Art and Faith, Part 1: Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth

 

August 16, 2020

Service of Worship

Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church

Rev. Natalie Bowerman, Pastor

 

Let us pray:

O God of the children of Somalia, Sarajevo, South Africa, and South Carolina,

Of Albania, Alabama, Bosnia, and Boston,

Of Cracow and Cairo, Chicago and Croatia,

Help us to love and respect and protect them all.

O God of Black and Brown and White and Albino children and those all mixed together,

Of children who are rich and poor and in between,

Of children who speak English and Spanish and Russian and Hmong and languages our ears cannot discern,

Help us to love and respect and protect them all.

O God of the child prodigy and the child prostitute,

Of the child of rapture and the child of violence,

Of runaway or thrown-away children who struggle every day without parent or place or friend or future,

Help us to love and respect and protect them all.

O God of children who can walk and talk and hear and see and sing and dance and jump and play and of children who wish they could but can’t,

Of children who are loved and unloved, wanted and unwanted,

Help us to love and respect and protect them all.

O God of beggar, beaten, abused, neglected, homeless, AIDS, drug, and hunger-ravaged children,

Of children who are emotionally and physically and mentally fragile,

And of children who rebel and ridicule, torment and taunt,

Help us to love and respect and protect them all.

O God of children of destiny and of despair, of war and of peace,

Of disfigured, diseased, and dying children,

Of children without hope and of children with hope to spare and to share,

Help us to love and respect and protect them all.

 

-From the pen of Marian Wright Edelman

 

Our Gospel reading is from John

9 As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. ² His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

³ “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him. ⁴ As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. ⁵ While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”

⁶ After saying this, he spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man’s eyes. ⁷ “Go,” he told him, “wash in the Pool of Siloam” (this word means “Sent”). So the man went and washed, and came home seeing.

⁸ His neighbors and those who had formerly seen him begging asked, “Isn’t this the same man who used to sit and beg?” ⁹ Some claimed that he was.

Others said, “No, he only looks like him.”

But he himself insisted, “I am the man.”

¹⁰ “How then were your eyes opened?” they asked.

¹¹ He replied, “The man they call Jesus made some mud and put it on my eyes. He told me to go to Siloam and wash. So I went and washed, and then I could see.”

¹² “Where is this man?” they asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said.

¹³ They brought to the Pharisees the man who had been blind. ¹⁴ Now the day on which Jesus had made the mud and opened the man’s eyes was a Sabbath. ¹⁵ Therefore the Pharisees also asked him how he had received his sight. “He put mud on my eyes,” the man replied, “and I washed, and now I see.”

¹⁶ Some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath.”

But others asked, “How can a sinner perform such signs?” So they were divided.

¹⁷ Then they turned again to the blind man, “What have you to say about him? It was your eyes he opened.”

The man replied, “He is a prophet.”

¹⁸ They still did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they sent for the man’s parents. ¹⁹ “Is this your son?” they asked. “Is this the one you say was born blind? How is it that now he can see?”

²⁰ “We know he is our son,” the parents answered, “and we know he was born blind. ²¹ But how he can see now, or who opened his eyes, we don’t know. Ask him. He is of age; he will speak for himself.” ²² His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jewish leaders, who already had decided that anyone who acknowledged that Jesus was the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue. ²³ That was why his parents said, “He is of age; ask him.”

²⁴ A second time they summoned the man who had been blind. “Give glory to God by telling the truth,” they said. “We know this man is a sinner.”

²⁵ He replied, “Whether he is a sinner or not, I don’t know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!”

²⁶ Then they asked him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?”

²⁷ He answered, “I have told you already and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples too?”

²⁸ Then they hurled insults at him and said, “You are this fellow’s disciple! We are disciples of Moses! ²⁹ We know that God spoke to Moses, but as for this fellow, we don’t even know where he comes from.”

³⁰ The man answered, “Now that is remarkable! You don’t know where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes. ³¹ We know that God does not listen to sinners. He listens to the godly person who does his will. ³² Nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind. ³³ If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.”

³⁴ To this they replied, “You were steeped in sin at birth; how dare you lecture us!” And they threw him out.

³⁵ Jesus heard that they had thrown him out, and when he found him, he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?”

³⁶ “Who is he, sir?” the man asked. “Tell me so that I may believe in him.”

³⁷ Jesus said, “You have now seen him; in fact, he is the one speaking with you.”

³⁸ Then the man said, “Lord, I believe,” and he worshiped him.

³⁹ Jesus said,^[a] “For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.”

⁴⁰ Some Pharisees who were with him heard him say this and asked, “What? Are we blind too?”

⁴¹ Jesus said, “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains.

 

A Message

Art and Faith, Part 1: Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth

 

Friends, I’m excited to announce that we’re kicking off a new 4-week worship series, where I’ll be drawing upon famous works of 20^th Century art as illustrations of the themes and messages of our Gospel lessons.

The first such work of art that we get to look at together is the one you see above. This painting is called “Christina’s World”, and it was painted in 1948 by an American artist by the name of Andrew Wyeth. Wyeth was born on July 12, 1917 in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. Art historians describe his work as realism, as well as regionalism. Wyeth’s home town in Pennsylvania, as well as his summer home in Cushing, Maine, served as the backdrop for the vast majority of his work.

