Sermons

Faith for the Future: Arts and the Spirit

Pentecost

John Wilkinson	Third Presbyterian Church
May 11, 2008	Acts 2:1-21

    
How thankful we are, gracious God, to be as your glad and joyful people. How thankful we are for the patterns and constellations of our lives. This day we thank you for mothers, our mothers, those who serve as surrogate mothers for us in so many ways. We remember those who have gone before us, who we remember with affection and tenderness and whose tenderness and affection for us has nurtured us along the way. We remember grandmothers and adoptive mothers and step-mothers and foster mothers, all who provide caring and compassion. And we remember those who would seek to become mothers and are unable to – we pray for them and with them. And we think of those for whom this day does not fully bring fond thoughts, and we pray for every relationship that seeks healing and wholeness. Bless all of us this day, compassionate God, and bless those whom we love and who love us. And open now, on this day of Pentecost, your word to us, that by your Spirit our spirits may be transformed. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

* * * *

I remember the second time I saw this church building. The first time I had been whisked through, in the clandestine way we Presbyterians do things in our search process. The second time, though, when it was known, or proposed, anyway, that I might be the one to come here, I experienced a more complete building tour. It was snowing. That was hardly shocking.

What else was not shocking was my appreciation for this place. You already know that I am an admitted church-building fanatic. New, old, stone, wood, colonial, gothic. I like them all. Even the ones where it is more difficult to detect the beauty.

And I like this one. A lot. I appreciate the craftsmanship throughout the place – the beauty of the wood, the grace of the glass, the strength of the stone – the marble and granite, even when it leaks! In fact, treat yourself for a moment or two following worship. Linger here and look at the wood and glass.

I realize that it is easy to be seduced by the beauty of this place. I’ve been to enough European cathedrals that are so glorious on the outside and have so little going on on the inside that I know a true church’s beauty is in the people and the ministry and the transformation.

But still, as our conversation around our “Faith for the Future” campaign and its vision and values continues to unfold, is it not worth it to pause for a moment – perhaps on this Pentecost Sunday, perhaps on this worship, music and arts Sunday – to ponder this stuff just a little.

It has been a deep aspect of the Third Church tradition for more than a century, in some ways for our 180 years as a community of faith. Our architecture. Our stained glass. Our music, especially, fed no doubt by a distinguished music school down the street, but certainly fed by more than that.

It is a delicate balance to be struck. Music and arts within the whole of the church’s life, but also music and arts within itself. Our two lovely spaces – the sanctuary and the chapel –each with a distinctive design, each with a distinctive function and feel, are not museums or concert halls. Rather, they are vehicles for worship and venues from which the gifts of human creativity might be expressed in uplifting this community and worshipping God.

This is not the time to discuss what the pundits call “worship wars,” which have something to do with worship and music styles, and ways to attract or retain people who may or may not be interested in what is going on inside. There is room in the wondrous economy of God for all kinds of worship and musical expressions for the people of God. Ours, we hope, is a faithful reflection of who we are and who we are called to be, that provides, and, again, we hope, meaning for this colony of God’s people, and is somehow worthy. This is not about that, nor is it particularly about what we do, or how.

But perhaps it is about the why of it all. God gave us music, we will sing in a bit, gave us voice. God gave us gifts to worship God. Two things seem to be happening at the same time. The first is the primary one, but is, in fact, the one over which we have the least control. God will be God in spite of who we are and what we do, regardless of who we are and what we do. God does not need our worship to be God.

But since people wrote things down, it is clear that the worship and praise of God has been at the heart of God’s community. We need to worship God. “O come let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before God our maker.” Words, musical words, actually, at the heart of who we are. “ I was glad when they said to me let us go to God’s house…and let us go to God’s house to sing God a new song, for God has done wonders.”

It is who we are and what we do – we sing God’s praise.

It is true that every act we take, every move we make, is an act of worship. But here, in this place, we focus with a greater sense of intention and purpose on those acts of worship which allow God’s people to declare God’s praise.

Which is the second thing going on – a faith-based exploration of beauty, a spiritual exercise involving the creativity and imagination that God has given us as a gift and called us to use.

The whole world is God’s theater of glory, our theological forbear Calvin said. And it is true. If you need evidence of that, consider Rochester, New York in the middle of May.

We heard a sermon on Tuesday that repeated what I often hear, that we can worship God anywhere, everywhere, even on the golf course. And it is true. This is not the sermon to make the case against that, not that I would want to make it, except that I would want to connect the worship of God anywhere as an individual exercise with the worship of God in the context of a gathered community.

