Controversy, conversation and community

Here's my sermon from today's Eucharist at St Martin-in-the-Fields:

The closest I have come to my 15 minutes of fame or infamy was when I attracted the criticism of Archbishop Cranmer – the contemporary blogger, not the 16th century Reformer – by exhibiting a crucified stormtrooper in a church as part of a contemporary exhibition of Stations of the Cross. The blogging Archbishop assumed and asserted that I could not have pondered the question of what that artwork was actually saying about God’s unique sacrifice and the ultimate source of salvation and thereby he contributed to a 5 minute flurry of controversy.

In the Star Wars films, stormtroopers are the main ground force of the Galactic Empire and are on the dark side in that conflict. The imagery of the dark side in the Star Wars films can be seen as equating to the idea that we are all sinners. In our alienation from God we need God to come to us, becoming one with us, living and dying for us. Being on the dark side, stormtroopers would also have that same need. The ‘Crucified Stormtrooper’ therefore provides us with the possibility of experiencing something of the original sense of scandal that Christ’s crucifixion generated. Both in terms of being controversial and also by revealing the dark side of our human nature, something we prefer to keep well hidden.

Some Christians, like the blogging Archbishop, either failed to see or, perhaps, did not want to confront that aspect of sin in themselves. However, many others who saw the exhibition were able to see the opportunity for reflection and dialogue afforded by the images included. Many of those who saw the exhibition described it as 'striking', 'intriguing', 'uplifting' and 'interesting.' It was commended as an extraordinarily broad-minded, human and thought-provoking exhibition in an extraordinary place with others asking that the church reach out to current artists more often. As a result of the controversy, the curator of the exhibition wrote publicly about his own faith while, in a perceptive meditation, a parishioner asked whether the crucified stormtrooper was us, and suggested that the piece created a dialogue about our own mortality.

The exhibition created a conversation about the crucifixion, human nature, mortality and faith in a way that was similar to the discussion St Paul began when he stood before the Areopagus and spoke about an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god’ (Acts 17.22-31). The Areopagus was the rock of Ares in Athens, a centre of temples, cultural facilities and high court, and also the name of the council that originally served as the central governing body of Athens, but came to be the court with jurisdiction over cases of homicide and other serious crimes. In speaking to the Areopagus Paul was giving a guest lecture, whilst also being, in some senses, on trial.

Pope John Paul II likened the modern media to the New Areopagus, where Christian ideas needed to be explained and defended anew, against disbelief and the gold and silver idols of consumerism. Understanding how St Paul did so in the original Areopagus can assist in understanding how we might initiate or contribute to debate and dialogue in our own day and time, whether virtually or in person.

Paul began where people were by referring to the altar to an unknown god which was to be found amongst the cluster of temples around him. He didn’t criticize those to whom he was speaking. Instead, he commended the breadth of their engagement with religion. He didn’t tell them they were wrong by suggesting they were pagans worshipping the wrong god or gods. Instead, he overaccepted their religious story fitting it into the larger story of what he believed God was doing with the world. Nor did he dismiss their culture. Instead, he made it clear that he had heard and appreciated their poets by making connections between those poets and the message he had come to share. In these ways, he began a dialogue with them about the nature of faith and its engagement with their lives and culture. We read that some scoffed but others said, ‘We will hear you again about this’, and some joined him and became believers.

Paul was able to be in Athens because he had a trade – tentmaking – which enabled him to be supported financially as he travelled and which opened doors and provided contacts that might not otherwise have been open to him. In each place to which he travelled he formed new congregations led by those who came to faith. In each place that he visited he went to the synagogue and sought to speak with those at the heart of the Jewish community, but also welcomed those who were on the edge, often Gentiles, slaves and servants.

St Martin’s has a similar pattern for its ministry. We call it the 4 Cs – compassion, culture, commerce and congregation. It is a pattern for ministry that we share with other churches throughout the UK, and the world, through a movement to renew the church that we call HeartEdge. HeartEdge is about churches developing these 4 Cs. Generating finance and impacting communities via social enterprise and commerce. Culture, in the form of art, music, performance, that re-imagines the Christian narrative for the present. Congregations that develop welcoming liturgies, worship, and day-to-day communal life while also addressing social need and community cohesion. We think nurturing each of these is essential for renewal of the church.

