A Beautiful Life

Matthew 5:1-16

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

22 September 2024

            This week on Facebook I asked, “What is a movie or story that because of something good that happens makes you cry or get the chills?”  The answers were quite varied:

• Old Yeller, wrote Jim Harmon
• Jennifer Forbes-Baily offered The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
• Teague Stanley said A Man Called Otto
• Places in the Heart wrote Becky McNeil
• Krissy wrote of Homeward Bound “I cried as a child and I cried again as an adult showing the movie to Wyatt. They make it home safe and sound!”
• Charlene Wozny recommended A Stoning in Fulham County and Smoke Signals
• And Linda Gabriel wrote that The World’s Fastest Indian is a gem.
• Matt Gutschick added Cast Away and explained, “After all he’s been through. At that big open crossroads right at the end.”

            I feel like there are so many movies and stories where I cry every time because of something good.  What immediately jumped to mind were It’s a Wonderful Life and E. T. 

The story that really gets me every time though is Les Mis, usually listening to the soundtrack of the Broadway Musical.  And in more than one place—when the young students’ lives are sacrificed for freedom, when Valjean offers Javier mercy and Javier cannot take it, when Fantine dies thinking of Cossette, but the most impactful moment of all is when the Bishop defends Valjean and offers him forgiveness and new life after Valjean has stolen from him.  That act of Chrisitan charity has always felt so overwhelmingly good and so outside the norm of human behavior, that I’m overcome every, single, time.

            When the psychologist Dacher Keltner and his colleagues did a big, global study of awe, they discovered that across cultures, the one thing that most inspires our awe isn’t nature, spirituality, or music—it is other people.  Particularly “other people’s courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming.”  This result, as the most common experience of awe, surprised them.  So this is the first of eight wonders of life in Keltner’s taxonomy of awe, that we’ll be exploring the next two months.  He writes, “Around the world, we are most likely to feel awe when moved by moral beauty.”

            What a thrilling result!  And I love that phrase too, “moral beauty.”  It perfectly captures the experience he’s trying to describe.  When goodness is on display, when we actually see it, and we find it beautiful.

            That we find awe in one another is one of the reasons that Keltner believes we can find awe in our everyday experiences.  We don’t need to be able to afford travel to sublime locations or a visit the great art museums.  We can meet this “basic human need” everyday in our encounters with people.

            One of the ways other people inspire our awe isn’t about moral goodness but about rare talents.  We’ve just watched the summer Olympics and there we witnessed so many awe-inspiring moments like the new world record in the 100 meter dash or the incredible heights achieved in pole vaulting. 

            But far more common experiences of awe occur when we witness people being kind to others, when we see people overcoming obstacles in their own lives to live well, and, by far the most likely human action to inspire awe—courageous actions taken on behalf of other people.

            Think about some of the people whose moral beauty—through kindness, strength, sacrifice, or courage—inspires you.  Some of the names that come to mind immediately for me—Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa, Dorothy Day, Oscar Romero, the passengers on board United Flight 93. 

            When we encounter moral beauty, Dacher Keltner writes, we can be taken aback.  Such moments “have the power of an epiphany,” a moment of illumination.  He writes, “The experience is imbued with a sense of light, clarity, truth, and the sharpened recognition of what really matters.”

            Yeah, that’s exactly how I feel every time I listen to the Bishop forgive Valjean.  An important lesson is being taught about grace.

            There’s even a physical explanation of what happens when we have these moments of awe.  Here’s Keltner’s description:

Witnessing others’ acts of courage, kindness, strength, and overcoming activates . . . [the] cortical regions where our emotions translate to ethical action.  These encounters lead to the release of oxytocin and activation of the vagus nerve.  We often sense tears and goose bumps, our body’s signals that we are part of a community appreciating what unites us.  When moved by the wonders of others, the soul in our bodies is awakened, and acts of reverence often quickly follow.

            So these moments of awe are felt deeply in our bodies, and they are likely to lead us into action.  We will be moved to reverence, gratitude, and appreciation.  Which can then prompt us into our own actions of kindness and courage. 

These very human moments of connection are what we consider sacred.  Over time we’ve turned acts of reverence and appreciation into our cultural and religious practices.  And those rituals can now themselves inspire our reverence and awe. 

