Sermon: Managing Cynicism

[ previous | index | next ]

Managing Cynicism

By Charles Rush

October 31, 1999

at follows is a work in progress. Probably 20 people asked me to see American Beauty. Finally, I went to see it yesterday evening. I had a sermon but this movie bothered me enough I tossed and turned, woke up at 3 a.m., walked in the kitchen, looked at the laptop, hit the delete key and started over. It is not recommended procedure but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

American Beauty, now at the box office, offers us a disturbing portrait of cynicism in our culture. Lester and Carolyn are married in a tree-lined suburb where she sells real estate and he writes for a magazine. Their daughter Jane is in high school. They eat dinner together, trading sarcastic barbs, sneers, and caustic attacks- all the while Mom has Lawrence Welk music on in the background, a kind of soothing anesthetic that masks over interpersonal distance.

Carolyn drives a perfect car to sell real estate, has color coordinated pruning sheers and shoes, keeps every hair in place, carefully fans out the magazines on her living room coffee table. She and Lester have essentially stopped making love and have settled down to an uneasy armistice at mid-life, as though this is all one should expect out of marriage after twenty years.

Lester is about to be downsized, after 14 years of employment. When he is asked to write a justification for his job, he chooses instead to write a little memo in which he tells his boss to go screw himself, and snidely threatens his company with a lawsuit to cut a severance package deal for himself.

Lacking love, Lester finds himself, at 42, full of idle lust, leering inappropriately at his daughter's friends, and fantasizing about bedding them to stimulate himself. His wife, Carolyn, also lacking love, has a quick affair with a powerful real estate man- if you can't make love, at least have sex with power, seems to be her approach.

In this alienated home, Lester carves out a little cocoon for himself in the garage. There, in his little refuge, he takes up smoking pot again, listens to music from the 70's, and starts lifting weights, all in a sad attempt to regain the glory of yesteryear.

Carolyn drives around in her perfect real estate car, listening to motivation tapes that are supposed to pump up her flagging self-esteem. Periodically, when no one is around, she breaks down and cries for herself like a little child and then slaps herself to straighten up and regain her composure, replete with a canned smile. Over and over she repeats a motto to herself. "In order to be successful, you must continually present an air of success." At one point, she passes on to her daughter, the most important lesson she can learn. Says mother to daughter, "the only person you can depend on is yourself."

Their daughter Jane is simply confused. She spends most of her time in her room and seems afraid to actually engage anyone in relationship. She and her friends spend most of their time just posing for one another, acting like characters on "90120" or "Sex in the City" rather than actually live their own lives.

The boy next door dresses like a model from Abercrombie and Fitch but he is just plain strange. He too comes from an emotionally dysfunctional home that is perfectly organized, viewed from a distance, everything in its place. He carries a video camera with him everywhere and videos his world, even his conversations with other people. The video seems to be a kind of filter for him. It allows him to one be one step removed from actual engagement. His actual relationship is not with another person, it is with the videos that he makes and can safely replay or erase in the confines of the control of his room.

Jaded and frustrated, the people in this family are actively thinking of murdering each other, while they go about their daily routines, with canned smiles, all merely posing.

It is a frightening portrait and curious for all of us 40 year olds. We were so determined as teenagers that we would not become like "The Establishment". How profoundly disturbing to wake up and discover that you have become Mr. and Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. As someone noted recently, we were so critical of our parent's gas guzzling Cadillac's, so now we drive SUV's that get half the mileage of a Seville.

The fact is that we are all tempted to fall into cynicism from time to time, and there is some sense in which our culture, not only tolerates it- in New York, we raise it to a strange kind of virtue. Cynicism is what we fall into when we find ourselves with nothing to live for, when we realize that we've become inauthentic, when we bought into a view of success that was too small, when we go through the motions out of obligation. The Bible says that without a vision, the people perish. They could have just as easily said, they become bitter and cynical. Spiritually speaking, how do we cope with the temptation of cynicism? The short answer is "these people need Jesus."

Part of the antidote to cynicism is finding your passion. By contrast, I was privileged to meet a woman several years ago in her late 60's. She had this beautiful garden. You have to wonder about the people who can create such a wonderful environment. I was admiring her garden, and started asking her about her life. She had 14 grandchildren, wonderful photos of them around her home. She had a most pleasant face and the kind of eyes that you just connect with. She had a charisma, magnetism. Kind of funky clothes. She had that endearing touch, a manner about her that seemed to nurture everything she came in contact with like good grandmothers. But there was something more to her. She was sensual, which is not quite the same thing as sexy. It's better. She radiated and drew you in. You just wanted to be around her.

She was the kind of person that you want to know more about. She told us the story of meeting her husband. They met during the war in Europe. She was involved with the resistance to fascism. He was a persecuted intellectual. She described a series of chance encounters, each full of suggestion and innuendo, both of them sensing that they were being swept away by an unusual sense of destiny on a bright blue sea in August.

