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Welcome to worship in the midst of
the Flower festival!!! We’re surrounded by the beauty of flowers:
flowers which are designed to be attractive in order to reproduce their
species, but which are wonderfully appealing to human beings across the
world – nearly all cultures value them and give them to others as
objects of beauty and signs of love, ephemeral and passing though they
are.
Today you see the encounter of flowers with art: a huge thanks to a whole
variety of flower arrangers from around the city and diocese – lots
of hard work has gone into the arrangements, from creative conception
to making the materials work; and thanks too for those who’ve sponsored
arrangements in memory of loved ones, commemorated in these objects of
art and beauty.
Beauty is one of the three cardinal values which the ancient world and
its philosophers believed in: the trinity of goodness, truth and beauty.
Christians have been very concerned with truth and goodness, but have
tended to neglect beauty, for some good and some not so good reasons.
Our society like the ancient world is very concerned with beauty –
though even more than the Greeks and Egyptians it’s a concern with
physical beauty, rather than beauty of character. Ancient Greeks and Romans
had cosmetic surgery to make them look better, and put on highly poisonous
make-up to be more appealing to other people. And we have cosmetic surgeons,
liposuction and botox. Nothing changes! The worst thing to be in our image-conscious
society is ugly… The Independent newspaper reported last year that
good-looking people earn 12% more a year than people perceived as ugly,
just because people want to work with them more. And where does that leave
most of us…?
God made the world a thing of beauty; truth is marked by beauty and attractiveness,
even if not physical, as saints through the ages have shown: beauty of
character is a hugely desirable thing. Physicists and mathematicians speak
of beauty as a test of the truth of equations and theories – there’s
an elegance to the way the world is.
But God doesn’t only value beauty. God isn’t just on the side
of the lovely people. And God doesn’t down-value people because they’re
not good-looking, or even good.
We see that in today’s reading from Romans 5: Paul says that Christ
died for the ungodly: but rarely will anyone want to die on behalf of
a really good person, let alone someone whose character is ugly and unpleasant.
But God shows how great his love for us is, in that Christ died for us
while we were sinners – while we are ugly people, dis-integrated,
unkind and unpleasant characters.
At 5pm on March 14 2008 a man called Kalimuthu, a mechanic, was catching
a train home on the New York subway, when he heard screaming, and saw
that a man had fallen onto the tracks from the opposite platform, all
the way on the other side of the station.
"People were getting their cell phones out trying to call the police,
somebody's got to help him and then I looked over and I saw the gentlemen
Kali jump down and hop over the rails," said witness Ed Dijoseph.
Kali made it across three sets of tracks, with three third rails, which
are electrified with 600 volts.
"I was jumping from one over one rail, to over the next rail, over
the next rail until I get to him," Kali said. Just getting to the
man was hard enough, but once he got to him he had to lift the victim
who was a good 30-40 pounds heavier than he was - and at 5 p.m. rush hour
trains come through that section of track every three minutes. "He
was trying to lift the guy up, but he was struggling because the guy who
fell was bigger than him," Dijoseph said.
With the help of someone on the platform, Kali hoisted the guy up, a minute
before the next train came along which would have killed him. The hero
then jumped across the tracks again, back to his platform and his train
home to his wife and two children. "People should help people,"
Kali said. "If all of us get along well in this world then we'll
get a better world to live."
Kali says he hopes to meet the man he saved one day, but so far he's not
come forward. A New York City Transit spokesperson said that the victim
was reportedly intoxicated and taken to a local hospital.
Would you risk your life on the rails of underground trains for a drunk?
An ugly person who reeks of vomit?
But to God all are valued, the beautiful and the ugly alike. Jesus dies,
not for good people, but for ugly people; sinners like us – people
with faults, not very nice people, people with bad breath and spots and
body odour…
And, says St Paul, because God loves the unloveable, we all have the hope
of sharing God’s beauty for ever, God’s love, God’s life
poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.
This Flower Festival is about hope for the future and commemorating the
anniversaries of the past – particularly the 500 years since the
tower was completed. As I’ve written in the Flower Festival programme,
it’s paradoxical that we celebrate hope for the long-term future,
and hundreds of years of tradition and faith, by using some of the most
short-lived bits of creation, which will wither and die within days.
But it’s also a sign of God’s graciousness towards us. There
are two particular ways in which flowers are referred to in the Bible:
one is as a picture of mortality; human beings are like flowers which
blossom briefly, wither and die. The other is that, as Jesus says, the
most glorious things in the world aren’t made by the hands of human
beings, but grow in profusion by the wayside – God scatters beauty
around liberally, and it can turn up in the most unexpected places and
ways.
A flower festival reminds us that we can’t hang on to beauty –
at least not physically for ourselves, as we age and decay; nor in the
life of the world and those around us. We have to enjoy physical beauty
while it’s there, and then let it go. But we can hang on to moral
beauty, in becoming more beautiful inside; and above all, we can look
to the beauty of God which is unfading, but which, far from eclipsing
us, comes down to touch the ugliness of the world and transform it into
something wonderful and new.
God proves his love for us in that while we were still ugly, still sinners,
Christ died for us.
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