Sermon: Free Falling

Free Falling

By Charles Rush

March 11, 2001

got an email recently from one of my buddies from High School. This is what it said:

“I am jammed up with anxiety, paralyzed by self-doubt, squeezed into a studio apartment by my fears, wedged in an overstuffed chair with a lapful of smelly banality piled high, before a TV with a test pattern of despair… other than that I'm cool.”

It turns out, he penned this plea with a deadline in sight for a new Ad campaign he was responsible for. He is the creative force. Unfortunately, he is presently surrounded by a lot of heated squabbling as there is talk of major transition and a number of people are posturing for their jobs. His mother-in-law is suffering the early difficulties of Alzheimer's, when she is doing a number of inappropriate things and doesn't know it, which is taking up a lot of his wife's time. Beginning a couple years ago, he had been heavily investing in Internet start-up companies. At the time, he was making some truly fantastic returns, the kind that make you green with envy and feeling like such a loser by comparison that he used to say “Oh it's only paper money anyway.” Now a whole bunch of these have imploded. I accidentally blurted out. “Oh well, it was only paper money anyway.” “Actually”, he said, “somewhere along the line, it became real money”. There is nothing like living with internalized defeat, set back, frustration. It can just blanche the vivacious creativity out the most colorful personalities. It is amazing how cautious you can become overnight. He was reaching out to me, because at some level he knew that this is fundamentally a spiritual issue. It is a spiritual issue.

You want to get back to that place where you feel confident, optimistic, where you feel like it will all click together and it will all work out. You want to see the world as an interesting place, full of wonder and mystery. You want to have that free abandonment that children have who are ready to drink in the world around them.

My number two son loved to swim when he was younger. We are going back in time here. He was probably one–and-a-half to two-and-a-half. He was one of those kids that never really walked. He started out running. In the summer time, Kate would push him in the stroller up to the pool. When he got fairly close, he would jump out and start running, peeling off shirt, pulling off shoes. It was a straight shot for the pool and he would dive in head first, usually into the deep end. It was amazing. There was only one small problem. He couldn't swim. So there were always guards diving in after him, parents diving in after the guards. He would always come up with this huge grin on his face. I'm sure his parents told him over and over, don't go near the pool without us, adults told him this. To no avail. Over and over we heard, “Kate, there he goes”. Dive into the pool. And sometimes he stayed under long enough to drink a goodly amount of water. I remember one such time. He was shaking a bit from drinking the pool and he threw up breakfast and lunch. He pointed at it and said ‘sick'. Two minutes later, he made a dash for the pool. It got to the point that you would hear over the loudspeaker. “Guards, Ian Rush is on premises, you know what to do.” Something like that is what primordial faith is all about. It is when you can dive into engagement, confident that everything is going to work out even if you don't have all the skills to make it happen, when you are driven to a full engagement with the world. The Spirit of God is just with you and you don't have to worry about it.

The Gospel of John says that Jesus went about preaching and teaching. A lot of people were very moved by his message. Crowds came out to hear him. It was all very edifying. Then he begins to teach about eating flesh and drinking blood. To our ears, it sounds like Hannibal Lecter. But the Gospel of John was written very late and it is filled with symbolism. We all know that Jesus is teaching about the Lord's Supper. But what is hard about that saying? It is not just the idea that God communicates grace to us through this simple, ordinary meal. We also know the end of the story. We know what happens to Jesus and if we follow after Jesus, we know where this can lead. Jesus is going to suffer. Jesus tells the crowds, symbolically, that they will suffer too to the degree that they participate in the same Spirit that lives in him.

At this point, “many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.” No surprise there. Everyone wants to go to the party. Few are willing to stay with you, keeping vigil through the night.

There is almost a pathos to Jesus' voice. He says to the twelve, ‘Do you also wish to go away?' It appears that he, too, is expecting rejection. Jesus knew what it was like to get worn down. This is a man who one time said, plaintively, ‘foxes have holes, birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.' What a terrible feeling to feel like you have no home.

More than that, these anxieties are so very personal, you experience them alone. This is the stuff that wakes you up in the middle of the night and leaves you without a bed. Often it is just a vague inchoate sense that things are not coming together, things are not working out. You wake up fixated on one particular thing but it is not just that one thing, it is a multifaceted anxiety that permeates everything you seem to be involved in. It colors your perspective, alters your mood, makes you tentative and edgy, not trusting, tense, sometimes expecting rejection.

I love Peter's response. In the Gospel of John, he is every disciple. He kind of blurts out, “Where else would we go?” Not real comforting words for Jesus. It is the bumbling confession of dimwit, who has little but honesty in his bank of credit. He rather reminds me of Wilie Coyote, in his quixotic quest for the Road Runner. Wilie Coyote had an unquestioning loyalty in the ACME corporation- as though he, too, had nowhere else to go. He would order rocket launched roller skates. Great idea 'til he skated off the cliff. Then the deadpan acknowledgment of impending doom. Then he'd disappear. Then the puff of smoke from the canyon floor. Next day, exploding birdseed from the ACME corporation. He never gave up. He never stopped ordering. Endearing, bone-headed loyalty. Peter is kind of like that. He says, “Where would we go?”

