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The One Significant Detail
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis October 12, 2003, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Genesis 12:1-4; 15:1-5 Philippians 3:1-16
In my study is a shelf overflowing with books I have been given to read…books, for the most part, I want to read…books with your name on the inside cover so that I may return them after I have finished reading them. I even have books lent to me on tape that sit languishing on my shelf for want of an ear. So it was no doubt the persistent recommendations I received every Sunday this summer at the door, as well as the tape left on my car seat, that compelled me to exchange both the bawdy twang of country music and the erudite voices on NPR for the sonorous tones of some unknown speaker reading to me, mile after mile, up the coast to Maine: “’My capitaine requires your expertise in a private matter,’” snapped Lieutenant Jerome Collet. “‘Now?’ [Robert] Langdon managed. ‘It’s after midnight.’ ‘Am I correct that you were scheduled to meet with the curator of the Louvre this evening?’ Langdon felt a sudden surge of uneasiness. He and the revered curator Jacques Sauniere had been slated to meet for drinks after Langdon’s lecture tonight, but Sauniere had never shown up….” With every twist and turn in the road, there came a clever twist and turn in the formulaic plot of The Da Vinci Code. I listened intently, driving past filling stations and postponing rest stops until Abbey literally could hold it no longer! With only a chapter or two remaining and the suspense building, I pulled up to my cottage…turned off the engine…got out of the car…unlocked the door…and headed for the icebox. After eight hours in the car, I was significantly more in need of liquid refreshment than literary closure! The ending would have to wait until the next day’s trip to the grocery store. Now I mention this at all because what really held my theological interest, long after the clever ending had fallen into place and the characters’ names had slipped from my mind, was not the question of whether Jesus and Mary Magdalene did it or whether the church has suppressed the truth of Mary’ divinity and Jesus’ progeny to this day. [Though I must admit, that disciple in Da Vinci’s Last Supper does resemble a woman!] Rather I was taken with the experience of listening to a story unfold inexorably forward not knowing which of the multitude of details, if noticed and remembered, might lead me to understand what was really happening. Why, asked the Princeton philosopher of religion Diogenes Allen, did every word of an unnamed short story he had heard read aloud seem to grip the audience? “It was not simply because it was a good story and had been read with great artistry,” he concluded. “Rather, it was because as the audience heard the story unfold, it did not know which part of it would be important. For a man actually to come out of a house, get into a car, and slowly drive away, is a prosaic event. But when it becomes part of a story, it can hold an audience’s attention because it just might turn out to be significant.” We live our lives. We listen to our stories unfold not knowing which detail will turn out to be significant: the butler in the pantry with the candlestick, the professor in the library with the knife, the maid in the drawing room with the rope? From one perspective, we are players in a mystery trying to figure out who holds what cards in order to be the first to guess the truth not of our deaths, but of our lives. So we wonder what is worth our attention? “Look out for the dogs,” says Paul, and we suspect we are not the first to live in a society whose ears are cocked, pocketbooks open and minds vulnerable to most any voice promising to reveal that one significant detail. Then it was the latest god to promise rain or health or riches. Now [little has changed] it is the newest guru to offer a sure-fire weight loss trick, investment scheme, child-rearing technique, political slight-of-hand, intellectual paradigm, spiritual mantra, religious community which, if followed or joined or learned by heart, will make all the other disparate details of life fall into place. Though there are an equal number of characters who, day after day, simply come out of a house, get into a car and slowly drive away with apparently no need to ask--at the end of the day--which details, if any, were significant in the unfolding of a grander plot. They live and move and have their being never wondering--at the end of a life--which event just might have been the event upon which the meaning of all other events depended. Rather, they are content to experience human existence prosaically in the sense of Webster’s second definition: life as “matter-of-fact; commonplace; dull and ordinary.” Life is just one damn thing after another, they say literally without reservation, and then you die. Presumably we who gather to hear the biblical story read not over the course of an eight-hour car trip, but over the course of a lifetime…who come in hopes that its meaning will be teased out of these pages by God’s Spirit and traced over the story