At a time such as this HeartEdge churches, like St Martin’s, are seeking to begin and develop a conversation with our communities and nations, as Paul sought to do in Athens and as I sought to do with the Stations of the Cross exhibition. St Mark’s Church in Pennington, within the Diocese of Winchester, have used their churchyard hedge as a site for yarnbombing to focus the attention of their community on Holocaust Memorial Day, Holy Week and Easter, and, most recently, the VE Day anniversary. Organising online community events and services combined with the organisation of knitting and crochet work for the different yarnbombs has placed St Mark’s at the heart of their community while connecting many who are isolated because of lockdown. St Mark’s has demonstrated that the boundaries of ‘church’ should be much more porous than we had previously imagined and so Rachel Noel, the Vicar of St Mark’s, hopes that in this season we will all get so used to worshipping with, and being led by, a variety of people, that we will in future always seek to find ways to include and value diversity and richness.

St Mark’s Pennington has begun a conversation with their community and the wider Church. It is similar here. When we talk about the work that The Connection at St Martin-in-the-Fields is doing to support those who are homeless in hotel or hostel accommodation at this time, we are sharing our belief in the value and significance of every human being as a child of God. When our Choral Scholars record music to share with other churches in their online services without breaking copyright regulations, we are sharing our belief in the innate creativity of human beings created in the image of a creative God and demonstrating the overflowing generosity of that same God. When the board of our business seek ways to enable that business to survive lockdown and its subsequent impact, we are sharing in the pain and challenges faced currently by all businesspeople while making clear our belief in the value, dignity and ethics of work and working people. When we develop new ways to support congregations and share services in the changed circumstances of lockdown, we are sharing our belief that faith sustains life in each and every season of existence enabling us to live God’s future now.

We seek imperfectly to model these beliefs in our mission and ministry here at St Martin’s, as do all churches in the HeartEdge movement. By doing so, we seek to initiate conversations about what it means to live God’s future now and how we can enjoy a future that is bigger than our past. As with Paul in Athens and the art exhibition in the City of London, so, in our current circumstances, we are seeking to connect compassion, culture, commerce and congregation to draw all engaged in those forms of community into a conversation that explores how we shall now live and who it is that is our neighbour.

When the ‘Crucified Stormtrooper’ was exhibited in the City of London, it seemed that those conversations could only begin on the basis of scandal or sensation. The mainstream media then didn’t seem interested in the ‘good news’ stories of compassionate community engagement that many churches are able to tell. At that time, it seemed as those their interest was only piqued when something controversial was underway.

Now we are in a different season where the ‘good news’ of community compassion and culture, with church at the heart and on the margins, can be heard and is being valued. So, we invite you to join the conversation, to have your say, so that the margins can speak to the centre that we might encounter God in everyone.

As we do so, we will together find a story which connects a series of otherwise inexplicable circumstances, begin to live in that story and then act our part within it. In this way, like those who joined Paul in Athens, we, too, may discover it is the story of what God is doing with the world that reveals where we are and what we are to do.

See the Stations of the Cross exhibition here, read my response to Archbishop Cranmer here and my thoughts on the Church and controversial art here. 

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Bruce Cockburn - Shipwrecked At The Stable Door.

The Centurian and Stormtrooper Crucifixion

The latest Visual Meditation for ArtWay is by Tim Harrold on his own piece entitled The Centurian:

'The Centurion is in part a response to Stormtrooper Crucifixion by Ryan Callahan, which was part of the Stations of the Cross exhibition at St Stephen Walbrook in London in March 2018. This controversial artwork gained much publicity. The Centurion would not have been made were it not for the discovery of a toy Stormtrooper among the collected junk in my studio. So when it was found, I began to think about making a piece that offered an alternative to Stormtrooper Crucifixion.

The Centurion is an assemblage using a mixture of found objects, paint, and printed and handwritten material. It sits in an old drawer from a German chest of drawers ...

The Centurion depicts an icon of contemporary pop culture – a Stormtrooper character from the Star Wars movie franchise – playing the part of the centurion at the crucifixion of Jesus. The casting of the toy Stormtrooper as the centurion seems only natural. Both represent oppression and empire. Both represent regimentation and tyranny. Both represent control by fear. The hand coming through the door is Christ’s. Jesus said, “I am the door.” Here he is reaching into the centurion’s life through his death and resurrection, through his sacrificial blood and healing wounds, through the portal between the dimensions of heaven and earth.'

In the wake of the ill-informed controversy regarding the exhibition of Stormtrooper Crucifixion, I wrote a piece setting out some of the reasons why such a piece should be exhibited in a church - https://joninbetween.blogspot.com/2018/03/how-does-crucified-stormtrooper-glorify.html. Tim Harold's The Centurian and his  ArtWayVisual Meditation demonstrate the value of conversation rather than censorship in regard to controversial works.

