Pastor Hector Garfias-Toledo + September 1, 2024
Beguiled by Beauty Week 3 - Awakening to Beauty, Falling in Love with the World
In his sermon for the third week of the Beguiled by Beauty worship series, Pastor Hector challenges the pursuit of perfect beauty, urging us to find beauty in the broken and imperfect aspects of our lives. He draws on personal experiences, including a broken cross, to show how God’s presence is most profound in our vulnerabilities. The sermon calls for a shift in perspective, inviting us to be mirrors that reflect God’s beauty, not through perfection, but through our authentic, broken selves.
Sermon Transcript
From automatically generated captions, lightly edited for readability by Chat GPT
Grace to you and peace from God, our Father, Mother, and Creator Abba, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who is our sibling, our companion, and the expression of the beauty of God, who is our Savior. And we said, Amen.
Well, I was going to show something to our young worshippers, and I want to show it to you before I forget. Last Sunday, Pastor Paul was telling us that beauty is not for us to possess. He said that you and I are called to be like mirrors, mirrors that concentrate the beauty of God and, through our lives, bring it into the world. But I was thinking of his words about beauty not being something to possess.
One of the questions that was asked of our older young worshippers was, "Can we buy beauty? Can you get one of your bags and go to the store or online—since everything is online now—and buy beauty? Can you purchase beauty? Can you pay for beauty? How much beauty can you buy?" Right, it’s almost impossible. And yet, as I was telling our young worshippers, that little cross that I showed you was made by Al and Ruth, who were the couple who made it. They gave it to me when I was serving in a bilingual congregation—Swedish-Latino congregation—in Aurora, Illinois. He took a piece of wood and made that cross for me, and through the moving—because I have been moving from place to place, from country to country—it got broken, like, four times. And it’s broken; it’s still broken, but I have not fixed the last little crack that it has there. So I was thinking about how many of us sometimes feel broken and imperfect in our lives, or how many things in our lives are broken and imperfect, and yet we still care for them, whether they are relationships, objects, memories, or things like my little cross that you love and cherish in your heart.
Last Friday, Jade, my wife, Pastor Jade, and I finally went hiking after a while. We said, "Oh, let’s take a short hike this time. Let’s go to Mount Si." And we forgot it’s like 3,000 feet up and like 8 miles. But, you know, we started feeling really beat up and broken, thinking, "God cannot love us the way we look like right now." Then, in this slide I’m going to show you, you’ll see that as we were walking, we were contemplating the beauty of God’s creation. On one side, in the early morning as the sun was rising, you see those trees and the moss hanging from the trees. When you are fresh, you start loving beauty because you are just starting the hike. Well, 3 hours later and 3,200 feet up, it was pretty hot up there, and we were like, "Do we really need to go back? Do we have the energy to go down?" And we were hungry. Then we found the sign that you saw next to the picture. There’s a sign filled with stickers. As I am trying to read—because I’m very tired—I found one that was blown up, as you see there. It’s probably too small on the screen, but that sticker says, "You are beautiful."
And I said, "Well, it seems that God wants me to come up to Mount Si to tell me that I am beautiful and to remind me of the series for these months, these weeks, when we are gathering here and reflecting." With that, I want to say that sign reminded me of all of you as a congregation and as a Christian community who are called to reflect that beauty to others. Now I told you so that you don’t need to go up to Mount Si to see it because it’s a very steep mountain.
As we heard today, Psalm 147 is a song of praise that reminds us of two important aspects of God’s story: creation and deliverance from the inability of people to see that they are part of God’s beauty. This Psalm conveys the same good news that the prophets have been talking about for centuries, announcing this good news to the exiled people and those who, after the exile, experienced life and challenges—a time of exile when they experienced the loss of their land, identity, and perhaps sense of purpose in their lives, and to the people of the post-exile time when they experienced emptiness, a spiritual void, wondering what it means to be free and delivered.
I like to think in the terms of Dr. Gabor Maté, who talks about trauma, because I think the trauma for people in exile was not the exile itself but what happened to them during that time. Dr. Maté says that trauma is not what happened to us but what happened in us. What happened to those people? What happened to us in our journeys? These traumas in our lives can prevent us from strengthening our spirits but also from bonding with God and with one another. And I believe that’s what was happening to the people of Israel—the same thing that happens to us—when we are unable to find fulfillment and meaning in our lives, we try to satisfy that thirst for a meaningful life and get distracted, leading to addictions that try to replace the aspects of life lost in our journey, but also addicted to power that makes us feel meaningful in this life.
