“Do you like American music?” That’s a question that one of my favourite bands, the Violent Femmes, ask in a song which as you might expect is called American Music. American music is songs that derive from the ancient ballads of mountain music. Songs, as Bob Dylan has said, that come from legends, Bibles and plagues and that are concerned with mystery and death. The Violent Femmes say that yes, they like American music because it is like an ugly lake that reminds them of themselves.
It might seem a strange reason to give for liking a style of music but it is pertinent to today’s reading from James which says that we need mirrors in which to see ourselves as we really are. Too often we live life, James says, like people who look in the mirror and then immediately forget what we are actually like. Music can be one mirror in which we can sometimes be brought up short and see ourselves as we really are but James says that the best mirror for us is God’s perfect law.
Our NT and Gospel readings today are to do with God’s Law, the commands that God gave to the people of Israel and that are recorded for us in what we now call the Old Testament (Mark 7: 1 - 8, 14 & 15, 21 – 23 & James 1: 17 – end). How can that Law be like a mirror to our lives?
The Law shows us two things. First, it shows us what sin is and that we are sinful people. Paul says in both his letters to the Romans and Galatians that the purpose of the Law is to show what wrongdoing is and, by that, to let us know that we are sinners. This is because the standard set in the Law is the standard of God’s holiness and glory and we all fall short of that. Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount that whoever disobeys even the least important commandment and teaches others to do the same will be least in the Kingdom of Heaven and James says that whoever breaks one commandment is guilty of breaking them all. The standard set is God’s perfection and we all fall short. We see that in the Gospel reading in that the Pharisees who accuse the disciples of sin are shown by Jesus to be guilty of sin themselves.
But if this is all that we see in the mirror of God’s Law then it is profoundly distressing and depressing. If this is all then the mirror of God’s Law is like the ugly lake that the Violent Femmes say that American music is; something in which all you can see is your own ugliness reflected.
David Runcorn argues that if “we define sin solely in terms of wrong actions or thoughts, we trivialise it [and] our diagnosis does not go deep enough.” He says that the Pharisees trivialised sin in this way by being pedantically obsessed “with external standards of behaviour” and that that is why “Jesus furiously castigated and mocked the religion of his day.”
Runcorn says that “who we are always comes before what we do” and that “our choices, desires and actions … always flow from our sense of personal identity.” This means that “our deepest need is not primarily to stop doing or saying bad things” because the power and significance of sin “lies not so much in what we are doing or saying, but in who we think we are.” Real sin, Runcorn argues, is insisting on being what we are not; the desire for a life other than the one God intended human beings to live. As James puts it, looking in the mirror and then forgetting who we are by being the people we want to be, not the people God wants us to be.
God wants us to be different from the sinful people that we are and so in the mirror of God’s Law we can also see all that God thinks we can be and longs for us to become. James summarises it by saying that “what God the Father considers to be pure and genuine religion is this; to take care of widows and orphans in their suffering and to keep oneself from being corrupted by the world.” God’s vision for human beings is that we become holy servants.
But this is not something that we can do by ourselves. It is something that happens together with God. It is God who has provided the mirror and God who has come into our world to show us in Jesus what living as a holy servant looks like. We see in Jesus’ life what that way of being human looks like in practice. But more than that, in Jesus, God is reaching out to us to show us that we are loved by him and that he sees our potential for change and for beauty. In Jesus’ story of the Prodigal Son, the son rejects his identity as a child of his Father and leaves home to waste his life. Finally, when he is eating the food of pigs the son looks in the mirror to see himself as he actually is and decides to return home to his father and ask to become one of his servants. But the Father rejoices at his return and welcomes him home as the son he has always been although for a time he rejected that identity. This is a story about us and God. We reject our rightful identity as children of God living as holy servants. We forget what we really look like in the mirror and live as we choose. But when we come to see ourselves as we truly are and return to God we are welcomed as God’s children with all of our potential for becoming the people that he wants us to be.
David Runcorn says that “the deepest awakening of all is to the discovery that we are loved with a wild, prodigal love – without condition.” We are then able to become all that God’s Law says we can be – those who love God with all their being and who love their neighbours as ourselves – because God has first loved us.
When I go away on holiday one of the things I like to do is to visit art galleries in the area where I am staying. One of the artists that I found out about when staying in the Vendée was Charles Milcendeau.
Milcendeau grew up in the Northern Vendée at a village called Soullans surrounded by marshes. He was the son of the innkeeper at Soullans but his artistic talents took him to Paris to study in the same class as Georges Rouault and Henri Matisse. Rouault went on to generally be reckoned as the greatest religious artist of the Twentieth Century while Matisse (together with Picasso) was one of the greatest artists per se of that century. Both Rouault and Matisse came to prominence through the Fauve movement which used strong, emotional colours in paintings at the same time as the Expressionists in Germany were doing the same.
Milcendeau would have had the opportunity to have gone in the same direction as his friends but he chose not to. Instead, inspired by Dutch and Flemish art, he returned to his own people, to the Northern Vendée to paint the people of the marsh. His painting of the flagellation of Christ still hangs in his home Church at Soullans and is one of the first paintings in which he modelled the figures in the painting on local people. This painting, which I went to see, is therefore a major milestone in his journey towards his art in which he shows a sustained and loving attention to a poor and unregarded community. His masterpieces not only capture the physical and cultural settings of his day but bring alive to us today the characters and personalities of the ordinary and unregarded people that he painted. To do this he had to pay attention not just to what those people looked like but also to what they were like and then identify how to convey what they were like as he painted what they looked like. Doing this involved sustained and loving attention to them as people.
Milcendeau’s story seems like a parable to me because his encounter with Christ (in the painting of the flagellation) leads on to him showing a sustained and loving attention to others in his paintings.
It maybe that for Milcendeau painting the people around him as the crowd abusing Jesus was his way of looking in the mirror and seeing himself for what he was; a sinner, an abuser of God. But he was also painting Jesus enduring that abuse in order to show God’s love for those who abuse him. After encountering Jesus in this way in his painting his life purpose clarified and he spent his life paying loving attention to his poor and disregarded community in his paintings of their lives and characters.
James says that if we look closely at ourselves in the mirror of God’s perfect law, paying attention and knowing ourselves to be sinners loved by God then we will go on to become the holy servants that God intended all human beings to become. May it be so for each one of us. Amen
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Violent Femmes - American Music.
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