Sermon: The Nature of Fulfillment, Advent 4, 2007

[ previous | index | next ]

The Nature of Fulfillment, Advent 4, 2007

By Charles Rush

December 23, 2007

[ Audio (mp3, 6.2Mb) ]

friend of mine called me. He was with his four year old daughter, wrapping some Christmas gifts. His daughter wanted to know what they were. He said to her, 'honey can you keep a secret?' She nodded 'yes' and then felt the need for full disclosure. She said, "Daddy, I can keep a secret but some of the people I tell the secret to can't." I know what she means. Christmas is almost here… so ‘sciting who can keep quiet!

Immanuel means 'God is with us' and our story is one of fulfillment. It begs the question of what would genuine fulfillment look like? If you were blessed to the core of your being, what would that mean? What would you look like?

Madison Avenue gets us thinking in the wrong direction this time of year and this year our offerings were more insidious than usual. Runner up for the spiritually disingenuous award this year is from Best Buy. The ad features a young teenage girl chatting on her cell phone in Valleygirlspeak about how awful her family is and how she detests her parents only to look up and see those very same horrid parents unloading tech equipment from Best Buys… She completely changes her facile tone to "Oh my God my parents are awesome", dropping the phone as she runs to greet them. Horrible depiction of young women… and a dangerous message for parents of teens since most of us are genuinely tempted to overcome the alienation with our teens by buying them too much crap since that does work for the short term. Spiritually, it is nakedly disingenuous, promoting as it does, panacea in the place of genuine fulfillment.

And the winner in my book is the ad that begins with a husband calling his wife, telling her that he can't pick up the kids like he promised, only to have her huff, grit her teeth, and hang up the phone on him. She grabs her things, stomps out of her house, looks up to see her husband, cell phone in hand, standing in front of a silver Mercedes with a huge bow on it. Horrible depiction of marriage… and a dangerous message for husbands since guys who are emotionally challenged when it comes to intimacy with women are genuinely tempted to reach for something decadently outrageous to prop up a sinking relationship. Spiritually, it is frighteningly disingenuous, promoting as it does, diversion in the place of genuine engagement. Moreover, I have a very long list of testimonials that this method does not work and unwittingly promotes an even greater sense of alienation and distance that, often as not, speeds a couple towards divorce.

Madison Avenue does not help on the question of genuine fulfillment. And I'm not sure that we help ourselves either. Most of us, because of the successful world that we live in, are prone to unrealistic images of fulfillment… One of the ironies about success is that the more you have, the more you think you need to finally get to the place that you will really be fulfilled. Most of us are as hobbled as inspired by our interior visions of what we need to finally be happy.

And I 'm not sure that the Church has helped us much either on the subject of genuine spiritual fulfillment. Our tradition has so often lifted up the miraculous or the nearly miraculous and the superhuman heroic that we would be forgiven for concluding that authentic spiritual fulfillment is simply extraordinary or beyond the purview of what we mere pedestrians are able to realize. That is for saints or rigorous ascetics but not for regular people doing regular jobs raising regular kids.

What would it take for you to be fulfilled? Really fulfilled? I'm going to give you a hint. Start with your gratitude. What are you deeply grateful for? Start there…

Sometimes, I'm not sure that we would recognize genuine fulfillment if it bit us on the backside.

When I was a child, almost all of my best days began before dawn, not that I was an early riser by nature. I was being shaken awake by Gran or Nana. It was always pitch black in that remote rural region of Mississippi where my grandfather had a hunting cabin. My brother and I were up in the dark, stowing tackle in the boat, holding a flashlight while my grandfather fixed some last minute tangle in the equipment. We were putting the boat in the water in the darkness and riding across the swamps and marshes in order to get to the fishing hole or the duck blind before dawn. Every fish bites at dawn and every bird wakes up and gets flying just before dawn. That half hour before the first rays of sun was so mystical. No one really talks. It was always chilly and just before dawn you would see rare things like a 15 point buck with his doe swimming nearby or the huge bushy tail of a fox on the bank. And just before dawn, the ducks start cutting across the sky black silhouettes against the grey sky. You can hear them, their wings whooshing in the morning air when you are perfectly still. I love the mystery of watching the natural world wake up. Most of what I know about the mystical was a gift from my Grandparents.

Last year, our family decided to have a giftless Christmas, pool our resources, and head to Hawaii to visit our son Ian and his family. I left Christmas day flying west across 5 time zones, making it the longest Christmas day of my life. I got there late, had a little family party, went to bed.

About 4 in the morning, my daughter wakes me up. Her baby is crying and won't stop. Would I walk her for an hour? I get up, put on my flip flops, walk the baby across the street to Sunset beach on the North Shore. The moon was quite full and the surf, which reaches 20 ft. at that time of year, was quite high and crashing over the reef about 30 yards from the shoreline. The baby was really crying, but the surf was roaring louder.

I love that sound of the surf at the shore. When I was younger, I used to sleep out on the deck at night just to sleep with that sound. And the Palm trees, the stars in the sky that are completely different than here, of course. I just walked up and down the beach. There was a very steep place on the beach and I finally lay down after she stopped crying. I just lay there looking up at the night sky until finally the baby fell asleep on my chest. I watched the stars for a while and I fell asleep too.

