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Recorded in the book of the Psalms, the Psalm numbered 104. "Bless the Lord, O my soul. O Lord, my God, thou art very great. Thou art clothed with honor and majesty,

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who covers thyself with light as with a garment, who has stretched out the heavens like a tent, who has laid the beams of thy chambers on the waters, who makest the clouds thy chariot,

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who ridest on the wings of the wind, who makest the winds thy messengers fire and flame thy ministers. Thou did set the earth on its foundation

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so that it should never be shaken. Thou did cover it with the deep as with a garment. The waters stood above the mountains. At thy rebuke they fled.

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At the sound of thy thunder they took to flight. The mountains rose, the valleys sank down to the place where thou didst appoint for them. Thou did set a bound which they should not

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pass so that they might not again cover the earth. Thou make a springs gush forth in the valleys. They flow between the hills. They give drink to every beast of the field.

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The wild asses quench their thirst. By them the birds of the air have their habitation. They sing among the branches. From thy lofty abode thou waterest the mountains.

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The earth is satisfied with the fruit of thy work. Thou dost cause the grass to grow for the cattle and plants for man to cultivate, that he may bring forth food from the earth and wine to gladden the heart of man,

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oil to make his face shine, and bread to strengthen man's heart. The trees of the Lord are watered abundantly, the cedars of Lebanon which he planted. In them the birds build their nests.

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The stork has her home in the fir trees. The high mountains are for the wild ghosts. The rocks are a refuge for the badgers. Thou hast made the moon to mark the seasons.

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The sun knows its time for setting. Thou make us darkness and it is night when all the beasts of the forest creep forth. The young lions roar for their prey,

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seeking their food from God. When the sun rises, they get them away and lie down in their dens. Man goes forth to his work and to his labor until the evening.

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O Lord, how manifold are thy works. In wisdom hast thou made them all. The earth is full of thy creatures. Yonder is the sea, great and wide,

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which teems with things innumerable, living things both small and great. There go the ships and Leviathan, which thou didst form to sport in it.

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These all look to thee to give them their food in due season. When thou givest to them, they gather it up. When thou openest thy hand, they are filled with good things. When thou hidest thy face, they are dismayed.

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When thou takest away their breath, they die and return to their dust. When thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created. And thou renewest the face of the ground.

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May the glory of the Lord endure forever. May the Lord rejoice in his works. Who looks on the earth and it trembles, who touches the mountains and they smoke.

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I will sing to the Lord as long as I live. I will sing praise to my God while I have being. May my meditation be pleasing to him, for I rejoice in the Lord.

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Let sinners be consumed from the earth, and let the wicked be no more. Bless the Lord, oh my soul. Praise the Lord.

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And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son,

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and of the Holy Spirit, amen. She was sweet 16, or maybe 17 or 18. And I asked her if she was a person of faith. And she said, oh, yes.

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I believe in God. But we've been out of touch for a while. I said, what does that mean? She said, it means I just don't feel his nearness anymore.

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Now, of course, the reality of God's presence is more of a fact than it is a feeling. That is the reason Paul said, I know whom I have believed, not I feel whom I have believed.

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Still, my heart went out to this young lady. And I'd like to share with her this morning, and with those who think as she thinks, for those who are longing for a greater experience

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of the presence of God. There are many avenues to God's way of nearness. But I choose only one for our focus this morning. And I choose this one because it seems to me

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to be one which so many omit from their life experience. I am proposing beauty as an answer for the searching heart. Now, it is a truism, of course, to say that we live in a very rushing time.

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John Ruskin said that cities are roaring, rustling, rattling things. And that goes for the suburbs of cities as well. When our ancestors used to go on a trip,

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they would ride on horseback and in wagons. They would camp by the side of the road at night. They would share their food there. They would visit their friends along their way.

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They would stare at the stars in the midnight sky. Travel required a great deal of patience. Today, we get angry if we miss the first section on a revolving door.

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We live in a very instantaneous time. Walk down the aisle in the supermarket. Instant coffee, instant tea, instant oatmeal, instant orange juice, instant fudge.

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And this last week, I saw instant mashed potatoes. Now, there ought to be a law against that. Mashed potatoes, well, the potatoes should be brought to you white and whole

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and steaming in a shining pan. And as you have them in front of you, with the steam, their gentle aroma rises to your nostrils. Then you take the masher and you crush them very gently

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so that you do not bruise them. And then you pour in sweet milk and then just enough salt and pepper. And then you use the mixer gently back and forth,

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moving in all different directions, until you've created a bowl of white cloud. And then you plop into the middle of that a great piece of yellow butter.