More of Tim Harrold's work and writings can be viewed on the ArtWay site. See Looking for clues: the cryptic, the puzzling and the parabolic in the search for meaning and John Espin & Tim Harrold: The Doors of Perception. My review of Tim Harrold's The Perceptualist Eye exhibition at the Wellhouse Gallery can be found here.

The next exhibition at St Stephen Walbrook is Exiles, a body of work by London based Italian photographer Matilde Damele from 17th to 24th September 2019. Taken on the streets of London with her Leica camera, Damele’s black and white photographs evoke and pay homage to great Masters of Photography such as Henri CartierBresson, Diane Arbus and Saul Leiter. For this exhibition, the artist has enlarged and transferred a number of her images onto the challenging surface of the black plastic bin bag. The uneven surface of these art works emphasises the individuality as well as the ephemerality of each of our lives. She will display these as sculptural art works within the circular space of the church, filled with yesterday’s news and discarded packaging, to express how many consider their lives to be cheap, valueless and disposable.

Other of my pieces for Church Times can be found here. My writings for ArtWay can be found here. Those for Artlyst are here and those for Art+Christianity are here.

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The Call - Scene Beyond Dreams.

'Striking', 'intriguing', 'uplifting', 'interesting'

• A useful lesson for my 'A' level art history students
• Striking exhibition
• Extraordinary place for an extraordinarily broad-minded, human and thought-provoking exhibition
• Stations of the Cross are an inspiration
• Very spiritually uplifting
• Fabulous exhibition
• Brilliant show
• Intriguing show. Well done - the church should reach out to current artists more often
• Very good, interesting
• Not impressed by stormtrooper

These are the comments made in the Visitor Book at St Stephen Walbrook during Art Below's Stations of the Cross exhibition. 

While most people attending did't record comments, those that have demonstrate that the Great British Public is more accepting and unfazed by the supposedly controversial than those who make it their job to stir up such controversy in their constant competition for readers, clicks, listeners etc.  

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Bob Dylan - Disease of Conceit.

How does a crucified stormtrooper glorify God?

The blogger Archbishop Cranmer asks the question, ‘How does a crucified stormtrooper glorify God?’ As I see value in exhibiting Ryan Callanan’s ‘Crucified Stormtrooper’ in a church, when he does not, he goes on to assume and assert that I cannot have pondered the question of what this artwork is actually saying about God’s unique sacrifice and the ultimate source of salvation.

The cross was originally a scandal and a stumbling block within the societies to which the Early Church took the Gospel. The Apostles asked their contemporaries to follow a man who had been given a death reserved for the lowest of the low, who had died among thieves, and who was cursed, as was the case, according to the Law of Moses, for anyone who died on a tree.

Christ’s crucifixion is one of the great subjects of Western Art and yet, for the reasons we are been considering, there are very few early crucifixion images as the Early Christians went out of their way to not depict it. We Christians, by contrast, have become so used to speaking about crucifixion that we tend to miss its horror. Instead we have beautiful crosses on or in our churches, in the lapels of our coats, hung around our necks and embossed on our Bibles.

Not only have we tamed the horror of crucifixion in our thinking but we have also tamed the true scandal of the cross; that we are all sinners and that the sinless Christ became sin himself on the cross in order to save us from our sin. In such a context, how do we recapture or represent the true scandal of the cross?

I suggest that one way is to display a crucified stormtrooper in a City church. To do so generates accusations of blasphemy from those who don’t understand that the sinless Christ had to take sin onto himself in order to save us and also the accusation of tackiness from those who seem to think that the beauty of our worship and architecture is what saves us.

In the Star Wars films, stormtroopers are the main ground force of the Galactic Empire, under the leadership of Emperor Palpatine and his commanders, most notably Darth Vader. They are on the dark side in that conflict. That the artist Ryan Callanan chose to create a ‘Crucified Stormtrooper,’ provides Christians and others with the possibility of experiencing something of the sense of scandal that Christ’s crucifixion originally generated.

The imagery of the dark side in the Star Wars films can be seen in this context as equating to the Christian belief that we are all sinners. If we use the imagery opened up for us by ‘Crucified Stormtrooper,’ then we are forced to reflect, much as we dislike the thought, that we are all on the dark side. We are all stormtroopers.

The amazing message of love at the heart of Christianity is that God does something about that situation. God becomes one of us in Christ. He becomes a stormtrooper in order that, through his death, he can take the darkness onto himself and enable us to live in the light. That is the original heartbeat of Christianity, which continues to radically change people's lives on a daily basis around the world when they genuinely acknowledge their own sinfulness. The scandal - the stumbling block - that is the cross, is brought to home to us afresh by including this artwork in this exhibition; particularly to any who view their own assets as the basis for their own self-esteem.

