Worship Arts Pastor Mike Cosper, on Sojourn’s “Cultivate Beauty/ Kill Your TV” month:

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if God spoke to me in an audible voice. Would I even hear it? Would the voice that Jeremiah described as a “still, small voice” be able to penetrate the din of music, TV, distracted thoughts, advertisements, internet pop-ups, emails, MySpace messages, voice mails, books, letters, friends, neighbors and enemies that are shouting to be heard already?

Sometimes when God speaks in the Scriptures, it’s quite extraordinary. The Bible tells us about mountains shaking, seas suddenly running dry, creatures called into being, and elsewhere, creation erupting into flame when God opens His mouth. But they also tell us that God wants to welcome us near Him like children, know us as a friend who speaks face-to-face and rejoice over us with singing.

These questions come to mind every year when Kill Your TV / Cultivate Beauty Month comes around.  Kill Your TV is a month when we ask Sojourners to turn off their TV’s to make some space (if only for a month) to cultivate something beautiful. That can be some kind of creative work like writing, drawing, painting, or playing music - or it could simply be cultivating a friendship, a marriage or a relationship with a neighbor. It could be finding an opportunity to love and serve others, blessing someone else, or it could be a walk in the woods, cultivating an appreciation for what God has done with the endless array of variety and simple beauty in the world around us.

It always strikes me as such an attractive idea - silence and solitude, a season away from technology and noise. But I know myself too well. I know how much I like TV and how much I like finding little justifications for turning it on. “It’s just one show”, or “It’s a really big game”, or “I’m REALLY bored right now.”

But lately I just come back again to those haunting questions. God could be speaking audibly all the time, and just refusing (as he rightly could) to shout over the din of LOST, Iron Chef, and The Ultimate Fighter.

The TV seems to be a symbol for everything that makes technology the sticky mess that it is in our lives. It’s an incredible resource - like the Internet, TV puts the world at our fingertips. For those of us with cable or satellite it just gets more intense - more options, more noise, more bright landscapes from the world over at our beck and call. There are great, redeeming and redeemable things on our TVs, and like the Internet, there’s a world of harmful dehumanizing stuff just waiting for our attention.

As I thought recently about the month ahead, I was reminded of the strange relationship that life, death and renewal have in the world around us.  I thought particularly of images I saw recently of a forest, post-forest fire. There was little that could have been associated with a forest in the image. The land had burst into flames after a series of unfortunate natural occurrences - a long, warm growing season one year was followed by a year of drought. The land had burst out with young new growth the first year, which turned into acres of dry, crisp kindling the following year. The dry season ended with a fierce lightning storm, and as the earth shuddered with the impact of untold volts, the searing heat caused acres of ground to literally explode. Soon, a miles-wide swath of California landscape was a sea of flames. From the air the images look like a volcano: black smoke, scorched earth, and spider webs of red and yellow sprawling indiscriminately across the view.

The aftermath looked like a scene from a war movie. The ground looked black and oily. What remained of trees were hollow stumps, gnarled black figures, like ghosts of Ents from Middle Earth, shadows of once-great statuesque creations that stretched overhead and provided the core of life in the ecosystem around them. Now the barren earth provided no shelter, only the bleak landscape which spoke in grim tones of the ends of things.

And yet … there’re amazing things that happen after a forest fire. Mushrooms go insane. Morels, which are a rarity in a normal forest, explode from the earth as though the forest fire was their cue. (I read a book recently that talked a lot about mushrooms. It seems that botanists still don’t quite understand the mysterious process that gives birth to rare mushrooms like morels and truffles, species programmed by their creator to resist any effort to “domesticate” them, resolved only to live wild under a fragile and unspoken set of rules and conditions.)

Then there’re the Monterey and Pond pines. These trees spend years populating hillsides with their cones, just as their neighboring species do, but only the combination of the oppressive carbon dioxide in the air and the heat from the flames coaxes these cones to open up, releasing thousands of seeds onto the now barren soil. There’s something in the wiring of nature, something woven into its fabric, that insists on being prepared for carnage, ready for death, and ready to spring back. While one part of the natural world looks at this ashen scene and says “hopeless”, another portion (like the Morel and the Monterey Pine) smiles and says “potential.”