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And it melts. And it sends its golden fingers out to the edges of the cloud and holds it all. Now, that is the way you mash potatoes.

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Anything else should be illegal. The other day in a supermarket, I saw a little girl carry something over and put it in the basket.

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And her mother said, no, dear, take that back. You have to cook that. We digest books for quick consumption. We see ads in the paper which say,

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learn how to play the piano in just 10 easy lessons. Even in the church, we crowd our schedule with activities and groups and more and more programs whispering to God, step lively, step lively.

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Is it any wonder that we don't experience the mysterium tremendum, the feeling of the nearness of God, when so many people are not run down, but rather all wound up, caught up in the sovereignty of speed and the dominion of din?

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Compare that with an experience I had last January in Australia. I was visiting Ayers Rock, which is a kind of national symbol. It's a holy place to the aboriginal people. It's part of the Olga mountain range.

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And it's made out of a stone called conglomerite, which reflects different colors. And as you watch Ayers Rock at night, it changes color. As the sun goes down, it begins to, well,

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to transform itself before your very eyes. And I sat there and I watched it. I saw it go from a bright pink to a kind of dusky orange, and then to a red and to a deep crimson and scarlet,

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then into a kind of blue as it faded into grayness. And as I watched it, I thought to myself, well, the real color is just mud. It's just a muddy color.

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Just because of the sunset that I'm seeing these different shades. But then the spirit of the sunset whispered to me, and it said, how do you know that what you're seeing now

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isn't the truth, and what you see by daylight is what is not true? How do you know that that glare that you see in daylight, which makes it look like a mountain of mud,

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how do you know that that isn't a lie? And if you really want to see it as it truly is, you see it now as it changes colors in the sunset. I had to acknowledge to myself that I've

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discovered a lot of truth at sunset times, when the sky becomes a symphony of colors above me, when the trees about become green and then deeper green, and then a kind of blue and purple as they disappear away.

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And when there is a kind of silence that settles about so that canyons are filled with hush, and you hesitate to speak, lest somehow your conversation will smear the kaleidoscope of the eternal, in moments like that,

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God is very near, and you feel his presence profoundly. Nothing more clear to you at such a time. It's interesting to notice how some very great personalities, when they have been off in the world of nature alone,

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have had experiences of God through what they have seen about them. Perry, who went to the North Pole first, said that as he stood and looked out

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over those vast fields of unbroken ice and the achingly clear sky above, no one, he said, could stand in such a place and not experience the presence of God.

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When Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott went to the South Pole, they testified to the same thing. Scott, when he and those with him who were dying at the end of his last expedition,

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wrote in his journal, "There are three of us now, but we always feel the presence of a fourth." Livingston, off in the darkness of Africa, testified that wherever he went, he

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had the knowledge of the presence of God. It surrounded him, he said, on rivers and in equatorial places and the great, great vast grasslands. Everywhere, he said, I feel the presence of Jesus,

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for God has promised in his word that he would be present with us. And his is the word of a gentleman which may always be trusted.

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Admiral Byrd went and spent a winter in Antarctica and wrote about it by himself there. And the title of his book was Alone. And yet he testifies in that book to the fact

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that again and again in that place, he felt the presence of God. The beauty brought him that nearness. I hear someone say, well, that's all right, preacher,

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but I'm not in Australia, and I'm not in the Arctic or the Antarctic. I'm not in Africa. So how do you expect me to experience

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the presence of God and beauty if I'm not in those places? I answer, let's not play games. It really isn't that difficult in this day and this age to find some place where you can be alone

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in the presence of beauty. The scriptures say that God speaks in a still, small voice. It is my experience that that voice is audible anywhere, but especially in those places where beauty is.

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That is my own testimony. And it's also the testimony of scripture. For the scriptures say again and again that the greatness and the grace of God

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are to be seen in nature and in beauty. Take this heart song, this Psalm number 104, which is before us this morning, written by what one scholar has called the Wordsworth

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of the Old Testament. He probably had before him the first two chapters of Genesis and Job, chapters 38 to 41. And using these as his guide, he paints this picture

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of God being revealed in nature. There's too much in the picture for us to see it all this morning. The Psalm is 35 verses long.

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But look at some of the little touches. In that second verse, when he talks about God being robed in light, light is the symbol of life and of gladness and of purity.

