Sermon: Spiritual Adventure

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Spiritual Adventure ^[i]

By Charles Rush

July 12, 2009

[ Audio (mp3, 6.1Mb) ]

e opening scene from Time Bandits, the Monty Python movie, pans in from outer space to a suburban neighborhood in England. We see thousands of blocks of the suburbs, hundreds of homes in variation of 6 house plans. It looks like the seemingly endless sameness that goes from the suburbs of North Chicago all the way to Milwaukee.

The camera zooms in on one home. Inside Mum is fixing a microwave dinner with her hair in rollers. Dad is pulling on a can of cheap beer in the easy boy lounger chair in the dining room. The T.V. is on. You notice that there is a T.V. in every room. One the T.V. is a game show like Jeopardy. The game show host is at least as obnoxious as Pat Sajak. The sound from the tele is so loud, no civil conversation can be had.

Mum is calling their only child to the TV dinner tray in front of the tube for the evening meal. This kid emerges from his room but begs off from dinner. His parents are glued to the set, glazed over by the beaming particles of banality that have sucked the élan from their souls.

The kid walks backward into his room and retreats to reading his book on Knights and Chivalry, of a different England in a more engaging era. He falls asleep, the light from the TV still shining under his door.

In the middle of the night, his bed starts to shake. A bright light is glowing from his closet door. He pulls the covers up over his chin. The door to the closet bursts open and a knight on a horse rears and bolts straight over his bed, smashes through a picture on the wall above the bed board. The kid freezes. People keep streaming out of his closet, jump on to his bed, through the picture frame after the knight on the horse. All of them are wee people, just like in the old England before it was so banal.

The kid looks through the picture frame. All of the people are falling into space and disappearing quick. What does it mean? Where does it go? He looks back over his shoulder at the safety and predictability of his TV den. He looks into the swirling chaotic adventure in front of him. He looks back at the security of his Mum and Dad and suburban England. He looks forward into the closing chance of the great unknown. And he jumps through the picture frame. Go for it kid.

It is still the secret longing of every kid. Our world isn't quite so uniform as Levittown but we might be surprised to hear our kids interviewed on the subject of adventure. I doubt that our children are going to remember us as real adventurous either. I suspect that twenty years from now, when our children lampoon us, they will remember how concerned the whole generation was about safety. They are going to tell us that we loved them so much, we couldn't let them fall.

Of course, a great deal of it is legitimate. We've learned a few things. When I was a child in the South, one of our favorite past times in the summer was riding our bikes in the evening behind the trucks that sprayed clouds of DDT to kill mosquitoes. I swear I never once heard a parent suggest we shouldn't ride right behind the truck, let alone come in doors, or organize a protest against spraying in general.

Ours is a generation that believes in safety. This is a generation that added an 11th commandment. “Thou shalt not unbuckle your seat belt for any reason at any time.” It is amazing to see toddlers all buckled in. I had trouble with my kids. But nowadays these car seats are so deluxe. Soon they will come with a built in juice dispenser and a remote to the VCR. Why would you ever need to leave?

Our playgrounds are phenomenal. All rounded edges. Lots of plastic and tire rubber. Slides that are tubes so you can't fall off. Nice fencing all the way around it with a gate that is locked every evening. And if a kid does a kamikaze off the three foot high walk way, he is cushioned by 18 inches of mulch.

Or, how about these new trampolines that have all the springs covered with pads and come with a screen all the way around the tramp to catch anyone that might go over the edge. They have a netted top, looks like a cage. Kids jump around. All the parents have to do is throw in some bananas and apples, come back in a week.

I was with one of my godson's last weekend. He wanted to show me how he could ride his new scooter. He had on his helmet, his elbow pads, his knee pads and a mouth piece just to ride down a 5 degree slope on his driveway. He was having a hard time keeping his balance. No wonder, he looked like the Michelin man.

Of course, part of this is driven by law suits. Nowadays, if an accident happens, somebody gets sued for it. It is as if, we are teaching the next generation that accidents no longer happen. I suspect our children are going to tell us, that it was as if we believe that the goal is to get our kids through their youth without a broken bone, without any pain. That is understandable for parents but it is not very exciting either.

My fear is that we are communicating this to our kids about religion as well. Directly and indirectly, I'm worried that we are telling them that religion is a kind of inoculation that will be good for them in the wide world of sex, drugs, and violent movies. We got through it when we were kids, you'll get through it too. It's like oatmeal, not very exciting, but “it's the right thing to do.” It may be true that we didn't get much from the institutional church when we were kids and it may be true of most church programs we could enroll our kids in today.

But Jesus says this is not true of the Kingdom of God. We've just had bad religion. Jesus says that the Kingdom of God is like finding a treasure in a field. It is so joyful and exciting that we are willing to sell everything we own to buy the field and have that treasure.

In the ancient world, people buried stuff all the time. This was an era of regular wars. Burying stuff was the safest way to protect precious cargo. The Kingdom of God is like stumbling on some buried loot from one of these wars.

