Sermon delivered at All Souls Community Church

Grand Rapids, Michigan November 27, 2005

Copyright ©

Jeremy Melvin

Today is the first Sunday in Advent. It is the beginning of the season when Christians prepare for the impending infant arrival of Jesus. Thus it is called Advent, from the Latin venire, to arrive or come, and the prefix ad, to or at. So at this time of year, this time of arrivals and beginnings, it is good to ask ourselves, where are we? What is this place we have arrived at in our life? How do we know who we are? How do we find our place in the world?

Usually we use an accumulation of labels to identify and position ourselves: we look to our nationality, religious background, gender, family. We say that we were born in this place and raised in that place, went to school here, were employed in this way and then in that way; we married so and so and are friends with these other people as well. We’re members of this and participants in that; we live in this town and vacation in that place. The more aspects of ourselves we can name and describe, the more complete the picture of ourselves becomes, the more precisely we are able to describe the geography of our life, the more accurately we can map our position in the world, our place in life.

Yet something, we know, will still be missing. When we identify ourselves through all of these various attributes, we have only described where we are in terms of the past, of where we have come from. When we speak about ourselves in this way we are always speaking, at least by implication, in the past tense. We have described where our lives are up to the point of their current ending – up to the point which has just past. But this is not the same thing as the present; it is not the same thing as saying where we are. In a certain sense we can never say where we currently are, because the present exists so fleetingly. The present is that moment, that liminal moment, where the limit of the past – the ending - meets up with the limit of the future – the beginning. The present is the space in which the end and the beginning coexist. And so to really be able to describe where we are we must know both where we have come from and where we are going.

That is exactly the problem: how do we know where we are going? Does anyone know where they are going? It is unfortunate, perhaps, that few of our births, unlike that of, say, Jesus, are attended by prophecy. No celestial voice or angelic visitor comes down to our mothers and says, “Rejoice, for you have conceived in your womb a daughter, and you will name her Beth. She will grow up to be slightly above average and will major in classics. Consequently, she shall go into business and prosper, and marry Fred. And she shall be called Vice President of Marketing, and Mother of Bert and Ellie; and her time on Earth might have had no end, but in her seventy-eighth year she shall die of a heart attack while planting rhutabega.” This simply doesn’t happen to us, and so we are left to figure it out on our own.

Often we might think of this as a curse. We may wish that everything was nicely mapped out for us and that we merely had to take one step in front of the other along the path that would assure us success and happiness and avoid trouble and pain. But it is also a blessing – it is the great blessing of our lives, because the fact that our future is not preordained leaves us free to determine it for ourselves. So much of our life has already been decided for us, anyway. Many of the identity markers I mentioned a few moments ago are things we have little or no control over. We cannot decide where, when, or to whom we are born. We simply show up one day and are immediately set down a path which we never chose and that does not even offer us many choices for a long time. The choices we are able to make as we grow and develop are still very limited by whatever genetic attributes we happen to have been born with and by the way our life has been shaped by the context that we are born into. But the future aspect is the one in which the choice is ours: given the place we have begun, where do we want to end up? Given the abilities and disabilities we have been given, what do we want to do? We are trying, in other words, to answer the question, “what is the end, the purpose, of my life on this earth?” “What is my life about, after all?”

Perhaps you’ve never asked yourself this question; or perhaps it occurred to you once and you quickly dropped it. I certainly don’t think about it constantly and most of the time it doesn’t occur to me because our daily lives are so engrossing. Between the daily grind and the routine pleasures of life, we can have little opportunity or even desire to look much further than the next few steps. At this time of year, particularly, when our lives are full of so much festive busyness it takes all of our energy simply to stay focused on what’s immediately in front of us.

But sometimes something will happen: this question of who we are and what we are about has a way of coming up on its own. Suddenly a moment may come when all of the things that are lives are full of and that are crowding our vision suddenly fall away – and instead of looking at the luxuriant undergrowth of life, instead of seeing that full and varied landscape that life so often presents to us, we suddenly find ourselves staring out across an emptiness – suddenly all of those things that just a moment ago seemed so big and so important – that so dominated our vision so fully – now seem small and insignificant; the scale of our life suddenly changes and we see very far, indeed, far across the blank terrain until our eyes reach that distant point beyond which we can see nothing.

I had a moment like this when I was eighteen. I was in the upstairs bath and I was looking in the mirror. I was eighteen, after all, and was living the sort of life only possible for eighteen-year-olds. Out of the worst of adolescence, I was confident and sure of myself; not yet burdened by the responsibilities of adulthood, I was carefree and lighthearted. I ran cross country, was active in drama, was a good student, accepted to my first choice college, with friends and money to spend. I was alive – and I knew it; I could feel life coursing through me and I looked in the mirror and I could see it. But I also saw something else. I looked again and then put my hand to my temple and lightly touched the skin on my head, up to where my hair was. And I realized that I had never touched this skin before! Last time I had noticed – whenever that had been – I had hair there! I felt again and pressed hard, to make sure I was feeling the right spot. And I leaned in and looked real close – and looked and looked and looked and then realized I was going bald. I couldn’t believe it. Going bald! No high school diploma, me, but I’ve got Male Pattern Baldness! Here I am, finally at the age when I feel that I am really coming into my own, when I’m really myself, and suddenly I see little bits of me slipping away – already! It was literally like a blinding flash went before my eyes and in an instant I could see my entire life stretch out before me – in running shoes today, shuffling in loafers tomorrow – I saw it all, but I didn’t recognize myself. I had thought I had known who I was and where I was, but suddenly I looked out ahead of me and realized I didn’t know where I was going.

