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 John 6:1-14
When I was a very young minister, my older brother, a Methodist minister, was on the program committee of a conference to be held at a resort in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. He asked me if I would provide transportation for the keynote speaker, a famous and influential rabbi. When I called the rabbi to arrange for the pickup time, I thought that he was not providing enough travel time and I suggested picking him up earlier. But very firmly and authoritatively, he said, "We will meet at the time I suggested." Conversation ended.
I did not look forward to that drive. I had never heard of this venerated rabbi and I knew nothing about him. When I first saw him, he looked like what I thought a rabbi should look like--a long beard, and penetrating and intense eyes. When he got into the car, my worst expectations were fulfilled. He said matter-of-factly, "We will not talk on the way to the hotel. We will talk on the way back. I must work on my speech."
So I drove in complete silence. I was certain we would not make it on time. Yet, miraculously, five minutes before he was to speak, we pulled into the resort parking lot. As we entered the auditorium and he stepped onto the stage, there was a spectacular standing ovation with extended clapping and cheering. "Who is this man?" I wondered.
His name was Rabbi Abraham Heschel. I came to learn that he was one of the spiritual giants of the 20th century. He had a profound understanding of the human condition. He understood so much about spirituality, the human need for it and the distorted views so many people have. He was most impressive in articulating divine mystery.
I never saw him again--he died soon after--but he has become one of my spiritual mentors through his books. They are all faded, underlined and dog-eared, and the binding of one is coming apart. Any time I want to refresh my acquaintance with awe and wonder and reverence, I go to Rabbi Heschel.
As you know from your own life journey, there are times when your sense of wonder becomes remote, covered over and hidden, because of the concerns, all the stuff, of our lives. Hear what the good rabbi said about this as he provides insight into our modern age. He said:
The Greeks learned in order to comprehend.
The Hebrews learned in order to revere.
The modern man learns in order to use.
...knowledge [to modern man] means success. We do not know any more how to justify any value except in terms of expediency.
When I reread this recently, it brought to mind a news broadcast I had just heard that some students who failed to be named valedictorian are suing their schools to contest the decision. To paraphrase one of the young girls who didn't make it, "I need this on my résumé." Sadly, as a result of these lawsuits, many schools are no longer honoring the valedictorian in their graduation ceremonies.
Rabbi Heschel comments that our age is one in which usefulness is thought to represent the highest value. We assume that achieving power and using our resources is our chief purpose on earth.
He goes on:
Unfortunately, in our age, man has indeed become primarily a tool-making animal, and the world is now a gigantic toolbox for the satisfaction of his needs?
We teach our children how to measure, how to weigh. We fail to teach them how to revere, how to sense wonder and awe.
And he wrote these words before we had all of our gadgets which compel so much of our time and energy?before the cellphone, before the fancy cameras, before the computer.
One of the more upsetting aspects of our modern age is the way we are raping the earth and irresponsibly using up natural resources which can never be replaced. It takes millions of years to create one drop of oil, and we are sopping it up as if there is no tomorrow. There is no consideration given to those generations that will come after us.
I wonder what the world would be like today if President John Kennedy, when in the 1960s he challenged the creative minds of this nation to get to the moon by the end of that decade, instead had challenged the scientists and business leaders to get us off our dependence on oil by the end of that same decade. It would be a very different world today. It would be cleaner and safer, and we would be healthier. No one knows how many of the diseases we suffer are a result of living in a polluted environment.
Too often we see the earth on which we live in terms of its usefulness to our human purposes. One way for us to help ourselves and really help the world is to rekindle our awareness of nature--to feel wonder, awe and reverence at the mountains, the streams, the lakes, the oceans, the animals, all the beauty of our awesome world--instead of how we can bend it to our own ends.
We might also remind ourselves of how amazing we human beings are and the wonders we can accomplish, how ingenious the human mind is in its creativity. I could suggest that when you walk outside the door of the church after the service, you look up to the left at the Empire State Building, and stand in awe at the ingenuity and creativity of the human mind.
But what I really want to talk about is being awed by the mystery inherent in life itself. Life really is mysterious. We will never get the answers we want. Most of the time the best answer we can get is another question.
I like what Albert Einstein says:
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.
Henry David Thoreau often wrote about the human need to be in touch with awe and wonder and reverence. He felt that the worst thing that can happen to us is to get to the end of life and discover we haven't really lived. I hope none of us here today feels that we have permanently lost our sense of wonder, for without that we will indeed not have fully lived our lives.
