Sermon Tone Analysis

Intro

How many of you took time off to visit someplace??These past few months have been exciting for many of you.

With the endless heat, many of you get away for a week or a a few days.

You dont go to algona/pacific… No, we are drawn to beauty.

If we have a few days.

Some you you went to the coast.

The feel of the water, the perfect ocean air.

The evening sunsets.

It makes you come alive.

Its beautiful

Others went to the mountains.

Nature, the trees, the view, Beauty everywhere.

Some of you visited a museum The paintings, the sculptures, 

Have you ever been in a place where you encountered the reality of Beauty??

Time tends to stop.

You wanna savor it.

PersonalWaves in crete Stars in sky foilage sushi

Have some people shout out times where they were lost in beauty..

You remember it vividly.

You can recall the smells, the sights, the feelings.

Its stays with you.

There are moments when you’re at home, bored.

And you think to yourself.

If only I could relive that time, sight, sound.

Definition of beautySaint Thomas’ definition of beauty is well known (beautiful things are those which, when seen, please Thomas Dubay.

(n.d.).

The Evidential Power of Beauty.

What is it about beauty that is so moving.

It makes us alive.

Makes us forget the pain of the present moment.

I think you would agree that Beauty is a powerful experience.

But there is another side to it that writers have been talking about for centuries.

That beauty is tremendously fleeting.

Its here and then is gone.

-The music ends, the sunset goes down.

Youth is quickly gone.

instagram is dedicated to trying to preserve the memory, capture experience, remember the view.

Or to rub it in to our friends.

What gives??

Why is that??

First lets look at the psalm.

Transition to Psalm

The psalmist, more than anyone has a deep appreciation for beauty,  They’re filled with wonder and awe.

Over and over they marvel at the created world.

They’re smitten by beauty.

Here

The psalmist invites humans and all the earth to sing, tell, declare the wonders.

The marvelous works among all people.

Now some of these marvelous works are easy to describe.

Couple in love cathedralWork of art The face of a baby (Mikey)In n out burger— animal style.

Marvelous

But among the familiar, there are thousands of wonders that we are only starting to get an understanding of.

Psalm says to describe the beauty.

Do my best to speak on the beautiful.

Im gonna run through the universe-  a light-year is the distance light travels moving at the rate of 186, 000 miles per second for one year.

At this speed light would circle Earth at the equator (about 25, 000 miles) seven times in one second.

- galaxy being from edge to edge approximately 100, 000 light-years across

-To stretch our minds a bit further: our known universe is approximately 12 to 15 billion light-years to its edges,

Each black dot in the image is a galaxy containing a hundred billion suns similar to ours Water - and then there is water, the most amazing substance known to science.

-over 50,000 books and articles written on water and scientist are still filled with mystery and wonder at it.

- colorless, clear, tasteless, odorless liquid, that can become a solid, that can become a gas.

- we cant survive without it, we swim in it.

Around 100 different theories of how it behaves have been put together over the years, and none work very well-We would assume that the one oxygen atom and the two hydrogen atoms that form the water molecule are a fairly simple matter.

Not so.

They must so link that “an incredibly tiny but highly charged electrical system” results.

“If two hydrogen atoms came to rest on opposite sides of an oxygen atom a water molecule would be electrically balanced, without poles.

All of its properties would be different.

Life would not existWatermelonthe watermelon seed.

It has the power of drawing from the ground through itself 200, 000 times its weight.

When you can tell me how it takes this material and from it colors an outside surface, and then forms inside of it a white rind and within that again a red heart, thickly inlaid with black seeds, each one of which is capable of drawing through itself 200, 000 times its weight: Thomas Dubay.

(n.d.).

The Evidential Power of Beauty.

Hummingbird  A tiny hummingbird has been called a biological dynamo.

“If a 170-pound man expended energy as rapidly as this dainty animal does while hovering, he would need 285 pounds of food a day and shed 100 pounds of perspiration per hour just to keep his skin below the boiling point.”cellThe

living cell is mind boggling- smallest living organism in the human body.-A

single cell contains more information content than all thirty volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica-we have not yet come close to the entirely complete automation that is standard procedure in a living cell.If we enlarged one, we would find-Around the surface of the cell we find millions of openings made to allow delivery of goods to flow in and out-We would see endless highly organized corridors and conduits branching in every direction It would be like a New York city.

It would be an object resembling an immense automated factory, a factory larger than a city and carrying out almost as many unique functions as all the manufacturing activities of man on earth.”Michael

denton-Each of us has in his body approximately 100 trillion tiny but extremely complex cities

You just woke up.

Didn’t think about that.

The world is charged,” said Gerard Manley Hopkins, “with the grandeur of God

Now, what was your response??

Most of you reacted differently.

some of you weren’t paying attention Others heard, but you’re indifferent Some had a feeling of joy sweep over you.

Others were trying to fight back tears.

The reality is everyone reacts differently to beauty.

John Newman would weep with delight as he would play the violin Others are annoyed.

Some would pay hundreds of dollars to hear a piece by Mozart or Beethoven.

Others find it utterly boring and uninspiring 

Some hike for miles to see a sunset Others are fine with the pixels on their screen.

What is going on?

Numberless Varieties- if there was only one tulip in the world.. people would come from the ends of the earth to behold its splendor.

But because there are millions.

It doesn't move us.

WE HAVE LOST WONDER IN OUR LIVES.

Benjamin Zander  he teaches them how to listen to the music.

They learn to identify impulses and chord progressions.

He trains their ears in music theory.

Many in the audience haven’t loved classical music because they were unable to hear the layers of beauty within it.

Zander unfolds these layers for them.