Six weeks ago, a small group of youth and adults from Bixby Knolls Christian Church and North Long Beach Christian Church spent the afternoon at the world-famous Griffith Observatory. One of the things we saw was an image from the solar telescope: Incoming sunlight bounces off from one of three tracking mirrors that are each aimed into three different instruments. The center beam passes through a telescope and a projecting lens, to another mirror, and displays the sun and its spots as a 21-inch wide image on a ground glass screen.
We stood around that screen, looking at the image of the sun. An employee of the observatory was explaining the image to us, and she could barely contain her excitement. “We have some really beautiful sunspots today!” she exclaimed.
I looked at the image on the screen. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to describe that image as “beautiful.” Just a large, yellow circle, a little fuzzy, with some small, black, splotchy spots.
But her excitement was contagious. And after she explained a little more, I did begin to see the beauty in that image.
And the older I get, the more I realize that there are so many different types of beauty. Beauty is not limited by what you see in magazines and on social media.
In the scripture reading, all of creation is declaring the beauty of God’s world. Heaven and earth, day and night, proclaiming God’s glory; proclaiming it without words that could be heard.
And since I’ve known for some time now that I would be preaching on beauty on this Sunday, I’ve been keeping my mind open to experiences of beauty in our world. It’s been a good exercise for me, since so much of our attention these days is focused on the ugliness of the world.
And my decision to start noticing beauty began with sunspots.
We seek to honor our God-who-is-beautiful by incorporating beauty into our worship. We have the beautiful music that Barb and Betsy and Ken bring us, and others as well. We have images on the screen and in our bulletins that Gretchen prepares for us each week, adding to the beauty of worship. We have tablecloths beautifully decorated by Samantha. We have banners. We have candles. We have stained glass windows… all of which add to the beauty of worship.
And we have you. Each of you is a beautiful, beloved child of God, and your presence adds beauty to this worship, and your presence adds beauty wherever you are. Don’t you ever forget that!
Here’s a more recent observation of mine: one of my favorite TV shows is Somebody Feed Phil. Phil Rosenthal created the sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, but now he hosts a show where he just visits different places around the world, trying different kinds of food - although what really makes the show worth watching is his fun personality.
There’s a brand new season out, and the other day Ginger and I watched the first episode. In this episode he was in Oaxaca, and in between trying different kinds of food, he visited with some rug makers. They were making rugs using very old, traditional methods, and - depending on the design - it would take them up to three months to make a single rug.
A similar rug could be made in a factory much more cheaply and quickly. And it would look very much the same. But would it be as beautiful?
And then Phil met a woman who prepared and sold food on the street. She would spend all day making a small batch of mole sauce. All day!
I’ve only ever made mole sauce once. I had to add a few things to it, but it largely came from a jar that I bought at the store. It was good, but not nearly as beautiful. Her mole sauce: the amount of time and care she put into making it… by the way, if you know what mole sauce looks like, it doesn’t actually look all that beautiful. But if you taste it - or if you taste any food that has been lovingly prepared with care, by hand, by someone who has put their whole heart into making it - that is beautiful.
Sometimes, we lose sight of what’s beautiful. This week, on one of my boat trips to Catalina, I was listening to a podcast that talked about traditional knowledge of the Tlingit people in the Pacific Northwest. The Tlingit were aware that, as salmon migrate up the rivers, bears and wolves would grab salmon out of the river and carry them into the forest to eat them… As the remains of the salmon decayed into the soil, they became a fertilizer, and the nutrients made their way into the trees. These trees grew bigger, and provided more shade, which helped keep the streams colder and more habitable for the salmon, helping the salmon to thrive.
In this way, the wolves and the bears, and the salmon, and the trees, all worked together to create a healthier environment.
And the Tlingit incorporated knowledge like this into their own fishing practices, working to maintain the balance, to preserve the forest, to not overharvest the salmon,... so that the life of the ecosystem would continue to thrive for many generations to come.
And I was struck by the beauty in this. You know that feeling you get when you experience true beauty? Your attention becomes captivated, your emotions swell? That’s what I was feeling, listening to this podcast. It just seemed so amazing to me, so beautiful, the way humans and animals and plants all work together, for the benefit of all.
We hear about competition in the natural world, and survival of the fittest, but here is an example of cooperation in the natural world.
