Wasatch Prebyterian Church Sermons
January 1, 2012
Sermon: "The Face of Jesus"
Scripture: Luke 2:28-40
Preaching: Rev. Scott Dalgarno
Description : The most carefree two years of my life were spent studying film and literature at the University of Oregon. My mother is full-blooded Sicilian, so I gravitated to Italian cinema quite naturally.
THE FACE OF JESUS
A sermon by the Rev. Scott Dalgarno for January 1, 2011
Based on Luke 2:28-40
The most carefree two years of my life were spent studying film and literature at the University of Oregon. My mother is full-blooded Sicilian, so I gravitated to Italian cinema quite naturally.
I love Federico Fellini. His film, La Dolce Vita (The Sweet Life) begins with a helicopter flying slowly through the sky not very high above the ground. Hanging from the helicopter in a kind of halter is a life-size statue of a man dressed in robes with his arms outstretched so that he looks almost as if he’s flying by himself, especially when every once in a while the camera cuts out the helicopter and all you can see is the statue with the rope tied around it. It flies over a field where some men are working in tractors and the fly-over causes a good deal of excitement. They wave their hats and yell and then one of them recognizes who it is the statue of and shouts in Italian, “Hey, it’s Jesus!”
Then a number of the men start running along under the thing, waving and calling to it. But the helicopter keeps on going, and after a while it reaches the outskirts of Rome where it passes over an apartment building on the roof of which there is a swimming pool surrounded by a number of girls in bikinis basking in the Italian sun. Of course they look up too and start waving – this time we see that the copter is piloted by a couple of young men and they make a second pass over the pool and we see that over the roar of the engine they try mightily to get the phone numbers of the girls, explaining that they need to deliver the statue to the Vatican, but that they would be happy to fly right back.
Now during this exchange the 1970s college audience I was sitting with laughed raucously at the incongruousness of the whole thing – profane Italian men, bosomy Italian women, and poor Jesus hanging there like an oversized religious pendant – so easy to make fun of. Jesus -- all stone, the Italians all fleshly, as full of life as any human beings have ever been.
Jesus was clearly getting the short end of the stick, but Fellini, as fine a film- maker as ever lived, wasn’t done with us yet. Not by a long shot, so to speak.
The helicopter continues on its way and the next thing that comes into view is the great dome of St. Peters (how can you miss with a backdrop like that?), and for the first time the camera begins to zoom in slowly on the statue itself with its arms stretched out, until for a moment the screen is almost filled with just the bearded face of Jesus. At that moment there was not a peep from the audience – the derisive laughter had melted away – there was just something about that face. For a few prolonged seconds that face filled the screen and made American young people silent – It was a face that was at once iconic and transfixing. It made us completely still.
The face of Jesus.
Now there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon, and this man was righteous and devout, looking for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him. And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he should not see death before he had seen the Lord's Christ.
This piece of scripture has long been known as the Song of Simeon (the Nunc Dimittis) "Let now thy servant depart in peace for my eyes have seen thy salvation."
At bottom this story of the recognition of Jesus by Simeon is about the wish to live long enough to complete one's purpose -- The wish to live long enough to see what one has to see, and then to die peacefully.
My best friend growing up’s grandfather said, “You haven’t lived until you’ve sneezed and seen your teeth fly across the room.” No, there’s something deeper here.
Madeleine L'Engle once wrote the following -- "How remarkable, how beyond the bounds of ordinary possibility, that two old people should see a small baby and recognize that he was the Light of the World! Was it perhaps because they were so old, so near to the Beyond, that they were able to see what people caught up in the cares of life could not see?" Who knows?
How sad to think a person could get to the end of his or her life and feel it had all been wasted. The mythologist, Joseph Campbell, said once that the greatest
let-down in life would be "to climb to the top of the ladder in one’s career and find that it is propped against the wrong wall."
I used to think this was a kind of funny, until the world economy started crumbling. I remember reading, back in 2008, about a 65 year-old man who had invested more than a billion dollars with Bernie Madoff and was found dead at his desk, a suicide. Well, that was just a compelling news item, until two days later when my own financial advisor took his own life. He was 50.
Madoff told the FBI he “paid [his] investors with money that wasn’t there.” Which might lead one to ask, “Well, how much of the economy is just smoke and mirrors?” I mean, I watch the market go down into the 11,000 based on speculation about the Euro, then up over 12,000 based on Christmas sales – over and over and over, and you wonder, what’s it all about?
I mean, “What can one invest in that doesn’t have a false bottom?”
Charles Dickens’ classic, “A Christmas Carol,” is about a man, Ebenezer Scrooge, who is prompted to ask such a question and decides to change his life, before it’s too late.
In 1840 a younger man, Henry David Thoreau, went to live in the woods surrounding Walden Pond in Concord Massachusetts. He gave up a comfortable life and took up a poor man's existence confounding his friends and family who could not understand. His defense was a book called simply, Walden
In it he makes the following statement: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately; to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
It was Thoreau who also said, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." You can’t always see it. No one had any idea my friend and financial advisor was in any way considering taking his own life. He always had a smile and a good word to say. But inside he was as desperate as a man could be, and we didn’t know.
