Created By and Living for Beautiful Community

Three years ago there was a scandal in the Camel Beauty Pageant in Saudi Arabia. Saudi news reported that a dozen camels were disqualified from the pageant just days before the event. Why were they disqualified? Well, they found the veterinarian who had been hired to give these camels botox injections and perform plastic surgery on the camels’ noses, lips, and ears. All in an effort to bring the faces into greater conformity with the document the judges use titled, Standards of Camel Beauty. This might seem like a strange thing to us here in the United States, but real money is at stake in these pageants. Upwards of $30M in prizes and awards are given.

What do we mean when we say that something or someone is beautiful? Is it just about being able to commodify camel or a person for their aesthetic appearance and make a judgment about how appealing they are to us? In other words, is beauty just in the eye of the beholder, and all about my likes and dislikes, my wants, needs, and preferences?

No. There is far more to beauty than that. Beauty involves mystery, transcendence, glory, weightiness. A weightiness that allures, that lovingly welcomes into fellowship and relationship. In other words, beauty is related to our deepest longings in life. And yet, because of the brokenness and darkness in this world beauty can be too much for us to handle.

Mako Fujimura is an artist. And he describes the unbearable weight of beauty as being what led him to become a Christian. He was in Japan studying an old form of Japanese paintings called Nihonga. He said that the way Jesus led him to faith was by confronting him with beauty. It was through the extravagant crushed minerals he was using in the artwork; malachite, azurite, gold, silver, and others; beautiful extravagant materials he was learning to use and was mastering. He said,

Everyday I sought higher transcendence through the extravagant materials. I found success in expressions through Nihonga materials. And yet the weight of beauty I saw in the materials began to crush my own heart. I could not justify the use of extravagant materials if I found my heart unable to contain their glory.

Recently, Dr. Curt Thompson, a psychiatrist, recently described a weighty encounter with beauty. He said,

I was with our family and we came to the south rim of the Grand Canyon. It was at that low light of the afternoon in the summer. And I remember saying to my wife Phyllis, “I can’t even look at it. It’s too painful to look at. It’s so overwhelmingly beautiful. I can’t look at it.”

What is this about? And what does this have to do with our Scripture passage from Genesis 1 and 2? The Bible opens with a story about beauty. This is because our Creator God is beautiful. And he creates the world out of an overflow of his beauty and love. What this means is that humanity as the image of God is created by and for beauty. We cannot help but long for beauty. We’re wired for it. But it disrupts us because there is so much brokenness, darkness, injustice and inhumanity, or what the Bible calls “sin”, in ourselves and in our world.

I want to take a few minutes this morning to try and orient our hearts, our minds, our affections towards the beauty for which we were created and are called to pursue. The Story of Beauty. The Summit of Beauty. The Success of Beauty.

The Story of Beauty

If you are familiar with this first chapter of the first book of the Bible, I don’t know how you’ve thought of it to this point. But I want to tell you that Genesis 1 is the story of beauty. The creation account in its literary form and content is the story of beauty. Here’s what I mean. One facet of beauty is the harmony. Things being in well ordered, in harmony; things being the way they ought to be. The Hebrew OT uses the word shalom to get at this notion of harmony, wholeness, proportion and right ordering. Essential to beauty is bringing order out of chaos. Setting things right. And after the first verse tells us that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, the second verse gives us a problem statement in need of a solution.

Genesis 1:2 NIV84

2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

This is a description of the chaotic, formless state of the world. The Spirit of God is hovering over the chaotic waters to bring order and harmony to the world. And the literary pattern of Genesis 1 is God forming and filling, bringing order and harmony in poetic fashion.

On the first day, in vv. 3-5, God forms the light with the words, “Let there be light.” And on the fourth day, in vv. 14-19, he fills what he formed, with the Sun as the light to govern the day and the moon and stars as the light to govern the night.

On day two, in vv. 6-8, God forms the sky and the sea. On the parallel day, day five in vv. 20-23, he fills what he formed, the birds to fill the sky and the fish to fill the seas.

On the third day, in vv. 11-13, God forms the ground and vegetation. On the sixth day, in vv. 24-31, God fills what he formed, land animals and the crown of creation, the summit of beauty, humanity.

This is the pattern of the creation account. A poetic story of beauty, brining order and harmony out of chaos by forming and filling on parallel days. And when God is done, everything is as it ought to be. There’s no disorder. There’s no disharmony. There is shalom, peace and well-being. There is beauty. And one of the ways we know this is because of a second aspect or facet of beauty that keeps on showing up in the text. A second aspect of beauty is pleasure or delight. And not a self-centered delight, but a de-centered delight. We find this sense of delight repeated in the passage seven times with the word God. The Bible keeps saying that when God saw what he created he saw that it was good. It was good. Over and over and over again until we hear on day six that God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.

