Sermon: Bowing Before the Sacred

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Bowing Before the Sacred

By Tom Reiber

May 25, 2003

n. Guilt. Love. Healing. Redemption. This is the stuff of great art, and of life. If you're like me, you do okay with the sin and guilt part; it's the love/healing/redemption part where we can all use a little help.

There's a Robin Williams film I really like called The Fisher King, maybe some of you have seen it, that hits on most of these themes. In it Jeff Bridges plays a flashy and successful DJ of the Howard Stern variety. He's living high on the hog with all the perks money can buy ‘till one fateful day when he makes an offhanded comment to an unstable caller. The caller is on the verge of a nervous breakdown and proceeds to act out what Jack meant as a joke, going on a shooting spree at an upscale bar.

Later that same day Jack is watching television when an urgent news alert breaks in with news of the story. He looks on in horror as the broadcast links the shooting to the call to Jack's show earlier in the day.

The film then jumps forward in time a year or so, long after Jack's career has crashed and burned in the wake of that fateful day. He's drinking hard and living with decent, though albeit struggling woman who runs a video store. It's a far cry from his penthouse existence at the start of the film.

I invoke the story line of this film because it certain respects it echoes the themes of our Biblical texts today. In the account of the burning bush we see encounter with the holy. The mysterious bush that is on fire without being consumed is a powerful symbol for the extraordinary spiritual experiences that meet us unexpectedly on life's path.

In the Gospel reading Jesus shares parables about buried treasure and a pearl of great price to make the point that the kingdom of God is priceless. Taken together, we have the notion of the holy and the challenge issued by Jesus to let go of everything in order to experience it.

This raises the question of what, exactly, we're called to give up. We instinctively think of possessions, since that's a recurring theme in the New Testament. But beyond the concrete notion of actually giving things away, there's the more nuanced notion of giving up our selfish clinging to those aspects of our identities that are rooted in the superficial things of this world. The imagery of the two parables we read this morning hint in this direction. Recall that the first is about buried treasure, while the second invokes the image of a fine pearl. A depth psychologist would really like these images, since both buried treasure and a pearl—that comes from beneath the ocean—allude to a realm beneath the superficial surface of things. So part of what we're called to give up is our attachment to a superficial mode of being in the world for things of deeper value.

It's one of life's great paradoxes that most of us spend the majority of our lives trying to build up a sense of who we are, what psychologists call “ego strength,” only to be challenged by the opportunity to let that go in search of something deeper. Of course this isn't to say that ego is simply bad. You need a certain amount of ego strength to simply exist and grow and develop. One could argue—and I would agree—that you have to build yourself up to a certain degree to be strong enough to take a leap of faith.

But there does seem to be something about the spiritual life that calls for a deeper response to life, something beneath or beyond ego.

I heard a Sufi story recently that expresses this idea nicely. It's about a young man named Raji who's on a spiritual quest. He's out-grown the answers to life's riddles offered to him by his teachers and friends. So he goes off in search of truth, much like the Buddha. He ends up meeting an eccentric old man who lives on the edge of a village, in a cemetery. He's got little bits of mirrors on his clothing and, recall that he's living in a cemetery, so the local townspeople right him off as a nut. But Raji discovers that he's full of wisdom and as he proceeds to get to know him, he undergoes a series of spiritual experiences.

In one such vision he finds himself watching a cosmic battle between good and evil. Suddenly someone says to him that he's going to have to have to enter the battle and that one of his opponents is to be Ego. He readies himself for battle and sure enough, the next day in the heat of the battle Ego comes out onto the battlefield on a big powerful elephant and the spiritual seeker walks out, shaking. They engage in battle and at one point it appears Raji has the upper hand. He's about to run his sword through his opponent when Ego lifts his visor and his beauty complete paralyzes Raji. Ego then swoops him up and throws him on the back of his elephant and rides around showing everybody his new trophy. Raji is terribly mismatched by the enthralling power of Ego.

But then something very beautiful happens. Raji hears something in the distance and strains to hear as gradually the sound of battle gives way to the sound of singing. He listens and then looks on and sees the armies of good and evil have stopped their fighting and have joined together in song, following a new being who has come out onto the battle field. The new being is Love.

Ego rides up to love, dismounts, and bows, saying “Even I must humble myself before you.”

We see a similar humbling of ego in the Fisher King film. After Jack the DJ's life falls apart on him, he ends up stumbling drunk one night out on the City streets, near the river. Things are so desperate he's standing there on the edge of the river with concrete cinder blocks tied to his legs, trying to get up the nerve to jump in. But just then two thugs pull up in a jeep. He's caught off guard and blinded by their headlights. Thy rough him up and douse him with gasoline and are about to light him on fire when suddenly out of the shadows comes a homeless man named Perry (this played by Robin Williams).

This is the final straw in the life-process that brings Jack to his knees. He simply has no ego left after that experience. He can no longer pretend he's somebody, when the truth of the matter is his life has fallen apart and if it weren't for the grace of God—in the form of a homeless man—he'd be dead. So Jack has been forced to let go of ego, which puts him in a place where he can be transformed by the power of love.

As his friendship develops with Perry, the homeless man who saved him, he makes the unsettling discovery that Perry first became homeless as a result of the shooting that cost Jack his career. Perry was in the restaurant the night of the shooting and his wife, who he loved dearly, was killed. Understandably, then, Jack feels responsible for Perry and makes it his mission to save him. This is powerful symbolism for the lesson that we sometimes learn to care for ourselves by caring for others. One reason for that, is that we often don't feel as if our own lives are worth saving.

Fear of authenticity and feelings of unworthiness plague us all at various times, consciously or unconsciously. W. H. Auden captures it beautifully in The Age of Anxiety.

