“Beauty”
Beloved Community: Beauty
Psalm 96
May 29, 2016, First Presbyterian Church of Holt
I’ve always liked musical theatre. To me there’s something freeing about people breaking out into song when their emotion simply can’t be contained in spoken word, and dancing when even song won’t quite capture what they’re feeling. After witnessing me breaking out into song on more than one occasion, a friend of mine in seminary told me that being friends with me was the closest he’d ever get to living in a musical. I decided to take that as a compliment.
Our scripture today comes to us from our biblical songbook, the Psalms. Like a scene from a musical, this particular passage is a psalm of thanksgiving, but not only through song and words, but through the gladness of the heavens, the rejoicing of the earth, the roaring of the sea, the exulting of the fields. Everything is uncontainably breaking out into song, and all of creation knows the choreography.
This litany of all of creation’s praise reminds me of Jesus’ words in Luke 19:40 in the context of the parade of palms, Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. The crowd is shouting praise and joy and excitement. The Pharisees tell Jesus to make the disciples stop, and Jesus says to them,“I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”
Our Psalm has all sorts of parts of creation singing out with joy and gratitude for the glory, majesty, and beauty of God. When we look at a sunset, a field of flowers, or a waterfall, it’s easy to attribute beauty to God’s creation. When we see winter bud into spring we can see the creative energy of God, creating life where there had been frost and emptiness. When we hear rain fall and thunder crash we are confronted with the enormity of God’s presence. The beauty of God’s creation is less apparent on the days when the world seems dreary, or when we have snow on Pentecost in May. And It can become even harder to see beauty in the part of creation closest to us, that is our own being. We’re used to these bodies that we inhabit. We’ve seen the good and bad that they can do, and consequently struggle to see what makes them worthy of admiration, much less breaking into song and dance at their beauty.
St. Irenaeus, an early theologian who lived around a century after Jesus’ death, wrote this about our created nature:
“The tender flesh itself will be found one day
–quite surprisingly– to be capable of receiving,
and yes, full[y] capable of embracing the searing energies of God.
Go figure. Fear not.
For even at its beginning the humble clay received God’s art,
whereby one part became the eye, another the ear, and yet another this impetuous hand.
Therefore, the flesh is not to be excluded from the wisdom and the power that now and ever animates all things.
His life-giving agency is made perfect, we are told, in weakness– made perfect in the flesh.”
Our purpose as we know it in scripture, as God animated, created flesh, was assigned from the very beginning of creation: to be made in God’s image. It can be tricky to reconcile that call to our lived out reality. Do we really see ourselves and those around us as created in God’s image? Do we treat one another and ourselves like this is true? Do we seek to bear God’s beauty in our lives and actions, or do we hide behind our insecurities and self-defined imperfections? Do we celebrate the ways that God’s own creative energy and capacity for reason empower our abilities, or is the beauty of our mind lost in apathy and ignorance?
Benedictine monastic, Macrina Wiederkehr writes this in her book, “A Tree Full of Angels,” “The most exciting of all calls is the call to be like God… There was a common belief in the Old Testament that if people were to see God face to face they would die. The reasoning behind this thought makes a great deal of sense. Our frailty simply can’t take all of God’s glory in one gaze. It would be too much for us. Our task, then, if we want to see God and live is to start looking like God. We must lessen the difference between us.”
What would it mean in your life, for you to lessen the difference between you and God? Not so you may be worshipped in your own arrogance, but that you might draw close to the beauty that God has instilled in you by virtue of your very creation. We live in the tension of ever being drawn to seek to be like God, while simultaneously knowing that we are not God and will never achieve God’s greatness. By acknowledging this struggle and still seeking to ever reflect as much as we can of God’s beauty, we live into God’s purpose for us.
The Psalmist explores this tension in Psalm 8: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.”
What are we that God is mindful of us? And why do we have such a hard time taking on our role in God’s desires for us? Do we see ourselves as capable of bearing God’s beauty? Have you ever taken the time to gaze into the mirror, not in a spirit of vanity or critique, but rather in gratitude? Do you see in yourself the beauty of God’s creation?
These bodies of ours can be harder to see as beautiful when they are not functioning in the ways we would hope and not allowing us to do the things we would like. 
Many of you know that I have had my own experiences with limitations throughout this pregnancy, particularly this last week, when various health complications required me to spend most of the time lying on my side, and even then experiencing quite a bit of pain. It’s a humbling and frustrating thing to be so confronted with our embodiment, at the mercy of our incarnation. And yet, the reality that right now, my son’s heart is beating inside of me and his feet have been kicking me all throughout the day, it is nothing short of miraculous. After witnessing so many friends and family members struggling with fertility and infant loss, I don’t take it for granted for one moment that Calvin’s very existence is possible. But one doesn’t need to go even as far as that to marvel at what our bodies are able to do, and the care with which God created us.
Whittaker Chambers, initially an avowed atheist, started towards conversion in a creator God when when he had his own experience of the divine beauty of creation in examining his daughter’s ear as she was sitting in her high chair eating. He writes, “She was the most miraculous thing that had ever happened in my life…My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear – those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind ‘No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature. They could have been created only by an immense design’.”
When you look for the beauty of God’s creation in others, what do you look for? It’s easier to see the beauty of God in your children or your spouse, but have you ever tried to seek this beauty in a stranger, or in that person at work or school that you just really don’t like?
When we step back and think of the intricate beauty of creation, of the way each of us are fashioned by God, we can’t help but notice God’s beauty in every single person, the intentional convolutions of each person’s ear, the miracle of hearts beating, the dependability of lungs circulating each breath.
“O sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth. Sing to the Lord, bless his name; tell of his salvation from day to day. Declare his glory among the nations, his marvellous works among all the peoples.” May we forever be in awe of God’s beauty in this world, both around us and within us. Amen.
Presbydestrian 