Finding Beauty

There have been few times in my life when beauty brought me to tears. Once I was standing on the edge of a cliff on the Isle of Skye, Scotland, looking out over the ocean at Kilt Rock as the gilded sun lit the black volcanic stone and waterfall through the mist. The ocean churned far below in a shimmering expanse of silver and gold. I drank in the sight through watery eyes. Such majesty made me feel minuscule. When you can access most of civilization's accumulated knowledge through a hunk of metal and glass the size of your palm, it's easy to forget how small you actually are. That was written by someone I don't know, a wife, mother, and English teacher by the name of Carissa Raffel. Well, maybe you can think of a time when you've been brought to tears by beauty. Where do you find beauty? That's our question for this morning. Let's face it: we live in a very beautiful part of the world—this is a beautiful place. The gray Gothic curve of the Harbour Bridge in all its industrial elegance, the shell-colored sails of the Opera House, to the glittering harbor, to the burst of spring orchids just outside the door—and you'll get to see them at morning tea time.

Brian Schmidt, cosmologist from the ANU and Nobel laureate in physics, in the foreword to his book some years ago wrote these words: "I have no idea why we are here, but I do know the universe is beautiful". And yet our relationship with beauty is somewhat problematic. Dostoyevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov: "The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man". And so we crave beauty, but we also destroy it. We pollute the beaches, we augment our bodies, we fill our wardrobes with clothes that we hardly wear, probably made in a sweatshop in order to have the look, but in the end we just become another mass-produced person thinking we're an individual.

As a society, we construct a standard of beauty in the media and in advertising that is impossible to fulfill. I noticed in the Father's Day catalogs that they now sell nasal hair waxing kits. When did this become a thing? Once upon a time, as a guy, you just needed to shave your face, but now you've got to actually wax your nasal hairs. See, the standards of beauty keep moving further and further away. Once you attain one standard, society creates another standard. The hemlines go up, the hemlines go down; the necklines go up, the necklines go down—we're just hoping they're working in tandem and not just independently of each other. So you can never be beautiful enough for society, and it's particularly destructive to women. It's the Kardashian-shaped beauty industry—the beautiful people, it's glamour, it's Los Angeles, it's London, it's Taylor, it's Travis. And we have this weird desperation that beauty leads somewhere—that we'll have satisfaction, that we'll have love, we'll have success. But is it me that society values, or is it just my perceived image?

And it's also transactional. If you are young and beautiful, you have an aesthetic that might be able to sell a film or a product—you've got something that is valued. But it's a prettiness that's only skin deep, and it won't last forever. And yet we turn it into an idol, or sensualize or objectify a person. There's a photo going to come up here at the tech desk—going to press it—but in the 1930s Max Factor came up with the beauty micrometer, and this is a picture of Max Factor himself with a Hollywood star whose name escapes me at the moment. It's not an instrument of torture, but it is this device to measure with absolute precision down to the millimeter the dimensions of this person's face so they can change the way it looks towards some aesthetic perfection with makeup—Max Factor's beauty micrometer. So beauty can be measured with a machine.

People say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, that it's subjective. And so some people find a starry sky beautiful, and some people find beauty in 5-meter scrums, and some in quadratic equations. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but what is it really? Maybe we need to think a little bit more about this. Maybe we need to question our thinking. You see, could beauty be honest? Could integrity be beautiful? Or what about humility—could that be beautiful? Beauty has a simplicity to it and a complexity to it; it has an elegance to it. Perhaps something is beautiful when it tells the truth. But what if the truth is ugly—can that then be beautiful? And maybe diversity is beautiful. Maybe it's not the conformity to an image, but maybe it's diversity that is beautiful when we see different shapes and sizes and skin colors of people, that that's beautiful. And maybe objectifying people is the truly ugly thing, to see them as an object.

Some of you know I used to work at a school with lots of teenage young men, and one of the challenges was to try and help them to navigate the world they're in, and in fact often to navigate the online world they're in. And there's all sorts of things you can see as a teenage boy online. And I can remember we ran a seminar, and a young guy by the name of David Cobbler came and spoke to our Year 9 students. And as he was talking in very candid terms about the things that you could see online, he said: "You know what I think the one thing that's missing?" And he said: "Reverence". And I thought, I think he may be onto something there. There has to be a truth and a beauty there, and there also has to be a truth and a beauty in brokenness.

Leonard Cohen, famous singer, said in one of his most famous songs, Anthem: "There is a crack, a crack in everything, and that's how the light gets in". One of his most hopeful songs, speaking of a period of tumultuous things happening on the globe, and the idea that there is beauty that can come from brokenness. Can beauty lead you to God?

