Hope United Church of Christ
Sturgeon Bay, WI
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Sermon Reading Isaiah 1:10-18 (The First Testament: A New Translation)
He was a man out of time, much like his magician advisor, the actual king at the turn of the 6th century unsuccessfully defending Britain against invading Saxons. Arthur’s story would be fictionalized, lifted from that context, and reset in the Middle Ages, all knights and chivalry, though with a hint of druids and witches to remind us of the ancient. We can see this anachronism in John Boorman’s 1981 film “Excalibur,” in T.H. White’s “The Once and Future King,” required school reading for my generation, in Lerner and Loewe’s “Camelot,” and above all in the greatest Arthurian masterpiece ever, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” which includes a scene where Arthur rides through a town ravaged by the Black Death, the classic macabre scene where the carter cries “Bring out your dead!”
In this swirling space of All Hallow’s Eve, of ghosts and ghoulies, and of Reformation Sunday, commemorating that singular expression of the shift from the medieval to modernity, it seems right to revisit the Black Death, the first and greatest episode of the Bubonic Plague to hit Europe, dropping the world population by an estimated 100 million people during the 14th century. To celebrate the end of the Black Death, Florence, in what is today Italy, decided on new doors for their Baptistry. A grand competition was held, with seven sculptors entering, and Giovanni de’ Medici as the judge. Lorenzo Ghiberti won the competition. Many of us have gazed on those very doors, on Ghiberti’s work, in that city filthy with masterpieces.
One of the other contestants was Filippo Brunelleschi, who, it turns out, was not a particularly graceful loser. His entry drew particular attention, can still be seen today as a Renaissance masterwork in Florence’s Il Bargello. He might have gone on to be a legendary sculptor, but he refused to work in that medium ever again. Instead, he would focus on architecture and optics, designing the groundbreaking dome of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence’s Duomo. If that is one particular piece in one particular place, his other great gift to humankind is everywhere, still impacts us today, for he is considered the inventor of linear perspective, that art of creating the illusion of three dimensions in a two dimensional drawing or painting, of using technique to invoke more.
Six centuries later, another approach to multiple dimensions rendered in the flat space of drawing and painting would contribute to the development of cubism, the reduction of objects to basic shapes, often seen from multiple angles at once. It was inspired by Paul Cezanne, who was a living bridge between Impressionism and new forms, his paintings attempting to represent three-dimensional form. The Cubist style took its name from words by Henri Matisse, who described a painting submitted for exhibition by Georges Braque as being made of little cubes. Braque, along with Pablo Picasso, would be most closely associated with the style.
There were folks who despised Cubism, still are folks who despise Cubism, and if I am honest, I personally prefer pre-Cubist Picasso, the Blue Period and the Rose period, but you can already see the trajectory, flat spaces creating angles, even there. There were folks who despised Impressionism too. The Académie des Beaux-Arts had no room for the work of the Impressionists at its annual juried art show, the Salon de Paris, so the young artists eventually showed their work at the Salon des Refusés, the Salon of the Refused.
We know how that story ends. The Impressionists included Renoir, Sisley, Manet, Pissarro, and the artist who painted the painting that would give name to the movement, Claude Monet. Paintings by these “refused” artists rarely come up for sale, so the prices reflect the economic insanity of a particular moment, but Monet’s “Meules,” not one of his best known works, sold for $110 million in May, while Picasso’s cubist “Les Femmes de l’Alger” sold for $179 million in 2015.
Then again, Vincent Van Gogh died broke, so maybe folks aren’t always so good at seeing what is happening, appreciating innovation and vision, in the moment.
The history of art is one of singular vision, experimentation, and rejection, of rebellion and the cost of rebellion. Each generation of artists reaps the harvest of those who went before, with greater freedom and new possibilities, but first came a generation of rejections and the devastating words of the art critic. Sometimes we look at the experiments and shake our heads, but each was a necessary step in the evolution of human visual artistic expression.
As a general rule, artists don’t have to flee for their lives, though that happens too, and more than a few have been hounded and harassed, even here in the U.S., even in my lifetime.
Still, better to be an artistic innovator than a religious one, where you can end of down a well, with your head on a plate, dying on a cross, burned at the stake.
Yet, religions evolve, sometimes for the better, sometimes not so much.
For example, since Constantine legalized Christianity, the church has consistently taken on the structural forms of other powerful institutions. When the world was ruled by emperors, the church looked like an empire, indeed, the Roman church sometimes was literally an empire, and played king maker where it did not rule directly. The ancient Roman grouping of citizens became the name of the Pope’s imperial court, the Curia.
As sprawling empires became smaller kingdoms, local church leaders became like petty kings. It is no wonder that local church autonomy was an innovation from Zurich, for the Swiss cantons were semi-autonomous.
At the moment when colonies became nations and 18th century thinkers embraced neo-classicism, romanticizing ancient Greece and adopting the citizen assembly and representative government, churches like our own Congregationalist tradition adopted town meeting style governance.
As our civic space became larger and more complex in order to meet expectations for crazy things like safe drinking water, as bureaucracy developed to meet the growing needs of urban living, so too did churches become bureaucratic, with an ever growing list of boards and committee, procedures and manuals.
