Good and Beautiful and Kind: Becoming Whole in a Fractured World

by Rich Villodas

We exist in a world eating away at itself. A world fractured from within. A world aching for wholeness. Whether the fractures are related to politics, race, religion, public health, or sexuality—to name a few of the polarizing issues we feel daily—our lives are not often marked by love, goodness, beauty, and kindness but by reactivity, impatience, judgmentalism, violence, and the inability to hold space with one another.

We long for the good life, a beautiful life, a kind life. The fractures within and around us don’t feel right because our souls desire bonds of belonging and belovedness. We were not made for the kind of antagonism that pervades our world. We were made in love, and for love, by a good, beautiful, and kind God.

To understand and respond to the

moment we are in requires us to ask ourselves a few questions: How do we find wholeness? How do we love well? What are the forces behind the fractures? What kind of spiritual formation do we need to embody? In sum, what does it mean to have our lives formed by God’s love? These are the questions I’ve been sitting with for many years—questions we will explore together. I pastor a large, diverse, and

Hughes knew that it’s only when we start here that we can truly undertake a life of goodness, beauty, and kindness. That’s where I’d like to take you as well. I don’t want to cut the world in two just to fixate on the worms. You can go to social media for that. Rather, I want you to see the worms that often go unnoticed and then offer a vision of what we can become if we allow God to work in and through us.

Before we examine these themes, a word about patience is in order. Living a good, beautiful, and kind life—the way of Christ’s love—is not something that happens overnight. Love is a fruit of the Holy Spirit; that is to say, it grows slowly. There is no shortcut to love.

The gifts of the Spirit are given generously and quickly. Not so with the fruit of the Spirit. One of the dangers is we expect the gifts of the Spirit to quickly do what only the fruit of the Spirit is meant to do slowly.

At its core, sin is failure to love. It’s a power that “curves us inward.” In the words of North African bishop Saint Augustine, humanity is incurvatus in se, curved in on itself.[1]

To classify sin as failure to love is not to sentimentalize or soften it. It’s to frame the very essence of our lives

with God and one another in the way Jesus did.

give the reader warm, fuzzy feelings. The chapter was Paul’s word of rebuke to Christ followers who had become fractured and distracted. They were marked by great miracles and charisma among them, but they had little of maturity and character where it counted.

and most of us need a course correction. In our culture, sin has usually not been seen as a failure to love but almost exclusively as a violation of a law: God’s law. When we expand our understanding, we can better assess our spiritual health. Perhaps we have not broken God’s law today, in a strictly defined legal sense. But have we failed to love? Have

into the depths of it. In other words, it’s easy to think, Well, I’m not doing that, so I must be okay. But sin is not just about “not doing that.” Sin is the negation of love.

When spiritual vitality is measured by sin-avoidance, we deceive ourselves into thinking that we are following Jesus faithfully. But following Jesus is to be measured by love—love for God expressed in love for neighbor.

by becoming solely focused on abstaining from sin (defined very narrowly), we live by a crushing moralism that robs us from enjoying God and self-righteously places us above others. This is one of the sad expressions of Christian faith we witness, or perhaps even perpetuate in our own lives.

with us growing in our outward love. Sin, however, turns us inward in such a way that we get stuck, horribly so. It causes us to desire an illusion—to center the world

on our comfort, security, fear, desire, and personal perspective. It curves us inward, leaving little room for God or anyone else.

Desiring the fruit, rationalizing their situation, and ultimately eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was a result of sin turning them inward. By the time they sank their teeth into the fruit, love had already been uprooted. And this turning inward has continued ever since.

The answer is found in God’s commission for them to fill the earth. Earlier in Genesis (1:28), God gave his people the mandate to fill the earth, to show forth his presence throughout the earth. The problem with them building this city is they would rather stay within their homogeneous setting than have their lives intersect with others. Collectively and geographically, they turned inward. Rather than going in faith, they began to stay in pride. God saw the deep problems this way of life produces. They lived in fear of those who were different, so they created a tower. I read this as a bubble. An echo chamber. The problem with their brand of unity is that it would lead to uniformity, and uniformity has a way of producing exclusivity and hierarchies—something we see reenacted daily in expressions of Christian nationalism, racism, ethnocentrism, and sexism.

This leads to an important question: How do we “uncurve” ourselves? To be uncurved is to be rooted in love, orienting our lives toward the good, beautiful, and kind lives God dreams for us, but the task sounds insurmountable. And it is insurmountable. For us. The weight of sin presses us inward. We are caught under its oppressive power.

