Trinity-b.06

On Trinity Sunday,
        the lessons and the occasion
        call us to remember something about who God is.
If God is real, then everything depends on who God is.
The very definition of God, to the extent there is a definition
        makes God the meaning, the value, and the goal
                 of all creation, of history, and of our lives.
God is what matters most.

So to ask who God is means to ask what matters most.
We spend our lives on what matters.
So how we spend our lives is the truest profession
         of our actual theology.
It says what we really believe.
Who we believe God is determines
         how we live and what kind of people we become.

A year ago, I used the Westboro Baptist Church as an example
         of how wrong people can be and still call themselves Christians.
I quoted from that Church’s web site a long litany of people
         that God hates according to those so-called Christians.
This year they have pushed the envelope of their theology
         by protesting at the funeral of American soldiers
                  killed in Iraq.
They carry signs saying “God hates America.”
And they shout to the grieving families
         that their slain children are in Hell.

The pastor’s daughter, in an interview this week,
         expressly denied that God is love,
         and stated her perplexity as to where we go that idea.
She might read the first Epistle of John for starters.
But she maintained God is a God of hate.
And that at least makes her church’s behavior
         consistent with their doctrine.

So, if God isn’t hatred, who do we say God is?
If God is not hateful, what do we say God is like?
In other words, what do we say really matters?

We cannot complete describe God.
But we can say a few things about God..
Today I want to focus on one characteristic of God,
         a characteristic that some great teachers have called
                    the most important.

Our Old Testament lesson tells the story
         of Moses’ first encounter with God.
The flames of a desert bush caught his attention.
The bush burned on and on.
Was it a slow burning bush

         – or did Moses’ sheer fascination with the beautiful fire
                  suspend the passage of time in his consciousness?

In the 4th Century, St. Gregory of Nyssa,
         was one of the most important voices in shaping
                  Christian faith.
St. Gregory wrote a spiritual biography of Moses,
         in which he regarded this encounter with God
                  as a moment captured in beauty.

David Bentley Hart, summarizes what Gregory has to say
        about this encounter and what it led to for Moses. He says:
                Moses . . . always thirsts for more of God’s beauty, . . .
                and such is the action of every soul that loves beauty:
                drawn on forever by a desire enkindled always anew
                by the beauty that lies beyond the beauty already

                     possessed,
                receiving the visible as an image of God’s transcendent

                     loveliness,
                but longing all the more to enjoy that beauty face-to-face,
                the soul experiences endless delight . . . .”

In other words, Moses was captivated by the beauty of God
         revealed in that sacred flame
         and he spent the rest of his life
                 trying to take in more of it.

Scripture speaks over and over of God’s beauty,
         God’s splendor, and God’s glory.
The Psalmist writes:

         “One thing I have asked of the Lord . . .
                  that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
                            all the days of my life
                  to behold the beauty of the Lord.”

1st Chronicles says,
“Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. . .”

The Christian tradition continues this understanding of God
           as the epitome of beauty, the ultimate object of delight.

St. Augustine did not figure God out as a truth,
           but fell in love with God as a beauty. He prayed:

           “How late I came to love thee, O Beauty,
                   so ancient and so fresh.”//

Dionysius the Areopagite, one of the greatest teachers
           of the Early Church, called God

           “the splendor that draws all things into itself.”

In the 18th Century, Jonathan Edwards,
           America’s first great evangelical preacher and theologian,
                    said that beauty is God’s chief characteristic,
           and the beauty of nature is God’s way
                    of showing us something of himself.

The beauty of God is beyond us,
           but what we see and hear in art, music, and nature
                    give us little hints.

Franz Wright was a psychotic drug addict,
           unable to speak or write a coherent thought.
But by God’s grace he came to himself
           and, last year, won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
In coming to himself, he discovered God
           in many ways.

These verses from his poem “Cloudless Snowfall”
           tell us about some of them:

           “Great big flakes like white ashes
           at nightfall descending
           abruptly everywhere
           and vanishing in this hand like the host
           on somebody’s put out tongue . . .
           Vast whisp-whisp of wingbeats
           awakens me and I look up
           at a minute-long string of black geese
           following low past the moon the white
           course of the snow-covered river and

           by the way thank You for
           keeping Your face hidden, I
           can hardly bear the beauty of this world.”

Consider the implications for our relationship with God,
           and for our sense of what life is about,
           if we thought of God primarily in terms
                     of beauty to be enjoyed
           rather than dominating power to be feared.
This is an ancient understanding of God,
           but it has been ignored for the past 200 years.

Today, it is being brought back to our awareness
           by our best theologians, philosophers, and poets
                    like Franz Wright.
We are reawakening to what may be the most important thing
           we know about God,
           and so we are rediscovering the relationship
                    between art and religion.

David Bentley Hart, an Orthodox theologian says:

           “Creation’s being is God’s pleasure;
           creation’s beauty is God’s glory;
           a(n). . . effulgence, upon all things . . .
           that proclaims God’s splendor . . . .
           The delightfulness of created things
                    expresses the delightfulness
                             of God’s infinite distance.”

There are two profound implications
           to thinking of God primarily in terms of beauty
                   rather than dominating power.
First, it gives us a vision of salvation,
           of how our lives can be set right,
           how our hearts can be healed.
We are saved just as Dante was in the Divine Comedy
           by the pure vision of God.

When we see enough of God,
           we will be, as the hymn says,

                    “lost in wonder, love, and praise.”
In that state, we are whole and well and filled with delight.

The second implication is how we connect with God.
It isn’t through guilt or self-righteous posturing
          but through delight in God.
We start by delighting in creation
          and that leads to delight in the Creator.

So if we consider that Beauty isn’t a luxury
          or a distraction from the practical and the real,
          that Beauty is in fact what matters,
                      how then shall we live?

Shall we perhaps watch our world
          a tad more attentively, a tad more appreciatively?
Might we form the habit of looking for beauty
          in odd places, and even creating a bit of it
                    here and there?

And might we stop our pursuit of all the functional
         and the utilitarian goals
                  long enough to “worship the Lord
                           in the beauty of holiness” each day?

                                                                 Amen.