The Sunday Sermonette – Photography.
The Sunday Sermonette – Photography.
Photography irrevocably changed the way we see the world. No longer dependent on artists to dab paint onto a canvas, thus creating their version of the world, photographs allowed us to view it as it really was through the camera’s eye. The oldest surviving photo was taken around 1826, and the camera that took it could be called one of the most important inventions since the printing press.
The old adage—the camera does not lie—is true because an evocative photograph can expand our understanding of humanity and nature by recording the visible world with its vivid beauty, horrific horror, and touching realism. It also records both the fairness and the unfairness of the world in which we live.
Picture, if you will, famous photos of people, places, and things that are now acid-etched in our minds. The burning Arizona. The collapsing Twin Towers. The bloody battlefields of Gettysburg, the Somme, Midway, and the Tet Offensive. Lincoln in his coffin. A billowing mushroom cloud. Houses obliterated by Hurricanes’ Camille and Katrina. A lynching. Piles of dead, emaciated bodies in Auschwitz. The smiling Czar and his family. King Tut. The American flag on the moon. The mansions of the Gilded Age and the slums of Dickensian London. A grinning Hitler. A scowling Stalin. A crippled Roosevelt. A dancing Astaire. The Hollywood sign. Bear Bryant’s hat. Wallace Hartley’s violin. And John Kennedy Jr. saluting his father’s casket.
These photographs spotlight all aspects of our human existence. Our highs and our lows, our loves and our hates. They remind us that life is a crazy quilt of the haves and the have-nots, the victors and the vanquished, those in power and the dispossessed, the kings and the paupers, the saved and the dying, the sinners and the saints, the hypocrites and the tellers of truth.
In a world gone mad, it’s easy to think your life is a boiling cauldron of unfairness. Nothing is good. Nothing is right. However, Jesus never promised a world of sweet-smelling roses and fairness. His solution to his believers who do, indeed, live in an unfair world is his guarantee of life with him forever. No matter how unfair your present world seems, Jesus offers the hope of being in his presence for eternity. Take a mental picture of that and live for another day.
Ponder this and go forth.