Sermon: The True and the Beautiful

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The True and the Beautiful

By Charles Rush

October 17, 2010

[ Audio (mp3, 6.4Mb) ]

am delighted to liberate this text from the culture wars over abortion and reproductive rights and finally preach on it in a context that is edifying. In this very early Jewish hymn, God is praised for the delightful miracle of birth and what a wonder it is as Bill Ketchum can tell you just about now. Bill and Amy had three children when they found out last spring that, wow, Amy was pregnant again… with twins. If you'd like to cook a meal for them next week, I have a signup sheet here. I'm going to make a dish I call “Chaos Control” and they will need it.

You stand there in the nursery, looking at the little guys grin, the grin that is remarkably, hauntingly reminiscent of your grandfather. He opens his hand and you look at those wee fingerprints and his balding line that is exactly like yours, worryingly like yours, and you just have that “Whoa” kind of moment. It is, simply very moving, the sophistication of our world.

You find yourself, almost silly like a drunken man, saying “Son you are perfect”, not because of any particular attribute but just because. And you know that the way you love this one child is the way that God loves us only purer/deeper. And you know that God, impossible as this is to actually comprehend, loves all of us this way. And if you allow that thought to run it's course, you realize that God loves you- even you- like this, as pathetic and compromised as you are in real life.

The world is simply a fantastic place. I think of a picture that a friend sent me from 20,000 ft. in Nepal looking down over cloud cover to the peaks that dotted through the clouds and a note that said, “I thought you might like to see what Heaven looks like”. I think of a friend describing the Northern Lights over Alaska or friends in the Physics department at Princeton calling me to the telescope to see the birth of a new galaxy. For me, I was 19, and we had ridden motorcycles across the Sinai desert in Egypt and were at the very point, Ras Muhammed, where the desert falls in to the Red Sea. You walk out a hundred yards across the coral bed, at the edge where it falls straight off a cliff underwater down for a few hundred meters. I sat on the edge and put a diving mask on before we jumped in, and there were hundreds of thousands of fish of every imaginable color swimming in schools, from 3 inches to 22 ft. long. I couldn't believe that it was real and stunned, I was just happy to have lived to see it. I'm sure the Serengeti plain in Africa inspires people the same way.

The world is a beautiful place and we reflect back that beauty as well.

When Roman philosophers described human nature, they tended to think about humans in three dimensions. First, they would think about humans as Homo Laborans, as workers. We toil for our existence. We work. And it is true that you can find evidence of this going back to our ancestors before we had evolved into Homo Sapiens. Everywhere you find human remains, you find some way that humans alter the world around them… a shelter, fire, some way that they clothed themselves. Humans have chores that they go through and basic work that has to be done for us to exist and develop the next generation.

But they said that humans are not just workers, they are also Homo Faber, man the tool maker. God creates the world in beauty. Human fabricate things that reflect the beauty of creation. Our clothes are never just functional. As far as we can tell, they are always also meant to make us look good.

Jewelery has been with us a long time. You may know that we discovered shells in Morocco, sea shells that were pierced with a tiny hole, so they were worn on a string, just like a necklace you would buy for your daughters at a beach town in Mexico and we've dated this necklace to 89,000 years ago.

I saw an exhibit in Paris several years ago of jewelry that had been discovered in tombs in the Ukraine and Russia from the Scythians from the 3rd century BC.. That is pretty old. 5000 years ago is half way back to the first cities that humans built. They were gorgeous braided gold necklaces and pieces that they wore on their heads with gold pieces that fell on their forehead. What was so striking was that you could quite easily imagine them being sold right down the street in those wonderful jewelry shops on Rue Saint Michele. Perhaps you have noticed this at the Metropolitan Museum as well. It is not just the case that you might actually buy a brooch that was made in Ancient Egypt, it is astonishing that design patterns persist across cultures and centuries. It makes you realize that aesthetic judgment is in the deeper recesses of our brains. As one of our Supreme Court justices described the difference between erotic art and smut, “I know it when I see it.” The same could be said of our tastes in art. Though we have a wide variety of cultural art forms, we also possess a remarkable consensus on patterns in beauty, colors and textures in beauty.

The aesthetic impulse has been with us for as long as we can see. Jewelry is among the earliest, most basic artifacts, from long, long before we established villages or cities.

Our world has become much more complex and diversified than the world of Rome. So when the Romans thought of Homo Faber, the capacity of using tools to fabricate things, they included all of the things that make our world a beautiful place to live: engineering, planning public places, gardens, neighborhoods, art, music, and the culture that it gives rise to.

And we Christians picked up on this idea and developed it. As God created the world in its manifold beauty, so shall we reflect the glory of God's creative spirit in fabricating worship spaces that are aesthetically inspiring. There have been a couple iconoclastic revolts, but for the overwhelming part of Christian history we spread art, music, and architecture everywhere we went.

