July 9, 2006

Rev. Emily Tanis-Likkel

Have you ever talked with someone who started looking around while you were in mid-sentence?  Perhaps you could tell that it wasn’t that they were avoiding eye contact, but that they were truly not present with you?  I’ve wanted to say, and have sometimes said, “Look at me!”  For most of us, our eyes are how we let another person know we are paying attention to them.  God has given us eyes to let others know when we are happy or sad or in love.  Can we be present to God through our sight?  How do we look at God when God has not shown up to us in bodily form?  How do we turn our eyes upon Jesus, when we can only approximate in our imaginations what he may have looked like?  How can the visual sense connect us with God?

I recently met a couple that talked about feeling spiritually alive when outdoors.  Ben told me that he felt connected with God during his years of backpacking at a lake.  On these excursions he felt that everything around him was sacred and interconnected.  He resonated with Jesus spending 40 days in the desert.  He said that when he was out in nature the noise melted away.  Samantha felt a sacred connection spending time on the beach.  Breathing in the fresh air and watching the waves fall fed her spirit.  She also sensed the spiritual world when riding horses.  These are spiritual people, as all people are, but they don’t go to church except for Christmas and Easter.  They are not alone – especially in the Northwest.  Many people sense the Holy when out in nature and then feel disconnected in church.   Why do so many sense this disconnect?  Perhaps in church we need to do a better job of affirming what we can see.  God created this world, God created us.  The beauty that surrounds us is to be taken in and loved and taken care of by us. Worship can be a visual liturgy as well as a word liturgy.

A religion professor who wrote a book called Finding God in the Singing River says that he begins most days with a ritual of taking in the beauty of God’s creation.  He says, “I get out of bed and walk into my front yard where I turn and face the four cardinal directions.  I weave a circle of gratitude and praise as I turn and look in each direction, and I thank God for the day that is about to begin.”   In this prayer he weaves together Native American ritual with Christian thanksgiving.  It has helped him reinforce in his own spirituality the idea that “divine energy gives breath and life to all things.”

I often begin the morning with a poem by e.e. cummings floating in my head, because it is a poem my parents have recited often and it was on a wall hanging that hung in the bathroom while I was growing up:

i thank You God for most this amazing

day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,

and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth

day of life and love and wings:and of the gay

great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing

breathing any-lifted from the no

of all nothing-human merely being

doubt unimaginably You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

The Psalmist in Psalm 123 prayed to God: To you I lift up my eyes.  Not to the television, not to the computer, not to the newspaper or worries or other well-intentioned activities.  To you, to God first before anything else.  This Psalm reminds us to begin our day, our week, our afternoon and our evening oriented toward God.  When we have a reflection in the quiet of the morning, a prayer, a slow reading of Scripture, a slow sip of coffee, a breathing in of God’s creation, our spirit thanks us; our connection to God is strengthened.  When we look around us, opening the eyes of our eyes to see God, we start seeing God’s power and love in the water, in the trees, in the faces of babies and in the deep creases of lives long lived.  When we are oriented toward God, then all we do in our day is lived in that perspective, with our spiritual eyes fully engaged.

            The word “eyes” occurs four times in these two verses of Psalm 123.  “To you I lift up my eyes . . . As the eyes of servants look to the hand of their master, as the eyes of a maid to the hand of her mistress, so our eyes look to the LORD our God.”  The Psalmist gazes at God in humility, like a servant.  It is striking that the Psalm uses feminine imagery, pushing the common metaphors for God beyond the typical father figure image.

            So can we find God in the singing river and forget about coming to church?  The answer the Psalm gives is in the use of pronouns.  It is true that the Psalmist begins by saying “To you I lift up my eyes,” but quickly transitions to the plural, saying, “so our eyes look to the LORD our God.”  We look to God together because we Christians are sisters and brothers, part of the same family, even part of the same body.  We have times when we pray and reflect on our own, and that is good.  But God intends that we be nurtured and nurture others in a community of faith.  Jesus instructed the first disciples, and by extension all of us, to disciple others.  We were not meant to live out our faith in isolation. 

            If you look at you bulletin cover you will see an icon picturing Mary and Jesus.  This “icon” is not the same as what we call the thumbnails on a computer screen.  An icon comes from the Byzantine art tradition, and is as one iconographer wrote, “an image of a person or event taken directly from Christian Scripture or tradition, rendered in a specific manner, according to specific rules.”  My good friend Kimberly has taken some workshops to paint icons, and she has told me how painstakingly precise the process is.  The purpose of an icon is for the one gazing at it to see beyond the painting.  It is not meant to be an end in itself.  In iconography, our usual sense of perspective is reversed.  Instead of objects being smaller in the background, they are larger.  It is the one viewing the icon who is the vanishing point, and so can be drawn into the image.  Eastern Orthodox churches are filled with icons.  Catholic churches have many images as well, but many Protestant churches have been stripped of imagery since the Reformation.  The Reformers warned against images because they didn’t want people to worship the image.  That is a danger—golden calves are not just a thing of the past.  Yet, something vital has been lost with that stripping, because we are visual people.  We are creative people, every one of us, and we all appreciate color and texture and beauty. 

