“In that day the Lord Almighty will be a glorious crown, a beautiful wreath for the remnant of His people,” (Isaiah 28:5)
Years ago, a well-known author received a handwritten letter from a concerned reader. The letter writer was a woman who lived in California. This woman had read a fair amount of the author’s work, and in her letter, she explained why this author’s writing was such a letdown. In essence, she said, “Look, the average reader when he comes home at night, he’s tired and he wants to read something that will lift up his heart. But my heart has not been lifted up by anything of yours that I’ve read.” The author who received the letter was Flannery O’Connor. Flannery O’Connor is a celebrated American author who was born in Georgia in 1925. She was raised there and died there in Georgia of a chronic illness. Gone too soon at the age of 39.
By the time she had received this letter, O’Connor was already well known for the fictional stories she had written. Most of O’Connor’s stories are dark. They’re usually set in the American South, and her writing style is sometimes labeled Southern Gothic. It often deals with characters and situations that are grotesque. Although commenting on this, O’Connor said she once thought that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by a Northern reader unless it is grotesque, in which case it’s going to be called realistic. O’Connor’s stories feature freakish and fiendish characters who collide with polite society in shocking ways, escaped criminals roaming back roads, exterminating families, traveling Bible salesman prowling about looking for girls with wooden legs. So O’Connor was not shocked when she learned that this tired reader from California didn’t find her stories uplifting. But O’Connor reflected later, “I think that if this reader’s heart had been in the right place, it would’ve been lifted up.”
You’ll have to read Flannery O’Connor for yourself to see if you agree. In the meantime, we could let her words guide our reflection on the experience of reading the Bible’s book of Isaiah. Even if you’re not a churchgoer, you’re probably familiar with some of Isaiah’s greatest hits, such as “The people dwelling in darkness have seen a great light” from chapter 9. Or “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son and will call His Name Immanuel,” from chapter 7. Or also from chapter 9, “Unto us, a Child is born unto us, a Son is given, and the government will be on His shoulder and His Name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.” For Christians those are among Isaiah’s most uplifting prophecies, and the prophet wants to lift us up, all of us, but first, he has to get our hearts in the right place.
In both Jewish and Christian bibles, if you open up the book right in the middle, that’s where you’ll find Isaiah. So, you’re reading Isaiah and you’re imagining the beautiful imagery he’s depicting. You’re seeing the peaceful purity of freshly fallen snow, the surprising hope of a green shoot, sprouting up from a dead tree stump, the expectation of a newborn child, a garland of flowers as a crown upon the head. But then you’re cruising along, flying home for the holidays, and you hit turbulence that turns your stomach. Isaiah 28, for example, is especially turbulent. Now, some of the scenes are just strange, even sort of comical. In chapter 28, Isaiah depicts a person; he’s come from a holiday party. He’s had too much to drink. He’s looking for a place to crash for the night, but the couch he crashes on is too short for him to stretch out on, and the blanket is too small to wrap up in. I picture a six-foot frat guy crashed out on a love seat, tossing and turning, never settled, but never thinking of finding a more suitable place to sleep.
That’s one image from Isaiah 28. But there are other images that would make a Southern Gothic novel look like a Christmas special on the Hallmark channel. Isaiah shows us the holiday party. The party-goers are dressed in their best flowers in their hair, but as the night wears on, things get ugly. Flowers on the floor, guests passed out, and on the banqueting tables, nothing but stinking, sickening, vomit, not a clean spot left. And that’s a tame example compared to others in Isaiah. Go and read it. See for yourself. And if you do, you might ask, what is Isaiah up to? Why all this grotesque imagery? Why doesn’t he just stick to the Christmas hits like all the other radio stations?
That tired reader from California who wrote Flannery O’Connor might have offered the same criticism to Isaiah. My heart is not lifted up by what you have written. But Isaiah’s a serious writer and a serious writer shouldn’t bother about tired readers. But aren’t we all tired? Flannery O’Connor thought so. And she said not only are we all tired, but we really all do need to be lifted up. There is something inside us that longs for that redemptive moment. There’s a part of us that wants to see every person, no matter how freakish, at least to be offered the chance to be restored. We want to be lifted up, O’Connor said, but have forgotten the cost of it.
