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God as Artist Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis March 14, 2010, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Isaiah 40:12-25 Romans 1:16-25
Hanging on the wall of my office, though presently propped up on an easel in the narthex, is the art of William Blake. From an exhibit at the Tate Gallery in London, we see God birthing Adam in the beginning. The face of God is pained--almost as if in labor. Here, at the moment when God gives life to the first human being, one can read into God’s face both the tenderness and the fearfulness of a mother toward her child: a child so surely of her and beloved, yet a being necessarily apart from her and free to fall. On God’s face we see not simply the beginning but the end: both the distance ahead between parent and child and the longed for reconciliation between Creator and creature, a reconciliation which only death on a cross was destined to accomplish. Yet I see something else on this Sunday when we give thanks to God for the decade of worship made joyful by organ and organist as well as the gift of the arts to the life of this church. Behind or hidden in God’s face I see drawn the passion and the pathos of One who, in the beginning, chose to speak and thus to compose, to sculpt, to draw, to paint, to dramatize, to write, to dance, to sing, to throw the world upon a wheel and shape it for shining. I see God in the act of calling into being that which is other than God, apart from God, and therefore that which is, by God’s choice of love, beyond God’s control. I see God as Artist. "The God who made the hills of Florence," wrote Anatole France, "was an artist…. Nowhere else is nature so subtle, elegant, and fine….How could it be possible that this violet hill of San Miniato so purely and firmly designed, be by the same author of the Mont Blanc?" I see, in Blake’s painting and in the arresting majesty of the cosmos, God as Artist. In the beginning, of course, there was no canvas or palate, no instrument or scale, no wheel or clay, no foot for leaping or place to land. In the beginning, there was only the Word of God speaking creation into being. “We can say what kind of act creating is,” writes Robert Jenson. “It is an act of love. Rather than causing, bearing, or making, love is a choosing and a communicating….Love is not silent [but] calls into being.” Out of nothing [say most theologians], God calls into being the sounds of which Bach's cantatas and our scales of rejoicing are made, the space and airs redefined by Calder’s mobiles turning, the stone wherein David's muscles were hid, the stars for van Gogh to swirl across his canvas, trees for Georges Seurat to behold in dots, the human face for Picasso to rearrange on paper. God as Artist created and ordered from chaos a cosmos and so a communication to which our eye and ear and mind and hand were made to correspond. “To love and to be loved is God’s passion,” says Kierkegaard, “almost as if God himself were subject to the power of this passion….” This passion is surely the substance of the God Blake’s painting proclaims. But in the second place, we see in Blake's painting and hear in Paul’s letter the pathos of the Creator whose works are subject to another’s eye and mind and misconstrual, namely our own. Earth’s Author has created us as creatures who, in freedom, may behold creation’s beauty or dismiss it; may thank creation’s Author or deny the One by whose hand we were made; may choose, in the end, to worship the creation instead of the Creator. Paul numbered himself among those who saw hidden in the cosmos the signature of its author, "Ever since the creation of the world [God’s] eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made." So too Augustine, whom to cite in this matter is to tread the dangerous theological waters of natural theology. Nevertheless, Augustine proclaimed to his congregation: "Some people read books in order to find God. Yet there is a great book, the very appearance of created things. Look above you; look below you! Note it; read it! God, whom you wish to find, never wrote that book with ink. Instead, He set before your eyes the things that He had made.” But oh what our eyes miss and misconstrue! Sometimes it is because we are being too religious! “There are Christians,” writes Gerardus van der Leeuw, “for whom the question of the relationship between the beautiful and the holy is exhausted by the question of the moral and pedagogical demands which must be made of a work of art. [This is how they view all created things,” he says, “whether from God’s hand or from human hands. The human body art? The sunrise for delight?] For them, a ‘Christian’ book is a book in which there is no swearing, but preaching; ‘Christian’ music is composition free from blemishes which infect opera and dance; a ‘Christian’ painting is a work of art in which everyone is decently dressed, preferably representing biblical characters.” Paul, on the other hand, wrote that we miss God’s artistry due to our stupidity and idolatry. “…they are without excuse,” he writes, “for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened….” By that I think he means we dwell in the shallows of human endeavor, flinging words and paint and notes against the silence. “Are we only talking to ourselves in an empty universe?’ asks Annie Dillard. “The silence is often so emphatic. And we have prayed so much already.” Of these artistic connoisseurs van der Leeuw says they “stand, proud and straight, unable to kneel, and have actually forgotten even how to sit down….