August 2002

Exodus 20:1-17

I would like to begin by sharing the words of Kirby Page, the author of Living Courageously and other books. It is a statement worth thinking about:

It is absolutely incredible, the way we walk through life with head down, lowered eyes and unheeding ears. To the presence of a veritable miracle we stand as unblinking as an old cow in the meadow.

He is telling us that too often we seem to be sleepwalking through a world filled with wonders. Instead of seeing one miracle after another, most of us see only a blur. Through the ages, great thinkers have considered this problem. Plato said, "To wonder is the beginning of living and thinking." Henry David Thoreau observed, "The millions are awake enough for physical labor. But only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, and only one in hundreds of millions is awake enough to achieve a divine life."

Today we live in an age of speed, technology, computers and information. Yet we seem to have lost our sense of awe. Many of us seem to be just sleepwalking.

Jesus faced the same challenge. Time and again, day after day, He tried to bring life to his disciples and to crowds of people. He tried to ignite some kind of energy in them. He tried to give them a sense of who they were, of what they were given, and of the wonder of life. Did He not say:

I have come that you might have life, and have it in all of its fullness.

We know that the Psalmist said:

This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

What is the problem with us? Well, some of us are bored. We've shut down, and life has become one continuous yawn. We're closed off from the wonder of it. Many more of us have become so busy that life has become clouded and fogged. Our whole lives are scheduled. We can't see beyond the tension, anxiety and worry. Because of our inner turmoil, we're not alive to what's going on in the moment.

How can we turn this problem around? One way is by listening to life, the real teacher. The lessons that we need to learn are given to us by our daily experience. I daresay that most of us receive a wake-up call every single day.

Illness can be one of the biggest wake-up calls. Often when we become ill, life is telling us that we are moving too fast. It is as though we are driving our bodies faster and faster as though they were cars, yet refusing to shift out of first gear. We need second, third gear. We need overdrive! We need to be relaxed as we move along.

Illness demands something else from us too. When we get sick, we are wise to ask the question, "What is my participation in this illness? Why has my body been a willing host to this problem?"

We don't like to ask that question. We like to think illnesses come from the outside. "This is not my fault, not my responsibility," we like to think. But Hans Selye, the grandfather of the stress movement, said that all illness is stress-related. Of course, we all have vulnerabilities and genetic predispositions to certain ailments. But when we become ill, the question we must ask is, "Where in my life am I a participant in this particular illness?"

Some of you know my story. When I was forty-five years old, I went outside one morning to take out the garbage. We were living in White Plains. It was a chilly morning, and I felt a little tightness in my chest. I'd never had that feeling before. I went back inside into the heat and I felt fine again.

A few days later, it happened again. I took an aspirin, and again I felt fine. Up to that point in my life, my belief had been, "If you don't feel good, you wait awhile, you take an aspirin, and everything is well."

That Thanksgiving, we were in Hawaii. I was swimming, and there was that tightness in my chest again and I thought, "I'm in trouble. Something's wrong." Still, I said nothing to anyone. I got back to New York. One Sunday morning, I was walking from Grand Central Station to Marble Collegiate Church. I got as far as Lord & Taylor's, nine blocks north of here, and I couldn't walk any more. I was stopped. The pressure and the tension in my chest were so hard.

So I went to the doctor, and he told me I had angina. I had heard that word before, but I didn't want to know anything about it. It would never affect me! But I had it. Angina means that the arteries are blocked and the blood supply cannot get to the heart.

And so I had surgery. I was blessed to have a wonderful surgeon. He was not only skilled at what he did, but skilled in the art of compassion. And he said, "Arthur, you know this kind of thing doesn't just happen. I'm going to make a suggestion to you. I want to refer you to a psychiatrist."

A psychiatrist! Me, needing a psychiatrist?

But I found a wonderful one. After a few visits, I asked him, "Can you tell me why I got sick?"

And he answered me, just like that. He had me figured out in the first ten minutes of our first session. He said, "Clogged-up arteries mean clogged-up emotions." I had trouble accepting that. I'm expressive. I'm from an Italian heritage. I cry at movies. But I knew deep down that he was onto something.

Then he said, "Everybody that I have seen who has clogged arteries has repressed anger." And I knew he had me. I knew that I had a lot of anger stirring around in me, and that I never knew how to locate it or express it healthily. I had spent years literally swallowing my anger.

