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The Landscape of Faith
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis April 17, 2005, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Job 38:1-21 Revelation 21:9-15; 22-26
To look upon that landscape where “the drama of humanity has centered such unforgettable scenes” writes Henry Van Dyke at the start of his classic travelogue through the Holy Land, “to trace the rugged paths and ancient highways along which so many heroic and pathetic figures have traveled…for the sake of these things, who would not travel far and endure many hardships?” Van Dyke prefaced this sometimes florid account of his pilgrimage in 1908 with the conviction that “Christianity is an out-of-doors religion. From the birth in the grotto at Bethlehem…to the crowning death on the hill of Calvary outside the city wall, all of its important events took place out-of-doors.” So it is fitting that we mark the fifth anniversary of our Mander organ with pastorales and landscapes, with the praise of the psalmist out-of-doors set by James MacMillan and Cesar Frank and a word that means to reframe the biblical witness as an extended pastoral landscape…with a 21st century edge! Van Dyke’s travelogue reflects the underlying assumptions of classic 15th and 16th century pastoral landscapes. Noting the “hurried and nervous… spirit of modern curiosity that has broken into Palestine, with railways from Jaffa to Jerusalem, from Mount Carmel to the Sea of Galilee, from Beirut to Damascus,” he confesses his desire to flee the uncertainties of city life “to walk quietly and humbly…in fellowship with the spirit which haunts those hills and vales, under the influence of that deep and lucent sky…to ride through the highlands of Judea, the valley of Jordan, the mountains of Gilead, the rich plains of Samaria, and the grassy hills of Galilee, looking upon the faces and the way of the common folk, the labours of the husbandman in the field, and the vigils of the shepherd on the hillside.” All this suggests we should take our text this morning from a scene such as Moses tending the flock of his father-in-law Jethro at Midian or David wandering the hills of Judea as he sings psalms or Isaiah foretelling a time when the valleys will be lifted up and the mountains and hills made low. Yet something more is required of us who have been born so late in time lest this pastoral frame imposed on the biblical witness be mistaken for the romantic escape from life’s uncertainty and death’s ubiquity sought in the pastoral landscapes of the 15th century. That something more—which I think has to do with speaking truth in the ruins of deconstructed art as well as belief--places us before a pastoral landscape laid out at first to the nth degree by the author of the Book of Job. Job, we are told, tended seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen and five hundred donkeys. The frame around this lush landscape, according to Satan, was a fence erected by the Lord in order that nothing would disturb Job, his house and all that he had. “Praise God,” the family must have sung in parts with ease around the dinner table, “from whom all blessings flow.” The landscape in Job’s first few verses appears to be as pastoral as human existence can be east of Eden, as removed from the intractable tragedies of this mortal life as the human mind can imagine. Even when news reaches Job of murdered servants, raided camels, sheep destroyed by fire, children crushed in the aftermath of a great wind, Job blesses the name of the Lord as though he were dwelling at some remove from reality. Suspecting this, Satan inflicts sores from the sole of Job’s foot to the crown of his head: “Skin for skin!” Still Job surveys the desolate landscape of his life and keeps silence. He keeps silence, that is, until three friends come to console and comfort him. Wisely for seven days and seven nights the friends simply sit with him in silence, surrounded by the landscape of Job’s personal holocaust. There are no words. But after seven days Job finally cries out and curses the day of his birth. This was all his friends needed to unleash their counsel, a counsel which, chapter after chapter, amounted to that oft repeated obscenity in the face of human tragedy: God’s will…this must be God’s will or God’s judgment in the face of human sin. Yet I think the question raised for us in the rubble of Job’s landscape is artistic as well as theological: it is the question of perspective. “Perspectiva” explained Albrecht Durer, the Renaissance artist and mathematician “is a Latin word which means ‘seeing through’” and, according to Erwin Panofsky, Durer’s perspectival view of space in art literally transformed the believing that human beings did while standing before a painting as the Renaissance dawned. From the viewing eye to the picture, if you can imagine, a visual pyramid, geometrically constructed, determined the width and the height of the window through which the eye would see; then seeing through the window, perpendicular lines met at a central vanishing point in a constructed depth as a horizontal line intersected the same point to establish the horizon. Underlying this perspectival view of space were two essential assumptions: first that we see with “a single and immobile eye”, and second, that the depth created by the corresponding