Sermon: The True, The Good, and The Beautiful

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The True, The Good, and The Beautiful

By Charles Rush

June 17, 2001

r passage this morning calls to mind, Jesus' remark, ‘where your treasure is, there your heart is also.' Where is your heart?

One little tyke was asked that question by his nursery school teacher and he pointed to the seat of his pants. His teacher asked him, why do you say your heart is down there? “Because, my Nana is always patting me there and saying, ‘Bless your little heart.'”

It will not be that easy for you to find your heart, I suspect. I'm afraid that we have birthed you into a world with unhealthy spiritual attitudes towards material prosperity. I hope that I am wrong. I can't help but call to mind the citizens of the Island of Nauru in the Western Pacific Ocean. These people lived contented for centuries in an island paradise with abundant natural resources and rich fishing waters. But one day, a chemist studying a piece of wood from the island, discovered it to be an area rich in phosphates. The island of Nauru was rich in phosphate rock, which is extremely useful in fertilizer. The government set about mining the phosphate rock and soon became exceedingly rich from its exports. Thereupon the government began to subsidize the life of its citizens and everyone on the island became rich.

The newly rich Nauruans became conspicuous consumers, stocking their houses with every kind of high-tech household gadget. Though their little island has only one road, most family bought two or more cars. They began importing food in large quantities. Few of them worked anymore. Today 90% of the population is obese, diabetes and heart disease rates have skyrocketed. Their wealth made them sick.

And there is a spiritual sickness from abundance as well. In the next couple years you will surely read the works of the French existentialists in the early twentieth century. It is a literature that is steeped in apathy and despair. I commend it to you because it was largely the product of a very prosperous society in Paris. I am thinking particularly of Jean-Paul Sartre. His Paris was near war in Europe, he was near deprivation in Africa and he internalized many of these realities but in a despairing way. But Paris itself, like New York today, was actually incredibly expensive, prosperous and abundant. Sartre went to great parties every night. He led the high life. Yet he awoke the next day to write about dread, anxiety, meaninglessness, and boredom. It is an odd phenomenon that materially prosperous societies are not necessarily happy. They do not often achieve spiritual integration. As the novelist Walker Percy has pointed out, hard times often brings out the best character in people: courage, determination, a sense of humor. But prosperity and abundance often lead to misplaced priorities, boredom, and apathy. I can fairly well predict that you will know people in your life that are hugely wealthy and spiritually vacuous.

I want to briefly suggest three things to think about that make for a rounded spiritual life. I got them from the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1750's) when I had to read his three critiques in college: The Critique of Pure Reason, The Critique of Practical Reason, and the Critique of Judgment. In his prologue, Kant says that he set about to write his three critiques because in his opinion, the task of philosophy is to determine the true, the good, and the beautiful. Reason, morals, aesthetics. It was one of those startling observations that you have in college that is so obvious you can't believe no one figured it out until 1750. But you would never have come up with it on your own.

Let's take them in order. What is true? Kant's longest work was on the nature of reason. What can we know and how can we know that what we know is actually true? I hope that is a question that you seriously ponder all the days of your life.

It is necessarily a God question in two senses. The smaller one is how much of the Bible is true or how much of our Christian tradition is true. I say that is a smaller question because we can very nearly presume that every human tradition, religious or otherwise, has overstated the case in their own interests on certain point. The bigger question is looking at the structure of the universe in its microcosm and it's macrocosm and asking if this looks like an intentional design that is evolving with purpose and meaning or not.

There are a lot of religious people that are afraid of asking this question openly and honestly. Someone wrote me about their five-year-old son who had a speak and spell computer program. At one point the youngster typed in the word ‘God” and waited for the computer to say it back to him. The computer said, “Word not found”. He typed it in again. Again, “Word not Found.” The little boy said to his Mom, “Jesus is not going to like this.” Too many Christians have this secret anxiety. They are afraid that if you pull back the curtain of tradition, the great Oz is going to be nothing other than an aging bald Mayor from a little town in Kansas. That could happen but it is not likely and frankly, we are more likely to discover that, like Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and Lion, we don't need the billowing, scary Oz anyway. What we need is brains, courage, and a heart.

But I hope that you consider the question in the wide open manner that it deserves and that you deserve. I am told that we cannot presume this of your generation. Indeed, The Atlantic Monthly recently visited Princeton University and reported that more than any generation since the 50's, your generation defers to the authority of your professors and primarily wants to know what will be on the exam. It is understandable to be focused on grades, goals, and achievement, but don't settle for the considered opinion of your professors, your Minister, or the authors of the books you read.

I have good news on two fronts. The first is the strictly intellectual dimension. I spent the last year involved in discussions with theologians, Ministers, and Physicists on the question of the Big Bang, the End of the World, and the question of God.

