sermons
Summer at Reservoir
Beauty Will Save the World
Steve Watson
Aug 10, 2025
Christian theology talks about this big, important experience called “salvation.” I think to many of us, it sounds like an outdated word. But today I’m going to use it. Because there’s an instinct in this word. That so much in a human life can get lost, hard, adrift. So much in our human communities, our little human planet, can bend toward cruelty, waste, even evil. So we all need a lot of help. So much in need of saving.
And in the Bible, the word “salvation” is used in three tenses: the past, the present, and the future.
In the past, we ask:
What saved our ancestors in their greatest trials? What saved me, when my life was drifting off course?
In the present, we might ask:
what is saving you today? What is drawing you away from despair, bitterness, whatever, and toward love, life, joy, justice, peace? What is saving you today?
And we can wonder about the future. Like who or what will save us from this mess we are in? (Whichever one of the many messes you’re thinking about….)
I used to be the kind of Christian that spent a ton of time thinking about salvation in the past tense, and on a personal scale.
How were you saved? was an important question. And it was a religious one, like when did you become a Christian? When – we would say – did you accept Jesus into your heart so that you can have a personal relationship with God?
I had a middle school Sunday school teacher named Mary Shearer. My family didn’t make me go to church services back then – while my parents went to church and sang in the choir, I’d hang out at my grandparents house down the street, drinking soda and eating chefboyardee canned ravioli my grandma heated up on the stovetop. Little Rascals reruns and Sunday morning football preview shows in the fellowship of my Nana and Poppop was a pretty sweet kind of church substitute for me, a sanctuary.
But I didn’t talk about that when I talked about getting saved. I talked about Mary Shearer, who was to me at the time a hokey old person (younger than I am now, right….) But then she was a hokey old person who had five kids and she’d play oldtimey hymns on her guitar and sing in her folksy voice –
“Heaven came down and glory filled my soul, when at the cross the savior made me whole….”
And even though we’d make up goofy words for them, she mostly wouldn’t get upset with us, but would tell us again and again that God loves us and that if we invite Jesus into our hearts, we’ll never be alone and God will live with us and love us forever.
And over the next couple of years, when I was lonely and sad a lot of the time, those words sounded good. And I remember I’d get on my knees in my musty basement bedroom and ask Jesus to live in my heart and tell God I would try to have faith and after I turned off the nightly high 5 at 9 on the radio, I’d read my Bible the church gave me, and I’d want to follow Jesus.
It didn’t seem like the best story, really, but it was what I had, how I got saved.
The past five or ten years, though, I’ve come back to this question of how I got saved as a teenager. I’ve been asking that question in therapy of all places, where we’ve talked about the places my life could have gone in those years, and the places it went instead, because knowing what’s saved me helps us know where I’ve come from and where I’m going, and sometimes it gives me some clues on how to keep going to the best places, the most beautiful places I can go.
And now when I think about what saved me back then, I still think about Mary Shearer and Jesus and the prayers I said in my basement.
But I think about other stuff too.
I think about my sophomore year English teacher Ken Jones, whose son died while he was teaching me, in a terrible, infamous tragedy. This after his daughter had died a year or two beforehand, and after his marriage had died a few years before that. And it was a small town. We all knew all this. And one of my choirs sang at his son’s funeral right after Christmas that year. And he came back to the classroom in January, and helped me become a writer, and he spoke at my brother’s graduation about the mysteries and terrible pains of life, saying here I am, bereft of children but not of hope.
And I saw before me what moral courage looks like, and I learned that life can go in the most terrible directions, and you can still keep showing up, one step at a time, and I learned that with the help of God and friends, we all can find hope and we all can find a way forward. And that saved me.
Like my crazy high school chorus teach Sonny Prior did when she tricked me into learning that I could sing and that singing felt so good for me, and that singing was a kind of portal to not just finding a voice for myself but finding peace, finding a kind of center, finding where what’s most beautiful and what’s most true are in the same place and speak to one another.
