Transformers
09/14/2008 - Beauty
Did you ever drive through the city and notice one of those large murals painted on a wall? Some of them are eight stories high! And when you see one it almost takes your breath away. I mean you want to stop and look at it right? It's amazing. It's beautiful.
I've come real close to causing car accidents because of these murals. There's one right along the Schuylkill Expressway as you're heading into Philly just past the Girard Avenue exit on the right as the road curves around under a railroad bridge. It's on a wall that used to be ugly and covered with angry graffiti. I know that wall because I went to college right around the corner from there and drove past it hundreds of times. But now it's beautiful. In fact, every time I go by I slow down and almost cause an accident! I just want to stop and get out and take a look at it.
Did you know that Philadelphia is the unofficial mural capital of the world? There are around 2,800 murals all over the city with about 135 new ones unveiled every year. What's now called the Mural Arts Program or MAP began as the anti-graffiti network back in 1984. But it's largely been the vision of one woman named Jane Golden who got tired of the ugliness all around her and thought we can do better than this.
And so the mission of MAP is to give street artists a legitimate outlet for their talents, to beautify neighborhoods, and to create a sense of community pride. "Philadelphia is a city of glorious neighborhoods," she says, "and sometimes the best way to capture that is through art. We are really showing Philadelphia's heart and soul." Jane Golden along with 300 other painters have taken art and made Philadelphia into a more beautiful place. Art like that brings hope to a community.
(Landscape) We're all attracted to things that are beautiful whether it's beautiful art, or a beautiful landscape, or beautiful music, or a beautiful picture, or a beautiful person. And yes I know that our tastes in beauty are all different and they are changing all the time. The psychedelic colors and the lime green leisure suits and the orange shag carpet that we thought was beautiful back in the 60's and 70's just doesn't cut it anymore. I know that. But I also know that they'll be back. So if you still have that lime green leisure suit hanging in your closet, keep it! You might wear it again!
Nevertheless, there is still something inside all of us that responds to beauty. And I think it's a God thing. I think it reflects the image of God in all of us. Just like we all have an inborn sense of justice that points to a God who is just and makes us long for a world that is just, I think we all have an inborn sense of beauty that points to the image of a beautiful God and makes us yearn and gives us hope for a more beautiful world some day.
Today we continue our series called Transformers: changing us … changing the world with a teaching on beauty because God is a beautiful God and he's out to make this world a beautiful place and he wants us to be a part of that. Beauty is one way that we can help change the world.
In Psalm 27:4 David says, One thing I ask from the Lord, this only do I seek; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple.
I don't know about you, but when I think about God I don't think about his beauty right away. Instead, I think of the love of God or the power of God or the glory of God, but not the beauty of God. Yet in this Psalm David longs to gaze on the beauty of the Lord. We just sang choruses that focused us on how beautiful God is. You are beautiful my sweet, sweet song. Oh Lord, you're beautiful. Your face is all I seek!
Down through the centuries theologians have talked about the beatific vision of God. It was their way of saying that the deepest longing of our human soul is to one day see God face to face and gaze on the beauty of the Lord. The term beatific vision comes from three Latin words that together mean "a happy-making sight." Seeing God's beautiful face is when we'll finally experience perfect happiness.
A few years ago in our Dream of God series we said that seeing God's face is the best part of heaven. Revelation 22:3-4 puts it this way, No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. 4They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads.
Someone has said, "Not only will we see God's face and live, but we will most likely wonder if we ever lived before we saw his face."
God is a beautiful God and he created a beautiful world, a visible world that we can see and touch and smell, a world that the apostle Paul says in Romans 1 points to God's invisible qualities like his eternal power and his divine nature which are clearly seen so that all people are without excuse. In other words, the evidence of God is not just inside us. It is all around us and when we look at creation we see compelling evidence that there is a God and that that God must be big and powerful to make all this and he must be beautiful too because so is his creation.
This past week Jennifer and I took a bike ride on the Perkiomen Trail. She's been wanting to do that for quite a while, but I've been hesitant because I still have the same ten speed bike that I bought when I was a twelve years old and its got the handle bars that curl under so I have to lean way over and the seat is as hard as a rock. But hey I can't get rid of that bike because it's symbolic to me. It represents the first major purchase I ever made, a hundred bucks of my own hard earned money made cutting lawns and shoveling snow. I can't get rid of it, but I can't ride it anymore either.
So we borrowed a couple of bikes and took off down the trail and into the beauty of God's creation. The soft September sun was shining brightly, and the sky was a deep blue, and there was a gentle breeze blowing and as we rode along the creek the sun was glistening on the water, and as we rode through the groves we could hear the birds singing and see the sun and the shadows dancing through the trees. It was breathtaking. It was beautiful.
And at one point I thought to myself, "God you made all this beauty. And it's wonderful. But it's not even as beautiful as it once was or as it once will be because we live in a world that is fallen and has been marred by the curse of sin that has affected all of your creation." The brilliance of creation faded after sin entered this world. Thorns and thistles began to grow.
But it's not always going to be that way. God is going to restore it all to its former beauty and beyond. He's going to rescue it and heal it and complete it. He's the great restorer. One day he's going to set creation free from the curse and take the beauty of this world to another level.
Paul writes about that as well in Romans 8 when he says in verse 19-22, The creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. 20For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. 22We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.
