On the Road
By Charles Rush
April 6, 2008
Lk. 24: 13-35
[ Audio
(mp3, 6.5Mb) ]
r story starts with one of the most enduring images in human history, being on the road. It brings to mind the Paul McCartney and John Lennon singing that quintessentially 60's song, “The Two of Us”.
Two of us riding nowhere
Spending someone's
Hard earned pay
You and me Sunday driving
Not arriving
On our way back home
We're on our way home
We're on our way home
We're going home
We're going home.
| |
Two of us riding nowhere
Two of us sending postcards
Writing letters
On my wall
You and me burning matches
Lifting latches
On our way back home
We're on our way home
We're on our way home
We're going home.
|
Two guys, Cleopas and… the author
couldn't remember his name, ‘old what's his name'… These two guys are leaving
Jerusalem after the Passover is finished, reflecting on the death of Jesus, sad
that the hopes they had for the political messiah really didn't come to pass,
just trying to figure out what it all means.
They bring to mind this whole genre
of two friends on the Road trying to figure it out. They are kind of clueless
like the guys in Jack Kerouac's book, ‘On the Road', only without the skewed
distortion of hallucinogenic drugs that Kerouac made Kerouac's work so Kerouac.
We've actually been saturated with
this metaphor when you think about it. As a child, I remember the very
beguiling images of Peter Fonda and Dennis Hooper in ‘Easy Rider' trying to
figure out what the 60's meant with the ‘who me' Jack Nicholson on the back of
their chopper in his football helmet.
That was followed by ‘Thelma and
Louise' in the 80's, two middle aged women, trying to figure out how to be
women in a world of chauvinists small and smaller, careening from one
catastrophe to another on a mission to find out if they could love themselves
and find meaningful romance at the same time.
That was followed by “The Motorcycle
Diaries” in the 90's, where the college aged Che Gueverra and his buddy take a
road trip in a very beat up motorcycle across South America and meet all manner
of peasant poverty and social ills that brought the educated and wealthy Che
into a new consciousness and a new political approach that he became so famous
for.
That was followed by- and here we are
squarely in our generation- the movie ‘Sideways', where two middle aged boys
who refuse to grow up, steal money from their mothers and sample wine up and
down Napa valley, all in an attempt to get laid the week before one of them
gets married, at the tender age of 40. They still sort of raise the great
questions of the meaning of life- just dumbed down, fluffed out, and the butt of
jokes on themselves. Gone is that concern about the great existential questions
of human existence that wracked Woody Allen just two decades ago. We are
content with an argument over the sumptuousness of Pinot Noir versus Merlot and
getting to the wedding on time. Such is our generation.
But the great quests have usually
been about the great questions. I read the novel “Molloy” by Samuel Beckett in
college. Beckett has this character Molloy that starts out on a journey on his
bicycle and much of the trip he suffers from a handicap and can only pedal the
bike with one leg. Very odd. He runs into this person and that.
He is looking for someone but he
can't exactly remember who it is. Along the way he keeps seeing a handkerchief
here or a country lane there that jogs his memory. It looks vaguely familiar
and it keeps him going. Along the way, people offer him bits of information
that are helpful.
Towards the end of the novel, this
character starts to lose his health, and becomes tired and somewhat desperate
to quit this journey and find his way home, only he doesn't really remember how
to get back. He is just getting weaker and weaker, each new day filled with
some ambiguous fog that partially helps him on his way but never enough to see
clearly. He just keeps stumbling
forward.
And just when he is about as inwardly
discombobulated as the ever-changing landscape around him, he turns up a very
pleasant drive, walks up to the house at the end of the drive and is filled
with a sense of positive vibrations,
like little fizzy bubbles from champagne floating to his consciousness. And
walking around he has this overwhelming sense of harmony and resonance like he
could close his eyes and still reach his hand behind him and find the latch a
side door. The place seems so familiar.
He has, unwittingly, found his own
home. And without knowing it, he has been looking for himself.
