I am officially a fossil. A geezer. A curmudgeon, and a crank. I am so “old” in my ways that I don’t fit in the world anymore. Or is it something else? The other day, I was stuck in rush hour traffic, backed up at a stoplight. In boredom, I scanned the cars around me. In the car next to mine, there was a young, blonde girl, early twenties, snapping a selfie behind the wheel. She held her phone out above her cocked head, turned her face to profile, made wide, doe-eyes at the camera lens, and pouted her lips. Then she checked the shot. No good. She did it again. SAME pose. Exactly the same pose. She checked the shot. No good again. She did the third re-take (it was a slooooooow stoplight). SAME pose! EXACTLY THE SAME POSE! NO ADJUSTMENT! Not a single variation in the angle of her head or degree of her profile, or in the eyes she made at the camera, or the extent of her pout. It wasn’t even an interesting shot. It was a behind-the-wheel-stuck-at-a-stoplight-shot. Not a lot you can do with the composition.
I never take selfies. It never occurs to me. I never think to myself, “you know what the world needs? More pictures of me.” But maybe that doesn’t come from a place of fossilization. Maybe I’m not a grumpy old man caught up in an endless tirade that starts, “Why, in my day…” Maybe I am just a KINGDOM citizen aching for HOME. One of the sure symptoms of this theological condition is feeling the hurt of the world around us more and more. Just before the light turned green and we all accelerated off in different directions, selfie-girl turned to see me watching her…and she was…lovely. She was beautiful. Anyone at the light who saw her would have thought the same. Except maybe one person. Do you know who seemed to be unable to see her beauty. SHE did.
Family worship resets our sense of beauty because family worship routinely puts us in the way of the GOSPEL. The GOSPEL says to us that all our attempts to make ourselves beautiful are unconvincing and unsatisfying. To us and everyone else. We are very good at flattering ourselves and each other, while simultaneously accusing ourselves and each other. It is a sophisticated brokenness, and it’s the reason selfie-girl subjected herself to retake after retake and never got the shot. But the GOSPEL also says to us that the otherworldly beauties of Jesus, given to us to WEAR and FLAUNT, as boldly as if it were Paris Fashion Week, are always FREEING and SATISFYING. Hopefully, we are hearing this GOOD NEWS in the preaching of the church again and again and again, every week in fact, but even if we are not, we can hear it together in family worship. In family worship, Jesus reminds as we encounter him that we are beautiful in him. The world may not have discerning eyes to recognize it, but we will notice it in each other. Together.
The GOSPEL, doing its work on us, making us beautiful after the resemblance of Jesus, the eternally beautiful one, is like a theological selfie. We can gaze at it, and admire it, and because it’s not OUR beauty we wear, it isn’t vain and shallow and desperate. It is worship. Family worship will not keep us or our kids from taking selfies, and posting them, and hoping for ‘likes’. (The incarnation of Jesus reminds us that the GOSPEL is not anti-culture.) But if we are regularly hearing together in family worship that we are ALREADY beautiful in Jesus, our selfies and posts will have far less at stake in them. And maybe we won’t need to snap so many.
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