A Homily on Genesis 25:19-34/ John 17:20-23
by Griff Martin
For the Sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time (and the Seventeenth of Covid Worship)
For the Beloveds of First Austin: a baptist community of faith
July 12, 2020
*This document comes from an oral manuscript.
*This document comes from an oral manuscript.
Near the top of the list of places I count as sacred sites is the Rothko Chapel. When we lived in Houston you would often find me on my day off headed into Montrose to sit and be still at the Rothko Chapel. When Blake was born she often accompanied me on the journey and she would nap in her carrier while I sat. When she got old enough, we made a day of it with the zoo in the morning and the Rothko in the afternoon, minus the nap and carrier.
If you have never been to the Rothko, it’s a most intriguing place. Its architecture style is mid-century modern; it might be one of the few houses of worship that matches the style of our space.
Inside the chapel are 14 paintings that Mark Rothko painted from 1964-1967. At first glance they all seem to be monochromatic, these huge, black canvases; they are 15 by 11 feet. Now I can tell you many times while I was there I heard people walk in, walk around a bit and then say, “but where are the paintings?” Because each of these paintings is a huge black canvas and at first glance that is all you see, but the more you study the paintings you find different textures and patterns hidden within, the different shades and depths of the black almost trick your eyes into seeing different colors. It’s a space you can easily get lost in. As one critic writes of these works, “the artist did not want the paintings to come out to you, he wanted them to draw you in.”
In the current issue of Texas Monthly, this space is described as a “sensory deprivation chamber that also functions as a theological deprivation chamber.” I am still pondering that, but I think I love it.
To me it became a Mecca point when I lived in Houston, a chapel that was quiet, a space that was both empty and full, a sacred place of emptiness, contemplation and prayer.
And recently I have learned that it’s not at all what Mark Rothko wanted the space to be… Rothko never visited the city of Houston, or the site of this chapel; this chapel was finished after his death. It attempted to be true to his vision, but there was the problem of light. Rothko dreamed of this space, created the paintings and the style of this space in a large carriage house in New York City. This house had a large sky light and that sky light deeply impacted his plan for this space. The problem is the New York City sunlight is vastly different than the Houston sunlight.
The New York City sunlight is a soft glow, ambient, whereas the Houston sun is bright and harsh.
This has been a problem since the day the chapel opened. The light was too bright, it was harming the paintings, it was hiding all the brilliant small details, the subtleties and color hues, it was blinding the brilliance of the paintings. So the chapel added a giant baffle, this large panel that blocks most of the sun, which created a darker feel to the room. Many have the opposite feeling I have about the space, they find it gloomy and depressing.
The Chapel has been closed to the public for the last few years, undergoing a $16 million restoration to try and create what Mark Rothko originally envisioned for this space. It will open this month and early reports are that these paintings are displayed in an even more brilliant way now using a better (vastly more expensive) sky light, that the space is incredible and finally matches what Mark Rothko always dreamed of for his chapel.
It’s pretty obvious why I am sharing this today, although I would love one day to take a group of us to experience the sacredness of the Rothko Chapel together, this goes beyond that… The parallel is obvious; I think there is clearly something going on in our world this day and perhaps we have a restoration going on amidst us that will get us back to what our artist, our creator has long dreamed for our world.
Looking around we have to be saying, we have to be confessing, we have to be praying: “this is not what it was created to be, the artist had better hopes and dreams and visions for us than this.”
Last week I came across a most intriguing poll in Harper’s Magazine, in the index this month the last statistic they share is the percentage of people who said, “I want everything to go back to how it was,” when the lockdown ends… it’s 1/10 of us, which means ten percent of us say we want things to go back to how they were when the lockdown ends… Now sit with that for a second, because I can tell you that in pastoral counseling over the last 4 months now I have heard way more than 10% of us say I just want things to go back to how things were. I confess that I have had that very thought, which tells me that our congregation is made up of folks like me who have the privilege and the ability to not have to face all that was so broken before the lockdown. We ignored the cries of our Black siblings, we blinded ourselves to the issues of the poor, we paid only enough attention to the climate to appear to care, we made safe and small contributions to justice from afar -- drive by donations… So privileged… And by the grace of God we finally see it now and we are wrestling with how we were so blind, feelings of intense guilt for our blindness and privilege and dreaming of ways we can do better.
Our text this morning has a lot to teach us for this moment. But I think we have to go back to the very beginning to understand what it has to teach us.
Genesis 1 and 2, our beautiful and brilliant creation stories, an epic poem and then a very clever narrative. Creation so big that one telling of it is simply not enough, not to mention the two stories vary greatly (a God whose truth is so big it has to be told in two different stories; different, but each true). But they do have common elements: a creative artist who is not only responsible for all of this, but infatuated with all of this. And they both end with humanity as whole, united, unity where all things work together and get along.
And then we get to chapter 3 where everything goes awry, the story of the fall. Everything that God has created is working well and then enters this crafty serpent (what a brilliant adjective here). The serpent finds the woman alone one night walking for a stroll, enjoying creation. On the stroll he convinces her to try this fruit in the middle of the garden, she does so and she gives it to her husband and when they get reprimanded for this, the man blames the woman. What God has created as one is now divided.
Now you all know I have made it very clear that I believe in original goodness and not original sin, but I do think the story serves to guide us and teach us and offers us some very clear warnings… Warnings against pride and ego, and warnings against division and blaming one another, which may very well be two sides of the same coin… the coin that still tricks us all today with its fake currency.