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What a beautiful figure. Or in verse 4, when he talks about the winds and the flames being the ministers of God, saying that not only is God present in nature, but the ethereal hosts

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are present there also. Or in verse 11, when he talks about one of the most beautiful of the wild animals, the wild ass, and talks about the birds also singing in leafy bowers

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as being testimony to the grace of God. And in verse 17, he talks about the stork, which winters in South Africa and then travels the length of Africa up through the Middle East

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and up into Europe, being guided by the providential grace of God. Incidentally, the word for stork in Hebrew is hasida. And the word for the grace of God is hased.

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There's a kind of pun there that the author uses most cleverly. And then he speaks of the whales in verse 26. And he doesn't talk about them just in terms of their size. He says rather that they play and they sport

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in the great seas which God has made and God has measured and God maintains. Then this ringing affirmation comes from his lips. The glory of the Lord shall endure forever,

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and the Lord shall rejoice in his works. See, what this psalmist is saying to us again and again is this, that believers who go into the beauty of the world will encounter God there.

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He's not saying that unbelievers will find God there. It is folly to believe that you can send an atheist into the woods and say, look about you and you will discover God.

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There was a theologian of long ago who said that you could argue from nature to God. But since the 18th century, such a notion has been untoward. Now, what we see in nature is what we bring to nature.

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Nature echoes back the faith that is in our heart. The believer can experience the nearness of God there with a power and a meaning that's beyond anything he's known elsewhere.

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But for the unbeliever, those things will not be seen. It's much as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle points out in one of his short Sherlock Holmes stories. It's a story called The Naval Treaty.

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And at one scene, Holmes is standing there with a flower in his hand. And he says, this flower speaks to me of the loving providence of God.

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You see, he doesn't say that the flower testifies to the fact that God is. But what he does say is that the flower does testify to what kind of God God is.

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You see, God could have made a world for us in which we could live quite successfully without any beauty, without any loveliness, without any splendor to touch our spirits or souls.

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God could have made such a world. But he did not. He made a world and crammed it with beauty and with wonder and with magnificence.

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And that tells us what kind of God he is. For only lovers send roses to those they love. This heart song, this Psalm 104 is testimony to the grace and greatness of God

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as seen in the world of beauty. I read about a minister who went to call on a member of his parish who was sick. And this person couldn't speak and was in an oxygen tent.

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And he walked up beside the man's bed. And the man smiled and greeted him. And the man had a little pad and pencil in there with which he could write a message.

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And he grabbed up his pad and his pencil. And he began to write. And as he began to write, his face became very red. And the more he wrote, his eyes began to bulge.

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And he began to gasp for breath. And he was writing as fast as he could. And the minister was very concerned. And so he tore open the oxygen tent.

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And he reached in and grabbed that pad and pulled it out. And just at that moment, the man fainted dead away. And as the minister read the note, it said, please stand back.

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You're standing on my air hose. [LAUGHTER] Well, I sometimes think that preacher types like me suffocate people with their sermons

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and strangle people with their oceans of words. And what we really ought to do is take believers on field trips out into the place of beauty where they can find the answer for hearts

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that are searching for a greater sense of God's nearness. Of course, it's natural that ours should be a talking faith. The Reformation occurred at the same time as the development of the printing press.

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At that time, 2/3 of Europe was illiterate, neither read nor write. So it was natural that the Reformation faith should ally itself with printing and should be essentially

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a faith built upon words, a left brain faith, if you will, that appears to the logical capacities of humankind. The tragedy today is, you see, that we as a people have become too left brained.

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We are too logical. We are too given over to formulas and ideas. And we have allowed the right side of our brains, the other side of our personalities,

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the artistic, the romantic, that which seeks after beauty, we've allowed it to atrophy and become of less importance. I sometimes think that these people who are searching for a greater experience of the nearness

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of God are caught up, you see, in all kinds of theologies, all kinds of ideas, all kinds of activities of one kind or another. And what they really need is to experience beauty,

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either in nature or in art. For art is simply bringing the beauty of nature down to manageable terms. Any artist will testify to the fact

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that in the act of creation, one's humanity is heightened. You see, when you make something, when you bring something forth that is beautiful, as beautiful as you can make it, whatever

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the degree of that beauty might be, you are at one with God. For God is the premier creator. And you are experiencing the creation which he experienced. And there's oneness in that.

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That's the reason for centuries the church was the mother of the arts. Go anywhere where the Christian faith has been, and you will discover there great testimonies

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to artistic accomplishment. And they came out of the womb of the church. Sad to say that's not the case today. Sad to say for our whole country that's

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not so much the case today. There was a time when every woman knew all kinds of things to cook, when women were masters of the needle and the thread,

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when every man could carve and whittle, when families made their own musical instruments and sat about the fire at night and sang, when we danced as a people and expressed

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our joy and sometimes our sadness in the dances which were part of our traditions, when family gardens were something in which the whole family was involved, when a barber shop was a place where people got together

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not only to get their hair cut but also to sing. Even in the early days of radio, as we listened to what came over the airwaves, we had to use our imaginations, create in our minds

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the scenes which were being depicted there. But today, we look at television, which leaves nothing to the imagination, nothing for us to create.

