For this evening’s NaBloPoMo post, I’m gonna do something a little different. Some readers know (as some do not know) that I am an ordained priest in the Community of Christ. I typically attend the Olathe branch, where Alli and I are on several committees and try to serve in whatever way we can.
One of the things that I do is I speak out in our district at congregations that are smaller and this past Sunday, I spoke at the Bethel Congregation off of Leavenworth road. Tonight I’m going to share with you an excerpt from the sermon that I gave, in which I talked about our experience in the summer of 2007 when we visited France and Italy, and more specifically, the Sistine Chapel. Understand that without delivery, it may not be quite as successful, but my sister-in-law suggested that I share it, so I thought I would.
This morning, the scripture I’d like to focus on comes from the Doctrine and Covenants, section 163:
“Faithful disciples respond to an increasing awareness of the abundant generosity of God by sharing according to the desires of their hearts; not by commandment or constraint. Break free of the shackles of conventional culture that mainly promote self-serving interests. Give generously according to your true capacity.”
I want to talk this morning a little about what our is meant by our “true capacity.” I think that our true capacity is probably a lot more than we think. Our true capacity is the capacity for greatness that God placed in each our lives.
David says in Psalm 8, “What is man that you that you take thought of him, and the son of man that you care for him? You have made him a little lower than the angels and have crowned him with glory and majesty. You have made him to rule over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet.” God designed us for greatness.
When I married Alli, I made her a promise. Well, I made her several promises, but this one was a little different. It wasn’t really a condition of marriage, per se, more of a goal for both of us to work toward. See, my wife is an artist. She has studied art for her whole life and is a self-sustaining painter now. My promise to her was to take her to Italy before her 30th birthday.
You see, one of the things that Alli never got to do through school was to go and actually stand in front of the masterpieces she had studied for so many years. This was an important life goal for her, so it was an important life goal for me.
We started saving up a couple years in advance and in the summer of 2007, we went on a 3-week vacation that took us from Paris to Venice to Florence to Rome — we went to every major gallery in those cities and stood in seemingly every church we passed.
We saw amazing architecture and artwork — from the Louvre to the Uffizi Gallery — culminating in our visit to Rome. While I might pretend that the trip was for Alli’s benefit, don’t let me kid you, this was one of the greatest trips I have taken in my life. I was particularly excited to visit Rome for a couple reasons. First, I was excited to see all the ancient ruins and history of a world we sometimes are blind to. Moreso, I was thrilled that Alli was finally going to be able to stand in one of the most significant places of art through all of history — the Sistine Chapel.
The Chapel is a part of the larger Vatican Museum — a museum that holds one of the largest, if not the largest, art collections in the entire world. There are 54 galleries in the museum and the Sistine Chapel is the final one — you have to walk through the other 53 just to get to the Sistine Chapel.
I can tell you, as tired as I was from standing in line in the blazing Rome summer heat for two hours and then walking through 53 galleries containing artwork and antiquities from all around the world, the wait, the exhaustion — it was all worth it.
Wow. Just wow. What an amazing testament to what we as humans are capable of with God. You know there are people who would want to claim that there are subtle things in the chapel that Michelangelo placed in there as a statement against the church, but standing in that room with about 2,000 other people, I didn’t see them. All I could see was the clear cut evidence of God’s presence. You can’t stand in the room and look at that ceiling and not feel God.
Alli and I spent more time in the Sistine Chapel than in any other gallery or church that we were in on our entire trip. We studied each wall, we listened to the stories of what the artist intended with each panel, and I watched as my promise to Alli was fulfilled. I saw the tears stream down her cheeks as she stared at the ceiling and mentally checked off that item on her “bucket list.”
Over the next several weeks, we would recount that experience over and over again to our friends and family. But the most insight that I got from the experience was listening to Alli explain the beauty of the chapel to her dad, who has a fear of flying and can only see the chapel through his daughter’s eyes.
She told him that one of the things that was most impressive about the chapel was that “Michelangelo painted all the way to the corners.”
When she said that, it really clicked for me.
It was something that I hadn’t even noticed at first, but yet something that was so crucial to the essence of the chapel. Michelangelo painted all the way to the corners. He probably could have stopped a few feet from the corner and very few people would have noticed. But he would have known. And God would have noticed.
So instead of “good enough”, Michelangelo blessed us with a space that is complete and marvelous — a space that is completely devoted to showing the world the essence of God expressed through paint.
There is a pretty great lesson that we all can learn from Michelangelo. It’s not how to paint buon fresco or to sculpt. No, the lesson for us in the current world is that we should paint to the corners of our life.
Have you ever been in a situation where you thought to yourself, I could have been better…? Have you ever thought that you could have been a better worker, a better partner, a better parent, a better friend? You have to wonder if you’d adopted Michelangelo’s philosophy to paint all the way to the corners of your life if you wouldn’t be asking yourself the same question.
One of the amazing things about a life with God is that the corners are closer and more accessible to our reach. God enables us to see the places we can be better. He shows us the places where we are not being good stewards over our lives.
Now that’s both a blessing and a curse. Sometimes God shines a light on a corner of our life that we might not want to paint. Maybe you have a relationship that in disarray and God’s request is that you heal the wounds. Perhaps God wants you to know that you aren’t reaching your full potential in your career or in your spiritual life.
Some things like your career and your spiritual life — they aren’t easy to fix. They require of you work, commitment and even some faith. If you put your faith in God and you follow the path of Christ, you’ll find ways to accomplish the things that God asks of you. And God doesn’t really ask a lot of us. He just asks that in all of our life that we serve him first and ourselves second.
II Chronicles 19:9 tells us: “You must serve faithfully and wholeheartedly in the Lord.”
This isn’t to say that we all serve the same way. In first Corinthians, chapter 12, verses 4 through 6, we get some amazing instruction:
“Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone.”
That means that we aren’t all meant to be painters or teachers or graphic designers or accountants or pastors. We aren’t all called to serve in the same way. But our purpose is the same — to spread the word of Jesus Christ. We are all empowered to serve God in a variety of ways and our challenge is to find out the way that we best serve and do our best we can to bring about Zion.
Being faithful stewards isn’t just about money. God calls us to be faithful stewards over our whole lives. He calls us to tend carefully to all the corners of our being so that we might fully realize the greatness and blessings that David spoke of in Psalm 8.
That means that even though it may be a challenge, in our spiritual lives, in our managing of our resources, in our relationships, we must always reach further than is necessary and paint all the way to the corners.
