Feast of the Transfiguration: Imagination and Mission
Sermon preached at All Hallows by Pippa Julings on 5 August 2007
Readings:
Daniel 7:9—10,13—14
Luke 9:28—36
There is an interesting story from the second century about the early Jewish rabbis. One day, somebody went to Rabbi Akiba, one of the greatest of the early rabbis, to tell him that something strange and slightly disturbing was going on with his colleague Ben Azzai, and that this ought to be checked out. This was the period when the canon of Jewish texts was being set down, and there was a sharp eye for the pure versus the heretical. What was happening was that as Ben Azzai sat expounding the Scriptures, he was being visibly surrounded by leaping flames! When called to account for this unnerving phenomenon, Ben Azzai defended himself mildly by explaining: ‘Well, all I was doing was linking up the words of the Torah with one another, and then with the words of the prophets.’ He continued, ‘The words rejoiced, as when they were delivered from Sinai, and they were sweet, as at their original utterance.’ These early rabbis liked to link sentences from texts that had no obvious connection, in order to create meanings that were new and original. We do something of the same today when we write lectionaries linking Old and New Testament readings, as we heard just now for the Feast of the Transfiguration. This connects Jesus’ experience on the mountain with the weird and wonderful visual extravagances of the book of Daniel.
- Making something new out of odd combinations of things.
- Connecting texts which don’t belong together.
- Creating something original and disturbing out of something old.
We are not frequently ‘surrounded by leaping flames’, as we pray, or work on the scriptures! We aren’t often given visions of Jesus transformed on the mountain, or visions of Daniel’s Son of Man, complete with revolving wheels and flashing lights! Perhaps we very occasionally experience flashes of insight, certainty, or sense of the genuine presence of God, with excitement and joy. To me, as a rare gift, this at least gives me a fleeting sense that I’m on the right path. And if it never happens, well, that doesn’t mean I’m on the wrong path either. There are other long, hard times in life when one just has to grit one’s teeth and carry on.
But these visionary parts of scripture are wonderful metaphors, and carry rich images and food for thought … Are there any hints here for how we can conduct our spiritual practice, our prayer and our study?
I want to look at three things this morning, which I have had in mind through the years I have been trying to relate work as an artist to my journey of faith.
The first is to think about the similarities between the journey of faith and the creative process of an artist.
The second is the way that looking at these journeys as metaphors for each other has, at key moments, led to a blurring for me of the distinction between people of faith and those without faith, which our belief-system seems to over-exaggerate, and the conclusions this suggests to me about our mission in the world.
And the third thing I want to share is that learning from the parallel with the artistic process moves me more deeply from a closed theology into that open-ended, inclusive style of theology and spirituality which is the great gift and calling of All Hallows. What I am learning is that this is not just helpful for my own personal struggle for my sanity and inner growth, but that it contains seeds of significance for the struggles of the wider church.
Part One
So what are the similarities between the journey of the artist and the journey of the person of faith? Trying to start out as an artist has been a life journey for me, and a struggle. I’m still not in a settled place where I can say clearly what it is I’m aiming for or what I do. The journey of an artist is certainly just as scary as the journey of faith! Making connections between unexpected things, just like with Ben Azzai of the leaping flames, and it can be a dangerous game with unexpected outcomes.
Artists play with ideas, starting out without knowing where a move might end, just seeing what will happen. This happens when I start with a table full of bits of material, an empty sketch book or a blank white page. Like prayer, it is very difficult to get started. Like prayer, it’s difficult to carry on if you don’t get visible results. And there may be only rare occasions when suddenly things become clear, pieces fall into place visually, or there is a rare flash of insight.
I’m working this month with a learning-disability group. We’ve got a deadline to produce a celebratory presentation for an anniversary party. The managers wanted a clear description of the outcome even before we started! They want it all secure and wrapped up. The artists want it to be fully participatory, with everyone’s ideas adding to the show, and it’s not possible to say in advance what will happen. Two ways of working. Two ways of seeing. Artists are open to serendipity: the recycling centre turned up some wonderful giant cardboard strips with circles cut out of them, and just by finding these boards, a direction has emerged for drama, song and construction.
This week we built towers, and made patterns dancing with these pieces of cardboard. Next week we are painting them yellow, and they are turning into a submarine. Cue for a song!
Learning to make art, like taking any great risk in life, is about starting out, and leaving the results to God. Launching out, like Daniel, without knowing the outcome. As T. S. Eliot the poet once said,
‘To us is only the trying — the result is not our business.’