What we are hearing is God delighting in the creation of the world. What we are hearing is God’s pleasure in the created world. Pleasure and delight are an aspect of beauty. And we’re not at the center of that delight. We hear this de-centered delight from King David in Psalm 27:4

Psalm 27:4 NIV

4 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.

He wants to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD. He’s talking about a de-centered delight. Not a self-centered delight.

God is the beautiful one who created the world in and for beauty. Let me ask you a question. Are you passionate about issues of justice? It’s because you were created by and for beauty. You want there to be harmony and order and right relationship in the world. You want things to be the way they ought to be. Are you passionate about environmental issues and the ways that we go about destroying our world? It’s because you were created by and for beauty. And when you see order and harmony created from a chaotic situation, what happens? It gives you joy! It gives you pleasure and delight! Because you and were created by and for beauty!

The Summit of Beauty

Of all of the creatures in creation, humanity is the summit of beauty in the story of beauty. We hear these words from God’s mouth in v. 26, “Let us make humanity in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” Then we hear a short poem in v. 27, “So God created humanity in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” No other creature gets this divine designation, the image of God. And please notice, the imaging is both individual and communal. It’s both singular and summative.

If I asked you to tell me who you are, what would you say? I am sure I’d get a number of different answers. I’d hear things like, “I’m a Christian.” “I’m an African American man.” “I’m a Korean woman.” “I’m father, mother, sister, brother, son, daughter, friend, professor...”

Would it come to your mind to answer by saying, “I’m a king!” “I’m queen!” “I am royalty?” You might consider that to be a bit arrogant, but it’s not. It’s actually the truth. In her book God’s Many Splendored Image, author Nonna Verna Harrison righty says about Genesis 1:26, “the word dominion(rule) speaks of royalty which is a facet of the divine image in every human person. Royalty involves (1) dignity and splendor, and (2) a legitimate sovereignty rooted in one’s very being.”

I want you to do me a favor this morning. This is participation time. Turn to the person next to you, and on my count, I want you to say these words, “Good morning your majesty.” Feels weird, doesn’t it? It’s not just that it feels strange saying it out loud. It’s like the case that it feels strange thinking it because that is not our internal default disposition when we are considering other human beings.

Sin, our greatest disorder as human beings, has us all jacked up. As a result of the pervasive nature of sin the gruesome aspects of the human predicament are often more prominent to our eyes than the glorious aspects. But the Bible doesn’t begin with the fall, death and depravity. It begins with a more true reality about human beings than our sinful condition. That truth is we are made in the image and after the likeness of God. Which means every human being from the womb to the tomb is saturated through and through with royal dignity regardless of age, ability, accomplishments, or anything else that differentiates us one from another.

To quote Nonna Verna Harrison again, “Because everyone is made in the image of God, and because this image defines what it means to be human, people are fundamentally equal, regardless of the differences in wealth, education, and social status. The church preached this countercultural message in the ancient world and still preaches it now.”

The church’s message in the ancient world was this elevation of every human being to status of royalty as the summit of beauty. It was a message of the fundamental equality and royal dignity of every human being. Who were the first recipients of Genesis? The people of Israel received it from the mouth Moses. What was their condition when they received the word of God? They had just been liberated from slavery in Egypt. They had just experienced the pervasive reality of inequality and injustice and oppression among humanity. In the ANE world the only people who were understood to be the image of god or the gods on earth was the king. And you were accorded dignity and rights based on your affiliation to the king. Were you his people? Then you had rights.

This is precisely why the Israelites were enslaved. They weren’t Egyptian. That’s why Pharaoh says to his people in Exodus 1, “We have to deal shrewdly with the people of Israel. There are too many of them in our land.” The Lord frees them from slavery and the first thing he communicates to them about humanity is that every person is image.

Here’s a quote for you. July 4, 1776, the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence begins with these words,

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Can I tell you something? The fundamental equality of human beings is not a self-evident truth! Apart from a vision of humanity rooted in the biblical ethic, the opposite is self-evident. These words open the founding document of the United States of America. And, at the same time, there is a lived, on the ground reality in the country that communicates the exact opposite of those words. It’s not self-evident on a collective level or an individual level. Every single day you and I have to fight against, have to push back against our tendencies and temptations to deny the royal dignity of other people. You don’t believe me? Open up and scroll through your Twitter feed. Even if you most of the people you follow and who follow you share your world view, somebody is going to retweet somebody who has said something you find utterly intolerable. What is your first inclination? Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5:21ff), that human anger can be akin to murder; that human anger can be dangerous and destructive.

Matthew 5:21–22 NIV

21 “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ 22 But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister, will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.

In the NT book of James, James tells us that our tongues are a restless evil.

James 3:8–10 NIV

8 but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. 9 With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings, who have been made in God’s likeness. 10 Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this should not be.

