Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World

A sermon shared at the Suttons Bay Congregational Church

August 13, 2017

Scripture: Matthew 13:31-35

Good morning.

I hope that today you will join me on an adventure in time travel.

We will start with a seven-hundred-year-old legend, then jump forward to a four-hundred-year-old painting, then leap backward to a two-thousand-year-old text, then plunge forward to a place Lisa and I visited a couple months ago, then vault up to yesterday, and finally we will end up at tomorrow.

I figure that, in the best tradition of visiting preachers, if I accomplish nothing else I will at least teach you to yearn for your regular pastor. 

Let’s start with that very old legend I promised you, which goes like this.

There was a house in the Holy Land where Mary, the mother of Jesus, was born and where an angel of the Lord announced to her that she would bear into the world the savior of humankind. A seven-hundred-year-old story of uncertain origin says that the earliest followers of Jesus preserved that house and that Constantine built a basilica around it to protect it. But that’s just the beginning—and by no means the most remarkable part—of the tale.

The legend has it that in 1291 a band of angels scooped the house up and transported it across the Mediterranean Sea from Palestine to the small town of Tersato in Dalmatia. Several years later, angels moved it again, this time across the Adriatic Sea to some woods near Recanati, Italy. They finally settled it in Loreto, Italy, where it stands today and continues to attract thousands of visitors every year.

From the beginning, this legend was not without controversy. Even the Catholic faithful varied in their acceptance of the story. And it will not surprise you to learn that our skeptical Protestant ancestors cited it dismissively as an example of cultish mysticism without a biblical foundation.

But the legend nevertheless persisted. The story had tremendous popular appeal and it captured the religious imagination of many believers. It also appealed to the artistic imagination of a number of Renaissance painters, who tried their hand at telling the story in a visually interesting and powerful way. We usually refer to these as paintings of the “legend of Loreto” or the “Virgin of Loreto.”

Many of these paintings show a collection of burdened angels carrying a small building across the sky with Mary and the Christ child positioned more or less precariously on top. An excellent example can be seen in the Sant’Onofrio Church in Rome, painted by one Annibale Caracci—a name I will ask you to remember. As one art historian put it, these works generally have an odd “magic carpet ride” quality to them.

I think that we can understand, though, why these artists chose to take this approach. They were trying to capture the miraculous moment that gave rise to the legend—they wanted to show that instant when angels appeared, a building went aloft, Mary and the Christ child rematerialized, and all of the laws of nature and time and space and life and death were suspended. They wanted to convey that sound-all-the-trumpets moment that symbolizes the grace and glory and power of the living God.

During this same time, an artist received a commission to do a painting of the legend of Loreto who had acquired a reputation—and not always a good one—for conveying traditional religious subjects in decidedly non-traditional ways. His name was Michelangelo Merisi, but we know him today by the name of the northern Italian town where he was born: Caravaggio. In the opening years of the seventeenth century, Caravaggio set about painting his own vision of the legend of Loreto for the church of Sant’Agostino in Rome. I’ll come back later to his painting of the Virgin of Loreto, but first we need a bit of background.

The decision to hire Caravaggio to do the Loreto painting was one fraught with risk. Church authorities had rejected some of his earlier projects after they had been completed, including a painting of St. Matthew receiving inspiration to write the gospel, perhaps the very gospel verses we’re considering today. Among other things—and you’ll just have to trust me, this is relevant to my sermon—there was a concern that Caravaggio had portrayed Matthew too realistically, right down to his pair of conspicuously unattractive feet.

 There were other reasons for concern as well. Caravaggio found it much easier to paint portraits of saints than to emulate them—in this respect perhaps we can all empathize with him. By this time in his life he had already gotten into more than his fair share of trouble—accused of multiple assaults, imprisoned, and released only because of the influence of his friends. He would go on to live his final years in flight from various people and organizations that had been on the receiving end of his mercurial—even murderous—temper, and he died, somewhat mysteriously, at age thirty-six.

