This Beautiful Mess: Finding Delight When Life is Ugly

Psalm 27:1, 4-9
I Corinthians 1:10-18

The Psalmist mentions beauty, seeking beauty, taking delight in beauty.  And so I’d like for us to talk for a few minutes about what you find beautiful. . . .

Clearly we find a variety of things beautiful.  But let me ask you, how often do you give voice to this feeling?  Those of you who post regularly on social media, when was the last time you said, “Here is a beautiful landscape or dress or building?”  And if you’re not a social media person, when was the last time you shared in conversation something you found beautiful?  What I’m trying to get at is whether we’re awake and alive to the many forms beauty takes all around us.
 
Murmurations
We’re going to do something a little different today.  We have this enormous screen.  And it’s fine.  We’ve used it a little.  We’ve avoided using it all the time because we don’t want it to dominate the way we worship.  We spend a good bit of time all week in front of screens, and so perhaps on Sundays here in worship we need a little escape from screens.  So we won’t do this all the time.  But today on the screen there will be a series of images during the sermon.  These are images of starling murmurations from a profile in The Atlantic magazine. 

I find murmurations beautiful.  They are also chaotic, unpredictable, always changing, and never last long.  There is a form to this beauty, but it never stops shifting.  Scientists tell us that there is order to this playfulness.  Starlings obey three basic rules in their murmurations . . .
1.     starlings fly wingtip to wingtip
2.     they fly in perfect tandem to the seven birds closest to them
3.     when in doubt they fly towards the center

So my hope is that you leave worship today with an image of beauty that sits alongside our Scripture readings.  But of course it may be that you like the pictures and ignore the sermon.  Or you may find the images distracting and just take in the sermon as if the images weren’t there.  As is always the case, you are welcome to be here and to worship in ways that make sense for you.

These two readings sit oddly together.  The Psalm is about beauty and the reading from Corinthians is about division and conflict.  The Psalm is about our attraction to God’s loveliness and the Corinthian reading is about how easily we can get bent out of shape with other people.  If the Psalm is a reading that directs us to the upper reaches of life’s possibilities, the Corinthian reading reminds us how often we get stuck living far below what’s possible for us. 

But I don’t want to give up either of these readings and what they have to teach us.  I want the truth of both to shape my life.  I want the inspiration and the exhilaration that comes from a life that pays attention to what’s beautiful.  And I want the honesty and realism that comes from a life that can deal with what is confusing and painful.  What if the life God offers to us is a beautiful mess? 

Psalm 27:1, 4-9
One thing I asked of the Lord, that I will seek after: to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple (v. 4). 

There are two things that might be explored here.  First, there is the singularity of this desire, this seeking.  I want this one thing more than the other things I want, says the Psalmist.  I might want other things, but all those wants are gathered up and integrated in this larger desire – to behold the beauty of the Lord.

Second, notice that this is a prayer about architecture.  What the Psalmist wants is to live in “the house of the Lord” and to “inquire in God’s Temple.”  We will need to ask ourselves whether we believe, along with the Psalmist, that God is beautiful.  That is a wonderful, but complex question.  And if we say that God is beautiful, what do we mean?  Regardless, it is clear that the beauty of the Jerusalem Temple had something to do with the Psalmist’s desire to “behold the beauty” of the Lord.  How might this inform our own exploration of the role of beauty in our lives?

It might mean that the Psalmist was beholding God’s beauty indirectly.  Perhaps the central experience for the Psalmist was an experience of beholding the beauty of the Jerusalem Temple – in all its majesty and color and symmetry.  And this building, this artfully made object, became for the Psalmist a sign of God’s beauty.  That is, the Psalmist moved from an experience of beauty to the confession that this beauty was an expression or manifestation of the beauty of the God responsible for the Temple and for everything else. 

"Come," my heart says, "seek his face!" Your face, Lord, do I seek.
Do not hide your face from me. Do not turn your servant away in anger, you who have been my help. Do not cast me off, do not forsake me, O God of my salvation!
(v. 8-9)

What is the connection between “seeking” after the beauty of the Lord in the Temple and “seeking” the Lord’s “face”?  Is this parallelism – a restatement of the same theme in different language?  It could be.  But the shift from the beauty of the Temple to the beauty of God’s face appears to mark a different tone.  The Psalmist’s  prayer registers the Psalmist’s intense, passionate desire to experience God’s beauty and not merely the signs of God’s beauty in the world around us.  When we pray with a passionate plea for God’s deliverance and help, we need more than signs of a God who is elsewhere; we need God’s face, God’s lively presence with us.