Part Two
I want to change tack for a moment, and look at how successful the church generally is at attracting outsiders into our worship and community life. Not very, on the whole.
But there is one place where outsiders are struggling to get into the church: asking to be let in; spending hours messing about in buildings, thinking, playing, arguing, re-examining theological ideas, moving stuff about and changing things. Artists are invading our churches, using them as 21st-century playgrounds, and coming up with some truly new perceptions. Have you noticed, even within Leeds, the number of churches hosting wacky and innovative art exhibitions in the last year or two? And on the whole, these are not being initiated by Christians. What exactly are artists doing in churches and why is it so difficult to get the church people to take any notice? This is becoming something of a phenomenon, and I get the impression Jesus might be saying, ‘Did you see that? Did you notice? I have not seen faith like this in Israel.’ Or perhaps: I have not seen faith like this in the Established Churches.’ Perhaps artists who call themselves outsiders, agnostics, atheists, may be the new prophets not being given honour in their own country. Perhaps they could be medicine to the church, bringing us back to a journeying faith. An inclusive theology and spirituality is essential to open our eyes to see such possibilities. Without it, we could be missing some important work of the Holy Spirit.
So what have these artists been up to?
Holy Trinity Church, Boar Lane, is a church with a ministry to the Arts in Leeds. It’s a slowly emerging nebulous network of artistic and musical activity and a rather fascinating use of a church which is still fully functioning as a Christian worship place, yet is willing to take risks and be open to a wide range of new uses. It’s frequently filled to capacity with creative projects, weird edgy experimental gigs and poets. There have been aerial gymnasts there, and on Light Night last October the place was filled with light and mirrors and strange sounds. Then there was a discussion six months later on the theological implications of that event. At last the church is filling up again, but more often with beer-swigging students than large numbers of worshippers. And the good church people aren’t noticing.
I joined in with a group of artists to do an exhibition at Holy Trinity in April this year. I was the one saying to the planning group six months before, when they kept talking about religious themes, ‘you don’t have to work with religious themes just because we’re doing an exhibition in a church, you know’, and the reply of the artists was ‘but of course we do, just look at all the stuff in this building! Look at the ideas it’s on about!’ The group returned again and again to religious ideas, to bad experiences of childhood religion, to possible images of faith today. So we ended up with all sorts of unexpected responses to an eighteenth-century church: a font filled with molasses, a deconstructed Bible, a whole host of responses to the supposition, ‘If I were God for a day I would …’ For me part of the excitement of this event was the engagement of artists of varying degrees of non-involvement with the church, with theological ideas, and the issues which emerged, through visual means.
Part of my own piece in this show is here, this altar cloth. Cutting Aramaic lettering into hessian seems to be my primary artistic activity this year! This is the words of Jesus, ‘blessed are the makers of peace’, in the Aramaic language which Jesus spoke.
It is also the language of a minority group of Christians from Iraq and Syria, and one or two families in Leeds. My full installation played very much with the shadows produced by layers of these texts in threads, both produced by theatre lighting and then, in Bradford Cathedral, by natural light through stained glass.
The theologian Walter Brueggemann speaks of the role of the church being not to construct and present a full alternative world for people, handing them a coherent system on a plate. He speaks of ‘funding the post-modern imagination.’ The task is to fund — for the church to provide the pieces, materials and resources out of which a new world can be imagined. This is a service the church can provide to people outside the faith, on the outsider’s terms, without requiring commitment or belief. But this also works both ways. The church is also inspired in its journey by the images, ideas and prophetic connections made by artists and outsiders, thinking in new ways and presenting this by means which communicate directly with our instincts and our hearts. This I think is what I mean when I talked about blurring the distinction between people of faith and those without. For me, working with artists is finally enabling Christians and non-Christians to meet and debate matters of faith on equal terms.
The church of St Mark’s, less than a mile from here, is a dusty building falling into disrepair. Greatly to his credit, our neighbouring vicar, David Calder, gave permission for two artists to have free run of the building for six months, prior to their Degree show. It was an extraordinary experience to climb the crumbling steps of this once proud church, look down into the dusty nave and see the various transformations made amongst the ruins by the two artists. Steven Allbutt travelled to the First World War battlefield of Verdun in France, collecting shrapnel from the farmers’ fields to recast into sculptures, titled ‘The Congregation’. A crumbling church was filled with overblown casts of bullets. He quotes the early twentieth-century painter, Franz Marc, who died at Verdun:
‘The world is giving birth to a new time: there is only one question: has the time now come to separate ourselves from the old world? Are we ready for new life? This is the terrifying question of our age.’
