Delivered at United Church of Christ, Simi Valley CA, on June 9, 2019:
“Now I walk in beauty, beauty is before me,
beauty is behind me, above and below me.”
That came down to us a “Navajo Prayer Song.”Wouldn’t it be wonderful if that became a way of thinking that we own for ourselves? What if we could wake up in the morning and think, “There’s beauty ahead of me.” What if we could go to sleep at night and think, “There is beauty behind me.” Is there any reason why we can’t have what the Navajos have?
This church doesn’t have problem with beauty– just look around us at the handiwork of our members decorating our walls. So I didn’t come this morning to exhort you to make big changes in your lives. I just hope that while we spend these minutes together, you experience a greater awareness of the role of beauty in our worship and in our lives.
Some people do have problems with beauty. Our ancestors, the congregationalists of New England, wanted no decorations in their churches, no pictures, no statues, no stained glass windows. Their churches from inside were all white paint, clear glass, and varnished wood, although the exteriors of their churches were often elegantly proportioned.
Some people are suspicious of beauty, for instance the Taliban of Afghanistan, who forbid playing music because it takes time that ought to be spent on memorizing the Koran. Some sects of Jews and some sects of Muslims look at the second commandment, the one against worshiping idols, and take it so seriously that they forbid any pictures of human beings or animals. And yet those same people create astonishing abstract art in the form of woven rugs, decorative tiles, silver and brass vessels, and many other things.
The Bible tells us that our ancient spiritual ancestors perceived beauty through all five senses: sight, hearing, small, taste, touch. If Curtis were here, he would show you an amazing slide show, but all I can do is to apologize and ask you to rev up your imaginations.
The first sense we think of is SIGHT, and the Bible has many references to visual beauty, either literal or metaphorical. The writer of Psalm 27 wanted to dwell in the temple [Ps 27:4] “to behold the beauty of the Lord…” The writer of Psalm 50 praised Mount Zion, the location of Jerusalem, and called it “the perfection of beauty…” Here’s a reference from the prophet Isaiah, quoted by Paul in his letter to the Romans, [10:15]: “How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace and bring glad tidings of good things!” We can assume that the preacher’s “beautiful feet” were metaphorical.
The sense of HEARING comes up many times in the book of Psalms. We chanted Psalm 150, which lists musical instruments. Did you notice that Psalm 150 mentioned dance? Maybe we could do more of that in the UCC.
You might be surprised how many times the sense of SMELL comes up in the Bible. The most memorable mention of smell is in a story in the gospel of John, where Jesus is visiting his friends, Martha and Mary. In that time of dusty roads and open sandals, it would be normal hospitality to have a servant wash a guest’s feet, but Mary went further and anointed Jesus’s feet with spikenard, and “the house was filled with the odor of the ointment.” Now, spikenard is a herbal preparation that was imported from India. Some disciples questioned the expense of spikenard, but Jesus justified Mary’s extravagant way of welcoming him.
As far as I could find, the references to TASTE are metaphorical. The most famous is in Psalm 34, “O taste and see that the Lord is good.”
The fifth sense of TOUCH is mentioned indirectly in the use of hands to heal and to bless in both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures.
We could learn many things from all these passages. The main lesson for me is that there is no law against pleasure. In the creation story, God looked at each day’s creations and said, “That’s good!” And we can say that God wants us to look around at creation and say, “That’s good!”
The impulse to create and to seek for beauty is implanted in all of us. In every tribe and society we human beings seek to shape and form and decorate our tools, our dwellings, our clothing, ourselves. All human tribes make music, sing songs, do dances, and most often we do those things together, as a way to celebrate our sense of community, of shared life experiences.
And with the mention of community I want to pivot to a second theme, community.
I have just read a new book called The Second Mountain by David Brooks, whom you may have seen as a conservative pundit on the PBS News Hour. A lot of his book is personal; the title refers to Brooks’s life experience to this point. He felt that he climbed a mountain of establishing his career and seeking professional success. Then he felt there was a different mountain ahead of him, a search for meaning, significance, a moral basis for his life. In the last few years, he came to feel that our American society is at a similar point. Let me read some passages that make his case.
“For six decades the worship of self has been the central preoccupation of our culture– molding the self, investing in the self, expressing the self. … When a whole society is built around self-preoccupation, its members become separated from one another, divided and alienated. And that is what has happened to us. We are down in the valley. The rot we see in our politics is caused by a rot in our moral and cultural foundations.”
Skipping forward to a section called “The Social Valley”: “Individuals can fall into the valley, and whole societies can, too. In the early 1960s our culture began to embrace a hyper-individualistic way of life to help it address the problems of that moment. But after a few decades, that culture, taken to the extreme, produced its own crisis.”
Brooks identifies what he calls “The Loneliness Crisis,” among other symptoms of a society that puts too much emphasis on individualism, too little on the ethical culture that encourages community. Among Americans over 45 years of age, 35% are chronically lonely. “Only 8 percent of Americans report having important conversations with their neighbors in a given year… The majority of children born to women under 30 are born into single-parent households. These are symptoms of a general detachment. The fastest growing political group is unaffiliated. The fastest growing religious group is unaffiliated. In 2018, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention announced that the life span of the average American had declined for the third consecutive year…. The last time the American life span contracted for three years was 1915 to 1918, when the country was enduring a world war and a flu pandemic… The reason American lives are shorter today is the increase in the so-called deaths of despair– suicide, drug overdose, liver problems, and so on. And those…. are caused by the social isolation that is all around us.”
David Brooks does not just complain and lament; he offers recipes for remedies to the problems he has identified. The remedies are in restoration of community and in building new communities. He has traveled widely to visit individuals and organizations that are having success. He describes dozens of these flourishing programs that come into existence because people see needs and throw themselves into the efforts to solve problems. Brooks says, “The good news is that what we give to our communities in pennies, our communities give back in dollars.” The people he singles out for praise are living lives of commitment and service and, as a result, lives of joy and fulfillment.
Along the way, in describing how to enhance feelings of community, Brooks says that we must not forget to sing and dance together. It’s hard to dislike someone that you are singing with, and if you are dancing with someone, you don’t have time to argue. And those thoughts bring me back to my starting place, exploring the role of beauty in our church life.
A long time ago I realized that I come to church for community. Joan and I know some of our neighbors, but where else could we meet teenagers and physical therapists and toddlers and psychologists? Here, we all meet on a basis of love, as we heard from our youth two weeks ago. After we sing together, we discover that we can throw ourselves into service for purposes and ideals that we all believe in. This church is a great place to do that, and we pray that many more people who need what we have will find us and enter into our church community. Amen.