            You may have experienced feeling connected with the divine when looking at a work of art.  I still remember many years ago when my Dad discovered a painting titled “St. Francis reminding the sow of her loveliness” by James Munce.  It depicts St. Francis of Assisi bending down next to a sow and touching the earth.  My Dad, knowing the profound connection that this Saint felt with creation, was moved by the image.  He bought the painting, and that evening we went out for dinner.  He was so moved from seeing the painting he wept through the meal.  We were created to appreciate and be moved by what we take in with our eyes.  Sometimes what we see can draw us closer to the one who created us.  Art historian Sister Wendy Beckett put together a book of art for children to use in prayer.  She wrote in the introduction “Looking at art is one way of listening to God.  Look at each painting in this book carefully.  Each one needs time.  As we look, we must think about each painting, and stay quietly before it, giving God space to enter our hearts and change them.”   I think this could be said about looking at a lot of things in this world.

Tom Crockett wrote the Artist Inside: A Spiritual Guide to Cultivating your Creative Self.  He says that all art should be spiritual practice.  He says that everyone has the ability to create art, and that doesn’t necessarily mean painting or drawing.  Creating can be as simple as arranging objects on a table.   We can all make visual offerings to God.  It could be a flower arrangement, a drawing, or whatever we feel moved to create.  Like an adult joyfully receiving a picture from a child, God loves to receive what we have created. Next month I will be giving a sermon on creating a sacred space, which will take this a step further.  The idea is that we can use what we see and what we create in our Christian walk.  As one artist said “Art is a natural vehicle for pouring out the praise we long to give God.”   We may not feel creative, but all of us truly are.  Another artist wrote “Creativity, like spirituality, is an intangible and mysterious quality that defines us as human.”  

            The spiritual can be encountered through everyday objects like water, bread and wine.  God uses earthly things to be made known to us.  The very idea of the Incarnation, God becoming flesh in the person of Jesus Christ, tells us God uses creation to connect with us.  As an iconographer wrote, “Christians see the fingerprints of their Maker in all of creation.”  We can use earthly things when approaching God.  We can look at a cross, an icon, or a candle glowing to focus our mind on God.  We can look at a beautiful painting, flowers in a garden, or a sunset to remind us of God’s creating power.  We are also able to see in our mind’s eye, to use our imaginations to look at God.  We can imagine Jesus with us when we are afraid, we can picture the spirit with us when we are praying.  We can do all these things knowing that God is not contained in nature or in an image, yet all of these visual pictures can help guide our connection with the holy.

            The text in Mark that we heard this morning tells of the folks in Jesus’ hometown remarking, “We’ve seen this guy before.  He’s the craftsman; he put the doorframe on my home.  Who does he think he is acting like he’s above all of us?”  Jesus was born into his trade, and was not in the educated class.  The educated class had time for learning the Hebrew Scriptures, and the trade class did not.  It was commonly felt that for a person to act in the role of a higher class was dishonoring to their family.  His teaching in the synagogue was strange because they had never seen him as a teacher.  They couldn’t make the leap, at least at that point, that he was anyone other than a carpenter.  They thought to themselves, “we’ve seen him before,” when in reality they didn’t see him at all, not really. 

            Do we really see Jesus for who he truly is?  Do we see God amidst the distractions in our lives?  Do we ever forget that the beauty around us, the creative energy inside us, is all a gift from the one who made us?  There is no need to separate our appreciation of nature and art with our Christianity.  I wonder if God ever gets frustrated with us, saying, Look at me!  I wouldn’t be surprised.  It’s not always easy to live for God when we can’t see God with our eyes.  Yet God’s fingerprints are everywhere. We take in the world through our senses.  We experience the beauty of God’s creation and the creativity of humanity through our eyes.  We are guided to the holy through our eyes.  Now the eyes of our eyes are opened.

Mark I. Wallace. Finding God in the Singing River.  Minneapolis: Augsburg, 2005, ix.

Finding God in the Singing River, x.

Sister Wendy Beckett.  New York: DK Publishing, 1995.  A Child’s Book of Prayer in Art, p. 6.

Tom Crockett.  The Artist Inside.  New York: Broadway Books, 2000, xiv.

Tim Keller, “Glory.” It was Good: Making Art to the Glory of God, 85.

James Romaine, “Creativity.” It was Good: Making Art to the Glory of God, 159.