Has there ever been a culture as preoccupied with appearance? Pick up the New York Times magazine. Thumb through the ads in the first ten pages. What are they selling - looks. Sexy looks. Successful looks. Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren are about appearances. You can hire an expert to help you dress for success in the business world. The incredible cosmetics industry is about appearance. Dolly Parton is interviewed on 20/20. At one point she says, "It costs a lot of money to make a person look this cheap."

The automobile industry is about appearance. Ford is worried about the appearance of the new Taurus. Will it sell? Fortunes hang in the balance. I still remember my teen years when Detroit changed the looks of its cars every three years. Everyone knew if you were one of the unfortunate who had to drive a three year old car.

Or how about the health and exercise industry, the diets, the vitamins, the variety of machines. And the books in the self-help sections of your favorite bookstore. Are they simply about living longer? Isn’t concern for appearance a driving theme? We want not only to keep going, we want to keep glowing.

Or look at the money we spend on our homes and yards. We want them to be more than functional. We want them to be beautiful, impressive. We make a statement about who we are with the expenditure of vast thought and energy to get them right. Isn’t it about appearances? We look on the outward appearance. Indeed!

And not for a moment is this criticism. The text is not passing judgment on us. Just making a statement of fact. We are people concerned with appearances because we appreciate beautiful things and fitting in and looking good. We find an environment that is pleasant to the eye, enjoyable and up-lifting. And if anything, we may need more of it rather than less. Vast stretches of American strip cities are sad processions of garishness. And there are too many corners of this country where children and young people grow up in an ugliness and squalor that suffocates their spirit and depletes their soul. There is an interesting historical and psychological association between evil and ugliness, beauty and goodness, not absolute but certainly there.

So we try to teach our children to look for and love the real beauty there is in every life, the gift of a God who loves beauty. "All things bright and beautiful, the Lord God made them all." Alice Freeman Palmer, once president of Wellesley, spent some time in her youth teaching a Sunday school class made up of small girls recruited from an urban slum. One Sunday she asked those poor children to find something beautiful in their homes, and then tell the other children about it the next Sunday. When the next Sunday came, one bedraggled little girl who lived in a particularly dirty tenement said slowly: "I ain’t found nothing beautiful where I live except...except the sunshine on our baby’s curls." Years later, long after Mrs. Palmer’s untimely death, her husband was lecturing at a university in the West. He was entertained in a distinguished home, and his hostess fondly recalled that she had once been a member of Mrs. Palmer’s Sunday school class. She said: "I can remember that your wife once asked us to find something beautiful in our homes, and that I came back saying the only beautiful thing I could find was the sunshine on my sister’s curls. But that suggestion your wife made was the turning point in my life. I began to look for something beautiful wherever I was and I have been doing it every since."

Appearances are important! But there are problems with appearances. When it comes to human assessment and interaction, they are inevitably misleading. Saul, first king of the young nation of Israel, had proved to be a failure. Erratic, depressed, paranoid, he is in danger of destroying the fragile unity of the scattered tribes. Samuel, prophet of God, is led to a little town east of Jerusalem called Bethlehem, in search of a successor to Saul to stand for the affirmation of the people. The popular election is yet a long way off, but the man must be found. Fiery prophets are scary people and the leading citizens meet him at the security gate to ask about his intentions. "I have come to share a banquet with you," he says, and he invites them to dinner. One of the city fathers, Jesse, is invited with his sons, seven of them anyway. And when the prophet sees the oldest, Eliab, he thinks, "I’ve found my man. Surely someone as handsome and tall as he is will play well in the media." Which shows you that not even a prophet of God always knows what he is doing.

God speaks to Samuel: "Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearances, but the Lord looks on the heart." Appearance is important! In fact when Samuel finally does find God’s candidate, the eighth son that Jesse had not even thought to bring along, he discovers that he is ruddy, had beautiful eyes, and is handsome. But more important is the invisible, the heart, the soul, the spirit of the man.

