Ever
since I was in graduate school I have carried a copy of Henry Thoreau’s Walden in my car. This practice came in handy a couple of
weeks ago when I found myself in the line at the District of Columbia Vehicle
Inspection Station. In other places I’ve
lived, having your car inspected takes about 15 minutes. Here in DC the process can last several
hours. Since I’ve already read my car’s
owner’s manual and tire warranties more times than I can count, I was glad I
had my copy of Walden at my side.
As
I began reading, I remembered the circumstances that led Henry Thoreau to move
to Walden Pond in the first place. The year was 1845. He had recently suffered the loss of his
brother John who cut himself and died of lockjaw. Henry had also had a difficult time holding
down a job. The economy was still
recovering from what we would call a Recession, our parents would call a
Depression, and Thoreau’s contemporaries called a “Panic”. Times were hard for everybody, and though he
was grief-stricken and broke, Thoreau wanted to show that it was still possible
to live abundantly, even through personal and economic crises.
Thoreau’s
answer to the question of how to live in the face of adversity, as all readers
of Walden know, was to suggest that we give
up pursuing luxuries and simplify our wants, so that our energy can go less
toward paying for stuff we really don’t need and more toward enjoying life in
all its fullness.
Sitting
in the DMV’s vehicle inspection line, it was easy to affirm with Thoreau that
life is hard and that there ought to be a better way to live it. But soon after that realization came another
one: life can be more than merely
annoying and frustrating. It can be
really, really hard in more serious ways. When I looked around, I saw all sorts
and conditions of cars and people, and I was reminded once again that life can
often be painful and unjust. People suffer from both natural and human causes.
We can easily feel that we are living in a universe with the deck stacked
against us.
Henry
Thoreau saw that most people were ground down by life—as he famously said, “The
mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is
confirmed desperation.” [Walden] All of
us experience hardship. If we’re honest, we’ll admit that our human spiritual
experience often begins with the experience of suffering. We cry out as an expression of our grief or
pain or bewilderment, and what we want in return is not so much an explanation
as to be heard.
The
poet (and former Poet Laureate) Robert Hass tells the story of taking his
grandchildren to a museum where they saw a statue of the Buddha. Because they
didn’t know who the Buddha was, Hass told them a bit about how the Prince
Siddhartha became the Buddha. As he puts
it,
I told them the story of Prince Siddhartha, how his
father had brought him up in a kingdom of the Himalayan foothills in such a way
that he would never see any form of human suffering, how when he was a young
man and curious, he snuck out of the palace compound and visited the local
village, how he saw there a sick man and a poor man and a beggar and a corpse,
and how, overcome with infinite sorrow at human suffering, he vowed to set out
on a path that would lead him to overcome the violence in the human
heart. [Robert Hass, “Study War No More: Violence, Literature, and
Immanuel Kant”]
Living in
contemporary America is much like being raised by Prince Siddhartha’s
father. We have constructed a world in
which we increasingly try to insulate ourselves from engagement with all forms
of human suffering—including --with alcohol, drugs, overwork, or
medication--our own. But those of us
drawn to the life and witness of the spirit, those of us drawn into the mystery
of a transcendent space like this Cathedral, we know somewhere inside ourselves
that the attempt to deny the reality of human pain is not only impossible; we
know that such an attempt runs counter to the whole religious enterprise.
Like
Thoreau, Jesus lived in a time of economic scarcity. And like Thoreau, Jesus
upended all conventional thinking by telling people that they can actually live
a joyful, free, and abundant life even in the midst of oppressive misery. For Jesus, the trick to living abundantly in
hard times is a simple one. Acknowledge
your frailty. Gather together with others.
Make common cause with them.
Share what you have. When we isolate ourselves behind our possessions,
our power, our privilege; when we try to hoard what we have and protect it from
the world, the forces we would flee gain power over us. When we admit that we’re finite and
vulnerable, when we band together with others and share what we have, we
discover not only the inner resources of God among and within us; we discover
also that there is miraculously enough to go around. And more than that: we discover that there is joy and hope in a
life of compassion and generosity. In
the presence of Jesus, people are healed and hopeful, and there is, simply,
enough: enough food, enough money,
enough companionship to get through life.
As we think
together about our scriptures for today, we find two implications for us in how
Jesus empowers us to live abundantly.
The first has to do with the Gospel reading we just heard, the one in
which a rich man comes to Jesus and asks him the key to eternal life. As Mark tells us,
Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, "You
lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you
will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me." [Mark 10:21]
The rich
man comes to Jesus looking for fulfillment. He has a lot, but he doesn’t have
enough. What Jesus says to this man is that he will find fulfillment not by
trying to shield himself with his possessions.
He will find that fulfillment by opening himself up to life in all its
beauty and ugliness, joy and pain, in fellowship with others. When Jesus uses the famous comparison of a
camel passing through the eye of a needle, he is naming the difficulty we all
have in moving from fear into trust. If
I want to get through the eye of a needle, it will be an easier journey if I
don’t try to take my Volvo with me. (My wife says her Mini Cooper could make
it, but I’m not so sure.) The stuff we trust in turns out to be not an asset
but a burden. It doesn’t protect me. It
walls me off from others and the world. Yes, life can be hard, but it can be
abundant and joyful, too. We usually let
our fear of life’s pains insulate us from the joy of life’s pleasures. The rich man in this Gospel story cannot make
the transition from fear to hope. But
others can and do and will, and they are the ones who in Jesus’s words “receive
a hundredfold now . . . and in the age to come eternal life.” [Mark 10:30]
I said there were two implications for us in
Jesus’s call to abundant living this morning, and here’s the second. It’s found in a gem of a verse from our
passage from Hebrews this morning:
For we do not have a high priest who is unable to
sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been
tested as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of
grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in
time of need. [Hebrews 4:15-16]
Jesus shows
us how to live abundantly in a world filled with joy and sorrow, happiness and
pain. But more than that: Jesus’s experience of human joy and sorrow, happiness
and pain, has changed the way God knows and loves us. God took on human life and experience by
coming into human life in Jesus of Nazareth. By becoming one of us in Jesus,
God now knows what it is to be you. God
has experienced everything—the good and the bad—that human life has to offer. God is not some abstract remote being out in
space someplace. God is some One who has
gone through human life in all its fullness. When we pray to God—when we
complain about our problems, when we give thanks for our blessings—we are
praying to some One who gets what it us to be us. That is the mystery of the Christian life and
faith. God loves accepts and blesses you
with full knowledge of what it is to be you.
That’s the miracle of how we “find grace to help in time of need”.
Reading
along in Thoreau’s Walden in the
inspection line, I came across another sentence, one not as well-known as the
first. Thoreau says, “I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we
do.” [Walden, “Economy”] God knows and loves
you. God made this world and placed you
in it so that you might live and thrive in it.
Here’s what God and Jesus want you to do. Trust the world. Love the world. Engage the
world. Embrace the world. Weep with the world. Rejoice with the world. In so doing you will not only live
abundantly. You will come to know and
trust and love God. And in coming to
know and trust and love God, you will come to know and trust and love yourself.
And when you know and trust and love yourself, you can serve and heal and bless
the world. Amen.
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