The movie, “The Brutalist” won the Academy Award for Best Actor.  It’s about a Hungarian-Jewish survivor of the holocaust who flees to America.  Through much tribulation he becomes a famous architect of the Brutalist style.  At the end of the movie his orphaned niece quotes him as saying, “No matter what the authors try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.”

Shakespeare put it this way, “All’s Well that Ends Well.”

But this is ironic as a theme for the movie because Brutalism is a 1950s style of architecture that is stark, colorless and communicates despair.  Brutalism speaks of a destination that is without meaning, thus reflecting the supposed meaninglessness of modern existence.

Art-Deco, Romanesque, Greco-Roman and Colonial styles, in contrast, speak of beauty and meaning.

We need to build lives, churches, families, art and societies that have meaning and that are going somewhere: the heights of heaven.  We should produce relationships that last forever by the grace of the Christ who crucified our meaningless existence and was raised to give us abundant, eternal life.

Please come Sunday as I preach on “Build for the Future” from 1 Corinthians 3:10-17.  We’ll look at “Build Carefully,” verses 10-15 and “Care for God’s Building,” verses 16-17.  The passage will help us build meaningfully for the journey and the destination!

Love,

Jim Meek