Our sense of evil is diluted. We’ve forgotten the price of restoration. So maybe this is why Isaiah deals in the grotesque. Maybe it’s for shock value. To this, we could say yes and no. No, because it’s not just shock for shock’s sake, like seventh-grade girls watching a horror flick trying to stay up at a sleepover. But Isaiah does want to grab our attention. Isaiah, remember, was the prophet who walked around for three years naked or perhaps partially so: his feet bare and his bony body shamefully exposed. Read Isaiah 20. But Isaiah wasn’t doing it just for shock value. He was depicting what was coming for his people.
Ancient Israel trusted in themselves. They were the people with all the right military alliances, the surest defense networks, the most charming clothing and customs and culture. But Isaiah warned that one day all of these things would fail them. Israel would be humiliated, stripped bare, and exiled. Their only hope was to turn back to the God who created them and called them into a special partnership. But they kept crashing on that ill-fitting bed they’d made for themselves and now they had to sleep in it.
I have a friend who sometimes sounds like a modern doomsday prophet. He’s convinced that our world is on the verge of collapse. He plans to sell his house, live off the grid, and forget this freak show that we’ve scripted for ourselves. Isaiah’s imagery is meant to shock us, but not like how my friend is shocked by what he sees in the news. When grotesque images are displayed only for their shock value, after they’re gone, we can shrug them off or laugh about them, or like my friend, we can become morally outraged and say, “See, that’s what’s wrong with the world!” Maybe my friend’s right. Maybe the modern world is on the verge of collapse. We’ve made our bed and now we got to sleep in it.
Whatever is in store for us, Isaiah’s message is relevant because God had Isaiah speak for us, too. Not just to shock us, but to get our hearts in the right place. See, wherever you go, even off grid, the most grotesque evil will follow you there. It’s not a horror film you can turn off. It’s not a bad neighborhood you can move out of. Evil is something inside you and me. It takes up residence in our hearts the moment we say that we are done with God and start building our identity on our own beauty or strength or cleverness. That evil disfigures us, though it may take a while to show. God inspired Isaiah’s images, even the grotesque ones because He wants us to see what’s missing. Often our need for God’s presence can be felt only when we see what it looks like when He’s absent.
So that might be another answer to our question. Why does Isaiah deal in the grotesque? Maybe it’s because he wants us to see something else, to look past the dark cloud and see the silver lining instead. Again, we could say yes and no. Yes, because the God who speaks through Isaiah wants to move us into the light of His presence, but also no, because the darkness isn’t just outside of us. It’s lodged in our hearts. It disfigures everything we see, and think, and feel. We’ve become like Tolkien’s famously grotesque character, Gollum, repulsed by the light, the cloud- breaking light that would save us, and attracted to our precious darkness that disfigures us. And looking at us, if I were in God’s position, I’d look away from this freak show or at least keep my distance.
God, of course, did the opposite. He didn’t shine the light from 90 million miles away. He came to be with us. A virgin shall conceive and give birth to His Son, and she’ll call His Name Immanuel, which means “God with us.” Disfigured as we are, God embraced us in the birth of His Son Jesus. And there is more because Jesus knows what it’s like to be seen as a freak. He knows how it feels when people are sickened at the sight of you.
Isaiah foresaw how Jesus would be received by His people, people like us, people who cover and surgically alter our blemishes. People who hide our ugliness behind self-justifications, people who don’t know good when we see it. Isaiah foretold the experience of Jesus in graphic detail. In chapter 53 he said the Messiah would have no beauty or majesty to attract us to Him, nothing in His appearance that we should desire Him. The Son who was given, we left Him to die on a cross like one from whom men hide their faces, He was despised, and we esteemed Him not. And even there He turned toward us and paid the full price to restore us. And He rose from the dead so that we could start to see like He does. God inspired Isaiah to depict what is grotesque, not for shock value, not to disclose some silver lining, but so that by faith in Jesus, you would see. It doesn’t matter how ugly or unattractive or weak or worthless you think you are. Jesus embraces you. God loves us freaks and all.
