On Beauty: A Manifesto

Second Sunday after Epiphany

Ezekiel 16:4-14

Matthew 4:12-23

The middle of winter here in Mid America is not very picturesque.  A friend who drove to Chanute for meetings said the drive was depressing because it was solid brown all the way there.  Not a single green thing.  We’re deep into the heart of cold, dark, winter.  And so you’ll have to use your imaginations today – we’re talking about beauty.  And it doesn’t look very beautiful outside right now.

A manifesto is a declaration.  It comes from the Latin word for “manifest,” and refers to an attempt to make something clear.  There are political manifestoes, educational and artistic manifestoes, and there can be personal manifestoes.  But what’s required of a manifesto is that it speaks with clarity about the path forward. 

 

So today, I’d like to offer a modest manifesto for 2014 here at First Presbyterian.  As I’ve thought and prayed about where we are and where we’re going, the theme that captures all that’s going on is: “more beauty.” 

Here’s what I mean. In the coming year, you are going to see some striking changes to our building and property.  We are having $200,000 worth of work done on the roof, gutters, and windows as a result of last years’ hail storm.  The manse already has a new roof and gutters, and will be repainted this Spring.  In late 2012, we purchased the property across the street and removed the existing buildings.  Later this year we hope to begin work on a beautifully landscaped parking lot and green space in that area.

It’s going to be an exciting year of very visible changes.  These changes are positive not just for our congregation, but for our neighborhood and the wider community as well.

But I’d like to admit that this all has me terribly worried.  Now don’t get me wrong -  I’m not worried because we’re spending a little time and money beautifying our building and church property.  I’m worried that all this exciting work on our facilities will make the year seem lopsided or out of balance.  I’m worried that all this energy going towards our facilities has the potential to distract us from the ongoing work of opening our hearts and lives to God’s beautiful work in us and among us.

If you’re looking to waste a little time this week, just google “abandoned places.”  There are many once magnificent cities, churches, castles, monasteries, schools, government and factory buildings that are now completely desolate or overgrown with weeds.  Of if you need an example of fleeting beauty, consider our downtown Episcopal Church, St. Andrews.  Its classic architecture is wonderful, and yet it sits empty.  I am not attempting to be pessimistic.  I am only making the point that sometimes beautiful structures lapse into disrepair and yield to the forces of nature.

Do you think that this could never happen to us?  It happens all the time.  Many beautiful, once thriving churches across the country are now shuttered, empty and decaying.  Just east of New Haven, CT, on a bend of road through an industrial area sits a gorgeous, red-brick church that now operates as a plumbing supply business.  A number of sister congregations in our own Presbytery are facing an uncertain future.

My point is that it’s possible to lose what we have if we do not summon the ferocious courage it takes to continually renew our sense of mission and purpose.

Today I would like to take from our readings two themes – God’s beauty, and Jesus’ gathering of the first disciples – and use them to illumine our own situation.

Ezekiel 16 is a powerful, visceral, moving picture of God’s love and care for us.

God rescues and cares for a discarded child and raises her to become a beautiful queen.  God says to Israel, as a baby you were cast out and discarded, left to die out in the weeds.  Those who bore you didn’t even care enough to wash you off.  But passing by I heard you crying.  I picked you up, washed you off and raised you.  And as you developed past puberty into your teenage years, I dressed you in the finest garments.  I gave you bracelets, necklace, a ring in your nose, earrings, and a crown on your head.  The passage builds to these lines about this beautiful woman:

“ ‘You became very beautiful and rose to be a queen.  And your fame spread among the nations on account of your beauty, because the splendor I had given you made your beauty perfect,” declares the Sovereign Lord.” (16:13-14).  (This is about you and me, you realize.  It is a poetic expression of the way that God’s way of relating to us makes us beautiful).

Now turning to our gospel reading, Matthew 4 describes the beginning of Jesus’ ministry in Galilee with language from Isaiah:  “The people living in darkness have seen a great light.  On those living in the shadows, a light has dawned.”

During the dark of night you can’t see.  But Jesus comes to us like the gentle light of dawn, breaking over the horizon, beginning to make all things visible.  Now we can see.  Now we can see all the beautiful things God has made.

This particular passage doesn’t use the word “beauty” or “beautiful.”  But there’s something about Jesus’ way of life and his hopeful vision for what is possible that people are actively joining his ministry as followers.  They have seen something beautiful emerge in his life, in his way of being with others, and in his teaching, and they’re following him.

Peter and Andrew are fisherman already at work, casting their nets out onto the water.  But when Jesus says, “Come follow me,” immediately they drop their nets and set off because there’s something beautiful about the kingdom of heaven he is announcing.  James and John are fishermen too.  They’re mending nets with their father Zebedee.  But when Jesus says, “Come follow me,” they immediately walk away from the security of their family business, because they’ve seen something beautiful in Jesus.

Some of us have lost track of the beauty in ourselves and the beauty around us, because we’ve lost track of God as the source of all beauty. 

