Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom has two birthdays: her date of birth – April 21st – and the official holiday marking her birth, usually the second Saturday in June. She had a grand 90th birthday several weeks ago.
The church isn’t all that different from the Queen. It has two birthdays. We don’t really know when the church was birthed. Theologians will offer a variety of possibilities for that. But we have the official birthday – today, the Day of Pentecost – which marks the giving of the Holy Spirit to the apostles. And what a party that was, right there in the middle of Jerusalem. Hijinks and hilarity, celebratory toasts in a multitude of languages, and sheer unadulterated amazement.
I don’t think that they had cake and ice cream, but they did have gifts. In some cultures it is the birthday person who gives the gifts. In a lot of children’s parties today, there are little gift bags for each one attending. But of course there are the gifts for the natal honoree.
The Holy Spirit seems to serve as both attendees’ gifts and as the gift for the center of attention, in this case the nascent church. That’s because the people who were there – apostles, hangers on, and bystanders alike – were the church in that creation moment.
What was really wonderful was that the gifts of the Holy Spirit were tailored with each recipient in mind. You heard the list, They range from Rome in the west to Iran in the east, from the Black Sea in the north to the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea and the Arabian peninsula and everywhere in between, including the local Judean community. What a mixture of people. They may have been visitors, but when they returned home did they ever have a story to tell.
All those Pentecost tongues of fire represent gifts of the Spirit. Those gifts are among the earliest treasures of the church. You won’t find them in shrines or museums. They won’t be in arks and reliquaries found in ancient churches. These treasures are all around us.
On Pentecost Sunday we celebrate what it means to become God’s heirs, joint heirs with Christ, inspirited expressions of God’s handiwork, and curators of the treasures of the church. God’s creative energy is once again poured out and passed on to the world, transforming it and redeeming it. All those “led by the Spirit” are swept up in this new burst of creativity. Who cannot be changed forever by an encounter with this spirit of adoption?
The church has bequeathed to each succeeding generation a growing collection of treasures. Some are ancient, as in the Roman catacombs. Others are Medieval, or Renaissance, or classical. Others are contemporary. Any cathedral or world class museum may have them. But some of them may be found in less impressive places. I remember being awash with rococo art in Bavaria and Austria and then pleasantly surprised by a simple, almost primitive folk art mural in a small parish church the size of our building.
To start to discover the church’s treasures, a person needs to go to what started out as the private art collection of the Tsars, but today is known as The State Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia. It has three million art works on display making it, some believe,“The World’s Greatest Museum.”
There are 24 Rembrandts in the Hermitage. Many people think that “The Return of the Prodigal Son,” which dates from the last tragic years of the artist, is the best of them all. It was Henri Nouwen’s favorite painting, and the basis for his book The Prodigal Son.
In an essay on Rembrandt, Georg Simmel claims that “for the first time in the history of art,” Rembrandt portrays the piety of the soul, not the religion of the church, and in this painting “people are no longer in an objectively religious world; they are subjectively religious in an objectively indifferent world.” Rembrandt's unique achievement, says Simmel, is that “he has captured the religious mood and sense of grandeur as the general element of his works, with light as the visual agent of this generality.” (1)
One personal favorite is Salvador Dali’s 1951 “Christ of Saint John of the Cross,” which hangs in the Glasgow Art Museum. It is the most popular of all Dali's religious works. The figure of the crucified Christ dominates the Bay of Port Lligat. The painting was inspired by a drawing, preserved in the Convent of the Incarnation in Avila, Spain, and done by the mystic Saint John of the Cross himself after he had seen this vision of Christ during an ecstasy. Dali wrote in 1951, “I had a ‘cosmic dream’ in which I saw this image in color and which in my dream represented the ‘nucleus of the atom’. This nucleus later took on a metaphysical sense; I considered in ‘the very unity of the universe’, the Christ!” (2)
But wait a minute!
Are these really the greatest treasures in the history of the Christian church? You don't have to go to The State Hermitage, Glasgow, Coventry, or any other museum to view the greatest art treasures in the history of the church. Pentecost Sunday proclaims that if you want to see the church’s greatest art treasures, GO HOME. STAY HOME. Look all around you. Open your eyes to the acts of service, the acts of grace, the acts of compassion going on all around you by heirs of Christ, the true treasures of the church. Didn’t Jesus himself say:
“I was hungry and you gave me food to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you gave me clothes to wear. I was sick and you took care of me. I was in prison and you visited me” (Matthew 25:35-36)?While God may give the Spirit to inspire great artists like Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Dali, and others, we know for certain that God sent the Spirit to be born in you.
God sent Jesus to be born in you. In the words of onetime Methodist, Vincent van Gogh, “Christ is more of an artist than the artists; he works in the living spirit and the living flesh; he makes [people] instead of statues.”
God is calling this church to be the greatest art treasure. God is calling you to be the church’s greatest art treasure. In the words of Ephesians 2:10, “We are God’s accomplishment, created in Christ Jesus to do good things. God planned for these good things to be the way that we live our lives.” Or as some translations render it, "You are God’s poem” and others, “You are God’s handiwork,” which really means “You are God’s artwork.”
God’s accomplishments, God’s handiwork, the church’s art treasures come in all shapes and sizes, all colors and ages. In fact, one is only five years old. One day he was walking to Grandma’s house after attending Sunday school. His lesson for the day had been Jesus’ “Parable of the Last Judgment,” and he couldn't get out of his head the teacher's comment, “When you give something to another person, you're really giving it to Jesus.”
Walking through a park, he noticed an elderly woman sitting on a bench, feeding some pigeons. She looked lost and lonely. So he went over to her, sat down, took from his pocket a package of M&M’s, and offered her some. She smiled and took them.
The boy liked her smile so much that, after she had eaten the M&M’s, he gave her more. This time they exchanged smiles and, for a while, they sat together in silence, just smiling at each other.
Finally, the boy got up to leave. As he began to walk away, he turned, ran back to the bench, and gave the woman a big hug. She gave him her very best smile.
When he arrived at his grandma’s house, she saw a big smile on his face and asked, “What made you so happy?” He said, “I shared my M&M’s with Jesus. And she has a great smile.”
Meanwhile, the woman on the bench returned to her little apartment where she lived with her sister. “You’re all smiles,” said the sister. “What made you so happy today?” She replied, “I was sitting in the park, eating M&M’s with Jesus. And you know, he looks a lot younger than I expected.”
Who are the church’s real treasures of art? You are. Each and every one of you are a treasure for the church, just as each of you are a fellow heir with Christ.
It has become a snide expression to say of someone, “He’s quite a piece of work.” But God sincerely says precisely that of you and of me. As the Pentecost Spirit of God rests upon us, we are indeed each one of us pieces of work, God’s work. You, me, and those around us are works in progress that God is creating for his glory. Let us recognize the genius of the Holy Spirit in each of us and be open to the brush strokes of the Spirit in our daily lives.
General Resource: “The Church’s Greatest Art Treasures,” Homiletics, May 31, 1998; http://www.homileticsonline.com/subscriber/btl_display.asp?installment_id=2839
(1) Georg Simmel, “Rembrandt's Religious Art [1914],” Essays on Religion [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997], 78-97.
(2) http://www.dalipaintings.net/christ-of-saint-john-of-the-cross.jsp
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
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