Lent 4 - Monday - The Church and The Arts

Text: Mark 7:24-37 (see below)


Yesterday on Facebook, a good friend of mine, the Reverend Bill Doubleday, shared the following reflection:

"I wonder why churches don't do more with Literature and the Arts. Reading groups turn up here and there. I once ran a Theological Book of the Month Club in Arlington, Massachusetts that steadily drew thirty or more people in a small parish. I hear of occasional museum visits, but why aren't there lots of guided pilgrimages to area museums to encounter the Passion Story in Medieval and Early Modern Art. We sometimes use theatre parties as fund raisers, but overlook the fact that a musical like "Les Miserables" is at its core a story of grace vs. works and law vs. love. "The Book of Mormon" on Broadway right now has huge potential to feed a discussion on mission, context, and conversions. A few of my friends, run movie or video nights followed by discussions, but there is so much untapped potential to engage younger and unchurched folks with this kind of entry point. I am afraid I am utterly prosaic, but for some people, poetry reading and writing represents yet another context for potential engagement. I am sure you all can think of other examples and opportunities for ministry related to the Arts. They certainly DO NOT need to be clergy led, though I personally would not want to miss the fun and the learning!"

I shared with Bill that I would probably take his question and reflect on it for one of my posts this week. Thanks to some extraordinary sunny weather in Northeast Ohio yesterday with the opportunity to sit outside and read, I have taken Bill's reflection and gone in a slightly different direction. Here is my answer to his post.

For over a thousand years, the Church has had and on again off again relationship with the Arts. There have been periods of greatness where the Church has served as a patron to the musical and visual arts: think of the partnership between the Church and the genius of Michelangelo and J.S. Bach, for example. Other periods of history has seen the Church at its worst: open persecution of the arts for expressions of sensuality or perceived hedonism.

In today’s culture, the partnership between the Arts and the Church is limited if not practically non-existent. Part of the reason for this is the less than favorable welcome that most members of the arts community receive in many congregations these days. Let’s face it; the Church is more interested in catering to the bourgeois than a crowd of bohemians. Many artists, my self included (during my musical days) have been treated as if they were hired hands and of little worth instead of being welcomed as "angels unaware".

Kae Evensen, a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), believes there is another reason for the poor relationship between the Church and the Arts. In an on-line article for the Christian Century, dated from November 2011, Evensen stated, “The book readers, the artists are leaving the church. There is no place for them” (christiancentury.org). She pointed out that in the past the Church often served as a patron for the arts, but today a reliance on technology rather than original creativity has left many congregations using projectors screens and showing uninspired clip art.

Later in the article, Evensen stated that in many churches that she has served, most folks in the pew simply did not think about art. “You go to the Minneapolis Institute of Art and then you come to church and a puppet show will do? People know that there is more to faith. It’s just that they do not have any vocabulary, they do not know how to articulate it.” Evensen thinks the decline of ecclesial art goes hand in hand with an overall dumbing down of Christian teaching (christiancentury.org). Amen, Sister!

When did mediocrity become a spiritual virtue in the Church?

John Piper once quipped that in worship there should be an “undistracted excellence” in all that we do. Folks who sit in the pews each week should demand and expect excellent preaching, as well as excellent music, excellent singing, and overall excellent liturgies. Sunday worship is an opportunity for those who have labored diligently for their craft to serve and celebrate God with their gifts. Mediocrity has no place in the Church when it comes to the worship of God.

I am currently worshipping with a community in Cleveland that works very hard at creating an atmosphere that is conducive to embracing and encountering the mystery of God. It is clear from what I witness Sunday after Sunday that the liturgies are well crafted and meticulously planned. There is a marvelous flow that I have seldom experienced in my many years in the church as a singer and later as a priest.  For each liturgical season, art is carefully and strategically placed in the open space for maximum effect. At Christmas, a large carved wooden triptych of the manger scene centered the attention of all present on the mystery of the Incarnation. Now, during Lent, a Celtic looking crucifix hangs to the left of the altar. Each of the last three Sundays I have had time to gaze upon this Cross of Christ and reflect on the meaning of the journey to Jerusalem. To see more about the Community of Saint Peters in Cleveland click here. Make sure to read about their understanding of the importance of art to faith.

