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David McCullough says that "the digital watch is the perfect symbol of an imbalance in outlook in our day. It tells us only what time it is now at this instant, as if that were all anyone would wish or need to know." (Brave Companions, p. 232) But it "is possible to be as provincial in time as it is in space," McCullough adds. Therefore, in his commencement address at Middlebury College in 1986, McCullough tells the graduating class that he wants them all to go far, to travel extensively. Not only in space, but also in time, because we face a crisis of memory, a crisis of history, he says. "Because you were born into this particular era doesn't mean it has to be the limit of your experience. Move about in time, go places. Why restrict your circle of acquaintances only to those who occupy the same stage we call the present?" "Imagine a man who professes over and over his unending love for a woman," McCullough challenges the class of 1986, "but who knows nothing of where she was born or who her parents were or where she went to school or what her life had been until he came along - and furthermore, doesn't care to learn. What would you think of such a person? Yet we [Americans] appear to have an unending supply of patriots who know nothing of the history of this country, nor are they interested. We have not had a president of the United States with a sense of history since John Kennedy - not since most of you were born. It ought to be mandatory for the office. As we have a language requirement for the Foreign Service, so we should have a history requirement for the White House." Harry S. Truman, who never had the benefit of a college education but who read history and biography and remembered it, spoke truth, McCullough insists, when he said that "the only new thing in the world is the history you don't know." Presidents should know it. McCullough concludes his jeremiad with the observation that in the Capitol building there is an old hand-made clock with two hands that show us where we have been and point us to what's ahead. On the clock is painted an old-fashioned face, the face of Clio, the Greek Muse of History, who still watches over Statuary Hall, the room where the House of Representatives, the people's chamber, used to deliberate. But in the chamber where the House now meets there is no such reminder of history; the present chamber is watched over only by television cameras, the ubiquitous eye of the narcissistic present. And just so, says the moral theologian Stanley Hauerwas in his book The Peaceable Kingdom, we live in a world of moral drift, because in our day we do not deliberate with Clio as watchman, with history as guide. We do not know who we are, he says, because we do not know where we have come from. We are uncertain about how to live and uncertain about what we value, because we no longer know or believe a shared story of who we are. Instead, we live in a world of moral leftovers, a world of moral fragments literally left over from an earlier people who did share a story, a people who did know who they were. But moral leftovers do not provide a balanced diet for a people, Hauerwas warns, so life, for us, has simply become a "consumer life," a life of "I want this" or "I prefer that," as if the choice of an abortion or a war or a theology, on the one hand, and the choice of a brand of toothpaste, on the other, are cut from the same cloth and carry equal significance. Since, as a people, we no longer know how to choose between that which is truly valuable to us as participants in God's story and that which is not, since, as a people, we no longer know or share that story - God's story in the world - we choose substitute gods, those gods the Bible calls idols. We choose our gods the way we choose toothpaste and presidents; we simply choose whatever god we desire to choose. And so we drift; we drift, to borrow an image from O. E. Rolvaag, like the early snowflakes of October, like a few white, downy snowflakes that hang quivering in the air, floating about and falling in great oscillating circles, heading for nowhere, following no common course, and that finally simply reach the ground, and, in time, are buried and disappear. I have a priest friend who once spent a pleasant morning in the quiet of a garden with his friend Dick. Dick was one of the ablest and most ambitious young lawyers in Chicago at the time and, at age forty-two, he was just home after hospitalization following a heart attack. "It was," Dick said, "a terrifying experience. I stood right at the gate of death." "And what now for you?" my friend asked. "What do the doctors say about the future?" "The doctors say I will be able to resume a normal active life," Dick replied, "back to the way I used to live. But I'm not going to do that. It's as Dr. Johnson said to Boswell, 'There's nothing like the prospect of hanging to focus a man's thoughts.' I've stood before death, and I've received life back as a gift. I don't know yet just how I'll live out that gift, but I do know that my life will never be the same." "It got me to thinking," said my friend, "that visit to Dick's garden. Thinking about how we focus our vision of who we are and where we're going and of what the living of life is all about anyway. It got me to thinking about where we stand to look at life and set the course for our journeys. Because, whether or not we stop to think about it, we all do stand somewhere: we all do have a vision that shapes who we are and how we live." So for a moment this morning I'd like to ask us to consider the place where Jesus has stood the past several weeks, the place from which he has invited us to focus our vision of life. Consider the man a couple of weeks ago who pushed his way out of the crowd toward Jesus and asked Jesus to make his brother share the family inheritance with him. And consider how Jesus offers to help the man focus his vision of life from the perspective of time and of God, how Jesus tells the parable of the rich fool who was so rich he had to build bigger barns and banks to hold all his money in, but how the man died that night anyway. And consider the way Jesus follows up that story with his words last week about how it doesn't do any good to worry about your life, about what you are to wear or eat, because worrying doesn't add a single hour to the time God gives us anyway. And consider how Jesus asks us to think about the lilies of the fields and the birds of the air, about how they don't worry, and how God clothes and feeds them like Solomon himself. And consider how God loves his children even more than his lilies and birds, Jesus adds, and how, even with our little faith, God is pleased to give us his kingdom. And consider how Jesus tells us to sell all our possessions and give to the poor, so that instead of putting any stock in treasure that wears out in time, we might find ourselves with treasure in heaven which will not be exhausted, if only we know who we are and where we come from and where we are going, if only we know what our treasure is which no thief can steal and no moth destroy. And consider how Jesus tells us all this because it is truth, a truth of history and of life, the truth that where our treasure is, there will our hearts also be. Consider