Harmony

Sermon by Brian Russo
May 23, 2010, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

Ecclesiastes 7:15-18
Romans 12:1-18

Qohelet, the brilliant sage of Ecclesiastes, writes, “In my vain life I have seen everything; there are righteous people who perish in their righteousness and there wicked people who prolong their life in their evildoing. Do not be too righteous, and do not act too wise; why should you destroy yourself? Do not be too wicked, and do not be a fool; why should you die before your time? It is good that you should take hold of the one, without letting go of the other; for the one who fears God shall succeed with both (Ecc 7:15-18).”

Now, unlike LOST (the greatest show on television since Seinfeld, whose television finale is tonight, which you should all be watching!), I will not keep you in the dark. I will not wait until the end of this sermon to explain everything. Instead, I will utterly destroy suspense and unveil the meaning of that oh-so-unusual Old Testament reading right now.

We are but human, and thus we must realize and accept both the limitations and possibilities of our existence.

Wow, wait a second. That was totally a LOST answer! Brilliant, heavy in thought, but ultimately dancing around the point like a moth caught in a midsummer’s breeze. So I pray of you, please, let me try again.

What Qohelet is simply yet profoundly stating is this: Life is both the good and the bad, the purity and the sin, the belief and the doubt, and to live is to share a stock in them all; for no matter where you are in life, these dualities will always follow you around.

Qohelet writes, “It is good that you should take hold of the one, without letting go of the other” – in other words, we ought not to close ourselves off like the anchorites (people who literally built walls around themselves so to practice their faith), but rather we must learn to practice our faith harmoniously with the ever-alternating currents of this world. This means that we don’t run from science, but we seek its insight. This means that we don’t cross ourselves at the mention of other faiths, but we engage their spirit. This means that we don’t hide our eyes from books written by Dan Brown, but we read them and see what they have to say, even if it’s mostly rubbish and poor writing.

But for many of us Christians, this has always been easier said than done. It is much easier playing the armchair critic, hurling ignorant insults at alternate lifestyles and dogmas that don’t clearly resemble our own. And this seems to be especially true for those of us who are so sure, yet completely insecure in our faith. And, sad to say, this is also true for the shadow of this preacher when I was once your age [addressing the confirmands]… I asked you to write a faith statement in which you described your story, so I guess it’s only fair that I should now unfold my own.

Believe it or not, in a far off decade, far, far away, I too was once 13. And I do believe, I was pretty cool. I had a walkman, pump sneakers, and a brand new 32-bit Sega Genesis system. Yes, I had it all you might say. But what truly defined me, what really separated me from the rest of the pack, was my orange pocket Bible. And boy, did that make me a hit with the ladies. Just imagine how many girls I sweet-talked with a reciting of the 10 Commandments. Try it sometime. Or on second thought, please don’t.

But all kidding aside, I really did have such a Bible, and I took its possession and contents very seriously. And outside of not always honoring thy parents, and occasionally treating my brother like an indentured servant, I say I followed it pretty good, and was a through-and-through earnest Christian. Well, at least, what I thought was an earnest Christian.

You see, for me and my then unchallenged system of beliefs, Christian living was simply abiding by the rules – a laundry list of do’s and don’ts. If I did or didn’t was the principle that qualified me as a follower of Christ. And more, if others didn’t and did, then that’s what qualified them as sinners unworthy of my time.

But as all of you know from our confirmation class, and as many of you articulated so eloquently in your faith statements, Jesus’ ministry wasn’t focused strictly on the rules, the Law. Rather, Jesus came to create a new law, marked by the greatest commandments of them all: to love your God and to love your neighbor – to create a harmony between the two all the days of your life.

But back then, when I was your age, I was just too proud to acknowledge this radiance, in fact, I only continued to blindly neglect it. I was so concerned with the ills of others that I never saw the plank beginning to rot in my own eye. And thus, I bricked myself off like those anchorites, erecting walls around me as my circumference, hiding within my own palace of illusion and believing that I was in the right to do so!