And pretend dying on my high school stage, when I was Tony in West Side Story was part of saving me too, because while my friends who played my fellow Jets bore my pretend-dead body up in their arms at the end of the show, while that super-talented sophomore who played Maria told us we had to put down our weapons and learn to love each other, 17-year old me thought:
oh my God, this is so true, that love and peace are our birthrights and everything we do to make our world a little more just and more humane and less violent is worth whatever it costs us.
And I guess I felt like: man, this may be fiction, but is this what it means to be born on others’ arms, and carried forward when I’ve got nothing left to give myself, and if so, this is so good, to be befriended, and to be a friend, accompanied by love and friendship wherever we go. I want to live in that world. I want to make that world.
See it turns out that in my teenage years, there was a lot that was saving me.
And when it came down to it, it was a lot of beauty. After a few tough and sad and lonely and barren years in my life, my mid to late years saw a kind of garden of beautiful things bloom around me.
And that beauty saved me.
I learned that beauty will save us all, that beauty will save the world, and that’s what I’m preaching on today.
Let me read one of my favorite stories in the good news of the life of Jesus. This one is from Mark, near the end, not long before Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion.
Mark 14:3-9 (Common English Bible)
3 Jesus was at Bethany visiting the house of Simon, who had a skin disease. During dinner, a woman came in with a vase made of alabaster and containing very expensive perfume of pure nard. She broke open the vase and poured the perfume on his head.
4 Some grew angry. They said to each other, “Why waste the perfume?
5 This perfume could have been sold for almost a year’s pay[a] and the money given to the poor.” And they scolded her.
6 Jesus said, “Leave her alone. Why do you make trouble for her? She has done a good thing for me.
7 You always have the poor with you; and whenever you want, you can do something good for them. But you won’t always have me.
8 She has done what she could. She has anointed my body ahead of time for burial.
9 I tell you the truth that, wherever in the whole world the good news is announced, what she’s done will also be told in memory of her.”
So there’s a lot here. We could talk about why this woman did something so extravagant and pour her life savings which was invested in this rare Persian nard perfume over Jesus’ head. We could talk about all the symbolic meanings this act of anointing could have in this culture. And why the disciples scolded her, or why Jesus in turn scolded them.
We could talk about what Jesus meant when he said that the poor will always be with you, how he was quoting his Bible where it talked about always having opportunities to share with those who are poorer than you, not accepting this is the way it’s supposed to be.
So much we could talk about.
But I want to talk about where it ends. Why this extravagant gesture of love, this anointing Jesus’ body before his death and burial, is something so important that Jesus says:
wherever in the whole world the good news about Jesus is announced, what she’s done will be told in memory of her.
It’s true. A version of this story is one of the few stories that is in every one of the Bible’s accounts of the good news of Jesus. All four of them.
Amazing. Wherever in the whole world the good news about Jesus is announced, what she’s done will be told in memory of her.
What’s so special? What in this story can help save us?
Partly it’s an image of Jesus himself. At the communion table, we remember Jesus expressing the suffering, sacrificial, extravagant love of God, his’ body and blood broken and poured out for the healing of the world. And here a follower of Jesus expresses her own costly, sacrificial, extravagant love, with her life savings broken and poured out for Jesus.
So maybe that’s part of why her story is shared whenever the good news of Jesus is told. Because she’s another image of Christ.
Maybe. But I don’t think it’s just that – remembered forever just for cospalying Jesus.
I think she’s remembered forever because this is what love looks like: extravagance, devotion, sacrifice. And love saves us.
And I think she’s remembered forever because what she does is beautiful. Jesus calls it a good thing, and by good he’s not like… meh, pretty good. But more like, this is what goodness looks like. This gesture of love and devotion is beautiful.
Beauty will save the world.
This phrase comes from the 19th century novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a writer of profound brilliance and also a person of profound faith in the God we see in the face and words and life of Jesus.
And Dostoyevsky puts these words in the mouth of one of his characters.
Beauty will save the world.
