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The Faith That Comes From Hearing
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis December 5, 2005, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Preface If you walk through the courtyard of the Cloisters of San Marco and follow the signs to the friar’s cells, you will next be directed to climb a wide set of stairs to a landing. There the stairs turn right and, before you take another step, you look up. On the wall of the North Corridor above you, larger than life, Fra Angelico’s fresco of the Annunciation proclaims the mystery of faith. The sight will take your breath away. Sometime between 1417 and 1423 Guido di Piero was ordained to the Order of Preachers, the Dominicans. Fra Giovanni da Fiesole was the name taken that day by this painter-preacher. He was to be given another after his death: Angelico, Beato Angelico as the Italians know him, Fra Angelico as the world refers to him today. Already an established illuminator of manuscripts with his brother Benedetto, a scribe, he left what would have been a secure and lucrative career for a life given to the proclamation of the gospel...in paint. As I scan the Scriptures, plumb the theological sources that have nurtured the church’s faith for centuries and come up with words, Fra Angelico does the same and lifts his brush. I speak the mystery of faith; he paints the mystery. On the walls of San Marco, he offers his own exegesis of the Scriptures and the tradition to the friars who, in turn, listen for God’s address through these frescoes. They are preparing to proclaim the gospel throughout the hillsides of Tuscany. But how do you paint mystery and where do you find words to speak of God. You cannot; though if you are ordained to this high calling, you must. In the end, theologians and preachers have only metaphors to dare and Fra Angelico only colors. He paints “the light of absolute otherness” and shatters certainty. We speak the lies metaphors tell. This is as close as any of us ever will get to telling the truth. I read the Dominicans believed that the proclamation of this mystery required of them heart and soul, but also and especially required their minds. The Order of Preachers took as their sixth mode of prayer the practice of thinking about scripture and as their eighth mode of prayer the meditative reading of theology. Forgive a personal aside this morning, but I confess that after reading this in the courtyard of the Cloisters, I looked up from William Hood’s book on Fra Angelico at San Marco and wept. I was home. I am home and more grateful than words can say for this time of reflection on my own faith, a time that has renewed me for the incomparable responsibility of proclaiming the gospel. So to the proclamation at hand!Romans 10:14-17 Luke 1:26-38
With Fra Angelico’s fresco of the Annunciation as our interpretive screen on the second Sunday of Advent some 1550 years later, let us see and see again the meaning of the church’s confession: that God has come to us from the beginning in the Word which became flesh in the fullness of time and was born of Mary. Luke first sets the scene of God’s address--God’s fiat, God’s “Let there be”--which at the beginning of time spoke the world into being and in the fullness of time conceived the inconceivable in Mary’s womb, the first born of a new creation. Exactly where and when is God’s Word to be heard and received, we ask. In the sixth month, writes Luke, to a town in Galilee named Nazareth, the angel Gabriel was sent. From the start, Luke locates God’s address in the phenomenal world, the world we can see and taste and touch, the familiar world in which we live. “In the days of King Herod of Judea” he begins. God has chosen human history as the place and the time to make known the mystery that nevertheless will remain hidden in the intractability of human flesh: the mystery of the incarnation. While we recognize this time and space, Luke’s gospel is not history as we know it, no David McCullough biography which we may or may not find interesting. Rather there unfolds in these verses the event toward which salvation history has slouched from the beginning, leaving us in the end with a choice to make about truth. So Fra Angelico set Mary down outside a cell whose imagined space was not Nazareth, but the very space where the Dominicans Thought about scripture and meditated while reading theololgy. He placed her in a courtyard which called to mind the public courtyard of the Cloisters just below; he painted her sitting outside a cell that, for all the world, looks just like the cell each friar was headed for as he passed by this fresco; he chose the window through which the friars would view the streets of Florence as the fresco’s vanishing point. Fra Angelico turned the friars to their world, and in turn, turns us toward ours proclaiming this to be the place to listen for God’s Word. Much as I would rather roar about God visiting the muddy and diseased streets of Port au Prince or the Bantustans teaming with AIDS outside Capetown, South Africa or the embattled neighborhoods of Falluja or the drug infested alleys of West Philadelphia—the places where God surely abides if God is the same God we know in the poverty of the manger—we will never get there from here if we do not hear the Word that addresses us. Fra Angelico’s exegesis constrains us to listen for God’s address here: around this table or nodding off during the sermon, while reading in an overstuffed chair by the nightstand where the Bible is buried beneath Dan Brown or Danielle Steele or James Paterson’s best seller or on your bed as you lay yourself down to sleep. Here is where mystery will find you. Fra Angelico proclaims that the places we live and die are the places where God addresses us; the time we are given between birth and death is the time when we may hear. At the center of ordinary time and space, God enters in to redeem both from insignificance. We hear nothing, of course, as human hearing goes, only silence, we say. Silence is enough for now. We who would be unwitting witnesses to salvation history on the way to bed or to breakfast or to the next chapter in a book, you see, first must endure the silent night, which is to say the emptiness, the loneliness, the weight of the world without God. This must be why, in the second place, Fra Angelico’s many paintings of the Annunciation locate to the left of the cloister a garden. In San Marco the garden is uninhabited; in cell three a bloody headed Peter Martyr looks on; in Cortona a shamed Adam and Eve sneak off the frame, away from God’s presence. Then there are the little red blotches that look like flowers in the garden, but if you stand close enough and stay long enough to see again, you see they are the same color and drawn with a stroke identical to the drops of blood falling from Angelico’s ubiquitous crucifixions. This is the garden of our sin and of Christ’s sacrifice. Mystery, to tell the truth, requires of the painter and the preacher to proclaim more than the sentiments of the season. Amid the soft pastels of Fra Angelico’s brush on the left, there is exposed our choice to live without God in the world (hence the garden). In the plain back and white of the church’s confession on the right—truth or lie--there is revealed God’s choice not to be God without us (hence the incarnation). We know better the landscape on the left, East of Eden. Even the volume of public cheer turned all the way up during these days rushing toward Christmas cannot return us to innocence or rub out the emptiness we carry within. We are brittle, cold, naked, alone. You see in Massacio’s Expulsion from Eden restored across the Arno the weight of human existence lived apart from God. The man and woman literally are heavy with paint pulling them down to the earth from whence they came and to which it seems they now are destined to return: dust to dust. A preacher reaches for words to say the same: We live and must die. We know truths…but as our knowledge grows…truth recedes. We scatter and we gather. We know the good we ought to do, but as we know it, we know we will not do it and never will….We want to settle down, but we have to move on….Every desire wants eternity. The enemy that changes satisfaction into dissatisfaction is already at the gate and is entering.’ The poet says it better: “Darkness and snow descend;/The clock on the mantelpiece has nothing to recommend…We who must die demand a miracle.” The time is Advent. We are waiting in the silence and the emptiness of life without God. Into the courtyard, Fra Angelico next draws Gabriel, an insubstantial angel of God, meaning a being that casts no shadow because the light shines through him. His wings glitter with specks of azurite that only an eyewitness can see, “subtle indexes,” writes an art historian, “of glory.” But the angel on one knee bowed is all “Ave.” He scatters the maiden’s fear, for she has found favor with God. “And now,” Gabriel says. And now! With those words, God begins the descent. Now with words alone Luke places us at the epicenter of mystery where nothing is humanly conceivable. In the silence, offering only our own emptiness, we listen: “you will conceive in your womb and bear a son [who will be called] the Son of God.” Words, only words, but precisely “now” with the Word God conceives, seeks the expectant emptiness, becomes flesh: grace enters gravity, taking on the weight of our sin, the heavy load of our lives lived without God. “Now” in a Word God comes. “According to thy Word,” Mary says, “be it unto me.” The theologians of Fra Angelico’s time read her humble submission through our text for the morning: “Faith cometh by hearing,” writes Paul, “and hearing by the word of God.” The theologians taught Fra Angelico that the Word to which the Virgin submits, “at the very moment of submission, miraculously impregnates her womb.…What is really occurring, they say, what turns everything upside down—laws of nature, the course of time, the salvation of human beings—only obliquely passes through the [story in] the exchange of words, like a light of absolute otherness. What is really occurring is…, at that very moment, the divine Word is being incarnated in Mary,” they say. “In an instant, the instant of a word, the Word of God is made flesh, the body of Christ is formed entirely and takes on life…. Aquinas, the supposed champion of theological reason, will merely ask reason to bow down before this…mystery.” The miracle we have demanded is conceived and inconceivably accomplished by words which have sounded in our ears but which we have not heard (according to the clock on the mantelpiece) for years. So Fra Anglico at the last paints Mary. Sitting on my borrowed bathroom stool hour after hour I stare at this other lady also on a stool. She grows larger than life the longer I look, her arms crossed in the first mode of Dominican prayer: bowing in humble reverence. It is the foundation of all prayer, the Dominicans say. As yet untutored by the books I later will read, I behold the maid, elegant in her simplicity, her face young and expectant, not yet the Queen of Heaven later to be crowned in a cell down the hall. My Protestant eyes are not expectant as I look at her. When I finally see, I am nothing less than astonished and bowed down. As though staring at random bars which—once a switch is thrown in the brain--turn out to spell JESUS—I see Mary clothed by Fra Angelico in the black and white habit of a Dominican preacher. She is a preacher--the preacher--one whose vocation is hearing. She hears God’s Word and, in hearing, bears to the Order of Preachers, in their living quarters, a Savior in whose flesh the world is redeemed. She has done nothing and everything, she hears God’s address and says only Ecce: Behold. Here I am. At that instant into our emptiness and silence is born the Word made flesh, God with us. At the bottom of the fresco Fra Angelico added words after he himself had beheld the mystery, the light of absolute otherness thrown against the dark North Corridor. The words command the one who has seen to act. “Ave” he tells his brothers who pass by on the way to write their sermons. Hail the woman, the preacher in whose hearing Christ was conceived. What are we to do, Protestants for whom an “Ave” sticks in the throat? Like the Mary in Lorenzo Lotto’s Annunciation, we cut and run to our bedroom where words, only words, are waiting for us under the stack of modern mysteries. We open to Luke’s first and listen: “In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazarth.” “Ecce,” we say. “Behold. Here I am.” Thanks be to God. |