At present physicists are divided on the exact the future evolution of the universe. On a cosmic scale, the history of the universe is a gigantic tug-of-war between the expansive force of the big bang, drifting the galaxies apart, and the contractive force of gravity, pulling them together. These two effects are so evenly balanced that we cannot tell which will win. Accordingly, two alternative scenarios must be considered. If expansion prevails, the galaxies now receding from each other will continue to do so forever. Within each galaxy, gravity will bring about condensation into enormous black holes, which will eventually decay into low-grade radiation through a variety of possible physical processes. On this scenario, the universe ends in a whimper. It also gets a lot colder towards the very end since we are drifting apart.

If, on the other hand, gravity prevails, the present expansion of the galaxies will be halted and reversed. What began with the big bang will end in the big crunch, as the whole universe collapses back into a singular cosmic melting pot. On this scenario, it gets increasingly warmer towards the end and our sense of time would speed up as well. I believe it was Steven Weinberg, in one of his books, who raised the question as to whether time would actually reverse itself in this collapse, a concept which is literally mind-boggling when you start to consider it seriously.

This discussion was begun because of the question that it raises. If in fact, the universe comes to an end, can there be any meaning to it? Or is it the case that upon implosion, we might actually explode apart again, in which case our universe would be re-created in a different form? At some point in the early part of these discussions, the question was posed to several of the physicists as to why they were so interested in this question. And the answer came back that they were interested in the intentions of God. Whereupon someone asked them why they believed in God. At this point there was a good deal of hurumphing and short answers like the one Albert Einstein gave 80 years ago in answer to the possibility of quantam physics, “God doesn't shoot dice with the universe.” They said, “our world is evolving purposively towards greater complexity”. Or as my friend David Wilkinson, the Chairman of the Physics Department at Princeton, put it, “After 40 years of studying the galaxies, the universe is not an accident.”

There are dissenters from this opinion to be sure, Steven Weinberg, among the leaders. But, there is a slowly emerging consensus that God is a reasonable assumption with our best understanding about the structure of the universe. I think it is important coming from Physicists. 1000 years ago, Theology was the Queen of the Sciences. All the best minds were theologians. 500 years ago, Philosophy took its place. But today, the greatest minds and the most interesting creative thought on the structure of our world is in Physics. Physics is the new Queen of the Sciences and well it should be.

Speaking for myself, I am optimistic on another front with Christianity. Someone once said that Christianity is an experiment that has yet to be tried and that is not all wrong. Few people have ever made a lifetime out of following the teachings of Jesus consistently.

I would suggest this as a spiritual experiment you really ought to try as you mature. Take the basic teachings of Jesus: love, compassion, grace, forgiveness, mercy towards poor and dispossessed, justice, peace, integrity (or as Jesus would say purity of heart), humility, honesty. Try them out in your life in a test of faith. Find some scripture passages that Jesus uses on say, love, and read on them. Try to actually develop them in your life intentionally. This is the step of faith- that you really, seriously try it out. What you will find is that they are genuinely a spiritually superior way to live. What you will find is that you genuinely become a better person with this way of living.

Some truth is not simply abstract and intellectual, (not just complex mathematical formulae), some of it is lived through faith and validated in experience. And the Christian life is like that. You have to try it out. But make Truth prove itself. Test it, consider it, doubt it, hold it up to the light and under a microscope, try it on, make it your own.

I've already started in on the second point, the quest for what is Good. What is the Right thing to do? How can we find moral purpose for our lives? Because as it turns out, we cannot really live our lives without moral purpose. It beguiles us and it haunts us all the days of our lives. At the very end of Saving Private Ryan, when Private Ryan is now an old man and he returns to Normandy Beach where so many of his comrades died that he might live. He is standing before the grave of a guy that saved his life. His wife comes over to stand next to him. He turns to her and says, “Tell me that I am a good man. Tell me that I lived a good life.” We need to know that our lives were worth while. This becomes more important with age. Almost all of your Father's say to me at some point that they wish they had paid more attention to this when they were younger.

There is a small College Chapel that has one of the most unusual baptismal fonts in the world. It is made from a huge stone which has been hollowed out for a font. On that very stone, African slaves stood to be sold to the highest bidder. Today, the stones serves Belmont Abbey as its baptismal font. And inscription on the plaque tells all who enter those cleansing waters: “On this stone men were sold into slavery. From this stone men are now baptized into freedom.”

I hope that is what your lives will be about. Redeeming injustice from the past and carving from it a new foundation of hope, peace, and love.

And it is never easy. Because the great moral questions of your time are never obvious in the moment you are living through them. You will have to be open and make convictions. You will have to be understanding of others but you will have to make up your mind and stand for something.

