Sermon: The Spiritual Adventure

[ previous | index | next ]

The Spiritual Adventure

By Charles Rush

Confirmation - June 6, 1999

couple of you asked me the question during the year, -why do we have to die?' It is a good question. The fact is that we don't live for very long. I read in the paper yesterday about a famous man that died at the age of 45, not much older than me. I gotta tell you that I'm not ready to die and I wish we had more time on this earth. It's a great place. And there are days when it occurs to me that I may not have a whole lot of time left, so I better not be squandering it.

How many times have you said to yourself "I'm bored! There's nothing to do." That is squandered time. Humans are lazy, self-indulgent, and self-pitying. I suspect that if we lived for 3 or 400 years, we would probably hear a lot more people saying "I'm bored! There's nothing to do."

But if you knew today, exactly how many years you would live on this earth, it would make a big difference how you would live your life. If you knew that you would only live to be 50, that you only have 37 years left, you would figure out a way to fill that time with meaning, with purpose. Each passing year, you would be more and more aware of how precious and outrageous our world is. You would want to drink it all in and soak up everything that it has to offer. The tragedy of life is not that it ends too soon, but that we wait too long to begin it.

Why do we have to die? Because God intends for our lives to be a spiritual adventure. This is good news. I know a bunch of you are worried that religion is boring. You are worried that it is only a monotonous ritual that adults go through every week that you don't really get and you are worried that one day you will be as boring as your parents and that precisely the moment that religion becomes truly important to you, you will be nothing but a boring, blob adult, without a life.

I understand that. Frankly, it is a real fear. I suppose religion has always attracted boring people who want to play it safe. They want eternal answers; they want a sure foundation.

But the characters in the bible suggest to us a whole other dimension of reality. Adventure. If life is short, live it like an adventure.

Think of Sarah and Abraham. They were 70 years old. They were married, no children. They thought life had passed them by. Probably they were bored and boring. One day, they are sitting in their living room, when some kind of vision fills their imagination. It tells them to sell all they have, pack up, and move to another land. What land? Who knows? Just move "to a land that I will show you." In other words, he is starting out on an adventure. At some point, Sarah and Abraham both say to God, "but I am too old". But they are not.

Think of David. The Israeli's are fighting a powerful army and they need a leader in battle to stand against Goliath. Goliath, the Arnold Schwarzenager/Claude Van Damme/ Bruce Willis of his day. The troops get another vision that God wants them to choose David, the 8 ^th grader, to lead them. Lead them how? Lead them where? Who knows? They are starting out on an adventure. At one point, David says to God, "But I am too young and not strong enough." But he is not.

They don't know where they are going. They don't know how their provisions will be made, how they will pay for this, where they are going to get the ability to do the job. And mysteriously, miraculously, somehow, someway it just works out. And they find that everything they really needed they already had and their whole lives were adventures where they came to rely on God to simply bring out the resources that were already in them but were never tapped because they were too shy, too safe, ... maybe too boring.

I hope that you get the chance to see your life as a spiritual adventure. I hope that you can attack it with zest. Like what?

I hope that you can see the sun rise at 15,000 ft. My son told me about waking up before dawn on the top of a mountain ridge at Colorado, watching the whole world come awake, the birds soaring below, breathtaking beauty, oneness with the world.

I hope that you get to lose yourself in the hospitality of strangers like I did once, when, by accident I was taken in by an extended band of gypsies in Yugoslavia, and spent a couple of days in their tents, overwhelmed the incredible variety of people on our planet.

I hope you can stand one day in Egypt, like a friend of mine, in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor, before all the incredible monuments that gird the avenue that once spanned a mile in length. And just try to feel what it must have been like to witness the building of this place and all that went with it, nearly 4000 years ago. What kind of people were they?

I hope that you can see something like Victoria Falls, so great are the falls the spray from them extends over a mile. To soak in the raw power, to be settled in the peace that comes from the sound of falling water.

