I have recently been reading Returnings: A Spiritual Journey by Dan Wakefield. It is what I
would call a “spiritual autobiography,” an account of Wakefield’s boyhood in
the American Midwest in the 1950s, a time of affluence, security, and religious
faith, followed by his education at Columbia University when he adopted a
superficial agnosticism. The book is about Wakefield’s eventual return to the
Christian faith later in life.
Wakefield writes of his youthful outrage at the pious
platitudes of Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, the popular preacher of the 1950s who
wrote The Power of Positive Thinking. Wakefield
says that Peale popularized a “bland, conformist Christianity” that “not only
seemed superficial but downright offensive.” The Power of Positive Thinking asserted “that religion was a
‘scientific’ method of making one’s life better” and that “the Bible contains
‘techniques’ and ‘formulas,’ … “that ‘may be said to form an exact science’.”
“Dr. Peale made it seem so simple with his assortment of
hints for happiness such as ’10 easy, workable rules,’ ‘7 … steps,’ and so on.
A friend of Wakefield’s family took him to New York City’s
Marble Collegiate Church which Peale served as pastor. Wakefield described “the
vastness of the church and the huge crowd of worshipers…” He said ”there was
not an empty pew… at the shrine of 1950s upbeat conformity and assurance. I
remember the smile and the gleaming white teeth of the famous pastor.”
I had an occasion to meet Norman Vincent Peale several years
ago and think that he had a bit more depth than Dan Wakefield is willing to
attribute to him. Nevertheless, it is difficult for me to reconcile Peale’s
belief that the Bible contains anything like a “science” of “positive thinking”
with the words of the prophet Zephaniah:
Be silent
before the Lord GOD!
For the day of the LORD is at hand;
…
At that
time I will search Jerusalem with lamps,
and I will punish the people
who rest
complacently on their dregs,
those who say in their hearts,
"The
LORD will not do good,
nor will he do harm."
THEIR wealth
shall be plundered,
and their houses laid waste.
Though
they build houses,
they shall not inhabit them;
though
they plant vineyards,
they shall not drink wine from them.
The great
day of the LORD is near,
…
That day
will be a day of wrath,
a day of distress and anguish,
a day of
ruin and devastation,
a day of darkness and gloom,
a day of
clouds and thick darkness,
…
Neither
their silver nor their gold
will be able to save them
on the day of the LORD's wrath;
in the
fire of his passion
the whole earth shall be consumed;
for a
full, a terrible end
he will make of all the inhabitants of the earth
The words
of Psalm 90 are almost equally harsh:
3
You turn us back to the dust and say, *
"Go back, O child of earth."
"Go back, O child of earth."
4
For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is
past *
and like a watch in the night.
and like a watch in the night.
5
You sweep us away like a dream; *
we fade away suddenly like the grass.
we fade away suddenly like the grass.
6
In the morning it is green and flourishes; *
in the evening it is dried up and withered.
in the evening it is dried up and withered.
…
The span of our life is seventy years,
perhaps in strength even eighty; *
yet the sum of them is but labor and sorrow,
for they pass away quickly and we are gone.
perhaps in strength even eighty; *
yet the sum of them is but labor and sorrow,
for they pass away quickly and we are gone.
About the same time that Norman Vincent
Peale was writing The Power of Positive
Thinking, theologian Paul Tillich was teaching at Harvard University’s
divinity school. In one of his great sermons Tillich wrote this about Psalm 90:
A shallow Christian idealism cannot
stand the darkness of such a vision. [But] the Bible… the most universal of all
books, … reveals the age-old wisdom about man's transitoriness and misery. The
Bible does not try to hide the truth about man's life under superficial
statements about the immortality of the soul. Neither the Old nor the New
Testament does so. They know the human situation and they take it seriously. [The
Bible gives us no] easy comfort about ourselves.
There is nothing in Tillich about the
Bible or the Christian faith as “a ‘scientific’ method of making one’s
life rosier.” I might say that Tillich represents the opposite pole from Peale!
I don’t know
about you, but I prefer Paul Tillich to Norman Vincent Peale. I also do not find the words of Psalm 90 to be
all that depressing, especially when you contrast them with the words of
Zephaniah.