Now, you will notice that the Psalmist longs for the beauty of God, longs to see God’s face – but the Psalmist does not mention having to do this seeking within a specific community or congregation.  This prayer is wonderful and important, but it feels a bit abstract.

The question about how we respond to beauty in our lives is not the only question.  There is also the question about how we respond to what is irritating and annoying, how we respond to what is frustrating and stressful.  You see, very few of us can afford to spend our time wandering around in museums looking at works of art.  Very few of us can spend all of our time waltzing through cities in order to take note of beautiful buildings and remarkable architecture.  Nor can we spend all day looking at beautiful people or fashion, hiking near lakes in the mountains, or strolling along beaches.  We might even develop a real appreciation for the shape of a bowl or a fork or a table. But you can’t stand there looking at it forever. 

We have to welcome beauty into our lives whenever and however we can get it.  But most of the time we’re living in the friction of our ordinary lives – working, going to school, cleaning, organizing, caring for others who need us, running errands.  Or we’re trying to figure out how to cooperate and collaborate with other people in things we care about – a civic group, or a book group, a dinner group, a children’s sports team, a leadership board, our neighbors, our own family or others in the congregation.

And those rhythms of trying to find common ground and get along with other people can be unbelievably trying, can’t they?  They can get us so worked up and out of sorts that the last thing on earth we’re thinking about is beauty.  When we’re stressed or worried, angry or sad, hurt or frustrated, we could walk right by something beautiful and not even notice it. 

I Cor. 1:10-18
The Corinthians embark on a new form of community life – an attempt to build and become a new kind of place, a congregation marked by baptism. They heard the good news of God’s love for us in Jesus Christ.  And they experienced an invitation into a new kind of family gathered around and shaped by this love.  And they signed up.  They received baptism and entered a new web of relationships.

But then things go wrong.  What they experience in their life together is conflict and division.  Rather than feeling united around common goals, they feel pulled into competing factions, rival teams aligning with different leaders in the community.  What had been an attraction to a beautiful way of life had become a bitter and negative experience of failure.

We have had some version of this experience ourselves.  And in this situation the Apostle Paul reminds us that the cross is not eloquent wisdom.  The cross is powerful precisely in its foolishness.

This presses back against our need and desire for beauty.  What kind of beauty are we wanting?  Are we willing to behold the beauty within a world and a life that can often be ugly?  Are we so devoted to what’s beautiful that we’ve lost the capacity to see and deal with what is difficult and confusing, terrifying and heartbreaking?

The cross of Jesus might be beautiful in some poetic way.  But it is also a site of grotesque violence, the crushing of a human life and a sign of terror to those who might identify with him.  It is an occasion for betrayal and hatred, a body disfigured and shamed.  We ought to at least be careful about calling this crucifixion “beautiful.”

These questions about beauty, ugliness, and messiness meet us in our lives and our faith journeys. . .
In our own congregational life and expectations;
In marriage and family life, in relating to parents, children, siblings;
In our work and financial lives;
In our desire for healthy community life in the places where we live;
In our desire for healthy political life on a broader stage;
In our concern for all of creation, across time and into the future.

Here is a little test for us.  And don’t worry if you don’t feel up to it today.  There are many days I wouldn’t pass this test.  But the test looks like this.  Can you look at the world around you – with all that’s wrong and out of joint; can you look at your own life, with all that’s frustrating and disappointing – and can you pray with all your heart: “Loving God, thank you for this beautiful mess”?

Paying attention to beautiful things can become for us a form of prayer.  That is, we need not be surprised by our attraction to what’s beautiful.  We are learning to recognize our desire for beauty as an important part of our lives – our way of being in the world, our particular form of gratitude and witness.  But this can only happen if we learn to connect our desire for beauty with our desire for the One who is the source of all this beauty, the fount of all the beauty that appears to us. 

In our praying, we can begin to come to grips with our passion and our desire as pointers to the beauty that gives us birth and sustains us through life.  In our praying, we begin to come to grips with the need to fight for our own desires, to struggle to stay awake to beauty.  We pray and desire in a world that crucifies the innocent and celebrates the ugly.   Those are powerful forces.  But beauty is more attractive, more persuasive, more alluring, more inviting than anything else that competes for our attention.

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