You hear the problem? Humanity is the summit of beauty. But our corruption is such that with our tongue we can praise God. And with the same tongue with the same tongue we curse other people who are made in God’s image. And don’t just think, curse as in use profanity. No. He’s saying that with our mouths we speak to and about other people in ways that dehumanize them. And so, Jesus has to come on the scene and correct our understanding and change our hearts.

Matthew 5:43–45 NIV

43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

Why does God cause his sun to rise on the evil and the good without discrimination? Why does God send rain on the righteous and unrighteous without discrimination? Because humanity is the summit of beauty as his image. Jesus has to correct us because our default when it comes to people with whom we have deep disagreements and animosity, and even contempt, is not to engage from a disposition of love for royal image bearers. We want to engage from a disposition of love with those whom we think are worthy of that love. We do not live like the royal dignity of every human being, like the fundamental equality of people is self-evident.

The Success of Beauty

In his recent book Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America From the Culture of Contempt, Arthur Brooks writes about an encounter on September 26, 2017 between Hawk Newsome, president of Black Lives Matter New York, and a white man named Tommy Hodges. This encounter took place here in DC at the National Mall just a few weeks after the violence and tragedy in Charlottesville, VA. Hawk Newsome had actually been in Charlottesville and was still recovering from a wound. He had been hit in the face with a rock.

For his part Tommy Hodges was in DC as the organizer of a pro-Trump rally. Hawk Newsome and the team of people with him were bracing for another confrontation. The pro-Trump folks and the Black Lives Matter folks were hurling insults at each other. Then something unexpected happened. Tommy Hodges invited Hawk Newsome up on the stage to address the pro-Trump rally.

Hodges said, “We’re going to give you two minutes of our platform to put your message out. Whether they disagree or agree with your message is irrelevant. It’s the fact that you have the right to have the message.”

Hawk Newsome, who is a Christian, said a prayer and addressed the crowd. I’m not going to run through the whole account. You can search for it online and watch it yourself. I’ll just tell you about an encounter after Hawk spoke. A man named Kenny Johnson, who’s a leader in a group called Bikers for Trump, approached him. Johnson said about Hawk, “I feel what he said came from his heart when he got on the stage. I probably agree with 90 percent of what he said. I listened to him with much love, respect, and honor, and I got that back.”

My point is not to say that this is an example of how to eradicate deep disagreements. My point is this. What does it look like to live into the reality that humanity is the summit of beauty in the midst of a corrupt and compromising world? I want to end our time pointing us to the guaranteed success of beauty. We are a long way from Genesis 1, when everything was as it ought to be. No injustice. No oppression. No unrighteousness. No inhumanity. But may we never forget that we were made by and for beauty. We were made for beautiful community; for union and unity with one another. By that I mean unity in diversity, love across lines of difference in Jesus’s name. We were designed by God as a royal humanity, not just royalty as individuals. I had you greet one another as royalty on purpose. It’s not enough for me to think of myself as royalty, or even to acknowledge that others are royalty. I have to begin imagining all of humanity together as the royal image.

Who is this God that we image? He is in himself unity in diversity, diversity in unity as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The God we image is beautiful community. The Trinity, as one theologian rightly put it, reveals God to us as the true life, eternal beauty. This truth is the guarantee of our success. God will not be thwarted. He made us to image him to this world as beautiful community, and nothing we can do will throw him off course in accomplishing that purpose. We looked at the picture and story of beauty in the first chapter of the first book of the Bible. But guess what, there’s a picture of beauty in the last chapter of the last book of the Bible as well. The apostle John writes this in Revelation 22:1-5

Revelation 22:1–5 NIV84

1 Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2 down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. 3 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. 4 They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. 5 There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.

Do you hear the notes beauty here? The notes of harmony, shalom? The notes of pleasure and delight? The leaves of the tree of life are for the healing of the nations. The reconciliation, the reunion, the harmony and shalom of all the diverse peoples of the world. John says, they will see the face of God and his name will be on their foreheads. In other words the deep desire that King David expressed in Psalm 27:4, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord all the days of his life, will be accomplished and shared by all humanity.

What do we do in the in-between time? What do we do now? What we do is grasp that this is actually what Jesus came to accomplish. His crucifixion, his resurrection from the dead, his ascension up into glory was the guarantee of beauty’s success; the renewal of the whole creation. And, if you and I have placed our hope, our faith, our trust in the Lord Jesus Christ, he has given us his Spirit to empower us for the pursuit of beautiful community right now so that his people are able to demonstrate to the world the supernatural reconciling power of God. Let me leave you with this question as I close. Who are the people whom you are tempted to despise, dismiss, or dishonor internally or externally? Those are the precise people the Lord wants you to begin thinking of as royal image bearers. It doesn’t mean that the deep disagreements will go away. It doesn’t mean that you ought to excuse or ignore injustice and unrighteousness. It means that you have to come to a place of willing and desiring their good to the glory of God and the pursuit of beautiful community.