I hope that one day you can give yourself to another person in trust and openness, that you can really be yourself, and grow together in the mysterious wonder of love. I hope that you can, one day, be privileged to see your own children born and sense the awe of being part of something that you participate in but is so much bigger than you that you just get weak kneed in sheer gratitude for life itself and the fundamental joy of living.

I hope you can sit among the stone circles at Broedgar on Orkney Island north of Scotland, where many of our ancestors sat in prayer and watch as the sun rises on the equinox of the year to shine right through an opening in the burial tomb to light up the altar deep in the interior of the tomb and to make the connection like they did 3000 years ago between those who are living and those that are dead.

I hope you get a chance to snorkel in a remote coral reef and swim with schools of fish that number in the thousands all around you; to see the exotic colors and to know how potentially lethal some of these creatures can be; to be absorbed by an environment alien to you, where you are no longer in control but you have to defer to the fish and stand back in respect of their ability. I hope you can participate in their world and maybe be blessed to ride with a dolphin, our distant cousins.

I hope that one day, you will get to invest yourself in someone else, maybe someone in the next generation, a young person. I hope that you can do something for one person that will really be a big gift for them and help them to grow. I hope you can do something for which you won't get any return but the sheer joy of doing it.

I hope you get to climb up the nearly sheer cliff at Delphi, where the Greeks had their holiest temples and shrines in 500 b.c. I hope you can make the pilgrimage like they did and get to the top exhausted and look out over the blue Mediterranean sea, walk in the caves where their temples once stood laden in the finest gold and jewels.

I hope you can make one trip to the wilderness, some place like the remote regions of Alaska, where there are no roads, no people. I hope you can sit beside a stream and watch the salmon jump, watch the bears fish for them, the weather setting the mood for you rather than the other way round, feeling the deep tired of work around basic survival chores, sleeping some of the best, deepest sleep you will ever sleep.

I hope you are privileged one day to be able to walk with someone, hopefully someone you know well and love deeply, through the portals of death. I hope you have a chance to take part in that holy transition that we must all make from living to dying. I hope that you have the profound experience of being blessed by a dying person, and feel the deep grief of saying goodbye.

I hope you get to see Rome one time and stand among all of its glorious ruins, see the thousands of miles of aqueducts that brought crystal spring water from the tops of the mountains hundreds of miles away to the city over 2000 years ago. I hope you can stand in the Parthenon, the temple to their gods, the temple that was so beautiful that when the barbarians sacked Rome, it is said that they went inside to steal all of the gold and jewels that were there; instead they were so overcome by the sheer beauty of the place that they left in silence. And if you are lucky, maybe you will go to the ruins of the bathhouse at night, where 100,000 people bathed daily when Rome was at its height, and you will sit and watch the opera Aida, with the full cast of elephants, and just marvel at the wonder of the arts.

I hope that you can bring the same excitement to what you do day in and day out. I hope you don't have to just settle for having a job that is not fulfilling and you only go to each day for the money that it brings. I hope you get to wake up and be anxious to get there because it is a real -calling', that you have a sense that you are expressing yourself and doing what you want to do, that you are making a difference and that what you do is where you find your meaning and purpose for living.

I hope that somewhere out there in the future, you survive a near death experience. It will help prepare you for your own death one day. Because when you survive it, you will feel the preciousness of life that I am talking about it today. You can't really understand what I am saying now. But then, you will get it. You will feel it and a new chapter will open before you.

You are no longer boys and girls. You are young men and women. You are here today because you are at the very beginning of an adventure that is going to unfold before you. It's a great trip. In the ups and in the downs, God will be there with you, challenging you to grow, to risk, to take in all the beauty and love that our world has to offer. And through you, sometimes quite in spite of you, others will be blessed. Don't let the bored and boring people adjust the glasses by which you see the world. Keep focused on the wonder, on love. That is what God wants you to soak up. Blessings and courage for the trip. Amen.