“The Colors Through Which we Look at Life”

A Lenten Sermon Series on the Sanctuary Stained Glass Windows

February 21, 2010 Des Moines

Genesis 1:1-10

“Empty Origins”

The church, through the ages, has not always approved. To be sure, the art of making stained glass windows was largely sponsored by religious communities beginning something like 1000 years ago, but there was a time when some thought the windows had gone too far. At first, colored glass simply afforded a way to create an atmosphere. There is, after all, like holiness itself, a mystery to glass -- a form of matter with gas, liquid and solid state properties; something akin to super-cooled liquid that captures light and appears to glow from within. Borrowing its iridescence from the precious rarity of jewels, glass is nonetheless made from the most ordinary materials: sand transformed by fire. (informed by text from the Art Glass Association).

And so it was that stained glass and spirituality became, for all sorts of reasons, easy and symbiotic partners. Eventually, as artists became more deft, and tools more refined, the windows became less vehicles for ambiance and more translucent pictures for teaching and guided devotion. In Gothic sanctuaries, stained glass windows took the form of complex mosaic of bits of colored glass joined with lead into intricate patterns illustrating biblical stories and the lives of saints. Even then, medieval worshippers experienced more than read the windows, which added to the church a sense of being a special, sacred dwelling place of an all powerful God.

But suddenly all that changed. Once prized, stained glass suddenly found itself condemned and despised. It happened during the time of the Protestant Reformation when people like Calvin and Zwingli and Luther began to see the windows as distracting ornamentations at the very least, and more dangerously insidious violations of the second commandment prohibiting graven images that incite idolatry. For the record, the condemnation was not confined to windows; it extended to art forms of virtually every kind – statues, paintings, even the pipe organs that produced the music.

It was clear to the reformers and those who followed them that such abominations had to go. Think of what followed as the time of “The Great Smashing” when frescoes were scratched out of the ceilings and windows were broken from their panes; when paintings and icons and statues and organs were dragged through the doors, heaped into piles and obliterated with an energy that only righteous fervor can fuel. In England, where the Puritans were busy “purifying” the Church of England from its purported abuses, one congregation – short of the funds necessary to put clear glass where the colored currently offended, simply covered a window with dung and mud and whitewashed over (Stained Glass Association of America).

The disrepute popped up again, almost 100 later, during the English Civil War. Listen as Bishop Joseph Hall of Norwich describes the scene when troops and citizens, encouraged by a Parliamentary ordinance against superstition and idolatry, went on a purging rampage:

Lord what work was here! What clattering of glasses! What beating down of walls! What tearing up of monuments! What pulling down of seats! What wresting out of irons and brass from the windows! What defacing of arms! What demolishing of curious stonework! What tooting and piping upon organ pipes! And what a hideous triumph in the market-place before all the country, when all the mangled organ pipes...together with the leaden cross which had newly been sawn down from the Green-yard pulpit and the service-books and singing books that could be carried to the fire in the public market-place were heaped together.' (Wikipedia)

The condemnation would eventually cool, but even today the Puritan influence can still be found in church buildings where clear glass is preferred over colored, emblematic for some of the pure, unfiltered and untinted light of God pouring in, illuminating a plain view of the world around, looking out.

But that, of course, isn’t the only way to theologize about windows. Historically speaking, stained glass was to make a comeback. Perhaps it stemmed from a hunger for that former sense of mystery. Maybe it was revaluation of the teaching power of those old glassy designs. Perhaps it simply had to with a liberalized estimation of the value of beauty. Whatever it was, stained glass reclaimed its place in the walls and ceilings of sacred places.

Like this one. Once upon a time, this room had its own stained glass, though very different from the ones now surrounding us. Indeed, I have often wished I could go back in time – prior to the renovations in the mid-1950’s – and see what this room would have looked like with its original stained glass skylights directly above us, and in the sections along the sides. In my occasional light bulb changing excursions up in the attic space above this ceiling, one can still see the remnants of those days in panels still intact, and once upon a time illuminated and exposed. These windows that now grace this space came from Central Christian Church whose circumstance is the opposite of the original glass in this room which, for all practical purposes, is gone though the building remains. For Central, the building is gone but the windows remain – here, inspiring and reminding us.

It is both of those functions I want to highlight in the next several weeks as we make our way toward Easter: what they inspire in us, and what they recall to us about how Christians see reality. It is my conviction that how we see life – the filters, the lenses through which we look – influences the life we lead. Is the world, for example, a voraciously threatening foe from which we can only do our best to hide and hold onto what we have? Or do we see the world as a fertile field of nourishment and opportunity beckoning from us our best? Is God a stern disciplinarian, just to ask another question, always waiting and watching for us to slip up? Or is God an embracing parent seeking our enlargement and well-being? The lenses we choose – and let’s be honest, we do choose them – matter.

For these six-weeks of Lent, then, we will claim these lenses of the Christian faith that surround us in this room as some of the defining filters of reality.

In fact, think of them not in isolation, but individually as panes in a much larger stained glass window – the colors of each changing the hue of our vision. We need, from time to time, centering moments when we intentionally “recalibrate” our view of things, and see reality through a different tint, and Lent is historically just that sort of time.

The window with which we start is the one that confronts us most dramatically and commandingly every time we enter this room: the center window above the baptistery. Interestingly, though all the other windows are described and interpreted in one old document or another, no written record apparently remains of how or why this largest window was conceived. Orally, however, it has been referred to in my hearing as the “Creation Window”, and I think that fits. Pressed to the periphery of the design are the images of water –like those waves that Genesis describes pushed aside so that dry land can emerge. At the center of the window – warmly and dramatically -- is the vivid yellow; light, if you will, separated from the darkness. Light, piercing not only darkness but the very void itself. Light – presence – where only absence had been before. Creation, as in “something” out of “nothing”; presence , substance, where only emptiness permeated before. “Let there be light!”

It’s an old, old story; one we’ve heard and recited countless times before, this summary of the beginning of all things – but what is its significance today? The answer, I suggest, is multi-fold. When we look at life through the creation window, we see among other things a world intentionally designed. However we might imagine the mechanics – with a word, or with a ‘bang’, in an instant or gradually over time, what the story teaches is that this world wasn’t accidental. God intended it – conceived and materialized it and kept holy hands around it. But moreover – and here is the more important thing about it – it was intended; on purpose. The world as we know it isn’t the love-child equivalent of the baby born to 60 year old parents whose only reaction is something like “oooooops!” God made this world on purpose, and not only that, once God had a chance to look at it all and each little part of it, persisted in calling it “good.” Good!

Whenever our esteem starts to wash away like a sidewalk drawing in the rain – like we just don’t matter anymore; like life has no merit or meaning or purpose or connection – all we have to do is tilt our head a little upward and look first into and then through this window and recall that though our origins were, indeed, empty, our present and future are filled with precious purpose...

...and light. Light that pierces the darkness and holds the waters at bay. Light, flashed from divine command, and it was done, and it was good. And that’s the way we see it: as purposeful and good. Not that everyone sees it that way, but that we see it that way; emptiness filled with treasure too good to dismiss, abuse, disregard or ignore. Creation – holiness made into soil and tree and blossom and flesh and wing and stem and feather and fin. And God saw it all and called it not simply “good”, but “very good, indeed.”

And that reminder and reassurance – that defining assertion – greets us first and foremost whenever we worship in this place, and colors everything else we see and say and do. That is the first lens through which we are called to see everything within sight: what is is not incidental. What exists is neither accidental nor mundane. God chose to make this world and all that is within it, and chose to make it precious and good – no exceptions. None.

Seeing it that way sort of changes things, doesn’t it?