Pastor’s Column
December 2024
Advent comes early and short this year, a function of the calendar - just after Thanksgiving, and only 3½ weeks from Christmas. Our church calendar has a full line-up of worship services and events. We still have our four Sundays, and our Longest Night service (Dec. 18). Our music ministry has a full line-up of concerts, starting with the all-Tucson ELCA concert Dec. 1 (at Our Saviour’s), and then the Southern Arizona New Discourses and Neoteric Chamber Choir on Dec. 14. It’s fun to be host to arts in different styles, and be a place of music and creativity. Many ways to glorify God in this season.
Sunday services have a theme: “Words for the Beginning” from sanctifiedart.org. As much as I like coming up with worship ideas, they make some amazing things way beyond my skill level – paintings, poetry, liturgies, children’s curriculums and more. You know I rarely do the Advent verses from the lectionary anymore, as they feel so tone deaf to the season. John the Baptist calling Pharisees a “brood of vipers” and crying about judgment and fire, then Jesus talking about wars and rumors of wars and the beginning of the end….just doesn’t have a whole lot of hope and grace. I know there’s a time and place for all of scripture, and, yes, I know the lectionary comes from a time before December was a month of pre-Christmas everywhere. But this is our world.
So I try to make Advent its own thing, with its own emphasis and meanings. This year we get a collection of quilt patterns, one for the season, which will go on the podium, and one for each Sunday, which will go up front on a stand. Each pattern goes with the theme for the day. The quilt squares play off the idea of new beginnings, how the pieces of who we are, where we come from, what we deal with, sometimes fall apart, but God takes them and makes new beginnings, new starts.
To me, quilt squares perfectly express the back and forth interplay of creativity and structure.
It’s often taught that the two are opposites, that rules and limits stifle and oppress, and that the fullest life is lived with the least restraints. Well, some times. Of course rules can be stifling, and so restrictive that no space is left for anything new. On the other hand, when given no limits, we often don’t know where to start. If I told an art class to paint a family on the lakeshore under a tree, I’d get all sorts of interpretations, but every artist would have to figure out how to make beauty out of that particular scene (Monet made a version; it’s a classic). But if I simply said, “make anything and see you Monday” I would probably get very little. I’m sure someone would try to be clever and hand me an empty canvass and tell me the lack of paint represents the emptiness of his soul being deconstructed of the normative influences of bourgeois society. One might even tape a banana to it and call it something. But I would be suspicious they were having too much fun over the weekend, and the philosophy-babble is just covering up laziness. Limits force you to problem solve, to imagine possibilities, to think of things you haven’t. No-limits creativity doesn’t push you, and you end up with, well, a banana taped to the wall.
I picture so much overlap between good art and engineering. The city comes to the architect and says, “there’s a river this wide, and two roads to connect, and they’re not straight across, and the ground is soft, and you have to put a ship X feet high underneath it, and it can’t all break apart if one section cracks. Go”. That will take a lot of creativity to solve, undoubtedly a good deal of artistic imagination too, so the selection committee likes it.
Structure and limits force creativity. But without variation and creativity, structure becomes stale.
So it comes back around to quilt squares. I imagine it was a challenge to the original artists: how do you express this Bible reading in a quilt, using only straight lines? How do you do it with only a small palette of colors? How do you convey blue, the liturgical color of Advent, with lively colors of hope and opportunity? Now you have to get creative.
This is what it’s all about: not just being able to paint, not being “artsy craftsy” necessarily, but being willing to problem solve and imagine new possibilities within the limits life has given you, using the spiritual gifts God has given you. Worship should be like that: a structure, an architecture, that remains largely the same, but which can be redecorated, repurposed, reimagined from time to time. The predictability of the order gives the security from which to explore and imagine the possibilities of a living God with words of new beginnings.
Peace,
Pastor Lars