Hilton Head Island, SC – January 19, 2020
The Chapel Without Walls
Psalm 27:1-8; Genesis 50:15-21; John 16:25-33
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – For he will hide me in his shelter in the day of trouble; he will conceal me under the cover of his tent, he will set me high upon a rock. – Psalm 27:5 (RSV)
Barbara Ehrenreich is a very thought-provoking writer. One of her many books is called Bright-Sided. Its subtitle is How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. She says that positive thinking has been a trend in this country for the past century. It came about, she believes, in reaction to a gloomy Calvinism which held sway prior to the 20th century. But all this American optimism is the undoing of America, she says. As you can imagine, there is much more to the book that just that extremely brief summary, but that is the essence of what Ms. Ehrenreich writes.
Sixty years ago Norman Vincent Peale was one of the best-known preachers in the country. It was he who wrote The Power of Positive Thinking, along with other such books. I can remember some smarmy professors in seminary derisively declaring, “Paul is appealing, but Peale is appalling.” It was somewhat amusing, but it may also have been a somewhat cheap shot.
No doubt there is an inherent danger in always seeing the glass as half full rather than half empty, especially when it is 90% empty. But there is also a psychological and even theological danger in constantly expecting the worst. Cartoonists love to portray the dichotomy of these two opposite positions.
Two New Yorker cartoons: In the first, the hooded figure of Death with the scythe in his hands arrives by boat at a stereotypical cartoon small island with one palm tree sprouted up in the middle. Death says to the anxious man stranded alone on this little mound of sand in the vast ocean, “I have some good news and some bad news.” To say the least. The stranded survivor is going to get off the island, but he has to die to make it happen. In the second cartoon, a doctor says to a patient with a glum look on his face, “Sometimes it helps to turn a question around. Why not you?” Indeed, why not? Somebody has to die. I guess it’s just that chap’s turn.
A Hagar the Horrible cartoon. In the first frame, Lucky Eddie, Hagar’s faithful if not-too-bright sidekick, says, “I’ve finally decided…”, and Hagar asks, “Decided what, Lucky Eddie?” In the second frame there is a loud “Thud!” as something hits the ground. In the third frame, a newly descended asteroid had planted itself in the ground beside Hagar, and from deep beneath it comes Lucky Eddie’s voice, “Life isn’t fair.” In a Funky Winkerbeen cartoon, Funky says to his friend, the bespectacled teacher, “It just galls me the way a bunch of greedy, amoral morons can ruin life for people who are just playing by the rules and working hard.” “I know,” his friend responds, “apparently life wasn’t conceived with fairness in mind.”
What do we do when misfortune befalls us? How do we handle it? Do we immediately go into a decline, and bemoan our fate, or do we try to make the best of it? When the doctor gives us bad news, or we think that the Grim Reaper has arrived at our doorstep or our safe little island in the sea, do we deliberately go into Negative Mode, or do we rely on Positive Mode?
Recently a volcano erupted on a small island off the coast of New Zealand. Some adventurous tourists wanted to get closer to see what was happening. That proved to be the end of some of them. Their survivors would be hard pressed to find anything positive in their lethal decision to witness a volcanic eruption up close. Clearly they did not expect the worst, but the worst engulfed them.
“We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose,” Paul said in his letter to the Romans (8:28). If that is true, it is very good news. But is it true?
Attitude is crucial in determining how we perceive life. Do we expect the worst, or do we hope for the best? If the best comes, are we grateful? And if the worst comes, how do we choose to deal with it? And remember, however we deal with it is a choice. Nobody outside ourselves and nothing inside ourselves forces us to respond in one way or the other. Not even God can coerce us when we are up against it. We are the ones who determine whether we shall make a positive or negative spin when hard challenges and only bad choices confront us.
Physical or psychological infirmities or handicaps can make us or break us. But it is not the infirmities or handicaps themselves which do that; it is how we deal with them which makes us or breaks us. John Milton was, he insisted, a better poet because he became blind. Georg Friedrich Handel probably became a much greater composer because of his bipolar illness, if indeed he was bipolar, which no one now can ever ascertain beyond doubt. Stephen Hawking may have been an even more brilliant physicist than he otherwise would be because he suffered from ALS for over four decades. For much of that time he could only think and not speak.
A debilitating accident convinces us how dependent we were on God and everyone else before it happened, and it really convinces us how dependent we are on God and everyone else after it happens. Dementia proves to those who don’t suffer from it how interdependent we humans are, but it doesn’t necessarily prove that to those who do suffer from it, because they may be incapable of perceiving it. Had Bill Gates actually graduated from Harvard instead of dropping out, there might never have been a Microsoft Corporation. And were that so, there never would have been a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. And millions of Africans and others would probably die, because the Gates foundation would not exist to provide medical help to some of the poorest people on earth.
How do we play the cards we are dealt in life? Do we complain, or do we give adversity a positive spin? That is the subject of this sermon.
In Psalm 27 David was kvetching about his enemies, of whom, presumably, he had legions. Were it not for the great monarch’s gargantuan case of pernicious paranoia, instead of having 150 Psalms in the Book of Psalms, we might have only a hundred or so. “Though a host encamp against me, my heart will not fear,” David exclaimed out of the depths of his constant fear. “Though war rise against me, yet I will be confident” (27:3).
Many of David’s Psalms are undeniable downers, but always they end with uppers. The Sweet Singer of Israel thought he was usually up to his eyeballs in alligators, which was usually true. But he also knew the way out. The way out for David and you and me and everyone else is God. For believers, God is the reason for the positive spin. We are not alone! We don’t have to face our adversities by ourselves! We have God! How could we not be positive?
