God wants every holy thing for us

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/112519.cfm
Daniel 1:1-6, 8-20
Luke 21:1-4

I’m sure you have heard the distinction made between looking good to our world and looking good to God. In the world’s eyes, so the story goes, we are ranked by beauty, wealth, fame, and success. In the eyes of God, we are ranked by faithfulness, sacrifice, trust, and love. The world is shallow, and God is deep.

This distinction is ridiculous. All of these things are desirable. There’s nothing wrong with beauty, or trust, or success, or faith, or any of the others. We’re built to strive for beauty, wealth, fame and success. It’s practically in our DNA. We are urged by every moral foundation — that matters — to act with faithfulness, sacrifice, trust, and love in mind. Aren’t we?

So, what’s going on here? How do we get trapped in a false distinction between the world’s eyes and God’s eyes? Some would say scripture clearly tells us that the world has other things in mind for us than what God has in mind. Some insist that any affiliation with the goals of beauty, success, fame and wealth sets us on a path for crude personal self-reliance, devoid of God’s plans for us.

Maybe. At times. The failures in everything from love back to beauty, though, is the failure of “looking good” rather than “looking to God.”

A "distinction" is the difficulty here. We fail miserably with logic once we accept a false distinction made between two sets of truthful things. The world is a wonderful place. God made this place for us. All these "worldly" things are pretty darn great. Also, God wants us to model him in his holiness. God does that by being with us and forming us in everything from faithfulness to love. We are with God.

How do we know what’s false? First, by knowing what’s true. God gathers us together in community to confirm the truth. We don’t always know it, especially when alone, but even when together. God must be part of our lives in every way we can imagine. There is no place where God does not exist, and no one whom God does not love.

This is good news, because if God can love the people whom we cannot fathom deserves love, then God probably also loves us.

Sin separates us from God. Being aligned with beauty, fame, wealth, and success does not separate us from God. Sin tells us that God hates these things. Separation from God is the definition of sin. Sin, therefore, separates us even from the world that God gave us. And, certainly from each other. We all know this fellow sin. It’s never been a good friend.

When a person, group of persons, or even a nation, denies who God is, and thus what holiness means, sin prevails. Good and bad, then, no longer make sense. Without God’s constant influence, guidance, recognition, and involvement in our lives (as family, friends, neighbors, and even nations) we come up with horrifying divisions between things like beauty and love.

If we take care of our health, a duty of the highest order, we’re surely beautiful. Even just a smile helps everyone to be beautiful, and helps us to smile and also be beautiful.

Wealth isn’t an act of stealing from the poor, but largely a dedication of investment and hard work. Wealth is created, and with God, one of the most responsible and exciting ways to combat the results of sin. Wealth has no limit. Everyone should have access to it. With even a modicum of wealth, we can bring food, shelter, jobs, and education to our communities.

Fame might have become a joke in today’s celebrity culture, but the positive element of fame fosters inspiration. Fame with God's light shined upon us is based upon character and position that inspires others. Our excitement over someone’s fame, from their exercise of God’s gifts, is a momentary, even globally shared, treasure.

And, what better encouragement is there than an effort to produce or build without quitting until our goals have been met? We watch failures turn into successes with anticipation. Who hasn’t been moved by someone’s unrelenting drive with God at their side?

You are correct to imagine that even with God intimately involved the wonders of beauty, fame, wealth, and success can lead us to sin. Of course, there are negative energies that are spent upon these things. Even the negatives have a holy purpose, though. A child learns, an adolescent experiments, an adult toils, and the elderly person struggles with change. In all stages of life we repeat the process from learning to change. The emphasis moves around, but the process continues in every decade of our lives.

The moral standards of God-given revelation, and a cultural framework that lauds holiness, both lead us toward the holiness we desire. In that process while we learn, experiment, toil, and change we inevitably sin. God still exists in all these things. His presence is what moves us toward holiness. So even the awful stuff has merit. Pride and envy are the sins, not wealth and fame.

Unfortunately, to separate out the affectations of beauty and success (by calling them crude and useless) from the effectiveness of trust and love we denigrate the very things that all of us truly desire. We must see God in both beauty and in toil, for instance. They’re all leading in one direction.

Juxtaposing the eyes of the world against the eyes of God grossly over-simplifies what’s actually going on. Truly, we yearn to be showered with all of these lovely and holy things. God didn’t create the world and then call it bad. The bad is only when God is avoided or unfairly challenged or blamed for our toils, failed experiments, and broken relationships. Again, it’s not how we look, but that we look to God.

If we switch the language a bit we can change the entire ranking system.

The world cannot help but honor and even emulate those who live in faith, sacrifice for others, trust in God, and live with love. If we look through the eyes of God, we are all beautiful. God provides everything for us, so we are consequently wealthy beyond measure. The more God engages with us, the more God is recognized by others. God desires, then, that we be famous for our relationship to him. God makes us holy by living within our hearts. Our ultimate success, then, is complete holiness in our eternal life, which is happening right now.

These desirable elements of wealth and success, trust and sacrifice differ not in where they come from, because everything comes from God. These things simply differ in the eyes of the beholder. If we don’t see with the eyes of God, then confusion will take place.

In the tale of the first reading for today (Daniel 1:1-6, 8-20), four young men are gifted with wisdom and prudence. God did that for them in order that they be famous, beautiful, successful, and thus wealthy in the eyes of the king. As the king, who did not know God, incorrectly skewed his kingdom toward his control — a control he understood to be correct — the young men were thrust into a situation that required an insistence upon God’s rightful place. They were charged with being faithful to their God. They trusted that God would be there for them. They were willing to sacrifice their very lives. In the end, their love for God, and God's love for them, turned the heart of the king.

No distinction exists between beauty and love, sacrifice and success, fame and trust, and wealth and faith. They are all one thing, one effort of living with God. The considered distinction we must make of these qualities and holy characteristics is that God is already all of them, and we are on the path to become them.