Back
in the fifties and sixties Groucho Marx hosted a show on radio and then TV
called You Bet Your Life, and at the
outset the audience was clued into a “secret word” or secret “woid” as Groucho
would have it, and a guest would get 50 bucks when they said it . . . well
today we have a woid, but it’s not particularly secret, so I’ll say it to you
now . . . witness. Witness . . . it’s an incredibly important word in our faith . . .
and in our passage it describes ancestors in the faith, who by faith did such great things . . . and
so today I’d like to do something a little different and just think about that
word, witness, and see where it takes us . . .
To
witness something is to see it, to experience it, and a witness is someone that
sees something . . . If I see a car wreck, I am a witness to it, and I might be
called as a witness in a court case
surrounding it, perhaps when one party sues the other or the car company for
damages. The word can therefore have a legal
sense, and it’s important to note that in a law court, when a witness appears,
and his testimony goes into the record, it becomes in a judicial sense truth . . . when someone is called to be
a witness, what she says on the stand legally becomes truth . . .
Well. A witness can be an inanimate thing, as well
. . . take a tree, for example . . . a tree is a witness to many things, if you
know how to read it, how to interpret it . . . a biologist or a gardener knows
that the way a tree looks, the color of its foliage, can be an indicator of the
richness of it’s habitat . . . if a tree’s leaves are yellowed instead of
green, that often means there’s a lack of some vital nutrient or water or
something else in the soil, and a gardener will fertilize it lest it die . . .
at the same time, mountains are mute witness to millions of erosive years, as
well as mighty tectonic forces deep underground . . . if you know how to read
the record—there’s another courtroom term—nature witnesses to a multitude of
things.
But
it’s us humans who are, I think, the witnesses par excellence, and the witnesses referred to in scripture . . . in the New Testament, of course,
the word often translates the Greek word Martyr, and it’s in this sense that
our passage speaks of a great cloud . . . of course Martyr came to represent
someone who gives her life as a
witness to the Gospel, as Joan of Arc here did, but us humans have the ability
to both bear witness in ourselves—in our words and actions—and in what we produce . . .
our arts say buckets about who we are and what we value, they witness to our
joys and sorrows, our everyday lives and
our extraordinary events . . . our arts bear witness to our souls . . . and
they’ve always witnessed to our faith
. . . the vast majority of art until very recently was religious in nature,
like this Titian, and there’s a special kind of artwork that has persisted for well
over a thousand years—perhaps closer to two—called the icon . . . icons have a
lot of functions, but perhaps their most important is as witness to things we either cannot see or have not seen . . . and one
of the most well known icon painter was Andrei Rublev . . . born in Russia
sometime in the last half of the 14th century, all we know about him
is that he was a monk who painted icons in four churches, and we only know that because he appears in the written
records of those churches, and then he died sometime around 1430. Nevertheless, he painted what has become
arguably the most famous icon in the
world, The Hospitality of Abraham, also
known as The Old Testament Trinity.
It
depicts the three messengers that visit Abraham by the oaks of Mamre . . . you
remember the story: the messengers
appear one day on the road, as Abraham is sitting outside his tent in the heat
of the day, and Abraham scrambles about, providing perfect middle Eastern
hospitality, killing the fatted calf—with Sarah making cakes inside the
tent—and the story has become symbolic of hospitality to strangers, and it is
important to monastics such as Rublev because welcoming the stranger is one of
the central tenets of monasticism . . . Welcome All Visitors as Christ is
pasted above the doors of many a monastery, and this icon was important to
Rublev, and he invested it with a mystical patina,
a sacred sheen that witnesses to the
thin line—in that story, as well as, presumably, the world around us—between
the spiritual and mundane realms . . .
But
it appears straightforward, at least at first glance . . . three figures sit
around a table, and on that table is a cup and the figures incline their heads
toward one another in wordless communion or perhaps conversation. Are they communicating with one another, are
they discussing what they’ve witnessed on the road that afternoon? Between two of them you can see one of
Mamre’s oaks, and it’s a twisted thing, almost ornamental-looking, like a Japanese
bonsai, or is it wrapped around the halo of the central angel? Does the supernatural thus control the natural? Does the halo, that evidence of God’s
activity, bend the tree to its will?
This is critical to the witness of the icon . . . icons witness to more than what we can see with our naked
eyes . . . the messengers have wings and halos, but they’re portrayed delicately,
ephemerally . . . compare them to the bodies of the visitors themselves, which
are solid-hued, pedestrian, worldly . . . It’s important to note that in the
Genesis tale there are no wings or haloes or any other visible means of
identifying the visitors as anything other than worldly . . . Rublev has made
the holy visible right alongside the everyday, he shows more than the worldly, more
than the natural, more than what we
normally see . . . he puts earthly and heavenly realities side by side. . .