Joseph was the 11th-born of Jacob’s twelve sons. A more irritating brother there never was, not the least because Jacob so obviously favored Joseph, and spoiled him rotten. Thus in a fit of pique the brothers sold Joseph into slavery in Egypt, and eventually he became second-in-command to the Pharaoh. When the Israelites were starving in Canaan, Joseph invited his whole clan to come down to Egypt for food, except they didn’t know it was Joseph who saved them. At the end of this whole sordid and sorry saga, Joseph said a truly amazing thing, after he finally identified himself to his brothers. “As for you,” said the by-now sagacious sibling to his eleven siblings, “you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today” (Genesis 50:20). Is that a positive spin on a seamy story, or what? If you hadn’t shipped me off to Egypt with that slave caravan, all the Israelites would now be dead, said the sanguine satrap to his shivering siblings.
Etty Hillesum was a young Jewish woman who died in Auschwitz in late 1943. In her diary she indicated she never gave up her faith in God, though she had no explanation for her suffering or that of her fellow Jewish prisoners. “Of course it is our complete destruction [the Nazis] want! But let us bear it with grace. There is no hidden poet in me,” said Etty Hillesum, “just a little piece of God that might grow into poetry. And a camp needs a poet, one who experiences life there, even there, as bard and is able to sing about it” (quoted in Spiritual Life, Spring , 2019).
Harry Chapin had a song about a night watchman who told a story to a rotund lady tending a bar in Watertown, New York. There may or may not be a kernel of autobiography in the song; I don’t know. Anyway, the night watchman met a beautiful young woman. After talking to her for a while, he asked her to come home with him, which she did. He was amazed she did, but also lasciviously pleased. The woman told him, “If you want me to go with you/ Well that’s all right with me/ ‘Cause I know I’m going nowhere/ And anywhere’s a better place to be.” After a night of indescribable pleasure, for him, they both went to sleep. In the morning the night watchman went out to get them both some breakfast. When he returned, he found a six-word note on the pillow: In the briefest of explanations, it said, “It’s time that I moved on.” Hearing the story, the barmaid was moved to the depths of her being. She said to him, “I wish that I were beautiful/ Or I wish that you were blind/ I wish I weren’t so (blank blank) fat/ And I wish that you were mine/ But if you want me to go with you/ Well that’s all right with me/ ‘Cause I know I’m going nowhere/ And anywhere’s a better place to be.” Did it happen? We aren’t told.
Everyone has a necessity for positive spin. It is really true: when life hands us lemons, it behooves us to make lemonade.
On the other hand, that doesn’t mean we should become perpetual Pollyannas. We can get ourselves into worse trouble if we are not realistic about the difficulties we face. But we do ourselves no favors if our instantaneous response to every adversity is, “Alas, poor me!” Nothing is gained from constant negativity other than more negativity. And the best way to climb out of tight spots is to engage in some serious positive spin.
Bruce Feiler is the author of nine books, the last of which was called The Council of Dads. He was diagnosed with an aggressive and lethal cancer in his leg. It is so rare that only a hundred people a year are afflicted by it. Shortly after the diagnosis, his 3-year-old twin daughters came twirling into the room where he was lying in bed. He wrote, “I crumbled. I kept imagining all the walks I might not take with them, the ballet recitals I might not see…the boyfriends I might not scowl at, the aisles I might not walk down.”
Realizing that he might not be there for his young daughters when they needed him, Bruce Feiler enlisted some male friends of his, whom he named The Council of Dads. It wasn’t easy to get normally cool-emoted males to agree to do this, but in the end he came up with what he thinks is an excellent back-up team of father-figures if he is not there to fulfill the primary paternal role.
That’s a positive spin. That’s lemons into lemonade.
A young man was about to be crucified. Nevertheless, he said to his disciples, “In the world you have tribulation; but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).
Choral music often addresses how humanity deals with the vicissitudes of life. The Brahms Schicksalslied was based on a poem by Friedrich Holderlin. (Schicksalslied literally means “Fate Song.”) Holderlin’s poem is dark and foreboding. It speaks of “suffering mankind” tossed “like water flung from rock to rock, endlessly down to the unknown.” However, Brahms was not content to allow that to be the tenor of his composition. He began his choral composition gloriously, and he ended it gloriously. I didn’t and don’t know who Holderlin is, but I know who Brahms is, and I much prefer his spin to the Holderlin poem than the Holderlin spin.
Te Deum was one of the sacred compositions of Guiseppe Verdi. After Verdi composed Aida in 1871, when he was at the height of his worldwide fame, he wrote only religious compositions, the finest being his Requiem and the Te Deum. Verdi’s wife died in late 1897, and his Quattro Pezzi Sacri (Four Sacred Pieces), of which the Te Deum was one, premiered under Arturo Toscanini in Paris six months later.
The music, especially that of the double choir, takes a rather somber traditional text and turns it into a masterpiece of magnificent sound. There are echoes of medieval plainchant yoked with the triumphant chords of the incomparable Guiseppe Verdi. And this painter of operas, this sculptor of the sacred, this maestro di musica, this singular Joe Green, lifts the human spirit to the very height of heaven, turning a darkened world into a place of celestial light and hope.
Life is not easy. Believers should do all they can to make the heavy lighter and the hard easier. Nothing is to be lost in the attempt, and potentially there is an infinite amount to be gained. Peale and Brahms and Verdi don’t have the whole thing, but they have a vital and necessary component of the whole thing. As the old song says, accentuate the positive; eliminate the negative. And thus get on with life.