Art and Faith, Part 3: Relativity by MC Escher

 

Service of Worship: August 30, 2020

Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church

Rev. Natalie Bowerman, Pastor

 

Let us pray:

Merciful God,

You call us to follow;

to turn away from our own selfish interests,

and to take up our cross and follow after You,

even if the path is difficult to see,

or is heading in a direction we would never have chosen for ourselves.

 

Forgive us for being so quick to question

and so hesitant to follow.

Help us to see with the eyes of faith,

rather than from our own human point of view.

 

Teach us to follow without fear,

knowing that You are always with us,

leading the way.

Amen.

 

John 14: 1-7

Jesus Comforts His Disciples

1“Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. 2My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? 3And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. 4You know the way to the place where I am going.”

Jesus the Way to the Father

5Thomas said to him, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”

6Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.”

 

A Message

Art and Faith, Part 3: Relativity by MC Escher

 

Our third work of art in this sermon series, today we spend some time with the favorite artist among math nerds: Maurits Cornelis Escher, better known by his first and middle initials. Growing up in the Netherlands Escher was a typical little boy with a tremendous amount of untapped potential. Despite harboring the brilliance that would propel his art career, he nearly failed out of school because nothing he was studying connected with the world within his mind. Eventually, though, he found his groove. He studied decorative arts at the Technical College of Delft, and became fascinated with mathematics, especially tessellations, perspective, and impossible shapes. He first made today’s work of art in 1953. You could spend hours examining it, and still your mind would struggle to comprehend this impossible structure. Looking at it through a physics lens, Escher printed here a world with three different zones of gravity. Looking at it through a lens of faith, we see something even more mysterious.

We might see something akin to the “house with many rooms” that Jesus teaches will await for us as we pass from this mortal coil into life eternal, a reality that I capture for the purpose of this sermon with the single word “heaven”. This passage from John is a well-read and oft quoted one, especially in more evangelical circles. Upon first glance these words read like a strict but understandable instruction guide to gain access to heaven: Step 1, commit your heart to Jesus; Step 2, worship no one else; Step 3, do what Jesus says, and when you die Jesus will examine your faith at the pearly gates and gauge whether to admit you based on how well you complied with these three things.

Sounds great. Except there are no steps—or maybe it’s more like a hundred thousand steps instead of three—there is no admission exam in heaven, nor would I argue that there are any pearly gates. Far from identifying Jesus as the border patrol who will demand to see your Good Christian papers upon your entrance to heaven, this passage rather cracks the window open ever so slightly to a world that we can barely wrap our minds around in this life. Jesus teaches us that there is something grandiose and vast in heaven, something specially curated for God’s Beloved (that’s us!), something we’ll eventually see if we just believe and follow Jesus.

Thomas, and not for the last time, expresses Divine Doubt that he knows anything about this world eternal and how any of us gets there. Jesus offers little in the way of explanation, and just tells him again: I am the way. Have a little faith.

How quickly those eight words turn a single staircase into the crazy stairs room of Escher’s imagination. Indeed, life as a Christian often makes us feel like we are trying to follow one of Escher’s road maps. Even knowing what we should do to stay one step behind Jesus on a single day can be oh so challenging. How are we supposed to follow him for life? How can we believe it’s as simple as having a little faith when we have to keep up with the Holy in this mucked up world? We start out innocent and try to walk in his footprints. But then we lose our favorite toy. And then our friend betrays us. And then our grandma dies. And then we see a young person get really, really sick. And then the next town over experiences a tornado in August. And then we navigate debt, breakups, marriages, divorces, firings, hirings, big moves, addictions, and shame. We shuffle the masks around in our purse as we prepare to go out in month 6 of COVID-19 quarantine. We flip between coverage of the Democratic National Convention and the Republican National Convention, we see police officers in Kenosha shoot an unarmed black man seven times and then a few days later praise a young white man for his illegal possession of a military grade weapon and his shooting of three people.

Where is that house, Jesus? Are we getting any closer? What will we find when we get there? If heaven’s going to be full of all the same people that live here, then how good can it be?

Like a mathematician-turned-artist picking up a pencil, God draws the staircase just one step at a time, because our minds can’t and shouldn’t be able to comprehend the whole picture. But that doesn’t stop us from imagining.

What do you think heaven looks like? Just for fun, this week I did a Google search of that exact question, and I have to tell you, the answers restored my faith during a tough week. The pictures started predictable:

Clouds, blue skies, angels, and a stairway to get there for you Led Zeppelin fans.

Then we see an additional element, and one that can fill us with trepidation: the gates. Who meets us there? Is there a wall around heaven? Are the doors to the Divine locked? If Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, does that mean that if we don’t know him well enough, if our faith falters, if our testimony lacks strength, or if we aren’t Christian at all, we don’t get in? For the record, I don’t think any of this is what Jesus meant. Like a confused art student looking at an Escher drawing, we overthink it. If Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, it means he’s got it all taken care of. We just have to open our hearts and do our best. But in many ways this is perhaps even more nerve-wrecking for us, the idea that we don’t have control, that we have to surrender all to the Greater One.

When we get past our fear, we start to open our minds and hearts to the beauty that awaits us after a lifetime of knowing Jesus. Some imagine a heaven full of rainbows, with a big castle that looks a little like the Emerald City from The Wizard of Oz.

When we abandon our fear and trust in the Holy, we start imagining more and more that maybe heaven is like something we’ve already seen in this life, and that we took for granted. Maybe heaven is a sunset over the ocean.

Or maybe heaven is in the sunrise over the mountains, with fields full of lilacs. It’s like what Alice Walker said in The Color Purple: “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.” Maybe we’re way too focused on a life after this one, so much so that we fail to see what God is doing all around us right now. Maybe if we take the time to love one another, to celebrate our joys, the soak in the beauty of the earth, to observe the Sacred in small ways all around us, we’d be in heaven everywhere we went.

Bringing that point home, this picture, that came up in my search for “What does heaven look like?” is a real, literal place, and perhaps the most beautiful human made structure I’ve ever seen. It’s the Schloss in Neuschwanstein, Germany. It’s the model for the big castle in the Magic Kingdom in Disney World. On days when we feel like all we see from humanity is violence, greed, and fallenness, remember that people built this, and remember that God created us in the Holy Image and called us good.

Like Escher showed us all those years ago, it’s all a matter of perspective.

For the record, I think heaven looks like this. A theme park (Six Flags Great America in Gurnee, Illinois, to be more specific) where Jesus welcomes you in with a huge hug and then hands you a map and tells you to go have fun. I’d go straight to Grandma’s Rocking Chair, and be joyously reunited with Grandma G. I’d golf with Grandpa F, go to an Eastern Star meeting with Grandma F (because they totally have those in heaven), go to the music lounge and ask King David to sing me a Psalm, and then, of course, go on a bazillion roller coasters.

The most important thing is the very first thing Jesus told us: take comfort. Trust in Jesus. It may all be totally overwhelming now, but one day we’ll all be on the Divine Ferris Wheel and everything will make perfect sense.

A Benediction:

Our God, our Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, will guard our going out and our coming in, for this time on and forever more. And as all of God’s people we all say, “Amen”.