The Lutheran Hour
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"Freshly Fallen Snow"
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Text: Isaiah 2:1-5
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Has the snow started to fall where you live? Where I live, I know that snow is forecasted when the neighborhood grocery store is all out of bread and milk.
A snow day, even from behind a closed window shade, looks different, feels different. It sounds different, too. The snow forestalls the typical morning sounds of the city, screeching tires, howling sirens, roaring engines. The snow has colonized the dawn with quietness. So, I lace up my boots and go out to survey the invasion. I’ve never noticed the uniqueness of the roofs on the houses in my neighborhood. Normally, I don’t pay them any attention. But now, the freshly fallen snow highlights their quirks, the particular angles and number of gables, gables that sometimes come in pairs or triples, others all alone and some only visible from the alley.
And below the housetops, the streets and storm drains and sidewalks are no longer visible, tucked under a fallen canopy like someone pulled out the supports holding up the sky and the clouds settled right where they fell on a sleeping beauty cast under a winter spell. Snow is beautiful to me anyway, probably because I spent many of my formative years in snowy states. And my memories, like one I just described, still enchant me. But maybe you live in a place where it never snows or maybe you get too much snow and the sight of it reminds you of frost-bitten fingers falling on the ice, catching a cold, or just how expensive it is to heat a home these days. Maybe snow reminds you of a car accident or holidays, missing someone who’s gone now. Snow may not be beautiful for you.
Some people say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. They say that because people don’t often agree on what makes something beautiful. But there is agreement on what beauty feels like on the inside. We agree how it feels to see something that grips us visually as beautiful. In 2013, brain researchers from New York University reported results of a fascinating experiment. They used an MRI scanner to measure blood flow in the brain. While under the MRI, volunteers were shown images of various works of art. The experiment confirmed that beauty, to an extent, is in the eye of the beholder. There wasn’t much agreement on what was beautiful. One person thought a painting of a snowy landscape looked bland, but someone else thought it was just gorgeous.
Now, you don’t need a million-dollar MRI scanner to tell you that taste in artwork is highly individual. But the MRI did show that when individuals see something that grips them as beautiful, our brains all do something similar. Our brains put our bodies on autopilot, sort of. Like when you’re driving on a familiar route and you’re processing some deeply personal memory and you go on autopilot. Suddenly, you’re home and you don’t even remember the last 10 minutes of the drive. And brain science tells us that something similar is happening when you see something that strikes you as beautiful. The beautiful scene has your full attention. It moves you, transports you into some other dimension, even can restructure how you see yourself and the world around you.
Or as Emily Dickinson put it poetically, “I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off.” For me and for other Christians, this feeling, this experience of beauty reminds us of the good gifts of our good Creator. Now, if you don’t believe in God, if you don’t identify yourself as a follower of Jesus Christ, I think you’ll still be able to relate with me in this experience of what it’s like to visually experience something beautiful. And I encourage you, the next time it happens, the next time you’re nudged awake by some work of art, or poetry, or music, or drama, or even a fresh snowfall, notice how this beautiful thing is inviting you to raise the shade and look out.
For me and for other Christians, beauty points us not to something but to someone, to our Creator, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God and Father of Jesus, the Messiah. And even if you’re not ready to raise the shade and explore that light, it doesn’t need to be the end of this conversation. Because there’s another place where you and I can stand together even before faith in Jesus. We all know what it’s like to experience beauty and we all know the letdown of when it fades, how quickly that moment vanishes. The top of your head clamps back down and you’re snapped back to reality.
When I was little, my family lived in Nebraska. It snows in Nebraska if you’ve never been. Early one winter, a storm came as forecasted. School was cancelled, the first snow day of the year. My friend, Mark, who lived down the street from me, walked over with his older sister. She had offered to take us to the snow hill so we could go sledding. My family had this classic sled with solid steel runners painted red and old Flexible Flyer. You remember those with the wooden steering bar that you could turn with your hands or your feet depending on which way you were facing? And on the front end of the sled, the red frame stuck out, curved like the blade of a scythe.
After a few passes down the hill, I was walking back up dragging our old sled, pulling it by a rope tied to the back. And Mark, my friend, was down the hill behind me. The rope slipped out of my hand, and the sled cut through the snow. And Mark, at that very moment, tripped and fell face down in the snow and he looks up just in time to see the side end of the sled plowing toward him. Now, he survived, thank the Lord. But I’m guessing he still has a sizable scar on his forehead to this day. I don’t remember much about what happened next. I don’t remember him screaming or crying, I don’t remember what his sister said. I don’t even remember if I said sorry. All I remember is the blood, so much blood, a sickening trail of it leading through the snow.