That's amazing to me. As beautiful as this world is now it is frustrated beauty that's in bondage to the curse and longs to be set free. And one day God will do just that. He will cut the chains and open the prison doors and his beautiful kingdom will come to this world and the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea, says the prophet Isaiah. But until that day comes I believe that we as God's people are to bring beauty and hope into this world. Let me help understand what I mean by that.
I thank God for the artists in our midst and for the beauty and hope that they bring into my life and into our church community. I thank God for the worship team and how they use their musical talents week after week to lift our spirits up to the Lord. I don't know about you, but I don't experience anything else like this anywhere else like this during the week. And I know they would be the last ones to take credit for it, but God uses them every Sunday to touch our hearts because they get out of the way and allow us to see him. This is about as close as I get to seeing the face of God each week and they help me to do that. That's bringing beauty into this world.
I thank God for the dancers in our midst. A few weeks ago we said goodbye to Jon and Renee Kovalik as they moved to California for a nine month work assignment. And that was hard. We're going to miss them, especially Renee because of the beauty she brought to all of us through her worship dance. And the way she worked with our kids to give them a vision for how they can use the beauty and gift of dance to bring glory to God.
I thank God for Hannah Nolan Focht another gifted dancer and choreographer who had the courage to take her dance troupe down to the Fringe Festival of all places to be salt and light in the midst of that event. And I just want to take this moment to clear up some confusion and say that as a church we were not promoting the Fringe Festival. Some of the acts at that festival are bizarre, offensive, and downright disgusting if you ask me. And they take place at venues all over the city. And we were not saying, "Go see them!" Instead, we were saying, "Go to the Painted Bride Art Center and watch a dance called Take A Step Back and support some people from our church community who are there to be a presence for Christ and for the values of his kingdom and watch them literally dance upon social injustice." That's using dance to bring beauty and hope to the world.
I thank God for the painters in our midst. These two pictures behind me were painted by a woman named Lauren who came to faith in Christ this year. And she was so grateful for what God had done in her life that she had to communicate that joy through painting. And so she created these two works of art and gave them to us to display on Easter Sunday. And they've been hanging there ever since. That's bringing beauty into this world.
And I just have to tell you what she wrote me this week in an email, "Coming to Christ and discovering that God really does have a purpose for me and that He wants to use me and my life to fulfill his dreams for me, has just opened up a whole new way for me to look at painting. I know that He gave me that gift for a reason, and just knowing that in itself, is enough for me to just keep painting, and keep making everyone else's space a little more enjoyable. It means the world to me that I could do that for someone. And I'm more thankful now, than ever, for what God has given me because I truly see all of it as a gift, and I can't squander a gift.
"He has inspired me to do the best I possibly can in every area of my life, and to never give up in helping others know Him, and if I can use art as a way to communicate to others or to lift up another person who might be where I was, then I'll do it for free forever. I just want Him to use me, and that will only happen if I use the gifts he has given me. I couldn't paint a thing without Him. And now when I paint, I know He is there with me, inspiring my art. It's like I'm never alone. It's painting with my best friend and the love of my life every day. It makes me SO immensely happy and hopefully it will make everyone else feel the same way. I really think creating beauty in this world is a creation that keeps on giving." Amazing!
Over the years I've talked to more than one person who has told me that before they came to know Jesus they lived their life in black and white. They just couldn't see the color in this world. But then after they came to know Christ that all changed. One guy told me once, "I never noticed a sunset until after I became a Christian. Now I see God's beauty all around me."
I thank God for the photographers in our midst. One of them is Jeff Wojtaszek. Last year, Jeff and I, along with my son, Jordan, went to two of the most desolate places in the world, Burkina Faso and Liberia, two countries in West Africa. And Jeff took his camera and captured some amazing images that hang on the walls of our hallways. In the midst of all that poverty, Jeff was able to capture the beauty of the people there and their infectious smiles. And we put them on the walls to remind us of the mission of Christ that we're about as a church. We want to be a blessing to this world, the whole world, and I think those pictures remind us of that.
By the way, I asked Jeff if I could share this with you and he said, "Sure, if you let me put my business cards on the back table next to the black box!" He's also a good businessman! But that's what the arts do, they bring beauty into this world and hope for the new world that is to come. So we celebrate those in our midst who are helping to transform this world through beauty because that beauty points us forward towards the time when this whole world will be made new.
While I was working on this teaching I thought a lot about our own Peg Olley and the work she does down at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Peg is a painted objects conservator which means that she restores art. Her specialty is restoring antique objects like chairs and desks and cabinets. She's restored old tins, a carousel horse, and a painted sculpture and each time her goal is to bring them back to life and to renew their original beauty. She sent us this painting as an illustration of what art restoration is all about. This is the before and here's the after.
And when I saw that I thought that's what God is into. God is into restoration. He's into renewal. He's into bringing things back to life again. And one day he'll do that for all his creation, but until then he's doing his best work in the lives of people, ordinary people like you and me. He wants to make us beautiful from the inside out, new creations the Bible says. And that work starts when we put our faith in Jesus Christ, responding to his love by receiving his forgiveness and choosing to follow him and his ways.
He's in the business of restoring broken lives that also are meant to give this world hope and point us forward towards the time when everything else is renewed. And I know there are a lot of us who could get up here and tell about the way God has restored our lives and is turning them into something beautiful. But this morning I want to close by asking John Jenkins to come up and tell us a little bit of his story and about how God has been renewing and restoring his life. Let's give John a hand.