of our lives…who mean to “worship God in spirit, and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh”: we would count ourselves neither in the number who view life as matter-of-fact, commonplace, dull and ordinary or in the number vulnerable to every peddler of insignificance come down the pike. Still, for all of our church going and our Sunday school upbringing, our lives and our deaths remain a mystery. We mostly live as if we had barely a hint of the plot, no tangible clue concerning the significant details revealed through these generations from Abraham to David…from David to the deportation to Babylon…from the deportation to Babylon to the Messiah…to us! Oh, we know details. Like Paul, we could list the particulars of being Presbyterian, of being religious, even as he noted the previous details of his existence before Christ: confidence in the flesh, by which he meant confidence in the details that mattered to the world. But of faith, of trusting and holding to the one significant detail while our lives unfold inexorably before us, we know nothing. On the one hand, this is because the church has played into our human need for tangible details by trying to make the Bible into a better version of every self-help scheme on the market, thereby exchanging the complexity of the biblical story for the popularity of easily accessible answers. On the other hand, the church’s shallow engagement with scripture has left generations to conclude that the disconnected details of the biblical story are simply dull. So people come out of this house, get into a car and drive away as vaguely religious people returned to their lives without hearing, once again, the one significant detail in light of which life’s mystery is illumined just enough to dare, by faith, the next turn in the road. That one significant detail is Jesus Christ: the revelation in human history—in your story and mine—of the Living God. For some this significant detail hits them like a bolt of lightening, as was the case with Paul, lighting up a road clear contrary to the one on which they had been driving. For most of us, it is a matter of Christ’s light quietly dawning. The plot of our days continues to unfold with its births and deaths, its victories and defeats, its good days and bad. But slowly through the community’s reading of scripture to us mile after mile, we are introduced to Him who accompanies us, our story read through scripture’s story over and over again, until we “find out that we are no longer thinking him, but that he first thought us, that,” says H. Richard Niebuhr, “is revelation.” “Revelation,” he goes on, “means the moment in our history through which we know ourselves to be known from beginning to end…means the moment in which we are surprised by the knowledge of someone there in the darkness and void of human life…is the moment in which we find our judging selves to be judged not by ourselves or our neighbors but by one who knows the final secrets of the heart…Revelation is [the] clue that enables one to put together the disparate experiences of life into a meaningful, coherent whole, to see a pattern and purpose in human history, to overcome the incongruities between what life is and what life ought to be.” In Paul’s words, this means counting every other detail as offering no clue to life’s meaning and purpose, counting every other claim as nothing, compared with the surpassing worth of knowing the one significant detail, Jesus Christ. Before Christ’s light dawned in his history, the details that mattered to Paul were details like his knowledge of the law, his tribe of origin, his bloodline, his zeal. We can tick off the same. Now only one detail is of significance for the rest of his days. Now the plot--no matter the twists and turns ahead--is marked by a purpose worth Paul’s life: “that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that if possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.” “From this point forward,” Niebuhr concludes, “we must listen for the remembered voice in all the sounds that assail our ears, and look for the remembered activity in all the actions of the world upon us. The God who reveals himself in Jesus Christ is now trusted and known as the [living] God, revealing himself in every event; [though] we do not understand how we could trace his working in these happenings if he did not make himself known…nor do we know how we should be able to interpret all the words we read as words of God save by the aid of this Rosetta stone,” this redeemer born in a manger, this savior nailed to a cross, this Lord of life raised from the dead. “Forgetting,” therefore, “what lies behind, and straining forward to what lies ahead,” we listen anew to the story that unfolds inexorably forward, but now we may listen as those to whom the one significant detail has been revealed. For it is not the butler in the pantry with the candlestick, nor the professor in the library with the knife, nor the maid in the drawing room with the rope, but the Son of God become flesh, in whose life and death and rising from the dead, every detail of our lives and our deaths has been redeemed from insignificance! Thanks be to God! |