I had a fairly good time a week or ten days ago painting a drop for the seminary’s spring dance.
I’ve never been much of a painter, but it was fun to get to reach far back into my skill set and pull out something like that for a little while.
While I was working on it, I got to thinking about my scene painter friends, an eclectic bunch at best, and I remembered a story about one of them.
Kym was the Scenic Charge at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival when I started working there as the Master Welder. We worked together for about five years before, sadly, she was killed a few months after her thirtieth birthday.
Kym had painted many drops in her time, not dinky little eight foot square things like I did the other day, but big old 60’x30’ scenes of various kinds. A lot of them were skies. Sometimes they were great expanses of graded blues with different kinds of white clouds and sometimes they had the reds and oranges of sunrises and sunsets.
The story happened before I started working with there, but our mutual boss shared it at an in-house memorial for her: one day after she had spent eight or nine hours working on a sunset drop for some show, she was exhausted and headed out of the shop to go home. We usually left the building through the loading dock, and as she stepped out that evening, the trees at the end of the dock were silhouetted in front of the most gorgeous Gone With The Wind sunset you have ever seen. Here shoulders kind of drooped and she shook her head and said, “Look at that, it’s beautiful, but if I painted it, no one would believe it was real.” They’d say, “there’s never been a sunset with those colors, and even if there was they wouldn’t blend like that, and look at those clouds, those are real clouds.”
I think about that sometimes when I think about preaching. Preaching is not just about telling the truth, but about telling it in a way that people can hear it and take it in. I think that just like the reality of a sunset is too much for an audience member to believe, so too is the full truth of God’s love and grace too much for a congregation to hear and absorb.
Sermons need to point towards the full reality of that Good News, need to represent it, and remind people of it. But, our words can never paint the full picture of the Gospel, because no one will ever believe it without the direct experience of it.
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