I found this an extraordinarily moving visual experience of new ideas entering an old declining church. A few weeks later, for an arts festival in the city, the local artist Rona Smith filled the same dusty building with powdered pigment designs of Islamic patterning, highlighting the two very different religious methods of artistic representation.
She says, ‘Placed in a Christian context where icons are used freely in worship, we experience the union of two highly contrasting methods of representation and faith.’
Part Three
In very bumpy and painful times of my life I have seriously struggled to make sense of the faith I had been taught in the past, which was far more based on keeping to the rules, respectability, and certainty. It has been a struggle to continue growing, changing practices and aspects of belief to make sense of it all. How did I come to terms with mental illness in the family? With separation and divorce? With shifting sexuality? Is God still around in all this? Was I just ‘twisting scripture to my own ends’ as I re-thought through, prayed, experienced God in ways unthinkable to me and my background of ten years previously? This kind of journey has been based very much on a private inner life and a struggle for my own sanity and self-acceptance. It has brought with it a richer spiritual life and experience. Yes, God is very much still there when life doesn’t turn out predictably or respectably. But, as I see others’ pain in the world, and pain and fracture in the wider church, I am beginning to see that this path towards an inclusive theology and spirituality has a much wider importance than each individual’s own inner life. It is a life-and-death struggle to find places where the action of God is truly breaking through and moving us on, challenging us to bring transfiguration to our world. Those places where we think new things and make new connections in such a way that it feels like there are flames flickering around us as we work or pray! This will not be done by systems of thought which suggest faith is a list of rules to sign up to, or by people who tell us that creativity and artistic effort is merely a tool for skilful illustration of the faith to assist its preaching. This may appear obvious to you, but in some places it has dire practical implications. Durham Cathedral, for instance, has had a chaplaincy for the arts for thirty years or more, which has tremendous achievements behind it, exploring links between the arts, spirituality and social projects. But shifting theologies now mean that this work is deemed not worth supporting, and its funding is to be withdrawn, probably at just the moment when such work is coming into its own.
So, it’s worth keeping an eye open for new experiences of the arts in Leeds and elsewhere. Open your eyes to expand your definition of what is contemporary art. There is plenty going on. It’s a place where you may unexpectedly find inspiration, and, who knows, a breath of the Holy Spirit.
Conclusion
In conclusion, let’s go back to those two readings we had this morning: there was Jesus transfigured on the mountain meeting Moses and Elijah while being watched by Peter and John; and there was Daniel’s vision of the coming of the Son of Man. Moments in people’s lives when they suddenly realise that things are not as they thought they were, that there are new understandings to have to come to terms with. But there’s a bit in the Daniel reading which our lectionary leaves out, watering down the impact somewhat. Did anyone read on in the pew Bible to the verse following the end of our reading?
‘As for me, Daniel, my spirit was troubled within me, and the visions of my head terrified me’!
Praying and receiving visions is not fun! Discovering new ways of seeing can be mentally de-stabilising and very frightening. An open and inclusive spirituality is not an easy way out. As people of faith we have to work out ways to overcome our terror and work with fear, in order to live in new ways. Perhaps that’s why Jesus addresses the business of overcoming fear quite so often in the Gospels. Training as an artist is teaching me a lot about overcoming fear, not knowing the outcome before I start a project, saying yes to a job without knowing whether I can fulfil it, working ‘off the seat of my pants’ as they say.
But prayer, like making artwork sometimes, can also be very boring, repetitive, and plain downright exhausting. Why do the disciples so often seem to be sleepy whenever Jesus starts really getting into practical praying?? They just don’t seem up to it! Remember the Garden of Gethsemane? ‘Can’t you stay awake with me just one hour???’
Look again at the story of Jesus taking his closest friends up the mountain for the spiritual high of their life:
‘Now Peter and those who were with him were heavy with sleep, but managed to stay awake … and they saw his glory.’
When we say that closing prayer for this service, ‘so we promise this day to keep awake’, I often think that’s rather a minimal requirement really. Rather a lowest common denominator. Doesn’t God want a bit more from us than just not to fall asleep? Well, in one sense, no not really. How does the prayer continue: ‘to live each moment to the full, to look with eyes of compassion, and to act with kindness.’
If we were really to be awake to all our senses, open at all times to seeing what is around us, making new connections, which can perhaps come through what is visual or made with our hands, then perhaps we will experience more transfiguration, in ourselves, in the church and in the world. And who knows, we might even see flames around those who pray …
Amen.
Copyright © 2007 Pippa Julings