The Sunday before Theophany On Repentance and Its Relationship to Beauty and Love 2 Timothy 4: 5-8; St. Mark 1: 1-8 “Behold, I will send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way, the voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight;” After me comes he who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” Sandals – he knew humility (despite the many temptations he faced for pride!). The problem is that we don’t: we must listen to and heed St. John’s message (as found in St. Matthew 3:2); “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand”. This is not some prophecy of doom, but a revelation that God is among us – and the warning that we need to prepare if we are to meet Him well. “We need to repent? We need to change? Why?” Some preachers might come at this by pointing out the many temptations that we succumb to, call us to account for the resulting sin, and explain the need for contrition, confession, and absolution. I want to come at it from a different direction: I want to focus on how this call for repentance flows naturally from one of the central components of our faith about the world and how it works. Specifically, I want to explain how an appreciation for the existence of beauty should naturally lead us towards repentance (and from repentance to glory). Why come at it this way? Because I am concerned about our faith. There are strong attacks being made against Christianity, and I am not sure that people with a lukewarm and superficial faith can withstand them; people whose faith is not informed by deeper knowledge and experience will drift away. There is a sense in which that might be useful – I am not sure how much good a superficial belief does a person, and we have all seen first hand the detrimental effect that nominal Christians have on the internal life of our parishes, not to mention their witness to the broader community. God says of such people – through St. John the Theologian - that He will vomit such people out of His mouth (Revelation 3:15-17)! No one wants to be vomited out of the mouth of God – and we do not want it to happen. This is why we must evangelize the lukewarm Christians in our midst. And it is not enough to give them a set of rules, describe how they have broken these rules, and then call them to repentance. Nor is it enough to give them more words that describe what it is that the true Christian believes or what Orthodoxy is. We must do everything we can so that they can personally experience the literal Truth of God’s grace. Ideally, this would happen through our worship together, but without an appreciation for the deeper nature of the things that worship taps into (the “Old Magic” as Aslan puts it in the Narnia series), it does little more than provide sentimental entertainment. People need to be taught so that they can enjoy the fruits of worship; they need to be taught so that they “may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.” (Ephesians 6:13b) I am not talking about the removal of doubt, but the answer to every thinking Christian’s prayer; “Lord I believe; help me in my unbelief!” (St. Mark 9:24; St. Luke 17:5). I think that one of the best ways to strengthen our faith and counter these new attacks – and especially the misleading reductionism of the militant atheists – is to focus on the fundamental existence of beauty, morality, and love and the implications of this ontology for us. Today I will focus on the sacramental ontology of beauty. 1. Beauty is basic, it is real, and it is eternal. When we say that something is “beautiful”, we do not mean that it interacts in a pleasurable way with the conglomeration of memories that culture and experience has put into our minds: we mean that it has a specific quality to it. It is beautiful. When we say that we like such a thing, what we really mean (or should mean, if we practice humility) is that it is actually likable. Yes, our description of beauty is filtered through our culture and experience - how could it not be? But there is a quality of beauty that flows into this world as a continual outpouring of the absolute Beauty of her creator. Just as the warmth of the sun points to the heat of that great star, so to does beauty serve as a sure sign that there is more to this world than our personal enjoyment of it. 2. Beauty is NOT for passive entertainment. It is interactive. Enjoyed properly, it draws us outside of ourselves as we participate in this special quality. We can be selfish in our encounter with it, simply appreciating how it makes us feel; but we get even more out of it when we release the tethers of selfishness and really lose ourselves in a good piece of art or music or, better ...
