Art and Faith, Part 2: Self Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States

 Service of Worship

August 23, 2020

Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church

Rev. Natalie Bowerman, Pastor

 

Let us pray:

Let there be peace, welfare, and righteousness in every part of the world.

Let confidence and friendship prevail for the good of east and west, for the good of the needy south, for the good of all humanity.

Let the people inspire their leaders, helping them to seek peace by peaceful means, helping them and urging them to build a better world, a world with a home for everybody, a world with food and work for everybody, a world with spiritual freedom for everybody.

Let those who have the power of money be motivated by selfless compassion. Let money become a tool for the good of humankind.

Let those who have power deal respectfully with the resources of the planet. Let them respect and maintain the purity of the air, water, land and subsoil. Let them cooperate to restore the ecological soundness of Mother Earth.

Let trees grow up by the billions around the world. Let green life invade the deserts.

Let industry serve humanity and produce waste that serves nature.

Let technology respect the holiness of Mother Earth.

Let those who control the mass media contribute to create mutual understanding, contribute to create optimism and confidence.

Let ordinary people meet by the millions across the borders. Let them create a universal network of love and friendship.

Let billions of human beings cooperate to create a good future for their children and grandchildren.

Let us survive in peace and harmony with Mother Earth.

-Hagen Hasselbalch

 

Let us receive the Word: Mark 4: 35-41

Jesus Calms the Storm

35That day when evening came, he said to his disciples, “Let us go over to the other side.” 36Leaving the crowd behind, they took him along, just as he was, in the boat. There were also other boats with him. 37A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped. 38Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?”

39He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, “Quiet! Be still!” Then the wind died down and it was completely calm.

40He said to his disciples, “Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?”

41They were terrified and asked each other, “Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!”

 

A Message

Art and Faith, Part 2: Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States by Frida Kahlo

For this sermon, friends, I invite you to consider this very intriguing painting from the revolutionary artist Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderon, remembered more succinctly in history as Frida Kahlo. Born July 6, 1907 in Mexico City, Kahlo’s father was German and her mother was of Mestiza ancestry. Kahlo was deeply in touch with her indigenous Mexican roots, and lived her life wanting to know all there was to know about her heritage. It had an immense influence on her art, her social engagement, and her political involvement. She chose, as her manner of dress, materials that were common to a matriarchal tribe in Mexico so that everything about her would be a public message of anti-patriarchy, anti-racism, and anti-colonialism…and all of that was before she ever picked up a paintbrush!

A survivor of childhood polio, Kahlo hoped she had put her darkest days of health problems behind her for good, and after she caught up from a year of missed schooling, she set her sights on becoming a doctor. She loved everything she was studying in school, and with only about three dozen women in her class she was excited to break the glass ceiling in medicine. Tragically, those dreams were torn asunder after a horrifying bus accident in 1925, where an iron bar impaled her abdomen and her right side was heavily hit. She was fortunate to survive, but suffered rib, back, pelvic, leg, and foot fractures, in addition to organ and nerve damage, and she experienced chronic pain, immense mobility issues, and frequent infections for the rest of her life. She was only eighteen years old, her career dreams were dashed, and she spent months recovering in bed. In order to forge a new path through crisis, in order to rediscover who and whose she was, and in order to put the pieces of her life back together, she turned to an old childhood hobby: painting. Her parents equipped her with an easel she could use while lying down and a mirror, and she began painting self portraits.

In 1929, Kahlo married fellow Mexican artist Diego Rivera, and they quickly became a power couple in the art community who traveled frequently. Kahlo saw many new cities throughout Mexico, and then saw the United States for the first time, initially from San Francisco, and then from Detroit. Though Kahlo and Rivera didn’t live in Detroit for a significant amount of time, the experience had a deep impact on Kahlo, and compelled her to create the painting you see above: “Self Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States”. What you’ll see when you examine the fine details of that painting is a swirl of pieces that all represented the pain and joy of her life, encircling her like the waters of a storm. She saw deep ancestry and heritage in Mexico, but also death and decay. She saw infrastructure and breathtaking technology in the United States, but at an enormous cost to the environment and to the working poor.

I invite you to take that all in while reminiscing on the well-known Gospel story of Jesus calming the storm. This story starts in a very non-threatening way; Jesus and the disciples are in a boat traveling from point A to point B, and this trip feels so routine to everyone on board that Jesus takes a nap. Suddenly the boat is nearly capsized by strong winds and enormous waves. The disciples are terrified when they think they are about to die and then even more terrified when they don’t.

The world that we see around us today is engulfed in storm waters. They are waters like Kahlo swam against where our very identity as a nation, as a Church, and as a world is in deep conflict. We face a crisis from Mother Earth in the form of climate change. We tremble from a global pandemic that has taken 170,000 American lives, up 20,000 from just a few weeks ago. We closed our schools nearly six months ago, and now parents, teachers, and children face peril upon the prospect of returning to the classroom, and unsustainable distress upon the prospect of continuing remote learning. Our hospitals are running out of ventilators and PPE, and our major cities are running out of morgue space. The Red and the Blue are at war in a Presidential election year, where the Right is fighting harder than ever to erect a wall and cut off all immigration along the very border that Kahlo depicted in this painting. Immigrants are endangered, their children are in cages. Young people of color are attacked by white law enforcement officers at a rate so frequent that it’s impossible to keep up, and the brokenhearted fight for the value of their lives against the cruel and apathetic. The United Methodist Church stands torn on so many borders of its own: homophobia or inclusion, prophecy or comfort, revolution or patriarchy. It’s no wonder that we feel tempted, like Kahlo, to hold a flag we love in one hand, and a cigarette in the other because we need a smoke break from all the stress.

Where do we go from here? Our hearts are with the disciples, crying to Jesus “Don’t you care if we drown?” That kind of faith is easy, the kind of faith that hopes Jesus can fix everything all on his own. But that is not the faith that Christ calls us to. Jesus takes short moments steering, where he buys us a few moments of relief, enough for us to have some perspective and remember that values that compelled us to follow him in the first place.

Kahlo had a similar moment of clarity right as she painted this work. She said “Although I am very interested in all the industrial and mechanical development in the United States, I felt a bit of rage against all the rich guys here, since I have seen thousands of people in he most terrible misery without anything to eat and with no place to sleep, that is what has most impressed me here, it is terrifying to see the rich having parties day and night while thousands and thousands of people are dying of hunger.”

Can we relate? While we see the rich get richer off the backs of the poor, while we see thousands and thousands suffer while so many go out and party without masks, while we see so many refuse to care about the deepest pains of the world, are we moved to action?

This is what Christ needs of us. Ours is not a faith where Jesus builds a kingdom of love and justice while we sit around and watch. Ours is a faith where Jesus slows down the wind enough for us to catch our breath, and then he throws us an oar and tells us to start rowing. We row toward feminism, we row toward anti-capitalism, we row toward antiracism, we row toward inclusion for all. We row, while Jesus leads the way.

Trust Jesus to hold back the waters for a moment, so that we can engage in the very hard, very long term work of calming those storm waters that we churned up in the first place.

May it be so.

Amen.