Followers of Christ establish our moral credibility in the world by routinely and fearlessly confessing and repenting of sin. And we lose our credibility by refusing to name our sins. This is the paradox of faith. To confess our sins doesn’t mean obsessing over our mistakes. To confess our sins—especially together in a community—is an act of solidarity. It’s a practice reminding us that we are all on equal footing, all in need of grace; that we all have sinned and have been sinned against; that we are in the same broken family.

How could this sweet, Bible-reading, pie-making, never-cursing mom bring her children to witness this abhorrent “family-friendly” act of evil? How did she reconcile her faith with this morally despicable act? Well, in

many ways, there was nothing to reconcile. Lynching was as American as apple pie. Even with the Lord’s Prayer on her lips, she was deceived by an insidious power greater than herself.

one of the beautiful parts of the New Testament, which poetically describes how Christ has already disarmed the powers (see Colossians 2:15), but the task remains for us to continue to witness and live out this reality.

The greatest scheme of the devil is to have us believe there’s no devil. As

love must be grounded in reality,

nurtured in unity, and protected through the compassionate valuing of a person’s worth and dignity.

the danger of lying is that if we do it enough, we begin to believe our falsehoods. We find ourselves creating a reality inconsistent with the truth and trying to inhabit it. Given enough time, we will eventually become our lie.

Much of our society holds the conviction that if two people disagree on important issues, they must be enemies. Media, politics, and a host of other popular and powerful opinion-making forces benefit from this conflict-based arrangement. For far too many, disagreement is not ever merely disagreement. It’s deeper than that. Can’t agree on mask wearing in a pandemic? You’re an enemy. Voted differently? You’re an enemy. Different theological beliefs? Enemy. On and on it goes.

The tendency to see people as objects to avoid or attack because of our differences is a testament to our immaturity. And when we fall prey to it, we are playing into the powers’ hands.

Depersonalization is an act of desacralization. When we depersonalize, we stop seeing individuals as sacred creations of God.

Depersonalization is a weapon of the powers because if we can avoid the nuances of an individual’s journey, we can comfortably refrain from relating to that person in a way that requires careful discernment.

The issue was not our theological conviction but rather our expression of our commitment to see them as treasured and loved members of our community.

American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr described the downward ethical spiral that often happens when we gather in

groups as opposed to when we are alone. Generally, when we are alone, our

morality is higher than when we gather with others. We see this principle at work in gangs, at political conventions, and on middle school play...

The church, since its inception, has lived with a dual identity. It has done wonderful things: establishing hospitals, serving the poor, working to abolish slavery, and inspiring people to live into a transcendent reality. These efforts have been both the work of individuals and the work of institutions. But at the same time—sometimes even in the same actions—the church has led violent crusades, embraced racism, perpetuated abuse, and aligned herself in compromising manners with political powers severely damaging Christian witness....

But at the same time—sometimes even in the same actions—the church has led violent crusades, embraced racism, perpetuated abuse, and aligned herself in compromising manners with pol...

We must understand and acknowledge this reali...

risk of rationalizing or becoming blind to our own shortc...

naming things accurately. This is a significant part of truth telling.

Sherry Turkle, a professor at MIT, astutely argued, “We have to love technology enough to describe it accurately. And we have to love ourselves enough

to confront technology’s true effects on us.”[11]

For Paul, righteousness—or justice—is one of the defining characteristics of those who are in Christ, and a powerful means to resist the powers.

Practicing righteousness in the daily small ways that show we are not in bondage to the lies of the world and instead are living free is vital for us as followers of Christ. As we work for justice, no matter how large or small our influence feels, the

powers are pushed back in his name.

When we are asked to hurry, we should slow ourselves. When we are asked to forget others’ humanity—especially if we disagree with them—we work to remember it twice as hard.

When they tempt us to greed, we strive to be doubly generous. When they ask us to numb ourselves with mindless entertainment, we seek to cultivate the humble, attentive, rich life of the mind. We withstand their influence by becoming an unanxious presence in a world marked by anxiety. We withstand their influence by becoming daily more like Jesus, who lived without sin in the shadow of their false dominion and conquered them through the Cross.

In an increasingly divided world, followers of Jesus are to participate in making peace, not in making matters worse.

By faith, we anticipate a world filled with the glory of God. But faith is not something self-oriented. We are saved by faith, yes, but it’s an outward-oriented faith.