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Mohandas Gandhi taught the Indian people that every one of them should learn to spin his own cloth so that he could have something that he created. Saint Francis of Assisi taught that you really cannot find

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yourself being comfortable with the things of heaven until you spent your hands a lot of time in the things of the earth, in the creation of beauty through order.

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Hildegard of Magdeburg, that great saint of the church, said that she never really experienced God until she began to write. If I may offer a word of my own testimony--

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and this has been corroborated by the testimony of many, many others-- when you write a sermon, you are not engaged in what is essentially a mechanical thing.

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You are engaged in what will hopefully turn out to be a piece of art that it will not only have truth, but it will also have beauty, a beauty that wins and persuades and encourages

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and uplifts. Beauty is truth and truth beauty. Both should be present, you see, in the sermon. And when you are working on a sermon,

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there are those moments when suddenly the materials at your hand, the ideas, the books, the pencils, the paper, take on a life of their own. And the sermon doesn't go where you plan for it to go at all.

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It goes a different direction. And you feel very much possessed by what is happening artistically. You're not controlling it.

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It's controlling you. Any artist will tell you the same thing. He starts out to paint a picture one way. It ends up being different.

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He begins to sculpt the stone in one day. And it ends up the next day in another way, because the art, the act of creation, takes over. That's a beautiful and sublime thing to happen.

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That's when you're really in touch with the divine. There's a sense of nearness that comes out of that, so that one can say the most important thing that the artist creates is the artist.

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The painter's first priority is not the painting, but what the painting does to him is the painter. Any preacher who doesn't preach to himself so that his sermons speak more to his own soul and his own needs

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than anybody else's will not be preaching as he ought to be preaching. And when we involve ourselves in the creative process, we discover oneness with the divine.

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Just this last week, Karl Epone, a music critic here in Pittsburgh, wrote an article in which he lamented the fact that churches are using professional singers more and more

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rather than volunteers. And he lamented this. He interviewed various people. And some people said that they thought this was a good thing.

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Well, I don't share that feeling. I don't share that feeling at all. You see, what Mr. Epone never considered was why it is that the church is having to rely more and more

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upon professionals. It's because there are fewer and fewer people who know how to sing. There are fewer and fewer people who've ever had a music class

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or have ever learned what it is to be involved in a singing ensemble. There are fewer and fewer people who feel at ease in such a situation.

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And that's a very sad thing. That's a tragic testimony. I make no apology for the fact that the church hires professionals to lead in its music.

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And I make no apology for that in the first place because the church has always encouraged the artists. And we ought to be encouraging the artists. Most of our society does not encourage the artists.

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And if the church can pay and help these people to develop their art, that's good. I make no apology for hiring professionals also because we want to offer to God the best that we have.

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But it does sadden me very much that there are so many people who won't even try, who won't even allow their left brain to adventure enough to come out and see how they'd sound when they sang,

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to know the thrill of being caught up in some piece of music that you thought you were singing, and you suddenly discover that it is really singing you. That's a magnificent moment of the nearness of God.

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And it's sad when in our nation, this whole avenue of artistic approach to God is being turned away from. So that in school systems, when there's not enough money, the first thing that you cut, the arts program.

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The psalmist writes, "The glory of the Lord shall endure forever, and the Lord shall rejoice in his works." And that's true. But not enough believers rejoice in the works of God.

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And the reason that they don't is that they don't take the time to smell the flowers, and they won't allow the time to learn how to paint a flower. Yes, I believe in God, she said.

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But we've been out of touch recently. Don't let that be the case with you. Cut the ropes that hold you back and restrain you. Ecstasy is not something for heaven alone.

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You can discover and delight in God now. You can know his nearness through the beauty that you see about you and through the beauty which you yourself create.

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And you can know that so profoundly that even when you're isolated, even when you're sick and separated and alone, you can still say, with apologies to William Wordsworth,

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"For oft when on my couch I lie, in vacant or in pensive mood, they flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude. And then my heart with pleasure fills and dances with God and the daffodils."

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Let us pray. Oh God, for the sake of the nearness of our experiencing thee, make us lovers of beauty, pursuers of beauty, adventurers in beauty, creators of beauty.

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For we would rejoice in thy works after thee. Amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]