Especially during the 400 years of the Middle Ages, when the whole Western world lapsed again into illiteracy, it was the art that carried the actual story. Ordinary people couldn't read and they couldn't understand the sermons that were delivered by the priests in Latin. Instead, our stained glass windows, the Altar pieces that were carved or painted in all of the prayer alcoves, the statuary, these magnificent Cathedrals that were built over multiple generations- these told the story itself.

And our commitment to art and architecture eventually developed new engineering as well. At the time that it was built, the Duomo at Florence was the tallest building in the world. In order to build something that big, the Architect Brunelleschi had to invent the crane, the proto-type of the cranes that you see dotting the horizon of Manhattan with every new building going up.

More than that, when we recovered public squares and public gardens during the Renaissance, almost all of our cities in the West were centered around churches that structured the shape and feel of our urban life. I heard a speaker on a radio show that quoted the statistic, which was staggering, that something like 90% of all the art in Western history has been commissioned and paid for by the Christian church.

We do it because we are in a pursuit, not only of the True, but also the beautiful. God's beauty radiates through the world in creation and we reflect that back by making a temple of our world, creating a garden as Pat Kettenring does week in and week out arranging flowers, weaving altar clothes, singing together.

It complements the beauty of our shared life of love, when we lift each other's burdens up in prayer and blessing. There is something about our shared life in love that intrinsically radiates beauty. There is something about the tenderness of a sympathetic hug that resonates with us at a deep level.

And we know that this is our growth area, to be comfortable radiating the beauty that is who we are. For almost all of us, to live out of who we actually are, to come to grips with what we have to offer and to be comfortable with actualizing who we ourselves are meant to become. For each of us, when we really absorb God's love, when we realize that we are beloved, we can find that confidence to be ourselves.

We can't help it when we are younger. Young people almost always buy someone else's dream. It is in trying on different dreams that they come to understand what fits them and what doesn't. And at some point as young adults or middle aged adults, we realize that we've been following a script that someone else wrote and it really doesn't fit who we are or what we want to be about. We realize that we need to stop living for other people's expectations and start living our own.

Perhaps you've seen that "Dove - Onslaught" ad that illustrates this how this is presently played out for our children. I read an article where the author said that these days, our girls grow up with beauty becoming a source of anxiety for them rather than confidence. Unwittingly, the market hype over beauty sets them up for this. This is dramatically portrayed in the ad [ e.g. www.dailymotion.com/video/x344dw_new-dove-onslaught-film_people or www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zKfF40jeCA ]

You go down that road, and we all do, you absorb that message, and we all have, and you are living out of someone else's script. You are not only anxious because you don't feel like you can compete at the upper ends, I wonder if we aren't anxious because we subconsciously realize that this script is pedestrian and manipulative and we've been too easily driven by it, whether we intended to be or not.

The actual spiritual truth is that we eventually mature into finding our own voice and this is the beauty that we live out of, that we radiate. The magic of the life of love is that we give each other the confidence to find ourselves, that for better and worse, to accept ourselves. We can only actually love to the degree that we are being ourselves and not someone else, so the quest to be authentic is related to our ability to be intimate. We have to be willing to live out of and share more and more of our actual selves as we grow in love and that is the actual difficult challenge for most of us.

Everyone wants it, as challenging as it is, because genuine self-expression is so full of creativity and humane beauty that we feel really alive. We just tap into the life force and that is how we actually radiate beauty, not mimicking someone else's image. When you talk to people that are living their dream, they don't actually go to work. They are living their lives. It doesn't feel like work. They are generating income doing what they would be doing anyway. It is a great space to be in.

You just keep wanting to get back to that place. It is the inspiring magic of love. The composer Aaron Copeland said that “inspiration may be a form of super consciousness or perhaps sub consciousness. But I am sure that it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.” It is that sense that you are being swept along, of engaging the creative process more fully. It is just flowing. You are in the zone.

One of the more moving images of God in the prophets comes from the passage that we read this morning in Jeremiah. It likens God to a potter throwing a pot on a wheel, making from the lump of our lives, a beautiful mold. Our lives, indeed, unfold before us like an artist creatively bringing shape from the stone, a sculpted image. The novelist, Eudora Welty, put it like this. “The events of our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves, they find their own order… the continuous thread of revelation.” It is an unfolding metamorphosis mid-wifed by those around us that love spiritually, giving us confidence and inspiration. That is the real beauty of self-expression, when you express what is genuinely you, and you don't need Botox to make it happen.

There is no short cut though, there is only maturity that happens as we leave behind the voices of other people and find our own voice. It is reciprocally related to our ability to love and be loved, revealing to us from other's around us who we are becoming. What a gift that we can give one another, the simple acceptance, the confidence that we can live out of our center. So bless someone today. Demonstrate to them that their inner beauty is reflected in the wonder of creation. Inspire them. Grant them confidence that they might let their beauty shine. Amen.