The craftiest trick that could be played on us is to build up our own ego and pride while also trying to make us think that division and separation is how things naturally exist. And man, did we fall for that lie, hook, line and sinker.
Just keep reading the story… Cain and Abel, Tower of Babel, Sarah and Hager, Issac and Ishmael and now Jacob and Esau. And with Jacob and Esau the story of division intensifies to such a crazy degree that the text tells us that Jacob comes out of the womb gripping Esaus’ heel, as if they had spent nine months wrestling over who got to go first.
It’s why their story is full of trickery, trying to win power, who is Mom’s favorite and who is Dad’s favorite… it’s a sibling rivalry that is truly historic.
And when this story finally gets written down, the author goes so far as to say that God predicted this separation and division, and Scripture fails to remind us that division is the furthest thing from God’s mind and heart. God’s heart is and always will be about reconciliation, about bringing brokenness to wholeness, about restoring things to One.
And yet, look at our story today… we continually fall for the lie of ego, pride and division. It’s why we see systems that are power over instead of power with and power to; it’s why the church has often fallen for the lie that is systems of power over when the very heart of Jesus is power to and power with. It’s why we have to continually remind ourselves of the lie that is scarcity over abundance because nothing that is true and good is scarce; all that is true and good is abundant.
We are so broken, we feel the fighting, we feel the division, we see the weight of the fighting and the division. It’s why the line from this story that stands out so heavy today is when Rebekah has felt the fighting going on inside her womb and her prayer is this: “If it is to be this way, why do I live?”
Which is the exact prayer that I took to God this week, holding our world out and all that is broken and divided and asking God, just like our matriarch Rebekah, “If it is to be this way, why do we live?”
And God responded, “You live to make it not be this way… it doesn’t have to be this way and if you will live the life and the way that I showed you, it won’t be this way.” Which is the very Gospel story... Letting power go. Including those on the margins. Loving everyone. Forgiving freely. Imagining better. Speaking truth to power that brings about wholeness. Creating systems of justice. Living in the light and love of God’s wholeness.
That is our calling. And that calling is about loving us back to wholeness, to get back to the place of Genesis 1 when it all fit together and we all belonged and God smiled because it was good.
And we have some work to do to bring about that unity. We begin by looking at what we need to let go of and what we need to do in order to be a people who can focus on unity, on making all people feel welcome. Because there is a lot of narrative and history we hold that leads to division and we need to let that go.
Every division that exists in our world… Black and white, gay and straight, male and female, trans and cis, rich and poor, liberal and conservative, educated and uneducated… every one of those divisions is part of our calling right now, to heal the broken places, the church stands in the middle of these divides and we are the glue that brings them back to wholeness, we are the bridge, the both/and instead of the either/or.
Currently the issue of race is very much on the forefront of all our minds and we are all, hopefully, doing quite a bit of work to educate ourselves on this issue and the work that is now ours to do and that leads us to a bigger work of unity. Because the work we do in race can translate to so much division in our world today and the goal is one -- one humanity.
I am holding onto the words of Austin Channing Brown who is calling us to do better right now and who promises the work of antiracism is the work of “becoming better, more whole human beings.” I think she is the voice of Christ in our world today because the work of Christ is about being better human beings.
And we have the example of Christ to guide us, our Christ who consistently took those who were being oppressed and stood with them, learned from them, dialogued with them, broke bread with them, spoke truth to power alongside them. Story after story in our Gospel is the exact way that we are supposed to be living in order to heal our world into wholeness.
Which is why this theme of reconciliation plays so prominently in the New Testament… it’s why Paul, our first mystic and really a spiritual radical wrote this brilliant theology in Galatians: “So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
And we have heard such a messed up version of that text, for the church has taken that verse and our history has led to this interpretation: “So in whiteness, there is hierarchy in race, gender, sexual orientation, class, ability, education, country, zip code, etc…” And we confused whiteness and Christianity.
And now we see that confusion… Finally, we are all like Paul because the scales that blinded us have now fallen off our eyes and we know in Jesus Christ all are one and anything the church does better be contributing to that unity.
Because many of us are just like me walking around the Rothko for the last decade, really being amazed at the space and the works… some of us have been privileged enough that we have been walking around this world really amazed at the space and at the work and the art.
And then we hear that this is not exactly what Mark Rothko had in mind for this space and that there might be an even better way of displaying this art so that people can see even deeper its beauty, to see more, to see truer… and I can’t wait for the day I can go back now and see those paintings the way he intended them to be seen.
And right now God is not whispering, God is yelling that this is not what God had in mind for this space and that there is an even better way of living… there are a lot of us right now who are so privileged and now we are finally awakening to the reality that things around us are not what God intended, but that God has plans that are deeper, truer and more.
And just like the Rothko Chapel, we might need to do some renovations. No, there is not a might there, we need to do some renovation work, to let more light in because God has created such a beautiful living gallery of work, full of subtleties and colors and the closer we get to one another the more we see the handiwork of God.
May we not stop this time until we finally do the work to bring us back to the good place, the place where everything and everyone belonged, because that is the very Kingdom of God. Amen and Amen.
*artwork: "Searching for Unity" by Kwame Boama Mensa-Aborampa
*artwork: "Searching for Unity" by Kwame Boama Mensa-Aborampa
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