Jumping To The Moon

Months ago, a local museum had an art exhibit.
My youngest daughter and I went for the afternoon.
We walked around admiring all of the artist’s paintings.
We each had our favorites.

One room overwhelmed us both in particular.
The artist, Jamie Wyeth, had painted a series entitled, The Seven Deadly Sins.
Wyeth’s take on the subject was uniquely his own.
He depicted the seven deadly sins using seagulls.

The canvases were enormous.
Without looking at the sign describing the painting, we were able to guess each one.
Wyeth captured the seven deadly sins perfectly.
Seagulls demonstrated each of the sins in a well-constructed scenario.

Wyeth observed many seagulls for decades along the coast of Maine.
He watched them from his studio on Monhegan and Southern islands.
In an interview, Wyeth commented on the seagulls themselves.
Gulls are nasty birds, filled with their own jealousies and rivalries.

Somehow without painting a characticture, the gulls acted out human tendencies.
Wyeth perfectly depicted the sins that are common to all of us.
He did it without pointing a finger, or using a specific group of people.
Wyeth expertly told the human story using a bird.

I thought of the exhibit on my morning walk.
I thought about the sins that are common to man.
I thought about how each of us is guilty.
I thought about how each of us struggles with one sin or another.

It is not one particular sin that is most heinous.
All sin is offensive to God.
All sin violates God’s holy standards.
We are all sinners.

That statement offends many of us.
But I’m good; I haven’t murdered anyone, I don’t cheat on my wife or my husband.
If we measured ourselves against other people, we might look pretty good.
However, we are to measure ourselves against God’s holy standards.

If we measure ourselves against God’s holy standards we come up short.
We come up short every time.
That’s why The Seven Deadly Sins painting struck me so.
Sin is the plight of everyman; it is the face of all of us.

The seven deadly sins were codified in the writing of Thomas Aquinas.
Dante dealt with them in his Divine Comedy and Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales.
Wyeth wanted to depict human frailty and he used seagulls to do it.
He told the story of pride, envy, anger, greed, sloth, gluttony, and lust.

Remembering the seagulls, I thought of myself.
Each one of us can park ourselves under the canvas of one of those sins at any given time.
On any given day, we may find that quite a few apply.
Despite Wyeth’s brilliance, one thing is vastly different.

Seagulls cannot be redeemed.
People can.

Redemption sets us apart.
Even angels long to look into these things. (1 Peter 1:12)
Angels do not experience salvation.
Salvation amazes even them.

Wyeth could not put the face of everyman on his canvas.
So he put the plight of everyman in the actions of a seagull.
Wyeth showed us ourselves on a canvas.
He showed us the ugliness of our sin in the surreal.

How can we point fingers?
The face of sin is the face of each of us.
We should not talk about degrees of sin.
That gets us nowhere.

All sin is against God.
Even when the sin is against another person, that person is made is God’s image.
Consequently, the sin is against God.
Sin is always against God.

In his book, The Grip of Grace, Max Lucado made a great illustration.

Judging others is the quick and easy way to feel good about ourselves. A convenience-store-ego-boost. Standing next to all the Mussolinis and Hitlers and Dahmers of the world, we boast, “Look God, compared to them I’m not that bad.” But that’s the problem. God doesn’t compare us to them. They aren’t the standard. God is. And compared to him, Paul will argue, “There is no one who does anything good” (Rom. 3:12). Suppose God simplified matters and reduced the Bible to one command: “Thou must jump so high in the air that you touch the moon.” No need to love your neighbor or pray or follow Jesus; just touch the moon by virtue of a jump, and you’ll be saved. We’d never make it. There may be a few who jump three or four feet, even fewer who jump five or six; but compared to the distance we have to go, no one gets very far. Though you may jump six inches higher than I do, it’s scarcely reason to boast. Now, God hasn’t called us to touch the moon, but he might as well have. He said, “You must be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect” (Matt. 5:48). None of us can meet God’s standard. As a result, none of us deserves to don the robe and stand behind the bench and judge others. Why? We aren’t good enough. Dahmer may jump six inches and you may jump six feet, but compared to the 230,000 miles that remain, who can boast?

Can we boast about jumping to the moon when we have so far to go?
Should we boast that at least we never did this sin or that sin?
We should not boast.
We all sin, we all fall short; we all have far to go.

No finger pointing.
If a seagull can depict human sin with conviction, then we are worse than we think.
If we think we are fine when we clearly are not, we deceive ourselves.
We are lulling ourselves into feigned sleep and soon we will be awakened with a jolt.

You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge the other, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things. Now we know that God’s judgment against those who do such things is based on truth. So when you, a mere man, pass judgment on them and yet do the same things, do you think you will escape God’s judgment? Or do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance, and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness leads you to repentance.
(Romans 2:1-4)

I looked at the seagull and I saw myself.
Do I see myself in you?
Do you see yourself in me?
Only in Christ, can we see ourselves in Him.

Have you jumped to the moon lately?