Empty Frames
Coming from suburban Georgia, there have been a lot of adjustments for my family to make since our move: parking (or not), navigating the T (or not), picking a grocery store, finding a go-to coffee-shop, shoveling snow, learning about baseboard heaters—not to mention the all-new geography and rhythms of the city—everything is new to us.
But there’s been plenty of familiarity, too. The RMV is still the RMV (or what is known literally everywhere else as “the DMV”), people are still people, and the local church is still what Charles Spurgeon called “the dearest place on earth.” First Timothy 3:15 calls it “the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of the truth.” That’s true of every local church where the gospel is proclaimed and God’s word is upheld, and it’s an essential vision for every local church on earth—God’s family on mission, exalting the truth.
No one admires a pillar any more than they admire a picture frame. We understand that these things exist to turn our attention elsewhere. It’s not the pedestal but the statue that interests people, and as a local church points people to Christ, overtly and subtly, she undermines the faulty values of this world and frames a different vision for people to admire.
I was made highly aware of this on my first visit to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum last week. The museum is really a massive home, designed with the vision of its owner to display various works of art, from furniture and architecture to oil paintings and tapestries. While the building is certainly beautiful in its own right, no one goes there to look at the bricks or ride the elevator. Instead, every inch of the place has been arranged with an eye for something greater, more aesthetically pleasing, and lasting—not just the individual pieces but the whole experience. The local church is meant to be like that, a people who exist not for their own glory but that of Christ, arranged by God’s design to direct the world to the truth.
But in a fallen world, our sensibility for these sorts of things is marred. We can easily lose perspective of what it is we are meant to behold. At the museum, I remember hearing someone say of a random canvas hanging on a wall, “Well, I could do that,” likely pointing out the relative simplicity of the artwork in front of her. She could very well have been a world-class painter for all I know, but I’ll just guess that, no, she probably could not simply “do that.” It’s easy to lose sight of what’s in front of us, but it’s equally common to lose sight of ourselves, our ability, our wisdom. When the local church or individual believers have a faulty perspective that exalts ourselves over/against Christ, we end up minimizing the truth we are called to display.
Several years ago, the Gardner Museum was robbed, priceless works of art cut right out of the frames that displayed them. While the artwork has never been found, the frames remain on the walls of the museum to this day. They are empty. Instead of Rembrandt’s only seascape painting (“The Storm on the Sea of Galilee,” no less), visitors to the museum can bear witness to the beauty of…an ornate, gilded, wooden frame. Guests seek the frame out so that they can talk about the missing painting, but no one actually admires the frame that’s left behind. Likewise, when our lives fail to depict the truth of the gospel, no matter how pretty they may look, the substance is missing, the one subject that arrests the sinful heart’s attention and gives life—Christ alone.
This is an easy trap for local churches and individual believers to fall into: exalting ourselves, minimizing Christ, and further alienating the world from the only hope it has. Christians are especially prone to this sort of thing in the name of attracting people to Christ, ironically enough:
Using language (whether profanity or worldly philosophies) that appeals to people’s sensibilities and obscures the truth and holiness promoted by God’s word (For example, while all sin is a symptom of the broken nature of this world, it obscures reality to only refer to sin as brokenness, especially when we retreat from biblical words like “sin” to avoid giving offense.)
Collecting possessions, wearing clothes, and consuming entertainment that the world respects in order to present a more acceptable, but shallow, version of the gospel (It’s the same sort of impulse that puts even the most immature Christian celebrities on a pedestal because we think the world will listen to them.)
Avoiding hard conversations and uncomfortable truths in favor of a diminished and empty devotion to “love” and “grace” that are really as unloving and ungracious as the world (Only the worst doctor imaginable refuses to give a bad diagnosis for fear of alienating his patient.)
When local churches commit to clearly and consistently articulate the gospel in words and actions, in both corporate worship and public obedience to God, they rightly place Christ at the center, orienting themselves around the truth of God’s word and the hope that is only found in him. That’s something the world needs to see, and it’s something the Lord has always used to gather the dead to himself and bring them to life. There’s value in the unspectacular, simple, wooden frame not for what it is but for what it displays. In this way, we are called to be pillars and buttresses of the truth.