And this is the problem with the age of appearance, with the television age, the image age. Neil Postman of New York University thinks that the greatest problem with the tube may not be all the violence and mayhem thereon, as bad as that is. It may be the fact that the screen seduces us into believing that seeing is knowing. Television is primarily a visual medium. It invites you to believe that what you see is reality, what truly counts. It invites us to look and assume that we are learning something. It invites us to believe that if the man or woman is handsome, beautiful, likable, magnetic of appearance, he is safe to follow. So political candidates are packaged and sold by image. But what if the most important things we can know about a person cannot be visualized, cannot be seen, like his thought and values, his character and substance? But what if the way a man looks tells you almost nothing about who he really is? What if the most important realities in life are not visual at all, but spiritual, are known through thought and word rather than image and picture?

It is no accident that the Biblical faith from the very beginning is suspicious of images, and dedicated to the word. And when it does give us an image for God, it is that of the Christ crucified, foolishness to the Greeks and an offense to the Jews. It is no accident that this faith created a culture attuned to the inner world of conscience and spirit, of thought and character. It is no accident that this faith is being eroded by a culture caught up with images and appearances.

Appearances are misleading as we look at others, and appearances are misleading as we look at ourselves. One of the tragedies of modern culture, with its emphasis on appearance, is how it leads us to judge ourselves by how we look, how we conform to the current images of beauty. I agonize especially over the young people who get caught in the trap of valuing themselves only on the basis of how they look in the mirror. The increase in eating disorders in our time must be related in part to this emphasis on weight and figure as constituting our worth to the opposite sex, not to mention the world at large.

Appearances are important! Important, but not enough. By no means enough. So what can we do to escape imprisonment in a world of appearance, escape assessing others and ourselves by the way we look? We need a new way of seeing. We need to learn to see one another and ourselves with the eyes of God. We need to learn to listen and sense the soul beneath the skin, the beauty and strength within.

We need to look at one another with eyes that are patient and perceptive enough to pick up the decor of the soul. Some of the most beautiful people I have ever known have been off-putting at first glance. My wife and I grieve just now at the loss in Germany recently of an old and dear friend, Hilda Hummrich. I would never have sought her out, much to my shame. She was six-foot-five, large boned; a woman whose eyes peered out at you through thick, thick lenses. Although neat and well dressed always, to be honest, there was nothing physically attractive about her. But on her own initiative she offered incredible amounts of time and assistance to a young minister and his wife suddenly planted in a strange and difficult culture. Our children, with their special eyes, saw and fell in love with her. I am not sure we would have weathered the years without her. And we came to love her also.

Never married, she became the favorite of many nephews and nieces. Social worker and head of the department for an entire region, she became Tanta to hundreds, if not thousands, of needy small ones in Germany. She is one of the most beautiful persons we have known. But if we had not given the time to allow her in, we would have never learned to see her beauty of soul, a beauty far more important than a Vogue cover face and figure.

We need a new way of seeing ourselves, and we need a new way of growing ourselves. David is by no means a finished product, but he is open to the impact of the spirit of God as Saul is not. In case you haven’t noticed, external beauty tends to fade, fray around the edges, no matter how much we paint over the wrinkles, or try to make ten hairs look like one thousand. The Apostle Paul writes, "our outer nature is wasting away."

A middle-aged bookstore customer was expressing her obvious annoyance to one of the store clerks. "Everytime I come in here to buy a best-seller, you are sold out." she scolded. "Why can’t you people learn to stock your shelves more efficiently?"

"And what is the title of the book you wish to purchase?" asked the clerk.

"How to Remain Young and Beautiful," the woman answered.

"Very well," replied the clerk. "I will place your order for ‘How to Remain Young and Beautiful’ at once. And I will mark the order ‘urgent’."

