The Excesses of God
John Shuck
Southminster
Presbyterian Church
March 8, 2015
The Excesses of God
Robinson Jeffers
Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
Our God? For to equal a need
Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling
Rainbows over the rain
And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows
On the domes of deep sea-shells,
And make the necessary embrace of breeding
Beautiful also as fire,
Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom
Nor the birds without music:
There is the great humaneness at the heart of things,
The extravagant kindness, the fountain
Humanity can understand, and would flow likewise
If power and desire were perch-mates.
The First Book of the Odes of Solomon 6:1-2; 7:22-8:7
As the wind passes through the lyre,
The strings speak.
So also the spirit of the Lord speaks
Through my members….
Let the singers sing of the kindness of the Lord Most High,
Let them bring their psalms.
Let their hearts be as the day,
And their chants as the great beauty of the Lord.
Let there be no one that is without knowledge,
And who is without voice.
For he gave a mouth to creation,
To open the voice of the mouth toward him
And praise him.
Acknowledge his strength,
Demonstrate his kindness.
Open; open your hearts to the dancing joy of the Lord
And let your love abound from heart to lips:
In order to bring forth fruits for the Lord, a holy life,
And to speak with attention in his light.
Stand and be restored,
All of you who were once flattened.
Speak, you who were silent,
Because your mouth has been opened.
From now on be lifted up, you who were destroyed
Since your justice has been raised.
For the Right Hand of the Lord is with you all,
And she will be a helper for you.
Peace was prepared for you,
Before what may be your war.
Why does Southminster Presbyterian Church host this art show
each year?
Why do we host this Celebration of Creativity?
Theologian Matthew Fox wrote in his book, Creativity:
“When we consider
creativity, we are considering the most elemental and innermost and deeply
spiritual aspects of our beings.”
It is our nature to be creative. It is who we are. If there is such a thing as original sin, it
is the repression of creativity.
“Redemption”
writes Fox, is “liberation from our fear
of creativity. Salvation is the return
of creativity which is the return of the Spirit.”
Creativity is our nature.
Creativity is the nature of the universe. The late Gordon Kaufman, theology professor
at Harvard Divinity School wrote that God is creativity. Rather than think of God as Creator, God is
Creativity itself.
Creativity is in our nature.
Creativity is the nature of the universe.
Creativity is the nature of God.
If anyone asks why Southminister Presbyterian holds an art
show every year and has done so for the last 37 years, and not just an art
show, not just a display of some art, but to use the poetry of Robinson
Jeffers,
Rainbows over the rain
And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows
On the domes of deep sea-shells,
That kind of art show.
Tell them it is in our nature. It
is in our nature to express the excesses of God. It isn’t enough just to meet a need. If our species is to survive, we will need
to be flooded with the superfluousness of beauty, of creativity. We
need Bread and Roses.
That phrase, “Bread and Roses” originated in a political
speech by a woman named Rose Schneiderman.
She said,
“The worker must have
bread, but she must have roses, too.”
This was a strike led mostly by women under the leadership
of The Industrial Workers of the World.
The strike united dozens of immigrant communities. It was settled March 14th, 1912 in
terms favorable to the workers, Pay
increases, time and quarter pay for overtime, and a promise of no
discrimination against workers. The
phrase and the strike inspired this poem by, “Bread and Roses” by James
Oppenheim:
As we come marching,
marching in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened
kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all
the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us
singing: "Bread and roses! Bread and roses!"
As we come marching,
marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our
singing their ancient cry for bread.
Small art and love and
beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we
fight for—but we fight for roses, too!
That poem has been set to music and sung by artists such as
Judy Collins, Ani DeFranco, John Denver and others.
Biblical scholar, Walter Brueggemann wrote that “Every
totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist.” Why? Because the artist reminds us of our
true nature. We are endowed with
creative power. Creativity is a power, a
force of nature, and when it is unleashed it can transform an individual, a
community, perhaps even a species on a path of justice, compassion, and beauty.
Why creativity? Why
this art show? Because humankind does
not live by bread alone. Jesus said
that one. We need bread and roses.
The greatest gift teachers, ministers, artists, anyone in
any kind of influential position can give is the inspiration, encouragement,
nudge, and permission to discover one’s own creativity, one’s own divine
nature. Each of us is an artist.
I included a reading from The Odes of Solomon. This
is an early Christian hymnal. These odes
were lost and not known until early last century. A professor named James Rendel Harris
discovered a pile of forgotten leaves on a shelf in his study in 1909. I never read them until a couple of years ago
when they were added to A New, New
Testament.
They are filled with ecstatic expressions of divine creativity.
They are filled with ecstatic expressions of divine creativity.
As the wind passes through the lyre,
The strings speak.
