The narrator of Donna Tartt’s first novel, The Secret History, begins his task by speculating as to whether there might be such a thing as ‘a showy dark crack running down the middle of a life’. He decides that there is indeed such a thing, and that in his case this dark crack is what he describes as “a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs”. But is that a flaw at all? Having just returned from a few days in the city of Florence, I am in neither the position nor the mood to suggest that there is anything unpleasant or dark or even necessarily flashy about the picturesque!

But yet there is something disturbing in what Richard Papen, Donna Tartt’s narrator, is saying. And it is not just the old contrast between style and substance, or between the glitzy and the nitty-gritty. Rather it is that we should think rather more carefully about beauty, and the appearance of beauty. Now surely that is at the heart of the life of any city, at the centre of the concerns of the reflective citizen.

A longing for the picturesque is indeed the motivation behind so much that makes up the life of a city. Architectural charm, certainly, but we crave for so much else that looks well. We yearn for that which looks attractive and which can entice appreciative looks, from the impressive financial report to the encouraging tourist numbers, from the piece of elegant oratory to the stylish civic reception.

But where is beauty to be found in the life of a city, and does it go beyond the picturesque? The biblical tradition suggests to all of us that it must, and that beauty and holiness belong together. Even a church building may be a place which appears beautiful, yet without the profound visceral sense of the presence of God, the beauty is mere cuteness.

This truth may easily be extended into the life of a wider world. Yes, of course we live in a world and in a city where the rumour of God seems ever less audible, but is that not what we have all made of modern existence? The beauty of God is something we reserve for specified places and specified times. It is not something we permit to intrude into the places of commerce, of education, of politics, lest the sensitivities of secularisation are thereby invaded. Yet it is the gentle intrusion of a God of beauty into the ordinary, into the everyday.. it is the unruffled appearance of a God of beauty in a situation of rancour, of ugliness, of prejudice.. that changes everything and renders it beautiful, and that is as far removed from the picturesque as it is possible to be.

We are worshipping here today, not only in a setting of beauty but also in the conscious awareness of our communion with the saints of God, saints known or unknown, some remembered on earth and others misplaced within the merely human database of earthly memory. And the saints bring us back to the theme of beauty, for goodness and beauty are inextricable, not the surface beauty of prettiness or even of the picturesque, but the beauty of goodness.

It is, I suppose, almost a commonplace to recall that when Christ, that great shepherd of God’s saints speaks of himself as the Good Shepherd, the word good - kalos - is the word for beautiful. Goodness and attractiveness are not mutually exclusive. Far from it - moral integrity, spiritual goodness, truth in its rawest form, are things which display far greater beauty than we will sometimes allow, and they all the force and the awesomeness of real beauty. Yet we have somehow managed to remove clinically even the vestiges of attractive character from our idea of what constitutes a saint – if they are not weaklings, they are seriously scary. They are most certainly not the type of people with whom we would choose to spend a spare week-end. That is of course partly what we’ve made of saints but it is also a self-protective mechanism which allows us to distance ourselves from them. Yet, the New Testament calls us all to sainthood and, in a phrase appropriate to this service, to a citizenship of heaven. This is not escapism, a retreat into a never-never land of pietism. This citizenship of heaven is as real a citizenship as our citizenship of this city or of any other city. Indeed it is more real, and it does not allow us to evade the responsibilities of earthly citizenship but calls us to see those responsibilities with a new focus – the focus of truth and of beauty, and if you get the one, you get the other with it.

A beautiful city is a place of goodness, a place of justice, and a place of integrity, a place of community. All the picturesque appearance in the world will never create beauty or community. T S Eliot, in his Choruses from The Rock, has his stranger ask the probing question:

• What is the meaning of this city?
• Do you huddle together because you love each other?
• What will you answer? 'We all dwell together
• To make money from each other'? or 'This is a community'?

The city that is not community is hateful. And so it can never be enough simply to hide the realities of brokenness, deprivation, hopelessness and squalor from public view in the desire to make a city more picturesque. It can never be enough to mask the realities of dishonesty, corruption and cynicism in the hope of making the public life of a country more picturesque. The realities themselves have to be removed if a city is to be a place of true beauty. Only when a city is consciously community can it ever reflect beauty.

The component parts of this city, all that it means to be a citizen - whether in the places of commerce, or in the seats of learning, in the chambers of legislature, or in the courts of justice, whether as one of those who protect the lives and welfare of others, or among those who add to the artistic radiance of this city, whether as unemployed or elderly or child, or indeed as a representative of the Church of Christ - all belong to one another. They are not parasitic of one another, or competitive with one another. They belong to a single community which seeks integrity, justice, generosity and truth as constituent of the beauty of God.

In a moment we will return to the beauty of worship, a beauty which is at the heart of the human encounter with the divine. Hans Urs von Balthasar, one of the greatest theologians of the twentieth century, placed this sense of beauty at the centre of all his theology. God reveals himself to us not simply as truth or as goodness, but as beauty. Christianity is therefore not just a mass of doctrine, or even a way of life, it is a response to a vision of the beauty of God. That vision may begin with the aesthetic, or with that elusive glimpse of mystery and of radiance that is here for us within authentic worship.

And so we can peddle the picturesque if we wish, or we can, as citizens of this city and citizens of heaven, pursue beauty as our vision for this city, a beauty of goodness and of truth, the beauty of God in the face of Jesus Christ.