March 25, 2007 Fifth Sunday in Lent
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Isaiah 43:16-21; Philippians 3:4b-14; John 12:1-8
How to live through end times: it is a question we hope never to have to
ask, a disturbing or frightening question, a question many people avoid until the
inevitable end time is hard upon them and it is too late. Humans have always
dreamed of a distant past or an approaching utopian future without any end times
to contend with—a Garden of Eden or a Second Coming, a deathless time. In the
meantime, while we dream, the world is changing around us and former things are
passing away.
The less stable our world the greater the temptation to cling to those
dreams. One of the attractions of fundamentalist religion is the promise of eternal
paradise, the end-of-all-ends that the faithful will enjoy. The Twentieth Century
was a time of instability and rapid change. The Twenty-First Century has only
intensified that pace. If you believe the warnings, civilization seems to be
approaching a cataclysmic end time.
Whether we feel concerned for the whole world or for our personal end
times of loss and change, how to live through them is the same question. From a
spiritual perspective, it has the same answer.
The answer is not to dream the escape fantasy that fundamentalist religions
work so hard to provide—as helpful as it can be to dream and escape at times.
Nor is denial the whole answer—as useful as denial can be in some situations.
Relying on dreaming or denial as our strategies for living through end times can
lead to missed opportunities to make a difference, either to prevent the end from
happening or to make it more meaningful, more of a triumph than a defeat.
Escape from reality into delusion is a slippery slope toward the worst kind of
death—death that is a meaningless waste of life.
One of the most terrible end times of the Twentieth Century was the Nazi
holocaust. Life in the Nazi death camps forced people to choose how to live with
the impending end of their own life and the already accomplished end of the
society and way of life they had known. There was no going back, even if they
lived.
Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist who was imprisoned for three years in
Auschwitz and other camps. He survived to write the book, Man’s Search for
Meaning. If I had to recommend only two books to help answer the question of
how to live through end times, Man’s Search for Meaning would be one of them.
Frankl talks about the strategies of dreams and fantasies, denial and mental
escape that death camp prisoners used to cope with their suffering. Some forms
were benign. Conjuring up images of other times or places could help make
hardship endurable for a while, but the return to reality was then so terrible that it
made the escape almost not worth it.
Some forms of dreams were dangerous. A friend of Frankl’s had a vision
that their camp would be liberated by March 30th, 1945. He was convinced that
the vision was true. As the day approached and there were no signs of liberation,
he became depressed. On March 29th he came down with a fever. On March 31st
he died.
Another year the rumor went around that the war would be over by
Christmas. Many got through that fall by dreaming of being free and reunited
with loved ones for Christmas. The last week of December when liberation had
not come, the camp saw its highest mortality rate from sickness.
But there was another form of mental transportation that had the reverse
effect, that increased vitality and the ability to survive hardship and
disappointment. Frankl discovered it by accident. During a pre-dawn forced
march to a work site, being beaten by rifle butts, limping from sore feet, half
starved and freezing in a sharp winter wind, a man whispered to Frankl, “If our
wives could see us now! I hope they are better off in their camps and don’t know
what is happening to us.”
Suddenly Frankl’s mind was filled with the image of his wife. He saw her
smile. He had conversations with her. She became real to him and he felt the
light of his love for her fill and transport him completely. He returned to reality as
he needed to, but always carrying with him the light and warmth of that love, and
he realized the absolute, ageless truth that “the salvation of [humanity] is through
love and in love.”
This attitude transformed death camp life for Frankl. Everything he did
was now inspired by and in relation to this love. It gave purpose to what
otherwise was senseless suffering. It affirmed Nietzche’s words: “Those who
have a why to live for can bear with almost any how.” Even the smallest act
touched by this love became something meaningful and sacred.
Frankl’s book explores how love provides the courage and strength to
endure the worst personal or social end times. It is the first of two books I would
recommend. The other we have already heard from—the Bible.
The prophet Isaiah wrote today’s passage while in exile in Babylon. Israel
had been destroyed, the people carried off into captivity. God spoke through
Isaiah saying, “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I
am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will
make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert to give drink to…the people
whom I formed for myself so that they might declare my praise.” The Bible gives
hope in a future beyond the horizon of whatever end times we face. We can count
on God making a way through whatever wilderness comes next, and rivers of
living water in the desert. We can count on our role of loving and praising God
not changing, no matter what comes. As Vicktor Frankl learned, nothing can take
such love away from us.