I remember feeling sorry, a little for Mark, but mostly for myself. I’m ashamed to say it, but I was annoyed that Mark was so misfortunate to get in the way of my runaway sled and make such a bloodied mess of a perfectly good snow day. There is so much bright and beautiful in this world, but also so much that is sickening. And much of what makes this world dark and cold comes from inside us. There’s beauty we can see, but also brokenness. As one ancient Hebrew prophet named Isaiah put it, “In this world, we see wounds and welts and open sores, rottenness, baldness, and branding, houses without inhabitants, gardens with briers and thorns. We see a world in decay.”
Other religions and worldviews try to cope by telling us that it’s always been this way—that the world was born in warfare and bloodshed and will die in entropy. And whether they say it’s the result of warring gods or competing species, violence and bloodshed we’re told, is the basis of our story. It always has been, always will be. The great prophets of Israel told a different story, beginning with the books of Moses. We are met with a beautiful beginning, a beautiful world, a beautiful mind who made it, and a beautiful Savior who will awaken His sleeping beauty. The world hasn’t always been under this spell, this curse, this sickness. And we can’t blame it on some evil sorceress. We are to blame, the prophets of Israel tell us, the whole human race. The world’s broken because of us.
See, this creation’s beauty was supposed to turn us out toward our Creator, the Creator who wants to be our beloved Father and then send us back into the world, transformed to love and serve our neighbors to care for His creation. But instead, we turned our backs on Him. And so, the Creator pulled out the supports and let the world slumber for a time, spiritually dark and dormant. The Bible calls the root cause of it “sin.” Sin means falling short of what God created us to be. It’s not just the bad things I do; it’s also my refusing of the good things that I could have done. I could have helped my friend, Mark, as he was bleeding in the snow that day. I could have walked home with him and stayed to see that he was all right. But instead, I stood there, stuck on my own agenda for the day.
When Mark got hurt, I stopped seeing him as a unique individual made in the image of God, a friend, and a neighbor to love. Instead, I see a bloodied mess, an obstacle I want to plow out of the way and pretend was never there. That’s what sin does to us. Sinners wound others but are themselves spiritually wounded in the process. Isaiah, the prophet, gives us a disturbing picture of how sin wounds the sinner. Isaiah, in the first chapter of his book, speaking for God, pleads with us. “Why will you be struck down? Why will you continue to rebel? Your whole head is sick. Your whole heart is faint. From the sole of your foot to the top of your head, there is no soundness, no health, only wounds, and welts, and open sores not cleansed or bandaged or soothed with oil.”
Sin injures us spiritually, makes us sick. You can look healthy on the outside, but you show your spiritual state whenever you take the beautiful gifts of God and use them for your own agenda, whenever someone disrupts your plans and you want to see them plowed out of the way. As a Christian, I am taught to reflect on my sin, to look back and to own up to the bad that I’ve done and the good that I’ve failed to do. We’re taught to do this, not to beat ourselves up, not to feel sorry for ourselves, but to let this remorse turn us again toward God, back to the good gifts of His creation, back to the good we can do for our neighbors in need. On behalf of the Lord, Isaiah commands us, “Seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the fatherless, plead for the widow.”
Turn back to your God, turn toward your neighbor, because God has given us His promise. In chapter one of Isaiah’s book, he speaks the promise. He says, “Come now, let us reason together. (Let’s argue this out), says the Lord. Even though your sins are as scarlet, they will be white as snow. Even though they are red as crimson, they will become like wool.” And then, he follows with a warning. “If you are willing and listen, you will eat the good of the land. But if you refuse and rebel, you will be eaten by the sword. For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.” It turned out in Isaiah’s day, most of the people weren’t listening and they were eaten by the sword, cut down by the military alliances they once thought would save them. They continued to refuse God.
But God kept His promise anyway. He sent His Son. “To us a Child is born, to us a Son is given,” as Isaiah said. In this season of Advent, Christians prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus. We’re not exactly sure which season it was when Jesus was born in Israel 2,000 years ago. Whatever time it was, snow would not have been common, except maybe way up on the mountain in the northern border. In subtropical semi-arid Israel, snow is extremely rare. And perhaps because of its rarity, snow in the Bible is proverbial for wonder, purity, and beauty. But Jesus’ conception in His mother’s womb was rarer still, unrepeatable, one of a kind, conceived by God’s Spirit of a virgin, Mary, a beautiful intrusion on a broken world. But His birth, as far as we’re told, was completely common, just like every other human born into the world.