So also the spirit of the Lord speaks
Through my members….
Spirit or Wind, the Hebrew word is Ruah, is Creativity. Our creativity is divine creativity, the
creativity of the universe, speaking through us. Whether that is poetry, music, painting,
sculpture, dance, it is not something we invent but we discover.
I was speaking with James Cone, professor at Union
Theological Seminary in New York. Author
of Black Theology and Black Power in
the 1960s and most recently The Cross and
the Lynching Tree. That book was
about the horrific experience of African-Americans at the hands of mostly White
Christians. Most importantly, the book
is a testimony to the power of Creative Spirit to this violence, terror and
chaos. I asked him how he had come to
write the book and he said,
“The book wrote
me.”
That is the experience of writing. It comes.
As the wind passes through the lyre,
The strings speak.
So also the spirit of the Lord speaks
Through my members….
These Odes of Solomon are lush.
“Let their hearts be as the day,
and their chants as the great beauty of the Lord.”
Open; open your hearts to the dancing joy of the Lord
And let your love abound from heart to lips…
This response to Spirit,
this dancing,
this singing,
this bringing forth fruits,
this love abounding from heart to lips,
is not a response to the via
positiva alone. It is not a
response to the magnificence and beauty of the universe alone. It is absolutely that. But it is also a response to the via negativa,
the sorrow,
the grief,
the chaos,
the oppressive numbness of loss.
In the midst of this lush poetry of dancing and praising is also
the voice of one who knows what it is to be flattened, to be without voice, to
be destroyed. This creative text with
its extravagant joy comes out of intimacy with grief and destruction. Art comes from the churning chaos as well
as the magnificent beauty.
The last couplet is powerful and surprising:
Peace was prepared for you,
Before what may be your war.
Creativity is ongoing because life in all its beauty and its
grayness is ongoing. Life in all of its
vibrancy and its flatness is ongoing.
Peace is not the absence of war, it is the confidence of help amidst
whatever war rages within or without.
When we experience the loss and sorrow and pain of living,
in time, and whatever the time is, there is no clock, this loss becomes
transformed through creative expression.
Creativity is necessary to live in response to loss. To put it bluntly: if we are not creative in response to loss,
the loss will kill us.
On my bookshelf is a beautiful book of poetry. It was written by a woman in my previous
congregation in response to the loss of her husband. I officiated at their wedding. A little over a year later, I spoke at his funeral. Her name is Nancy Jane and I want to share two poems that she wrote in response from
a year of grief. Prayers From a Grieving Heart: Seasons of Gentle Healing.
The Little Things
It’s the little losses, dear Father,
that are tripping me up so
Everyone knows about the
BIG ONE
“How are you doing?”
They don’t know how it
feels to stop getting invitations
to those
Thursday night dances
when
we would arrive and the
keyboard player would announce us as
The Newlyweds and play
OUR
SONG
I’ve never felt so
Honored and
cherished
He would take me in his arms
bring my
right hand up to his lips
and
kiss it so tenderly
Those eyes of his would look into mine
as if I
were the only
woman
in the room
Swept away I was
For the
first time in my life, Lord
You sent him to be the husband
Of my scattered
days and
blessed me with a hundred ways that he could
melt my
heart
And it’s those little things, Father
that keep
me stumbling
Her last poem in the her book, “Prayers from a Grieving
Heart” testifies to the power of creativity to heal and transform.
Enough
In the silence of a shower
something has shifted in my
guarded heart, God of
this magnificent season.
I lower hands from
astonished eyes, shamed
no longer by perceived
disappointment from an
absent taskmaster.
I am whole, alone and
strong, blessed
beyond measure
in a life of my own making.
I am enough.
As you look at this artwork, the pieces that touch you, may
touch you because they capture the via
positiva the awe and wonder and beauty of creation. They may also touch you, and you may not even
know it, because they express the via
negativa as well. I imagine that
many of these pieces come from the crucible of both joy and tears.
Thus they are holy.
Why do we do this art show?
Because there is chaos and loss.
Because there is sadness and grief.
Because there is cruelty and meaninglessness.
Our creativity says, “Ah, but here we are. Surviving anyway.”
Not only surviving, but on good days, thriving.
We live on bread and roses.
We live on bread and roses.
Stand and be restored,
All of you who were once flattened.
Speak, you who were silent,
Because your mouth has been opened.
From now on be lifted up, you who were destroyed
Since your justice has been raised.
We do this art show because we are human beings, beautiful,
silly, complicated, messy, confused and confusing, brilliant, sad,
compassionate and filled with the excesses of God. God, Ruah, Spirit , Wind.
As the wind passes through the lyre,
The strings speak.
So also the spirit of the Lord speaks
Through my members….
Amen.
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