LIVING THE CONTRADICTIONS

LIVING THE CONTRADICTIONS

October 30, 2005

Texts – Psalm 43

Matthew 23: 1 - 12

Contradictions: life is full of them. So are our scriptures. “The greatest among you will be your servant,” Jesus says; “all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.” [Matthew 23: 11-12] Another time he put it this way – “He who seeks to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Paul, his student and advocate, repeated the theme – “We preach Christ crucified and risen – a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles . . . but God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” [I Corinthians 1: 23, 25] I could go on, and on, and on.

Contradictions. At their best, they point the way past the limitations of our logical “I-am-in-control-here-Thank-you-very-much” mind set and open up a pathway for us into the depths of what is real. I love the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi –

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“O Divine Master, Grant that I may not so much

seek to be consoled, as to console;

To be understood, as to understand;

to be loved, as to love.

For it is in the giving that we receive;

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;

and it is dying that we are born to eternal life.”

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Plenty of contradictions there . . . but plenty of truth right in the midst of them.

Contradictions. They challenge us by upsetting the status quo. What we expect is exactly what we do not get. Life is like that more often than not. “Like parents of the past,” one woman says, “my husband and I always assumed that when our children went off to college that it would be an irrevocable break. Instead it has turned out to be a four year intermission.” Forewarned is forearmed.

Contradictions. “You don’t know how good you have it,” a frustrated father said to his children one day. He was fed up with their constant complaints that they needed bigger allowances. “Why, when I was a boy,” he said, “I used to get up in the dark to deliver newspapers. I walked to school in the snow and rain, and after school I delivered groceries. Sometimes we didn’t even have enough to eat.” The children listened intently, seemly impressed. Finally the youngest spoke up.

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“Gee Dad,” he said, “I bet you’re awfully glad you live with us now.”

Contradictions. Some aren’t fun or funny. Some are painful and difficult to bear. “The trouble with having children,” Michael Novak says, “is that you can no longer be one yourself.” Seems that way sometimes, doesn’t it? Still yearning to be comforted and understood and loved by those around us, we are compelled instead to comfort, understand and love those vulnerable and helpless little ones. And sometime between the 1 a.m. and 4:30 a.m. feedings many of us learn, don’t we, that “it is in the giving that we receive.” As Robert Bligh put it, the child becomes the father of the man. But it is not therefore easy. Not by a long shot.

Contradictions. Robert Louis Stevenson was a poet, but he was also a student of this school of discipline. “In every corner of our life,” he wrote, “to lose oneself is to be a gainer, to forget oneself is to be happy.” Life, he suggested, is at its best when we recognize that it is at heart a losing proposition. Learn to lose well and you will be the richer for it. Sounds contradictory and maybe even depressing, but it is also profoundly true.

It starts early. If you want to hear some real losers, just stand in the hallway outside our nursery at five minutes to ten as a two-year-old is dropped off for the first time. You will hear all the agonies of the damned! Or again, think of the losses we all suffered in those early years of schooling. No more the carefree hours devoid of restraint and routine. Now it’s the programming and perspiration of real life. A little girl said to her friend, “Never learn how to spell ‘c-a-t . . . cat.’ Once you learn that they just get harder.”

Remember the loss of your first love? It felt like the end of the world. And what about the loss some feel during their first semester at college? Oh we put up a brave front, but there’s real grief for many as they long for that old familiar private bedroom to retreat to, to say nothing of the refrigerator which was always well-stocked.

“To lose is to gain,” the contradictory truth of life says, but that does not diminish its pain. My son just turned thirty. We joked about it together, but it was genuinely hard for him for a little while. No longer young. Just wait until you get here, I said – Now when I feel something new in my body I automatically assume it’s a symptom.