On the surface, he’s talking about aesthetics – the beauty we see in the human form and nature, and the beauty expressed in art.
And as a singer, a musician, I say a hearty Amen to that.
What would we do without our artists – our singers and poets and filmmakers and sculptors and chefs and all the rest of them?
The other week, I made a trip down to the Fuller Craft museum in Brockton. I’d been meaning to get there for a couple of months, because one of our own community members, the very talented visual artist Cicely Carew, has an exhibit up there. She’d told me about it when she was working on it, and sent me a link to some press about the opening there. And then with the help of one of our pastors Ivy, herself a huge promoter of the integration of arts and faith, Cicely gifted us with a small installation right here in our sanctuary, and I’d been thinking the least I can do is go to Brockton and see her work.
But honestly, I made the trip out of obligation.
And then I got there.
And my God, it is beautiful.
I mean the whole Fuller Craft is beautiful – a sanctuary tucked into a beautiful little urban reservoir landscape.
And then walking down the stairs into Cicely’s exhibit Be(loved), and I felt like I was walking into a kind of multimedia, multicultural, immersive sanctuary I hadn’t realized I needed.
Sometimes we call beauty breathtaking. But what about when the beauty of art gives you back your breath? When it shapes a space that helps you breathe more, feel more? Breath-giving, beautiful, peace-making.
Cicely installation (Be)Loved is this and more.
I paced around and explored and sat on a bench, and I found my breath and my pulse slowing down. It was a place I could be still, and remember that the sum of the ugliness and evil out there isn’t the truest thing in the world, just like the sum of my stresses isn’t the truest thing about my life. The truest thing is that we are loved, and that we too can be love.
Art does this, you know. Maybe we haven’t all had this experience in a museum – but at a show, listening to song, reading a poem, you’ve had it, I’m sure, that tasted of art catching you with a beauty that saves.
This insight is even baked into some of the dustier parts of the Bible, where we get design schemes for ancient temples and religious costumes. We see there a commitment to the saving power of beauty.
Like this bit in the book of Exodus.
Exodus 31:1-6 (Common English Bible)
31 The Lord spoke to Moses:
2 Look, I have chosen Bezalel, Uri’s son and Hur’s grandson from the tribe of Judah.
3 I have filled him with the divine spirit, with skill, ability, and knowledge for every kind of work.
4 He will be able to create designs; do metalwork in gold, silver, and copper;
5 cut stones for setting; carve wood; and do every kind of work.
6 I have also appointed with him Oholiab, Ahisamach’s son from the tribe of Dan.
Bezalel and Oholiab are filled with the spirit of God. So they can carve wood and bend metal, and cut jewels. They are artisans, gifted by God, honed by years of practice, and called by their community to the holy vocation of the beauty and art that will help save us.
I named one of our artists today because of the impact her work had on me this month, but we treasure all the artists of this community – past, present, and future.
And we’re going to do everything we can in this church to make this a house of beauty, where the songs we write and the art we make inside and outside of the walls of this church tells us the truest truths about God and our world, and shines the light we need to be people of love and hope and wonder in a world that doesn’t have enough of those things.
When Dostoyevky wrote:
Beauty will save us, though, even more than the arts, even more than aesthetic beauty,
he meant moral and relational beauty.
Not just the visual glory of the tabernacle’s gold and jewels but the beauty and goodness of God and all of God’s creation that they were trying to visualize.
Not just the breathtakingly gorgeous scent and feel of that perfumed oil as it poured across Jesus’ head, but the radiant love and purity of the human who gifted it to him, and the never-stopping, always extravagant love of God that animates the universe which inspired her.
Beauty, Dostoyevsky insisted, is not just an escape or a reprieve from the usual ugliness of life, but a witness to what is most real and true.
Beauty transcends aesthetics and inspires all of what is best in us, our aspirations for what is good and true, and what reconnects us to each other.
I told you a little bit about my high school story at the start of this sermon. I want to end with the high school story of a friend of mine.
