Crazy Art Dudes- A Sermon

“Crazy Art Dudes”

I was sharing a household that academic year, living with my best friend and her husband. And it was a very, very small freezer, but we rarely overlapped in our shopping, so it was okay. Then there was that day. Ruth had come back with groceries, then headed back out. I came home with groceries and found a freezer that was jam-packed. So when Ruth returned for the second time she found me on the kitchen floor with all of the frozen foods, sorting. She looked at me a moment, then I spoke in exasperation. “You had square stuff on top of round stuff,” I sighed. “How is that supposed to work?” She chuckled and said “OCD man does the freezer.”

You see, I like things neat and organized. I love things that start on time. I straighten the papers on my desk, even if they represent tasks I am avoiding. People who know me can be trapped into believing that this desire for neat categories represents the real me. They’re often surprised to find out I was an art major. And not a neat carefully controlled and drawn perspective sort of art major. A big sloppy expressive painter sort of art major.

So how do these parts of me, the controlled and intellectual, and the expressive and emotional, fit together? They fit together in my faith, in my theology, in the words of the psalmist.

“There is no speech, nor are there words … Yet their voice goes out through all the earth.”

An aesthetic theology? Or a theology of aesthetics? What is it that makes art “art”? I’d like to begin by suggesting that all of the theories about symmetry and color balance and even about content are just that, human attempts to explain the inexplicable. Neurons firing? What a bunch of hooey! Okay, well, maybe, but oh so much more. Art is art because it is a part of something larger. In the visual arts, the art points to something that is beyond. Now, lest you miss it, let me repeat. Art is art when it points to something beyond itself. It cannot “capture” the subject; all it can do is gesture towards it. I can paint a tree, but my painting won’t be a tree, it might, hopefully, evoke “tree-ness.” In the words of the post-modern theorist, we might think of an artistic object as having infinite regress. It cannot be tamed, and there is nothing neat about it. Our hearts soar or ache or leap to our throats because something about that image, that Lucien Freud grotesque or Mark Rothko smear, connects to something else, to our experiences and to this amazing beautiful terrifying creation.

And then there is God. As we look at the theological trajectory that stretches from the small tribe fleeing slavery in Egypt to the hopefully post-imperial Christianity represented by America’s progressive Protestants, we see a continual struggle to describe God. We can troop out complex and esoteric theological terms, intellectualizing an apophatic theology or the problem of predication. We can fall into traditional but sometimes trite formulations that flatten if not completely misrepresent God. Even statements like “God is Love” become problematic. Maybe, just maybe, the most important moment in the history of the people of God was that moment when the descendents of Abraham realized that you couldn’t make an image of God, that even the name of God was beyond the human.

You can already see where I’m going. And I’m sure you can see all of the reasons I’m going there. Who isn’t terrified when Westboro Baptist claims to speak for God? Who isn’t ashamed when Joel Osteen preaches a prosperity theology grounded in a distorted reading of early texts that clearly contradicts the preaching of Jesus? And yet, we do it too. We can be just as certain that we know God in our own way, albeit a God who is tolerant and liberal and, well… a lot like us.

This contradiction is woven into our religious DNA. While the Priestly trajectory was busy creating a self-serving bureaucracy and complex laws, the Prophetic trajectory was undermining it. Be humble, treat each other right, love God. While Jesus looked more like the prophets, the early church looked more like the priests. Codify, define it, understand it, put it in a box.

We can’t find comfort in a God that is abstraction, there’s simply nothing to grab, no way to connect. But we also can’t turn God into a super-sized human that simply justifies our own desires. We humans are prone to idol worship, to worshipping a God made in humanity’s own image. We always have been. But we’ve also always had voices that challenged us, we’ve had our own prophets.

Poetry acts in much the same way as painting. It isn’t the thing it represents. It isn’t even language in the way that we normally communicate, depending on some degree of mutual understanding. No, poetry gives meanings a little wiggle room, is a little slack. Maybe this is the only language that can adequately gesture towards God, the only language about God that isn’t in some way too solid. Maybe poetry, the language of the psalmist, is the only honest language we have when confronted with the divine, though I think most of us would be hard-pressed to deliver a sermon in blank verse, to hold a meeting of the membership committee in iambic pentameter.

The great psalmist of our age, Walter Brueggemann, writes of God:

One time holy,

Two times holy,

Three times holy,

All cry, “Holy, holy, holy.”

You… holy,

You…unutterable, dread-filled, beyond us…

Psalmist, poet, painter or prophet, it’s all the same. We gesture towards a magnificent and transcendent “God-ness” that is, as Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, a freshness “deep down things.”

Now, I know we’ve got some pretty stained glass, some amazing poets, a painter or two hanging around. But to be honest, we’re a pretty austere bunch. We ran away from the pageantry and ornamentation of the Roman church, from the gold and splendor. We chose simple buildings, lightly ordained, and though we’ve abandoned plain black clothing, even allowing in the occasional tattooed and pierced, we are still a pretty mainstream bunch. We really do color in the lines.

So I am proposing that what the United Church of Christ needs is more crazy art dudes. Women and men who will not only bring a modern aesthetic into our sanctuaries, but will kick the legs out from under our sometimes static language and theology. Of course, that means change, the dirtiest six-letter word we know. But isn’t it amazing! We serve a God beyond our understanding but made known to us in Jesus who is beyond our understanding and built in us by the Spirit that is beyond our understanding, and we claim this God to be alive because we are alive and this creation is alive. Art is alive, is reaching for the transcendent. Let us stand on our spiritual toes gesturing towards God, gesturing with paint and plaster and poetry and song. Wonderfully and fearfully made- the works of these hands, these hearts that long for our God. May it always be so. Amen.