THE POWER OF THE PERSONAL
October 23, 2005
Texts – Psalm 90, selected verses
I Thessalonians 2: 1-8
It’s been a rough year so far . . . I’m talking about the year of disasters and catastrophes we’ve experienced together. 79,000 are dead from the earthquake in the Himalayas this morning, and winter hasn’t begun yet. Hurricanes Rita and Katrina took more than 1,200 souls from us last month, and caused billions of dollars in damage across the Gulf Coast. Over 250,000 perished in Southern Asia last winter from the tsunami. Do you wonder how much more we can take? I do, but more seems to be on the way. Hurricane Wilma is moving toward Florida as we meet; the threat of avian bird flu is just beginning to enter our consciousness.
A rough year indeed . . . It has left a lot of us reeling. I’m not talking about “compassion fatigue,” although that is a very real phenomena, but what I want to think with you about this morning are the deeper questions which are always raised in times such as these.
We ask “why” when tragedy and suffering enter our personal lives. “Why me? Why now? Why?” The same thing happens when we are forced to confront the tragic suffering of others. We want to believe that life has meaning and purpose and value. It should make sense. But what sense does it have in the face of all these seemingly “natural” disasters?
“There is nothing in the world that so effectively helps one to survive even the worst conditions,” Viktor Frankl wrote, “as the knowledge that there is meaning in one’s life.” He went on to say that the person “who has a ‘why’ to live for can bear almost any ‘how.’”[1] Frankl spoke out of his own very personal experience of suffering and tragedy – he survived the Nazi death camps of World War II –, but his words apply equally as well to those confronted by suffering and death in the world around them. If we don’t have an underlying sense of meaning and purpose in our lives, we are in danger of losing some of the strength and energy – the “spirit,” if you will – that is so essential for life itself.
So yes, we ask “Why?” We struggle to make sense of it. We do that intellectually, of course – rationally wrestling with the causes and effects which could conceivably have brought us to this time and place. Sometimes that leads into peculiar places. “It’s global warming with a vengeance,” some say. “It’s the end time, the eschaton, foretold in the Bible,” others argue. Both are places of fear, perhaps even of paranoia, but we go there almost whether we want to or not.
That’s one way many of us respond, but there’s a second way . . . a deeper level . . . which I think we also experience in times like this. Listen to Viktor Frankl again. Those of us who were surrounded by so much suffering in the concentration camps, he said, discovered that “we needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead (began) to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life (on a) daily and (even) hourly (basis).”[2] We realized, he goes on to say, that
class=Section2>“what matters . . . is not the meaning of life in general, but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.”[3]
Is that something you’ve been experiencing? I have. Oh to be sure we are the ones who ask the meaning questions, but at a deeper level we are also the ones who experience ourselves being questioned by this terrible convergence of natural disasters. “Who are you? What are you doing here? What is the meaning of your life in this world which is so fraught with peril?” Do any of those questions sound familiar?
Three years ago a Southern Baptist pastor out in California by the name of Rick Warren wrote a little book called The Purpose-Driven Life. It took the publishing world by storm; over twenty million copies were sold. However you judge it as a piece of writing, it obviously struck a responsive chord among millions of people. Many find their days coming up short of deep meaning, even though something deep inside each one of us knows we cannot live vital lives without it.
If ever there was a person whose life was invested with a sense of meaning and purpose, surely Jesus of Nazareth was such a man. His mission was nothing less than to bring into being a new kind of human community, one based no longer on blood line (the seed of Abraham) nor upon an all embracing culture (the old Levitical Laws of the Hebrews), but one based on a new vision of God. God is approaching us in sacrificial love to draw us together into one human family, he said in effect, and God’s family is one where neither gender, or class or ethnicity or status count. That was his message and his meaning, and to that end Jesus was willing to suffer and die. He yearned to give birth to a new covenant community among those closest to him, a community based solely on God’s love for all children.
Now his was, surely, a “purpose-driven life.” But notice two things about that life. The first is its intensely personal character. Jesus found the meaning of his life and mission in relationships, particularly in the friendships of that small group which gathered for dinner with him on the night before his death. Oh, to be sure, his was a very public life – there were crowds as he began his ministry, but they soon faded away as the demands of his new way of living became apparent. In the end it all boiled down to a few friends whom he sought to inspire and guide toward the future for which he hoped.