For us, the Kingdom of God is like sorting through the papers in your Grandfather's attic just after he died and discovering a shoebox with a rubber band around it. Inside are sheaves and sheaves of stock certificates for I.B.M. stock and a picture of your Grandfather with Tom Watson taken back in the 30's. They are both holding a typewriter that your Grandfather invented. Inside is a note that says, “For all your help in our little venture together. I hope one day this stock is worth something. Yours, Tom”. Sheaves and Sheaves… your mind is bubbling with possibility… a whole new vista has suddenly opened up… you can't even sleep it is so overwhelming.

I suspect that our kids are aching for a little real adventure in the midst of all this safety. Real spirituality is like that, let's not forget it. And in the bible, real spiritual encounters so often come in open-ended adventures. Abraham and Sarah are told to “go to a land that I will show you” by God. Moses is called out of the desert to go to Egypt and speak for God”.

Lived spirituality is an adventure. And it is not only an outward adventure, it is also an inward adventure. I am thinking for a moment of a spiritual journey not in the bible but which we can learn from nevertheless, the journey of Odysseus one of the oldest spiritual journeys recorded.

Odysseus fights a noble battle against the Trojans and he wants nothing more than to return home to his beloved wife Penelope and find happiness. But happiness is not so easy and you can't just sail back home to realize our full spiritual purpose.

On the way home, Odysseus is held captive on an island by Calypso, a goddess that forces him to love her until he is sexually drained every night. Rough work, but someone has to do it. He is stranded on this island and she will not let him go. She symbolizes the inner struggle that we all have to go through coming to grips with the primordial sexual urges that rise up within us and control us at different points in our lives, particularly in our youth. Part of the interior spiritual journey is coming to grips with our shadow side and wrestling with it until we have developed a meaning and purpose for ourselves, not because someone is watching over us like the police, but because we have wrestled through with our shadow side to the point that we have owned our purpose for ourselves.

At one point, Odysseus proclaims that his love for his wife is so great that all other sexuality causes him pain. He pleads to be freed and Calypso, upon hearing this, lets him go.

He sails for home again. But he is stranded again on an island and has to fight the Cyclops, a half-god/ half-man that is a brute no one can handle. Again, the outer adventure is matched with an inner adventure. As we go through life, we have to face the primordial brute forces of emotion that reside so deeply in our selves that they threaten to overwhelm us on occasion- anger, frustration, the lust for revenge, rage. It doesn't matter that they are real or apparent, they are parts of ourselves that still have to be met and wrestled with if we are ever to find our way home to happiness.

Jenny in Forrest Gump goes back home with Forrest one day to the house she grew up in. Standing there, she remembers the sexual abuse that she suffered as a child at the hands of her father. The house is empty now. Her father is dead. She picks up a rock and throws it through the window… and another, and another. She is wailing and throwing. Forrest says “sometimes there just aren't enough rocks.” Real rage, real revenge is a lot to deal with spiritually.

Like so many real victims of abuse or unjust suffering, her adult life revolves around managing the subterranean emotions of anger, revenge, rage. And the polar twin, self-loathing, feelings of unworthiness, licentious behavior that doesn't take yourself seriously.

No, that is tough spiritual work, wrestling with those subterranean emotions, tough mainly because we don't even realize that they are affecting us until we have already acted out in some rash, stupid, self-defeating manner. It is a life long adventure to tame them.

Odysseus defeats the Calypso, a giant that has killed hundreds and hundreds of men who have tried to battle it and lost their lives. He continues home.

He lands on another island and is taken to cave to the underworld. He sees his old comrades that died in battle at Troy. He sees his mother. He sees his childhood friends and mentors. He has to come face to face with the inevitability of his own dying, his own mortality. You can't find the full spiritual meaning of our happiness on this earth without coming face to face with your own dying. That is not easy work either but it simply must be done. Through that encounter, he comes to realize that beauty, power, wealth, position are all fleeting. They come and go but they don't last. He comes to realize that the only thing that transcends time is our character- the excellence that we have internalized and externalized in gestures of love, compassion and sacrifice for others. For the rest of his life, he is going to focus on character.

Finally, he gets home. He has been away for 10 years. He comes disguised as an old Man. Things have changed. His kingdom is in disarray. A bunch of people figure that he is dead. His old friends having big feasts on his cows while he was away. Some of them have been trying to seduce his wife full time. Now, he has the biggest and most painful challenge of all. He has to figure out who is genuine and who is a well-meaning fraud. He has to look into the soul of other and discern who has character, who is virtuous. That takes wisdom. And wisdom only comes after you have mastered all these other things.

At this point in his life, he has seen all that glory on the battle field has to offer. He understands the possibility and limits of money and material things. He has mastered his emotions and his sexuality. His morality and his spirituality are his own. No one has to tell him what to do. They don't have to guilt him into anything. That is not the point. He is beyond that. His moral spirituality is internalized. He is in search of excellence, of a virtue that money cannot buy and time cannot rust.

The truth is that authentic spirituality is something we make our own. It is like a treasure that we find. The truth is that the inner journey is as adventurous as the outer journey. It is as challenging to master and a great reward when you discover true excellence and virtue. I'm not saying it is easy. I'm not saying it's quick. But it is not boring and frankly, it is not safe either. No matter how much we inoculate ourselves against it, the spiritual adventure will try us to the very depth of our souls. But what an adventure it is. Amen.

^[i] A version of this sermon was preached by Rev. Rush on October 1, 2000.