And you know what I did within that palace? Like so many of us who find ourselves there, I used the Bible to justify my presence. For written over and again all over those walls was my trusted passage, Romans 12:2. “Do not be conformed to the world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” I would keep muttering it to myself, fashioning it as my safety blanket, even though I had scarcely an idea what it actually meant to begin with. And thus, I remained ignorant, and focused my energies on not conforming to the outside secular world, believing that as long as I did so, I would be walking right by God finding my mind in a perpetual state of renewal.

But reality, however, is often so different than what our ambitions dream. For it was precisely because I didn’t create a harmony between myself and my surrounding society that I never really renewed my mind; rather, I only confined it to a static existence within my own little plastic prison in a misguided attempt to avoid those uncomfortable years of teenage discovery.

And thus, there were so many years and so many potential experiences that I lost to the onward march of time; and all because I harped on a passage that I never clearly understood. In retrospect, I’ve always wondered who I would have been if I had just continued reading that chapter, even just the next verse. Perhaps even my father wouldn’t have the gray hair he does now.

Paul writes in verse 3, “For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.” Not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think – that was my greatest flaw. I was so sure of my superiority, my purity, my faith and lifestyle being correct, that I never humbled myself to think otherwise. And so I distanced myself from “inferior” others, and did so while claiming a belief in Jesus Christ who strictly ministered to the essence of humility. Wow, truly how misguided was I?

And this refusal to appreciate anything or anyone of secular origin stayed with me into college. Now to be fair, in those years, I eventually became more socially lighthearted and in the process achieved both great and substantial friendships; but still, I couldn’t shake myself entirely from the grave suspicion of what the world could offer – the womb of blind faith was still my home. Thus, when I finally entered into the platform of higher education, I found myself severely threatened by the promotion of scientific reason and the post-modern mentality known as skepticism.

And it almost devoured me; it almost erased my faith completely. You see, to leave a realm that tells you to believe that the Earth was created in six days; that Noah’s Ark was not an exaggeration; that four different gospels somehow espouse the same eyewitness testimony… and to enter into a world that suggests that no, the world is actually more like 14.5 billion years old; that no, Noah’s Ark was just a story lifted off of the legend of Gilgamesh; and that no, each gospel writer actually had an agenda when writing their account… all this was almost too much for my proud, but entirely insecure faith to handle. Almost.

For at the moment when it could have crumbled completely, when I could have listened to my friends who were saying, “see, we told you it was all just a silly superstition,” a sage entered my life and pointed me to the passage from Ecclesiastes. Echoing Qohelet, she said, we constantly think that it’s either belief or doubt, faith or reason, the church or the world. But it is never so black and white. There is a harmony in most things and always an answer intersected somewhere in between. And she was right. Ecclesiastes is right. And you, the confirmands are right.

For each and every one of you have not shrieked from the challenge of your confirmation. None of you have written a faith statement just to please your parents, elders, or this congregation. Instead, you were both earnest and honest, and you juxtaposed the world you inhabit with the faith you are searching, all, mind you, without the help of a sage. And sorry, Seth [a confirmand], I don’t qualify.

So to all of this, to what you have here achieved, I celebrate you. You have done what I could not – you have confronted the questions of the secular that I never had the strength to ask at your age; you have reconciled science with faith, doubt with belief, and the world with the church. You did not seek to separate each from any, but instead created a harmony that will be seen and heard by many. And so I know, I just know, that none of you will meet the crisis of faith that I almost succumbed to, for each and every one of you wear the armor of spiritual integrity.

Thus, on this day of Pentecost, when we praise the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples of Jesus, we honor you. We honor you as our future, the next generation of believers, the embodiment of our harmony. For did you know that the alternate definition of harmony is literally defined as “a pleasing combination of elements in a whole?” Now take a look at each other, and then at the rest of the congregation – in a couple of minutes, when you are officially received, you will be the most pleasing of elements in this whole.

But before that happens, remember this always: it is good to take hold of one without letting go of the other; do not retreat into atheism when reason suggests otherwise; and do not flee to the monastery when life gets too heavy. But discover the balance. Discover where belief and doubt, faith and reason, the church and the world cross their paths, for surely you will need each and all to discover success.

Amen.

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