Endings

28 December 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

It is the end of another year, and time to take stock of ourselves and of our gods.

Are we serving worthwhile gods? Are we serving them well, and are they worthy of our service? Could we be convicted of neglect or abuse of our own spirits?

Don’t let us be called faithless. For we have a kind of faith, and we serve our gods well even when we do not serve wisely.

We play our roles. We act the parts of characters in the stories of our lives. Yet how often do we examine the scripts we have agreed to play?

It is the end of another year. Let us pause for a private meeting with our gods before going on into the next year. Let us pause, not only to ask how faithful we are, how well we are serving the gods whose ideals direct our energies, but also to ask whether these are gods worth serving, whether they are worthy of us.

Do they cherish us and call forth the best in us? Does serving the gods of our lives make us more authentic, more of who we need to become to honor our unique gifts, and bring them to the world?

Or have we become means to someone else’s ends, cogs in a machine that drains us rather than empowering us?

For though the world can be a sacred place, we too are sacred. And unless the gods we serve reward that, they are not worthy of us, and not worthy of our world.

And so it is the end of another year, a time to pause and take stock of ourselves and of what we are serving with our lives. Let us take stock of our gods.

Amen.

SERMON: Endings

In every tradition, the end of one year and beginning of the next is a time for introspection, for reviewing the past year, for judging whether it was lived well or foolishly, lived by high standards or low ones. It is a time for us to check in with ourselves, with the story we are living out with our lives, to see if it is still the story we want to be living, or whether we want to change something.

If we take this challenge seriously, it can be a very upsetting task, especially when any honest assessment tells us we haven’t fared well, haven’t been true to ourselves or our gods. It’s been said that children want justice in their stories, while adults pray for mercy. I found, in thinking about “endings,” that both yearnings came up: both for justice and for mercy.

I want to put together a couple new movies, a 19th century play and an old parable by Jesus to help focus on “endings” this morning. The movies and the play can be seen as offering that kind of justice kids love because they have all the time in the world, and adults find uncomfortable because we don’t. The parable of Jesus, one of his oddest and most controversial, offers a kind of mercy that you may find both surprising and welcome, as I do.

Writing endings is tricky, not as easy as it might seem, because the ending has to grow from the story, not contradict it. Winston Churchill once famously said, “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” In fact, though, history has been pretty kind to him because in the eyes of those who did write it, Churchill demonstrated eloquence and leadership put into the service of character and courage during some of the most critical moments of W.W.II. Sir Winston didn’t have to worry about the judgment of history, for his life directed his epitaph.

Still, at the level of governments, power often does trump truth, and official stories that were not true can last for decades or centuries. I’m still amazed that the Warren Commission Report on the murder of JFK is taken seriously, for instance. One simple reason we know it can not be true is because, as many have shown, in order for there to have been only one gunman, the unmarked bullet found on Kennedy’s stretcher would have to have passed through two bodies and shattered two or three bones without ever getting a scratch on it, and this is impossible. Still, it has been over forty years, and there’s no indication that the true story is any closer to coming out.

And for a current example, polls are still saying that 70% of Americans actually think that Saddam Hussein and Iraq had some connection to the attacks of 9-11, though there was no connection at all. But 70%! It gives weight to the cynical revision of Abraham Lincoln’s famous saying, that goes “You can fool all the people some of the time, you can fool some of the people all the time – and that’s enough.”

So I know that no matter how much I might wish it weren’t so, it seems true that at the level of governments and mass communication, power can trump truth, character, and courage, even for a very long time.

But at the personal level, this doesn’t happen often. Here, we really don’t fool anywhere near as many people as we like to think. Here, there is a kind of judgment at the end. Because in life, we almost never get to write our own endings. They are written by those who survive us.

Oh, you can go online and buy eulogies for $30 or $40. They’ll send you three, and you can mix-and-match them to get the effect you want. Let me save you some money. Even if you buy them, you can’t count on their being read at your memorial service. For those decisions will not be made by you, but by your survivors. And they will have their own ideas about how your story should be ended.

I’ve been at enough memorial services to believe that the truth usually comes out at the end. If it isn’t spoken from the pulpit, you’ll hear it buzzing through the audience. We want the ending to have an organic relation to the whole life.