We see this reality throughout nature. In the fall, the trees stop feeding chlorophyll to their leaves, turning them into the amber and golden mosaic we’re used to calling “fall colors,” showering the ground around them and leaving the tree to face the cold winter as a skeletal silhouette against the metal-grey skies. Leaves return, along with buds. Buds become flowers. Flowers fade and drop. Fruit buds, then swells, then bursts, dropping tiny seeds into the soil that will take their turn attempting to grow up. Soon, the chlorophyll stops flowing again and the cycle renew.

In the story of Israel and Yahweh, it seems there was always rubble before renewal. The kings who led Israel faithfully almost always begin their reigns with a bloodbath, declaring war on the idolaters who led Israel astray, scouring the hills and the countryside tearing down temples to idols, shrines, Asheroth poles and altars to Baal. Hezekiah took the throne of a kingdom with an aging and disrepaired temple, and led the people to spiritual renewal. Nehemiah traveled along the walls of Jerusalem by night, weeping on horseback, brokenhearted by the tattered remains of his city. From those ashes he led Israel to reconcile their differences and to rebuild.

This rhythm remains today: God speaks, the people are broken, the covenant is made or renewed, and new life and beauty emerge from the ashes. God made a formless world ordered and beautiful. “Good,” He called it. Sin entered the world, and chaos ensued. The form decayed. The order disappeared. God continued to stay involved, sending a flood for a clean start at creation, making covenants with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, which culminated in the birth of the Son of God and the Son of Man, who lived and walked in the midst of the chaos. He saw it and wept. He wept at the tomb of His friend, He wept over the sad and lost city He loved, and He wept under the pain and agony of separation from God, crying out, “My God, why are you forsaking me?” He died, like a seed, buried in the dark soil of a scorched earth, and rose green and lush in stark contrast to His dead surroundings.

Art, literature, music, all point to this rhythm of life, death and renewal. We see it in the observation deck of the Death Star, when Luke stands before the Emperor and watches the darkness prepare to swallow the light and crush the Rebel Alliance. We see it in The Two Towers, when Saruman’s army breaks through the last defenses at the Hold, and the warriors mount up on their horses, ready to die fighting, refusing to die cowering in the Hold. We see it in jazz, when Bill Frisell, or Ornette Coleman, or our own Jason Tiemann takes the melody and pulse of a song, and twists it, turns it, flips it up onto its head, and puts the listener in that place of relentless tension and mystery.

We sit in those moments and wonder where the light will come from. When will the tension release, when will hopes be answered? And we can all remember what happens. Darth Vader repents in the old-fashioned sense of the term, and saves the day, casting the emperor into the abyss. Gandalf and his Riders appear on the horizon with the rising of the sun on the third day, crushing Saruman’s army. And often, Frisell, or Coleman, (or Tiemann) brings us back to the melody, having taken us on a journey that gives that melody a new meaning, a new perspective.

So therein lies the paradox. There is something to the reality that life, death and rebirth are all intertwined. Beauty has some connection to the broken, the battered and the destroyed. As we return to Kill Your TV month, I hope we see the image of a TV’s shattered remains as a symbol of hope, a symbol of renewal. To cultivate beauty means to acknowledge the brokenness and the need for order amongst the disorder. It’s a simple and plain metaphor for the gospel.

Join us this month; make space for quiet, pay attention to the beauty amongst the brokenness around you, and listen for that quiet voice speaking in its midst.

by Sojourn Worship Arts Pastor Mike Cosper, republished from Travelogue, the quarterly journal of Sojourn Community Church.

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We kick off this month with the 2008 Cultivate Beauty Festival at Sojourn’s The 930 Art Center, featuring visual art, short films, music sets by national and regional artists, and lectures by noted author Harold Best.  For a full lineup of this event, taking place Friday and Saturday, visit the Cultivate Beauty Festival page at the930.org.

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