Sermon: Finding Inner Resolve

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Finding Inner Resolve

By Charles Rush

March 29, 2009

[ Audio (mp3, 7.2Mb) ]

dedicate this sermon to the memory of Kianoosh Sanjari and the long list of conscientious objectors who are imprisoned or have died alone for speaking the truth to power. May God be with you. The original idea for this sermon was to speak a word of hope to those who are stuck in the mud of life, whether that be re-visioning your work that is not coming back or other spiritual sludge that has you mired.

Sometimes, the hardest part is getting to that first step.

I would like to open with a short piece from one of the iconic depictions of youthful dreaming in the American imagination. It is the opening scene of Dorothy in the “Wizard of Oz”. As she sings “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, she so wonderfully embodies all of that naïve, optimism and promise that she is sure that life holds for her. [ Roll clip ].

But there is another scene that uses this song that was cut from the original film that also uses this song. The producers decided that Judy Garland did it too well. We no longer have the film but we do have an audio tape of that scene. It is late in the movie. Dorothy, the Lion, The Tin Man, and the Scarecrow have been captured by the Wicked Witch. She has taken them back to her castle. Dorothy is locked in a cell and tries to revive her spirits with a familiar tune [ listen here or here ].

Such pathos! That second one was truer to Judy Garland's lived life. She was so wonderful, talented and beset by inner conflicts that did her in… The director and the producers decided that this scene was too good to show. The year was 1940. The United States had been through a decade long Depression, the Axis powers were in ascendency and the Germans were making steady gains across Europe. The producers decided that the song was just too sad and that the American public couldn't handle it. They were probably right.

We humans are fundamentally meaning shapers. It is the most amazing thing. With a sense of meaning, we can endure almost anything. Without real meaning, no matter how much we may be propped up by material comfort and prosperity, we wither.

It is easiest to see in and through people for most of us. Most of us are pretty concrete at the end of the day. What we know of the love of God, we know in and through the love we have experienced right around us. Sting had a great song about this spiritual piece of us…

You could say I lost my faith in science and progress
You could say I lost my belief in the holy church
You could say I lost my sense of direction
You could say all of this and worse but

If I ever lose my faith in you
There'd be nothing left for me to do

Some would say I was a lost man in a lost world
You could say I lost my faith in the people on TV
You could say I'd lost my belief in our politicians
They all seemed like game show hosts to me

I never saw no miracle of science
That didn't go from a blessing to a curse
I never saw no military solution
That didn't always end up as something worse but
Let me say this first

If I ever lose my faith in you
There'd be nothing left for me to do

If parents hang in there long enough, they may be lucky to watch this magic at work in their own children. Many are the hours that my spouse has fretted over some immaturity in our children that you wish would ‘grow up'. You model. You lecture. You take it to therapy, perhaps… Nothing, no visible change of behavior. I used to say, ‘honey, there are some things that Mother's never will cure and that is why we have girlfriends'.

Right now, it is the baby, muddling through her freshman year at Art school. This is a child that couldn't be bothered with cleaning in High School. Clothes covered the floor of her bedroom. You didn't even want to open it and have a look see. God only knows what is growing underneath that pile.

She is home spring break with her boyfriend, the Chef. The two of them are making dinner for her other brothers and sisters. I'm like ‘Wow, we've graduated from Raman noodles'. Dinner table is set, looking good. Her mother and I are walking through the kitchen and we overhear the boyfriend giving her a little talk on the importance of presentation with food. She is plating the food and asking him if everything is in place like it should be…

We just kept right on walking into the living room -- a quick ‘High Five'. How does that transformation take place?

And the converse is true as well. That is what makes divorce so painful. There are so many different kinds of divorce… I think that some of the toughest one's I've known are the one's that spouses can't actually talk about. There may be infidelity, may be not, but that is not the problem anyway, it is just a symptom.

The problem is not even that you don't communicate that well, although that may be an issue as well. The problem is not even that you aren't very fulfilled, although that is almost always the case. It is something more fundamental, fundamental enough that you can't really bring yourself to voice it to anyone. You know your spouse so well. You know what they can change and what they can't change. And you add it all up. At some gut level, you just don't have… a basic respect? What is it? A basic faith in them? You find yourself just incredibly flat and sad and confused… You don't even want to say it but you are up early in the morning, walking by yourself before dawn, and you are thinking to yourself, “I can't do this anymore… I just can't.”

And the thing is, when you get to that point, it really feels like there is nothing you can do to salvage this relationship. Even if you wanted to, you just couldn't re-knit the shredding fabric in your hands. That is simply a deeply sad day. So sad, you can't even really explain it to your friends and family. It is so sad that most of the time, you and your spouse don't ever actually name it either but both of you know and just seems better to walk away.

We are fundamentally meaning shapers and when that meaning is gone, we cannot go on for long, no matter how propped up we are with material comfort or security. It just doesn't work.