In 2008, there was a national conference entitled Transforming Culture which tried to address this issue of the relationship between the Church and the Arts. Questions posed at that conference are as important today as they were four years ago. Here are a few of the questions that struck me as I reviewed the conference website:

In what way is art a gift, a calling, and an obedience?

In what way does art tell us about the nature of God and the nature of human beings?

How is the pastor an artist and the artist a pastor?

How can a pastor see her/himself as an artist? How can s/he learn to think artistically, or live artfully, or grow in the art of shepherding of words and people which is also the art of love?

On the other hand, how can an artist see her/himself as a shepherd? How can artists see themselves as uniquely anointed shepherds of the imagination of emotions, of ideas, of physical matter, of beauty?

How can our actions and spaces be artfully shaped?

How can our corporate actions (the liturgy) and the physical spaces (architecture) be informed by an artistic perspective? How, in fact, can the arts reinforce and enliven our theological convictions about worship?

What is an artist and how do we shepherd these persons?

What is the anatomy of an artist? What is their peculiar nature? What do artists need to be healthy, mature persons? What do artists need but don’t immediately realize they need? How can the Church provide spiritual formation as well as community and opportunities for expression for the artists in our care?

What are the dangers of artistic activity?

How can the arts undermine the calling and mission of the Church? What are the possible excesses and misuses of the arts in a church setting: in the worship, in the discipleship, in evangelism and service?

For more information on Transforming Culture, please click here.

As I sat out on my deck yesterday afternoon pondering these questions, an experience I had many years ago at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco came flooding into my mind. I had always been told that if I ever visited the “City by the Bay”, I was to make the pilgrimage to Grace and encounter the beauty and majesty of God. It is a phenomenal experience and one that I encourage you to take for everything in that Cathedral is carefully designed and created to set all of your senses into motion.

You enter the great front doors and the baptismal font greets you. There is no clutter anywhere to be found. The leaders of this faith community want you to have a spiritual experience from the time you enter the Cathedral. After encountering the baptismal font, there is the labyrinth. It fills the first portion of the Nave and reminds one of the labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral.

Then the long center aisle leads you to a free standing altar with four magnificent candle stands at each corner perfectly proportioned for the space. Again, there is no clutter anywhere like in so many other churches. The simplicity is refreshing, insightful and instructive.

I had been told by friends to make my way behind the altar and to look back towards the labyrinth and the baptismal font. It was a moment that I shall never forget because an artist had been commissioned to create out of stained glass the birth of a star which from a distance looked like it was being born out of the waters of baptism. Fantastic! My senses and imagination were on overload as I tried to comprehend the meaning of what was ultimate mystery.

Here is a faith community that completely understands the relationship and healthy balance between art and worship. The emphasis at Grace Cathedral is clearly on the glory of God and not on any individual and their creative gift. It is all about God, the majesty of God, and the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus.

Now, my peers will begin to complain at this point and say, “That is all well and good, Brian. But it takes a lot of money to do the kind of things that Grace Cathedral does.” I agree only that it takes sufficient funds to make that kind of art happen. The difference is the faith community at Grace Cathedral has made such a ministry a priority and funded the ministry appropriately.

You do not have to be a Cathedral to support the arts and make things come alive artistically in your congregation. I was reading about a small ELCA congregation in the Twin Cities named Mercy Seat which pays liturgy composers $250 and band members $50 each when they perform. Including costs for promoting visual art shows, a sound technician and the Director of Music’s monthly stipend, Mercy Seat spends about $27,000 a year on the arts—a quarter of its annual budget. (The ELCA's Minneapolis synod contributes about $25,000 a year to the church.) At those rates, the church is one of the better-paying gigs in the area.