In the spring of 1960, Flannery O’Connor received a letter, not a critique this time, but a request. A request from some nuns living in a convent in Atlanta. Enclosed with the letter, there was a photograph of something O’Connor herself described as grotesque. It was the freakish disfigurement on the face of a little girl in the picture. “Her face was straight and bright on one side,” O’Connor wrote. “The other side was protuberant. The eye was bandaged. The nose and mouth crowded slightly out of place. The child looked out at her observer with obvious happiness and composure.”
In the letter the nuns detailed some of the young girl’s story. Her name was Mary Ann. In 1949 when she was three years old, the doctor at the cancer clinic broke the news to her mother. The tumor is still there. Everything they had done for Mary Ann over the last three years, removing her eye, radiating her, X-raying her, it had been in vain. The cancer was incurable. The tumor under her left eye socket would keep growing, keep disfiguring her face, and eventually cause her death. She had nothing to offer or to look forward to except misery and grief. So, her heartbroken parents gave Mary Ann over to these nuns, these sisters at the free cancer home in Atlanta, Georgia. Followers of Jesus who devoted their lives to His service by caring for the incurable. The doctor said that Mary Ann had maybe six months to live, but she turned out to be a remarkable child. She lived with those nuns for nine years. Her body finally succumbing to the cancer at the age of 12.
After Mary Ann died, the nuns wrote Flannery O’Connor, the famed Southern Gothic author who hailed from their state because they wanted her to write Mary Ann’s story. O’Connor knew immediately that she could not and would not write that story. If anyone were to write Mary Ann’s story, she said it should be the sisters themselves who had known and nursed her. O’Connor wrote them back with this suggestion, and if they did end up writing the story, she generously offered her assistance in preparing the manuscript. But at the time she figured that this was safe generosity as she did not expect to hear from them again. They were busy nurses after all. They wouldn’t have time to write a memoir. Their manuscript arrived at the end of the summer, and O’Connor kept her promise. She even wrote a beautiful introduction to it. It was published in 1961 under the title, A Memoir of Mary Ann. In that introduction to Mary Ann’s memoir, O’Connor comments on how in our time it’s common to use the suffering of children to discredit the goodness of God. And once you have discredited His goodness, you’re done with Him. But then what?
Here’s one way it could work out. You tell God you’re done with Him. It’s time for Him to move out, and now you have the house all to yourself. You’re still outraged by all the ugliness you see in the world, and slowly the people around you look more and more freakish. You escape momentarily in digital fantasies, but even the horror flicks lose their thrill. And when it’s over, you look in the mirror and are repulsed by what you see there. The sisters of the free cancer home in Atlanta followed another way. They invited God in and in His presence, they were shocked at nothing and loved life so much they spent theirs caring for the incurable. They loved a dying disfigured girl that the world wished didn’t exist, and they wrote her memoir because that’s what Jesus was doing for them.
I’m not saying that we should all go live in a convent or a monastery to care for the incurable, but I am saying that if Jesus has your heart, you can do that any place. Because He is writing your story, not just a memoir, but a new script, a new life, and new eyes to see even when so much is still dark. One day, Mary Ann saw her face reflected in a mirror on a medical cabinet. She said to the sister who was standing with her, “I’m not pretty.” The sister turned to her and said, “Mary Ann, you are beautiful.”
And Mary Ann seemed to grasp the difference.
Please pray with me. Dear God, we all like freaks have gone astray, and our best is as filthy rags, but You crown us with love and compassion. Help us live so that no one would be left out through Jesus Christ, Your Son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with You in the Holy Spirit, One God, now and forever. Amen.
Reflections for December 11, 2022
Title: Beauty We Can’t See
Mark Eischer: You’re listening to The Lutheran Hour. For FREE online resources, archived audio, our mobile app, and more, go to lutheranhour.org. And we’re back with our Speaker, Dr. Michael Zeigler.
Mike Zeigler: Today I’m visiting again with Dr. David Schmidt. Welcome back, David.
David Schmitt: Oh, thank you. It’s great to be here.
Mike Zeigler: During the season of Advent, we’re following readings from the book of Isaiah. And I’ve asked Dr. Schmitt to be here with us because I’ve learned so much from these ideas that he shared about how Christians can reflect on beauty. And what we’re talking about today, as it was in the title of the sermon, is that beauty we cannot see or “broken beauty,” as we’ve called it. David, why is it important for Christians to know that there is beauty we cannot see?
