O come, O come,
Emmanuel. Amen.
The Psalmist proclaims, “May all the earth be filled with
the Lord’s glory.” That is our
prayer, our hope, and our focus – that all the earth be filled with God’s
glory. Last Sunday, I began a sermon series on the Incarnation – the central
tenet of Christianity that the God of Israel, the God who created all things,
the God who is being itself took on flesh and came to us in Jesus of Nazareth. This
radical belief is at the heart of our Anglican tradition and influences how and
what we believe.
Embedded within this Psalm’s prayer for the earth to be
filled with God’s glory is a sense of splendor, awe, and beauty – as that is
what glory is. Another Psalm tells us to “Worship the Lord in the beauty of
holiness.” And that particular verse is so integral to our Anglican tradition
that it became a part of Morning Prayer. Typically, at Morning Prayer we say
Psalm 95 at the beginning, and then that verse about beauty from another Psalm
is added to it. Because of our emphasis on the Incarnation and the embodied
nature of Jesus and our faith, it has meant that Anglicans place a high value
on beauty.
Beauty comes when we value and appreciate the glory and
splendor of the world around us. Beauty is unnecessary, but it is also vital. Think
about food – yes, you could survive on a diet of nothing but plain oatmeal, but
eventually your senses are going to crave more. Beauty feeds our senses by
delighting us. In our tradition, we focus on the Incarnation, on how faith is
manifest in our lives, and so we, therefore, focus on the senses and the beauty
that satisfies those senses.
This is why our Anglican tradition is so full of beauty.
While some might see it as extravagance, we understand that it is merely a
reflection of the embodied people that God created us to be. Had God wanted us
to exist without being made up of matter and bodies or without senses, that
could have happened. We could have been made as disembodied consciousness. But we
weren’t. We are creatures who come from the dirt of the earth, and when God has
completed the work of making the world, we are told in Genesis that God called
it all “very good,” a phrase that in Hebrew means something like “This is what
I intended.” In other words, God made a beautiful world. So paying attention to
beauty is about recognizing the power and presence of God all around us.
An Incarnational faith focus reminds us that, first and
foremost, Creation is the product of a good and loving God. What is most original
about Creation is goodness and beauty, not Sin and Death. For too long, Christianity
has forgotten that a declaration of goodness came before the Fall. This is not
to say that Sin isn’t very real and deeply within us. But Sin is something like
a disease, not an identity. What is core to our identity is that we are made in
God’s image, and God’s image is one of goodness, love, and beauty. Sin corrupts
that image, just as illness corrupts health and wellness. But an Incarnational
theology recognizes that the beauty and goodness endowed to us by our Creator
is more powerful than the corruption of Sin that we are complicit in.
Traditions that focus too much on Sin will ignore beauty
because if we are wretched to our core, what’s the point of beauty? But we
remember that goodness is at our core, and so we surround ourselves with beauty
to remind us of God’s beauty and love and to awaken our senses to God’s gracious
presence all around us. This is why beauty is such a hallmark of our tradition;
being rooted in the Incarnation, which is about God’s physical presence with
us, we focus on the beauty of the Created world.
So it’s
no accident that St. Luke’s is the most beautiful church around here. There’s a
reason why when we have liturgies that non-members attend, like last Sunday’s
Advent Lessons & Carols or funerals, that the comment that we most often
hear is “That was such a beautiful and meaningful service.” While the best
response to that is a gracious “Thank you,” the truth of the matter is that our
worship is beautiful because we are shaped by a tradition that recognizes and emphasizes
beauty. The Anglican musical tradition is one of the richest in the world. And
it’s no surprise that our tradition is filled with poets – TS Eliot, John
Donne, WH Auden, William Shakespeare, Christina Rosetti, John Milton, Madeline
L’Engle, Charles Wesley are all people who were formed in the Anglican
tradition of beauty and it shaped the gifts they offered to the world. The
stained glass, the intricate wood carvings, the glorious music, the ornate
vestments, the flow of our liturgy – these things are not add ons, these are
not extras, these are not excesses. They are beautiful markers of the
Incarnation of God in the flesh of Jesus, reminding us of the inherent beauty
of Creation that surrounds us. Beauty demands the best in us, and so we honor
God by responding with beauty.
