Pastor John Van Sloten

Just back from a 30k ride.  Usually my mind clears by 15k… not this time.  Three thoughts were concurrently running through my mind. They were all the same; of the same essence.  The first was one had to do with abstract art.  In God in the Gallery author Daniel Siedell writes about the nature of abstract painting -  that it is a kind of expression that seeks to leave the conventional behind and attain a more numinous sense of immediacy.  The content of abstract art lay not in what it is trying to depict, but in the symbolic imagery itself.  As abstract painter Mark Rothko famously stated, he painted with “nothing but content.”  The second idea had to do with the idea of icon; the old mystical church kind.  Icons were pieces of art that were less about what they depicted and more about what they led you to experience.  They were paintings you looked through(to see/experience God).  The third idea was the concept of exhortation.  I remember reading an article that spoke of preaching as a different kind of communication – exhortation.  Exhortation is not primarily about the communication of content but more about – via the proclamation of words about God – speaking into reality a condition through which one experiences God.  When a sermon exhorts, in a sense it becomes God’s word; God is there, speaking.

Anyways… all three ideas seemed to be getting at the same thing; an immediate experience of a transcendent something more. This is what sermons at our church – when they turn out right – feel like to me…like spoken abstract pieces of art that lead to an immediate experience of God.