Music is a sacrament.~ Bono

For the Christian, pleasure is innocent until proven guilty. ~ Tim Keller

At various times, we all come to a place where we notice something almost sacramental, rich, and holy about the experience of listening to the music of Beethoven or Mozart. Or listening to Johnny Cash sing Amazing Grace.

There is something transcendent about watching a bee pull nectar from the tiny alpine-forget-me-not flower at fourteen thousand feet above sea level. There is something holy about watching a sunrise or the smell of a baby’s hair. There is something packed full of beauty and goodness about the innocent laugh of a toddler. Or the wise, gentle smile of a grandparent.

What do we do with these instincts that this material reality is beautiful, good, and holy? Is it merely neurons firing and synapses reacting in our brains, or is there more going on?

Live in God’s World Playfully

Have you noticed that Christians are some of the saddest, dourest, meanest people on the planet? And yet one of the salient marks of what the Scriptures say is supposed to set us apart from people with God is that we are joyful people.

God made this world, and even in its groaning and marred state, we are to enjoy the creative world God has placed us in.

Will we slow down enough to see the petals of a flower, hear the distinct tone of a songbird, taste the texture of a pan-seared steak, or have a leisurely conversation with an old friend? Will we slow down enough to see, hear, taste, smell, and touch this good earth? How will we ponder and praise the moments of beauty God offers us this week?

Live in God’s World Gratefully

That is one of the great benefits of gathering weekly to worship. When we gather to sing, pray, laugh, study, hear, and love as a gathering of the faithful, we focus all the inarticulate praise of the cosmos and turn it into an expression to the living God. Worship is practiced in gratitude.

This is why it is so important that we determine to be present in a place of worship even when we don’t feel like it. Without the weekly discipline, it is so easy to fall into a default mode of working on the next item on your “to-do list” that we fail to realize we have so much life and grace for which to be thankful.

In worship, we are to slow down long enough to be stunned by the beauty of God and the grace of Jesus and—to say thank you as a people.

Live in God’s World Seriously

We know that this world is both beautiful and broken. God loves this world so stubbornly that He enters it in Jesus to restore and heal it. Each of our lives is supposed to be a signpost to that blessed hope. That means we get serious about serving the world that God loves.

When you work in your yard, when you speak with the clerk at the store you frequent, when you teach a child to read, when you build a house, when you pump gas, when you provide employment for others, when you process transactions at a bank, when you write a story, when you listen to a friend, when you play with a child, when you cook a meal…it is all spiritual.

One of the fascinating restoration projects happening in the world today is happening in Istanbul, Turkey. The church of Hagia Sophia (literally “Holy Wisdom”), built in Constantinople, now Istanbul, was first dedicated in 360 by Emperor Constantius, son of the city’s founder, Emperor Constantine. Today, it boasts the largest unsupported dome structure in the world. It is beautiful, breathtaking, and transcendent. And yet, with all of its grandeur, it is in disrepair.

In the 15^th century, Sultan Mehmed ravaged the city and converted it into a mosque, which it remained until the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century—plastering over the beauty of the mosaics with the ugly of plain plaster. However, in the 1930s, the Hagia Sophia was officially commissioned as a museum and was no longer controlled by a religious entity. Since that time, slowly—week-by-week, month-by-month, and year-by-year—the ancient beauty of that place is being restored. The plain plaster is carefully, gently chipped and peeled away so that the original beauty underneath might reemerge.

What a wonderful picture of what God is doing in this world through Jesus’s apprentices and what the maker of Heaven and Earth is doing with His creation. Through Jesus’s person and work, He is repairing and restoring a ruined cathedral, and He intends—no, insists—that it be beautiful again.

So, dear friends and fellow pilgrims, may you know the maker of Heaven and Earth and learn to live well in His good world.

Kings of the earth and all peoples;
Princes and all judges of the earth;
Both young men and maidens;
Old men and children.
Let them praise the name of the Lord.    Psalm 148:11