One of the great mysteries of life is that our logic is not the same as that of the Higher Mind. What we, with the limits of our human minds, think is best is not necessarily what God knows is best. Thoreau tells a story of the spring day when he burned over a hundred acres of grass. He wrote about how the grass was seared and how dead everything looked. And yet by the middle of the summer, the area he had burned was greener and lusher than anything around it.
I remember a cottage I had on a Maine island which was flanked on two sides by a high hedge. I loved that hedge, but over time it got to be unruly. Parts of it looked dead. I wondered what to do about it. Then one year my neighbor, who had the same kind of hedge, cut it down almost to the ground. I thought, "What an ugly thing she has done. She's ruined the hedge." Yet, within a year or two, it had grown tall and was in full bloom and more beautiful than ever.
Our reasoning, the reasoning of human understanding, says that the way to go forward is to keep moving ahead, yet the reason of the Higher Mind says, "Sometimes to move forward, we have to move back a few steps." We never know what the Spirit is going to do--what it needs to do--in order to bring us into our fullness.
As I look back on my life--and I imagine as you look back on your lives right now--I see how often the hand of God has been present. I look at decisions I made which seemed casual or whimsical, where I just made a decision because one was needed, and I wasn't contemplating its long-term effect that these decisions would have. For example, when I was in high school I had an afternoon job where I learned more lessons about life than I ever have learned in any other place. When it was time to choose a college, I knew what I wanted to study and the part of the country I needed to be in. I asked around, got some advice, and chose the college. The friendships I made there changed the course of my life. At the time I had no idea that some of the decisions I was making, which were natural next-step decisions, would become so important to who and where I am today. I look back on it, and there's a pattern. I can see the mysterious movement of the hand of God, putting me here, and here, and here.
Have there been difficulties? Yes, there have been difficulties. Have there been tragedies? Yes, there have been tragedies. But behind all this is the moving hand of God, creating a pattern I had nothing to do with.
The older I get and the more I see of life and the working of the Spirit, the more I understand that God is in charge. We might think we are in charge. We are not. The Spirit is in charge.
I have had a couple of major illnesses in my life, and I was upset and angry that they were interrupting the plan I had made for myself. Yet now I understand that behind them was the hand of God. These illnesses weren't adversities. They were advantages. Every major negative in my life has really been a gift. It is the movement of the Spirit saying, "Arthur, there are certain lessons that you need to learn." The disadvantages really became disguised blessings.
The other day I was talking with a woman in our congregation who has been employed for a long time at the same company. She is what I would describe as an impact worker there, as she has made a significant impact on that institution. She was telling me that she has a new boss who is coming to the company with a very different orientation from her old boss. She said, "I don't know what's going to happen to me and my job, how many changes I'm going to have to go through. I don't know if in three months I will even have a job." But then she said, "We never know when we go through things like this, with all the anxiety and the fear, if God is setting us up for the next thing we are supposed to be doing."
I told her of a conversation I once had with a mentor. He was in his early nineties, a keen student of human life and human growth. He put his thumb and forefinger together, with just a little space between them, and said: "Arthur, in any given moment we see this much of what is really going on. It is only well after the fact that we get the big picture."
So keep the faith and trust God. As we trust, we will become more attuned to the extraordinary presence of the movement of the Spirit, and more filled with wonder, awe and reverence at the mysterious movements of the hand of God.
One of the great stories in the New Testament is found in all four gospels. Just after He heard that John the Baptist had died, Jesus went off to a deserted place to be alone. But people found out where He was and followed Him. The crowd swelled to five thousand, all waiting to see and hear Him. Jesus ministered to them, teaching and healing. It got to be very late in the day and His disciples came to Jesus and said, "The people are hungry. Let us send to the villages nearby to get some food."
Jesus asked, "Don't we have any food?"
They responded, "There are only five loaves of bread and two fish that a young boy brought."
"Bring the fish and the bread to me," Jesus said, and He held them in His hand and looked up to heaven and gave thanks. Then He said to the disciples, "Distribute these to the people," and they did. When they finished, to their amazement they had twelve baskets of food left over.
We empower the mysterious element in life when we keep the faith and trust, trust, that the Spirit will take care of us. God has a way of being faithful to those who are faithful to Him. So keep the faith, and trust.
When you see the movement of the Spirit in all of its glory, you feel a sense of reverence. God is in charge. The Spirit, mysteriously, is always in motion in our lives--in adversity, in joy, in good times and bad--all of the time. Keep the faith, and trust the Spirit. Let us pray.
For the blessings of our lives, Lord, for our ability to sense wonder and awe, we give You thanks. Keep us open to that important dimension of our lives, that we might always be in a place where we trust that You will guide us. AMEN |
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