You might remember that in the beginning, Genesis chapter 1, when God made everything, he made it good—that is, it perfectly conformed to the plan he had in his mind. He had a plan and he achieved it, and therefore it was good. He made things beautiful, and God has given us beauty in the things that he's made. He could have made the world just useful; he could have made the world just pragmatic, but he hasn't—he's made it beautiful. He's made apples red and sweet, unless they're Granny Smiths. He's made water cool and refreshing, and it actually tastes good to drink, unless you happen to live in Adelaide. Flowers are colorful, babies are cuddly—it's beautiful.

Beauty is not just subjective, but it begins, according to the Bible, with God. It's not just useful, but it's uselessly beautiful. Someone brought me—someone who's here this morning brought me some flowers when I came back from my holidays. What is the point of flowers? They just die—they're useless, they're impractical, but they are beautiful. It is so thoughtful when someone does something like that to you. God does not just give us function, but he gives us form.

John Calvin, famous Reformed theologian, said this: "Wherever you cast your eyes," Calvin writes, "there is no spot in the universe wherein you cannot discern at least some sparks of God's glory. You cannot in one glance survey the most vast and beautiful system of the universe in its wide expanse without being completely overwhelmed by the boundless force of its brightness and beauty". Paul in Romans chapter 1 says: "Since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made". See, Paul's saying: "Beauty preaches". When God made humans, he made them in his image, so there is a sense in which they are pointing us back to the beauty of God himself. In the Old Testament, the temple was beautiful: "How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord Almighty" (Psalm 84), speaking of the temple. And the picture of the New Jerusalem—heaven, which is ahead—is of a glorious city with precious stones and streets of gold. It's not just function, but it's actually beautiful.

Unless you think that beauty is just a spiritual thing, Jesus was a real person—he was real flesh and blood. It wasn't just the spirit of God, but he actually became a real human, real flesh and blood. And when he rose, he didn't just rise as a spirit. Jesus says: "Touch me, feel me, I'm real. Give me something to eat, I'm not just a ghost". See, the very reality of God becoming human is grounded in flesh and blood, and atoms and molecules, just like you and me. And here in Ecclesiastes it says God has made everything beautiful—there is a time for everything, and he's made everything beautiful in its time. But he also says it's somewhat obscure, because people are sitting there and they just can't quite work out what God has done. There is a sense it's somewhat opaque, the beauty that God has created. Some people see this as depressing, or maybe what it's saying is that even in the turmoil of life, God is still present. God is still good, God is still bringing order out of chaos, and that is beautiful.

Perhaps beauty is not just happiness, but deeply involves adversity and how we go through it, where even if my life is in turmoil, God is still present, God is still good, and there can be beauty amidst suffering. Christians see beauty in the cross of Jesus, where in one of the most horrible events, the most terrible, an innocent man dies, the light of the world is extinguished, but here I see God's unconditional love for me, and that's beautiful. And God gives you permission to be exactly the person you are. Everything was made beautiful, and maybe you don't see it now, but at some point we will understand why it's beautiful under the sovereignty and leadership and clarity of God, who can see everything that's happening. Maybe beauty is to understand the wisdom of God.

So how then shall we live in light of this? Well, I've really got two things to say. The first one is know this: Jesus can take the brokenness and turn it into something beautiful. There is a song based on a line in the Old Testament in the Bible that goes like this: "He gave me beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning". He took the ashes, turned them into beauty; he took the mourning and turned it into joy. Jesus can take the brokenness and make it beautiful. Think for a moment of his interactions with people—and one of the great reasons to read the Gospels is just to see the way he interacted with people—but think of people like the woman at the well, the leper, the blind man, Mary Magdalene, Peter, Jairus, the centurion—it goes on and on and on. Bring to him the sin, the guilt, the shame, the hurt, the regret that's inside all of us, and he will turn it into something beautiful. Jesus can take the brokenness and turn it into something beautiful.

The second thing to say is notice the beauty around you, because we are shaped by the things we love. Let the beauty around you shape you. Do and think about things that are beautiful. That's what Paul is telling us in Philippians chapter 4: think on these things. It's good to go to an art gallery; it's good to walk along the beach. Seek justice where it can be found. Go kayaking with the whales. Read a classic. Take a long lunch with good friends and family—maybe even today. Eat delicious food, but delight in it. Take joy in color, feel the sand between your toes, enjoy the rain and the sun, write a song, write a piece of poetry. Life is beautiful. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins said: "The world is charged with the grandeur of God". There is a creative, personal God who made stuff, and he made it beautiful in its time.

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