Something Beautiful - Isaiah 61:1-4, 10

How is everyone feeling in their beautiful Christmas sweaters this evening? I’d like everyone wearing one of those gorgeous holiday sweaters to come right on up for a picture. I’ll post and share the picture this evening, but do you see what God has done…He’s taken those ugly Christmas sweaters, the tackiest apparel of the season, and turned them into something beautiful as we gathered in them together as a Church family.

After Sunday, are y’all really surprised that I am using a Peanuts’’ clip tonight?  In it we see more transformation…the transformation of something ugly and the transformation into something beautiful—whether you are talking about the tiny little tree, that never was truly ugly, into a showcase Christmas tree or simply the attitudes of the kids from ugly in their cruelty to being gracious in their efforts to cheer up Charlie Brown.  Are those God transformations?  That’s your call, but consider the way the script was written—the ugliness is on one side of Linus’ recanting of the Biblical Christmas story and the transformation is on the other.  Whether that is a message that Shultz was intended, we may never know, but God’s Word is there in the midst of it all.

If you think about it, the story of Jesus is all about God taking something ugly and transforming it into something beautiful.  It happens over and over and over again.

God has always been and is always taking what is ugly and bringing something beautiful to being.  That’s the hope that Isaiah was offering to those in exile.  The people had seen the brutality of an invasion.  They had watched their homes destroyed.  They have been taking from their land to the land of the invading army and now found themselves in Babylon.  God speaks into the ugliness of their situation and tells them, have hope, I am about to do something beautiful.  God said, “I am going to take your ashes, and give you a garland,” (a sign of victory); “I am going to take your mourning, your sadness and your sense of loss, and I’m going to anoint you with the oil of gladness;” “I am going to take your faint spirit and place a mantle of praise about your shoulders;” “I am going to take your destroyed homeland and raise it up again.”

This is a Word that we need to hear, my brothers and sisters.  We need to know that God takes what is broken and ugly and turns it into some beautiful.  September left many of our homes and churches in a very ugly place.  We may not have been stripped from our homeland like the Israelites, but we might as well have been with the destruction that Florence left behind.  Still today, three months later, all we have to do is drive the roads of this Island and we still see the ugliness of destruction, whether it is a boat laying on the side of the road, a home still covered with tarps, or beyond that, an empty lot where a home stood.  We don’t even have to leave this building to see the ugliness of that storm, as evidence of the destruction is simply yards away in the sanctuary, still stripped bare.  Yet, from the words of Isaiah and the faithfulness of God, we know that God will not leave us in this “ugly” place.  We know that God will take what is ugly and turn it into something beautiful.  We may not see it yet, but we know that God is still at work transforming everything ugly into beauty, just as He always has and always will.

Consider the birth of Jesus.  For Jesus to have been fully human, as He was, that had to be an ugly moment.  Not only is there the messiness of childbirth, with all the pain and screaming and water breaking, Jesus’ birth happened in the stable with all the animal hair and straw and dirt and dung.  More over than that, for Jesus to have been fully human, He had to have started out ugly.  Every time someone comes around with a new little one, all we hear is, “that’s the most beautiful baby there’s ever been.” How many of you have heard that?  Said that?  It happens, especially if that baby is kin to you.  However, to get to that point, a transformation had to take place.  If anyone has ever been in a delivery room, whether it be through natural means or a C-section (all that I have experienced), that baby fresh out of the womb is not the “most beautiful baby there’s ever been.”  It is covered in all that amniotic fluid and blood and all sorts of liquid…it takes the gentle touch of those delivering to clean the baby up for everyone to see how beautiful the baby is…Jesus would have been no exception…whether Joseph or Mary or one one of Joseph’s kinfolk who snuck out to check on them did the cleaning, Jesus was transformed from being as ugly as every other newly birthed baby to truly being the “most beautiful baby there’s ever been.”

Then there is what God did with that feeding trough and stable.  God took an ugly feeding trough, likely covered in stains from the livestock’s’ sloppy eating (isn’t it funny how all of our Christmas programs and pictures look like Mary and Joseph stopped by Tractor Supply and picked up a brand new manger to lay Jesus in) and transformed it into the bed of the newly born savior—taking a less thought of piece of barnyard ware and transforming it into the subject of many a carol.  Then there’s the stable itself—God transforming the dingy smelly locale of family livestock into a beautiful center of worship as shepherds and angels gathered round to worship the newborn King.

Yet in the life of Christ, that is not the final time that God turned ugly into beautiful.  Throughout His ministry, Jesus touched the “ugly” of society—those that the “proper” people deemed ugly, dirty, unworthy.  As Jesus touched them, healed them, embraced them, ate with them, he declared that they were the beautiful children of God.  Later, Jesus was placed on the ugly Roman instrument of capital punishment.  As he hung upon that ugly cross, God transformed it and made it the beautiful instrument of our salvation as Christ died our death, taking the punishment for our sin, and brought our forgiveness.  Three days later God would take a cold stone tomb, roughly cut into the side of a hill, and, raising Christ from the dead, transformed it into the beautiful locale of our promise of eternal life.

What does this mean for us, my brothers and sisters?  It means everything, for it may not be our church building and homes that we feel are the ugliest—it may be our very lives.  We may find our lives destroyed.  Maybe our lives have been left ugly because of what someone else has done to us—maybe we have been in an abusive relationship, and that us left hurting, physically or emotionally; maybe we have had someone take advantage of us and leave us with nothing; maybe we have been let go from a job we really loved, or even a job we didn’t love and don’t know how the bills are going to get paid;  maybe family and friends have abandoned us, leaving us feeling unloved.  Maybe it wasn’t what someone else did to us, but things that just happened in our lives.  Maybe we have battled with cancer or had a loved one battle with Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s; maybe we or a loved one have been fighting depression, schizophrenia, or some other mental health struggle that has left us feeling ostracized by those who just don’t understand.  Maybe our own choices have left our lives in an ugly mess—battling addiction, finding ourselves in financial ruin, or feeling abandoned and alone because our choices have run everyone out of our lives.  Into all this ugliness God still speaks and says, “there is good news, I will take whatever has happened, I will reach into that ugliness, and I will transform it.  I will restore lives beyond imagination.  You will see something new born out of this place of ugliness, brokenness…and it will be something beautiful.”

Thanks be to God!

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.