Beckett's novel was admittedly very
strange but I thought this insight was close to brilliant. In many ways that
aptly describes most of us at mid-life. Whatever expertise we may have in our
professions, mostly we feel that the interior search to discover authentically
who we are- who we really are- is pretty much like this character. We are on
some vague quest, in poor health. We have forgotten just slightly more than we
remember. We know who we are looking for but not really, not nearly as well as
we ought to know them. We have this sense that we are just stumbling forward in
a fog, hoping against hope that we are headed in the right direction home.
And he wrote this piece at
mid-century with all of the questions that were posed to us Westerner's by the
Holocaust, by two World-Wars that nearly rent us in half, and were only brought
to a peace by the invention of a nuclear bomb. Symbolically, it was posed for
us collectively by those gaunt faces at Auschwitz staring blankly through the
barbed wired.
And it prompted this deep,
soul-searching question in Europe and the U.S.? What is the meaning of Western
man? What was the point of Western Civilization now that we have come to this
impasse? The flowering of humanism in the Renaissance… the spread of human
rights for all people… the dignity and sanctity of the individual… the freedom
to create… the role of conscience… self-development and the faith in new economic
initiatives.
All of these ideas, all of these
values shaped over centuries of faith, reason, art, erudition. And in the most
advanced part of Europe, in the most urbane and sophisticated heart of Europe,
we have the blank stare of the victims at Concentration camps, silently posing
this question for us… Who are we really? What have we been about?
Particularly for those European
intellectuals that felt that they were born into a ‘world come of age', they
lived on the other side of the Enlightenment from the Age of Faith. They
believed in the humane values of the individual, of conscience, of human
dignity and values of Christianity but those values were no longer rooted in
the institution of the Church which they had left behind. We were so sophisticated,
so secular, so mature…. So why do we have these haunting, gaunt eyes staring at
us from these death camps?
Collectively, all of us in the West
had to set off again in search of an explanation, a collective soul-searching….
And
without really knowing what it was exactly that we were looking for, we came to
realize that we were looking for ourselves.
Do you ever wonder about that in your
own life? Do you ever wonder that right in the middle of living your life, you
might actually be missing the point altogether?
This is one of the main reasons men
love Tony Soprano. Tony has so many contradictions in his life, so many
compromises that he has made to patch his career and his family together, that at 45 he has these panic attacks which cause him to faint. The mobster in
therapy and he gets that his life is killing him, but he still doesn't really
get it. He knows something is wrong- wrong enough to go to therapy. But he just
can't see enough to actually change anything.
Do you ever wonder if you are like these
two guys in our story, walking with Jesus but not actually seeing who Jesus
really is- you are going through your life and you are getting it done but you
have this feeling that you the meaning of your life is eluding you, even you?
It is like Rollin Burhans, who tells
of the day he went to pick up his son at Harvard. Graduation ceremonies were scheduled and they
went to see what was going on. The
German chancellor Konrad Adenauer was to be there, and they stood outside the
graduation hall to watch the cars and limousines drop people off at the
entrance, hoping to spy him. They looked
and looked, but they never saw him. They
did see one car drive up and two elderly women get out and walk in
together. They were disappointed.
When they got back home, his wife said, “Did you see
them?!” “See who?” Rollin answered. “Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller!” she
excitedly said and showed them the news photo of them: Anne Sullivan and Helen
Keller as they walked into the Harvard graduation, the two older women they had
seen. They had seen them and missed them
all at the same time.
Do you ever
wonder if you aren't watching your life, but without the newscasters at CNN and
Fox to tell you what is significant about the tape of your life, if you aren't
actually seeing it but actually missing it completely at the same time? Dante
has that haunting opening line in the Inferno “Midway through the journey of our life I found myself in a dark woods,
and straight away I was lost. Ah, and how hard it was to actually tell even
what kind of wood it was… the thought of it is as scary as death itself… I
cannot say how I entered it, it [was like] I was a sleep.”