And with meaning in our lives, we can endure all manner of hardship and difficulty. That is one of the profound truths of the Christian story at this time of year. In the middle of the gospel of Luke, we have this one line about Jesus. The gospel says, “He set his face towards Jerusalem”.

He had been in the beautiful countryside of Galilee where he was very popular and had been well received. But he had a sense that destiny lay in the great city on the Hill where the Roman authorities had their seat of power, where the religious leaders gathered at the Temple. You didn't have to be clairvoyant to know that he would likely see confrontation, arrest, probably death.

Trust me, he had a pretty good idea of what kind of fate awaited him in Jerusalem. Trust me, he had thought about this and he had prayed about this. The people were telling him what would happen. His disciples were advising him about these things. You didn't have to be a genius to figure this one out. The Romans left people hanging on those crosses as you entered the gates of Jerusalem. With all of that in the back of his mind, the scriptures say, quite simply, ‘he turned his face towards Jerusalem.'

He didn't need prosperity to prop him up. He didn't need to control power. He didn't need to be entertained or even have fun. But he lived profoundly. He found the meaning of his life and that accessed the deeper dimension of human existence. He did not live or die, in vain.

The night before he was assassinated, Dr. King was in Memphis to help unionize the garbage workers. They were on strike for a livable wage. At the time, as hard as this is to believe, the Mayor of Memphis didn't want to pay the garbage workers a standard, regular wage because he argued that one of the perks of their job was being able to leaf through the trash and keep some things that other people were throwing out. The Mayor was white, almost all of the workers were black. The Mayor spoke just like the racists from the Old South. He brought in the police. He was going to bring in the National Guard. The garbage workers were afraid.

Dr. King had to speak to their fears and he did. He talked about the previous ten years. He reminded them of facing fire hoses and dogs in Montgomery. He reminded them of the nights he had to sleep in his car. He told them about the death threats. He reminded them that when he was signing books in New York City a woman with psychiatric issues stabbed him in the chest and that the blade was so close to his aorta that the Doctors said if he had sneezed, he would have died. He had been surrounded by threats, so that he could have easily been thrown off his game if he had focused on safety alone. He knew the dangers around him.

But he asked himself the same question that the Good Samaritan asked: what would happen to me if I didn't help? What would have become of me if I didn't get involved? Who would I be if I didn't risk? That is the question that God asks of us.

And then come his haunting last words… “Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the Promised Land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord…”

His life was not lived in vain. Even though, he lived too short a life, his life was not a triumph of tragedy. He tapped into the profounder way to live. He discovered what he was put on this earth for and he tapped into the deeper dimension of human existence.

Surely this is one of the reasons that the crowd came out to see him. It was the cause. It was the oratory. Sure. But it was also that people realized that he had tapped into something they suddenly knew they were missing when they saw him. We are hungry for a deeper way of living. We need a profounder meaning in our lives.

Mohandas Gandhi… In India they called him “Mahatma” which means ‘The Soul-Force”. Just a wee man with steel spectacles… an ordinary lawyer… the only assets he had when he died could be held in a couple boxes. But, what a life? What a profound life. He almost stumbled on the meaning of his life and became the conscience of his nation.

Profundity is not usually romantic. You don't always win the Nobel Peace Prize or have your face turned into an icon. No most profound people you've never heard of. They are like Steven Biko. He died naked, alone, cold and in pain. It was nothing but ugly. Truth be told, we don't get to control much of that. But he found a cause in his life, organizing the end of apartheid, that was so powerful that none of that could stop him. No threat could undo him. No torture could cause him to compromise. They could kill him.-And let's be clear, sometimes they will kill you- but had found a meaning and a purpose and that opened him to a spiritual dimension of human existence that can give you super-human resolve.

No, most profound people are like Kainoosh Sanjari.[i] He was arrested for protesting at college in Teheran about 10 years ago. And he was re-arrested nine more times, serving 6 different prison terms for the crime of peacefully protesting the autocratic Islamic Republic of Iran.

He would have like to have had a relaxed life like any 25 year old, enjoying soccer and bottle of beer probably. But he could not be uninvolved. He kept alive the cases of 500 other prisoners of conscience in Iran. For that he was arrested again. He knew that was not good. He told his friends that he probably wouldn't survive the torture. Like any normal person, he was afraid of prison. No one wants the deadening boredom of a prison cell. And he was beaten to death. It was not romantic in the least. But somewhere in those first prison terms, he became changed as a person. He found his inner integrity. He found a core meaning. ‘This I believe'. It opened to him the deeper spiritual dimension and gave him a super-human resolve.

What are you living for? What is the meaning of your life? What are you to be about? My brothers and sisters, I hope that you can avoid serious suffering and deprivation. I really do. But more than that, I hope that you stumble on a purpose that can see you through the thick and thin times of life. I hope that you can become real. The clock is ticking. Amen

[i] My thanks to Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal. His op-ed on Tuesday, March 24, 2009, p. A15 first brought Mr. Sanjari to my attention.