Imagine

Marc Jolicoeur · Tidal Church Moncton · February 20, 2022 · Finding Wisdom series

Marc Jolicoeur asks whether Jesus was an artist and whether He cares about art and beauty. Looking at Mark 6, the Gospels and the Lord's Supper, he shows that God delights in the physical world and meets us through our senses.

More from Marc Jolicoeur · The Finding Wisdom series

Topics: Discipleship, Worship

Transcript

[0:01] Amen. Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any virtue, if there be any praise, think on these things. I'm going to invite you to take a seat for a moment. If there be anything lovely, think on these things. That's from the King James Version, the Authorized Version. Now, there's a lot of really good reasons why we don't read from the King James Version today. We're not going to very often, and we're not going to get into those. You can look into that online if you'd like to get a little more information. Pastor Joel has actually done a really great write-up on his Facebook page, but I'll confess to you that I grew up reading from the King James, and a lot of these kind of core verses are in my psyche. So I think of "whatsoever things, whatsoever things are lovely."

[0:59] And actually, my undergrad, I took a college degree from a secular college, and we read the King James Version, not as a religious text, but as a piece of art. It was a piece of poetry. Atheists read the King James Bible. And there's a type of thinking that this is associated with, so don't worry, I'm going somewhere. Sometimes you'll hear in theological circles, you'll hear a theology of aesthetics, or a theology of beauty. And that's just a way of thinking about God and thinking about the world in light of, we'll say, kind of beauty in general, and then art in particular. Art can help us visualize and thus contemplate these, you know, whatsoever things that are lovely.

[1:47] But art can't necessarily tell you why you should be attracted to those things, and it can't tell you what to do with that attraction. In my limited experience in the music industry, I've come across a lot of people who are just enraptured with music. I mean, like they are in love with its beauty, to the point that it's almost for them a religion. I mean, you might hear somebody say, "Music saved my life, man!" And I've actually heard many people say that. And there's this kind of bumper-sticker-able statement that maybe you've come across before, written a long time ago by a Russian with the last name Dostoevsky. He says, "Beauty will save the world." Beauty will save the world.

[2:34] Can that be true? Can aesthetics, can whatsoever things which are lovely, can that have this kind of salvific effect on us? Now, our branch of the church, and when I say our branch, I probably should say our trunk, the Protestant trunk of the church, we've had a complicated history with art. In fact, the whole church really has had a complicated history with art. At some points in history, we have been the number one purveyors of art. We have been the patrons of art. We have been the ones who have produced art, whether that's Christian or otherwise. And then at some other times in history, we have been sort of art's biggest opponent, to the point that sometimes we have even destroyed a lot of art.

[3:23] There's a word for this kind of tension, at least this side of the tension, which is sometimes used. It's called iconoclasm. Now, this isn't going to be a history lesson, I promise, nor is it going to be a language lecture, but let's just, one second. So iconoclasm is a compound Greek word, which if we translate it into English, will be something like "image breaking." Now, there's a huge movement a long time ago in the eighth century Byzantine church that carried this name. It was not anything new. And then the Protestant Reformation, you know, that revolution that led to the kind of space in which we worship today, they certainly made a whole lot of iconoclastic moves as well, literally, in many instances, breaking images.

[4:09] And this is the reason that within the broad scope of Christianity, we can have churches that look like this, or we can have churches that look like this. Or if you're in the room today, you can look around and you can say, even this, my friends, is a church. Or maybe you've been a part of a church that's met in a living room, or maybe you've been a part of a church that's met in a movie theater. The space, in some respects, has meant very little. It's not just a difference in size, it's a difference in style, it's a difference in philosophy. Now, one of the primary verses that's used in support of iconoclasm is a big one, and I think you'll understand why. It's one of the big ten, one of the Ten Commandments. Exodus 20:4 says, "You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below."

[5:04] No images! It says it right there. Boom, no icons. A few chapters later, in the very same book, and apparently we would expect the same kind of divine revelation from Yahweh to Moses, we read details about how to construct the Ark of the Covenant. Now, if you don't know what the Ark of the Covenant is, you can read the Bible, or you can pick up any sort of Indiana Jones movie, I should make it clear for you. Exodus 25:17-20, "Make an atonement cover of pure gold, two and a half cubits long and a cubit and a half wide, and make two cherubim, two, out of hammered gold at the ends of the cover. Make one cherub on one end and the second cherub on the other. Make the cherubim of one piece with the cover at the two ends.

