Nov 23 2009
The Myth of Fulfillment
preached by Winton Boyd on Sunday, November 22, 2009
Matthew 13:54-58
53-57When Jesus finished telling these stories, he left there, returned to his hometown, and gave a lecture in the meetinghouse. He made a real hit, impressing everyone. “We had no idea he was this good!” they said. “How did he get so wise, get such ability?” But in the next breath they were cutting him down: “We’ve known him since he was a kid; he’s the carpenter’s son. We know his mother, Mary. We know his brothers James and Joseph, Simon and Judas. All his sisters live here. Who does he think he is?” They got their noses all out of joint.
58But Jesus said, “A prophet is taken for granted in his hometown and his family.” He didn’t do many miracles there because of their hostile indifference.
Matthew 23:37-39
37-39″Jerusalem! Jerusalem! Murderer of prophets! Killer of the ones who brought you God’s news! How often I’ve ached to embrace your children, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you wouldn’t let me. And now you’re so desolate, nothing but a ghost town. What is there left to say? Only this: I’m out of here soon. The next time you see me you’ll say, ‘Oh, God has blessed him! He’s come, bringing God’s rule!’”
Matthew 27:45-51
45-46From noon to three, the whole earth was dark. Around mid-afternoon Jesus groaned out of the depths, crying loudly, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”
47-49Some bystanders who heard him said, “He’s calling for Elijah.” One of them ran and got a sponge soaked in sour wine and lifted it on a stick so he could drink. The others joked, “Don’t be in such a hurry. Let’s see if Elijah comes and saves him.”
50But Jesus, again crying out loudly, breathed his last.
51-53At that moment, the Temple curtain was ripped in two, top to bottom. There was an earthquake, and rocks were split in pieces. What’s more, tombs were opened up, and many bodies of believers asleep in their graves were raised. (After Jesus’ resurrection, they left the tombs, entered the holy city, and appeared to many.)
There I was, in one of the most remote regions of a northern Scandinavian country, Norway. At the end of a fjord, on the edge of the wilderness, I lived on a small farm for a number of months in the fall of 1981. I was spared the early morning milking, but did spend my days herding sheep, pulling potatoes, building rock walls, repairing fishing boats, and tearing down an old shed in return for the privilege of lodging. The Bjorkland family had that quiet Norwegian reserve; and was conservative and hard working in all ways. I found this place because it was the childhood home of a teacher I had a couple of years earlier while going to school in a small town near Oslo. While words in the two generation house were spare, it was clear after just a couple of weeks that this family, like so many, had its internal divisions. Bjorn, my former teacher, was a liberal, vegetarian, agnostic urban educator who had married a temperamental but brilliant pianist named Berit. Oddbjorn (I never thought of how strange those two names sound together) was the oldest son, married with two young children, traditional, stern, and evangelical; and drank an ounce or two of cod liver oil a day for good measure. I think Bjorn was trying to help me out when he arranged this stay, but because of the clash in the family, I was never sure if it was because he liked me or because he didn’t like me.
In many ways, Bjorn was not really welcomed back home – he had no interest in milking cows, he dressed funny, he didn’t eat any of the products the family raised, and he had abandoned the faith of his parents. Truth be told, he was considered a failure, or at least a severe disappointment, by the folks back home. It wasn’t surprising that neither he nor his wife didn’t like to take the all day train ride back “home” any more.
Because they seldom spoke, the fact that they talked frequently about Bjorn with a sad and judgmental look in their eyes meant that even I as a self absorbed, linguistically challenged guest could tell there was sadness and grief over the distance they felt from this one who grew up with them.
This kind of disappointment and even confusion over the direction of our lives or our loved ones is not unique. Even in the gospels. While Jesus may have been a great teacher, healer, and long awaited Messiah in the eyes of first century Jews, when he “went home” early in his public ministry, he faced a mixed reaction. The text tells us that he went home with the energy of previous successes, started out with a bang but was then unable to do “miracles there because of their hostile indifference.
Scholars have pondered this for centuries. The simple fact, however, is that he was rejected by many who knew him best. His great talents could not persuade them, could not convince them, and could not move them from where they were to where he wanted to be. In that setting, at best he faced disappointment and quite possibly saw his visit as a complete failure. Certainly, he was disillusioned. As his loved ones may have been also. We don’t really know the long term result of this disappointing visit, the fact that the story was told in Mark and Luke as well suggests it was a story with deep impact on many people.
The second story, of course, comes at the end of his ministry. He has been teaching, preaching, healing, discipling, and sharing meals. He has come to Jerusalem, the center of Judaism, a city that he loved, but also a city he knew could be the site of his demise. As the reality of his failure begins to weigh on him, he laments. He realizes that despite all of his work, all of his trust in God, there is so much that has not been finished. There is so much the Jews of Jerusalem did not get or understand.