Learning to recognize and appreciate and protect beauty when no one else can see it is part of the life of faith.  This requires a long-term commitment to patterns of prayer and practice.  Often we get too busy, too caught up in our lives and work to notice how beautiful the world is.  At other times we give in to the temptation to negativity and pessimism.  We are disappointed in ourselves, and we allow that disappointment to fester and later emerge as a negative, complaining spirit directed at others.  Or directed at our surroundings.

The Manifesto today is not new.  It’s something we already believe.  God is beautiful, and everything God makes and loves is beautiful.  You already know this, so I won’t tarry long here.  But a few simple reminders.

1. God is beautiful.

During Epiphany we are reminded that God is beautiful.  And God relates to all other things to make them beautiful.  God is the source of all beauty.  God is in the beauty business, you might say. One fitting way to describe God’s renewal project in Jesus Christ is to say that God is making things beautiful.  In our worship we offer God praise for God’s inherent beauty, and we offer God thanks for the beauty of creation that has its source in God’s own beautiful life. 

2. People are beautiful; you are beautiful.

During a difficult period of my life, when I was anxious and bogged down in all kinds of questions and worries about my work, parenting, marriage – ok, it was basically a midlife crisis.  And therapy isn’t cheap, but it’s cheaper than buying a sports car.  The therapist I was seeing was interested in hearing about my dream life.  And so I began tracking my dreams.  Several of them were ominous.  I dreamed I about descending, going down into the depths and darkness of my life.  Sometimes it was on an elevator, sometimes it was going down under water.  But it was always scary and foreboding.  This isn’t surprising for someone beginning therapy.  There was some messy stuff I had stored away unattended in my unconscious life, and I was wary of retrieving and exploring all that. 

Yet during the same period of time I had another dream that was vastly different.  It was an exhilarating dream of a stunningly beautiful space, a vaulted roof in gorgeous wood filled with wonderful light.  And in the dream I just stood marveling at the beauty of it all.  That dream was a sign to me that there is something beautiful within me too.  But I had never once ever thought that about myself.  Never brought it to mind or said it out loud.  I didn’t hate myself.  I knew I was occasionally capable of goodness.  But hadn’t thought of my heart or soul or unconscious depths as “beautiful.”

Sorry for the detour into my therapy!  But hear this: You are one of God’s beloved, beautiful creatures.  And you are called to love yourself, care for yourself, seek your own flourishing, and develop ways of continuing to enhance your own beauty.  I would imagine you will have to fight to hear that gracious word of God to you over the din of all the other voices that speak to us of our ugliness, our lack of worth, our never being good enough.

3. Our city and our neighborhood is beautiful.

Like every community, Fort Scott and Bourbon County have challenges.  We have economic and cultural challenges.  We have self-esteem challenges: like other smaller cities, we’re not on any lists of “best places to live.”  Many of our young people venture off elsewhere, and have trouble finding good jobs even if they want to be here.  Yet this place, like every other place, has beauty.  And part of the spiritual life is learning to find beauty all around you.  And not just to notice beauty, but also to energetically join in God’s work of beauty-enhancement too.  So we don’t just notice beauty.  We actively work for more of it to shine forth.  So one that note, make sure you plan to join us for our next Sunday Serve on May 4.

All these things are connected, you see.  Faith in God provides a new kind of light that enables us to see more beauty, and in seeing some of it, to throw ourselves into the hard work of calling forth more beauty from everyone and everything.

Why am I talking about “beauty”?  Because it’s the best way to describe what’s happening right now and what’s coming at us this year. 

During the coming year there will be striking, beautifying changes to our building and surrounding property.  And so I think it also a good time to pay attention to the beautiful things God is doing among us and in us this year too. 

I mentioned earlier my worry that the beautifying of our building and property will distract us from the work of worship, prayer, generosity, and service.  But there is another possibility.  Our property can become for us a kind of beautiful icon.  Visible things can be beautiful in a way that transports us to God’s beauty.  Beautiful things can be icons, windows, tools for prayer.  An icon does not distract us; it draws us into itself and beyond itself to the beauty of God.

Without that personal renewal – beautiful soul making – we will become off balance and lop sided.  This year can be the pivot point, a shifting of gears forward into a new time of exciting ministry and service, where the renewal in our hearts is literally embodied externally in the beautiful things visible outside.

The British writer George Eliot wrote the novel “Middlemarch” in the 1870’s.  George Eliot was the pseudonym of a woman named Mary Ann Evans. In a recent NYT book review, Joyce Carol Oates tells us that another novelist, Henry James, was not impressed by her appearance when he first met her.  He proclaimed Eliot as “magnificently ugly — deliciously hideous. She has a low forehead, a dull gray eye, a vast pendulous nose, a huge mouth, full of uneven teeth and a chin and jawbone that never seem to end.”  Yet this first, crude impression is altered as he continues looking at her: “Now in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end as I ended, in falling in love with her. . . . Yes behold me literally in love with this great horse-faced woman.”

God sees something beautiful in us that we often don’t see.  But God is at work to dress us as queens and kings, and to enlist our help in making everything beautiful again.  Come, follow me, says Jesus.  Amen.