Living in Christina's World--March 12, 2020

Living in Christina's World--March 12, 2020

"For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation. For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us, as it written, 'I have made you the father of many nations')--in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist." [Romans 4:13-17]

I want to tell you about one of my favorite paintings in the world, and why it has taught me a great deal (more, even, than I realized at first) about grace.

Below you is Andrew Wyeth's 1948 painting entitled, simply, "Christina's World."

I find this painting absolutely beautiful, simply in his depiction of the field, the woman, the barn, and the farm house as they are.  But beyond that, it deepens my appreciation even more to know that the woman in the foreground, based off of Wyeth's real-life neighbor Anna Christina Olson, was stricken with a form of neuropathy that forced her to crawl on her hands and knees like this, and that this scene was inspired by a real moment in which Wyeth saw her straining across the filed like this across the field to her actual house.  In other words, the artist has taken something we might have called "sad" or "unpleasant to look at" and helped us to see the beauty of it.  Instead of simply seeing the woman in terms of her diagnosis or disability, the artist has helped to see both beauty and the strength of this woman, by creating a painting to retell the moment (with her permission, of course, and using his own wife actually as the torso model after being inspired by a real-life event).  

Anybody else might have just seen her as her diagnosis ("She's just a cripple," you can imagine someone thoughtlessly putting it, or "Who would want a painting of a paralyzed woman to put up on their wall?").  But in the eye of an artist, something beautiful has been created, something that does not hide her condition but also brings out things we might otherwise have overlooked: her strength, her persistence, her graceful beauty even in the struggle.  

And I want to suggest that this is what God does with each of us as well.  God takes what others might see simply as our liabilities, our weaknesses, or even our dead-ness, and with the eye of a master artist, God raises up beauty... grace... strength... life.  Or, like the song by U2 puts it, "Grace makes beauty out of ugly things... grace finds goodness in everything."

That's what I hear in these words from Paul's letter to the Romans as he thinks about our ancestor in the faith, Abraham.  Paul recognizes that Abraham isn't really the hero of his story--God is.  What Abraham brought to the picture was his near-dead-ness: he was approaching a hundred years old, had been worshiping the idols of the Chaldeans, and had no prospects of continuing the family line through children since he and his wife didn't have any.  Abraham didn't even have a perfect permanent record of rule-following, since there was no "Law of Moses" yet, and the commandments hadn't been given yet.  In other words, what Abraham had to offer looked only like weakness, nothingness, and near deadness.

But in the eye of a master artist, what seems only like weakness becomes the source of beauty and strength and life.  What seems dead becomes the point where resurrection breaks out.  And as Paul sees it, it is not any obviously impressive traits or accomplishments of Abraham that puts him in good standing with God--it is only his willinges to trust, even feebly and shakily, that God can bring life out of his near-deadness, and that God can bring beauty out of what looks to anybody else only like ugliness.

Abraham is the subject the story, but God is the master artists to lifts up the life and vitality in what otherwise might seem a tragic life story.  Maybe in a similar way to what a painter like Andrew Wyeth does to his friend and neighbor Christina--she is the subject of the painting, but it is the eye and hand of a skilled artist that creates beauty and hope where others might only see pity and sorrow.  It is an act of creation out of nothing, or an act of resurrection if you like.  And this is exactly what the God of the Scriptures keeps doing all of the time: finding us just as we are, and, without waiting for us to fit anybody else's definition of being "good enough" or "strong enough" or "great enough" or "beautiful enough," God just brings life out of our deathliness.  It's not a lie or a fiction, but it is the work of a master artist whose creative eye raises up what otherwise would have gone unseen.

And this is how God keeps operating for each of us.  Where the world looks at you or me and sees only our brokenness, our non-good-enough-ness, or our dead-ness, God creates something beautfiul and true out of us. God acknowledges the struggles, the setbacks, and the sorrows we bear, but instead of just tossing us away as damaged goods, God raises us up and brings life to the foreground.

Maybe the challenge of this day is not to pretend our struggles, our weak places, or our needs are not there, but to seek for God to show us ourselves from the view point of God's own Master-Artist perspective, where life comes out of death, and where things come into existence that you'd have sworn weren't there a second ago.

May we have such courage and vision to see things through the resurrection perspective of God.

Lord God, we offer you ourselves as we are, asking for you with your creative eye to help us to envision life in us where we might have overlooked it, and to bring life out of us where we can see only deadness.