This Sunday, December 3, is the First Sunday in Advent.
Verse of the Advent Season:
This week’s sermon is:
Hope:
The King Comes
This week's readings are:
This week’s message:
Beauty is part
of God’s design for life in this world.
-
Beauty
is an invitation to explore God’s creative glory, gracious redemption, and His
gift of hope in a fallen world.
Previously,
we talked about the goodness of God’s creation and how that stands against our
experience of a world subjected to the curse of decay because of our sin.
Suffering is
a regular part of the human experience, yet it is in suffering that we
experience another view of God’s beauty. We might call this “Broken Beauty.”
“Created
beauty is the beauty that God gives us to see. This is first article beauty,
woven throughout creation. Broken beauty is the beauty that God knows we cannot
see. This is second article beauty, woven throughout the experience of
salvation. Broken beauty is centered in the cross, where love and evil meet to
change the world. In his death and resurrection, Jesus has changed things,
renaming and reclaiming all evil in this fallen world. So, by God’s grace,
there is beauty in brokenness.” – Dr. David Schmitt.
Think of
some of the oldest Christian art. There are “glorious paintings of ghastly
crucifixions, beautiful pictures of beastly beheadings,” and the stories of
saints and martyrs deeply move us. I can hardly sing, “For all the saints who
from the labors rest, Who Thee by faith before the world confessed, Thy name, O
Jesus, be forever blest, Alleluia! Alleluia!” without a tear in my eye, and I
know that is true for many people.
Humiliation. Suffering. Sorrow. Death. These are the troubles of this world and the tools that Jesus took hold of to save us. He humbled Himself in his Incarnation, his life and ministry, and he even died a humiliating death. Crucifixion, after all, was the death of a criminal, and the victim was naked, stripped of any semblance of dignity. Yet it is in these things that we experience hope because the eyes of faith see there the love of God, his mighty hand stretched out to save, and his faithful determination to reclaim us as his own.
Our
experience of the horror of evil and suffering in this life is in tension with
the hidden love of God, leading us to trust in suffering love.
I want us to
understand suffering love in two ways:
-
Jesus’
suffering reveals and expresses God’s love to us.
-
And
we lovingly suffer the evils and indignities of this life as we await our salvation,
holding on to Christ’s promises by faith.
We make two
critical mistakes when we, on the one hand, explain away the suffering in this
world as either deserved or part of God’s plan and, on the other hand, when we ignore
the real and apparent suffering of this life without pointing the sufferer to
God’s love and mercy in the middle of their sorrows.
I think of a
young mom whom we will call Sally. Sally was diagnosed with breast cancer that
tore her apart. She lost her hair. She lost her breasts. She was sick from
chemo and radiation. She couldn’t support her husband. Her children had to help
take care of her. These were not small losses. They struck at her identity as a
woman, a wife, a mother, and even personhood. I talked with her about her
experience, and this is what she said to me. “I thank God that He allowed me to
have breast cancer.” I was shocked and asked how that could be. She said, “I
thought I trusted in God before I had cancer. I thought I believed in His
promises. I didn’t know what it was to trust him until I had nothing else – no
one else – to trust in.”
That’s
broken beauty. The love of God is real, even when it is hidden from our eyes
and only seen by the eyes of faith. The evil and sufferings of this world are
real, too, but they do not negate the love of God. And where suffering and
God’s love meet, there is profound beauty in the brokenness because we stand
with Jesus and experience His life in our dying.
This is not
an easy topic, but I hope this was helpful. If it was, please like it and share
it. Next week, I will finish this series on Holy Wonder with Promised Beauty.
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