Wyeth was inspired to create this particular painting while vacationing in Maine. He was visiting the neighboring farm of the Olson family, and while sitting outside he noticed the Olson’s daughter, Anna Christina, who preferred to go by her middle name. Christina suffered from a degenerative neurological condition that rendered her unable to walk. These days we have a few guesses as to which specific condition she had, but in the 1940s Christina’s condition was unknown and untreatable. This left Christina dependent on her family for her care. She spent most of her time hanging out at home, and she enjoyed sitting outside. She didn’t use a wheelchair; she preferred to move by using her arms to pull her lower body along. On the day that Christina spent in the company of Wyeth, Wyeth noticed her sitting casually in the grass upon first glance. But as he looked closer, Wyeth saw that Christina was looking intently at the family house, and her upper body was firm and angled in that direction, like she wanted to get there, but didn’t know if she could. When Wyeth was with his wife later, he asked her to be his model so that he could recreate the moment on canvas. His wife told him the painting should be called “Christina’s World”, because Wyeth captures not just Christina’s surroundings, but her perspective. It’s cliché to say, but a picture is worth a thousand words. Today “Christina’s World” hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where generations of visitors have been moved by the work’s deep depiction of pain and longing.

While we continue to think about this, I invite you to consider this week’s Gospel text from John. While traveling on foot from one town to the next, Jesus interacts with a blind man. The reason why the blind man comes onto Jesus’ radar is because the disciples ask about him, and not as an act of compassion. They ask because they want the dirt on the beggar. Who sinned, him or his parents? The disciples, and the society that raised them, hadn’t moved very far away from the ancient Pagan belief that any suffering is punishment from a god you angered. To the disciples, you stick the name YHWH in the conversation and this idea holds over to monotheistic Judaism. Truly, today we’ve traveled not much farther from this idea that our Creator blesses us with health and wealth if we make God happy (Google “prosperity Gospel”) and afflicts us with pain if we make God mad. What saves the blind man, the disciples, and us is that Jesus doesn’t give up on us no matter how badly we misunderstand the nature of God. Every time we try to twist around our religious practice as an excuse to abuse our neighbor, Jesus subverts our worst intentions into teaching and healing.

He does exactly this for the blind man from John 9. He defends his uprightness, and that of his parents, to the disciples, and then turns his attention to the man himself. Rather than dishing out the dirt with the disciples, Jesus makes dirt, rubs it on the man’s eyes, and then tells him to go wash the dirt off—literally and symbolically. The man comes back able to see, and transformed by his encounter with Christ from a beggar dependent on the charity of others to an independent gentleman ready to live his life.

This quickly catches the attention of the man’s neighbors, who apparently never bothered to learn his name but had long ago assigned him his “spot” out on the streets. They demand to know what happened—not out of curiosity or compassion, but to know what kind of idol worship he got into—and this quickly gets the attention of Jesus’ biggest adversaries, the Pharisees.

The Pharisees march onto the scene much like the Plastics from the 2004 film Mean Girls: cold, unsympathetic, with a long list of rules they expect strict adherence to, and a desire to protect their name and standing above anything else. The relative new kid in school has made quite the splash, healing so many people and performing so many public miracles and signs that droves of people are following him around, threatening the Pharisees’ social superiority. They deduce within minutes that Jesus is behind yet another miraculous healing and decide once again to pounce. This time they decide to go after him not for healing, but for healing on the sabbath. Jesus is prepared, he knows if he heals someone the Pharisees are watching, and waits for them to show their hand before he sends them reeling with his prophetic, yet ominous response: “I have come so that people who are blind will see. I have come so that people who can see will become blind.”

Many of us will get to sit and read this message from a position of relative privilege: white, male, healthy, able bodied, cisgender, heterosexual, natural born. A lot of us won’t. Those of us who don’t check all of those boxes live in a world knit together to give as much advantage as possible to those who do. But Jesus comes to flip that world over, and not only because it’s the just thing to do. He comes even to help those at the top, comfortable to enjoy that privilege. Because this vicious world that oppresses and kills the poor, the BIPOC, the disabled, the female, and the LGBTQ will someday implode on the top 1%, and they won’t be able to stop it because so many of us waited far too long to do anything.

We live in a world full of beautiful Christinas. Women, men, and nonbinary, every race, color, and creed, every type of body, every type of ability, all with something special to share. And so many Christinas, including the one in our own hearts, sit in the grass from generation to generation, hoping to get to the house on the horizon but meeting all kinds of systemic barriers every time they get close.

As we contemplate the painting I shared with you, and as we let the Gospel renew our hearts, we must ask ourselves, what are we doing to help Christina? How do we see her in the faces of the people all around us, longing for something we could help them reach? And, as Christ-followers, how are we preparing the Church to become the motorized scooter waiting in the grass to deliver Christina to the oasis of home? How are we preparing a place for her?

Are we affirming the sacred worth of the black lives? Are we believing the women? Are we celebrating the loves and identities of our queer neighbors? Are we empowering support services for the disabled, sharing our abundance with the poor, and leaving a light on for the lost?

Our world is full of unnamed blind people, of faceless Christinas. Of people that we’ve never tried to interact with except to gossip and judge. If we can sit in the grass next to Christina, and ask how we can use our advantages to help her, we would see Christ in her eyes.

Amen.

Receive the benediction:

O God, our Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, will guard our going out and coming in from this time on and forevermore. And as the people of God, wherever we’re reading this, we say together, Amen.