Words for Worship
Ministry Today
In the Picture?
Texts:
Psalms: 139.1-12
Matthew 28.16-20
They say there as more photographs in the world than bricks. In fact, pictures are one of the most transacted objects on the planet with newspapers, wallets, brochures and the internet moving literally billions of images per day. No wonder we use expressions like seeing the whole picture or can you picture it without any thought.
Yet thinking about pictures is apt for today. Indeed the particular photograph I have mind, is enormously apposite for any 30th of December. For the one I am recollecting was taken behind the Gare St Lazare by Henri Cartier Bresson in 1932. If you are not familiar with the study, let me describe it to you. Its main subject is nothing more than a man leaping over a huge puddle. However, other elements are portentous of the year Hitler came to power. For its gypsies’ warning includes a pile of rubble and a tattered poster in mid distance for a polish ballet dance company. There is also a high fence with shadowy people beyond, maybe some grave stones and the forbidding black roofs of the station belch grey smoke. Moreover, the man is leaping out of the picture and there is no clue as to where he would land. In its few elements then, many have divined the story of a Europe starting on its journey to the abyss of total war, occupation and the holocaust. A continent commencing its jump into what it knew not.
Of course, our leap in the next 48 hours from 2007 into 2008 is surely less audacious yet it can be almost as foreboding. For who would not stay behind in the nostalgia of Christmas and the old year that we have the full picture of?
And something of what worries, frightens even repulses us about the unseen year comes across in the work of another photographer. Now she was of the same era as Cartier Bresson. This time it was a photographer employed to depict the ravages of poverty upon agricultural America in the 30s. She was Dorothea Lang. And her iconic image is the Migrant mother. In 1960 she described how she took this portrayal of hopeless impoverishment. This is what she said: I saw and approached the woman as if drawn by a magnet. She asked no questions nor did I ask her name or her history. The outcome, showing a women and her two ragged children staring into the distance; is an image that indeed contrasts with all the cosy sentimentality of a Christmas card’s depiction of Mary and child in stable bare.
Well, I am unsure how many of us fear financial poverty but our anxiety for the New Year can be sourced by other poverties. For we worry about the loss of health, loved-ones, relationships and, yes, even faith. But underlying even these is something even more insidious; the fear of the poverty of purpose. Because we can in our soul be like Dorothea Lang’s migrant mother. That is to look into the unknown and perceive no point in its struggle, it is to see no destiny ahead and it is to feel our name is being unasked for history.
How then do we find the consolation to let go of the old year with all its certainties and riches for unseen shores of an uncharted year?
To answer that I need to tell you of the images of favourite photographer working in the 20s and 30s. For the work of Ansell Adams has suggested to many what exactly photos as art should be. Because his breathtakingly detailed pictures of the western states’ wildernesses are what we want to hang on the wall as a new calendar two days hence. In fact, probably his most famous picture is of Half Dome Mountain. For he liked nothing better to work in the Yosemite national park where he took a special interest in its ecology and preservation. And I would defy anyone not to look at one of his images and not be astounded by its beauty.
But then that should not surprise us for despite its moments of ugliness usually manmade, the world still contains great beauty. Indeed, beauty is one of the constants that we can rely on being there in our new year. The beauty of what we can do with our riches, the beauty of what we can do with our good health, the beauty of friendships and family relationships that enrich our lives and enliven us to be there for others. Nevertheless, the greatest beauty we can rely on is the most universal constant of all – and that is the loving concern God has for us – a love that was depicted in such detail in the picture by Christ coming down to earth.
Surely it was something of this beautiful love that the psalmist was trying to grapple with. For I don’t think I am making too much of it when I suggest that his motive for writing so well of the love of God was the same anxious malaise that we can feel today. He too may well have been weighed down with the sentiment of poverty of purpose, of destination and of having some impact on history. No wonder on this day, we again can feel the comfort of those scalp tingling words – if I make my bed in the depths you are there.
If I rise take my flight into the dawn
If I settle on the far side of the sea
Even there your hand will guide me
Your right hand will hold me fast.
For darkness is as light to you.
However, the images that Ansell produced were not just comforting by depicting the permanent beauty of the earth, his images were also uplifting. And art historians believed that he achieved that by focussing on high points through lifting our eyes from the valley floor up to the peaks.
So if we find comfort in scripture’s record of the beauty of God’s love, as the psalmist did, can we find in its pages more?
Can we find its encouragement to be willing to enter forthcoming New Year?
We can indeed learn the Ansell Adams lesson and uplifted by the Bible’s high points. And what greater high point can there be than the pinnacle of the great commission all Christ’s disciples; the very promise that allowed a worried and dispirited group to go over the horizon and find their own destiny and their place in our history. For there can be no bigger picture of God’s heartening love than those words – and surely I am with you always to the very end of the age.
However, to utterly dispel our sense of anxiety, our fear of our own personal poverty and worries of being forgotten in history we can crave more. For today most of all we come seeking something that will inspire us out of the trenches and propel us joyfully into the no man’s land of January. In fact, we come today wanting not just hope but delight at the opportunities in the balance of experiences ahead.
Well if the reasons for the effectiveness of Lange and Adams photographs can readily be ascertained, that is not the case for the work of Cartier Bresson. For it seems that rather like life itself he takes a whole lot of different and often competing elements and makes them into a work of art. He had indeed an eye for a complete picture. For it has been said that when we look at his images we see the comic, the sad, the banal and the tragic all kept in a single balance. Indeed, he took the disperate, the disharmonious, the sad and the cheering and made them into history.
And he achieves that stunt by one belief alone. That there was one decisive moment that the geometry of dissecting lines and shapes were complete. In simpler terms there was only one moment to press the shutter.
So today God’s love can give us mere comfort to leave the past behind; so to his concern can encourage us to move on. But if we really want to grab 2008 with vigour and pleasure we need something more; we need to see his constant presence in our lives.
And only then when we see all our imbalances brought into a harmonious whole by his completion do we press the button in faith; do we leap gleefully into the New Year and do we possess forever our better picture.
Amen
In the Picture?