In the DVD(Genesis: A Living Conversation) we used for Java and Jesus this morning, the point was made that every time we come to the biblical texts, we read it with new eyes based on new circumstances. In the language of the Hebrew Bible, we return to Sinai ourselves. In the language of Jerusalem in the early part of the Common Era, we too have lamented or continue to lament over Jerusalem. This story of a dream unfulfilled, a project fallen short, a relationship gone sour is our story too. We too have known beloved endeavors or people to be disappointing, confusing, disillusioning. [I remember a colleague in California who yearned for years to be the senior pastor of his home church, a large progressive, flagship church in the UCC. He was deflated and confused when the church search committee – many of whom he had known most of his life – past over him for someone with much less experience. It caused him to ponder, “When is that point in life where experience no longer matters?” In the years since witnessing that question, it is abundantly clear to me that his question, or questions like it, could be the question of any one of us. When is it that what we thought we knew to be true, no longer seems to be so? When is it that we let go of dreams we have held for our whole life? How is it that we handle the rejection from those we know and love?
Somewhere in our journey of life – and it hits us all at many different ages – we see the shattering of what Gerald May called the “myth of fulfillment”. We realize the myth that all will go our way in life is an illusion. And yet, as people and as a culture, many are addicted to fulfillment, desperate to eradicate all the emptiness that comes with such disappointment. In fact, our addiction to fulfillment or at least maintaining the illusions of success often weave a harsh, desperate barrier against participation in love. This myth is so widespread that the majority of adults in our culture accept it without question. We become so masterful at masking our true feelings about success and failure that we begin to believe our own lies. We use many means to fix it, repress our restlessness, or dull our concern all together; seeking to lose ourselves in word, food, entertainment, drugs, etc.
Rainer Rilke in his book Letters to a Young Poet wrote what are now famous words, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Live the questions now. Perhaps over all there is great motherhood, as common longing.” Emptiness, yearning, and incompleteness, he believed, hold the hope for incomprehensible beauty.
Frederick Buechner, author and chaplain wrote a book a book called The Longing for Home, in which he explored many of the disappointments and struggles of his life; not limited to but including his own father’s suicide when he was a young boy (and his mother’s silence for the rest of her life), his daughter’s anorexia and his own depression. He described his life as one of always longing for home, until finally he realized that this longing was indeed home. Yearning, wishing for more, living through the unexpected trials of life, are the essence of faith and our relationship with God.
In my own life it has been those moments of uncertainty which follow disappointment that have been my periods of deepest trust, and my most open and vulnerable time of prayer. This has been true after being passed over for a job, disappointed and confused by people I know well, or faced with unexplainable tragedy.
The story of Jesus, however, goes ever further with this paradox of disillusionment, failure, and faith. Our third story, including Jesus’ cry “my God, why have you forsaken me” occurs on the cross. This cry of confusion shapes the climax of his life. Whatever strength and hope he had in the face of rejection and his impending death, they could not eliminate the despair from his heart. They could not gloss over the reality that he also knew fear, confusion, and uncertainty; that he wondered about the success of his ministry. The story of his final hours – his despair, death, and ultimate resurrection – the central story of our faith – embodies the truth that in faith, all failure, all death, all confusion, despair, and disillusionment are wrapped into the mystery of resurrection. They are part of the fullness of life.
They are an invitation for us to live the same truth in our lives – to abandon ideas that somehow we are not whole if we fail – to abandon that myth of fulfillment and in so doing to adopt a humble trust.
• Trust in Divine goodness that promises grace when others reject us outright…
• trust in ourselves to see in failure the seeds of new opportunities, new insight and new hope …
• trust in a future that has yet to unfold.
Living with this kind of trust does not just happen. In a way it takes practice. For many of us, the school of hopeful faith occurs when we share space in the world with others who have seen more struggle than us but live with a contagious hope. Living in community affords us ample opportunity to observe, learn from, and take heart from the diversity of human experience around us. While music, literature, movies and poetry are also aids in our learning, there simply is nothing as instructive and compelling as the real live stories and of those we know and observe.
It is not an accident that some of those who understand the power of faith amidst failure and disappointment best come from people of faith in places like South Africa. It is here that we find communities that yearn for fulfillment, but experience deep disappointment, oppression, and obstacles of all kinds. It is here we find people who know that the power of the Christian faith is not that it helps us be victorious in all situations, but that it helps us find life in the midst of even despair.
As part of practicing hope, I’d like to invite us to a time of prayer, which will be led by the music and faith of Christians in South Africa. I invite us to be led in prayer by their music and in so doing seek to turn over our disappointments and disillusionments, our unmet goals and our feelings of failure and discouragement to the One who receives all prayer and all life and offers life. I invite us to “give our burdens to God, knowing we will not be turned away – a truth that over time, with practice, we hope will resonate as deeply in our souls as the deep base notes resonate in the music. Let us pray, let us give up our own version of the myth of fulfillment, and let us give our burdens to God.
Come, Bring your burdens to God
This song was played as the sermon concluded. Arranged by members of the Iona Community in Scotland, it was first heard in South Africa, and is sometimes sung at services where testimonies are being given by people who have been affected or infected by HIV/AIDS.
Woza nomthwalo wakho
Uyes’akaozathi yah.
Come, bring your burdens to God
for Jesus will never say no.