That experience was certainly terrifying in some respects. Obviously, today I am quite reconciled to my littleness of hair; in fact, my mother took the news of my eighteen-year-old balding harder than I did. But that moment was also thrilling, exciting. It was exciting because I saw that there was more to me, more to my life, than I had really understood. It was almost like relief to know that I was not as finished as I, at eighteen, felt; it was freeing to know that I was still in process, that life was opening up with possibilities I hadn’t yet seen and did not at that moment really understand – and which I am only now coming to understand.

My baldness – or at least the first realization of its inevitability – was an important milestone in my religious journey. A central part of the religious and spiritual life is the practice of integrating these sorts of moments into our lives. It is the discipline of dealing with the questions, “who am I?” and “what is my life for, what is it worth?” It is through asking these questions that we make ourselves open to those glimpses of transcendence; it is the practice of stripping away all of the things that might limit our vision so that we can see life at its barest, most basic – at its baldest - so that we, too, looking out over the ocean of the world can see far into the distance, so that, as the poet says, “God’s visions are to me more vivid” than those of daily life.

The religious life is a discipline, something that takes practice; it is difficult and it throws you back on yourself and your own reserves of strength. It is often lonely and difficult. Jesus, of course, was born in a barn and killed on the cross – an exile from regular society at his birth and his death and for much of the time in between was a wanderer, and reviled and rejected by many. And the Buddha, born a wealthy prince, renounced that life and wandered in the wilderness searching for enlightenment and, after achieving it continued to live the life of the wanderer, depending on gifts of food to stay alive. To embark into the religious life is to ship out for the “steep salt-water road,” it is to have one’s “thought…thrown beyond [your] heart’s cage now…[Your] mind is cast upon the sea-swell, over the whale’s world, widely to course creation’s coast.” It is to journey out, into the unknown future, to journey out from where you feel you know yourself, to where you feel a stranger, to where you can see yourself in a new and different way.

At times it will be, as the poem I read so clearly expresses, a bleak and forbidding experience. Because it forces us to look at things in a very strong light, a light that exposes many of the things that are often hidden by the complication and confusion of daily life. On our own, drifting across the blank sea of life, we are forced to face ourselves. We will have to face our fears, and there is nothing as frightening as our own fear and weakness. Nor is there any storm as fierce as when our own soul is conflicted, or any landscape as bleak as our own times of hopelessness; the greatest ugliness we will ever have to face is our own.

You are likely saying right now, well, if this is religion, thank you very much – good sermon, learned a lot, you’ve got my offering, now see you later – I’m going to join the Church of the Sunday Paper. Why subject ourselves to something so difficult and unpleasant? Why not just look away from the bleak shore, and have a good time with that “fine fellow, carefree in his cups, set snugly up in town”? Why not just try to live a happy life while you can?

Well, one reason is that there is no guarantee that life will be happy – and there is a good chance it won’t, and we should do what we can to prepare ourselves for it. But there is another, more important reason to subject ourselves to the rigor of the examined life, the true life of the spirit, and that is because it is only in facing the forbidding landscape of ultimacy, it is only by setting out to explore the edges of life, by going out to the edge of death itself that we can understand what life itself is. Looking out to our end is only the beginning; it is only by starting from an understanding of the end that our life is really able to begin. It is in those moments when we come up against our limits, when we see where we fail, we weaken and collapse; it is in those moments when we look at life baldly, when we stand in the bow and strain our eyes in the bright light and the stinging spray, looking out into the emptiness that burns our eyes – it is only by doing that that we are able to understand how full life is.

When we look away from God’s visions – when we return to the shore of routine human life – when we see again how our lives are dappled like the forest-light with good things: with friends, family, the great bounty this earth is capable of – when we hear again the sweet sounds of music and laughter, when we feel again the rapture of art, or the wonder nature – then we are able to really know it, really appreciate it. We are able to see deep into the heart of life, we are able to look into its depths because we have looked out to, if only briefly, its edge and even beyond its edge. We are able to know beauty because we have seen terrible things; we are able to know how wonderful it is to eat because we have been hungry – how good it is to sleep because we have been wearied; we are able to feel love because we have known loss; we know pleasure because we have felt pain.

It is because we have sailed out along “creation’s coast” – we have reached out to the limits of life and have felt its shape – it is because we have done that that we are able to reach out and put our arms around it, we are able to reach out and embrace life, bring it close, and cherish it.

And we do not make this journey alone, for we are all shipmates on life’s voyage. This congregation is a gathered people – a people that have freely chosen to join themselves together in one body and in one purpose, who have covenanted, promised one another, “to walk together in the ways of truth and affection.” This is the way it must be, for no substantial spiritual life can be lived in isolation. Even and Jesus and Buddha did not walk alone. Jesus did not spring from the womb, fully-formed prophet, but thought and conversed for decades before setting out on his own ministry. And he did not even do that alone, but gathered about him his twelve companions and was constantly in dialogue with those around him. And Buddha, after he left his father’s palace, studied under and spoke with every sage and holy one he could find and he, too, had many followers that accompanied him in his travels after he had found enlightenment under the tree. So do we, also, journey together in the company of our fellow congregants. The world is to big, the journey to complicated and far to make without each other’s help. You look out to the horizon from where you stand, and I from where I am and it is only by sharing with each other what we have seen and experienced, what we have learned and what we are still asking that we will go the farthest and see the most. What wonderful sights we might miss that someone else has seen and can tell us of! What hard-won wisdom we might die with us if it is not shared, passed on to others.

So, where are we? What is the place we have arrived at now? We have arrived at the boats; we have arrived – our destination – is the beginning of our journey. So let us journey together. Let us, before the day comes when we must let go of life, take leave of shore again and embark on that last voyage from which no one returns, let us set out upon the waters together, making our way over the waves, circle this world and embrace it, and know we have arrived at home.