In a lot of the scholarship on homiletics – the study of preaching, its approaches and methods – Christian preachers are enjoined to have in our uppermost consciousness the imperative to preach the Good News, to ask, of each passage of scripture on which we are called to preach, what is the good news here? For some passages, it’s pretty easy. When Jesus calls for the oppressed to go free, or proclaims that his yoke is easy and his burden is light and he will give us rest for our souls, those things are pretty good news. Not hard to preach.
However. There are passages in scripture, including a number that come up regularly in the revised common lectionary, that don’t seem to include a lot of good news. Into that category I would certainly insert today’s gospel passage from Luke 21. The disciples have been observing folks in the Temple, including the widow who gave of her last few coins, and asking Jesus questions based on what they notice. Our passage for today starts with a few of the disciples admiring the beauty of the Temple, the stones with which it is adorned, and so forth. Jesus hears this conversation and says, “Look, guys, a time is coming when this Temple will be utterly destroyed.”
He’s not just speaking metaphorically about his own body, as he might be doing elsewhere in discourses on the Temple. He’s speaking literally about the actual Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, rebuilt under the prophets Ezra and Nehemiah after the return from the exile in Babylon, and considerably expanded and upgraded with fine materials by the tetrarch Herod the Great.
The disciples, as faithful Jews, have a strong attachment to the Temple – this is, after all, the place where all the great obligatory annual celebrations of their faith are held, like the Passover, and this is the place where the God of their ancestors, of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, has promised to meet them. They hear Jesus say that the whole thing is going to be violently destroyed, and they are understandably alarmed. “How will we know that this is about to happen?” they ask.
Jesus gives them a list of clues. Other prophets will come in my name, but they are trying to lead you astray. Don’t listen to them. There will be wars and insurrections, nation rising against nation, but don’t be afraid. There will also be earthquakes and famine and plagues.
But even before all this happens, you all are going to be arrested and persecuted. You will be betrayed, even by those closest to you.
Brothers and sisters, this to me does not sound like very good news.
And Jesus’s predictions all came true. In mid-April of the year 70, right before the celebration of the Passover, the Roman army, led by future emperor Titus, attacked and besieged Jerusalem. The siege lasted for four and a half months, At the end of August, the Temple was indeed destroyed, and by the end of the first week of September, the palace had been captured, and the city was entirely under Roman control. The Romans so utterly destroyed the Jewish resistance movement and indeed the Jewish population, that for the next 65 years, and well beyond, there was no Jewish presence in Jerusalem to speak of at all, and the city was renamed by the Romans Aelia Capitolina.
To this day, all that remains of Herod’s Temple – the Second Temple, after the destruction by the Babylonians of the First Temple built by Solomon – is the western wall. Jews in our time call it the Wailing Wall, and it is a place to go to lament all of the persecutions that have been faced by the Jewish people in the almost two thousand years since. There are certain rituals prescribed in the Torah that
Jewish people have been unable to do in all that time because they are required to be performed in the Temple. And it is unlikely that the Temple will be rebuilt in its proper location, because in 691 the ruling Muslim forces in Jerusalem built a holy shrine, the Dome of the Rock, there.
Jesus was also right about the disciples facing eventual arrest and persecution; according to legend, every single one of them died a martyr. Bartholomew and James the son of Zebedee were beheaded; James the son of Alphaeus was clubbed to death; John died an exile on the island of Patmos; Andrew, Philip, Thaddeus, and Simon were all crucified; Peter was crucified, upside down; Matthew and Thomas were each run through with a spear. And of course, famine, plagues, and earthquakes happened periodically, as they do throughout human history.
But where does that leave us? Other than demonstrating that Jesus knew what he was talking about, there doesn’t seem to be much good news in this passage here. We recall also that Luke was writing for an audience of Gentile Christians, a generation or two after Jesus and the disciples’ time, and they too were being persecuted, so perhaps they could derive some comfort and encouragement from knowing that the disciples were all persecuted and martyred before them, and were able to stand firm in their faith.
