At the close of Sunday’s service, I picked up a guitar and played a version of Psalm 23 by Trevor Morgan. I’ve long found its melody had a kind of haunting beauty to it, and Trevor Morgan doesn’t get the play on the radio that he deserves as a musician and artist. While I anticipated people would appreciate the (presumably) unfamiliar rendition of a familiar song, I had not predicted that some assumed I had written the composition myself. To speak frankly, few have ever assumed much of me in the way of such artistry…… scholarship, yes; but artistry, no.
It is true that I write poetry, though I have only recently been fairly open about that. I write for myself; and while it is nice to have others appreciate and resonate with what I have written, the real value is in the writing itself.
Even fewer people know I have actually written some songs. Most of these have been parodies or involved lampooning friends, but a few have been serious.
I have my photography and I enjoy playing music, but the majority of those who have known me make no further assumptions…… and yet you all here at CBC somehow see these “smaller” parts of me more truly than I sometimes acknowledge in myself, assuming this week a capacity in me I was boggled to imagine.
I am humbled. And inspired. And, like Mary, have found myself pondering these things in my heart. And curiously, the Spirit keeps turning me back toward Revelation.
I’ve been learning these past weeks that Revelation is a part of the scriptures that has been less explored in this church’s history. For whatever reason (or more truthfully, reasons), it has been as though the Robot from Lost in Space has stood at its threshold, warning “Danger, Will Robinson!”
But the book of Revelation in the New Testament is an apocalypse, and an apocalypse is simply art. The artist, an otherwise unidentified exile named John, paints with brushes of symbol and metaphor, using the colors of the prophetic tradition and the shading of repetitive cycles.
It’s a bit like Georges Seurat’s famous painting at the Art Institute — “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” A pointillism masterpiece, it is made up of thousands upon thousands of dots of color — look at it up close and it doesn’t make sense, but take a few steps back and all those disparate points of seemingly random color blend into an easily comprehensible scene.
An apocalypse can be that way too. Stand too close… focus too much on the details and you can miss the whole picture that is being painted. And the picture — the vision, and not the details — is the whole point. It’s not a roadmap to be followed but an alternate reality to be glimpsed, and once seen to be the seed of our hope and work in the cause of the One who is with us from beginning to end.
The next two Sundays, as we look to passages in Revelation 21 and 22, the picture zooms out into the future and all those details… those dots… merge into unified view. It is one of the most important “scenic overlooks” in the whole of the scriptures, and I hope you’ll be sure to join me as we spend some time appreciating it together and considering what it reveals to us about who is this Jesus that we follow.
Peace+
Pastor Michael