My friend entered high school an increasingly angry young man. He was bullied as a kid, and he’d seen adults at school fail him more than once. And so as he entered high school, and learned more about the problems not just in his life, not just in his school, but in the big, wide world we live in, he was disposed to want to speak out about these things and fight.
And one of the fights he took on was in his school and his racial problems, and at one point he lashed out at a teacher publicly, and spread some rumors about them.
There were community discussions, parents were called in for meetings, but the real kicker came when my friend realized he’d misinterpreted a few situations and trusted a really biased peer of his with an axe to grind and that he’d unfairly maligned a teacher who was actually one of the real moral gems of the school.
And the problem for my friend wasn’t only realizing he’d been wrong but that he really wanted to take a class that this teacher taught. And he was like:
shoot, this teacher will probably never let me into their class.
But my friend decided to eat his pride and try. He asked a school administrator if he could be placed in this special class that the teacher he once maligned taught.
And if I’d been this teacher, I know there would have been two easy ways for me to handle this. I could have privately asked a school administrator to not place this student who’d done me wrong in my class, so I wouldn’t have to deal with him. Maybe I would have had my way, maybe not, but I could have tried.
Or I could have said nothing, let them into my class, and just hope for the best – let the past be the past, and just try to avoid the conflict and move forward.
But this teacher didn’t do either of these things. The teacher reached out to my friend directly and said,
you can be in my class, but we need to have a meeting before the school year starts.
And my friend was like:
shoot, what kind of trouble am I in?
But to his credit, he had the courage to show up to the meeting, and when he did, the teacher said:
I need you to know three things about how you treated me last year. One, I need you to know that it really hurt me. It didn’t feel good and you could have ruined my reputation. But two, I also want you to know that I forgive you. It’s hard being a teenager, and we all make mistakes, and I don’t believe that mistake is all you are. So we’re going to show up together and start something new between us, and let that go. I forgive you.
And my friend tells me he was speechless when the teacher said this because it was the last thing he expected. But then the teacher said,
the last thing I want you to know is I’m really curious why you were so angry last year, and what’s happened in your life in school so far to make you feel the way you do, because we all are who we are for a reason.
And that opened up my friend, to think about the difficulties he’d faced, to start talking about those things too, and to start getting free from the effect they’d had on him.
Not only did this teacher teach him that year, but they developed a really precious relationship, one that produced a great college recommendation, and a desire in my friend to work with youth himself as an adult, and one that even more than all that, started to rewire my friend’s sense of what he could expect in this world of ours.
It was my friend’s Ken Jones moment, where he caught a taste of what grace and courage and real moral beauty look like. And it saved him.
Because that’s what beauty can do.
Beauty in a broken, often ugly world is a signpost.
It helps us see what’s true again.
You know, when someone claims to tell you the truth about something in the world – like what’s true about Israel and Palestine, or what’s true about what should happen in Gaza. One way back to the truth is to ask:
- is what this person is saying beautiful?
- Is revenge beautiful?
- Is dispossessing your neighbor beautiful?
- Is bombing your neighbor’s children, is starving your neighbor’s children, beautiful?
- If not, then it’s probably not true, is it?
And if someone claims to tell you the truth about God, well even more so here, you can ask: is what this person saying about God beautiful? Because if not, it’s probably not true at all, and I don’t need to take them to heart.
Because beauty is one of our portholes to what is true, and the truest truths – even when they are hard – are always beautiful, as is our Creator God, Mother and Father to us all.
And friends, don’t just pay attention to beauty but make it, receive it, reward it.
Because beauty helps us find our way to ourselves, it helps us find our way back to one another, and it helps us find our way back to God.
Whether it’s in the food you cook or the pottery you throw or the songs you sing or the houses you clean, whether it’s in the product you sell or in the way you treat your customers or in the way you talk with a hurting kid who’s done you wrong, try doing something beautiful.
Make something beautiful.
Be someone beautiful.
Notice, welcome, take in all that’s beautiful, friends, because beauty will save the world.