“Artful Witness”
1 Corinthians 2:1-13
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
2/16/14
During the
sermon-writing process a few weeks back, an observation wriggled its way into
my thoughts and onto my legal pad. That
observation had to do with faith as relational rather than rhetorical.
It seems to me that any
religious faith based principally on rhetoric quickly devolves into mere
dogma. It becomes a rigid -ism to
be argued rather than a grateful hope to be embodied and shared. And so, God becomes just one more thing
about which “believers” must win. The
trouble is that in order to keep winning, “winners” must keep building and
strengthening their arguments – their doctrines and walls, their monuments and
munitions, their fears and egos.
All “winners” eventually
resort to blunt force intimidation because continually reminding losers that
they are losers becomes the only way for winners to keep their hard-earned
status. And in such a world, can there
even be winners?
“Rhetoric,” says
commentator Paul Sampley, “is the art of persuasion.”1
Ancient Roman and Greek
cultures held the art of rhetoric in particularly high regard. So, in places like Corinth, public squares
and private institutions would likely have been to rhetoric what the Guggenheim
and railway cars are to visual art in New York City. Everyone, from rich to poor, from snob to
lowlife gets in on the act.
Rhetoric may be an art,
but I don’t know just how much it leaves to the imagination. In its attempt to persuade, rhetoric will
entice, finagle, and even willingly manipulate emotions. When in service to some special interest,
when desperate for a “win,” rhetoricians will jettison their sense of “fair and
balanced” in order to turn opinion toward their desired outcome.
While I’d like to think
that I take the relational high road
on faith, I am acutely aware that when any preacher stands in any pulpit to
preach, he or she engages in an overtly rhetorical act. Like Paul, I am “chief among sinners.” I never climb up here without making sure
that my words are as well prepared as possible.
I have an almost neurotic need to mask any visible manifestation of
inner weakness or doubt, and to camouflage any “fear and trembling” that might
make my rhetoric less persuasive. And
God forbid that someone stop me to ask a question or to challenge me on
something. Again, like Paul, I will say
that I want your faith to rest on
“the power of God,” but as for my sermons,
I depend upon my own preparation, and on the time-honored tradition of this
unilateral interface called “preaching.”
There is no way around
it. Preaching is no less than fifty
percent rhetoric. I just hope it shows
that I do try to remember that the beatitudes do not pronounce blessing on crafty
speakers and clever theologians. They
pronounce blessings that cannot be earned or won.
Like art, blessing can
only be lived into, experienced and shared.
In this preacher’s opinion, blessing is the high art. Rhetoric is simply a tool to communicate the
extent to which the art of blessing becomes revealing and redeeming to those
who listen.
I think Paul knows
this. I also think that he knows that in
the city of Corinth, he had better keep his rhetorical skills polished. If he is to establish a relational ministry,
he has to be able to speak the language.
He must honor the rhetorical ears of his audience. And
he has to do that in such a way that he proclaims, and invites high-brow
Corinthians into something as rhetorically indefensible as “Jesus Christ, and
him crucified.”
Paul’s challenge, you
see, is to commit heresy. His mission is
to proclaim to sophisticated Roman colonials, who live and work in a vital
economic hub of the empire, that to see God’s presence in the world, do not
look at Caesar and his great power.
Caesar is not God, nor even a god. He is as gloriously, splendidly human as
anyone else.
No, says Paul, to see
God’s presence, look at and listen to Jesus of Nazareth: the son of Jewish
peasants; an itinerant rabbi who lived hand-to-mouth and who, during his
empire-defying life of love and justice, invited the creation into renewed
relationship with the Creator. And
though the empire killed Jesus, says Paul, it could not end him.
By the time he begins
writing letters to the Corinthian church, Paul is already in relationship with
that congregation. It may be that the
rhetorical skills the apostle demonstrates in his letters make the most
difference after he establishes that
relationship, because it takes far more than clever persuasion to get artless
minds to take seriously a story like the Jesus story. It takes transformation. Some call it conversion. The story itself calls it resurrection. And regardless of what word one uses, it is
something that cannot be limited to any one moment or experience – nor even to
one well-argued doctrine.
Resurrection is the
ongoing life-to-death-to-new-life process of creation and recreation that has
been at work for billions of years.
Resurrection, says Paul, is God’s wisdom, a wisdom that is
incomprehensible to “the rulers of this age,” that is to say, to the “winners”
of temporal wealth, and power, and arguments.
“If any want to become
my disciples, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow
me. For those who want to save their
life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.” (Mt.
