all that — does God sing? LEONARD: The greatest example of God singing that we’ve missed — and I don’t know how we’ve missed it — the psalms of Israel were on Jesus’ lips when He died. I spend a lot of time talking about this in Jesus: A Theography. We can ask people, do you have images of Jesus praying? Oh yes. Do you have images of Jesus healing? Oh yes. Preaching? Yes. Eating? Yes. Gloria Gaither
