Misled By Beauty
Sermon
Sermons On The First Readings
Series II, Cycle B
It seems to me that the so-called "reality" television shows that have proliferated on the airwaves recently have introduced some new lows in the quality of broadcasting, and one of the more unwholesome -- and dare I say even ungodly -- notions they have reinforced is that what you look like is a measure of your value as a person.
Two shows in particular promote this view: Extreme Makeover and Average Joe.
On the first of these, Extreme Makeover, from the more than 10,000 applications the show receives for each opening, a person who is not especially good-looking is selected for a Cinderella-type experience. Using plastic surgeons, eye surgeons, cosmetic dentists, hair and makeup artists, clothes stylists, and other experts in the transforming arts, the person is indeed made to look more attractive. Often this involves things like having bulges removed, breasts augmented, teeth straightened, noses re-sculpted, hairpieces glued on, and so forth. At the end of the makeover period, the person is sent back to his or her friends and family in a kind of unveiling ceremony, where those gathered are usually very impressed by how the person has improved in looks.
There's certainly nothing wrong with a person wanting to make his or her appearance better, and sometimes the show helps people who are handicapped by something truly unfortunate in their looks, but the subtext of the show is that physical beauty is good and that homeliness is bad.
The other show, Average Joe, is much more blatant in promoting that doctrine. Each series of that show so far has involved a woman with model-like beauty, who, at least on the Average Joe promos broadcast during other television programming, never wears anything but a bikini. She is set up in a contrived situation with a bunch of guys of average looks. Over a period of several weeks, she is to narrow the group down to one she'd be willing to spend some time with. Near that point, however, some hunky guys are brought in, and you get to see whom the young woman will now choose. On the first series, the woman dropped all of the average Joes and opted for a hunk.
While I think these shows, especially Average Joe, send a terrible message, their creators are also very astute in realizing how big the potential audience is for such programming. According to one survey, 99 percent of women and 94 percent of men would change something about their appearance if they could.1 I myself am in that group. If there were something I could easily do about it, I would have hair on the top of my head and would be about five inches taller. If you watch the general population for very long, however, you'll soon notice that not many women are candidates for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and not many men are candidates to be on the cover of GQ. Abraham Lincoln, who by no measure was much of a looker, is reported to have made much the same observation. He said, "The Lord prefers common-looking people. That is the reason he makes so many of them."
Well, today is the third Sunday in a row where our Old Testament reading has taken us to an incident in the life of the prophet Samuel. In today's passage, following God's rejection of Saul, who was Israel's first king, Samuel is told to go to Bethlehem to anoint a new king, one of the sons of a man named Jesse. This man, however, has eight sons, and God does not tell Samuel in advance which son has been selected. So Samuel goes to Bethlehem where he announces a sacrificial ceremony and invites unsuspecting Jesse and his sons to attend. Once they get there, each of the sons comes before Samuel, in order of age from the eldest to the youngest. The first to come is Eliab; he is tall and movie-star handsome. Seeing this hunk, Samuel thinks to himself, "Surely this is the Lord's anointed." But God tells Samuel, "Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart." As the incident proceeds, it turns out that the one God has chosen to be Israel's next king is Jesse's youngest son, David, who is also described as "handsome," but by the time we learn that, we also know that David's looks are not what makes him God's choice; God is looking at what's in David's heart.
Do you want to know one way God is different from us? He is not fooled by a person's appearance. He is not misled by beauty.
We often are, however. There has been some research about how our attitudes toward, and assumptions about, people are often shaped by how they look. For example, these studies show that:
¥
mothers of attractive babies hold, cuddle, and kiss them more than mothers of unattractive babies do. In one case, the researchers found a 4-year-old boy whose nose, part of a cheek, and one ear had been bitten off in a dog attack. When that happened, the child's parents began to behave differently toward him. They didn't hug or touch him as much as before and seldom smiled at him.
¥
adults tend to rate the more serious transgressions of attractive children as temporary departures whereas they rate the same transgressions in unattractive children as basic character flaws.