My reflection on the ‘Crucified Stormtrooper’ is unlikely to be what the artist intended when he made the piece. The concept of cross referencing is important in Callanan’s work, taking one item out of its context and splicing it with another to create something that feels familiar but whose meaning is subtly shifted, so he was probably primarily interested in juxtaposing incongruous images. But once he had put the stormtrooper on a cross, he made that reflection possible.

For us to show this work in a church enables that reflection on Christ's love to be seen and shared in a new way and that is why it worthwhile for the Church to show art, especially controversial art, and to explore the questions that it opens up to us. I am interested in putting art exhibitions into churches because I recognise that artists, in their work, are seeking to explore the big philosophical questions in life. Questions like, who am I, where am I, why am I here and is there a God? The Church is also exploring those same questions and, therefore, there is potential for real connection between the Church, artists and those viewing the art in exploring those questions together. We won't all come to the same conclusions or even to any conclusions but exploring the questions and living the questions is a profoundly spiritual thing to do.

Those who have come to the exhibitions I have organised, and many do, generally respond reflectively and with appreciation. Ben Moore, the curator of this exhibition, said that its well-attended Private View was a great success with an atmosphere that had a good warmth and glow about it. In that context, I was able to talk to people, for whom churchgoing is not necessarily a regular feature of their lives, about the art in relation to the love of Christ. That is both a great privilege and opportunity. Ben himself has, as a result of the controversy, written publicly about his faith. He equates the image to the storyline in Star Wars 'The Force Awakens' (2015) where we see ‘a stormtrooper escape from the dark side to come and support the rebellion’ and therefore views 'crucified stormtrooper' as playing into the notion of forgiveness.

In addition, many Christians see no issue with the image. One, who wrote to me, is a collector of Callanan’s work, and stated clearly that it is not offensive. A parishioner, who is thankful that the piece wasn’t removed from the exhibition, has written of how the exhibition has informed his Lenten reading:

‘Like each work on display, individually both ‘Crucified Stormtrooper’ and ‘Dying Slave’ are beautiful and thought provoking. Placed together, they seem to take on an extra dimension - creating a dialogue about our own mortality and relationship with body image - and the extent to which our minds and bodies are a legible witness to our faith. These themes are explored in Chapter 5 of Ben Quash’s Book ‘Abiding’: Wounds that Abide. The reaction of my anonymous friend at church and the subsequent act of moving the Crucified Stormtrooper has meant that all of us, as parishioners and visitors to the exhibition, are bound up in this dialogue.’

I give thanks to God for these and other responses. I think it better by far to engage with these images and discuss the questions they raise, instead of seeking to suppress or censor. I think it important to build relationships with those who are outside the Church but nevertheless grappling with their response to the challenge and scandal of Christ's cross. I think that all these are in play as part of this exhibition and that that is genuinely glorifying to God.

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The Call - I Still Believe.

Statement – Art Below: Stations of the Cross

Art Below's Stations of the Cross exhibition at St Stephen Walbrook has generated considerable media coverage. At today's press call, I shared the following statement about Ryan Callanan's 'Crucified Stormtrooper':

'I am interested in putting art exhibitions into churches because I recognise that artists, in their work, are seeking to explore the big philosophical questions in life. Questions like, who am I, where am I, why am I here and is there a God? The Church is also exploring those same questions and, therefore, there is potential for real connection between the Church, artists and those viewing the art in exploring those questions. We won't all come to the same conclusions or even to any conclusions but exploring the questions and living the questions is a profoundly spiritual thing to do.

To bring an artwork like 'Crucified Stormtrooper' into a church enables us to see key aspects of the Christian faith in new ways because it challenges the traditional ways in which we picture Christ. Stormtroopers are on the dark side and that perception equates to the Christian belief that we are all sinners. If we use the imagery opened up for us by 'Crucified Stormtrooper', then we can reflect that we are all on the dark side. We are all stormtroopers. The amazing message of love at the heart of Christianity is that God does something about that situation. God becomes one of us in Christ. He becomes a stormtrooper in order that, through his death, he can take the darkness onto himself and enable us to live in the light. That is the heartbeat of Christianity, which is changing people's lives on a daily basis around the world and it is brought to us in a new way by including this artwork in this exhibition.

This reflection is not what the artist intended when he made the piece. He was interested in juxtaposing incongruous images. But once he had put the stormtrooper on a cross, he made that reflection possible. For us to show this work in a church enables that reflection on Christ's love to be seen and shared in a new way and that is why it worthwhile for the Church to show art, especially controversial art, and to explore the questions that it opens up for us all.'

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Star Wars Main Theme.