When Beauty Rocks Your World

Sometimes the world can be breath-takingly beautiful – as it was last night under a bright full moon. A silver halo, an unusual lunar corona, framed the moon over the waters of Lake Norman in North Carolina. Some days – and nights – the world feels like paradise itself.

But the news reminds me that others are digging out from fierce winter blizzards, that scud missiles are falling in Syrian neighborhoods, thugs attacked Christmas worshippers in Nigeria and the families of Newtown face a grief that can’t be spoken.

On Christmas Day Tiffany and I went with thousands of others to the opening of the new movie of Les Miserables. What an uplifting story of hope against
a background of squalor, cruelty, human degradation and pain. The protagonist Jean Valjean experiences mercy and forgiveness when he least deserves it – and it rocks his world.

That in-breaking of grace transforms him. The victim becomes a benefactor who pays forward the grace he has tasted; the greedy self-serving taker becomes a giver who sacrifices himself to redeem and enrich the lives of others. His antagonist, Javert, completely fails to grasp how dehumanizing the law is without mercy or how powerful forgiveness can be, how beautiful and wonderfully life-giving!

Somehow it seemed especially fitting to see this film on Christmas Day. The story of Christ’s advent is as redemptive a story as the world has ever known – a story of love and forgiveness, sacrifice and hope - a beauty that completely rocked our world.

The Sunday before Christmas in our little church we lit the fourth advent candle, highlighting Love alongside of Hope, Peace and Joy as four great gifts we receive through the coming of Jesus. I spoke of our call to “love one another fervently because love covers a multitude of sins.”

To illustrate, I placed a big garbage bag on the communion table to represent the offenses and failures (our own as well as those of others towards us) that stalk us and thwart the flow of grace in our lives. Then I covered the ugly bag with a red silk cloth to remind us how God covers our sins, forgives our failures and clothes our shame and short-comings with honor. The cycle of blame and shame is broken by forgiveness and love, by identifying with our enemies.

A lot of ugly things in our world remind us that we live a long way downstream from paradise, but they do not have to define the world for us. The moon reflects an unseen Sun, that light refracts in a crown of glory and the beams of that glory light our way even in the darkness.

Images: Moon Halo: Wikipedia Commons Jean Valjean: Les Miserables - Patheos.com  Red Cloth: GdeFon.com