This fall season we have been exploring Awe, and how experiences of awe and practices of awe are so important to living lives of faith, to meaningful, rich, life-giving living. We have been discovering that awe is a very powerful antidote to the forces in our world, in our society, in ourselves that want to close us down and constrict us in despair and desperation. What’s so awesome about awe is that it opens us up to a wider reality that breaks the bonds of our limited point of view, that leads us beyond a small and restricted sense of ourselves, our egos, and frees us up for the more astonishing horizon of possibilities that God offers.
What the psychological research into Awe has shown, according to the neuropsychologist Dacher Keltner, is that, across the board, across cultures, “what most commonly led people around the world to feel awe … was other people’s courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming. Around the world, we are most likely to feel awe when moved by moral beauty” (Keltner, Dacher, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life, pg. 11).
Many of the other major common occasions for awe have been our subjects for the past weeks, – and, please, for the Love of God, let’s continue to explore and practice them: Collective Effervescence, Wild Awe, Musical Awe, Sacred Geometries, Religious & Mystical Encounters with the Divine, Beholding Life & Death; Experiencing Epiphanies.
Considering all those wondrous, wonderful things, how moving it is that what we humans are most likely to be awed by the Moral Beauty of others.
So, for these last two Sundays in our Awe series, we are going to explore moral beauty.
Lord knows we need it! How good it is when we find it. We need to be led and inspired by reminders of other people’s astonishing capacity for goodness even, or especially, in the face of our human capacity for evil, wickedness, and neglect. Amen? Amen.
So please my invitation to you is to be thinking about and noticing where you have witnessed moral beauty. Let’s share those stories with each other. Here’s my proposal: please share your examples or stories with me, in an email or a phone call or written note or text … And next week in the sermon I will share the examples you give me, anonymously if you like.
In this way the focus next week will be on the stories of moral beauty that have touched your hearts, especially everyday acts of moral beauty.
For this week in this sermon time I want to highlight the moral beauty we find in the Bible. This is a wonderful lens through which to look at the Bible. The stories and testimonies of our faith are replete with acts of moral beauty, of ordinary and extraordinary people engaging in acts of awe-inspiring courage and compassion, in times of trial and tribulation.
Now, at the same time, there are lots of stories in the Bible of people behaving badly, really badly, even in the name of God. There are plenty of all-too-human characters and dramas who really mess up in all-too-relatable ways. But the redemptive through-line of the scriptures is that God is ever faithful, and because of this faithfulness, God inspires, urges, supports, challenges folks to acts of moral beauty, even at times despite ourselves.
Here is just a sampling of acts of moral beauty from the Bible:
Moses had the chance to be safe and comfortable despite his people’s enslavement in Egypt. But his astonishing encounters with the presence of the Holy I Am drove him to confront Pharaoh and lead his people to freedom. When God first showed up and gave Moses this call to help be a liberator, Moses said, “Please find somebody else! I can’t even talk without stuttering. I’m no leader.” God’s response? “I will be with you.”
After Moses confronted Pharaoh and successfully led his people to freedom, God then inspired him to share precepts for right living, to guide his people in how to use their freedom responsibly, how to live in right relationship with the Holy Creator and with each other. He urged them to never forget their mistreatment in a foreign land, to never take their freedom for granted, to let that experience move them to act with care and humanity towards those who are struggling or vulnerable or unsafe. Love God and love your neighbor.
So, Moses can be an example of moral beauty who can inspire us to go and do likewise according to our gifts and opportunities and leadings from God, even if we stutter.
But Moses would not have even survived infancy if it were not for the moral beauty of two midwives, Puah and Shiphrah who courageously disobeyed Pharaoh’s order to give up Hebrew baby boys to be killed. Pharaoh had felt threatened that this oppressed minority would find their own power and rise up, so he sought to assert his fearsome power and extinguish them. He couldn’t do it alone, he needed people to be over-awed by his power and obey his orders to turn on the foreigners in their midst. But these two midwives, Puah and Shiphrah listened to their inner moral compass, and followed it, doing the right thing, even though it was not the safe thing. Puah and Shiphrah, “had awe for God,” as the book of Exodus puts it, “so they disobeyed Pharaoh’s orders,” and they saved baby Moses’ life.
The Biblical accounts wanted to be sure that the secret act of moral beauty of these two humble women was preserved for posterity. The writer of Exodus wanted to be sure we knew it was because of their awe for God, over and above Pharaoh, that they did what they did. The Biblical accounts wanted to be sure we knew the key role these kinds of acts have in the ways that God is at work through history.
Moral beauty is as much – or more – about normal, everyday people, than it is about famous leaders. Moral beauty is as much – or more – about who we are and how we act in daily and even unnoticed ways, as it is about celebrated public displays of righteousness.
I could go on and on telling these kinds of stories from the Bible…
The book of Esther, for example, is about a woman who used her privilege and intelligence and compassion to intervene to prevent a pogrom against her people.
The book of Job is about a man who was so steadfast in his faith in God and his commitment to doing right by others, that he persisted regardless of whether that brought him reward or punishment. What did Job’s moral beauty look like? He “delivered the poor who cried and the orphan who had no helper”; he was “eyes to the blind, and feet to the lame … father to the needy”; he “championed the cause of the stranger;” and “broke the fangs of the unrighteous and made them drop their prey from their teeth” (Job 29:12-17).
All of the Prophets – from Amos and Micah to Isaiah and Jeremiah – are about folks, most from humble backgrounds, who said Yes to the stirrings of God in their souls, to stand up against the corruption of the powerful in their society, to stand up against violence and neglect of those most vulnerable, to stand up against the selfish disregard of a Higher Holy Power, and to offer the hope and vision that, with God’s help, (that part is very important: With God’s help), we can indeed do better, that a transformed way of being together is possible with God, who calls us mortals, as the Prophet Micah said, “to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”
Then, of course, we have Jesus.
What awesome moral beauty Jesus offered the world. Jesus’ moral beauty has touched and transformed so many hearts. He has kneeled to wash all of our feet. He turns to look on any who call on him in our need, and he offers one and all what they, what we, most truly and deeply need, an open welcome into unconditional love. Jesus healed and fed and welcomed home. Jesus gave of his very self. As the Apostle Paul put it, Jesus “emptied himself” and became servant of all, even to the point of undergoing death on a cross.
Jesus leads us to witness the moral beauty of God, who gives the gift of existence to all things, who is faithful to humanity, regardless of whether we are faithful in return, who offers the gratuitousness of Grace, offered not because some people earn it or deserve it through our good behavior or while others are denied it because of our bad behavior, but offers Grace to all people as a free and unconditional gift of love. When we say Yes to this gift, how can we respond but to allow our hearts be changed?
When we witness with awe the kindness, courage, and resilience of others, we are more likely to feel inspired to give ourselves in service of the good. We become more self-giving, readier to lend a helping hand or commit energy to making the world a better place. How much is this all the more true when we witness the moral beauty of our Creator, our God. As Jesus said, “Go and do likewise.”
Thanks be to God.
Delivered Sunday, November 8, 2026, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge
