How to Be Creative in a Culture of Anger (Summer Arts Week 4)

Isaiah 2:1-5

Luke 22:47-53

Let’s look first at the images in your printed liturgy.  There are three photographs by Gordon Parks: Emerging Man (1952), The Fontanelles at the Poverty Board (1967), and Black Children and White Doll (1942). 

What do you see?  What do you notice?  What do you feel?

Gordon once said that his goal as a photographer was to have you the viewer thinking about the image, about reality, and not about him the photographer.  Did he succeed on that score? 

 

One of his famous early photographs was “American Gothic.”  It’s an African American cleaning woman, Ella Watson, standing in front of an American Flag, holding a mop and a broom.  She is posed – and the image is titled – in a way that parodies a previous American Gothic painting of simple, white, midwestern farmers.  Parks said later that the image was angry, was too much about his anger, too much about him.  When you see it you might think, this is a photographer with an angry viewpoint. And if you think that, you can dismiss him, and the problems of racism woven through the photograph. 

But you cannot dismiss the Fontanelles.  They are there.  And you cannot dismiss the children with the doll.  They are not posing.  They are just sitting against a wall, at home.  This is reality.  This is the world we live in. 

Is art valuable?  Is creativity valuable?  These are hard questions to answer.  I think many of us reflexively think, “Not really.   I mean, they’re nice luxuries.  But they’re not really at the white hot center of life.  They’re ornamental, window dressing, nice if you have the time and leisure for them.”

It might seem like the times we’re in don’t really have room for art, for creativity, for beauty, and for large, slow-moving, deeply considered images and ideas.  After all, the economy is bad.  Good jobs are hard to come by.  The middle class is shrinking.  Europe is falling apart.  The stock market tumbled last week.  We can’t agree on terrorist threats and gun legislation.  And we’re in the middle of an election cycle.  Is this really any time to doodle and draw, plant flowers or start a business, sculpt or write poetry?

In this economy, in this political climate, in this social media culture – it’s tough to be a kind person, a courageous person, a peace-loving person.  All of us wrestle with feelings of anger and fear.  And I would argue that it is precisely at this moment that we are starved for more art, more creativity, more making, more imagination, more innovative problem solving.

If you haven’t read Gordon Parks’ autobiography, A Choice of Weapons, I highly recommend it.  Parks was born and raised here in Fort Scott.  It was a terrible, hateful, degrading time to be black.  His mother died when he was sixteen and he went to live with his older sister in St. Paul.  Her husband was abusive and violent and kicked Gordon out of the house.  So Gordon was homeless, sometimes without work, often starving, frequently desperate and despairing.

When Parks’ luck ran out in the Minneaplis/St. Paul area, he jumped a train to Chicago.  He almost froze to death on the way.  He got downtown and found a dirty flophouse called the Hotel Southland on Wabash Avenue.  Rooms were twenty five cents a night.  He asked for a room.  They told him to go to the colored section on the South Side of the city.  He said he’d work, so the manager gave him a room.

Here’s how Parks describes the place . . . (p. 66, 68).  It was a building full of cramped cages for various kinds of criminals and the mentally ill.

One night a man ran past Parks on the stairs.  Police were chasing him.  He’d been involved in a robbery.  They found him hiding under Parks’ bed.  . . . (p. 72).  He left his gun under the bed.  And Parks found it three weeks later.

One Saturday, when Parks went to collect his pay, Big John – who ran the place – was drunk.  He refused to pay, referred to him in racist terms, beat him and threatened to kill him.  Parks went upstairs to gather his things to leave.  And he found the gun.  He went back downstairs and pointed the gun at Big John and demanded his pay.  He was ready to shoot but didn’t have to.  He left there, hurried across the river bridge, and when no one was looking, pitched the gun into the river.

Later Parks found work as a waiter on the North Coast Limited train that ran between Minneapolis and Chicago.  He had heard about a nasty Southerner named Barnes who was a head steward.  Most African Americans switched crews rather than have to work for Barnes.  Parks thought he could handle it.  Parks would stay up late in the dining car reading, and Barnes would turn the light off, calling him an “uppity nigra”.  Parks turned the lights back on.  Barnes retaliated in every way he could, piling extra work on Parks.  One night, Barnes pushed Parks’ arm and made him spill four bowls of hot soup on a passenger and himself. 