Loss . . . it comes in all shapes and sizes, doesn’t it? There’s the loss of that secret vocational dream which almost all of us must endure. We just aren’t ever going to quite live up to those early fantasies. There’s the loss of our parents. It happens to each of us, but it’s never easy (as I’ve learned again this Fall). Out there on the horizon for all of us is also the loss of our careers. I heard about an executive this week who was asked how many of her employees were approaching retirement. She said: “They all are. Not one of them is going the other way.” Hello.

The truth is – life is one long string of very real losses. How well we learn to lose may have more to do with the quality of our life than any other wisdom we can gain. Life does not have a reverse gear. But here comes the contradiction – it is in losing that we gain . . . it is in dying that we are born again. This is not just good theology; it is an acutely accurate description of reality. Death and resurrection are part and parcel of every season of living. With each death we face comes the possibility of a new ascent to fuller life . . . with each loss some new gain of greater living.

“All who humble themselves will be exalted,” Jesus says in our New Testament lesson. Matthew presents it as a scathing critique of the religious establishment of his day. Perhaps it was originally so. Certainly the temptation for the professionally religious, then as now, was to think of oneself as special and different. But we who stand in pulpits are not the only ones so tempted, are we?

I love the story one mother tells about a night when Jerome, her nine-year-old, was asleep in his room upstairs. She was sleeping in her room nearby. Suddenly (she says), she was awakened by a thunderous crash. Apparently a truck had veered off the road and crashed into the side of the house. The mother’s first thought was for her son. She called out, “Jerome!” Jerome called back, “I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it.”

No Jerome, you didn’t . . . and neither did you or I. Powerful, capable, independent, responsible we may all be, but not a one of us is in charge of the universe ... are we? But many of us spend a fair amount of our time feeling that way. Tell the truth – when you walk into a room filled with people who are busy talking with one another, don’t you sometimes wonder just what it is they are saying about you?! Silly, really, to be this way. Embarrassing to admit it. “All who exalt themselves will be humbled” indeed.

Life teaches us this, whether we want to learn it or not. There is a built-in self-correcting aspect to it. What do I mean? Many of us start out like little Jerome – convinced that we are not just responsible but wonderfully independent and powerful. The old psalm of David captures that spirit: “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” [Psalm 14: 1] So off we go – convinced that the world is our oyster, and that to the victor go the spoils. It is heady and invigorating, but what happens? Sooner or later as we go our merry, self-confident way, life trips us up. 9/11 happens, or the stock market falls, or a child falls ill, or the spouse or partner you’ve long taken for granted walks out, or you retire and they take your nameplate off the door. Suddenly you are caught in what feels like a very different world, helpless and adrift.

Remember that conversation Jesus had with Nicodemus in the dark of night? “Unless you are born anew, you cannot see the kingdom of God,” he said. And Nicodemus was dumb-founded. “How can a person be born when he or she is old? . . . How can this be?” [John 3: 3-4, 9] A lot of us ask that question, especially when we’re young.

“The gentle, imperceptible work of the Spirit may have been working in a person’s soul for years from youth on,” retired minister and therapist Robert Raines writes,

“but again and again the explosion of new life comes in the middle years: when a person has lived long enough to learn something of the intractability of life, of his or her own gross limitations, and of the mortality of all things . . . then we begin to understand our need of something or someone . . . (And) we begin searching. How can a person be born again when he or she is old? But that's precisely when it (does) happen!”

The search takes us to a host of places, doesn’t it? Self-help books, therapists, new age philosophies . . . many of us try them all. They just don’t work, do they?

Sooner or later, we come back (I think) to those contradictions I started out with this morning. “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.” One man puts it this way – “No matter the twists and turns in my life, no matter the disappointments (I’ve known) with other people, what I learned in Sunday School long ago, that I am a child of (a loving) God, has been the one anchor that has saved me, (and) kept me going.”

Life is full of contradictions, my friends. Rather than fighting them, or trying to run away from them, we do well to simply live with and through them. In the end, that old prayer of Francis of Assisi says it best –

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