The Creation
(#1 in the “Masterpieces” series)
Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love . . .
Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.
Create in me a clean heart, O God . . .
(Psalm 51:1a, 5, 10a)
A sermon by Siegfried S. Johnson on the First Sunday in Lent, March 5, 2017
(Volume 6 Number 30)
St. James United Methodist Church, 321 Pleasant Valley Drive, Little Rock, AR 72212
I’m excited this morning to launch my Lenten sermon series, Masterpieces. Having read a new
biography of Michelangelo by Miles J. Unger, a tracing of his life through six of his
masterpieces, sermon ideas just kept popping up until it occurred to me that I might do some
homilectical sculpting myself, fitting some of his masterpieces into Lenten themes. Having been
to Rome on a couple of occasions and being inspired myself in viewing several of the works we
will highlight in this series was all the more inspiration for me.
Unlike the biography, which was chronological through Michelangelo’s life from his
apprenticeship to his death, my series will not be chronological, but rather an alignment of each
masterpiece to that week’s Lenten theme. For example, one of his earliest works was the Pieta,
completed in 1499 at the age of 24. By the way, tomorrow (March 6) is Michelangelo’s birthday,
born in 1475, 542 years ago. We will arrive at the Pieta, however, only in our last message -Good Friday’s crucifixion and the body of Jesus across the lap of Mary.
We begin today with The Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, completed a
dozen years after the Pieta, in 1511. The Sistine Chapel sits at the northeast corner of the
massive Basilica of St. Peter, a brick box of a building with a completely unimpressive exterior.
Built in 1483 by Pope Sixtus, its thick walls and narrow windows testify to the threat of violence,
the chapel conceived as half a place of worship and half fortress (the true meaning of sanctuary),
the architect even designing slits from which defenders could pour boiling oil on attackers.
Despite its dour exterior the chapel has played a key role in the pomp and ceremony of the papal
court, serving first as the pope’s private place of worship and also as the place where the
conclave of cardinals meet in order to elect a new pope. One may imagine it as the Roman
Catholic answer to the Jewish temple’s Holy of holies, its odd proportions – 134 feet long, 44
feet wide, and 68 feet high -- meant to replicate precisely the dimensions of Solomon’s temple.
From its earliest days in the 1480s its interior walls on the long sides, north and south, were
covered with frescoes balancing this Jewish/Christian conception. On the southern wall are
scenes from Moses life such as crossing the Red Sea and the receiving the tablets of the Law at
Mt. Sinai. On the northern wall are scenes from the life of Christ, his baptism and temptation,
handing of the keys of the kingdom to Peter, and the Last Supper. These parallel narratives
established the church’s role as the vehicle of salvation, just as was Moses was the vehicle of
salvation for the Hebrews.
The ceiling, though, through the Sistine Chapel’s first 30 years retained the chapel’s original
austerity, 5800 square feet of blue sky speckled with golden stars. In other words, the vault of
heaven was suspended above, to be viewed as though the ceiling were not there at all, as if the
worshiper were in the immediate presence of God.
When Pope Julius II was elected in 1503, however -- the Sistine Chapel still only 20 years old -he sought out the new artistic talent in Rome, Michelangelo, for a commission to paint the ceiling
with the twelve apostles. It was the last thing Michelangelo wanted to do. He was a sculptor, not
a painter. Some say his enemies, jealous of his gifts, were using their influence with the pope to
lead him to Michelangelo, setting him up for failure in a medium of art with which he was
unfamiliar. Michelangelo asked for liberty to accomplish something much grander than the
pope’s idea of the apostles and this was granted. He would write to his father in Florence that the
pope had given him liberty to “do whatever I wanted.”
Michelangelo, though, did not want the job at all, priding himself on being a sculptor. He was
fully confident as a sculptor. As a painter, not so much. Yet, once commissioned, he was
determined to turn the task into something worthy of his genius. Once committed, he gave his
heart and soul to the project, striving to offer a work that would astonish the world.
If the south wall depicted the Hebrew people under the Law (sub lege) and the north wall
depicted the church under Grace (sub gratia), Michelangelo’s ceiling would not move forward to
the apostles, but backwards, to our very human beginnings. He chose Genesis as his source,
God’s relationship to his creatures prior to the Law (ante lege). Michelangelo would take us
back to the primal basis of God’s relationship with those created in his own image.
In a flow of nine architectural divisions Michelangelo’s paintings run the chapel's length,
thematically grouped into three triads, so that the entire sequence is deeply Trinitarian. He offers
images of mankind in his most visceral state, the ceiling a fast paced, vertiginous journey, a
cyclone of primal energy created by an artist of titanic talent and consuming ambition. With the
ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the one known as a philosopher of marble now shows himself a
rhapsodist in pigment, a conjurer of celestial visions.
It wasn’t easy. Painting a vault 60 feet above the floor posed challenges. His scaffolding offered
usually enough room to stand, but his back and neck ached and his eyes were often enflamed. He
wrote to his father back in Florence, “I am not in a good place, and I am not a painter.” He felt
his true talents were being wasted by the Pope’s commission, even going so far as signing
official notices, “Your Michelangelo, sculptor in Rome,” as something of a reminder that he
should be about more important work. Yet, unwilling to give his rivals the satisfaction of
witnessing his failure, he determined his greatest challenge would be his greatest triumph.