David Schmitt; It’s important for us to know because otherwise we limit the working of God. I have a friend who always talks about his first dog. He loved his first dog, and he showed me a picture, and it was the ugliest dog I have ever seen. I said, “That’s your first dog?” He said, “Yeah, that’s the day I got it.” They went and he said, “It was the runt of the litter. It had the mange.” And it was in the back and all these other dogs came up to him and he picked the one that was all the way in the back, cowering. And he loved that dog, right? And if he was looking for the beautiful, he would never have seen that dog. And this kind of reminds me of Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation, right? That God’s love doesn’t find its object. It creates it.
Mike Zeigler: Yeah.
David Schmitt: And if we’re only looking at the beautiful as the place where God works, then we limit the places where God can work. And so this beauty that we cannot see reminds us that God is able to work in some of the places that we have difficulty looking at.
Mike Zeigler: Well, and we think about the center of the Christian faith is a crucified Man.
David Schmitt: Right.
Mike Zeigler: Not conventional beauty.
David Schmitt: Right. That’s the whole point, right? There are things that are not beautiful but do express God’s love in the work of God to us in Jesus Christ. There we obviously have something that is not beautiful, it’s broken, it’s a broken beauty. And yet artists can paint crucifixions that begin to look beautiful to form our feelings so that we trust that in the middle of this death there’s something that is beautiful. And I think it’s the same with our vocation. There’s aspects of our vocation that are not beautiful. Cleaning the puss out of a sore is not a beautiful thing. And yet we conform the sentiment of people so that we recognize these acts as being moments where God is at work in ways that can’t be seen. So that would be kind of a sense of what broken beauty is.
Mike Zeigler: So, if part of bad sentimentality, as you described it, is ignoring suffering or looking past suffering. And a Christian embrace of the sentiment is not going to do that. It’s going to look at the world through our crucified Lord, through this broken beauty. So how do we look at suffering differently?
David Schmitt: We look at it very carefully because I think you laid out the challenges. There is evil and evil is real, and we cannot distort that. We cannot overlook that. So, Christians look at beauty, broken beauty, in a way that confesses that evil is real. But the reality of evil does not make us ignorant of the work of God, so you don’t just throw up your hands.
I think you referenced Flannery O’Connor and her work. And she has some wonderful lines in there about that we need to be blind and prophetic, and with an unsentimental eye looking at these things, that I cannot ignore that the evil is there. The evil is there; it is real. But I will not use that to erase what God has said. And so, on the other side, I’m going to say that God’s working. I’m going to trust that God’s working, but I need to be careful that I don’t prove it, that I don’t try to guild this event in such a way that I explain how God is working. I don’t know how God is working here. The reality of evil is too great. I don’t know how God is working here, but I know that He’s working here. And so, you’re right there in the center. You’re not saying I’m ignorant of God at work. You’re not saying there is no evil; it’s all erased. Rather, you’re recognizing, yes, there is evil, and yes, there is a God working, and God is working in the midst of this evil.
Mike Zeigler: So, we don’t arrogantly try to explain it all, but we don’t plead ignorance and say there’s nothing. We trust that there is beauty, but we can’t see it.
David Schmitt: Right. We confess that God is present there and because of His presence, it makes this beautiful. It makes me think of that painting by Grunewald, Mathias Grunewald, at His crucifixion. And it was there at St. Anthony’s Monastery, which was a place that worked as a hospital. And in the figure of Christ, His body is grotesque, but He’s bearing the sores of the very people who are in the hospital. And so as they look at that painting, it’s not erasing the evil of their sickness. It’s visibly present, but it’s also not denying that God is there and at work. You see Christ there in that suffering at work. And it’s that center position, which is really a posture of trust. It’s a posture of trust. We’re not ignorant. We know that God is there, and yet we’re not all-knowing. We can’t explain how God is there and what God is doing, but we trust that God is there and so we live in this trust of suffering love.
Music Selections for this program:
“A Mighty Fortress” arranged by Chris Bergmann. Used by permission.
“Hark! A Thrilling Voice Is Sounding” From The Concordia Organist (© 2009 Concordia Publishing House) Used by permission.