Sermons
21st September 2008 - Trinity 18
The production of art is surely a degenerate activity by anyone who professes to be in possession of Christian truth. St Paul says that as Christians we commend ourselves by an open statement of the truth. What possible need have we of art if we possess the truth?
Yet throughout Christian history the trinkets and daubings of sculptors and painters and the melodies, wailings, and trumpeting of composers as rendered by choirs and organs have stood between us and a pure expression of the unadorned truth of the gospel.
There is an endless number of images of the crucifixion. There are endless Madonnas, and cherubs and angels, pictures of saints and sinners, acres of music for the Mass, for the Requiem Mass, there is Christian drama, liturgical dance. There seems no end to the ways in which mankind substitutes its need for emotional excitement for acceptance of doctrinal truth. If naturally degenerate, art must be one of the by-products of our fallen nature; there were no paintings or sculptures in Eden and Adam and Eve only began humankind’s interest in fashion after they discovered their nakedness.
With regard to this covering of humanity’s naked sinfulness with patches of colour, clergy have tended to fall into two types: the ones who detest the intrusion of art into the sphere of the theological verities, and those who lose their heads over the supposed beauty of the objects and sounds put together by the artist. I place myself firmly in the latter category, in contrast to the ferociously dull Dean of St Paul’s known to the press and the public as the gloomy Dean, Dean Inge, who commented on the use of extended choral works in the liturgy thus: ‘These services [ones with a great deal of music] seem a criminal waste of time…never at any time have I thought it at all probable that God is the kind of person who enjoys being serenaded…the noise gets on my nerves and interferes with consecutive thought’.
If the possession of truth is the delight of Christianity, a truth that will set us free, what need have we of imagery, music, colours and choirs, candles and incense? And what on earth are we up to, thanking Anna for the very beautiful candle stand she has made us, indeed thanking God for giving Anna and other artists their insights and skills.
If Christian truth were simply a matter of information - and if being human were simply a matter of sorting fact from fiction - how straight forward life would be. But being human and being a Christian is a lot less easily defined than that. Christian truth is larger than information and the possession of it in its full extent is not available to us in time. Conversion and believing are different to understanding how something works. If it were otherwise, the expert Christian theologian would convince simply by speaking the truth about God. Mr Dawkins and his band of fanatics would listen to a single speech by our beloved Archbishop and go racing to their nearest church to commit themselves body and soul to so rational an enterprise as Christianity and to confess the dullness of their previous thoughts.
Art is very much in the mix when it comes to our relationship with Christian truth, because that relationship is characterised not simply by information but by emotion, we don’t in the end believe because it makes sense, we believe because of the way we love, and because Christianity makes us love one another and love God more.
Can we delight in our fallen nature then? Can we rejoice in the happy fault of the fall? Jesus spent a lot of his time with people seen to be particularly fallen, tax-collectors and sinners, people like St Matthew whose call we remember today, people like Mary Magdalene, like the woman caught in adultery, people cast out of polite society, particularly polite religious society, people on and beyond the edges of religious respectability. Like the rest of us, but for very different reasons, Jesus was much more interested in sinners than righteous people.
But are we not the people in possession of the truth, that sets free, the truth that liberates? We may have some purchase on the truth but we are not in full possession, and a sign of this is that we have art and sin, repentance and forgiveness - or if you like the means grace and the hope of glory - because we wallow, do we not, in our fleshly lives, and can we convince ourselves that we would have it any other way? Imagine yourself for a moment utterly free of your sinful nature, would that still be you? How much of your identity would need to be subtracted to leave the sinless you, and what sort of existence might that be? An existence unaware of its own nakedness, a rather blank canvas, an image of a paradisal state of infancy unclouded by knowledge of good and evil, unclouded by desire and greed and pride and shame and duty and honour and the need to repent.
It is real humanity that Jesus comes to redeem, the normal sort, the sort of humanity we all have...the only example of sinless humanity presents itself as a challenge to our friendliness with sin. No fall - no art, but no Jesus - no redemption.
So will there be art and music in heaven? Will Sydney Smith ever experience his vision of Heaven as ‘eating pates de foie gras to the sound of trumpets’. He will not. He will have no need of them because then and only then possession of the truth will be experienced.
Art versus truth, art or truth? It is not a choice we can or should try to make. We grasp the truth with our hearts and minds in so far as we can hold on to it, but art may be for some a diversion, an unhelpful distraction, whilst for others it may be the handmaid of truth leading them deeper into an non-verbal appreciation of the expanse of Christian verity, for others still it may become a more direct form of transportation to the divine realm, seeing may be for some believing. Remember Oscar Wilde’s little line about us all being in the gutter but some looking up to the stars. On our brief journey through this fallen life we take the opportunity to look up, to be guided by the inspiration of poets and artists and musicians, we allow ourselves to be transported by some of the by-products of our fallen nature into the realm and possibilities of God’s infinitude. Praise God for allowing us to glimpse through art the shimmering beauty of his presence among us, praise God for allowing our fallen nature to be shot through with the radiance of his light, [praise God for guiding Anna’s mind and hands in making this beautiful candle stand], praise God for the beloved gutter of your fallen nature, but keep your eyes on the stars.