that truth, Jesus suggests, as a place to stand, from which to focus our vision of who we are and how we are to live! Consider what treasure will truly provide for us in the emergency room at one o'clock in the morning, he says. Where do we stand at that hour to take the measure of our vision of life? What treasure, at that moment, focuses our vision of life, our vision of what we are to wear and how many barns and banks we need? Which god speaks to us then the story of our lives? What treasure do we have to call upon at that time and in that place? Do we need then only the gods of the digital watch and the television cameras, the gods of the narcissistic present? Or might we be better served by the God of eternity, the God who, throughout history, points us toward where we are headed in life because he reminds us of where we come from and who we are? There are, Jesus reminds us, gods that fail us. The idol of the moment - personal preference - is one of them. Money and power and fame and success are in that pantheon as well, as are all manner of correctness, whether political or racial or sexual or intellectual or theological. Even religion. In the end, all these fail us, and only faith and hope and love - and God - remain. So Jesus calls us to an alternative vision, an alternative treasure, an alternative story, calls us to the story Mary knew, the vision we sing of today:Elizabeth said that Mary was blessed and that the fruit of her womb was blessed. And Mary said that all generations would call her blessed. Why? Why was Mary blessed, rich beyond measure? Mary was blessed, rich beyond measure, because she had more than a digital watch to tell time by, more than television cameras to give her a place to stand to measure life. Mary was blessed because she knew who she was, because she knew the story of the God of Israel, and she knew where she stood in that story and accepted her part in it. She knew that she was a small, but crucial part in a story that was much bigger than she was, a story that required more than digital watches and television cameras for its measure. In her low estate of that one-o'clock-in-the-morning experience when the time had fully come and the angel Gabriel spoke to her, Mary knew that her hope lay only in treasure that is never exhausted and whose promise endures. So drawing upon that treasure, she consented to bear Jesus to the world, and she sang the whole history of God's way with us. She sang about how God, too, is One whose heart is where his treasure is - with the lowly and poor - and so he remembers them and raises them up and blesses them with great purpose, with purpose larger than that of the narcissistic present, purpose and meaning greater than "I want" and "I prefer." Mary was blessed because she was God's treasure and because she, too, had a treasure - the story and promise of God - which is not exhausted at one o'clock in the morning and which not even death could diminish: Mary knew who she was, and whose she was: child of God, God's heir, God's servant. Mary knew that it was not all about her, and so she said "yes" to God's vision for her life. "I am the Lord's servant," she replied; "may it be to me as you have said." We need to have an audit of our treasure chests. We need to know what real treasure is, so that when our time has fully come we can sing with Mary: "My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, who extends his mercy to the lowly from generation to generation, and fills the hungry and lifts the humble. We need an audit of our treasure chests so we can see what is there, so we can see where our hearts are. Would yours reveal a treasure that can survive those one-o'clock-in-the-morning crossroads of life when a business fails, or a husband or wife falls apart, a treasure that can survive those moments when dreams fade or a child is missing? Jesus, of course, stood at just such a crossroad in life on the way to Jerusalem, facing the Cross. The fruit of Mary's womb, too, was blessed and rich beyond measure, just as Elizabeth said he was, because he had a mother and a Father who watched over him as he learned his history. Jesus, too, knew who he was and whose he was. And so, as he confronted the Cross, his treasure did not fail him, but enabled him to live out his life and his death with a difference, a life and a death - a destiny - much bigger than "I want" and "I prefer." St. Laurence also stood there. We celebrated his feast day this week, the feast of the deacon who was martyred at Rome in the year 258. Roasted alive, tradition says, on a gridiron. The Emperor Valerian had begun a persecution aimed primarily at the richer classes of Christians. Valerian confiscated the properties of the Church, told us we couldn't meet in lovely buildings like the one we have here. And he took them by force for government use. Valerian arrested the bishop and seven of his deacons, and then executed all of them except Laurence. The emperor held Laurence back for a time as hostage, because he believed that Laurence knew where the the Church hid its treasures. So Valerian showed Laurence the dead and mutilated bodies of his bishop and his brother deacons and then ordered Laurence to take him to the Church's treasures so that the gods of the present could steal them. Well, as Dr. Johnson said to Boswell, "There's nothing like the prospect of being roasted alive to focus a man's vision, so Laurence gathered all the poor and sick of the Church, all those whom he as deacon was responsible to serve with the Church's relief funds, and he brought them to the emperor and said, "These are the treasures of the Church." To help Valerian focus his vision of life, Laurence pointed Valerian to the story of God in history, to the story that Mary sang and Jesus lived, to the story we sing of today - to the needy, to the poor and the poor in spirit, to those who know that their treasure is God. God loves and raises up and blesses the likes of these, Laurence said, because God's heart, too, is where his treasure is. Valerian, of course, was sorely disappointed. But Laurence was not, because Mary was with him. And Jesus. The Feast of St. Mary the Virgin, a feast of the Incarnation, reminds us that God happens in time, in history. God happens in the days of Caesar Augustus and Pontius Pilate, in the days of Isaiah and the emperor Valerian, as well as in our own. And as David McCullough says, "it is possible to be as provincial in time as it is in space," and therefore, like the Class of 1986, we need to travel extensively, not only in space but also in time, because we face a crisis of memory, a crisis of history, not only in the nation, but also in the Church. We appear to have an unending supply of Christians who know nothing of the story of God in history, nor are they interested. But this morning Mary calls us to go far, to travel widely, not only in space but also in time, because the only new thing in the world is the part of the story of God you don't know yet, the part that Mary played at one o'clock one night long ago, the part that Laurence played in the emperor's courtyard, the part that the Cross and the empty tomb have played time and time again in palaces and in mangers, always under the watchful eye of Clio. In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. |