¥
schoolteachers tend to give more attention and consideration to good-looking students and assume that they have higher intelligence.
¥
adults tend to assume that handsome people are sexually warmer, more interesting, more sociable, and more sincere.
¥
good-looking female employees often earn between eight and twenty percent more than average-looking females.
It also sometimes works the other way, too, in that very beautiful people are often assumed to be unfeeling or stuck on themselves. They sometimes have trouble being taken seriously.2
C. S. Lewis' classic book, The Screwtape Letters, gives us an example of how we can be misled by appearance. The book is written as if it were a series of correspondence between a master devil named Screwtape and his nephew Wormwood, who is only an apprentice devil. Wormwood has been assigned to capture for hell the soul of a young man, but he's not had much success. In fact, the man has become a Christian, so Screwtape writes to give Wormwood some advice.
In one letter, Screwtape advises how Wormwood might trip up his Christian subject by getting him to enter into a marriage with a woman who will not be good for him. Screwtape writes, "Our aim is to guide each sex away from those members of the [opposite sex] with whom spiritually helpful, happy, and fertile marriages are most likely."3 Screwtape goes on to advise Wormwood in the value of "directing the[ir] desires ... to something which does exist -- making the role of the eye ... more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible."4 In other words, mislead humans into building an impossible vision of the other person based on the other's attractiveness. That way, the relationship is sure to have problems later when the other person cannot live up to that vision.
Aren't you glad that God sees who we are on the inside and is not fooled by our outward appearance?
Jesus makes a similar point in a confrontation with some scribes and Pharisees. He castigates them for relying on certain outward behaviors -- how much they tithe, how scrupulously they observe the ceremonial laws, how righteous they look. Jesus tells them that they are straining out gnats while swallowing camels. And he adds, "So you ... on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness" (Matthew 23:28). Jesus, like his heavenly Father, had the ability to look at the heart.
Today's text from 1 Samuel invites us to learn a few things. One of them is to be aware of our natural tendency to be biased toward people one way or the other based on their looks. But an even further point is that trying to avoid this bias is not just smart behavior, it is also a religious matter. If we are trying to be followers of Jesus, then we ought to work at looking past a person's physical appearance.
The text also invites us to learn a different meaning of beauty. Saying that God looked on David's heart and found him worthy to be the next king is a way of saying that even though David was a good-looking man, his real beauty was at the heart level. The Navajo, I am told, use the word beauty to designate the beneficial alliance between spirits and nature.5 While the traditional Navajo faith is not Christian, Christianity can understand that way of using the word. Jesus told the Pharisees that cleaning the inside of the cup (that is, their hearts), would result in a clean outside. That is a way of saying that they would then reflect God's beauty.
In fact, Christianity does use a form of the word beauty in much the same way. The root word for beauty is the also the root for the word "beatitude." The beatitudes are the statements of Jesus that begin "Blessed are those ..." and go on to talk about states of spirituality, such as "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness...." So we can see that in God's eyes there is true beauty in the spiritual state of a humble person who is sincerely seeking righteousness.
Yet one more thing this story from 1 Samuel invites us to learn is about the moral nature of God. Frankly, we don't know why God made some of us better looking than others of us or why he made us so that we are able to prefer certain physical attributes over others, but it raises our confidence in the moral nature of God to know that when God looks at each of us, he sees our hearts and is not misled by our appearances.
For those of us who are not candidates for a Miss America competition or for a Hunk-O-Mania revue, that is good news, but it's also good news for those who are. For it is only at the heart level where an extreme makeover is really possible and where with God, real beauty counts. And in the case of that kind of makeover, we aren't expected to be able to do it ourselves. Instead, God calls us to trust him to make us new -- beautiful and new.
____________
1.ÊLouis Harris, Inside America, cited by Daniel Weiss, 100% American (Poseidon Press, 1988).
2.ÊInfo on study results from Carol Kramer, "How Your Looks Shape Your Life," Parade, July 4, 1982.
3.ÊC. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: Macmillan Paperbacks Edition, 1968), Letter XX, p. 91.