I’ve focused your attention for this First Sunday in Lent on the most famous of ceiling’s scenes,
The Creation of Adam. This part of the ceiling he completed in 1511, the full ceiling finished
and dedicated on October 31, 1512 – All Saint’s Eve -- five years to the day before a monk
named Martin Luther would shake Rome, launching the Reformation.
The Creation of Adam revels in man’s limitless potential, a celebration of Adam’s uncorrupted
beauty at Creation. If David said, “I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me,”
this is not true of Adam. God thrusts his hand toward Adam’s, an implacable will and urgent
purpose matched by Adam’s tentative, not fully aware yet somehow yearning reach.
What I want us to focus our attention on this morning is the narrow gap between the extended
index fingers of Adam and God. It’s easy to image this gap crackling with invisible discharges,
animating sparks of the divine. The creative moment as presented here departs from the Genesis
text, which presents the creative moment as one of breath breathed. He has transformed an
intimate scene with the muscular male anatomy he was so profoundly gifted to display.
The image of the near-touching fingers of God and Adam has become iconic of humanity. It is
claimed that this painting, along with Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper, are the two most
replicated sacred paintings of all time. Not bad for “Michelangelo the Sculptor.” Every year
some 3,000,000 pilgrims flock to the Vatican in Rome and crane their necks to peer upwards at
what has become one of the most famous masterpieces of Western culture.
Do you wonder, though, how can Adam be alive before God has endowed him with life? If
Adam is already living, what exactly does he receive from God that renders him created in God’s
image? Was Michelangelo exploring a profound theological question: “What does it mean to be
created in the image of God?” Instead of showing us the moment when God forms Adam's body
out of the dust and breathes the breath of life, Michelangelo shows God giving Adam Something
Other, his own power of creativity. Adam reaches with a reciprocal longing for God, not in
response to command but the intimacy of connection between the divine and the human.
Yet they are not equals. There is a gap, a space between their fingers. While not co-equal with
God, Adam is yet invited to participate in the divine. Human beings are the only creatures called
to participate with their creator in the journey of their Becoming. What other creature has the
capacity to look beyond what they are by nature with holy ambition to become something Other
tomorrow than they are today? I see this gap as a Calling, a beckoning into spiritual territory, to
live into our likeness of God.
The Creation of Adam suggests that Something More is compounded within the human molecule,
Something More to which we feel beckoned, invited into the gap. To feel the energy of that gap,
is, in essence, the religious, sacred experience. When we worship, when we sing praise, when
we pray – at last, when we imagine what might be – are we not drawing energy from that gap
between God and Man? Alas, to dream is to be on the periphery of God-likeness.
In this gap I see symbolized what we all know, innately, that ours is a journey incomplete, that
our spirituality is precisely our recognition of the gap between what we are now and the
Something More to which we aspire. What is this Something More? Our best philosophers, our
most gifted artists and eloquent poets and preachers, hint that our destination is none other than
our origin, that we are Becoming what we were created to be.
I hear David in Psalm 51 speaking, not as the King of Israel (which he most certainly was), but as
the repentant sinner, and never is a soul more poetic than when repenting. “A broken and
contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” David craves for what was, what should be, when
he says, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” If David’s sin
had widened that gap, the plea for divine forgiveness would be its closing.
So here is our Masterpiece for the First Sunday in Lent, Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, an
invitation to spiritual exploration, to discover that the Something More for which our soul aches
in its most sacred experiences, is none other than our beginning.
What we ultimately seek is something we once possessed. This is the story of the Fall, another
famous image of the ceiling. Our essential human quest is to become what once we were. Futile
quest, until the atonement accomplished in Jesus’ death, as Paul wrote, “Through Christ God
was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, by making peace through the blood of the cross.”
The blood of Christ bridged that gap. If this message seems more philosophical than usual, it is
because Lent lends itself to such thoughts, inviting reflective imaginings of who we are, so
distant from who we were created to be. Who are we, at last, as Human Beings? Those two
words are spoken with a space, a gap in between – Human . . . Being. Do we not sometimes rely
on that Gap when we excuse ourselves for being merely “Human?” We say, “Well, I’m only
human,” are we not saying, “See the Gap? How can you expect me to be otherwise than I am?”
Yet we are not just Human, but also Being and “In him we live and move and have our Being,”
This Paul shared with the philosophers at Mars Hill in Athens, a place where ancient thinkers
gathered seeking to describe the Something More that we innately feel. We are human, yes, dust
returning to dust as we remembered on Ash Wednesday. But we are More. Our Being is from
God. If our bodies are clay jars, within resides a treasure – our true Being. In the self-reflections
and repentance of Lent, let us discover again that treasure! So let us proceed with the
Masterpieces of our Lenten journey, next week to see Michelangelo’s Moses the Lawgiver.
Baruch ha-Shem! Blessed be the Name!