Zephaniah
tells the people of ancient Judah that they would build houses but not inhabit
them; they would plant vineyards but not drink the wine that would be pressed
from their grapes.
In contrast,
the psalmist says to God, “You have been our refuge from one generation to
another.”
Do you hear
the contrast? Zephaniah speaks of the futility of human effort: Nothing we
build will last. That’s true, says the psalmist, but we DO have a home, an eternal home, in God who is our refuge from one
generation to another.
In brief,
the human predicament is this:
Life is
short. Nothing we do or build or make will last forever. So what’s the point?
Why try?
Not only are
we mortal but even our civilization is mortal, finite, limited. According to
Psalm 90, we may live for 70 or 80 years. A civilization may last for a few
hundred or even a few thousand years, but even our civilizations will pass
away.
However, there
ARE things that are eternal, and Paul speaks of them in his first letter to the
Thessalonians: “…since we belong to the day, let us be sober, and put on the
breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation.”
Faith, hope,
and love – these are the things that are eternal, the things that last.
Today our
stewardship drive concludes. We are asking you to make a pledge to Christ
Church not so that we can build the things that are mortal and finite such as
buildings. We are asking for your financial support so that we can build
things that really last, such as faith, hope, and above all, love.
This last
week I saw the new film Interstellar. Like
Zephaniah and the author of Psalm 90, Interstellar
can be seen as a pessimistic and gloomy film. For some unspecified reason, life
on earth is coming to an end. Humankind must find a new home on another planet.
But any planet conducive to human life is an unimaginable distance from Earth,
so some way must be found to bridge the vast distance from our galaxy to
another. Some way must be found to transcend not only the vast distance of
space but even time itself.
One of the
main characters in Interstellar says
something that even the apostle Paul would agree with: “Love isn’t something we
invented. It’s observable, powerful, it has to mean something... Love is the
one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends the dimensions of time
and space.”
“Love is the
one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends… time and space.”
In today’s
gospel reading Jesus tells us of the wealthy man who went on a journey and
entrusted one servant with five talents, another with two talents, and a third
servant with only one talent.
We misread
this completely if we think the word “talent” as Jesus used it means anything
like the word “talent” when we use it. It does not mean a skill, such as a
talent for music or painting or playing football.
The talanton was
the largest unit of currency in Jesus’ time. It meant something like a huge
bucket full of solid gold." You would have to be a weight lifter even to pick up a talanton.
I don’t
think Jesus was thinking of money at all when he spoke of “talents.” What do
you or I have that would be the equivalent of a bucket of solid gold?
The word
“talent” as Jesus used it meant all the gifts that God gives us.
In the
parable of the talents Jesus is asking us: What have you done with all the
things that God gives you -- the life, the health, the intelligence,
imagination, and creativity, and above all the love with which God endows all
of us? What have you done with all that?
Those are the
things that last, the things that will not go down to the dust. Those are the
things that we are trying to build here at Christ Church.
In his
sermon on Psalm 90, Tillich went on to say: “The psalmist does not think that … the truth of what he has
been saying will cast man into despair. On the contrary, he believes that just
this insight can give us a heart of wisdom -- a heart which accepts the
infinite distance between God and man, and does not claim a greatness … which
belongs to God alone. …Something
new appears in these words: the significance of past and future, the prayer for
a better future,… a future of happiness
and joy, of the presence of God…. God … is … the God of the future. The cycle
from dust to dust, from sin to wrath, is broken. There appears the vision of an
age of fulfillment, after the ages of misery…. The individual no longer stands
alone before God. He is included among the other servants of God, in the midst
of the people of God who look not toward their return to dust, but toward a
life in a new age in which God is present. Hope supersedes tragedy.”
That is a faith worth living for and a
future worth building: We are mortal but we are not alone. We look not only
toward our return to the dust but toward life in a new age in which God is
present.
So build
something that will last: Love others with all your heart. Counter despair with hope. Overcome evil with goodness. Because at the
very heart of the universe there is a goodness greater than evil; a hope
greater than despair; a love which holds us in an eternal embrace.
