Rev. Paul Sundberg + August 25, 2024
Beguiled by Beauty Week 2 - We Are Made for the Beloved
In his sermon for the second week of the Beguiled by Beauty worship series, Rev. Paul Sundberg explores the theme of being made for the Beloved by reflecting on our role as co-creators with God. He challenges us to recognize the beauty within ourselves and in the world around us, not as something to possess but as something to share and amplify. Paul encourages us to live out our calling by bringing beauty to life through our relationships, actions, and presence in the world.
Sermon Transcript
From automatically generated captions, lightly edited for readability by Chat GPT
Grace to you, and peace from God the Speaker, from God the Word, from God the Breath. Grace to you, and peace this day and always.
I've been writing poetry for over 50 years, and I remember my father really introducing it to me—sharing the funny and pointed poems of Ogden Nash. And all of you younger generations, if you don't know Ogden Nash, you should; it's worth the time. I was not yet 10 when that started. Visual art is a more recent medium for me, but it's been part of my life from the earliest days. My mother was a painter and had taught art in college. In my early 20s in Chicago, I spent my time between the Divinity School and the Art Institute—which was an easy drive down the road—exploring in depth the way that words and images formed our world, our values, and our faiths. And there, I think especially there, I learned that beauty isn't the trait of a person, thing, event, or moment. It's an invitation to see that person, thing, event, or moment as not an object of perception, but as a partner in a shared relationship.
Masterpieces are not things; they have their own lives and invite us into them. A dozen years later, or after that, it was Seminary that introduced me to the art—and I do mean the art—of preaching. And not long after that, when I was ordained and began entering into congregations, I discovered the art of building community—shaping community for the sake of the world that God so loves. It's a different way of doing things than just community organizing. Beauty and creativity have been my life's blood and flesh.
So, this is personal for me, this exploration of beauty that we're sharing. And it was very personal to try to write this sermon. I come to it more as a poet and an artist than as a pastor. I think beauty has formed me and has given me purpose. And in the deepest valleys of my life, in 20 years of the Dark Night of the Soul, beauty has saved me.
But when I talk about beauty, I want you to make no mistake: I am not talking at all about prettiness, or pleasantness, or comfort, or any of the other cheap veneers that masquerade as beauty in our world. I'm talking about the deep, deep beauty of tears and aging, of well-earned wrinkles and justifiable rage, of unexpected persistence and uncalled-for grace, the colors of storms and the smell of baking bread. It's the beauty of being and becoming that is the shared reality of all creation. That's the beauty I'm talking about.
I don't believe in brokenness, especially not as our beginning. What we call brokenness comes from our failure to see beyond ourselves, and it seems to be just who we are. And maybe it's a little contrary, but I don't believe there's any beauty to be found in suffering at all. But there is beauty in responding to suffering with heart and compassion and courage.
I will never deny anyone who is suffering the right to ask why God has abandoned them. After the soul-destroying violence of Wounded Knee, the Tulsa Massacre, AIDS, after Columbine, Sandy Hook, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Uvalde, after October 7th, after Gaza—it is only those who could have intervened and didn’t, those who abandoned the lived beauty of love, who have forgotten God's presence. Those, I suppose, and those who are driven by desire and ugliness to try and possess beauty.
It's absolutely fascinating to have a Psalm from David as our scripture this morning—a perfect irony. David, who knew the power of beguiling others. In a genuinely beautiful bit of acting, he feigned drooling, frothing insanity to save himself from his enemies. We don't tell that story very often, but it's there. And then he is, just then, beguiled himself by the thought of possessing beauty, and he responds by planning the act of murder, forgetting justice, forgetting faith, forgetting God. And if there's ever an object lesson in how to go wrong with beauty, that's it. Beauty is just not ours to possess. It is ours to create, but not on our own.