But at the time he did his painting of the legend of Loreto he was also recognized as a brilliant artist whose dramatically lit, heavily symbolic, and almost uncomfortably realistic paintings spoke in a language all their own. Consider, for example, his painting of the conversion of Paul, completed just a few years earlier. Full disclosure here: this is my favorite painting in the history of art and my “Falling Off The Horse” sermon blog is named for it.

The painting shows the moment at which Saul of Tarsus, on the road to Damascus to persecute Christians, falls to the ground in a shower of divine light and becomes the apostle Paul. The painting bears all the distinctive Caravaggio signatures: a spotlit scene with a dark, almost black background; players—particularly the horse and the elderly retainer—of unapologetic ordinariness; and a captured scene, as if someone hit the pause button at the most intense instant of an unfolding drama.

Now, here’s a thought experiment for you. Imagine that you were the Renaissance artist who had received this commission. How would you have painted the moment of Paul’s conversion? I know what I would have done, and it would have had none of the brilliance of Caravaggio’s masterpiece.

No, I probably would have “done an Annibale Caracci” and painted an extravagant monstrosity with angels and trumpets and a horse of heroic stature and Paul flying around like some sort of apostolic superman. It would have been dreadful. And this explains why if you look up lists of the great Renaissance artists you will find Caravaggio’s name much more often than you will find mine.

But my mistake would have been an understandable one, wouldn’t it? That is, after all, how we often think of miracles—that they are spectacular, flashy events where God grabs the world by the lapels and shakes it and yells “Hey, look over here.” That’s what Caracci was trying to show in his painting of Mary and the Christ child levitating up and shooting off across the sky—a moment of external drama for us all to behold.

Here, however, we see something entirely different. Yes, Caravaggio portrays a miracle at its central moment in real time. But, as Andrew Graham-Dixon observes in his excellent biography of Caravaggio, the moment shown here is deeply personal. He writes: “the action has been completely internalized, so that we see or sense it unfolding within Paul’s soul. [The light] is something he feels, accepts, [and that he] draws into the depths of his body.”

Okay, so hold those thoughts and jump backward with me to the time of Christ, who is sitting with his disciples and is speaking the words that I read to you earlier. And think about the power of this phrase: “I will tell you things that have been hidden from the foundation of the world.” Let me repeat that: “I will tell you things that have been hidden from the foundation of the world.” What an amazing idea: there are secrets, mysteries, that have been unknown by humankind since the very beginning of time—and I am going to tell you what they are.

This sounds like a “cue the trumpets” moment, doesn’t it? We expect to hear Jesus talk about angels and earth-shaking thunder and heavenly choirs and the like. But what does Jesus say in this context? He talks about two of the most ordinary things around—a mustard seed and leavened bread.

Are you looking for miracles? Are you looking for inspiration? Are you looking for guidance on how to live? Then look there, Jesus says to us, look even there, and you will find it.

This is not to say that God never takes the big, splashy, extravagant option. The God of the mustard seed and of leavened bread is also the God of the burning bush and the parted Red Sea and the raised Lazarus and the empty tomb. The most powerful force in the universe knows how to use an exclamation point when the unfolding narrative of humankind calls for it.

But I think that one of the central messages of the Gospels is that God mostly works for us, and in us, and with us, and beside us, and through us in much subtler and quieter ways. We often hear Jesus express his wry and wise enjoyment of paradox, and I believe we get some of that here. “I will show you things hidden since the very foundation of the world”—and do you know what they are? They are a mustard seed, a loaf of bread, the things all around you, the things hidden in plain sight, even the deeply imperfect things.

This last point, about God’s presence even in the deeply imperfect, is what Gerard Manley Hopkins was getting at in his wonderful short poem called “Pied Beauty”—“pied” in this context meaning, dappled or brindled or mulit-colored. Hopkins wrote:

Glory be to God for dappled things – 

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; 

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; 

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; 

Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; 

And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. 

All things counter, original, spare, strange; 

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) 

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; 

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 

                                Praise him.

I would happily trade everything I have ever written if I could just have written that.