Now I wonder if there is not something in that for us as we ponder our own purpose in life during these traumatic days. Part of our problem may lie in the fact that when we think of purposeful living, we think of a powerful career or some public cause worthy of great diversion of time and energy.
Rick Warren’s book is a good example. In many ways it is a moving exploration of how we may find meaning right up to the last chapters where he seems to say that the real purpose of life for everyone of us is to go out and find people, the more the better, who are heading for hell and convince them to accept Jesus. He says: “What are you willing to do so that the people you know will go to heaven? Is anyone going to be in heaven because of you? The eternal salvation of a single soul is more important than anything else you will achieve in life.”
Now that sounds, on the surface, exactly like what you might expect any Christian minister to say. But strangely, in all of his letters to the early Christians, I do not find Paul pressing this narrow imperial purpose. Indeed, the picture of Jesus which the Gospels paint – alone with his few friends on that night before he died . . . such a portrait suggests that the most significant moments, the real meaning of our days here, may lie not in careers or causes, but in the intimate and personal relationships that are near to us and which we often taken for granted. At least it did with Jesus who at the last settled in with a close circle of friends whom he trusted to fulfill his vision.
Do not, in other words, underestimate the power of the personal, the impact of person to person. I hear that in Paul’s words from our New Testament lesson this morning as well. “We were gentle among you, like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children,” he says. “So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.” [I Thessalonians 2: 7b-8] This is as personal as it gets, he says in effect. Nothing is more important.
In the end, the real meaning of our days on this earth is as simple as our closest relationships. That’s the answer I hear to the question life addresses us with in times like these. And it leads me to want to ask of you, as I ask of myself – Who is there in your life . . . who is it who gathers about your table . . . whose care is meaning enough for your days? If you were able to gather about yourself a company of friends for your own “last supper,” who would be there? Who would you invite?
And then, as you grapple with that, entertain one other question – Who might you reach out to invite who is not already present around your table? Who needs to be welcomed in?
Consider again the strange bunch of friends Jesus called together for his Last Supper. There was a revolutionary (Simon the Zealot), a servant of the Romans (Matthew), an unstable fisherman (Peter), a traitor to his cause (Judas), a couple of ambitious entrepreneurs (James and Andrew). All of them were welcome at his banquet table. Women were there too – Mary, Salome, Mary Magdalene. Together they constituted the whole of his vision and purpose, which was nothing less than a new kind of Godly family, one in which all are welcome. In this community there is to be neither male nor female, Jew or Greek, slave or free, but all are one in Christ’s love.
Two thousand years later the church that bears Christ’s name is found in every land under the sun, over two billion, but I ask, has it truly and fully embraced that vision and purpose of his? I like to think we are trying here at First Church, but I am painfully aware that there are many places – many churches – where God’s extravagant welcome has yet to be embraced.
Why are the communities of this world so fragile, and unable to heal and save? They all tend to be conditional upon something that separates human beings – ethnicity, race, caste, competencies, pedigrees. We are called to be different as Jesus was different, as we try to embrace as God does in mercy and love, as we reach out to include wise and simple, young and old, highborn and ordinary, accomplished and struggling, whoever is drawn by the love of God to us.
There is an old story I love about the child who got it right, this kind of community we are to be. It is told by a woman who taught Vacation Bible School. Her class was interrupted on Tuesday when a new student was brought in. The little boy had one arm missing, and since the class was well along, she had no opportunity to inquire about the cause of his problem or his state of adjustment. She was very nervous and afraid that one of the other children would comment on his handicap and embarrass him. There was no opportunity to caution them, so she proceeded as carefully as possible.
As class time drew to a close, she began to relax. She asked the class to join her in their usual closing ceremony. “Let’s make our churches,” she said. They each folded their hands and began to recite – “Here is the church and here is the steeple, open the doors and there’s . . .” The awful truth of her own actions struck her. The very thing she had feared that the children would do, she had done, exclude this unfortunate. As she stood there speechless, the little girl sitting next to the boy reached over with her left hand, placed it up to his right hand and said, “Davey, let’s make the church together.”
So the church of this Jesus, the new covenant in his life, is something we make as we meet and gather here on Sunday or on occasions in between. We are called, as Paul put it to the Thessalonians long ago, not just to offer the Gospel of God to one another, but to share what is at least as precious – our very own selves in love and friendship. Let us do so with joy and gladness. Amen.