One of my core beliefs is that we are made as partners for the Beloved—co-creators with God. Or, if I can riff on Pastor Hector's words last Sunday, we are made to reflect God's beauty, but not as flat and passive mirrors. Instead, we're made as parabolic mirrors to concentrate that beauty and direct it into the moments and the people that we meet that need it—the moments, the sufferings, the struggles, the hopes, the possibilities, all of the needs of the people around us. That's our call. That's how we mirror God's love—by having the courage to be with them.
Or maybe even more bluntly, in this often painful, challenging, chaotic world, we are made to be, to enact the living presence of God's beauty. We are the media of God's ongoing artistry.
And I know that can be a daunting, empty canvas to face. And that, I think, is where contemplation finds its purpose. Now, I'll tell you, I will let others really speak of stillness—it's not easy for me, never has been. Seventy—70 years old—still ADHD. But I have known it. I have known stillness and known it to be a powerful opportunity for the Holy Spirit to sit with my spirit.
But what I can talk about is the literally moving mindfulness that has helped me to understand beauty, to see it, and to participate in its creation. It can be as simple as walking into rooms and reading postures and faces, listening to the movement of voices and words, and remembering and making space for the paths that brought everyone there. It's the kind of contemplation that happens when you walk down the street and consider the sweat and toil of those that carved the road, those that laid the asphalt, and the lives and the families that they supported through that labor. It can be eating and remembering the lives given and taken, that I may have life. Remembering also the farmers, the truckers, the shelf-stockers who made it available to me. To see the beauty of those lives, that work, that web of connection—it opens our eyes, our minds, to the beauty we are called to create with our lives.
That whole world formed in the way of God's relational love—to use the traditional words, the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, the Three in One, the One in Three—we mirror that to the world and should look for it wherever we go. Here, at the table we share, it's an embodied remembrance of the radical, dangerously transformative beauty of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, all given to us so that we might create, reflect, be that same beauty for others.
Such beauty will challenge the powers that would sell us prettiness, comfort, passivity, and complacency in its stead. Such beauty will defy the divisions that isolate and anesthetize us from suffering and need. Such beauty will see us through the valleys of frustration, anxiety, fear, and grief. Such beauty will sustain us in our living and in our dying.
But to be clear, such beauty isn't an instrument for resisting the world. I remember thinking that at a time, but what I've learned over time is that such beauty will love the world. Such beauty will save the world.
So I leave you with a poet's challenge, a poet's charge, if you will—a poem I wrote, actually, last December, when the days and the times seemed especially dark. It's entitled Resist?:
The meaning: to stand again, to stand against.
The implication: a fall, a force.
The inclination: to scramble, to push back.
The indication: a wall unseen, a line lying new in a chaotic landscape.
It makes me think (uncomfortably)
that resistance is only about restoration.
That resistance is a sudden hope for something
far enough in the past that it will never be
more than a memory, only raised up by grief,
then melancholy, and eventually (for the kindhearted, at least)
the impotent wistfulness of age,
the memory of a place where once we stood comfortable
in our accepted constraints, and no more
than ankle deep in chaos’ waves.
I wonder if suddenly (perpetually? again?)
we’ve forgotten the ancient wisdom -
chaos does not call for resistance,
it calls forth, bears forth, heaves up creation.
It was chaos that was the blank canvas
of the wordsmith, painter, sculptor god of Genesis.
Flood, waves of warriors, riptide angelic conversations:
these were the ink of the story,
the brush and chisel of new worlds.
So create rather than resist!
Batter the forbidding wall with beauty!
Wash the tainted landscape with beauty!
Gentle the broken hearts with beauty!
Just let it not be easy beauty,
placid prettiness,
shallow rhyme,
swollen contentment.
Let it be the beauty of the scarred
and peeling bark of birches,
the watchful grotesquery of gargoyles,
the life-threatening crests of mountains and waves.
Let it be the possibility of bloody birth,
the careless joy of children,
and the shameless embrace of the rejected.
Let it be dangerous and seductive and fierce.
Do not speak of resistance. Create!
Create such beauty that breath is stilled
long enough to make us gulp for air,
for more,
for life.
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