There is something about Jesus, says Simeon, that just by considering him will “reveal the secrets in a person’s deepest heart.”
What’s it all about, this life? And why do we live as long as we do?
Consider this -- I read recently that the average mouse lives about 2 years; the average canary, 15, the average fruit bat, 50. Yet all three are about the same size and weight and all are almost identical genetically. Why such disparate life spans?
Simeon and Anna lived well into their 80s. What must a person do to feel he’s lived a full life? What must she see in order to die in peace? Maybe it’s enough to know that our children and perhaps grandchildren are making out okay? Perhaps. There’s something about that two generation spread. Maybe that’s why we live as long as we do. If we are lucky, we learn from our grandchildren what we missed learning from our children, and our grandchildren often learn from their grandparents what they miss picking up from their parents.
Simeon warned Mary that over the years, watching her son grow up, a sword would pierce her heart.
Well, it’s true. This kind of thing happens to parents. It was the author, Barbara Kingsolver, who said that to have a child is to have your heart go running around outside your body.
Yes, a sword always pierces a mother’s heart as she watches her child struggle and grow. But Jesus’ mother suffered more than most – to think of her at the foot of the cross looking up at her child’s face there.
In 1984 Paul Tsongas, U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, shocked the country by announcing his retirement from the Senate. He decided that he would not stand for re-election. Now Tsongas was a young man. He was not retiring due to age. Nor was he retiring because of scandal. He was very well thought of.
In fact he was a rising star, an overwhelming favorite for re-election. Tsongas was frequently mentioned as a candidate for Vice President or even President. What happened?
A few weeks before the announcement, he had discovered a lump while showering. It was found to be a form of cancer; something that in time his doctors were to tell him was not curable, but was quite treatable. He had no reason to believe he wouldn’t live quite a lot longer and they said it wouldn’t affect his physical abilities.
The illness did not force him out of the Senate, but it did forced him to think about his life in ways he'd never thought about it before.
Tsongas had always been a very goal oriented person. He had wanted to go to the best college, the best law school, get into congress, the senate, and aim for higher office. He was not someone who lived for today. His ambition would not let him do that. So, he was always projecting himself forward. Happiness for him always lay somewhere down the road.
It was while he was waiting for his doctor's report that he came face to face for the first time with his own mortality and the fact that for longer than he could remember he had been thoughtless about living day to day. Interestingly, the time he spent thinking reflectively between his diagnosis and his prognosis was all that was necessary for Paul Tsongas to reorder his priorities.
He decided that what he wanted most in life -- what he would not give up if he could not have everything he wanted, was being with his family-- watching his kids grow up. He would rather do that than shape his country's laws, or go down in the history books.
After his decision a friend wrote to congratulate him on having his priorities straight. The friend reminded him of the saying: "Nobody on his death bed ever said, 'I wish I had spent more time on my business.'" Some called his disease a tragedy. Tsongas came to see it as a personal gift.
Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." Our lives cry out to be examined the more we go along. That seems to be the way our maker set it up.
Life is like a receiving a pound of Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee beans at Christmas. This stuff costs about $35.00 per pound. At first you drink it liberally; you make it for everyone, drinking cup after cup.
But after a little while you realize how fast it's going and begin to ration it. You stretch it; you savor it, down to the last bean in the bag. So it is with life; when we are young it seems like it will last forever. We can't imagine anything else.
We eat whatever we want, and in any amount we want. We take entry-level jobs that pay next to nothing. We date people we have no intention of marrying. That's perfectly natural; we are just getting a foothold in the world.
But one day we begin to wonder if maybe more time has passed than is ahead for us. That can be a wake up call. We become pickier about what we do, and about who we do it with. We become careful about what we buy. We quit asking the young person's question, "How high will I rise, how far will I get? "
We begin to ask, "What will I have accomplished when it is all over?"
"What difference will it be whether I was here or not?"
What answer can you give to the question, "What has been your greatest moment?" Now that is a question that can tell you a lot about you.
Some years ago the late great singer, Marian Anderson was asked that question. How would she answer, she had had so many great moments? Would she mention her concert at Carnegie Hall, or perhaps her debut at the Met? Perhaps she would single out the day Toscanini said that hers was, "the voice of the century?"
No, it was none of those, she insisted. Rather, it was the day she came home and told her mother that her mother would no longer have to take in other people's laundry in order to live. That says everything about what kind of person Marian Anderson was. She certainly had her priorities in order.
What then is your life? Someone has said that life is like a fine wine; something that improves with age. The wise and thoughtful rabbi, Harold Kushner, asked himself that question some years ago and said that he preferred a different analogy. He thought that life was more like a really good book. The further you get into it the more you see how it all comes together; you see how it all begins to make sense. Characters become more fully developed. The meaning of earlier incidents in the book of life gradually come to be clear. And when we come to the end there is a satisfying sense of completeness to it."
I hope that is the case for every one of us as we enter this new year together; that our lives will be rounded, not just by a sleep, as Hamlet says, but by a feeling that it was all right – not easy, maybe, but full nonetheless. Full, yes,
and blessed.
Amen.
