Mommy Life: Worshipping God in truth, love and beauty

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May 8, 2008 4:05 PM

Worshipping God in truth, love and beauty

Frederica Mathewes-Greene is Orthodox and has so much wisdom and common sense I consider it a privilege to subscribe to her email list.

Today she wrote: "A year or so ago I was invited to speak at a conference on Apologetics, as related to Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. Peter Kreeft got "Goodness" and William Lane Craig got "Truth." Here's my presentation on "Beauty," with the title "A Golden Bell and a Pomegranate."

She begins by reminding us of the importance of knowing and being able to defend our faith. then of preaching the gospel in love.

Finally, in addressing the topic of beauty, she comes to a conclusion that I think must be very challenging to Evangelicals, who have stripped so much of the traditional beauty of the Church away, and taught their children that they are wrong.

I once felt that way, I suppose. But lately, I've been thinking how strange it is to devalue tradition and ceremony and ritual in the church. Especially when you think that even an institution like the Boy Scouts or a ritual like the Changing of the Guards acknowledges our human need for tradition and for sensorial input.

Do you have boxes of Christmas ornaments and decorations which you haul out to celebrate the holiday and create a special bond with your family? Do we put candles on cakes and sing Happy birthday and blow them out? Do you have pictures around your house of people you love? Do you burn candles and other pretty smelling things to enhance your domestic experience?

Martin Luther had no problem with these things in churches. But I suppose as one church break/splinter followed another, the church became bereft of many things that individuals had quarrels with.

I LOVED Frederica's essay and instead of teasing you with the beginning - which simply reminds us of the need for intellectual and spiritual understanding - I will give you the end:

A few years ago I was being interviewed on an NPR program, and the host asked me, “All this fancy stuff you do in church, the icons and candles and incense, doesn’t it get in the way? Doesn’t it distract you from worshipping God?”

I said, “Imagine that it’s your anniversary, and your husband has taken you to a nice restaurant. There’s a white cloth on the table, roses and candles, a glass of wine, and violin music is playing in the background. Does that distract you from feeling romantic?”

Now, it’s true, you can have all this beauty and just take it for granted. You can go to church every Sunday and just yawn your way through it. But that’s not the fault of the church. A married couple could plow through a fancy meal without once looking each other in the eye. But that wouldn’t be the fault of the restaurant. They did everything they could. Beauty is not enough, all by itself. It’s not the goal, just a way toward the goal, which is life in Christ.

Yet beauty in worship is not an option; it is something God commands. After the Israelites crossed the Red Sea, as they were wandering in the wilderness, God told Moses how to furnish a tent to be their place of worship. He told him, for example, that there needed to be a box to hold the two stone tablets of the Ten Commandments.

Now, today we’d say, “Oh, sure,” and run out to the mall and buy a clear plastic storage unit with a snap-on lid. But God did not ask for something merely functional. He told Moses to make this box, the Ark of the Covenant, from acacia wood, and to overlay it with gold—not only on the outside, but the inside as well. Even though the inside of the Ark would not be seen, it should be beautiful and costly, because it was being made for God.

The Lord gave Moses further instructions . . .

Think about it: even though the children of Israel were refugees, wandering in the desert and living in tents, God still commanded Moses to use extravagant resources in making worship beautiful. Beauty matters. . .

As missionaries, at home or abroad, we must prepare ourselves to do the work God gives us. We must know the Scriptures well and have a good understanding of our faith, so that we can present it clearly. And we must have love for those we speak to, so they will feel welcomed and invited into God’s household.

But when a visitor comes to join us for worship, the focus is no longer on us, on our knowledge or our loving character. In worship, it’s about God, and all signs must point in His direction. An atmosphere of beauty teaches wordlessly about the nature of God. It teaches that He is not just a concept to be endlessly discussed; that at some point our capacity to grasp him intellectually fails, and we fall before him in worship. Beyond all we know and cannot know about God, he reigns in beauty. Beauty opens our hearts, and stirs us to hunger for more, to hunger for the piercing sweetness of the presence of God.

A visitor may not at first see what we’re seeing, but he can see that we see something. When I was a child I was near-sighted, but no one realized this and a number of years passed before I got glasses. Till then I kept having the frustrating experience that my parents would want to show me something, but I couldn’t see it. They would point, for example, at a bird in a treetop, and say, “There it is, do you see it?” And I would squint and try to follow the line of the pointing finger, and just see a greenish blob that was probably a tree. Sometimes I would say, “No, I don’t see it;” sometimes I would pretend I had, just to get it over with.

But you know what? I never said, “There is no bird.”

When a visitor comes into our worship, he might not see what we’re looking at—in this case, not a bird in a treetop, but God in His heaven. But the visitor can see us. He sees us worshipping with awe and gratitude, hears us singing ancient and Scriptural hymns that Christians around the world have offered for millennia. He sees candlelight flickering on the gold of icons, and hears the bells on the censer. He tastes the antidoron, smells the incense, and is greeted by other worshippers with the kiss of peace. Every one of his senses is affected. Maybe he doesn’t yet see the Lord we worship, but he see us, and sees that we see something; that we are being held rapt by the presence of something awesome, terrible, beautiful. He can tell that something is going on. And that mysterious beauty is a hook that pulls people further in.

Any missionary needs theological education, as well as love for those in the mission field. But we Orthodox know of one further element of missions: beauty. We worship in beauty because it is what God commanded. He instructed Moses to provide elaborate beauty in worship—gold, incense, embroidery, carved wood, vestments, “a golden bell and a pomegranate.” But not because God needs these things – as the psalmist says, he already owns the cattle on a thousand hills. No, it is we humans who need such things, and their use in worship empowers mission in ways that, literally, can’t be conveyed in words. Beauty sets the heart aright, and opens it to God.

Read Frederica's entire essay here.

And read more Frederica or subscribe to her emails here.

I hope this sets us all to thinking/evaluating/listening for what God might want us to hear. And to appreciating that there is nothing wrong - but really something very right - about worshipping God in a rich and radiant environment.

Love,