July 4 Proper 9
During our recent vacation in Chicago we saw some wonderful art and stunning architecture. Alden and I toured Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous Robie house near the University of Chicago. We all heard music in Frank Gehry’s Pritzker Pavillion, looked at the city from the top of the John Hancock building (it’s cheaper than the Willis Tower), and spent a few hours in the Art Institute of Chicago looking at masterpieces that even we recognized, thanks in part to a recent viewing of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
But the most thrilling encounter with art and architecture on this trip for me, at least, wasn’t in Chicago at all. It was in a disused shoe factory in St Louis that we visited on our way home.
When you approach the City Museum of St Louis, there’s no question that this is a different kind of museum. It’s less about preserving wonderful old things than putting them to use in the wildest of ways. Outside there is an old airplane fuselage, a rusty steam shovel cockpit and a tree of welded scrap metal whose branches sprout dragon heads at their ends. And between all this lovely wreckage are what look like giant slinkies, tubes of metal mesh and rebar, some of them 40 feet above the ground through which children climb while the blood drains from the faces of any responsible parent watching from below.
Inside the building everything gets only stranger. The distinction between sculpture and performance art props and playground equipment is intentionally blurred with wonderful installations made from huge welded cogs, the long iron arm of an old shoe sewing machine, and the 10 story high coils of sheet metal deep within the building that one may ride as slides down past an old Wurlitzer pipe organ.
A visit to the City Museum is like stepping into a Tim Burton movie, but without a creepy Johnny Depp character (at least during our visit). And the driving artistic and architectural principle of the place seems to be nothing as earnest as “Less is more” or “Form follows function”. But something more like, “Hey, look at this thing over here! I wonder what we could make with it.”
Or, put another way, maybe the creators of the City Museum are the kind of people who could walk into an abandoned building or a scrap metal yard and look around with wonder, saying, “Look, the harvest is plentiful; but the laborers are few.”
Jesus comes off as a pretty severe guy in our gospel lesson today. Maybe not the kind of person who would appreciate the whimsy of a place like the St Louis City Museum. It’s still a little jarring to hear him instruct those 70 disciples to stand in the streets of unwelcoming cities and say, “Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off in protest against you.” Yikes.
Jesus was clear that his disciples were to respond in one way to the towns that were receptive to his message and another way to the towns in which the message was rejected. And because of this we can miss something. The message was exactly the same to both kinds of towns: “The kingdom of God has come near to you.”
To those hospitable places where people welcome and care for these strange itinerant preachers, the good news is, “The kingdom of God has come near to you.” To the towns where these strangers are dismissed and rejected, the news is, “The kingdom of God has come near to you.” The kingdom’s coming apparently had nothing to do with the worthiness or even the actions of the people who were hearing the good news.
So Jesus’ message didn’t seem to be that people need to get their acts together so that God’s kingdom would come near. The kingdom has come near whether you like it or know it or not.
Which may be why Jesus described the world not as a barren wasteland full of ignorant, wicked people, but as a field of fruitfulness and abundance, ready to be harvested. For Jesus, missionary activity didn’t seem to be about delivering the presence of God to people’s lives. Jesus’ project assumed that the world and even the lives of strangers and enemies are full of God given fruit already. The question is about how we can live in such a way that those gifts get harvested and put to good use.
Seeing the world as a ripe field was a radically different way of seeing the world for the people of Jesus’ day, just as it is for us. And I wonder what this change in perspective might mean for us today.
This year we happen to read this story on Independence Day. Reading about Jesus’ sending out these disciples, insisting that there is a great harvest in the lives of people waiting to be gleaned is particularly striking on this day.
Famously engraved on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty are lines from a poem: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” There is a hopefulness and an optimism in those words that sounds quaint, maybe even naïve today. The phrase is not, “Give me your strong, your wealthy, your confident folks with advanced degrees.” It foolishly assumes that even in the lives of people who have been discarded by the world lie great gifts. Apparently we once believed that those lives and those gifts were fields ripe for harvest. Gifts enough to build a country with.
And this seems to be something like Jesus’ view of the world. Something was growing and flourishing in the world before Jesus sent his apostles out to announce that it was nothing less than the kingdom of heaven. He tells his disciples to walk away from the towns that refuse to live as though God’s kingdom has come near, to shake off the dust of their sandals in those communities that refuse to see the world and to see every single life on this earth as gifted by God.
And maybe he was so insistent about walking away from those towns with a warning because it has always been easier to believe that the kingdom of God is somewhere else or was sometime else than to believe that the kingdom of God has drawn near in our very own world right here and right now. Which means that maybe the harsh parts of this passage are what we need to pay closest attention to today.
Perhaps we’re also being called to turn away, to shake the dust from our shoes from those forces that tell us that the kingdom is only in certain towns, only in certain countries, only among certain kinds of people.
We can look at the poor, we can look at the immigrant, we can look at our enemies with fear and suspicion and blame. But is it possible to look at these same people with a Christ like expectancy? Can we look at the cast off and forgotten ones in this world not as useless and in the way, but believing that the kingdom of heaven has come near, that their lives are part of this kingdom, just as Jesus taught?
Wouldn’t we respond to the world differently, wouldn’t we live differently if we really believed this were so? If the church really became a community of people who believe that there are ripe fields of potential in every last member of the human family? Who believe that the kingdom of God has come near not just to us and to our community, but to everyone and every community? And maybe as we come to believe that this hidden kingdom is all around us we could reclaim some of the strange sounding wisdom of our forbears in this country, becoming people once again who can say with great and honest expectation “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” The lives of such people are not burdens. Lives such as these are but more fields ready for harvest.
To see the world as Jesus did is to be a little strange. Which means that the Christian church may need to see itself less as a grand institute of art, with the lives of its members as the masterpieces displayed on its pleasantly lit walls, protected by little ropes and alarms that keep the greasy fingers away. Maybe the church is to be more like a community of people who can step in to the scrap yard of our world, the scrap yard of this remarkable nation and the wild, wild difference of her people, maybe Jesus is calling us to be the sort of community that would step in with welding machines and cutting torches and a sacred, playful expectation, saying, “Wow! Imagine what wonders could be made with all this. Surely the kingdom of heaven has drawn near to us.” Amen.