The Lord created all things in beauty. He was not shy in telling us this. After calling from nothing the something of His creation He did not shrink from telling us it was good. In fact, even the foreknowledge of what we would do with His creation and with our selves did not keep Him from glowing over the man He had made. He was very good! All of that came to a crashing halt when our first parents chose their way over His way and sought to become an equal to their Creator. Then what we had only known as beauty was challenged by and a shadow cast over it by ugliness. Sin is the source of ugliness but we have trouble convincing ourselves that such is the case.
Sex which was created in beauty became ugly with lust driving it instead of love and pleasure its object instead of a child. We took what God had made so wonderfully and made it into something that shamed Adam and Eve even without the benefit of internet porn or a hook up culture or consensual desires that have no bounds but what you choose. The shape of gender which obviously reflected man's need for woman and her need for him was too beautiful to be left without challenge and we took this holy order and rent it asunder with divorce and adultery and genders invented to glorify the power of desire most of all. Creation itself was raped and pillaged until mountains collapsed under the might of our power and valleys rose up just because we were sure we could do better. Life was built with a purpose for work that helped to define us as well as provide for us until we decided work was evil and leisure was good. Now the most prized inventions of our technology are those that replace work and allow us the freedom and resources to pursue our childish desires with reckless abandon. We have taken what God created in holiness and beauty and turned it into something cheap and ugly that even disappoints us.
The most grievous sin of entertainment worship and the churches which are temples of "me" is not that it all offends God but it perpetuates the image of ugliness that we mistake for beauty and good. The worst consequence of our libertine sexuality and our application of choice to gender is not what it does to morality but what this immorality does to us. It makes cheap what God has valued with the priceless blood of His Son and it makes common His nobility placed on us in His image. What were once facts are not ideas or preferences. What was once clear through our vision of God has become muddied and opaque under the guise of freedom and a culture of rights. When we as the Church ceased to look to the Word of God to find rescue and release, we did not stop looking. Instead we looked past God and into the mirror of ourselves, our wants, and our desires. We drank so deeply from this poison in our glass that we ended up blind and broken -- something obvious to everyone but ourselves! Seeing we did not see anymore as beauty gave way to ugliness. Sin took so much from us and the only thing sin left to us was our strong will to be who we want and to do what feels good now.
The liturgy beckons as the voice of God to surrender the ugliness of sin and its desire and begin to learn beauty. The house of God dare not be like the living rooms in which we plan and carry out our sinful desires. It must be something holy and sacred --- not simply because of its noble function and purpose but because beauty is God's gift and blessing. Where Christ is, there is the challenge to all the ugliness we can invent and only where Christ is their hope beyond the mess we cannot clean up. Churches would do well to think in terms of beauty -- beauty which contrasts with the bare walls that have become mere screens to the gods of technology where we film ourselves because we love that subject best of all. This beauty is not for the sake itself but for the sake of us for whom our beautiful Savior came.
No comments:
Post a Comment