The trouble is, Christians today are not really being persecuted, at least in the United States. Certainly, there are persecutions going on, especially in Nigeria, for example, but American Christians enjoy a fair degree of hegemony and privilege. For no other religion observed in our country are the days of sacred observance automatically accorded bank-holiday status; for no other religion are the teachings about life, creation, and prayer mooted as being appropriate for public school contexts and curricula. Christians and our houses of worship are not attacked for being Christian – Mother Emanuel AME in Charleston, South Carolina, was attacked by a mass shooter because the congregants were Black, not because they were Christian – and in most places, churchgoers enjoy the social sanction of the entire community.
That said, I still think we are definitely called to do exactly what Jesus was calling the disciples to do in Luke 21, verse 19: to demonstrate endurance. Other translations put it as demonstrating patience, standing firm, staying with it – so that we might gain or possess our souls and win life. This is central to the Christian faith regardless of circumstances: we have to assiduously practice the tenets of the faith: prayer, worship, service, compassion, and prophetic justice.
And the challenges that American Christians today face may be less scary and violent than those faced by the disciples and the early Christians, but they are no less real. We face the challenge of apathy, of treating our faith and worshipping community as a social club rather than a movement of prophetic justice and love. When only certain kinds of people are truly welcome, or when we want to close off our spaces to so-called “undesirables,” that’s a pretty sure sign that a social-club mentality has infected our religion. I’m not necessarily talking about First Church here, although we need to guard against this, because I’ve known plenty of churches where the social-club mentality has taken over.
Another challenge that we need to be prepared to face is a sense of increasing irrelevance, and this can come from both within and without our walls. The fastest-growing category in surveys of religious affiliation is “spiritual but not religious” – people who have some kind of spiritual practice or belief but don’t see the need to be part of a worshipping community, and there are also increasing numbers of militant atheists who long for the day when religion is altogether eradicated from the face of the earth – when humanity outgrows religion – because they see religion as being responsible for many of the worst atrocities human beings have committed towards one another. And frankly, they’re not wrong.
The sense of irrelevance coming from within looks like a feeling that what we are doing to further our ministries isn’t really worth the effort anymore because so few people are participating. We might repeat to ourselves and one another Jesus’s promise that where two or three are gathered, he is there in our midst, but it is so tempting to adopt the world’s values of increased numbers as a sign of success. Social media trains us in this way of thinking: the more “likes” you get on a post, the more valuable you seem to be as a human being communicating with other human beings. In so many of our jobs, we are evaluated based on numbers and metrics: did you reach farther, work faster, earn more?
As I was pondering how to respond to this particular challenge, the sense of irrelevance generated internally, I remembered the story of a man who faced exactly this challenge, his whole life. His name was Vinnie.
As a young man in his twenties, Vinnie felt called to be a missionary. So he went to Belgium to preach the gospel to the coal mining communities there. The trouble was, Vinnie really wasn’t very good at it. After a year and a half of attracting exactly zero Christian converts, Vinnie gave up and went home to think about what else he might want to do with his life, what else God might be calling him to do.
He remembered that as a child he had loved drawing pictures, and he wondered if he might be able to make his way as an artist. So he moved to Brussels to study perspective and anatomy, and within the next five years, he began seriously applying himself to the work of creating art.
Unfortunately, once again, Vinnie was not very successful. Measured in terms of paintings sold, he was not successful at all. The trouble was that Vinnie didn’t like to paint the way his contemporaries painted. For hundreds of years, apprentice artists had been taught to painstakingly build up their panels and canvases with thin layers of oil, one upon another, ending with a smooth surface and an image that was as realistic, more or less, as a photograph would be.
That wasn’t how Vinnie wanted to paint. Vinnie loved to mix his paints thick and apply them in a heavy, exuberant impasto brushstroke that built up almost a sculptural presence on the canvas. He loved bright, joyous colors, and used them to create innovative portraits, especially self-portraits, as well as hundreds of landscapes and images of flowers, haystacks, olive trees, and gardens.
But no one seemed to want his paintings. Vinnie wrote letter after letter to his brother, asking for money for more paint and canvas, but his brother – who was an art dealer – couldn’t seem to move Vinnie’s finished paintings. By some reports, Vinnie’s own brother didn’t even really like Vinnie’s work and didn’t make much effort to try and sell it.
Understandably, Vinnie struggled with depression, and was for a time committed to a mental asylum – but he was able to keep painting there. Vinnie finally took his own life at the age of 37. Over the course of his lifetime, Vinnie had created 860 oil paintings, 2100 works of art in total. And he sold exactly one, mostly because the buyer felt sorry for him and his brother.