pyramid within the picture creates an infinite, unchanging and homogeneous space. In reality, said Panofsky, there is no such homogeneity or infinity visible, but both exist only as this reproduction of what we think we see is constructed mathematically and with the aid of Euclid’s geometry. This may be a stretch, but there is a sense in which religion has attempted to do the same: attempted to construct an infinite, unchanging and homogeneous truth that human beings could know and by which the church could order human existence with ultimate certainty. So with the Euclidean precision each friend of Job proceeds to measure out the straight lines of religious conviction concerning God’s judgment and justice toward the vanishing point of this man lost in the ruins. “If one ventures a word with you,” says Eliphaz, “will you be offended?” From the fixed position of an all knowing, immovable “I”, Job’s friends construct the infinite and unchanging, homogeneous space of rationally straight theological lines: if this has befallen you then we can draw an exact line from your offense to God’s judgment. We have had such friends…or been such friends…in the face of human finitude and change and the heterogeneity which ironically threatens our homogeneous worldview. The implication is that Job has failed to see through the tragic landscape of his life to the ethical and religiously constructed truths that would rationally explain his fate. Job, in return, acknowledges that he has lost all perspective, his face being shoved by fate into the dust of death and defeat while he lives. His question is neither religious nor ethical, according to George Steiner, but has to do with the nature of being itself: what am I and is there meaning any longer in my human being? Some here know this landscape, the sorrow in which you feel yourself drowning without breath, the anger which erases any nuance of thought short of rage, the hopelessness whereby each minute passes as a millennium and tears taste of metal in the mouth. The canvas is flat and you stand too close to see. “Look,” says Job of God’s presence, “he passes by me, and I do not see him; he moves on, but I do not perceive him. He snatches away; who can stop him; who can say to him ‘What are you doing?’” Precisely here, of course--where there is no perspective, no future, no hope—here we believe, in the fullness of time, Christ assumed and so redeemed the sores, the sorrows, the sin of being human. God in Christ eyed this human landscape “from below”—in Bonhoeffer’s words—“from the perspective of the outcast, the suspect, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled—in short, from the perspective of those who suffer” and, in the same flesh, revealed the perspective of God immanence in human suffering and sorrow. In a word, Christ is the pastor in our every landscape, inviting us not escape to from life’s uncertainties but enter in and follow him. Job’s lot in time was not to see the word made flesh, but rather, by way of the same word hurled at him from out of a whirlwind, to hear. From out of the whirlwind God addresses Job not with answers but questions. “The litany of asking deafens,” says Steiner, and yet Job hears: hears not the truth of constructed Euclidean certainty but the explosive poetry of a volcanic god whose space [created and curved] makes of straight line inventions a lie. No translation of this speech comes close to the “enormousness of the original Hebrew….Its category is the aesthetic…Like some ultimate Leonardo [whose measurements defy imagination] the Deity in Job promenades us through a gallery of masterpieces, of rough sketches, of enigmatically encoded patterns, of grotesques and anatomies…God’s address to Job comes out of an artist’s workshop.” God simply overwhelms the man from Edom whose suffering is unanswerable, overwhelms him with “the downright stupendousness, the well-nigh demonic and wholly incomprehensible character of [God’s] eternal creative power.” Because we have this poem, concludes Steiner, “because it leaves us overwhelmed and mutinous, we are able to experience something of God’s choice of the poetic in counter-blast to the challenges of…the ethical and the religious.” In response not now to his friend’s perfectly constructed religion, but to the height and depth and length and breadth of God’s terrible and tender love, revealed from out of the landscape of God’s transcendent perspective, Job can only offer a psalm of praise: “I have uttered what I did not understand, things to wonderful for me, which I did not know,” Job lines in Hebrew verse. “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye”—no longer the single and immobile eye fixed upon a geometrically constructed vanishing point of moral truth—but two constantly moving eyes in whose curved space Job exclaims—“now my eye sees you”: sees the Artist of a landscape no longer desolate but “crammed with heaven,/And every common bush afire with God/…only he who sees, takes off his shoes,[says the poet]/The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries,/And daub their natural faces unawares.” Therefore “I will not sleep under a roof in Palestine,” concludes a barefoot Van Dyke, “but nightly pitch my wandering tent…beneath the Syrian stars,” the same stars beneath which God in Christ has pitched his tent with us! Thanks be to God. |