Rev. Kevin M. Pleas

Psalm 96:1-13

November 25, 2007

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 marvelous works among all the peoples. For great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised; he is to be revered above all gods. For all the gods of the peoples are idols, but the Lord made the heavens. Honor and majesty are before him; strength and beauty are in his sanctuary. Ascribe to the Lord, O families of the peoples, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength. Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name; bring an offering, and come into his courts. Worship the Lord in holy splendor; tremble before him, all the earth. Say among the nations, "The Lord is king! The world is firmly established; it shall never be moved. He will judge the peoples with equity." Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice; let the sea roar, and all that fills it; let the field exult, and everything in it. Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy before the Lord; for he is coming, for he is coming to judge the earth. He will judge the world with righteousness, and the peoples with his truth.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Today we come down to the last in this series on some of the qualities that make for vital churches. We've talked about hospitality, contemplation, diversity and justice, among other things; all of which Diana Bass found in the active and energized mainline churches she studied. Today, we wrap up with some thoughts on Vital Beauty, before taking a break for Advent and Christmas. Then in January, we'll have a chance to shape what we've learned into some kind of plan for moving forward. Once again, I appreciate all of you for hanging in with this process, reading, talking and reflecting about who we are and where we're headed. I hope you realize how important this can be for us.

Saint Augustine was talking about "time," when he once said, "If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know." I'm inclined to think the same could be said about beauty. We all seem to have a sense of what it is, but try to come up with a good definition, without simply pointing to examples, and life suddenly get's complicated. The Oxford dictionary says that beauty is "a combination of qualities that pleases the aesthetic senses." But look up the word "aesthetic" and you'll read: "concerned with beauty or the appreciation of beauty." So, if I'm reading this right, beauty is what pleases our sense of what's beautiful. Round and round we go. And yet none of us seem to have much trouble recognizing beauty when we see it. We know what it is. We're just not very good at explaining what it is.

And the Bible doesn't really help us very much on this one. It makes many references to beauty, but doesn't define it. There are lots of beautiful women: Sarah, Rachel, Abigail, Bathsheba, Tamar and Abishag the Shunammite, who was beautiful in all but name. There's also at least one beautiful man: King David. Beauty in the Bible, though it's not politically correct these days, is sometimes a trap laid by women for men: "Do not desire her beauty in your heart, and do not let her capture you with her eyelashes." In Proverbs, grey hair is said to be "the beauty of the aged." We find beautiful boats, beautiful crowns, beautiful flocks, even beautiful feet (How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace. Isaiah 52:7)

According to Ezekiel, the city of Jerusalem was once beautiful. But then it began to take pride in its beauty, and so God destroyed it. Isaiah laments "the fading flower of its glorious beauty." And then, in a class all by itself, is the love poem from the Song of Solomon: "How beautiful you are, my love, how very beautiful!" Personally, I think he started well, but when the poet goes on to compare his love's hair to a flock of goats, her teeth to shorn ewes, and her neck to the tower of David, on which "hang a thousand bucklers, all of them shields of warriors," I'm reminded that beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder.

I'm not sure we really need a definition all that badly. What's clear though, is that beauty is part of the furniture of our lives. It's there in the background of an awful lot of what we do. We are drawn to beauty. We look for it everywhere. The tabloids make a great deal out of the so called, "beautiful people." But there is also beauty in art and architecture, beauty in nature, beauty in relationships, beauty in the elegance of certain theories. Whenever we find something desirable, as opposed to repulsive, part of what we're responding to is a quality of beauty.

As people, I'm sure we have celebrated beauty since the dawn of time. One of my favorite examples comes from Shakespeare's eighteenth sonnet.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer's lease hath all too short a date:

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance, or nature's changing course untrimm'd;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,

Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st;

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Now that's beautiful; not just because it's a poem about beauty, but because of the rhyme, the cadence, the balance of the language, and hopefully, the presentation has something to do with it as well. Shakespeare's use of language, so often, is simply exquisite. Of course, not everyone appreciates Shakespeare. There's an old Greek saying that goes: "De veritate disputandum est; de gustibus non disputandum est," which means, on matters of truth argumentation has a point, but there is no disputing matters of taste. Not everyone appreciates Shakespeare, but everyone does appreciate beauty, in some form or other. One of the reasons we all love living here on the Midcoast is that, all by itself, it is such an amazingly beautiful place. Just living here is good for the soul. We know that don't we.

And knowing that beauty is good for the soul, shouldn't it be obvious that it deserves a place in the life of our fellowship? Not the surface beauty of Miss America pageants, but the deep, passionate harmony-of-the-universe beauty that participates in the very heart of God. Diana Bass certainly thinks so. For her, beauty is one of the attributes of thriving congregations. She talks about beautiful music, artwork and other creative expressions, how they belong in the church because of their power to inspire, and how Christian history "is riddled with arguments over icons, paintings, stained glass windows, and statues." She holds enlightenment rationality in one hand and beauty in the other. She says that the two have often been at odds, and that our mainline traditions have usually opted for reason. "People expect mainline Protestantism to be intelligent," she writes, "but few expect it to be beautiful." Which, by the way, is why I included a Greek quote and a sonnet from Shakespeare this morning. We wouldn't want anyone to think we weren't being intelligent here.

In the opening paragraph of her chapter on beauty, she paints a picture of churches like ours that I found absolutely fascinating.

My first visit to Redeemer in New Haven was on a very cold day. The chill wind cut through my down coat. The snow was deep, and topped by a thick crust of ice. The starkness of New England's winter impressed me anew. The same quality that haunts the season also marks New England Congregationalism, the region's native Protestantism, that unyielding Puritanism of early America. Especially in deep winter, the white clapboard Congregational churches add to the season's sense of spiritual void, the bleak beauty of a world frozen, as if perpetually awaiting the arrival of spring.

Heaven help us. I've been laughing about that one all week long. I can't help remembering all the times I've given people tours of our sanctuary and how struck they so often are by its simplicity and attractiveness; all the people who want to be married here because it is such a beautiful place. And on the other hand, I thought about Saint John the Divine Cathedral in New York. In my last church we used to take our yearly Confirmation Classes to St. John's for an overnight program they called, "Nightwatch." It was a great program, consisting of a tour of their artwork and worship spaces, an organ demonstration and a midnight worship service on the high altar. It is undoubtedly a spectacularly beautiful place, but a few hours there once a year was about all I could take. I found it simply oppressive in its opulence, and I was always so glad to get home to our simple sanctuary.

It's a mistake to think that this is not a beautiful place simply because we don't have any stained glass. But it would be just as wrong to assume that beauty is something we can safely ignore. Whether simple or elaborate, whether rational or heart-felt, everything we do, ideally, should embody a quality of beauty; because beauty is a quality of God. That includes worship, of course, but it should also be a consideration for our programs, our missions, even our meetings. Beauty, and our experience of the Divine, are all wrapped up together. As John Keats put it in his, "Ode On a Grecian Urn." Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. Or, again from Saint Augustine, "Since love grows within you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul. For those interested in the vitality of our congregation, some attention must be paid to beauty.

Amen.