So, would you see the greatest miracles of God working in this world and in your life? Well, perhaps you will have the chance to witness a building sailing through the air on the shoulders of angels. But, in the meantime, consider the mustard seed, consider the loaf of bread, consider an ordinary road and an ordinary horse and a most extraordinary moment in someone’s life, consider even the most imperfect of things imaginable—humankind. It is here that you will find them—those miraculous things hidden since the foundation of the world—if you will seek for them. By the amazing grace of God, all things can be transformed into the miraculous, even—most remarkably of all—each and every one of us.

         Earlier this summer, Lisa and I spent a week in Rome wandering around and engaged in what we came to call our “Caravaggio treasure hunt.” We went in search of as many of his masterpieces as we could find in the city. We had the opportunity to see some of them on grand display, including one in the Vatican Museum, but most of them are tucked away in dark chapels in small churches that are hard to find in Rome’s labyrinthine streets.

         Our explorations took us to the little church of Sant’Agostino, where, as I mentioned, Caravaggio’s rendition of the legend of Loreto is displayed. Tucked away in a corner of the city and lightly trafficked by tourists, Sant’Agostino is anything but an imposing museum-like structure. To the contrary, it is a “working church” and on the day we visited it a dozen or so homeless men sat in the pews, enjoying the shelter from the sun and waiting to be served lunch.

         Caravaggio’s painting about the legend of Loreto, which we found in a side chapel there, could not be more different from Caracci’s. 

Here Caravaggio gives us no angels, magical levitations, or flying houses. Instead, he shows us two pilgrims who have come a long way to a ramshackle little structure looking for a miracle and, to their astonishment, they have found one. Their clothes are shabby; their skin is veiny and sunburned; their feet are caked with dirt.

         Some contemporary observers rolled their eyes over Caravaggio’s portrayal of the pilgrims. They were particularly unhappy with those grimy feet, which almost come off the canvas at you. But those critics either missed his point or were unsettled by it.

For here, as with his painting of the conversion of Paul, we have a miracle experienced at a highly personal and intimate level—indeed, we may even wonder whether anyone else standing beside these pilgrims would have seen the same thing. The miracle has come to two people without social rank or privilege. And the miracle was accomplished through something as simple as a mustard seed—their very ordinary feet, walking one step after another down hard roads, slowly but steadily bringing these pilgrims to a place of unimaginable grace.

         Standing there in the church of Sant’Agostino, Lisa and I saw instantly the resonance between this painting and the experience of the homeless men. They, too, had come in dingy and ragged clothes looking for a miracle: a respite from their hunger and discomfort. And they, too, would find one: in the coolness of the sanctuary, in the kind words and gestures of those who would care for them, in the very leavened bread of which Jesus spoke.

         I suppose that you could say that Lisa and I, we two pilgrims, found something very like a miracle as well. We found it in the unlikeliest of places, on a warm June afternoon, just around the corner from the bustling crowds in the Piazza Navona, up a set of ancient steps, past the sad man with the underfed dog, through the old doors, in an obscure and shaded sanctuary. We found a miracle there, just as we have found miracles in so many other improbable places: on a clear day at the top of Pyramid point; in an apple orchard, smelling the scent of the fruit in the sun; gathered around the dinner table laughing with friends and celebrating this life we are given, short and fragile though our time on earth may be. And, speaking of dappled things, we think we have even seen something a little miraculous in the face of our seven-month-old puppy, Rocky.

         The news these days can threaten to overwhelm us and crush us with despair. The events yesterday in Charlottesville—a wild and insane display of hate ending in violence and death—leave us reeling with questions. In these times, it is important that we remember that Jesus was no stranger to hatred and violence and death. And he assured us that those forces do not have the final word. And he told us that the answers to our questions lie in the things all around us and—most importantly—the things within us.  

         So I ask you: what of your tomorrow? How will you serve God’s miraculous and transformative power through your own acts of forgiveness and reconciliation and love? In what everyday location will you catch a glimpse of eternity? In what dark and obscure space will you find the light? On what lonely and lost road will you realize that you are not alone—and that you have been found? In what implausible and unlikely and ordinary place will you discover the secrets that have been hidden since the foundation of the world?