[5:51] The cherubim are to have their wings spread upward, overshadowing the cover with them. The cherubim are to face each other, looking toward the cover." Now, cherubim seem to have been widely understood culturally in this time and place, so not just by the Israelites, but by their neighbors as well, as angelic or heavenly beings, which they are now explicitly told to make what sounds an awful lot like an image of. So which is it? You cannot make an image, or you must make an image. And this is just one example, guys. There's a ton of different challenging texts as we read through the Old Testament, as we try to figure out what's going on here with these objects of worship. In fact, both sides have a lot of fodder that they can use in any kind of debate.

[6:44] But what about that commandment that we read earlier? That sounded an awful lot like a slam dunk, right? Let's take a look at it again. Exodus chapter 20. You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them. Bow down to them or worship them. So maybe, church, it's not the image necessarily. What if it's what you do with the image that makes all the difference? Maybe it's not how plain or how ornate a worship space is, but whether or not that object or that space is the object of your worship instead of a tool through which you worship its Creator.

[7:34] See, beauty in the end may save the world, but only as long as that beauty is pointing through to the source, the Maker, the Creator, and the Savior of all things, the One who through Jesus Christ is reconciling us all to Himself, because He is the ultimate source and purpose of all beauty. We can overvalue or we can undervalue beauty, and both are a mistake. Said another way, beauty is not a destination but a route. It's not a dead end street, but it's a throughway. It's not a pond, it's a stream.

[8:24] Beauty is not a destination but a route. If you've ever tried to read through the Bible, you know, from cover to cover, a lot of people end up having some sort of place where they just, they hit a wall and they have a hard time breaking through. For some people, it's the list of genealogies, you know, all those names that are just completely unpronounceable to you. For other people, it's the book of law. All the vows and the shouts and the shout knots, those can kind of hang you up. But for still other people, it's when you get to the description of the worship spaces that the Israelites were called to make, whether that's the tabernacle or the temple. Because frankly, they are really, really long and they are kind of repetitive, and unless you are the kind of person who can very easily visualize what's happening just with text alone, you can kind of get lost with what's going on. Now obviously, there are no photos of what these spaces would look like.

[9:24] There are no images that we can kind of look up. If there were, they would just be artists' representations. But even if there were, you know, all of these photos that we could look at, they wouldn't tell you what it would be like to actually walk through the doors of these places, to actually experience them. But I do have to wonder sometimes, why would a God who seemed so concerned with ensuring that His people did not worship objects prescribe the detailed construction of such beautiful and awe-inspiring objects?

[10:11] I mean, it seemed rather that the intent was for the beauty that they experienced to point them through to the source of that beauty. Let's listen to the psalmist in Psalm 84. He says, How lovely is Your dwelling place, O Lord Almighty, for my soul yearns and even faints for the courts of the Lord. My heart and flesh cry out for the living God. Blessed are those who dwell in Your house. They are ever praising You. See, in this psalm, we see the interplay between the psalmist's understanding of the earthly court and the heavenly court, right? This earthly representation of this heavenly reality, this kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.

[11:03] And the beauty, church, the beauty that they're experiencing, it is not just some sort of a spiritual or detached immediacy, but it's embodied. It's something that he or she is experiencing with their eyes, with their ears, with their senses. And yet it is pointing them through to something that is of eternal nature. In verse 10, it says, Better is one day in Your courts than a thousand elsewhere. I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked. If you're with us in the room today, I'm just going to invite you to stand. Maybe if you're at home, you can stand as well or you can change your position because we're going to sing right now. And I don't know. I don't know where you're at.

[11:49] I don't know what this morning has been like for you. I don't know if this has been an easy day or a hard day. I don't know if you've ever actually experienced the beauty and the wonder of God. But in this moment, I would invite you to try to taste and to see that the Lord is good. Better is one day in His courts than a thousand elsewhere. How lovely, O Lord, is Your dwelling place. Amen. Well, if you ever heard the name Eugene Peterson, then well, if you haven't, you'll hear about it right now. He became kind of famous later on in his life, famous for lack of a better word, I suppose, as the kind of translator, adapter of the kind of wildly popular biblical paraphrase known as The Message.

[12:43] But before that, long before that, actually, he was a long-term pastor in a place in Baltimore, Maryland. The church was called Christ Our King. I think it's called Christ Our King. Oh, yeah, Christ Our King. It had been there for a few years as a church plant. It finally became time for them to build a building. And so early on in that process, they found an architect that really kind of got them, got their vision, got their focus, and that they liked. And his name was Simon. And so, immediately when I read that, it made me think of the Saturday Night Live sketch from the '90s. "Hello, my name is Simon." And if you don't know what that is, don't look it up. It's not important. But his name was Simon. And even before they did budget meetings to raise funds and had all these things, they slowly worked through the book of Exodus.