4.ÊIbid., p. 92.
5.ÊAccording to Deena Metzger, Writing for Your Life (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), quoted in Context, July 1, 1993.
Two shows in particular promote this view: Extreme Makeover and Average Joe.
On the first of these, Extreme Makeover, from the more than 10,000 applications the show receives for each opening, a person who is not especially good-looking is selected for a Cinderella-type experience. Using plastic surgeons, eye surgeons, cosmetic dentists, hair and makeup artists, clothes stylists, and other experts in the transforming arts, the person is indeed made to look more attractive. Often this involves things like having bulges removed, breasts augmented, teeth straightened, noses re-sculpted, hairpieces glued on, and so forth. At the end of the makeover period, the person is sent back to his or her friends and family in a kind of unveiling ceremony, where those gathered are usually very impressed by how the person has improved in looks.
There's certainly nothing wrong with a person wanting to make his or her appearance better, and sometimes the show helps people who are handicapped by something truly unfortunate in their looks, but the subtext of the show is that physical beauty is good and that homeliness is bad.
The other show, Average Joe, is much more blatant in promoting that doctrine. Each series of that show so far has involved a woman with model-like beauty, who, at least on the Average Joe promos broadcast during other television programming, never wears anything but a bikini. She is set up in a contrived situation with a bunch of guys of average looks. Over a period of several weeks, she is to narrow the group down to one she'd be willing to spend some time with. Near that point, however, some hunky guys are brought in, and you get to see whom the young woman will now choose. On the first series, the woman dropped all of the average Joes and opted for a hunk.
While I think these shows, especially Average Joe, send a terrible message, their creators are also very astute in realizing how big the potential audience is for such programming. According to one survey, 99 percent of women and 94 percent of men would change something about their appearance if they could.1 I myself am in that group. If there were something I could easily do about it, I would have hair on the top of my head and would be about five inches taller. If you watch the general population for very long, however, you'll soon notice that not many women are candidates for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and not many men are candidates to be on the cover of GQ. Abraham Lincoln, who by no measure was much of a looker, is reported to have made much the same observation. He said, "The Lord prefers common-looking people. That is the reason he makes so many of them."
Well, today is the third Sunday in a row where our Old Testament reading has taken us to an incident in the life of the prophet Samuel. In today's passage, following God's rejection of Saul, who was Israel's first king, Samuel is told to go to Bethlehem to anoint a new king, one of the sons of a man named Jesse. This man, however, has eight sons, and God does not tell Samuel in advance which son has been selected. So Samuel goes to Bethlehem where he announces a sacrificial ceremony and invites unsuspecting Jesse and his sons to attend. Once they get there, each of the sons comes before Samuel, in order of age from the eldest to the youngest. The first to come is Eliab; he is tall and movie-star handsome. Seeing this hunk, Samuel thinks to himself, "Surely this is the Lord's anointed." But God tells Samuel, "Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart." As the incident proceeds, it turns out that the one God has chosen to be Israel's next king is Jesse's youngest son, David, who is also described as "handsome," but by the time we learn that, we also know that David's looks are not what makes him God's choice; God is looking at what's in David's heart.
Do you want to know one way God is different from us? He is not fooled by a person's appearance. He is not misled by beauty.
We often are, however. There has been some research about how our attitudes toward, and assumptions about, people are often shaped by how they look. For example, these studies show that:
¥
mothers of attractive babies hold, cuddle, and kiss them more than mothers of unattractive babies do. In one case, the researchers found a 4-year-old boy whose nose, part of a cheek, and one ear had been bitten off in a dog attack. When that happened, the child's parents began to behave differently toward him. They didn't hug or touch him as much as before and seldom smiled at him.
¥
adults tend to rate the more serious transgressions of attractive children as temporary departures whereas they rate the same transgressions in unattractive children as basic character flaws.
¥
schoolteachers tend to give more attention and consideration to good-looking students and assume that they have higher intelligence.
¥
adults tend to assume that handsome people are sexually warmer, more interesting, more sociable, and more sincere.