"I'm going to be a nice man," I always thought. "I'm going to be Christian. Christians don't get angry."

He helped me to get in touch with my anger. And then he said another important thing: "Everybody who has this problem feels trapped in some area of life. Caught, unable to move out of a situation."

And I knew he had nailed me again. I was a participant in the illness that I had. In order to get well, I would have to participate in the healing process.

That illness was a wake-up call for me. It has been an incredible gift. It has forced me to get in touch with problems I would not have related to otherwise, and it has made my life fuller.

Before my illness, I had lived a life of postponement. "I will look at the colors later on," I told myself, "I will get together with my friends someday. Some Christmas, I will go up to Rockefeller Center to look at the tree. Maybe next year. I'm too busy now." My illness broke me out of that pattern. It made me attentive to the really important things in life.

My guess is that everybody has had some kind of major illness or been close to it, or experienced a major traumatic event. Those were wake-up calls. Were you paying serious attention to the messages they brought?

I was talking with a minister friend from here in the city. He told me he had recently met with a group of young male executives who were making a lot of money in their great jobs. They were working very hard. They had everything they had ever wanted. But they said to him, "Reverend, we have all this, but we don't have a life."

Statements like that are wake-up calls. Those men were beginning to move into another dimension. They were listening to the call of that still, small inner voice that speaks to us all.

In the quiet and darkness of the night, what is that voice telling you? When you're in the midst of a mishmash of activity and bothersome stuff, what is that voice saying? Listen to it. There's a good chance that voice is telling you the truth about yourself.

Laurie Beth Jones, in her book Jesus in Blue Jeans, writes about keeping life precious, which means staying in touch with life's wonder. She writes that when Moses came down from the mountain bearing the Ten Commandments, he was telling us to keep life precious. Do not take the name of the Lord in vain, keep His name precious. Remember the Sabbath, keep it holy and precious. Honor your father and your mother, keep them precious. Do not commit adultery, keep your marriage vows precious. Do not kill, keep life precious.

There's something disturbing to me in the American soul today. There's such harshness in our attitude toward those who have committed crimes. Now, everybody needs to be accountable for what they do, but I view as horrific the decision the Supreme Court made in 1977 when it reinstated the death penalty. We are the only western country that has this penalty. It's barbaric.

Whenever I mention this topic, people say, "Arthur, you don't understand!" I do understand. I understand when Jesus was on the cross, He did not call for revenge against the people who'd had Him killed. He did not belittle himself by the smallness of doing to others what they had done to Him.

In the New York Times recently, I read an article by Bob Herbert called "Inside the Death House: The Grisly Work of Executions." He had interviewed a number of people who worked in a prison in Texas, where many executions happen. One guard, a man who had often participated in executions, said, "I was working in my shop one day, and all of a sudden something just triggered in me. I started shaking. I walked back into the house and my wife asked, 'What's the matter?' Tears, uncontrollable tears, were coming out of my eyes. I said, 'I just thought about that execution that I did two days ago, and everybody else's that I was involved in.' Something triggered within me, and all those executions all sprung forward in my mind."

The Rev. Carroll Pickett, a chaplain who was present for ninety-five executions before he retired, observed, "Lots of guards quit. Even those tough guards you're talking about, a lot of those quit."

Those are wake-up calls, wake-up calls to our sense of values. Wake-up calls to the sense of the precious, to the realization that life itself is precious.

Gary Zukav, in his book Soul Stories, refers to Victor Frankl, the late Austrian psychiatrist. During World War II, Frankl was a prisoner in a concentration camp. His captors took everything away from him. They killed many of his friends. They forced him to live in terrible conditions, to work in the cold with little clothing, to sleep in a frozen barracks.

One morning as Frankl and his fellow prisoners were going to a job, the guards were yelling at them and hitting them with their rifle butts. Then something strange came over Dr. Victor Frankl. He began to understand his reason for being. He saw that he was not a victim - that he was not to belittle himself by acting toward his persecutors as they were acting toward him. He saw that his whole job in life was to learn to love. Even in those horrendous circumstances, he could keep life precious and hold onto it.

That's a wake-up call. It's a gift. Let us look for our own gifts as well. Let us pray.

Lord, we thank you for this time together, for sharing this word and, Lord, for the call to keep life precious and to be aware and alert to the good things that are happening. May this be in each of our lives. In Christ's name we pray, AMEN.