One of the things we see happening in our lives and society is the pressure to conform, for example, to idealized beauty standards. We are persuaded by media and advertising, and this has a tremendous impact on the health and self-esteem of every person, especially our younger generations. We try to fill that emptiness and void in our hearts. I think that’s why, and I don’t like this, and I agree with them that they don’t like to be categorized as Millennials or Gen Zs. These categories, personally, if I can tell you, all the categories that are given to me for who I am—I am sometimes tired of hearing every single label put on me just because I am who I am. But for the sake of this reflection, I will say these earlier generations, Millennials and Gen Zs, are probably seeking purpose and fulfillment beyond material success and superficial achievements in life. I think they are getting tired of living in this vanity and superficial beauty sold to us by media and advertising, making them feel unworthy.
When we don’t feel worthy, we become self-absorbed. When we are self-absorbed, we become disoriented and tend to rely only on ourselves. Our lives become isolated, and eventually, everything and everyone becomes a threat. In the end, we become indifferent to God’s presence in and around us, as well as to the beauty and presence of God in others. That’s why I believe the psalmist is inviting us today and centering us again on the source of life, the Giver of life, who is God, who brings stability in a time marked by shifting ground and winds pulling us in every direction, as we were saying earlier in our book discussion—a time when the social, economic, and political environment in which we are living is pulling us in so many directions, creating more divisions, making us feel more confused, disoriented, isolated, antagonistic toward one another, unable to see the beauty that God has created around us and for us to complete us and make us whole.
I need to confess that when we began this series—actually, even before that, let me step back a little bit—for the past year or so, David and I have been working on worship, and David introduced some other practices for contemplation during worship, like breathing in, breathing out, wiggling your toes, and other things. It has been the most uncomfortable time for me, honestly. I don’t feel it was doing anything for me. By nature, I’m a person who is calm and quiet. I can tell you that one day I went to the doctor, and they didn’t want to let me out of the hospital. It was just a very simple thing, but the nurses didn’t want to let me out because they thought my blood pressure was so low I was going to faint. But the truth is, my normal blood pressure is low; I’m always calm.
So when I heard "Breathe in, breathe out, calm down," I thought, "I’m already calm; if I do more, I will fall asleep here." It just didn’t work for me. It doesn’t work for me. I share this with you because I want us to be aware that not everything works for everyone. And yet, through the months that we have been doing this, I have been challenged by the Spirit to remember that this is not about me. Even though I am uncomfortable, don’t know how to do it, cannot do it, and am not willing to do it, this is something that may be working for my neighbor, my sibling in Christ who is next to me. And if that is happening to my neighbor, my sibling next to me, I should be praising God and glorifying God for giving someone else the opportunity to experience the beauty and presence of a God who is right here, as I said earlier—here and here—when we come broken, when some pieces have been put together, and when some pieces are hanging there because life has been tough for us.
It has challenged me to remember that I’m not here to judge or say this or that but to join in the work that the Spirit is doing in the life of every one of my siblings who are here and online.
Awakening to beauty requires intentionality, vulnerability, and practice.
To conclude, I want to say that I came across a video, and in the beginning, I didn't know, but later I found out that Pastor, uh, Father Richard Ro, so I give some credit to this, but I haven't done enough research to say that this is fully true, but it certainly speaks to me and helps me understand what these contemplative practices that we are including in our worship mean.
Richard Rohr says that the word YHWH, that we read today in Psalm 147 and in many other Psalms that we have been reading, actually is four letters, four consonants without vowels. The purpose of this was to create a sound that would represent the name of God that is so holy that we are not worthy to name, but the Hebrew people did it in a way that this was not going to use our lips, our tongues, to pronounce it because it doesn't have vowels. But it was created to recreate the essence of God, to represent the inhale and exhale of the air, of the Breath of God. So instead of pronouncing YHWH as we have been doing, perhaps one of the pronunciations will be [breathing in and out]. And we do it constantly. If we look back in our lives, this breath is the first word that we said the day that we were born, and these are the words, or this is the word, that we say the last day of our lives on this earth [breathing in and out].
YHWH reveals, heals the brokenhearted, and lifts the oppressed up. So with this video that we are going to watch, I invite you to say the word and to think about how
God is around us and in us, and how our lives are going to reflect this living God who calls us beautiful. Let's watch the video that we have.
So even when I cannot perhaps fully participate in the breathing in and breathing out, and wiggling my toes, I know that I need to be open and to take a new posture of the presence of God in the midst of this space and in the life of every person.
To conclude, I will say that this is a process to acknowledge and to celebrate God's unfolding presence. And I will conclude with the words of one of the best theologians that I have met in my life and who happens to be part of this congregation, our Theologian in Residence, John Tobin. John Tobin—I'm looking at you, and I said John. Jeff Tobin, who says, "We live in God like fish do in water. We are marinating in God's presence." And with that, we say, thanks be to God.
Amen.
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