“RUNNING ON EMPTY”

 

 

A post-homiletical discourse delivered by the Rev. Dr. James R. Beebe

Rector, St. Patrick’s Church, Incline Village, Nevada, December 27, 2009

 

     Yes, I admit it.  I’m guilty.  I have said it.  I think I may have been about 10 years old or so.  There they were – sisters, parents, grandparents, all sitting there in the room.  In the center of the room loomed a mountain of torn, folded, spindled and mutilated Christmas wrappings, along with an assortment of orphaned ribbons, scotch tape and little scrawled to/from cards.  We had just finished unwrapping the 753rd present. 

 

I looked up and exclaimed, “Is that all?”

 

     Excess has a certain symmetry to it.  There is the long season of shopping…umm, I mean, Advent waiting.  There are lights and music (if that’s what you want to call it:  “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” “Let It Snow,” and, if you’re really lucky, perhaps a very bad “O Holy Night”).  I think, subliminally, I’ve got the November 25^th-to-December 25^th-humming-mindless-tunes-to-myself-as-I’m-walking-through-the-mall routine down pat.

 

     But I digress.  One of the things I’ve noticed is that strange, rather empty feeling that happens right after Christmas.  Before Christmas, at least, the snow was there for a reason.  If I had it my way, we’d have two feet of snow until noon on Christmas Day.  Then it would suddenly clear up and be 72 degrees for the rest of the year.  Well, maybe not.  At the Saturday Night Alive service the kids all pray for snow.  Maybe there’s room for compromise.  How about cancelling the snow in March?

 

     Then there is that lovely sense that you’re going to be paying for the joy of all this emptiness for quite some time.  What is your VISA-break-even month?  February?  No?  Gonna use your tax return?  No?  Then maybe June….

 

     Maybe I’m one of the lucky ones.  For many folks the whole season is nothing but empty.  Parents or partners who have died, leaving intimate and well-practiced family traditions full of wistfulness rather than joy.  Maybe a divorce or seasonal depression or bad childhood memories.  Clergy try to make you feel better by telling you that Jesus will fill that empty spot.  Or make you feel  better.  But I’m thinking there’s more to it than that.

     Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German minister who was thrown into a concentration camp following his conviction in the conspiracy to kill Hitler, was spending Christmas Eve in 1943 alone in an empty stone cell.  He was thinking of his family, of the woman he loved.  Here’s what he wrote in a letter from that prison:

 

“Nothing can make up for the absence of someone we love, and it would be wrong to try to find a substitute; we must simply hold out and see it through.”  It is nonsense to say God fills the gap; he doesn’t fill it, but on the contrary, he keeps it empty and so helps us to keep alive our former communion with each other, even at the cost of pain. 

 

     When I read things like this, I am reminded of the God who makes a living bringing resurrection out of death.  The transformation of bitter pain into a precious gift is nothing other than an out-and-out miracle.  Karl Barth, a Swiss theologian and contemporary of Bonhoeffer, forever felt guilty for shaming Bonhoeffer into coming back to Nazi Germany from his New York City safe haven.  Yet, it was Barth who described the church as a “hollow place.” 

 

     People sometimes criticize the church for being hollow or for lacking substance.  But that wasn’t what Barth meant at all.  He saw the church as a hollow place – a canal through which flows something quite different from itself – living water.  “Where the church ends, there is its beginning.  Where its unrighteousness is exposed, there its righteousness dawns.”

 

     [The Rev. Sarah Odderstol]  In his article, “The Healing for Which We Took Birth” Stephen Levine tells of his experience with a woman hospitalized with metastasized cancer.  With the cancer now in her bones, Carol was in agonizing pain. She had been a tough business woman and a difficult parent—to such a degree that, although she was apparently dying…, her children would not visit her, having been pushed out of her heart and life so often before.

     She had never even met her grandchildren.  Nurses, doctors, visitors were all greeted with anger and profanity. So she was usually alone in her misery, wrapped in self pity.  Then one night, a strange thing occurred.  One night when she was in excruciating pain, instead of resisting the pain, she surrendered for a moment and allowed the suffering to move through her….

“She experienced herself not as that woman in the hospital, but as an Eskimo woman dying in childbirth.  A moment later, she said, she was a black-skinned [Nigerian] woman nursing a starving child from a slack breast, dying of hunger and disease.  Image after image arose, which she described afterwards as feeling the suffering of “ten thousand people in pain.”

 

     The transformation that grew out of that moment was astounding. Levine describes her as a wholly new woman.  She asked her children for forgiveness and pleaded for their return into her life, and within a week the grandchildren she had never met before were sitting next to her on the bed.  Although her body continued to deteriorate and she continued to be drawn gradually toward death, “she died as healed as anyone we have ever seen,” Levine writes.

    

     Consider the blessed ones in the parable of the Last Judgment:  the king says to them, “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat.”  And the righteous reply, “Who, ME?”   People who practice dying to themselves become, in the process, unselfconscious.  And that’s because they don’t make a practice of thinking about themselves and what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.  They’ve subtracted all of the superfluous “needs” in their lives until they become, simply, themselves.

 

     Jewish philosopher Martin Buber used to tell the story of Rabbi Zusya, an 18^th century Hasidic rabbi.  Shortly before his death, the rabbi said to his disciples, “In the world to come I shall not be asked, ‘Why were you not Moses?’  I shall be asked, ‘Why were you not Zusya?”

 

     Spirituality is pursued by subtraction.  Michelangelo was asked once how he sculpted such a perfect statue of David out of a block of marble.  He explained that he took the block of marble and chipped away anything that WASN’T David.  To the Christian, the chipping away of anything that ISN’T our True Selves is the sine qua non of the spiritual journey. 

 

     The first thing we decide is whether we WANT to lose our life for Jesus’ sake in order to find it.  Do you want to find your REAL life – the one that is full of joy and peace and redemptive suffering?  It’s not an easy decision to make because our egos are very content with the way things are.  Jesus told Nicodemus that you have to be born again if you want to see the Kingdom of God. 

 

Problem is, if you ever allow yourself to see, it will be the death of you, for to see is to love and to love is to die.

 

And to die is to live.