This is his longish poem about four strangers who meet in a New York City bar during a time when the country is at war. On a deeper level it's the quest of the archetypal individual (as symbolized by the four parts) for healing and wholeness.[1] While describing one of the four, a character called “Emble,” Auden offers this profound insight into this sense of unworthiness that plagues so many modern people:

Emble…put down his empty glass and looked about him as if he hoped to read in all those faces the answer to his own disquiet. Having enlisted in the Navy during his sophomore year at a Mid-Western university, he suffering from the anxiety about himself and his future which haunts, like a bad smell, the minds of most young [people], thought most of them are under the illusion that their lack of confidence is a unique and shameful fear which, if confessed, would make them an object of derision to their normal contemporaries. Accordingly, they watch others with a covert but passionate curiosity.

Auden knows intuitively that this watching of others really has very little do with an objective comparison between oneself and others, since it's ultimately rooted in one's own internal feeling of unworthiness. So Emble wonders:

What makes [these others] tick? What would it feel like to be a success? Here is someone who is nobody in particular, there even an obvious failure, yet they [don't] seem to mind. How is that possible? What's their secret?[2]

We find expressions of the same sentiment in popular culture. In The Indigo Girls song, “Hey Jesus,” the singer gets drunk and argues with God, the next morning she apologizes saying,

…You've got friends all over the world,

the whole world was waiting for your birth,

Me, I aint got nobody,

I don't know what I'm worth.

Given the pervasiveness of guilt, shame, it should come as no surprise that the Bible's got a lot to say on the subject. One the refreshing ironies of the Gospels is that, as you read through them, you get the feeling that it was the people who were living the wildest lives that were most able to hear Jesus' message. Consider the beginning verses of Luke chapter 15. “Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the [religious leaders] were grumbling and saying, “This guy welcomes sinners and eats with them.”

I don't think there's any doubt these were the partiers. Yet they were the ones who apparently were able to glimpse a profound truth in the simple teaching that there's more to this world than meets the eye, that it's all been called into being by a Supreme Being that loves and cares for us, that we can access that being and share that love with each other.

I was actually going to use this as our Gospel text for today, which his why Luke is listed in the bulletin instead of the portion of Matthew I actually read. I had originally wanted to make the point that to access the kingdom of God we have to be ready to let go of everything else. I thought that was the point of these parables in Luke. But when I looked at them closer, I realized Jesus is talking about God's attitude to us. In Luke, Jesus is providing a rebuttal to the religious leaders who were critical of him for hanging out wit sinners. And it's in response to that criticism that he offers up the parable about the woman who sets aside her coins to find the one she lost and the shepherd who leaves his flock to find one last sheep. But the point is Jesus is saying God does this for us. If you don't believe me, look at the concluding verse in the Lukan passage. After concluding the story of the shepherd who lost his sheep by saying he called his neighbors together for a party, Jesus says, “I tell you that in the same way there is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent (Luke 15:7). This is a pretty novel approach to the religious life, the showing of favoritism to those who have strayed the furthest from the path. Yet it seems tied to something central to the life and ministry of Jesus.

This is what we might call the inbreaking of the sacred into history. It's the realization that it is possible to let go of false security offered by the world in order to drop into something deeper and more profound. This is precisely Jack's experience in The Fisher King. At the start of the film he cares only for himself. But after having his ego stripped away and being confronted by the limits of his humanity, he finds himself through an unlikely friendship with Perry. The power of love propels both men forward on their respective journeys of healing and redemption.

Perry makes progress and even falls in love, but the opening of his heart prompted a flood of traumatic memory plunging him into catatonic-like coma. This reflects how sometimes things get worse before they get better. Desperate to help his friend, Jack humbles himself still further. Perry had fixated on a picture in magazine of what looked like the Holy Grail in an apartment being featured. And though Jack new it was crazy, he breaks into the apartment and takes the grail. It turned out to be a golfing trophy, but he took it just the same.

He goes to where Perry is asleep, a symbol of the wounded, unconscious part of each of us, and puts the Holy Grail in his hands. For a second he waits to see if anything happens, but nothing does and he falls asleep.

But as the sun begins to stream through the window the next morning, Perry speaks for the first time since entering his coma. He says, “I had a dream last night, Jack. I dreamed I had the most beautiful wife, and I miss her. Is that okay, Jack, can I miss her?” Jack doesn't say anything. He doesn't have to. The cup has worked its magic.

The cup is the symbol for the sacred power of God, the fire of the burning bush, the priceless pearl worth risking everything. It's essentially an invitation to let of the superficial sources of power that give our lives pseudo meaning, in exchange for the power that transformed history into before and after its emergence in the world.

Perry's girlfriend, the one he fell in love with for a few days prior to going into the coma, stuck by him throughout his ordeal, bringing him colorful pajamas and sitting by his bedside, keeping vigil. Near the end of the film, after Perry has been healed by the cup, she walks up to the bed and can't quite wrap her brain around the bed being empty. You get the feeling she's fearing the worst, that maybe he died; but then she hears the sound of singing. Following it like Raji in the Sufi myth, she comes into a large room in the psychiatric hospital where Perry is leading his fellow patients in song.

He wipes away her tear and they embrace, bringing to closure the healing process with the coming together of the male and female. It's a great ending, reminding us all that sin, guilt, love and redemption are not simply to be found in ancient stories. They can be found here, in our midst. May it be so.

Amen.

[1] Edward Mendelson notes that Auden actually had in mind Jung's notion of the four psychological types, with each character representing one of the types. See Mendelson's, Later Auden (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), p. 247. The character, Emble, represents sensation. It's also worth noting in the context of this sermon that Mendleson says about The Age of Anxiety, that Auden was searching for the “unifying grail” (p. 242).

[2] Auden, W. H., The Age of Anxiety (New York: Random House, 1946), p. 6.