Audio Recording
In my last church down in Caledon we had an artist, Merle Harstone of Silvercreek Studios. Merle births abstract creations. Going to her house is a real treat. If there is a loll in the conversation, you can always just stare at one of her pictures. Admittedly, abstract art isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. Most people will want a picture of something and know what it is and appreciate the artist’s interpretation and skill. Abstract art is different. What you see in the picture usually tells you more about yourself than it does about the artist or anything else. It can be like looking at the clouds to see what shapes appear.
This is one of Merle’s paintings entitled “freedom with limits”. She gave it to my family a few years ago around the time my daughter was born because she knew I had formed a special attachment to it. At face value it seems just a bunch of shapes, lines, and colors. But the more I look at it the more I see. The very first time I saw it, the first image (or icon if I may) that drew me in to ponder is what appears to be the bare back and neck of a very elegant woman with a Victorian hairstyle and dress. That should tell me something about myself, but we won’t go there. If it helps, Dana saw it to. Then I saw this spot here in the upper left quadrant and for some reason it looked like a blackened eye swollen shut on a face that is angled down to look at me. And then here just above it is this series of dots that look like a crown of thorns. There is royal blue where there should be blood. The wrinkled tissue paper all over looks like capillaries on the human heart in some places and tree roots and branches in others. Here’s one of those Christian fish symbols. I asked Merle if any of what I saw was there by her intention and of course she said no. It was just what I was seeing.
There’s a sermon in this painting that I don’t think Merle was aware she was delivering…a sermon for me that I share with you for which Merle through her creativity was the conduit. When I look at this painting I will forever see the face of King Jesus crowned in thorns and looking down to me from the cross. I see him. He sees me and I come to understand that he, the Crucified One, needs to be rooted deeply in my heart, as it’s very capillaries in order for me to have a life in him that is as majestic as a well-aged and very wise old tree. The fish symbol connects me to the early church because it was the symbol that identified Christians back then rather than the cross. It reminds me that Jesus is King Jesus, the Anointed King who fed all those people with a few loaves and a couple of fish and it also reminds that we are fishers of men as well.
I'm not sure what to do with the lady though. I think she represents the church to me and I see two ways of seeing her. I could see her as being seductive with her hair pulled up and neck and back bared but then she’s done up in this Victorian dress and the Victorian age was known for its prudishness. Moreover, she looks away from her crucified Lover to something else. Is the message here that the Church is little more than a seductive, Victorian prude who spurns her Lord while wiling for another? I don’t know about that. Another way to see her is to say that a woman exposing the nape of her neck is a sign of vulnerability and it may be that she represents to me that the way the church is to embody Christ and indeed learn to love him, is to let herself be vulnerable and in that vulnerability lies her beauty.
Well, this lesson in abstract art is neither here nor there. But, you never know what you’re going to see until you actually take the time and make the effort to look at things, life, God. Nevertheless, keeping this lesson in mind let’s look at our reading here 1 John. You see, John wants us to look and see something here; something that when we see it we are going to understand who we are and what we are becoming through are relationship with God and one another in Christ Jesus by the work of the Holy Spirit. John says, “See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” Children of God - God himself calls us his own children. This is a great love that God lavishes upon us.
I am a child and I have children and I know that it is something huge to say that God calls us each his child. I’m not poetic enough to be able say anything more than its huge, indeed staggering…you know, to take these feelings and all that I have towards my children and towards my parents and even those children I have felt parental towards and the people who have been like surrogate parents to me, to take those relationships, those bonds, those ties that bind and say that if you want to know and understand and experience what a relationship with God is, it is a bond quite like that. God calls us his children.
Yet, I don’t want to wax nostalgic about the love between parents and children and quite cheesily say that God’s love for us is the epitome of that. It’s not. God’s love for me as his child totally redefines how I feel and how I am towards my children and towards my parents. I can’t love my children with the same steadfast love and faithfulness that the Trinity swaddles me in. I can try…and I do try…but still the best I can do is point them beyond myself, beyond their mother to their Father in heaven and his love for them made real by the very mother-like loving presence of the Holy Spirit who in a great mystery bonds them, unions them, krazy glues them to Jesus Christ so that they know the love of God the Father just as he knows it through his union with the Father in the Holy Spirit. To be called children of God means we share Jesus’ relationship with the God Father in and through God the Holy Spirit. This is the great love that God has lavished upon us that John wants us to see.
I know I just threw a lot of theology at you. Theology can be abstract. When we describe what it is to be in a relationship with a God who has revealed himself to be Three in One and One Three, well, we’re going to run into some difficulties. But to talk of God in any other way than how has revealed himself to us through Jesus Christ as it is attested in Scripture is to talk about an idol that we have created in our own image. It is a waste of time and too often a harmful waste of time.
Let me send you home with an exercise in the abstract art of theology. When you look back over the work of abstract art that is your own life, do you see how God has lavished this great love upon you consistently at every turn without fail no matter how painful things may have gotten? I’ve had some nasty turns come up in my life. I’ve taken more than my share of wrong turns as well. Yet, through it all God the Trinity has be there and been faithful to me. Things aren’t perfect. Life is not one big episode of Leave It to Beaver with a little Jesus thrown in. This is a fallen, broken world but God is faithful. God is faithful.
One last thing, as a congregation we are God’s work of abstract art as well. We are collection of people whom God has called together and made it known to us that we are his children. If people were to look at us what would they see? Would they see, would they know that we are God’s children lavished in his love? When we practice righteousness, which is to know Jesus and live like him sharing in his relationship with the Father and his love for each of us and for everyone and when we love one another the world is supposed to see Jesus in us like I saw some very meaningful symbols in this painting. The world may not see it and in turn know who we are and through us see Jesus and know God and how God loves them. We are a work of abstract art in which God carefully and uniquely brushes images of himself and his love so that the world can see. Let’s not forget that, but rather put it on display by practicing righteousness and loving one another, indeed with vulnerability. Amen.