Sometimes, we have to be pried from our unhealthy faith alliances because, truth be told, too many of us are boneheads for security like Peter. As one person said about their extended family, “it may be dysfunctional but I know it well.” I have heard this line more than once. “When I got laid off, it was the worst thing I could imagine at the time and the best thing that ever happened in my career.” What these folks mean is that they were tracking themselves down a path that was not fulfilling, constricting of their self-expression and creativity because it looked like it paid enough and after doing it for so many years, it was very familiar terrain and they got to the point where they actually feared the unknown more than the misery they lived day in an day out, even though they couldn't actually articulate that at the time, even though they weren't entirely aware that they were miserable at the time. But looking back, even with less job security, even with fewer retirement benefits or corporate perq's perhaps, they are much happier today. But for them, somebody had to launch them, they would never launch themselves. That is about half of us. We have to be launched.

But there is another half too, a positive half. Peter also has this wonderful line to accompany his bone headedness. And that is one of the reasons he is so endearing. He says, “You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” In short, you are the One. You are the way, the truth, the life. You are what brings us spiritual wholeness. At some point, you have to make a confession and a commitment and go for it. That is the free falling part of faith. You have to jump.

Many years ago, I was in Venice, on the Vaporetto that goes to the train station from the Grand Canal. The Vaporetto was at the stop for the train station. People were getting off and on, saying hello, saying goodbye. As our Vaporetto started to pull away from the dock, one of the passengers shouted in Italian “Wait, this is not right.” And he leapt back onto the shore. The driver stopped the boat and the man parted the crowd on the dock until he found this young woman. In front of everyone, he was saying something. I turned to a nice woman standing next to me and asked what is he saying and she proceeded to translate. He says, “I can't let you go. I just can't do it.” Then he got down on his knees. All of the English speaking passengers crowded around this nice woman as she translated his rambling proposal about how he didn't have enough money and wasn't settled enough but she was the only happiness he had ever known, the flower in the middle of winter that kept him going and if she would have him, he would they would light a candle of love. Everyone waited. Her eyes were filled with tears. She leaned over and kissed him. Everybody cheered and he carried her back on the Vaporetto, with her bags that had been packed for some trip. What a moment. Some times you just have to go for it. You are the one.

Love is a great faith leap. Truth be told, maybe most of us, if we had a full disclosure agreement- if we knew in advance exactly what we were getting into, how much it would challenge us, how much heart ache we were opening ourselves to- we might never make the leap to begin with. And that is part of the deal. We don't know everything in advance. We don't know how we are going to solve all the problems out there, how we are going to rise to the occasion when it comes, but we will. You just have to make a faith leap when you have the intuition that it is the right thing to do and it is never a clear-cut thing. One of the nieces in our family asked one of the uncles how you know when you find the right partner, the one. He said, “Oh you know, but … you don't”. And part of that is because, the leap of marriage is not only marrying the right partner, it is being the right partner. Mark Twain once said of his wife, “Wherever she was, there was Eden.”

Part of faith is a free falling jump. Right now, we are coming around to everyone in the congregation and asking them for a big contribution for this building that we want to put up. We have to ask everyone because we can't afford to put it up without everyone's help. We are going to tell you what we need you to give and it is a big number, a bigger number than you would come up with on your own. That is what a challenge means obviously, although I have to tell you that a couple of people, when we gave them a big number, doubled it, and we'll take that too.

What I'm talking about with faith is way bigger than a building campaign and I don't want to reduce it to that, but also whenever we have to give away money, it is an issue of faith. Most of us instinctively get jammed up with the anxieties of college tuitions, we get paralyzed with the self-doubt of our investments and the economy, we get squeezed into the studio apartment with our fears about retirement, and wedged into an overstuffed chair with a lap full of smell banal things we think we need but we don't really need- they just keep us from being bored. Committing our money to anything that is a challenge. Presuming you believe in what you are committing to, in this case what we are trying to accomplish as a spiritual community, there is still that moment of faith, when you have to let go. And some of you don't have a big history of philanthropy. As someone in our church has said, that first big check is the hardest. Once you do that and you find out the world isn't going to fall apart, it gets easier from then on.” That is right. There still comes that moment, when you have to let it go. And a lot of that is faith- a free falling trust that it is all going to work out. You'll have to call upon that faith too…

My godson Zach is four and a half years old. He is with his Dad at the pool this week and he says to his dad, you want to see me go off the high dive. This is the ten-foot board. He starts walking over to the ladder. His Dad doesn't know what to do or say but he doesn't want to tell his son that he can't do something that is a great challenge but not lethally dangerous. So he follows his son over to the ladder. Up Zach goes, up and up and up and he is on top of the ladder. Now Dad is tense. He steps back to see Zach run off the end of the board and leap into the air, Kaboom, great canon ball. Dad is stunned. Zach swims over to him. Dad helps him out of the water. Dad says, “Zach, weren't you scared?” Zach says, “Yeah, that's what makes it cool.” They sit there for a moment. Zach says, “You want to see me do it again?”

Peter says, “You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” Brothers and sisters, take the plunge and free fall. It drives out anxiety, self-doubt, fear, banality, and despair. It opens us to hope, love, purpose, and meaning. Go for it.

Amen.