Romans 8:14-17
Psalm 104
Acts 2:1-21
When I crossed the Queensborough Bridge on 9/11, it was a Muslim merchant who handed me a cold bottle of water from his inventory. This was the reality of that day, not the cheering Muslim crowds in Jersey City of the infamous lie. Still, it is true that fundamentalist versions of Islam have sometimes had difficulty in societies that are diverse, free, and open, for fundamentalism of any kind makes an enemy of tolerance and peace, is always destructive, whether it is the fundamentalism of American Christians, our very own red, white, and blue Taliban, or the fundamentalism of Hindu nationalists in India, even the fundamentalism of atheist extremists who rage against the existence of churches. It is no surprise that fundamentalism often goes hand in hand with racism and nationalism, for they all violently pursue a mythical and pure past. Still, just as there are moderate and open-hearted forms of patriotism, there are moderate, even progressive, open-hearted forms of Islam, of Christianity, of Hinduism. We like to count ourselves among the most open-hearted of Christian movements.
One of the challenging paradoxes of our age comes when a free and open society welcomes fundamentalists who object to the sort of free and open society that would welcome them. Nowhere has this question been messier than in the Netherlands, where the nation’s tradition of radical welcome resulted in the large-scale immigration of Muslim fundamentalists who objected to Dutch liberalism, to the equality of women, of the LGBTQ community. In November of 2004, one of those Islamic fundamentalists murdered a Dutch film director who had, working with a Dutch-Somali member of the Netherlands’ House of Representatives, created a controversial short film about the treatment of women in Islam. The victim achieved more fame in death than in life, though he carried a rather famous name, for he was Theo van Gogh, great-grandson of Vincent’s brother, an art dealer also named Theo.
Like Einstein, who we discussed last week, Vincent van Gogh has become a cultural icon, movies and songs, Kirk Douglas in “Lust for Life,†Don McLean’s ballad “Vincent,†an episode of Doctor Who, and of course his ubiquitous works, Sunflowers and Starry Night on shirts and bedsheets, umbrellas and underwear.
It may be gauche to love van Gogh, but I do. There may be some snobbish grace in the fact that I can take or leave Monet, prefer Donatello’s David to Michelangelo’s, that I think Cezanne was a prude and Picasso was better before Cubism. But in the end, I just like van Gogh’s use of color, of distortion, his choice of subjects.
A preacher’s kid who wanted to become a preacher, van Gogh’s path took a very different turn. Brilliant but struggling during his own lifetime, he famously cut off his own ear in 1888 and took his own life in 1890 at the age of 37. Forensic psychiatrists and medical professionals have tried to give the artist a post-mortem diagnosis for decades, everything from bipolar disorder and porphyria, a metabolic disease that can have psychiatric effects, to temporal lobe epilepsy and Ménière’s,, a disease of the inner ear. His mental illness has always been synonymous with his work, part of the myth, so much so that some have even tried to find a clinical cause for his unique vision, stripping him of all that we might call talent. If they can turn sadness into a clinical condition that requires pharmaceuticals, can turn life itself into a clinical condition, why not art too?
I strongly object to romanticizing mental illness and suicide, something Netflix has been guilty of doing with their recent series “13 Reasons Why,†now renewed for a third season. Broadcast of the first season correlated with a spike in suicide attempts, successful and not, by young males.
The tortured artist stereotype is incredibly destructive, giving implied permission for the talented to engage in risky behavior and narcissism that all too often deprives the world of untold treasures as they overdose or take their own lives. The assumption that talent goes hand in hand with madness and addiction diminishes the value of those geniuses, artists, and performers who have long and successful careers without dramatic self-destruction.
There are amazing humans who see the world in all new ways in every age and in every field. Take, for example, the great architect and thinker Buckminster Fuller, who said as he neared the age of eighty-eight
“I am confident that the only thing important about me is that I am an average healthy human. I am also a living case history of a thoroughly documented, half-century, search-and-research project designed to discover what, if anything, an unknown, moneyless individual, with a dependent wife and newborn child, might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity…â€
His statement was evidence of his humility, his longevity, and was utterly a lie, for he was far from average. But he is the anti-thesis of the mad genius, the tortured artist, the alcoholic writer. Bucky Fuller experienced profound grief and failure and depression, during the course of his life, like most of us, yet he kept on going and survived.
Even if I object to the effort to turn van Gogh’s art into a symptom, in the stupidity that equates genius with madness, the simply truth is that van Gogh saw things in a way that was uniquely his own. His paintings, like all great art, did not exactly reproduce objects in two-dimensions so much as point toward the “thingness†of the thing, to borrow words from a tradition that flows from Don Scotus to Gerard Manley Hopkins to our own lifetimes and Thomas Merton, a Franciscan, a Jesuit, and a Trappist.