When I preached on community, I talked about how what’s best for an individual is what’s best for the community, and vice versa, and that the individual cannot thrive if the community does not thrive. “I cannot be what I ought to be unless you are allowed to be all that you can be.” …And here was a real example of that in nature.
It’s so beautiful; even more so when we humans respect and honor that, and work to incorporate it into our own practices.
But so much of this knowledge has been lost or ignored by modern society. Maybe because of our desire for efficiency, or because of our greed? We’ve lost sight of the beauty, we don’t see the importance of maintaining that balance, and that has very real and very dangerous consequences for us and for all of creation.
In a few weeks, I’m going on a trip, and one of the places I’ll be visiting is Zion National Park. This week, I learned that the flowers of the yucca that grow in Zion are pollinated by only one species, the yucca moth.
In turn, the only food yucca moth larvae are able to eat are the seeds of the yucca fruit. The dependence of the yucca on the yucca moth and of the yucca moth on the yucca is another example of different parts of creation cooperating with each other - something the naturalists call “biological mutualism.”
Each spring when yucca moths are ready to lay their eggs, they find a yucca flower and gather a sticky ball of pollen with two tentacles near their mouth. After they’ve gathered the pollen, they fly off to find another yucca flower and lay their eggs. After they’ve laid their eggs, they pollinate the flower by pushing the sticky pollen into tiny recessions within the style, which leads down to an ovary.
Once the flower is pollinated, the moth marks it with a chemical pheromone (scent) that warns other moths from laying their eggs on the same flower. If too many moths have laid their eggs on one flower, the plant will not produce fruit from that flower. The yucca moth’s eggs will hatch into larvae as the flower develops into a fruit, eating only some of the seeds and leaving the rest to be scattered and hopefully grow into new yucca plants.
Isn’t that beautiful?
Like most moths, yucca moths are nocturnal, and depend on the daily and seasonal cycles of light and darkness for their life cycles. Which means that this whole process is interrupted when there are city lights brightening up the sky at night. Fortunately, Zion National Park is an International Dark Sky Park, and the park service is continuing to look for ways to reduce the amount of artificial light at night that would disrupt this beautiful phenomenon.
And, coincidentally, after I read about the yucca moths and their need for darkness, I was substitute teaching a class of sixth graders who were learning about baby sea turtles, and how they depend on darkness to find their way to the ocean after they hatch, and how people in Florida are working to reduce the amount of artificial light shining on and near beaches, in an effort to help these sea turtles.
And that, too, is beautiful.
My purpose this morning is to help you open your own eyes and minds to the beauty that is all around. If there is such amazing beauty in moths and mole sauce, then truly, there must be beauty everywhere!
Here’s one more place where I see beauty. When people think seriously about faith, and wrestle with ideas - I think that’s beautiful.
It’s beautiful, in part, because so many Christians in our country, it seems to me, haven’t really thought things through. They blindly follow and agree to whatever is told to them. They refuse to question what they’ve been taught, because they’re afraid - afraid that if one tiny part of their faith system is allowed to be challenged, then their whole faith will fall apart.
But without challenge, without questions, faith never grows.
And many of the loudest voices in American Christianity come from those who have never seriously wrestled with faith. They speak without thinking. As John Shelby Spong once said, “The church is like a swimming pool. Most of the noise comes from the shallow end.”
But I think it’s beautiful when people do go deep in their faith, and are willing to question things, and wrestle with ideas.
It was beautiful when Rajal did that, trying to decide whether or not he should be baptized, or be confirmed. To see a young person, especially, take so seriously a decision like that - to me, that is beautiful.
Now, I know, for most people who are trying to figure things like this out, who are wrestling with questions… it doesn’t feel beautiful. Not at the time. A lot of people have been raised in churches that taught them to never question anything, and when they did start questioning things, it felt like their whole world was falling apart.
It’s a process called deconstruction, and it’s actually quite common. Everything they thought they believed gets called into question, until it feels like there is nothing left.
But then they start putting the pieces back together, slowly, and discover a new, more liberating, more honest faith - one that isn’t afraid of struggle, isn’t afraid of questions. A faith that is sincere.
It feels messy. It feels like a problem that must be solved. But I find the process to be beautiful, and to anyone going through that, I say: be patient. Let the Spirit do its work. Spend some time with those questions. It may feel like things are dying, but just wait: a resurrection is coming.
And all your questions and all your doubts and all your struggle will lead you to a faith that is deeper and richer and way more beautiful than anything you could have possibly imagined.
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