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1 Samuel 16, Romans 12: 1-2
Smoke and Mirrors: the Body and the Media
I wish I had a mirror here in front of this circle of chairs, facing all of you. A big one, one in which, if you would stand in front of it you could see your whole body. And then I wish that some of you, one by one, would come and stand in front of the mirror, seeing what you see, even as all the rest of us watch you see what you see. And I wonder what you would be thinking, standing there in front of the mirror, watching all of us watch you. I wonder what you think we see.
And then, had I the resources of a massive multi media stage with multiple screens, I would flash images, the very images that we see every day. Images on billboards and on the television, in magazines in the grocery store check out lane, and in movies. Dashing men and perfect women, trim waistlines and high fashion. Perfect symmetry, immaculate smiles, not a hair out of place. Ever. Now look back into the mirror, and remember that all of us are watching you as you see yourself. What do you see now? What do you think we see? What do you think God sees?
As Marilyn introduced to us last Sunday, the theme for the fall season will focus on our bodies and how our bodies intersect with our faith expression. My topic for this morning is how the media shapes and even determines how we see our bodies. We can agree, can we not, that we are inundated, even those of us who try to insulate ourselves from the power of the media, inundated with images, telling us who we are, who we want to become, what’s important, what’s normal.
Here’s a clip from Jean Kilbourne, a one-time model, who has come to reflect on the effect of media on the way we perceive our bodies and the bodies of those around us.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=PTlmho_RovY
Here’s one called “Evolution of beauty” that unmasks the smoke and mirrors behind the images of bodily perfection that we consume every day.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHqzlxGGJFo
Evolution of beauty – so that the standard of beauty to which we hold ourselves and each other isn’t even real. Standing here, looking in the mirror, now clouded and muddied by our comparison with these images of unattainable “beauty,” how can we help but play the comparison game? How can we do anything but despair of our inevitable failure to measure up?
These clips tend to deal with images of women – almost all white women, if you noticed. The images we consume tend to be homogenous, not just in bodily perfection or facial symmetry (did you know there’s mathematics to what’s considered a beautiful face?) but also in many other ways, making most of our society invisible. Where are indigenous people portrayed in the media we consume? Where are the beautiful, wizened faces of our elders? Where are LGBT folks, or those who don’t fit easily into “Male” or “female” distinctions? What about disabled people? The media we consume renders them invisible, and in our consumption, we are rendered complicit in their invisibility. And it all comes down to bodies – is it the right kind of body or not? Does it get to be considered “normal?” The message is that if we don’t conform to “normal” there’s something wrong with us.
The values that emerge in most advertising, especially when it comes to our bodies, conflict sharply with (what God thinks is important.) We read the Samuel passage this morning in order to notice that physical beauty didn’t rate very high on God’s priority list when it came to choosing a king. There were more important things to consider. How many of (Jesse’s) sons did God pass over, strapping, capable lads who presumably were the picture of vim and vigour and still didn’t meet God’s muster. “God looks at the heart (find quote)….” Samuel must have been confused when he got to the end of the line, knowing that he must find the new king from among these very sons, yet God had rejected them all. It turns out there was another son, tending the sheep in the field, whom no one had considered. Evidently, he didn’t rate when it came to looking for kingly attributes.
God knew something about David that the rest of them didn’t, however. Something about his heart, about the quality of his character, about the strength of his will and resolve. God knew something about the man David would become, something about the way in which David would grow and serve and lead. And God deemed those more important than mere appearance. It seems so intuitive.
It’s interesting to me that the biblical writer himself couldn’t resist commenting on David’s striking physique, as though he had forgotten what he had written just a few short sentences earlier. Did you notice it? (Read…) It would seem that the impulse to rely on physical beauty to take the measure of another is as old as the hills.
What I’m saying here, and what this passage in Samuel reminds us of, is that the world is lying to us – lying to us about what’s important in life, about what we should care about, about what we should spend our money on. Lying to us about what makes us and those around us valued members of the world community. We know these things, and yet we can’t escape it. Images are everywhere, with constant and pervasive reminders of what our values are, about what matters most in life, and about how little we have of any of it. Our inadequacy, our insufficiency. It also helps us measure the people around us, holding us all to an impossible standard that doesn’t even matter in greater scheme of things.
Now I know it’s not enough to stand here and say to you – how you look isn’t important, it’s what is on the inside that counts. That’s faint consolation to anyone who goes through life worried about the size of her thighs, or frantically covering up his acne for fear of public ridicule. Or feeling invisible and undervalued because she’s too fat, or too old, or disabled, or – you fill in the blank.
But God’s standards should be heartening. They remind us about what we already k
now, somewhere in the backs of our minds – that there are more important things in life than chasing the pervasive and ever elusive standard of beauty presented to us in myriad ways every day. The beauty of our bodies is not in their immaculate perfection, but in their capacity to carry out God’s purposes in the world. None of us will be chosen to be King, I daresay, but each of us is chosen, and our chosenness isn’t annulled by the wrinkles on our faces or by the cellulite in our nether regions. Our bodies, in their astonishing diversity and marvelous particularity, whatever they look like and however abled they are, carry us into our calling, to contribute to God’s purposes in the world. And when we live into our best and God-intended selves, we come face to face with our inner strength and the beauty of our hearts will transform even our outward appearance, and make it beautiful.
So what can we do?
When I was growing up, my family played a game with advertisements called Find the Lie – we do this sometimes with Ezra and Ani too. It’s about turning a critical eye toward the advertising we are exposed to. We could see, for example, that in an ad for a fancy new sportscar, the woman draped across it had little to do with the quality of the actual product, except to make you think that if you drove that car, you might also get the girl. The first thing we can do is to raise our own consciousness about the media we consume and how it attempts to shape our values and priorities. We’ve begun that process today.
We can also notice our complicity in all of this. We are not simply passive recipients of the media we consume. Rather, our consumption fuels the marketing economy, our demand generates the very values that we must later resist. Establishments that we frequent, entertainment that we consume, things that we buy, even institutions that we support, all bolster this media driven culture in which we participate.
Secondly, we can choose to limit our exposure to media and its tepid values. We can opt out and fill our minds and our time with things that remind us of what’s really important. Turn off the TV, better yet, cancel your cable. Read a book or the newspaper in your spare time rather than surfing the internet, have a family games night, spend time outside, enjoy the company of friends, put energy into something that’s important to you, find ways of making the world a better place. Become contributors rather than consumers.
Third, we can cultivate our capacity for seeing as God sees, for curtailing our judging spirit, our age-old instincts to use physical markers to judge character and worth. To see and find the best in the people we encounter rather than cutting them down or making them feel worthless and unvalued by our words and actions. Imagine a high school in which everyone looked for the best in everyone else, where what you wore or looked like had no bearing on your value as a person. It starts with you. It starts with me. And in the starting we’ll begin to live into God’s real purposes in the world.
My call to you echoes Paul. Be not conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind so that you (and your body) can truly live into God’s purposes. So that when you look into the mirror you can see as God sees, without the smoke and mirrors.
Amen.