If you haven't
felt this way yet? Great. But you will. Everyone, each in their own way, loses
their way. That is why the message of the New Testament is about starting
over. It is about redemption of what is
lost. No one gets it right out of the starting gate. At some point, we all lose
our way and the point of our lives becomes about putting it back together,
about picking up these broken pieces and figuring out a way to go on. It is about reconciliation with others, with God, with ourselves. We
worship the God of the Second Chance. The spiritual point of our lives is not
about obtaining perfection. It is about recovering from our brokenness. It is
about healing what is quite obviously sick in our families, in our communities,
in our selves.
How do you do
that? Our story this morning contains a simple suggestion. Don't overlook the
obvious.
The enigmatic
figure of the hidden Christ does two things. First, he opens the scriptures. We
have a tradition and perhaps the main value of that tradition is that, over the
past 2-3 thousand years, this long procession of millions of people that have
been in this tradition, have posed almost all of the main spiritual questions.
You don't need to re-invent the wheel.
By the way, you
probably aren't going to be very good at it either. I was recently watching
with amusement, The Darjeleeng Limited,
a story about 3 brothers that go to India to find their mother and sort out
their odd New York upbringing. Not having any religious tradition, but sensing
that healing their family was fundamentally a spiritual quest, they keep coming
up with these quasi-religious things to do, harnessing the energy of the
universe like some Indian swami would, as though somehow Indian rituals are
more spiritual- I guess because they are more exotic. Of course, they look absolutely ridiculous
and Quixotic. And the movie is pretty funny. But, I never would have believe
how many otherwise sophisticated, educated New Yorkers will look anywhere and
everywhere for some loopy spiritual guide like Shirley MacClaine rather than
consult anything at all in the religious tradition that has sustained 400
generations of their ancestors.
Of course, when
you are sick, you could just seek out healing remedies wherever you could find
them, but I wouldn't advise ignoring intentionally anyone that has gone to
medical school or who is acquainted with our 2000 years of medical education.
The tradition
may not have all the answers, and surely it has created some stumbling blocks
along this arduous tenure, but it is probably wise to stay in conversation with
the tradition. You aren't the first generation to get lost on the way.
And the second
one is also simple, but probably profound. When do these two lost travelers
recognize Jesus for who he is? In the breaking of the bread… Even today, we
recognize Jesus in the breaking of the bread.
For Jesus, as a
Jew, he was saying the blessing that
Jews say the world over even today. “Baruch Hatah Adonai Elohenu Melek Ha Olam
Ha Motsi Lechem Min Ha Eretz” “Blessed
are You, O God, King of the Universe, who brings forth bread from the earth.” It
is the very simple, but profound blessing and eating together that brings us
into community.
So also with
the Eucharist. We break bread together and we share in our communion together.
I had a patient years ago that was afflicted with Schizophrenia of a manic
variety. He was always talking to himself in this garble… agitated, his poor mind flooded with more
thoughts than he could focus on. The doctors and staff were amazed at the fact
that the young Chaplain was the only person that could actually get him quiet
and calm. It was during the Eucharist. After the elements were blessed, I would stop over him and say,
“Spencer, the body of Christ” and he would finish “which is broken for me” and
taking the wafer he would become completely calm. He stopped talking.
He stopped his nervous habits. For about 20 seconds, he was himself again. It
was sort of miraculous.
If someone were to ask me why I take communion week in and week out, I think that
is what I would say. I want to remember whose I am so for a
minute I can be myself again. Week in and week out, we bring so many
different burdens and concerns around that table, sometimes full of grief over
the recent death of a loved one, sometimes just psyched about a new job,
sometimes just looking for something to help us endure the coming week with an
intractable problem that will not be resolved. We stand shoulder to shoulder.
Because one way
or other, the end of this story is probably significant. After these two
recognize Jesus. After they wake up and get it, what do they do? They stopped
wandering aimlessly confused by themselves, and they return to their people.
They head back to their peeps.
For better and
worse, that is exactly where the matrix of our salvation lies. We are no better
and no worse, no more able to find ecstatic rapture than with our people. The
experts and the patients are sitting on either side of you. No matter how far
and wide your journey may take you, and it just might be pretty far and wide
eventually the long and winding road leads you back here to start the healing.
Welcome home! Amen.
© 2008
Charles Rush.
All rights reserved.