In overturning the tables in the temple and reimagining Sabbath law, Jesus invites us into a new relationship to our work. Not as adherents and citizens, but as artists and co-creators.
Jesus invites us to be artists collaborating in a global masterpiece
Lent 3B | John 2:13-22
This church may have a lot of doors but you had to get to one of them. And that walk from the car or the dorm or your house in Farrington Grove was probably quiet.
Or maybe you plug in your earbuds like I do and listen to music or a podcast on your way to church. I often listen to On Being with Krista Tippet on Sunday mornings and that’s a lot like going to church. Whether she’s talking to one of the first undersea explorers who they call Her Deepness or practicing doubt with Adam Gopnik, I’m going to church when I’m going to church.
And as we explored silence last week and our deep need to listen and get bored — we ought to recognize how intertwined these two things are. My sincere apologies to all the educators in the room, but many of us who had a propensity for falling asleep in class actually are listening.and learning from you.
This is the tangle involved in teaching and learning: that teachers aren’t transmitting facts onto a blank page. They are collaborating with their students to create art. Art that is the complex firing of neurons in the brain which embed memories, spatial reasoning, analogies, and phrases that we can recall years later.
It is a co-creative exercise. It is not the mechanistic programming of a computer or even the sophisticated processing of artificial intelligence, which still requires the training of a mechanical system and the use of a massive storage unit — even if that is the quasi-living internet.
Learning isn’t brute-force memorization or storing information on a hard drive. It is co-creation. It’s making art. The teacher isn’t the artist and the student the canvas. We’re all art called to make art.
Making Art
When we walk into church, are we prepared to make art? As the art God has created and the artists God empowers? Are we prepared to make art in the world in bold new ways — ways which surprise and excite God? Ways which inspire the art of others?
This is what we do in liturgy, after all. Liturgy, the work of the people, is made by us all. Every voice raised, every stand and kneel and sit — that Episcopal pew aerobics — every note sung and prayer lifted. We make art together each week.
And in the midst of our art-making we listen to stories from scripture. Different stories from different genres. This morning we read from the Torah — the Law, which is also the story of God’s relationship with a special people. We sang an ancient song from a collection of praises and laments. We read a letter from a church leader and then the gospel.
Four beautiful, different, and difficult stories. Stories for us to hear and explore. These are the materials from which we can make art.
Our Inspiration
So where do we start? If we’re making art, what are we actually going to make with these different stories?
Our reading from Exodus is the revealing of the Ten Commandments to Moses. So of course there’s plenty to draw on here. We see plenty of evidence of creative use of these rules in our world. And I don’t just mean cross-stitches or the “creative” placement of monuments on public grounds.
Yeah, that’s not so creative.
But how does God invite us into this teaching to see the art we’re called to make?
For instance, I was struck this week by the fifth one:
“Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.”
Remember these are written in the second person, so all of these are about you. When I read it, I’m hearing God speaking to me, not to my children about me—it’s to me about respecting my parents.
And how many of the rules I’ve made for my children encourage them to hear that as being about them? And how often are they really about me — about my wanting to be respected? Or force them to be people who respect me?
Doesn’t this idea reveal something about God? How God never forces us to respect God? But instead, we’re given the tools to learn how to love and respect God?
How often do we hear people attack our children for their behavior rather than to hear God’s words are to us, not them! We’re called to treat our parents well, not condemn them for not treating their parents well!
Exploring Our Stories
When I hear the Ten Commandments or read them in my devotions, I find myself always going back to Jesus. As Christians, that’s really OK to do. Even good Episcopalians can read the Torah with both a historical lens and a Jesus lens.
And I go to all those times Scribes and Elders complain about Jesus breaking Torah — this happens in every gospel — because he heals people on the Sabbath. Here, that’s number 4.
But each time, Jesus reminds them that they’re breaking the Law to keep it. They aren’t keeping the spirit of the Sabbath when they let others suffer on the Sabbath.
Jesus isn’t giving us permission to break rules only. Or telling us to disregard the stuff we think is bad. He’s inviting us to look at these commandments with new eyes. Eyes of love and compassion.
This same spirit is behind that gospel story from John. Love and compassion for each other are more important than human laws written to protect God.
God doesn’t need our protection. We don’t need to be God’s apologists. We don’t need civil laws which privilege our beliefs because any belief which leaves someone out is not from God.
Any law which seeks to punish more than it does to include the outcast isn’t from God.
Any attempt to exploit or physically divide us by social or economic class so that the poor lose access to God have got to be torn down.
And just because we don’t do animal sacrifices doesn’t mean we don’t do this in our own ways.
The Art of Love
We read these stories and we respond to these stories so that we can create beauty in acts of love and devotion. We are trying to make the way for the jubilee kin-dom with its upside down economy and its just sense of inclusion.
These stories shouldn’t encourage us to be like the Pharisees — creating new laws for other people to follow. But they guide us to embody the creative character of Christ.
The one who finds wisdom in fools and hope in the outcast. He brings in the one who falls through the cracks and encourages faith in the one beaten down by her environment.
We share these stories to learn so that we can do this work too. All of us in our various gifts. Storytellers, teachers, bakers, stewards, administrators, treasurers, clerks, wardens, ushers, acolytes, musicians — we are artists co-creating love.
This is our laboratory, our classroom, our studio, with Jesus as our teacher. And this should surprise no one given where we are, but this is a teacher’s college. From the moment we’re born until we draw our final breath, we live into this calling as students, teachers, artists of love. Love is our art.
And the art we’re called to make is part of a global masterpiece of beauty and love, signed by every one of us.