What makes beauty so essential to our flourishing in
faith is what beauty does to our imagination. One way of viewing a Van Gogh
painting is that it’s just a hodgepodge of paint. Or we might say that we’ve
evolved to appreciate things like symmetry, so that certain structures seem beautiful
to us. But if you’ve ever been caught off guard by the beauty of a starry
night, or a wonderful evening with family and friends, or a masterfully crafted
sculpture, then you know that beauty can’t be dismissed with simple
explanations of mechanics. What beauty does is to open our imaginations and
reframe what is possible. Beauty means that things can be bigger than the sum
of their parts and that things can have an ever-deepening meaning. It is a
sense of beauty that can see a blank page and imagine a symphony, sonnet, or
still life.
Consider how our Scripture passages this morning point us
towards the wonder and possibilities contained in beauty. When people hear the
passage we heard from Isaiah, they often say something like “What a beautiful
vision!” Indeed, the wolf and lamb, lion and calf, cow and bear, child and
serpent living and playing together, while jarring, is a beautiful vision of
what is possible in the peaceable Kingdom of God. It’s no surprise that this
scene is so often depicted in art, it truly is a beautiful idea. It’s been said
that prophets, like Isaiah, are people who have the throttle of their
imaginations wide open. And that’s where beauty comes from; when we focus on
what is possible instead of what is difficult. It really doesn’t take much
effort to come up with a list of all the problems in the world or to shoot down
solutions. That doesn’t take any imagination.
What is much harder is to keep our eye on beauty and our
imaginations open. And the prophets do this. It’s no accident that so much
prophecy in the Bible, including today’s passage from Isaiah, is in the form of
poetry, a literary form suffused with beauty. It is only with an eye for beauty
and a wide-open imagination that we can see a vision in which wolves and lambs
live together. This is why we surround ourselves with beauty in our worship, because
we need to feed our senses, awaken wonder, and be stirred by that which is
beautiful in the face of so much ugliness in the world.
As a counter-example to the prophets, Matthew presents us
with the people meeting John the Baptist in the wilderness. His call was to repentance,
which is the call to change your mind. Repentance isn’t about making an
apology, it’s about making an about-face. Repenting means that we think
differently about faith and the world, that we let our imaginations consider
new possibilities. But this is hard work; to pursue what we thought was
impossible or wrong takes a lot of humility and courage. Those in Jesus’ day
struggled with a poverty of imagination about what the Messiah would like, and
we suffer that same poverty when we think we have all the answers.
So what does this Incarnational sense of beauty mean for
our lives? Beauty, whether it be in music, dance, or writing is about
proportionality, not too much or too little of anything. It’s about both rest
and activity, both resonance and dissonance, about commonality and diversity. When
it comes to a life that is focused on beauty, I’m reminded of a documentary
that I watched earlier this year. It’s about a Dolores Hart, who was a rising
actress in the 1950s. She starred in roles opposite Elvis Presley and was
nominated for Tony and Golden Globe awards. Hart had money, fame, and was
engaged to a very successful architect. But her soul wasn’t nourished by this.
The documentary, called God is the Bigger
Elvis is the story of her leaving all of that behind to become a
Benedictine nun in Connecticut where she still serves at the prioress of the
abbey.
What’s so interesting about this 37-minute documentary is
that you can tell that HBO film crew that produced it was captivated by her –
they were intrigued by her story, but also confused by it. Why would someone
walk away from super-stardom? Her story is so compelling because it is so beautiful.
It is the story of someone who found peace, fulfillment, and joy and because of
that, she resonates beauty that is so much more than skin deep. What drew Hart
to the abbey was a sense of beauty, of alignment and resonance with the God of
love. Beauty beckons us to go deeper in faith, deeper in wonder, deeper in
imagining what is possible.
As Anglicans with the Incarnation at the bedrock of our
theology, we recognize the importance of beauty because beauty aligns us with the
goodness and love of God. Some have said that there’s really no such thing as a
uniquely Anglican theology, rather we have an Anglican aesthetic. It is an
aesthetic of beauty that trusts that God created us in the divine image, that
claims that we are called good, that is grounded in love, and that calls us to
repent of the Sin that distorts that image in which we all are made. Jesus
lived a life a beauty – that doesn’t mean there wasn’t pain or suffering, but
it was a life full of love, which is the most beautiful thing that there is.
Jesus is love incarnate, so when we follow the path of Jesus, it is a path of
beauty.
So surround yourself with beauty. Take time to appreciate
beauty. Let your imagination run wild. Know that in God’s eyes, you are
beautiful. And when you encounter beauty in your life, say a prayer of
thanksgiving to God, for in beauty you are seeing God’s fingerprints. O come,
let us worship God in the beauty of holiness and pray that the whole earth be
filled with God’s glory. Amen.