Parks writes, “I forgot that it was winter, that I had a family and needed a job.  I shoved Barnes into the pantry, snatched up a bread knife and held it against his throat.”  The other waiters pulled them apart. 

These kinds of experiences cultivated a deep growing anger in Parks, understandably. . . . (p. 95a, p. 127).

But there was another way opening to Parks.  When working on the train, he found magazines filled with powerful images of migrant workers.  They were pictures taken by photographers working for the Farm Security Administration.  Then on a layover, he wandered into the Chicago Art Institute and saw images of poverty and migrant workers taken by photographers working for the FSA.  And it was then that Gordon realized the power of images.  He bought a camera and taught himself how to take pictures.

Rather than fight with knives and guns and fists and hateful words, Gordon determined to shine a light on poverty and racism by taking photographs.  Images could show, better than anything else, the beauty and dignity of all people.  He learned how to be creative in an angry world.  Hateful retaliation would have destroyed others and himself.  But to make pictures – that would enable a kind of healing newness to emerge in a troubled time.

The readings today imagine a way of life beyond revenge and retaliation.  Those things happen, obviously.  The world is a violent place.  We have all been caught up in it.  The question is whether we are full participants in the revenge, retaliation, violence and anger around us, of whether can begin to live to a new tune.  There is music playing – God’s music – and it is often faint.  You have to want to hear it.  But the music is for those who want to share in the new world of peacemaking, justice, and compassion that God is building amidst the old world of competition and success at all costs. 

The readings ask us if we want something more creative and fulfilling than a life of revenge and retaliation.  They ask us to imagine a life that exchanges anger, fear, and hatred for beauty, justice, friendship, cooperation, and forgiveness.  Here’s the hard truth of the good news: no one else is going to stop the flow of mean-spirited talk and hateful actions.  It has to stop in you.  And it has to stop in me.  What I mean is – the only “solution” – if it’s a solution at all – is to open ourselves to the work of God in the depths of our lives so that we can create a different kind of life.  Now whether this will add up to something larger – I guess that’s up to God and this thing we call “God’s kingdom.”

And so make something.  Make a friendship.  Make a meal.  Make a garden or flower bed.  Make a diary or journal.  Make a business or a side-project.  Make a quilt or a table.  Let your energy flow clean and fresh, purified from the anger and fear that drive so much of what we do.  Let your natural energies craft something new in the world. 

The readings are not about personal piety.  They do not pare down God’s dreams for the world to something like the flimsy little frame of your life or mine.  God’s dreams are for reconciliation, healing, and blessing between all peoples of the world.  It is a very political dream.  It is a public, visible dream.  And so we cannot let ourselves off the hook by saying that we personally aren’t harming others.  We have a voice.  We have minds and imaginations.  We have an allegiance to Jesus’ way of life.  We have commitments to non-violence in a violent world.  Don’t think for a minute that non-violence was easy for Jesus, or for the early followers of Jesus who wrote the gospels.  They urged the non-violent way of peaceful resistance in a climate shot through with hatred, violence, and fear.  At the tip of the spear, they didn’t blink.  They stuck to peacemaking when the costs were high.  We have to do the same now.

Both passages imagine creative responses to God’s work in the world.  Making ploughshares is creative work.  And it signals even more creative work – tilling and cultivating a field.  Jesus’ healing of the man’s ear is creative work.  Violence always cuts off and cuts away.  Healing always mends and puts back together. 

Both readings suggest a larger image – God’s new community of friends as a creative work.  So – don’t miss this – being part of a congregation is creative.  By being here, by belonging here, you are part of something fundamentally creative.  You have bet your life that a community of friends following Jesus Christ is a powerful, healing, blessing thing.  You are contributing your life and voice and skills to an ongoing, risky, courageous project. 

Your generosity, prayer and support makes possible this always moving work of art we call church.  It is all about beauty and blessing, not hatred and retaliation.  It is all about creating friendships and connections, not naming and excluding enemies.  It is all about the ferociously creative task of gathering up our messy, disordered lives and offering them to each other, and to God, in the hopes that something kind and compassionate can be made of them.  Come Holy Spirit, and make something beautiful in us and between us.  Amen.