“To the present hour we are hungry and thirsty, we are poorly clothed and beaten and homeless, and we grow weary from the work of our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we speak kindly. We have become like the rubbish of the world, the dregs of all things, to this very day.” [1 Corinthians 4:11-13]
Sometimes I need to be reminded that everything in a work of art is really a choice of the artist. You might forget that if you are walking through the gallery of a museum somewhere; you might assume that a landscape painted by some old master, or a still life with fruit and flowers, is nothing more than an exact representation of “real things.” And, sure, you might be able to track down the point from which the artist set up an easel and see how well the picture on the canvas aligns with the view before you. But you’d also start to notice how artists “edit” reality, too, even when painting scenes from daily life. You notice how modern intrusions like power lines or distant smokestacks might be left out of a painting because the artist thought they detracted from the scene. You might recognize that a particular painting actually merges features from several locations into one ideal scene. Or it might even dawn on you that it was an artist’s choice to put these particular fruits in this particular bowl, and to select these particular flowers.
It’s the same with every kind of art. Da Vinci had to tell the woman posing for what we call the Mona Lisa how he wanted her to sit; even her enigmatic hint of a smile is an artistic choice, a collaboration between model and painter. (As comedian and erstwhile art student Hannah Gadsby has pointed out, too, we sometimes forget that artists make choices about how people are posed, who is clothed... and who is not, and who will be treated as an object rather than a subject. Every Renaissance painting of some woman lounging luxuriously on a couch with fabric draped in unlikely ways came into existence, not because a painter just happened upon that exact scene from daily life, but because they hired models and staged them to sit in precisely those poses for hours on end.) Photographers have to choose what to include in the frame of their photo, and what to leave out, what angle to select, and how much to adjust the warmth of the colors or the contrast between the lights and darks. These are not random accidents—they are choices.
When you look at a piece of artwork with that awareness in mind, it opens up a whole new appreciation for the artist’s vision and process. The composition, the themes, the story, the things included and things left out, these are not “given” but chosen by an artist; it’s just that sometimes an artist does those things so well that it seems effortless, like the art just flowed into existence from a brush or a camera out of thin air.
The more I read the story of the early community of Jesus’ followers, whether in the book of Acts, later sources, or in New Testament letters like First Corinthians here, the more I realize the sheer artistry of the Christian church. I don’t mean that they were painters or sculptors (although pretty quickly we do find samples of Christian art in the archaeological record), but that they were as deliberate in their choices about how they lived as a master painter is in arranging the composition of a still life. And the sticking point is the same: sometimes we forget how much of their life’s work was actually a choice, not merely the random accidents they could do nothing about. When a painter includes a blemish on a piece of fruit in their painting, it means the artist chose to keep that, when he or she just as easily could have “edited” it out of the painted version. And when the early Christians responded to hatred and hostility with kindness and endurance, it means they chose to respond with love rather than violence, when they certainly had other options. They chose to respond in the ways they were convinced Jesus responded—with suffering love rather than answering evil with evil. If we overlook that, we miss out on the utter creativity of Jesus’ followers in bringing beauty from the midst of the world’s ugliness.
When Paul starts listing off hardships he is facing here in these verses, it could seem at first like he's just complaining about the random difficulties life has thrown at him, over which he has no control. He's hungry and thirsty, and his clothes have holes in the knees. He's got nowhere to lay his head, and he's exhausted at the end of the day from doing work to buy his daily bread, before he has to find the strength to do it all over again tomorrow. Those things at first just sound like the struggles that might come upon anybody in daily life who is trying to get by in a harsh time. But the further you go on in Paul's list, it becomes clear that these are not just unchangeable circumstances over which Paul has had no control. Rather, Paul has chosen a certain way of life because he is committed to bringing the beauty of Christ into a world full of ugly and mean. He has been willing to endure hunger and homelessness and all the rest, and he has been willing to answer hostility with mercy. These are not merely thrust upon him--they are choices.
Because he is convinced Jesus has called him to bring the good news into new places and new people, Paul knows that he is choosing a life where hardship may come. He is choosing a particular way of responding to the hostile authorities or the dangers of a lynch-mob. He knows he will face times when he is on the receiving end of hatred and threats, and he has to decide in advance how he will respond. The conventional wisdom would say, "If they're gonna threaten you, you've gotta hit 'em first." The logic of the day taught, "If they punch you, you punch back harder, so you don't look like a loser." Paul's response to answer cursing with blessing and persecution with endurance was a choice--but an often overlooked one.
We rarely see suffering as something chosen. We usually tend to think that when someone is going through hardship it's just what life has given them. But for the followers of Jesus, from the earliest days, living out our faith often meant the intentional choice to practice suffering love--love that was willing to endure hardship if it meant lightening the load of someone else, love that was committed to breaking the cycle of violence, love that looked like Jesus. These were choices that folks like Paul made, choices that arose out of our commitment to the way of Jesus.
What I want to suggest for each of us today is that these choices are still there for us to step into as well. We live in a time as well where the conventional wisdom still says, "When someone else is your enemy, you have to get them before they get you." The logic of our time still teaches, "You gotta look out for Number One, so shoot first and ask questions later." We still live in a world where a lot of loud voices say you have to meet hatred with more hatred, answer violence with more violence, and kill them before they kill you. The world's logic cannot fathom that how we respond to hostility and hatred is a choice we can make--that we can choose differently than endless death and enmity. We can. Every day brings the choice of how we respond to the world's meanness. Every day we can either get swept up unthinkingly in the conventional wisdom, or we can see the power in our hands to choose another way. I will be honest with you--it is hard to make that unexpected choice, and it takes more courage to defy the world's expectations than to go along with its dog-eat-dog mindset. It takes more bravery to say, "No, I will not perpetuate the same old cycles of hate and hostility," than it does to wave a weapon at your perceived enemy. And such bravery is often in short supply.
Today, we can choose, like Paul did, to do something beautiful rather than staying stuck in the world's ugliness without a second thought. We can make the unexpected choice, like an artist, and bring little transformations to the world around us. But it won't happen by accident, and it won't happen automatically. It demands our decision daily to resist the pull of hatred with a defiant, creative kind of love.
Lord Jesus, help us see our agency in the world around us, and give us the courage to choose the way of self-giving love.
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