[13:35] They did that with Simon, with Eugene Peterson, and with their church team. And after doing this for months and months, one day Simon showed up to Eugene. I'm going to call him Eugene. I guess we're on a first name basis. He showed up to Eugene and said, "I think I finally have something. I think I finally understand." And he said, "I am Bezalel." And so if you're like the overwhelming majority of the people in the world, you're going to ask, "Well, who in the world is Bezalel?" Well, we read earlier, right? Bit of a theme emerging. We read earlier from the book of Exodus, and we talked about the tension between worshiping the created things instead of the Creator. Now, the majority of Exodus chapters 25 through 30 are actually these really quite detailed records of how the Israelites were to construct the mobile tent, which is kind of called the tabernacle, which is where they're supposed to be worshiping Yahweh.

[14:31] And then in Exodus 31, the opening verse, we read this. "And the Lord said to Moses, 'See, I have chosen Bezalel, son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah. And I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with wisdom and with understanding, with knowledge and with all kinds of skills to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze, to cut and set stones, to work in wood and to engage in all kinds of crafts.'" Now, I think it'd be a missed opportunity to not note here on the hinge point at the end of this really great sermon series we've been in called Finding Wisdom, to note here that the word that's actually used in this text for some of the skill that Bezalel has is that Hebrew word that we translate as wisdom, chokmah.

[15:25] Now, if you have not had a chance to track along with this series, you know, you can find it on our podcast, you can find it on our Vimeo page and our Facebook, our YouTube, it's out there. There's been a number of great teachings. And one of them early on actually was with Pastor Joel, when he gave a working definition of wisdom, hopefully you'll all remember this in one way or another, which is that kind of knowledge is what we know, and wisdom is what we do, or rather, wisdom is when we do what we know we should do. So knowledge knows and wisdom does. And when I read the idea here that Bezalel, he needed wisdom to be able to do what he did. There's a book that I read in my, well, a long time ago, it's by Steven Pressfield, and it's called The War of Art. The War of Art. It's obviously a bit of a play on words from the much more ancient book, The Art of War. But in it, Pressfield says, "Listen, lots of people want to be creative.

[16:19] You want to be a writer? That's great. You've got ideas? Wonderful." The discipline is actually creating the space to show up every day and actually write, to actually do it. And I couldn't help but think that there's an interesting analog here for us, anybody in the room who considers themselves to be creatives. Having ideas, that's important. But unless you can put those ideas out into the world, you can't really call yourself an artist. That's a bit of an aside. Back here at the suburb of Baltimore, Maryland, 1964, and Eugene Peterson's church architect, Simon, who said, "I'm Bezalel." So Peterson, he had been growing in his own understanding as a leader and as a pastor. And he kind of viewed himself as a bit of a prophetic pastoral leader. And as he's working through the book of Exodus, he sees that as being analogous to the role of Moses. You might say, "Pump your brakes there, Mr. Peterson.

[17:15] That's a bit of an audacious claim." He was not really shy about making audacious claims, rather. Peterson certainly loved the world of ideas. He was an idea person. He was an academic through and through. In fact, right before he kind of tumbled into the pastorate, he was on track to being a really highly respected, not just author, but professor. And so, nonetheless, he figured out that his time as a pastor showed him, as they're preparing to build this church, that yes, faith communities do need these Moses figures. They do need people to lead. They do need people to teach, but they also need these Bezalel figures. They need people to imagine. They need people to create.

[18:00] They need people, actually, to put flesh on bones. That the 1960s were going to go on to prove that art was not enough. That beauty would not necessarily just save the world, but neither would lifeless religion. I'm just going to read one quote here from Peterson's memoir. "Without Moses, worship would soon degenerate into aesthetics and entertainment. But without Bezalel, salvation would blur into generalities of heavenly bliss and fragment into isolated and individualized fits and starts." Do you see? I'm not sure if you're going to understand what he's saying there. It's a bit of a loaded statement, but here's the thing.

[18:46] Sometimes, listen, you showed up today and you're like, "What is this service on art? Oh my gosh, what's happening?" Right? A lot of times we talk about art. It can seem like this highfalutin kind of nonsense that it's for nobody, or at least it's for somebody else. And I totally, honestly, believe me, I get that. When we talk about, I think the problem is that's when we're talking about art, not when we're talking about art, or sorry, it's when we're talking about the concept of art, not the instances of art. It's difficult to try to, let's talk about painting today. We'll think about it as a concept, but it's really quite easy, hopefully as you saw earlier, to look at a painting. It can be difficult to try to contemplate what poetry is at its core, but it's actually remarkably simple to read or to listen to a poem.