Right at dawn, one of those island wee clouds passed over head and sprinkled on us, waking us both up. But it was just a quick shot and over, rains we just don't have on the mainland. My granddaughter looked at me like 'who the hell are you and what are we doing here?'

All around us surfers were appearing one at a time. They would survey the breaks, collect their thoughts like a prayer, and silently glide into the water and out to the swells. We stood up, watched them for a while and turned toward home. I realized that I had unwittingly given her a peek at the best of what I know, the mystery of the early morning, the peace of the ocean. I thought of my Grandmother, and the way she used to be with me in the morning like that and I wondered if maybe she had blessed me. Maybe she was smiling, one generation to another and another. We started it over again.

If Christmas isn't really over until the dawn of the next day, then I saved the best present for last. And the thought occurred to me, standing there with sand in my hair with a baby in wet diapers, that for me this is probably as spiritually fulfilling as it gets. And for just a short while, as I stood there, I was simply grateful to be alive, grateful to get to that moment.

I don't remember what came next, probably because I got home and someone was fighting or the baby threw up on me or someone wanted me to get some toilet paper at the store.

We don't get to stay in awe and wonder but for a moment. The Angels come and sing, the shepherds adore this great moment, but then you have to run after the goats that have wandered off, or tend to the baby that has colic. That is just the way it is.

And isn't that the way that love is? It has its genuinely touching moments, sometimes even ecstatic moments, but these very same people can shortly become petty and whinny, self-absorbed or myopically involved in a project you think is foolish.

But when you think about it, this is the Christmas story. In the birth, life, and death of the Christ we say that 'God loves Us'. God is willing to be involved with us, sometimes in moments of awe, but also with all of our messiness too. It starts in a stable, with two simple teenagers and a few ordinary shepherds. Later, when Jesus is a man, he will recruit some fishermen- rough ordinary simple guys; he will befriend women and spend time with some dicey characters, tax collectors, Lepers- the AIDs patients of the Roman Empire, prostitutes.

There are some ecstatic moments, yes, he was widely reported to have powers to heal people. His sermons inspired throngs of people. And he also got into disputes with the religious and political leaders of his day when he stood for something on principle. He was jailed, forsaken, tortured, killed.

Through his life, early Christians concluded that God was not afraid, so to speak, to get involved with the utter messiness of our existence. God was not afraid to become vulnerable to the same heartache that we know, the same disappointment and frustration that are also part of love.

There is a wonderful scene in an English movie where a Step-father goes to see his 11 year old stepson to find out why he is so sullen and withdrawn. He is asking him what is wrong? We can talk about it… Anything…

Finally the kid says 'even if there is nothing that you can do about it?'

The stepdad says 'even if I can't do anything about it.'

The kid says finally, 'okay, I'm in love… helplessly, hopelessly in love.'

The step father laughs, "Aren't you a little young for that?"

The kid gets pensive, "No"

The stepfather regroups, "Well I'm relieved?"

"Why?" says the kid.

"Well" says the stepfather. "It could have been a lot worse".

The kid thinks for a minute and says, "Worse than living with the utter agony that is love?"

The stepfather sits back, reflects on his own loves lost, and replies, "Yes, it is an agony."

…Because love cannot really be love without opening ourselves and making ourselves vulnerable. That is why it drives us crazy. We have to put ourselves out there and you can be rejected; you can be hurt; these people can make you angry like no other people on the planet. And if you are lucky and everything breaks your way and you are genuinely, deeply happy, when you lose love in death, it is a pain like no other we humans know. It is all part of it.

God loves us and is involved in our messiness, our contradictions, hoping that our higher selves will structure our lower selves, hoping that we will grow to become people of reconciliation, to become people of peace, hoping that we will inspire each other to realize who we were meant to become, hoping that we will become people of salvation for those around us.

I remind you of this at precisely the time of year that you are sent out to put this gospel to the most difficult test… dealing with your own extended family. God may have loved tax collectors and lepers way back when… but God has never met my brother-in-law. It is a lot easier to get all warm and sentimental about the holiday spirit until we conjure up the image of being seated at the Christmas table next to….- you know who. And the truth is, it is a lot easier to be gracious to the homeless guy you've never met than the dysfunctional Aunt you've avoided for 25 years.

This is where the cheap Muzak leaves off and the genuine miracle of Christmas is waiting to be born. I'm sorry that I have no generic, sage advice to help you deal with your quirky relatives but it is not possible to give generic advice because each dysfunctional relationship has its own unique peculiar weirdness as you know all too well. It is precisely at this point that we Christians are enjoined to pray for an infusion of the Spirit of God in our lives to help us untangle what appears to be the largest hairball in the history of snarled psychosocial strangeness.

We pray for discernment. We pray for wisdom and understanding. We don't have to save everyone, but we do have to do our part. We also have to know when to stop, when enough is enough. This is not easy. It is messy as people are.

But I hope that you remember, somewhere in the middle of the physical chaos that your house may become, somewhere in the middle of the social chaos that your extended families might become, that this is your stage and this is your time… to love- in all of its risky vulnerability.

Poor Ebenezer Scrooge… It wasn't just that he was preoccupied with work and money. He kept holding himself back, waiting for a better year or different people. He kept waiting and waiting… And he missed… his own life.

Don't leave any unused love in your tank. If God can use a couple simple teenagers to start the revolution of love, God can use you. If God can make it all happen in a simple barn, God can make it all happen in your home too.