The philosopher Jonathan Lear has written a book entitled Radical Hope:
Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. He looks at what happened to another
tribe whose homeland was destroyed and that was led into exile—the Crow Nation
American Indians. His book confirms the Apostle Paul’s experience of finding all
former systems of values overturned. In today’s passage Paul talks about all those
qualities of which he once boasted as now being rubbish. He considered all
former gains now as loss. Like anyone in an end time, Paul could not know what
new life was coming, but the love of Jesus Christ gave his life and sufferings
meaning and purposeful direction. It gave him strength and courage to press on.
Jonathan Lear says we need to find creative expressions for our fear that
leads us to new conceptions of courage. This is what happened in the gospel story
of Mary anointing Jesus’ feet. As was true for Paul, the value of former things had
changed for Mary. The pound of nard she poured out cost as much as a year’s
wages for an average laborer. In today’s terms it was worth more than twenty
thousand dollars. By conventional standards that made it extremely valuable.
Even by Jesus’ standards, there was no denying how much it could do for the
poor.
But something had happened to Mary. Remember that Mary was the
devoted disciple whom Jesus said had done so well by sitting lovingly at his feet
listening attentively. Mary had seen Jesus raise her brother from the grave. But in
recent days Jesus had been forced to go into hiding. His life was in great danger.
The authorities were looking for an opportunity to arrest him. He had taken a
great risk in coming to their home.
Mary knew the end was near at hand. Suddenly things that had always
been so important no longer were. In the context of the loss of Jesus even helping
the poor seemed of secondary importance.
The one thing that seemed absolutely valuable, the one thing that grounded
her life with meaning now was to pour out her deep, deep love and gratitude for
Jesus. It was a time of great fear, and only the perfection, the complete expression
of her love could drive out that fear and change her debilitating, paralyzing
negative emotions into a force for doing something meaningful and good. The
coldness of the end time she faced threatened to freeze her inside. Instinctively
she knew that only the intense focus of her love could thaw her heart.
Anyone who has sat with someone they loved deeply who was about to die
knows something of what Mary was going through. Your grief threatens to
overwhelm you, and you want to do something—anything—that will keep your
love connected to your beloved. You feel that if you can express your love now at
their death it will transform your grief into something beautiful and life-giving, a
positive force that will stay with you forever.
So Mary took that fabulously expensive, sweet smelling, soothing nard and
kneeled down and poured the entire pound on his feet. It trickled over them and
dripped on the floor. Then, in an act beyond servitude, in an intimate act of total
abandon and grateful love, she wiped his feet clean with her hair.
If she had taken the perfume and sold it and given it to the poor, Judas
would have said it was not wasted. But to Mary, with values changed by love in
the face of end times, it would have been like pouring it out on the floor. For
Mary, only one thing could give life value or meaning now, and that was to focus
everything she had and all she was on her expression of love to Jesus. Nothing
else would have meaning without that, but having done it, then everything would
have meaning, because everything could be done in the love of Christ. Having
given her love and her all to Jesus, whatever small or large acts she did from then
on would be done on his behalf and made sacred, even if he should be taken from
her and her whole world fall apart.
Whatever end time concerns us now, the way to live through it without fear
or despair or numbness is to turn the entire focus of our heart, mind, soul and
strength to a love that we will carry with us forever. No end time can take away
from us the dignity of a faithful love or the nobility of self-sacrifice for the sake of
love or the beauty of creative acts inspired by love. “God is love,” our great
survival manual says in the First Letter of John, “and those who abide in love
abide in God and God abides in them….There is no fear in love, but perfect love
casts out fear.” And the Apostle Paul said in the same manual in First Corinthians
13, “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends.”
How to live in end times? Commit random acts of kindness and senseless
acts of beauty for the sake of love. Consider the artificial social values of your
former life rubbish. Be guided by a love that is eternal. Give your whole life and
love to the Holy Spirit, to God, to Christ to lead, and you will find the way through
the wilderness and rivers in the desert, and you can trust that you will reach the
goal, even though you cannot now know what that goal may be.
Let us pray in silence, feeling in our heart the love for which we would give
our pound of nard, the love for which we would give our life. What love gives
your life meaning? How would Christ have you express that love in context of the
end time that concerns you today? Let us pray in silence…
Sermon 03/25/2007