And
there’s one other thing . . . looking at the painting, we can see that unlike a
lot of icons, there is perspective,
but it’s not what we’re used to, not the perspective we’re taught in beginning
art class, where there’s an imaginary vanishing point in the painting towards
which everything gets smaller . . . in the Hospitality
of Abraham, the perspective is just the reverse, it opens out from foreground to background, so
that the viewer is the vanishing point, the viewer
is the focal point . . . it draws us into the painting, into the icon, as if we
are there with the messengers, as if Abraham is offering us his hospitality, his table . . .
And
that brings us back to the cup, and it should remind us Christians of
something, Rublev undoubtedly meant for
us to, it should remind us of the communion table and the cup of Christ that
rests upon it . . . because for Rublev this story isn’t just a tale of three
angelic visitors to a patriarch, it’s a prefiguration
of God the father, God son and God the holy spirit, thus it’s better-known
title of The Old Testament Trinity .
. . and even though it sets Old Testament scholars’ teeth on edge, it’s an
appropriation of Hebrew scripture for Christian ends that’s wholly in line with
the mothers and fathers of our faith . . . we are invited to the table with the
three-in-one, drawn in by the other-worldly perspective of Rublev’s beloved
icon, there’s a place reserved just for us . . .
Through
this icon, Andrei Rublev is a witness to the kingdom of God, to God’s divine
actions in history . . . indeed, icons
are especially created to be
witnesses to that kingdom, to that numinous, invisible-to-the-naked-eye realm
that is here all around us, and yet in some sense still approaching . . . and
that is what our passage is all about—not the icons, but the witness that they
embody. Our passage gives a laundry list of our progenitors in the
worship of God . . . Abraham, Isaac and Jacob . . . Moses, Rahab and Gideon . .
. all ancestors in the faith, all people who through their faith lived out their lives in the service of God . .
.
Abraham
who—through his faith—nevertheless
offered up his son Isaac who, in his turn, invoked God’s blessings upon his
children . . . Jacob who by faith
blessed each of the sons of Joseph, and passed on God’s promise in the unbroken
Hebrew line . . . Moses who by faith
gave up his place in the house of Pharaoh to suffer with his people . . . and
like the witness Andrei Rublev, the author of Hebrews conflates the Hebrew and
Christian stories, blurring the line between them, flattening them right out so
that their history is our history . .
. according to Hebrews, the faith of Abraham is faith in Christ 1400 years before the fact, just as his
three visitors are at the same time heavenly messengers and the very God-head
itself.
And,
says Hebrews, because we are surrounded by so
great a cloud of these witnesses—of Abrahams and Isaacs and Augustines and
Rublevs—because we are surrounded by such a mighty cloud of witnesses, we can
be inspired ourselves to witness to God, to lay aside every weight—and by that
he means every worldly encumbrance, every worldly care—that clings so closely,
and because of this mighty cloud of witnesses, we can run the race set before
us, do the work that God has called us to do . . .
Our
passage uses the word witness
advisedly, with all its depth of meaning, all its layers of connotation . . .
all who have come before, that mighty cloud of faith-bearers, all are witnesses
to God’s transformative acts in the world, both as observers and as
participants, actors and acted upon . .
. they are witnesses in the legal sense, in that what they testify to becomes a
species of truth in the testimony . . . and their actions are in themselves
testimony, in themselves witness, to the wondrous acts of our creator . . . the
leading of the Hebrew people up from the land of Egypt, the painting of
gloriously mysterious icons, the founding of a church at 21 Cromwell Road . . .
Because
you see, in addition to the great witnesses of the Judeo-Christian Christian
tradition, we have our own who paved the way for us . . . Sally Ambrosius . . .
Al Ambrosius . . . Dale Haller. Helen
Steinway . . . Jim Steinway . . . Jane Steinway . . . Barb Lavash. All witness to the power of the Gospel in
their lives, all still with us in everything we see and do at Greenhills
Community Church, Presbyterian.
And
this church has itself been a witness—an icon—of
the kingdom of God for over 75 years . . . it’s been testifying to the love of
Jesus Christ by its social outreach, by its nourishing worship, and by
everything that it does . . . and now, as we seek to find our way again, to
sharpen that witness, to refine it and define it for a new era, we should
remember all those witnesses who have gone before, that mighty cloud of
witnesses who’ve made it possible for us to be here today . . . we must
remember their faith and the testimony of their actions, and run the race that
is set before us, accomplish the work that God has called us to do. Amen.
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