¥
good-looking female employees often earn between eight and twenty percent more than average-looking females.
It also sometimes works the other way, too, in that very beautiful people are often assumed to be unfeeling or stuck on themselves. They sometimes have trouble being taken seriously.2
C. S. Lewis' classic book, The Screwtape Letters, gives us an example of how we can be misled by appearance. The book is written as if it were a series of correspondence between a master devil named Screwtape and his nephew Wormwood, who is only an apprentice devil. Wormwood has been assigned to capture for hell the soul of a young man, but he's not had much success. In fact, the man has become a Christian, so Screwtape writes to give Wormwood some advice.
In one letter, Screwtape advises how Wormwood might trip up his Christian subject by getting him to enter into a marriage with a woman who will not be good for him. Screwtape writes, "Our aim is to guide each sex away from those members of the [opposite sex] with whom spiritually helpful, happy, and fertile marriages are most likely."3 Screwtape goes on to advise Wormwood in the value of "directing the[ir] desires ... to something which does exist -- making the role of the eye ... more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible."4 In other words, mislead humans into building an impossible vision of the other person based on the other's attractiveness. That way, the relationship is sure to have problems later when the other person cannot live up to that vision.
Aren't you glad that God sees who we are on the inside and is not fooled by our outward appearance?
Jesus makes a similar point in a confrontation with some scribes and Pharisees. He castigates them for relying on certain outward behaviors -- how much they tithe, how scrupulously they observe the ceremonial laws, how righteous they look. Jesus tells them that they are straining out gnats while swallowing camels. And he adds, "So you ... on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness" (Matthew 23:28). Jesus, like his heavenly Father, had the ability to look at the heart.
Today's text from 1 Samuel invites us to learn a few things. One of them is to be aware of our natural tendency to be biased toward people one way or the other based on their looks. But an even further point is that trying to avoid this bias is not just smart behavior, it is also a religious matter. If we are trying to be followers of Jesus, then we ought to work at looking past a person's physical appearance.
The text also invites us to learn a different meaning of beauty. Saying that God looked on David's heart and found him worthy to be the next king is a way of saying that even though David was a good-looking man, his real beauty was at the heart level. The Navajo, I am told, use the word beauty to designate the beneficial alliance between spirits and nature.5 While the traditional Navajo faith is not Christian, Christianity can understand that way of using the word. Jesus told the Pharisees that cleaning the inside of the cup (that is, their hearts), would result in a clean outside. That is a way of saying that they would then reflect God's beauty.
In fact, Christianity does use a form of the word beauty in much the same way. The root word for beauty is the also the root for the word "beatitude." The beatitudes are the statements of Jesus that begin "Blessed are those ..." and go on to talk about states of spirituality, such as "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness...." So we can see that in God's eyes there is true beauty in the spiritual state of a humble person who is sincerely seeking righteousness.
Yet one more thing this story from 1 Samuel invites us to learn is about the moral nature of God. Frankly, we don't know why God made some of us better looking than others of us or why he made us so that we are able to prefer certain physical attributes over others, but it raises our confidence in the moral nature of God to know that when God looks at each of us, he sees our hearts and is not misled by our appearances.
For those of us who are not candidates for a Miss America competition or for a Hunk-O-Mania revue, that is good news, but it's also good news for those who are. For it is only at the heart level where an extreme makeover is really possible and where with God, real beauty counts. And in the case of that kind of makeover, we aren't expected to be able to do it ourselves. Instead, God calls us to trust him to make us new -- beautiful and new.
____________
1.ÊLouis Harris, Inside America, cited by Daniel Weiss, 100% American (Poseidon Press, 1988).
2.ÊInfo on study results from Carol Kramer, "How Your Looks Shape Your Life," Parade, July 4, 1982.
3.ÊC. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: Macmillan Paperbacks Edition, 1968), Letter XX, p. 91.
4.ÊIbid., p. 92.
5.ÊAccording to Deena Metzger, Writing for Your Life (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), quoted in Context, July 1, 1993.