I’ve been present in the room for the birth of four humans. It is a beautiful moment, but there is a lot of blood, so much that for a moment I almost turned away. And maybe in some way, every human birth can be proverbial for how God chose to save humanity, that is, with beauty hidden in brokenness. The Son of God born among a people who eat each other up with swords and slander and turn away from bloodied neighbors. “The Messiah would have no beauty that we should desire Him,” Isaiah said. “He was despised and rejected.” He took our sickening sins onto Himself, covered them with His blood, and then rose from the dead to raise the shade and let in the light so that you and I would wake from death with the whole creation, more pure, more rare, more wondrous than a freshly fallen snow.
For Christians, Advent is a time of repentance, remorse over our sins that drives us back to God. Remembering the bad we’ve done and the good we’ve failed to do reveals our need for God to cover us and make us new. But there is another work of God, another way God wakes us up, takes us by the hand, and leads us home. “God,” the Bible says in the book of Ecclesiastes chapter 3, “God makes everything beautiful in its time.” The experience of beauty in this broken world is one of God’s more subtle signs. This Advent, in addition to reflecting on your sin and resting in God’s forgiveness for Jesus’ sake, I encourage you to notice how God is nudging you through small experiences of beauty.
I can remember the freshly fallen snow that day I went sledding with my friend. And even though the snow was visually ruined for me, there’s another kind of beauty in that memory that I see, Christlike beauty hidden in brokenness: Mark’s older sister. I was standing there sickened by all the blood, steeped in self-pity over a ruined snow day, but she calmly goes to his side to soothe him, uses her scarf to help stop the bleeding and then takes him by the hand and leads him home.
Would you pray with me? Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, Your advent was forecasted long ago by the prophets, and so we look eagerly for Your coming and making all things beautiful in their time. Amen.
Reflections for November 27, 2022
Title: Freshly Fallen Snow
Mark Eischer: Once again, here’s Lutheran Hour Speaker, Dr. Michael Zeigler.
Mike Zeigler: Today I’m visiting with Dr. David Schmitt, a professor at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. Welcome back, David.
David Schmitt: Thank you. It’s great to be here.
Mike Zeigler: David, for the season of Advent, we’ve started a series following readings from the book of Isaiah. And as I’ve mentioned to you, I’m drawing on some of the ideas I’ve heard from you about how the Bible uses images. Let’s just say someone picks up their Bible and pays attention to this, and they start reading the book of Isaiah and are struck by the number of images, and they wonder, “Why are there so many images in the Bible?” What would you say?
David Schmitt: I think I would say we’re visual creatures. God created us with eyes and He can use what we see to communicate with us, so there’s a variety of images because there’s a variety of things God desires to communicate to us. That’s what images can do. They can strike us as strange, cause us to see, and then begin to reorient us in relationship to God and His work.
Mike Zeigler: What do we make of the dizzying variety of images, even in Isaiah chapter one, from horrific to beautiful?
David Schmitt: I think the very fact that you’re asking that question is great because you’re recognizing how images invite us to slow down and to meditate. They are not immediately accessible. We see something and we’re struck by horror, struck by wonder, and we just need to stop and look at it for a while longer.
Mike Zeigler: So when we think about the whole story of scripture summarized in, say, the Apostles Creed or the Nicene Creed, how does that help us understand these images, these freeze frames, and specifically how we reflect on the beautiful images there, and also the horrific ones?
David Schmitt: It’s wondrous that the story begins and ends in beauty. It begins in the beauty of creation and the way in which God has created, and then repeatedly we’re told that He saw things and that they were good. And then at the end, the very end, the seventh time it’s, “Behold, God saw and it was good.” So we’re invited to watch with God. And then at the end, we have this promised beauty, this beauty that is yet to come, that there will be a restoration, it will be glorious.
And like a good story, in the middle there’s the complication. The original beauty has been disrupted, and God enters in. The work that God does is a horrific work, the death of His Son, and yet it is beautiful because it is a work that restores beauty. And so we have this created beauty, we have the broken beauty, and then we have the final promised beauty.
Music Selections for this program:
“A Mighty Fortress” arranged by Chris Bergmann. Used by permission.
“Savior of the Nations, Come” by Erin Bode. (erinbode.com) Used by permission.
“The Advent of Our King” From The Concordia Organist (© 2009 Concordia Publishing House) Used by permission.