We asked her how she knew that he was the one. She relayed a series of conversations they had and then she said, "He was the stars and the moon. I breathed him in. From the very first time we kissed, it was like rounding a corner and coming home." To this day, I find myself wondering what it was she did to that man and how I can get in on it.

Passionate love, passionate living. When we asked her to tell us about the rest of her life, she described it with the same sense of a passionate adventure. Her children were an adventure. The hardships she and her husband overcame were an adventure. And now, even her garden was an adventure of a different sort, an interior sort. At some point, her husband came in and they exchanged glances. It was the shimmer in his eyes too. I am sure that he thought of her the same way that Mark Twain felt about his wife. Twain once said, "Wherever she was, there was Eden."

Part of the antidote is finding your passion. It is not necessarily passion in the sensual sense of passion, though that is not bad either. But it is passion in the sense of being grabbed by a vision larger than yourself, sensing that the vision is more important than yourself, willing to make sacrifices to make it come to pass because it just seems like the thing to do. M.L. King had that passion. Bobby Kennedy Had that passion. Mohandas Gandhi had that kind of passion. Jesus had that kind of passion for the Kingdome of God. They radiated a charisma. People want to be around them because they are full of a spiritual energy and an important vision. The bible says that people like this have the gift of the Spirit of God. They have an infectious charisma because they have found their passion and are living out of it.

Part of the antidote to cynicism is being part of a movement that is larger than your little world. In our story in the Bible, the people of Israel were about to embark on an Exodus from slavery toward freedom. They were all on a quest for the Promised Land together.

Do you remember the sense of energy in our country around the Apollo mission to the moon? We were going to put a man on the moon. There were news releases on all the events leading up to the launch. We got profiles of all the astronauts, the flight pattern. Every school had a big science section on space travel. There was something incredulous about that project that captured everyone's imagination. The whole country woke up at 5 in the morning to listen to Walter Cronkite talk in front of a picture of the rocket on the launch pad at Cape Kennedy. Lift off. Then some time the next day, everyone stopped what they were doing at work. There on the screen was Neil Armstrong, stepping down a ladder onto the moon saying "One small step for man, one giant leap for Mankind". Wow! The imagination just bubbles with possibility. We all stood back in wonder, grateful to have lived to see this moment.

And for that moment, there was no guile or cynicism in us. We were caught up in something that was bigger than ourselves, in wonder. Part of the antidote to cynicism is being part of a movement that is noble, which is bigger than ourselves, that we will gladly make sacrifices to be part of.

Part of the antidote to cynicism is developing authentic Spiritual values, ultimately. Jesus taught us about these and asked us to go with each other on the passionate adventure in faith toward the Kingdom of God. Jesus taught us the values that make us authentically humane: Love, compassion, Empathy, Justice, the deep Peace of Shalom, Forgiveness, Harmony, Integrity, Authenticity, Reconciliation. These are the nobler reasons for which we live.

And part of the antidote to cynicism is making a commitment to developing these values. The ancient Israelites used to keep the Ten Commandments posted on their front doors to remind them of the covenant with their God. They needed to remember. So do we. That is one of the important reasons that we come to worship together, to remember.

But it is more than that. We need each other as a community. All of the values that sustain us spiritually are relational. You can't do love or empathy or forgiveness on your own. If cynicism breeds isolation and loneliness, spiritual authenticity nurtures true intimacy. We get drawn into deeper levels of involvement, profounder engagement.

We are kind of skittish in this church to talk too much about commitment. I think that is because so many of us are refugees from some bad experiences in other churches where we were guilted into some negative obligation. So this church doesn't have a lot of formal rules for commitment. We are light on structure and leave your commitment up to you.

But I don't want to lie to you either and suggest that commitment is not spiritually important. It is important. You know that there is a correlation between the profundity of your passion and your level of commitment. Cynicism is detached and committed to nothing, except the self and even that feels cruddy somehow. Jesus was so passionate about the Kingdom of God; he was so filled with those values that he died in the midst of living them out. So did Gandhi. So did Dr. King. But, their lives were not a waste. Their deaths were not tragic. What they lived for, were committed to, exploded way beyond their individuality. They got caught up, too, in the vision they were committed to.

Once a year, we come around to pledge Sunday, which is next week. And we ask you to make a commitment. It is a concrete commitment. Money is funny like that. But it is really much more than that.

Truth be told, we don't just want your money. We want you to willingly commit your passion. We really want all of you. We want your passion to manifest itself in relationships through this community, encouraging one another to live out our more noble selves. We want you to support your passion financially, to nurture those relationships. We want your leadership and involvement, your gifts and talents, that even through you, believe it or not, the Spirit of God might just occasionally move and touch other people.

Get plugged in and live, really live. Live your life and not somebody else's small notion of success. Don't just go through the motions. Don't waste your time compromising the best part of yourself. Don't settle and just pose for the rest of the world. Venture out on the passionate journey of faith with the people sitting all around you. Find your passion in God and live in it.