Often times, the most profoundly moral witness, the most profoundly Christian witness you will make will come from doing the one obvious thing that is right in front of you to do. Emma Atkins was in Vietnam in the early 60's because her husband was an American engineer for the military.

She was curious about he fact that every Vietnamese woman over 60 had a bent back. Then she noticed that after the monsoon season the sweeping of the debris was inevitably done by older people who used a broom with a short handle. Since wood for the handles cost too much and was in short supply, Emma found a long-stalked reed and planted shoots from the reed by her door. She tended these reeds carefully. One day when neighbors were in her house she cut a tall reed, bound coconut fronds to it and began to sweep with her back straight. When the people questioned her concerning the reed, she told them where they might find it growing. Four years later, after she had moved back to Pittsburgh, Emma received a letter from the leader of the village thanking her. The letter read: “In the village of Chang Dong today, the backs of our old people are straight and firm. No longer are their bodies painful and bent. You will be pleased to know that on the outskirts of the village we have constructed a small shrine in your memory… at the foot are these words; ‘In memory of the woman who unbent the backs of our people.' My profoundest hope is that you will be privileged in your life, to unbend the backs of someone else.

The great leader of England, Winston Churchill, once said “You make a living by what you get but you make a life by what you give.

I hope you discover what Martin Sheen discovered. Sheen is best known for playing the role of the President of the United States on West Wing. But he is also a practicing Roman Catholic and is very involved in a restaurant in California for the homeless called Bread and Roses. He volunteers every week and has become personally involved in the lives of some of the people that he has met there. This is what he said recently, “Acting is what I do for a living, but my social justice work is how I stay alive.”

Finally, it is not enough to find the truth, not enough to establish goodness, I hope you also discover and nurture what is beautiful.

My generation owes you an apology. We said we would “Make love, not War” and usher in the “Age of Aquarius” where everyone “who get together, and try to love one another right now.”

Somehow, we lost our way. In the place of love, we decided that what you needed was to be sold pornography over the Internet. What you needed instead of great atheletic competition was the concocted charade of championship wrestling. We decided that what you needed instead of personal interaction was a childhood of video games that blast people apart. We knew you would pay good money for some of them. And we knew your parents would pay good money for the others to keep you entertained.

But this is a far cry from the beautiful life. The quest for beauty is the higher life of culture. The Greeks thought conceived of it as the things in the Arts that develop culture that corresponds to a fulfilling intellectual and spiritual life. That is why their art characteristically depicts the ideal human form. Their statues characteristically are of the Spear thrower in ideal youthful shape. They thought that the Arts ought to guide us towards the higher reasons for which we live and that we ought to come out of a play, not only entertained, but wanting to be better people for having seen it. They wanted us to be ‘inspired', which literally means ‘to be filled with the Spirit'.

We stand at a crossroads culturally. In the next couple of generations, we could develop the richest program of Theater, Ballet, Opera, Orchestra and Fine Arts that the world has ever seen. We have all the possibilities of prosperity and peace to make that happen. But it will only happen with a vision for the Arts

At the end of the movie Mr. Holland's Opus, the School Board calls the Music teacher into a special meeting to tell him that they have decided to cut the music and fine arts programs at their local High School. The budget is tight. They decided to keep all the sports programs and let music and fine arts go. They say to the teacher, Mr. Holland. “The arts aren't practical. We have to teach kids math and science so they can get into college and get good jobs.”

Mr. Holland says, “And once they have good jobs and all the money that comes with it, what are they going to do if they don't have the Arts and Music to make a life. What are they going to talk about after they have those good jobs… the Arts and Music are what people talk about in their free time. The Arts and music are what makes us live.”

He's right. I hope that when you are in college, you don't just take the courses that prepare you for a career. I hope you take the Humanities and read the great books of Western Civilization so that you appreciate great literature, great Art, Drama, music. And I hope that you don't just content yourself with Fraternity parties, but you save your nickels and attend a couple of cultural events every semester. It is your tithe to the Arts.

I remember when we were in Graduate School and I was as poor as a Church Mouse. Kate and I would save and save so we could go see one ballet at the Met or one great play like Fences with James Earl Jones. We would have the seats so high, there were clouds between us and the stage. Every once in a while, these days, we will get invited to sit in the Box seats for one of those events. I still look back up at the nose bleed seats. I'm looking for the young people with a hunger for the beautiful.

Don't just get a diploma, get an education. Develop a love affair with the Arts. Support them with your money.

Brothers and sisters. Live for what is true, what is good, what is beautiful. And go to church every once in a while, even if it is Vespers on Thursday evening. And come back and see me. Now it gets interesting.

Amen.