Pablo Picasso once said, “Good taste is the enemy of great art.”
He was talking about painting. But sit with that for a moment on the porch and see if it doesn’t say something true about faith too.
Good taste is about refinement. About knowing what belongs and what doesn’t. About edges that are clean and surfaces that are smooth and nothing too raw or uncomfortable left showing. Good taste keeps everything presentable.
But art is not about presentable. Art is about human. And human is messy.
So is the gospel.
We have spent a great deal of energy in the church making Christianity tasteful. Polished testimonies with tidy endings. Struggles that are always safely in the past tense. Prayers that sound composed. Faces that look like they have it together. We have refined the faith until it gleams and somewhere in all that polishing we have lost the thing that makes it real.
Here is what we know to be true: you are not useless to God because you are broken. You are useless to God if you pretend you are not.
The most powerful moment in all of Scripture may be the one that takes place in a garden before dawn, when a woman named Mary Magdalene stands outside an empty tomb and weeps. She is not composed. She is not refined. She has nothing left. The one she loved is gone and she doesn’t even know where they have put him. She is, by every measure, a mess.
And into that mess, Jesus speaks her name.
Not the cleaned-up version of her name. Not the Mary she was trying to become. Her name. As she was. Standing there undone in the early morning dark.
And she became the first witness to the resurrection. Not a theologian. Not a Pharisee with impressive credentials. A broken woman who showed up weeping and met the risen Christ in her mess.
That is not an accident. That is the whole story.
Paul understood this. He wrote from his own unresolved weakness in 2 Corinthians 12:9 “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Not after the weakness is resolved. Not once you have worked through it. In it. The power of God shows up most clearly in the places we have stopped pretending are fine.
God is not looking for refined. He is looking for real.
He takes the jagged edges and the unfinished places and the parts of us we would never put on display and He makes something out of them that good taste never could. He is less interested in our polish than our surrender. Less moved by our composure than our honesty. He has always done His best work in the mess.
The clay on the ground. The tears in the garden. The cross on the hill.
None of it was tasteful. All of it was holy.
So we lay down the performance this morning. We stop smoothing the edges long enough to let God work with what is actually there. We bring the unfinished, unresolved, unpolished version of ourselves to the porch and we let that be enough.
Because it is. It always has been.
Lord, forgive us for the energy we spend trying to look like we have it together. For the testimonies we rehearse and the struggles we hide and the prayers we dress up before we bring them to You. Today we come as we are. Messy and real and trusting that Your power shows up best in exactly this kind of weakness. Make something beautiful out of what we have been too ashamed to show You. In Jesus’ name, Amen.