There is the spirit of a thing, not a Platonic ideal so much as the intersection of all of the meaning and emotion and entanglement of the thing, the deep history that this particular fox is one fox and every fox, is timeless, eternal, that bed in Arles might be my bed.
The bedroom in Arles really did have odd angles, and the use of perspective and foreshortening is worthy of the great Florentine inventor of linear perspective, Filippo Brunelleschi. No other painter would have painted that bedroom in quite this way, these colors, this angle. Van Gogh saw the world as van Gogh saw the world, not in the way we are told to see the world. All the critics and skeptics and teachers in the world could not have beat it out of him.
Fie to claims that van Gogh’s new vision was a clinical problem! Like every innovative artist, van Gogh liberated artists that would follow. His new way of seeing, flats and hues and swirls, is still the cause of wonderment over a century later. The rare van Gogh painting that comes to the auction block is guaranteed to sell for $100 million or more.
God save us from sameness. We could use more Van Goghs. And more Buckminster Fuller’s while she’s at it. More people who see in new ways, see the thingness behind the thing, the brushstroke of the Master Creator, people who see the might be and the just beyond.
And here, in Jerusalem, these disciples… According to traditional accounts, they spent three years with Jesus as he did things they did not think possible, as he explained an entirely new way of understanding God and our role in this strange thing we call life. They saw these things in him, they heard these things from him, but they clearly did not yet experience the world as he experienced the world. We see this repeatedly in the gospels, as they say something and he corrects them again and again. You can almost see him rolling his eyes, though you’re probably picturing him as Anglo rather than as Semitic, for we have had to learn new ways of seeing him as well, unlearn lies we have been taught.
Those disciples saw what he did, and he sent them out to do some healing and preaching on their own, but they weren’t him, could not feed thousands, could not cure the epileptic boy.
The gospels tell us that after the resurrection he tried to make clear to them his new way of seeing the world, of understanding God, this god that was not a petty tyrant, egotistical and nit-picking, but was a source of life, of creation, was parent of all that is, of us. But he also said he would send them this new experience of the divine, this Holy Spirit that would become a part of them, and that through this Spirit, they would see as he saw, would do things they never thought they could do on their own, without him.
And there, in Jerusalem, the Spirit is upon them, and they share this new way of being in the world, of relating to one another and to that source of all that they named Yahweh. They tell the world what they experienced in this man they understood as a thin place, as God with them, and they do it in languages they do not know. I love how very real and human it feels when Peter says “Seriously? We’re not drunk. It’s only nine in the morning!â€
Jesus suggested a new way of seeing things which opened the door for those at the margins, the powerless, but undermined those who were benefiting from the system, from stagnation, those who measured their righteousness by being more righteous than others, those who sought to drive out anyone who didn’t see things the way they saw things, for their way of seeing things was all about them, they were their own alpha and omega. Their ancestors had driven Amos out of town, threw Jeremiah down the well. They would gossip and bully and whisper until they managed to get Rome to murder Jesus, for Rome was always up for a good murder. But they did not win, for those who loved Jesus had seen him alive again, for God was and is more powerful than death.
Jesus would not be the last. Scripture records some deaths, like that of Stephen, the first martyr, while scripture, legend, and ancient sources point to the deaths of James, the brother of Jesus and leader of the Jerusalem community, of Peter, of Paul. Seeing the world in a new way could be costly then, can be costly still. Maybe your paintings don’t sell. Maybe you get run out of town. Maybe you end up in hiding like Martin Luther, or dead at the gates of Zurich like Huldrych Zwingi. Maybe you get hung on a cross.
A new way of seeing, a new way of being, and these babbling not-drunk men and women would go out and change lives. People would experience healing and wholeness at their hands. More important, they would find meaning in a new way of seeing the world. It was madness, this claim that God was not petty like a human, but was better, and called us to our better selves, to radical love, generosity.
They had not been able to do what he could do when he was with them, but they found that they could do much of it when he was gone.
Heck, they could speak in tongues without the help of new wine!
You may not be the van Gogh of spiritual practice, the Buckminster Fuller of social policy, the Paul Gaugin of institutional church. Or maybe you are. Peter wasn’t exactly Jesus, but here we are.
The Spirit is upon us, bringing us new ways of seeing church, new ways of seeing the world, visions of the possible, where we still aim for those ideals that have run through three thousand years of Hebrew and Christian thought, where we embrace the sacrificial love that Jesus teaches us, where our lives are not ruled by fear, where love wins in the end, where the maddest thing of all is to love no matter what.
The world is charged with the grandeur of God. Seeing it may take an all new way of seeing. But once you see it, once you believe it, go out into the world and speak it every way you know how, in whatever language is needed so they can hear it, in the language of quantum physics, of hip-hop, of fiscal policy. However you need to speak it, the Spirit will be there. Amen.