But if all the world is God’s theater, then beauty, the gifts of the spirit, may be found on the beach, in the mountains, on the cape, deep in the woods. And they may be found, too, in the words of a play, in the pages of a novel, in the brushstrokes of a canvas, as Yo-Yo Ma (or Kathy Kemp!) draws a bow across the strings of a cello.

We believe enough in the sovereignty of God to assert that every artistic endeavor, whether defined as "sacred” or not, and whether, I would hazard, the artist knows or acknowledges it, to be a divinely-inspired work of art, and a gift of the spirit. Those happen anywhere, and rightly so, and everywhere. Creativity and imagination do not happen on Sunday mornings only, nor is God confined within the walls of this place, as beautiful as these walls may be.

But even so, something special happens here when we join together, does it not? God is praised. Gifts are engaged. Spirits are raised. We sing a majestic hymn or a simple song. We ring a hand bell. We witness the sun streaming through our favorite stained-glass window. We feel the handiwork on a piece of finely-carved wood. And things somehow change.

On this day, we might even call them Pentecostal moments.

Theologian John de Gruchy reminds us that Calvin believed that the Holy Spirit was the source of genuine artistic creativity. All arts, Calvin believed, music and sculpture and painting included, come from God.

Our Puritan ancestors, even, did not object to arts as such, de Gruchy reminds us, though that is often their reputation. They appreciated the beautiful. What they did object to was ostentatious adornment “that distracted from the dignity and simplicity of true worship and authentic living,” and even more so, they objected to any attempts to usurp God’s role as creator. (See John W. de Gruchy, “Holy Beauty: A Reformed Perspective on Aesthetics within a World of Ugly Injustice,” in Reformed Theology for the Third Christian Millennium, edited by B.A. Gerrish, pages 13-25.)

* True worship must include the arts, because God calls us to worship with every gift we have.
* True worship engages head and heart, calls on word and image.
* True worship involves the whole people of God, a core value as we consider the future of our worship spaces.
* True worship uplifts the human soul, demonstrating an alternative way of understanding how things are and how things may be.
* True worship is radical and life-changing – “art is at the heart of liberation,” the South African novelist Nadine Gordimer has said.

It is Pentecost, that most unusual day in the life of the church, the day, in fact, on which the church was brought to life. We do not know what to make of the Spirit’s arrival, nor do we Presbyterians know very well do make of the Spirit’s presence.

But might we consider for a moment the point in the Pentecost story where every language was being spoken – and understood – as a gift of the Spirit in the same way that the moments when we hear a Bach chorale or a Taize chant or a gospel anthem, or read a novelist’s paragraph or are transfixed at the Geva stage or swallowed up by a film or drawn into an O’Keeffe landscape or an Ansel Adams print as gifts of the Spirit and Pentecostal moments.

And rather than being mere observers of the Spirit’s artistry, might we also claim our role as participants, as artists. Our talent level matters not a bit. Our authenticity does, our acknowledgement of our human spirit’s deep hunger and the Holy Spirit’s ability to fill it.

A wonderful benefit of the thawing of east-west relations in our lifetime has been our ability to connect with the Eastern church, including their iconography. Icons fill the interiors of Russian and Greek and Ukrainian and other Eastern Orthodox churches. The spiritual exercise is to consider them in an extended way. (For me, the spiritual gift is the patience and stillness to be able to do it!) Icons are not God, but by looking at them, by truly looking at them, we see through them to experience something of God’s glory.

That’s what we do, or seek to do, here. We approximate icons, in the worship and liturgy we offer, in our singing and ringing and gathering and dispersing, in the worship and liturgy that comprises the every-day moments of our every-day lives.

To look through, to venture to catch a glimpse of the Spirit, who is there waiting, waiting to transform us, waiting to heal us, waiting to challenge us, waiting to lead us ever forward into the glory of God.

A Pentecost prayer/poem seems in order, this one by Mainrad Craighead. “O Rain from heaven,/ Temper us, we beseech Thee!/ O Gate of heaven,/ Open us, we beseech Thee!/ O Cave of the heart,/ Illumine us, we beseech Thee!/ O Waters of salvation,/ prove us, we beseech Thee!/ O Hidden Garden,/ Enfold us, we beseech Thee!/ O beauty of the deep,/ Sound us, we beseech Thee!/ O Guardian of the Dance,/ Choose us, we beseech Thee!/ O desire of the Eternal Hills,/ Enchant us, we beseech Thee!.”

May it be so. And may every song we sing, every act of justice, every love, be as Pentecost, a work of art, a gift of the Spirit, an alleluia, an ode to joy. Amen.