Christian worship, for instance, is rooted in the experiences of awe that Jesus inspired in those who witnessed him.  Here, for example, is a description of the Sermon on the Mount, of which today’s Gospel reading is a part, by the German pastor Helmut Thielicke:

Then Jesus opened his mouth and something completely unexpected happened, something that drove these people to an astonishment bordering upon terror, something that held them spellbound long after he ceased speaking and would not let them rest.  Jesus said to the people gathered around him, people who were harried by suffering, misery, and guilt: “Blessed are you; blessed are you.”  The Sermon on the Mount closes with the remark that the crowds were astonished and frightened, even though it was a sermon on grace.  But this is what always happens when God unveils his great goodness.  It is so immense, so far beyond and contrary to all human dimensions and conceptions that at first one simply cannot understand it and we stand there in utter helpless bewilderment.

            Which is a pretty apt description of awe as a response to moral beauty.

            Today we aren’t exploring the entirety of the Sermon on the Mount or even going into all the rich details of the Beatitudes, but let me say a few things about what’s going on in this teaching of Jesus.

            The New Testament scholar Dale Allison writes about how this sermon is intended to inspire the moral imagination.  The beatitudes, he says, were originally intended to startle their audience because they were a reversal of ordinary values.  The folks normally on the bottom or the fringes of human society are identified as blessed and made happy by God. 

            Jesus’s teaching is a revelation of the very heart of God and a glimpse at what God intends for the human future.  This is what God’s kingdom is supposed to look like.  So, here we have an “exercise of the imagination” in what “human experience of the fullness of God’s presence” can be. 

            But we don’t have to wait for some expected fulfillment in the future—we can, and should, begin living this way now.  To live according to God’s dream for humanity will help to address the current human condition with all its griefs and pains.  So the beatitudes become imperatives of what a good and beautiful human life looks like.

            In the Middle Ages, Christian writers taught that the Beatitudes were “disciplines, cultivated habits of the heart” [David Lyle Jeffrey]. 

            So, if we are going to cultivate moral beauty in ourselves, as followers of Jesus, living as Jesus taught us here in the Sermon on the Mount, is the primary way to do that.

            Earlier we heard an excerpt of David Brooks’s book The Road to Character.  Brooks is critical of the narcissism he believes dominates our current culture.  Too often human achievement is now judged through professional success and competition, ambition, self-preservation, and cunning become the preeminent values.  He longs instead for the “aesthetically beautiful” persons of humble character who radiate joy. 

Such character, he writes, is built over time, beginning with an awareness of our own flaws and struggling against our own weaknesses.  We don’t build our character alone, but with the help and support of others in community.  We develop our self-respect through inner triumphs.  He writes, “It is earned by being better than you used to be, by being dependable in times of testing, straight in times of temptation.”

The book is a rich exploration of various people who he believes exhibit this depths of character.  Like Frances Perkins, the New Deal Era Secretary of Labor or General George Marshall or Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham or Civil Rights activist Bayard Rustin. 

At the close of the book, he presents what he calls “The Humility Code,” which he describes as “a coherent image of what to live for and how to love.”  The first proposition of the code, which he says “defines the goal of life” is this:

We don’t live for happiness, we live for holiness.  Day to day we seek out pleasure, but deep down, human beings are endowed with moral imagination.  All human beings seek to lead lives not just of pleasure, but of purpose, righteousness, and virtue. . . .  The best life is oriented around the increasing excellence of the soul and is nourished by moral joy, the quiet sense of gratitude and tranquility that comes as a byproduct of successful moral struggle. . . . Life is essentially a moral drama . . . .

            And our Christian vision of that beautiful life was exhibited for us by Jesus of Nazareth and how he taught us to live.  In places like today’s passage from the Gospel of Matthew.  And lives of such character and moral beauty inspire us with awe.

            Nothing inspires us more than beautiful people.  Not physically beautiful, but morally beautiful.  People of character who are kind, generous, gracious, and courageous, who overcome their struggles. 

            Let us not only admire such people, but aspire to be such people.  For that is the good life God dreams for you and all of God’s children.