[19:39] Actual instances of art, pieces of art, are some of the best ways, in fact, to expand our understanding of challenging or kind of like ethereal concepts. Art takes the conceptual and makes it concrete. We know this, and so, in fact, does God. So when Jesus, when Jesus wants to talk to us about the kingdom of heaven, what does he say? He says, the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed. Or he says, the kingdom of heaven is like some yeast. Or he says, actually, the kingdom of heaven is like treasure buried in a field, right? He gives us these images, these concrete instances of these concepts.

[20:29] When Jesus wants to help us understand God's heart for the lost, he tells a series of stories, and the most famous of which has made us so that the word prodigal remains in our English language today. When Jesus, on the eve of his crucifixion, wanted to help his followers really understand the price that he was about to pay for them in a way that would not only penetrate their own darkened understanding, but would actually live on today and be something that would actually transcend cultures. He didn't just try to give them some sort of a concept, but he looked on the table in front of him, and he picked up the loaf, and he said, this is my body broken for you.

[21:16] In just a moment, we as a church are going to reenact that moment as we take communion together. And in a few moments, I'm going to ask you to remain seated, but in a few moments throughout this building here, we're going to have people who are going to be coming through the ushers. They're going to be distributing the elements to you. You're going to see that they're double cupped, so essentially you'll just take one cup out, and you'll hold those items with you, and then we'll take them together. If you're joining us from home, you're going to have a couple minutes now, probably about three or four minutes to go out to your kitchen, to stop your car maybe, and go into a drive through to get some crackers, some bread, and some juice so that we can partake in this together. Now, this is available to every single person here if you have professed and are professing to be someone who's following after Jesus Christ.

[22:06] Now, I'm not sure what you picture when you think about communion. Almost all of us have some sort of familiarity with this, right? We might picture Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper. We might picture these really ornate goblets, or if I can go back to Indiana Jones again, we might picture the cup of a carpenter. We have some kind of an image in our mind. Quite likely, for a lot of us who've grown up in the church, we might even have these little individual cups as part of our image. Those aesthetics, the way that you picture it, the way that you taste it, the way that you smell it, all of it in some respects actually does matter because it does kind of point us towards the Lord's table, and thus to the Lord.

[22:54] Now, taking communion together can be a wonderful antidote to those of us who are sort of like, you know, we think in concepts. This is an opportunity to really hold and to taste and to smell and to feel, to return to the language that we used earlier. Regardless of how beautiful or aesthetically pleasing a communion experience might be, the point of all of this, of the earthly court, is to draw our hearts upward or outward towards the heavenly court from whence our King comes. This daily bread is to sustain us and to build us up as we cry out for His kingdom to come, for His will to be done here on earth as it is in heaven.

[23:45] Now, as the elements are being distributed, we're going to be reflecting on a song, Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus. And as we reflect, I'm just going to pray that our senses will be turned towards Him from whom all blessings flow, the source and the point of all beauty. Let's sing together, Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus. So in Luke chapter 22, we read that when the hour came, Jesus and His apostles were reclined at the table. And He said to them, I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you that I will not eat it again until it finds fulfillment in the kingdom of God.

[24:38] And after taking the cup, He gave thanks and He said, take this and divide it among you. For I tell you, I will not drink again from the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes. And He took the bread and gave thanks and He broke it. And He gave it to them, saying, this is my body given for you. Do this in remembrance of me. If you have these, we can kind of separate them. And then the bread would be together with Thanksgiving. And in the same way, He took the cup, saying, this cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.

[25:33] And so church, together with Thanksgiving, the cup. Lord, these things are images and yet they are real. They are something that we can touch, something that we can taste, something that we can feel to know that we can know you in this same way, in a way that is real, in a way that is immediate. Lord, may your, through this daily bread, may your kingdom come, may your will be done in our lives as it is in heaven. Church, I'm going to invite you, whether you're in the room or at home, to stand as we sing in response to this.

[26:23] Jesus being the center of our lives. Jesus being the center of our worship. Jesus, from whom all blessings flow, we revolve around Him. We are being drawn to Him so that we can be sent out from Him because He is the center of our worship, the center of our lives, the center of actual being. Jesus Christ, be the center, not only of this world, but of your church. Come on church, Jesus, be the center.