"It's nice to bring [musicians] in and say, 'You know, what you're doing is really great and worthwhile,'" Wes Burdine said. "Since the rest of the world won't recognize that by paying you well, we want you to know that creating something is valuable."

“Scott Munson, 32, left a career in civil engineering to pursue songwriting. Mercy Seat paid him for a liturgy before he'd ever performed in public. With two of his masses in the worship rotation, the church is one of his key employers. His work at Mercy Seat has led to scoring music for a documentary film and a commercial.

"When someone's willing to pay you actual money and use what you do for their service, it means the world to you," Munson said. "That to an artist is a tremendously dignifying  and meaningful thing in the day-to-day calculations of life" (christiancentury.org).

In my search across the web for this post I came across The Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts (ITIA); a research institute based at St Mary's College, the Divinity School at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Their mission statement reads: “ITIA aims to advance and enrich an active conversation between Christian theology and the arts — bringing rigorous theological thinking to the arts, and bringing the resources of the arts to the enterprise of theology. As part of this, it seeks to explore the role of the imagination in the arts, as part of a wider theological interest in the imaginative aspects of our humanity.”

Their website is worth a look as well as their blog post which can be found here. So there are in fact communities that are actively wrestling with these issues and trying to find a way forward. This in itself is very good news and a sign of hope for the future of the Church.

One final post is worth mentioning. In an article written for Religion Online entitled “The Church’s Stake in the Arts”, F Thomas Trotter, former General Secretary of the Board of Higher Education and Ministry of the United Methodist Church, writes eloquently about the balance between the arts and theology.

“I propose that the more helpful understanding of the relationship between the arts and religion is in the suggestion that religion, understood etymologically, is that form of human expression that seeks to tie all things together and to provide an environment of meaning to the otherwise randomness of events. In fact, the word religion is a derivative of the Latin res ligatae, ‘things bound together.’ The arts are, in this sense, profoundly similar in intention. Therefore, as is often suggested, the arts have a religious function as well as a history of functioning in religion. For some disbelievers, art is elevated to religious status. For some believers, art is the language of religion” (religion-online.org).

Mr. Trotter’s reflection is well worth your time and effort. It can be found by clinking here.

Thanks to Bill Doubleday for his reflection that stimulated my thinking. Some more thoughts on this subject tomorrow: a painting by Caravaggio. I trust you will return.

Love One Another - Brian

To Be United With Beauty

C.S. Lewis

We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words – to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. 

Source: The Weight of Glory

Mark 7:24-37

From there Jesus set out for the vicinity of Tyre. He entered a house there where he didn't think he would be found, but he couldn't escape notice. He was barely inside when a woman who had a disturbed daughter heard where he was. She came and knelt at his feet, begging for help. The woman was Greek, Syro-Phoenician by birth. She asked him to cure her daughter. He said, "Stand in line and take your turn. The children get fed first. If there's any left over, the dogs get it." She said, "Of course, Master. But don't dogs under the table get scraps dropped by the children?" Jesus was impressed. "You're right! On your way! Your daughter is no longer disturbed. The demonic affliction is gone." She went home and found her daughter relaxed on the bed, the torment gone for good. Then he left the region of Tyre, went through Sidon back to Galilee Lake and over to the district of the Ten Towns. Some people brought a man who could neither hear nor speak and asked Jesus to lay a healing hand on him. He took the man off by himself, put his fingers in the man's ears and some spit on the man's tongue. Then Jesus looked up in prayer, groaned mightily, and commanded, "Ephphatha!—Open up!" And it happened. The man's hearing was clear and his speech plain—just like that. Jesus urged them to keep it quiet, but they talked it up all the more, beside themselves with excitement. "He's done it all and done it well. He gives hearing to the deaf, speech to the speechless."

Translation: The Message