16:25-26)
“‘Teacher, what good
deed must I do to have eternal life?’...‘If you wish to be perfect, go sell
your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in
heaven; then come and follow me.’” (Mt. 19:16, 21)
This message cannot be
argued; it can only be revealed. And
revelation is not the work of the witness himself or herself. It is not the work of the preacher, the
rhetorician, or the storyteller, or the artist.
It is the work of the Spirit.
“What no eye has seen,
nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived… these things God has revealed to
us through the Spirit,” says Paul, “for the Spirit teaches everything, even the
depths of God.” (1 Cor. 2:9-10)
What a magnificently humbling
and liberating reality: “Lofty words [and] wisdom” have their place, but
according to God’s secret wisdom, they are not the difference between the
labored breathing of emptiness and the breathtaking wonder of facing the
mystery of God. The mystery and holiness
beyond us can only be understood by the mystery and holiness within us. This is what Paul means when he says that “no
one comprehends what is truly God’s except the Spirit of God.”
Paul uses his rhetorical
art to urge the Corinthians – and us – toward a new awareness of the deep
hunger and thirst within the human heart.
And he challenges us to see, to hear, and to comprehend that the longing
within us is itself the image, the very presence of God, for only that which is
God can know God.
This becomes a far
deeper thing than saying, as so many of us have been taught to say, “I have
invited Jesus into my heart.” This new
consciousness moves us from some ankle-deep tidal pool and out into the ocean. It moves us from a fishbowl terrarium and into
the forest. It moves us from Facebook to
face-to-face.
Paul is trying to help
us understand that we, you and I, all of humankind and all of the creation –
all things seen and unseen – we are part of, and we participate intimately in
the Incarnation of God.
Incarnation does not
begin in a stable in Bethlehem somewhere near the beginning of the Julian
calendar. Incarnation has its genesis
when the eternally brooding Spirit begins to knead order and beauty, purpose
and mystery out of formless chaos. Jesus
of Nazareth becomes, then, the bright face of Incarnation, the Holy One in whom
we see the resurrecting potential of heart-to-heart union between Creator and
Creature.
The point of Christian
witness, like the point of all art, is to present something of indescribable
beauty that connects with the indescribable, God-imaged beauty within us. This is the point of the sacraments. Bread, and wine, and water, our words and
bodies, these are the sheets of dog-eared construction paper we use to create
splendidly imperfect paintings of union with the Creator and with fellow
creatures. Sacraments may be the most
revealing refrigerator art we offer to God.
This becomes
exhaustingly difficult to do in an increasingly artless and individualistic age
– an age of competitive black-and-white, an age of searing suspicion and cold
greed, an age of chaos resurgence.
Sacramental art
abounds. “We see a sunset,” says Richard
Rohr, “and it mirrors something already inside us that is just waiting to be
joyful. We look at Picasso's Guernica,
and we know and feel the absurdity and terror of war. At such a moment, we normally feel more
alive, connected, and authentic, even if it is sadness that we feel.”2*
The poet behind Psalm 42
expresses the same sacramental consciousness when he writes: “As a deer longs
for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God.” And then he says, “Deep calls to deep at the
thunder of your cataracts; all your waves and your billows have gone over
me. By day the Lord commands his
steadfast love, and at night his song is with me…” (Psalm 42:1, 7-8)
In this sad but most
artfully rendered lament of exile, the psalmist finds himself beside a
thundering waterfall. It is of no matter
whether he is there in person, in grateful memory, or in his imagination. In pure and transforming truth, he feels the
wash of timeless and invigorating grace, of “hidden and secret” wisdom. The relentless rush of water over rock speaks
to the equally relentless flow of holy Mystery within him. Taking a deep drink from that flow, he knows
that whether he lives to see it or not, God will redeem Israel, because the
creation cannot be undone from the Creator.
For the poet, that
experience delivers healing shalom – God’s wholeness and peace. And even now, some two and a half millenia
later, his simple words about a deer and a waterfall witness to us of meaning
and hope. They witness to us of the
holiness within us and around us, holiness that creates, sustains, and
recreates.
To those with ears to
hear and eyes to see, such words, such art
reveals to us God’s promising way of resurrection.
1J. Paul
Sampley, The New Interpreter's Bible: Vol. X, Abingdon Press, 2002, p.
783.
2Richard Rohr,
Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self, Jossey Bass, 2013, pp 73-74.
*Though I did not quote him directly anywhere else, in my
references to Incarnation and spirituality
as art, I am deeply indebted to Richard Rohr in his book, Immortal Diamond:
The Search for Our True Self.
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