As corporations came to dominate our culture, many churches took on the avarice and showmanship of corporate media, with a charismatic CEO at the helm and worship in an arena with all the authenticity of a World Wrestling Federation smackdown. Today, the cool churches look more like a TED-talk, and often have just about as much religious content.
If the forms of the church have evolved since a breakaway sect of the Hebrew religion became a thing in its own right, so too have the beliefs about the big questions, about life and death and our encounter with mystery, about what it means to be human, a social animal with a powerful spiritual yearning, longing for meaning and connection.
Serious study of the Hebrew scripture and the historic context in which it formed is not for the weak of faith, for it shows a religion that borrowed and evolved over time. That does not mean that God changed, though that is possible and even probable too. It does mean that each generation wrestled with mystery in their own way, had prophets and artists, suffered and thrived, and that their expression of their faith was their expression.
The Hebrews were never the racially pure eternal monotheists of scripture, but were an ethnic, political, and religious stew of Ancient Near Eastern people and cultures, borrowing names for their God from Midianites and Canaanites. But they were also innovators, unique in their context in prohibiting idols, in refusing to ever conflate their God with an earthly ruler. They developed a unique and powerful narrative of justice and witness, likely the result of some of their people spending some time as slaves in Egypt.
They had believed in a god who demanded blood sacrifice, who punished children for sins of the parents for generation after generation, who called in enemy armies to slaughter the disobedient. They believed that the faithful got rich in this life, and when that didn’t happen, they had to make up stories to explain it away.
Prophet after prophet changed the Hebrew religious trajectory and called the people to live their faith into the world. Isaiah Bin Amoz, the first in that school of prophecy, seven centuries before Jesus, told them that they couldn’t mask their misconduct with sacrifices, a lesson the Sacklers are having to learn two and a half millennia later.
The Hebrews arrived at this idea that God was one, that God was good, that God was in relation with Creation and particularly in relation with human kind, for we had the audacity to believe God was in some way like us.
And then, when times were particularly tough, some came to believe that God was like us in a particular way, for they found a man who felt like an encounter with the holy, who felt God-like in his power to heal bodies and spirits, who was courageous even on a cross, who they experienced as present to them even after they had seen him executed by the brutal Roman occupiers.
None of this was easy. It was disruptive and divisive. Jesus told them this explicitly. Doing what was right, what was righteous, came at a cost, for the mob operates from fear, but the faithful dare to love.
There was another five centuries of trying to figure out what Jesus meant, who he was, how he continued or didn’t the Hebrew religious trajectory. None of this was easy. It was disruptive and divisive. Yet even in all of the wondrous mess of human ways, there were these moments of clarity, of radical selflessness, these thin spaces where the heart would quicken and the senses tingle, not Spidey-sense, but Godly-sense.
For while some would like to believe that God fell silent after a vision to a man named John of Patmos, we know better. Prophets came and they keep coming, those dragged, often kicking and screaming, by holiness and love and madness. Francis of Assisi and Jan Huss and Martin Luther, John Wesley and John Robinson, our Pilgrim ancestor who dared to tell us, in humility, that neither he nor those sailing to the new world had all the answers, for God was still speaking.
Our faith is a human construction over three thousand years in the making, from a band of escapees in the desert to a genius painting a ceiling in Rome to a vote declaring this denomination Open and Affirming. But it is also the sack of Constantinople and the Salem witch trials. It is sham faith healers, get rich scams, and the grotesquery of racism and hate disguised as faith. Christianity is not perfect, not even our particular expression of it, for our apology for our misdeeds in Hawaii will never undo the damage.
None of this is easy. It is disruptive and divisive. The world does not stay the same, and a faith that does not evolve will become more and more irrelevant over time. The same is true for the church.
You wouldn’t want healthcare of a hundred years ago. Most of us will take a pass on bleeding and leeches. Why in the world would you want spirit-care of a hundred years ago? Longing for God is always going to be a leap…
An evolving faith is not a shallow adaptation to popular culture, though the church can learn from popular culture. We need a faith that has room for Darwinian evolution and quantum entanglement and the questions provoked by each new discovery, incoming hard and fast, for the discoveries of archeology and the observations of the social sciences, for the work of the anthropologist René Girard on scapegoating, for Thomas Piketty and his challenge to our economic sustainability in a world where a tiny sliver own a lot, and a lot together own but a tiny sliver.
Today’s 95 theses are not hammered onto the church door. They are posted online. They are the Twelve Phoenix Affirmations, the confession of faith in a time of crisis called “Reclaiming Jesus.” They are statements of witness made by our UCC General Synod, and prophetic letters of resignation written by pastors who no longer find God in institutional church.
None of this is easy.
But the world will not stop changing, no matter how much we want to ignore it.
Our time calls for courage and adaptation, for deep thinking and hard work, for Sunday morning forums and Theology on Tap, for an ability to disagree and still love. It calls for reformation, not as a one-time act frozen in history, but as a daily recreation, a re-weaving, the preventative maintenance that keeps this show running.
Let us not be the fellow thrown onto the cart, proclaiming “I’m fine,” just before the carter cries out again “Bring out your dead!” Let us be Brunelleschis and Braques of faith, seeing things in a new way, for we follow a man who said “Come out of the tomb Lazarus.” May our mysterious God have more life in store for us too.
Amen.