If you haven’t already guessed, Vinnie’s full name is Vincent van Gogh. He’s the artist who gave us Starry Night. Vinnie’s paintings now sell for tens of millions of dollars at auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s, and no reputable art museum would feel like its collection was complete without a Van Gogh. In fact, there’s a whole museum in Amsterdam dedicated to Van Gogh’s work. The Art Institute of Chicago has 18 of Van Gogh’s works – 9 drawings and 9 paintings, including a self-portrait from 1887. The St. Louis Art Museum has 6 Van Goghs: 5 paintings and one drawing.
When you visit a museum that has Van Gogh’s work exhibited, you’ll see people standing for long minutes, looking closely, studying the exuberant brushstrokes and bright colors. A time and motion study discovered that most art museum visitors spend about 4 seconds on average in front of each artwork, but Van Gogh’s work often seems to attract those willing to look much longer and deeper. The major art movements and artists of the 20th century consistently credit Vincent Van Gogh for the influence of his vision and his use of paint, composition, and color.
But during his lifetime, no one seemed to care. He painted for buyers who never materialized, exhibitions that never took place until after his death. How much would the world have lost if Vinnie had decided to pack it in and do something that might seem more immediately successful and productive? It hurts my heart even to think about it.
What if we as Christians in an age of seemingly increasing irrelevance, were to think of ourselves as artists? Not necessarily to literally make paintings and sculptures, although some of us are – but to do the work necessary to make beautiful things happen in our world? Delivering hungry and lonely low-income elderly shut-ins a hot, home-cooked meal on Thanksgiving and Christmas Day is a beautiful thing, is it not? Welcoming 20 or more elementary school kids every Thursday to provide them with nourishing food and a safe place to learn how to be full and active participants in, and positive contributors to, the life of our community is a beautiful thing. Growing a garden for the sake of feeding not ourselves but hungry people is a beautiful thing. Taking care of one another, making phone calls and visits and sending cards and bringing food when one or another among us is sick or low in spirits, is a beautiful thing.
And coming together to sing praises to God, to pray together and worship and learn more of God’s word is a beautiful thing as well. And the thing is, even the most successful artists never recoup all the time, effort, and resources they commit to making art. If artists were paid by the hour, including all the time spent in practice and preparation, no one would ever be able to afford a painting or a symphony ticket ever again, with the possible exception of Jeff Bezos. Artists do what they do because that’s how God has made them, because they cannot do otherwise. They do what they do out of love, often with little to no expectation of just reward or success. And as Christians called to continue the work of Jesus peacefully, simply, together, I think we should do likewise.
The story of Jesus being anointed with expensive, perfumed oil appears in all four of the canonical gospels. In Matthew and Mark, when the host of the banquet to which Jesus has been invited speaks scurrilously of this woman, Jesus rebukes him by saying, “She has done a beautiful thing for me.” This woman, like an artist, paid no mind to the expense or the potential social repercussions of walking uninvited into a roomful of banqueting men and pouring fragrant perfumed oil on Jesus’s feet and head. She understood that she was called to do a strange and beautiful thing, and with courage, patience, and endurance, she stood firm in her actions while being stared at and whispered about. And Jesus praised her for it.
Brothers and sisters, what if we understood ourselves, individually and as a community, to be called by Jesus to be artists just as this woman was? To do beautiful things for Jesus, to do beautiful things for others, regardless of the effort or expense, regardless of what other people or even we ourselves might think? To stand firm, be patient, endure, be strong in our faith and the actions it calls for? In the parable of the talents, the servants who did well were rewarded with the words, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant,” and many of us look hopefully to the day we might hear these words from Jesus ourselves. But I’ll tell you, friends, even more than that, I hope to hear Jesus one day say about me and about our church, “She has done a beautiful thing for me.” Amen? Amen.
Bobbi Dykema is currently serving as pastor at First Church of the Brethren in Springfield, Illinois. She is also on the pastoral team of the Living Stream online Church of the Brethren and serves on the steering committee of the Womaen’s Caucus. Bobbi is passionate about racial and gender justice, beauty and the arts, and reading scripture as a living document.
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