[For them] art is exhausted in a purely formal game of colors and sounds, of lines and forms. When God proclaims the law from Sinai with thunder and lightening, they have eyes only for the glow and depth of the landscape.” Though more than the aesthetic stupor of theologians and the theological shallowness of artists, I think we have to do business with the essential vulnerability of Blake’s sublimely biblical God. Because God is Artist rather than autocrat, God intended that this gallery in which we have been placed between our birth and our death, this concert hall whose acoustics would set creation’s reverberant notes sounding deep within our souls if we would but listen, this stage on which we have been invited to take up our part and even edit the script handed us: all these venues must leave us free to be the Almighty Artist’s critic, to be creation’s bored and slumbering audience, to be patrons of another’s claim to creation--science, say or culture. God the Artist, on the other hand, has never ceased trying to arrest our attention, even as God maintains our right to the shallow and the shabby. “Have you not known? Have you not heard?” cries the prophet Isaiah, “The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.” The prophet invites our awe at earth’s Author asking, “Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and marked off the heavens with a span, enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance?” “Who laid [the earth’s] cornerstone,” says God to Job, “when all the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?” What would our days look like were God to arrest our attention anew, and were God’s praise to be elicited, by the beauty, movement, color, shape, rhythm, texture and tone displayed wherever we turn our eye or cock our ear? Both Isaiah and Paul are counseling a kind of attention paid to the depth of things and, because in van der Leeuew’s words, “the artist makes the depth of things resound,” the counsel turns us toward the artist’s high and holy calling, for the artist is the creature used of God to astonish us and bow us down in a world that is charged with God’s grandeur. “The more I work,” wrote one of last century’s most compelling sculptors, Alberto Giacometti, “the more I see things differently, that is, everything gains in grandeur every day, becomes more and more unknown, more and more beautiful. The closer I come, the grander it is, the more remote it is.” Remote, that is, until the Artist, who in labor pains delivered us onto earth’s canvas, chose no longer to remain anonymous. For whereas before the incarnation, God's signature was hidden in the hills of Florence, in Sinai's landscape, in the starry, starry nights of Provence, in the earth's dust enclosed in a measure, or the heavens marked off with a span, now God the Artist, with more passion and pathos than Blake’s canvas can contain, conceives beyond our imagining, in a mother’s womb, the Son of God’s substance, to be born as the first of a new creation. In these latter days you and I have not been left to understand God’s eternal power and divine nature through the things God has made, but finally through the One who is “the express image of the invisible God,” even Jesus Christ. And if it is true that he is the image of the invisible God…true that by Him all things in heaven and on earth were created…then through him our creative imaginations are given a ground and a destination. Or, to put it another way, in him and through him we are given an imagination for the God who is God. We do see Jesus, Word made flesh, image of the invisible God. And having seen Jesus, all other seeing, hearing, moving, feeling, all other singing, dancing, sculpting and composing will never again be the same. For having heard in his voice God’s address, our ears now lean in to hear hints of the same truth in the cadence of a poem or the rhythm of our days; having seen the mercy of God’s way of seeing in him, we watch for parabolic glimpses of the Kingdom breaking through the plot of a novel or in the twists and turns of history; having known in him the grace note sounded throughout all eternity, we may catch-in symphony and cantata-melodies of mercy which previously had been announced only through the rustle of angel voices. Moreover, through his eyes we are invited to behold the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and consider God’s providence, to notice what we had never suspected in a mustard seed growing and listen as we walk through the fields for the stones to cry out. He bids us in water and wine, in bread broken and cup poured out, in vines flourishing and fig trees withering, he bids us notice the activity of the One whom he called Father and whom we may therefore also confess to be earth’s Artist and Author. “Perhaps,” concludes van der Leeuw almost wistfully, “there are a few generous, humane Christians and a few reflective, reverent servants of art, Christians who have learned, through the manifestations of their Lord, to love the whole manifest world.” Perhaps, if these ten years have located us at least on the edges of that number, we may with Augustine finally confess to Paul’s delight: “The whole world proclaims its maker. Let your mind roam through the whole creation; everywhere the created world will cry to you: ‘God made me,’ Whatever pleases you in a work of art brings to your mind the artist who wrought it; much more, when you survey the universe, does the consideration evoke praise for its Maker…. Now if in considering these creatures of God, human language is so at a loss, what is it to do in regard to the Creator? When words fail, can aught but triumphant music remain?” Thanks be to God for the gift of triumphant music that lifts up our eyes on high to see who made these and that then gives us voice to praise him! Amen! |