Indeed, but there is an inner beauty we can grow all the way to the end. Paul says, "Our outer nature is wasting away but our inner nature is being renewed day by day. Therefore we do not lose heart." If there is an art we need to learn and practice, it is that of interior decorator, longing to nurture within the spirit that God gives, the spirit that is loving and joy, creative and giving, caring and self-disciplined, the spirit of Jesus that is the beauty of the soul no matter the shape of the body. This is the ultimate beauty we ought to admire and pray for and seek to grow toward to the very end.

Many years ago at a celebration to mark his 95th birthday, Sir William Mulock, former Chief Justice of Ontario, arose to acknowledge a great ovation. The great hall fell silent as he began to speak. What would Sir William’s message to his friends and associates be? The simple dignity of his manner, his serene contentment at the age of 95, touched the heart of every listener. There was an almost magical quality about his words. Men and women of fifty, of sixty, felt the weight of the years slip from their shoulders, felt somehow young in heart again. Men and women who had long lost sight of the true meaning of life, who had let themselves become tangled in the web of their own fears and failures, doubts and confusions, listened to the words of this grand old statesman and jurist to whom life was still a thrilling adventure toward his God - and as they listened they wistfully revalued their own dreams and ideals, aims and purposes.

What did Sir William say on that special day? "I am still at work, with my hand to the plow and my face to the future. The shadows of evening lengthen about me, but it is still morning in my heart. I have lived from the forties of one century into the thirties of the next. I have had varied fields of labor, and full contact with men and things, and have warmed both hands before the fire of life. The testimony I bear is this: that the Castle of my Dreams is not yet behind me. It is before me still and daily I catch glimpses of its battlements and towers. The rich spoils of memory are mine ... the precious things, books, flowers, pictures, nature, friends, faith in God. But for me, the challenge of life is always further on."

Isn’t that beautiful? And may we know it and grow it and show it ... too.

Floyd Brown: Gil, what a marvelous message, and a challenge to us all. But in opening our discussion, I’d like to talk about images of the church. Because you’ve traveled extensively, I’d like to talk about the image of the church in Europe as opposed to the image of the church in the United States. What is it? Is it - are we doing a good job? Are we out of touch, or what?

Gil Bowen: Well, Europe covers a lot of territory, obviously, and a lot of cultures, when you think of it. Certainly in the American church we use the media far more than anybody in Europe has even begun to use it as far as the church community is concerned. I mean, even in our own congregation, the use of films and the use of video is common to us. We, in a sense, have learned to live with it. And I suppose I was directing my remarks to the danger of sliding too far in that direction.

In Germany, with which I’m quite familiar, the church has not embraced the media-age, if you will. And as a result I think it’s lost out, in fact.

Brown: Is this a political thing, the reason they haven’t done it? Or technology?

Bowen: Well, part of it is the fact that the church in Germany is not a volunteeristic organization, like it is in the United States. So frankly, they’re not driven to attract people like we are. But the media are a part of the life of West Germany, for example, just as they are here, and the church has not responded to that, and I think sometimes to its impoverishment.

If you go east, in June we were in Romania and Hungary with the Reformed Church there. Television doesn’t play much of a role in people’s lives ... yet. So they still - I almost have to say - have the capacity to listen, without looking.

Brown: I hate to butt in, but we’ve got about 45 seconds and you’ve got to get on to the United States: Is our image good in the church today? Are we as active as we should be?

Bowen: Well I think we’re a remarkable country in that there’s much that can be said in criticism of the church in this country, but by and large, along with the country of India, we’re the most religious people on the face of the globe. So obviously we’re doing something right, or the American people are still deeply religious in terms of their sensibilities and hungers and needs and faith.

Brown: Can we improve our image, so that people will view us properly?

Bowen: Oh, of course.

Brown: I’m talking about as the individual now - of course we can. And we do that through the church and religion and inner beauty and our relationships with one another. I’m sorry we’re running out of time here, but we’ve got to go. Marvelous message - a lot of food for thought. Thank you very much.