I was reminded of some words from one of the most honest and wise writers in history, Michel de Montaigne. If you’ve never read his Essays, I recommend them to you. At one point, he said, “If we have not known how to live, it is wrong to teach us how to die, and to give the end a different shape from the whole.” (p. 329)

The ending, the eulogy, needs to fit the life we’ve led. We don’t fool people, and the people we don’t fool will write our endings. This is one reason I wish more people attended memorial services, to hear this quality.

Sometimes, preachers can be pressured not to tell the truth. But if they don’t speak the truth from the pulpit, it will usually come out from somewhere else. Sometimes, it’s the open-microphone time; sometimes it’s just a buzzing in the congregation. I have been in the congregation at two memorial services when the preacher didn’t speak the truth, tried to cover over ugly facts about the deceased. And both times, I was delighted to hear the buzzing spread through the congregation, as congregants told one another the truths they weren’t hearing from the pulpit. Frankly, I think whenever the pulpit is used for dissembling and hiding the truth, the preacher has committed a great sin, for which he should be punished by spending eternity listening to bad sermons.

Still, when the honesty goes past a certain point, we are always shocked, no matter how much we thought we wanted to hear it. The most brutally honest eulogy I know of was given by an old preacher I knew in Michigan. It was the memorial service for a member of his church who had been wealthy and powerful, but who had used and abused others his whole adult life. The preacher met with the family and told them what he would have to say if he conducted this service, and they agreed with his assessment. And so a few days later, at the service, the preacher’s eulogy began with the words “Michael was an evil man, a stark and sobering example of all that good people must try to avoid.” Before he turned the eulogy towards a lesson in what we should live toward, he detailed some of the ways in which this man had used and harmed those who loved him – and all over the church, heads nodded. They knew the truth, and they knew how this man’s story should be ended; they just wondered if they would hear it from the pulpit on that day.

I think we know when the ending is right. We know what we want to accept as an ending that fits with the life that has ended. You can either see this as a kind of tyranny, or as a kind of assurance that, finally, there may be a kind of justice in life.

But you don’t have to go to churches to hear this sermon. You can find it anywhere people are telling their favorite stories. This month, you can take two of the big moneymaking movies that opened in the past two weeks that are making similar points in very different ways.

The first one I saw was the conclusion to the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, which was very long, but pretty spectacular. It was a morality tale about the eternal war between greedy power, and the more subtle force of character and courage. And it ended, as we like all our favorite stories and myths to end, by saying that in the end, power should bow before truth, character, and courage, and that sometimes, if our character and courage are strong enough, it will.

The “Lord of the Rings” can be seen as asking the question “Who is finally the more strong and noble; whom do we respect and wish to be like: evil forces with big armies, or a lot of common people with character and courage?” And the heroes of the story are the commonest of the common people, Hobbits.

The other movie is “Mona Lisa Smile,” a move with some wonderful ensemble acting. Again, it’s a conflict between a nasty kind of power and the quiet persistence of character and courage.

The questions of this movie are “What is the difference between high-class people, and low-class people with money and power?” and Jesus’ old question “What does it profit you if you gain the world and lose your soul?” And again, the trump suits, those we feel win in the end, are “truth, character and courage.”

But we knew, at each step, how we would write each person’s ending, if that’s all there was to their life. We have a sense of how to complete the story of a person’s character, based on what we’ve seen. And they have the same sense of us. I don’t think we fool many people.

I’m reminded of some lines from a great theologian of two hundred years ago. His name was Friedrich Schleiermacher, he is known as the father of liberal theology, and he also believed that we knew what was required of us, knew the difference between noble and ignoble paths, and that we didn’t fool others even if we managed to fool ourselves.

He said that we recognize those who seek for the most true, courageous and authentic life, and we admire them more than all who have lesser aims. That’s another way of saying that we also judge those who aim lower, and when we write their eulogies, we compose them in a minor key.

Movies like the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy have such an effect, strike such chords, I think, for some of the same reasons that the book The DaVinci Code did. Partly, they’re just good movies, stories well-told. But also, we recognize those stories, because they are dramatizations of the stories we find ourselves living among.

If we tell these stories over and over, it’s because we need to remind ourselves of the higher values to which we want to aspire, whether we are living that way or not.

And one of our favorite lessons is that it matters how we live; that our lives are judged, there is something like a judgment day when our ending is written for us, and that when our time comes, we don’t want to fail.

“Judgment Day” sounds so hokey and supernatural that it’s hard to hear without getting the worst kind of images of preachers shaking their bibles at you for theatrical effect, while interpreting those bibles in low and mean ways that Jesus, for one, would have abhorred.

But I’d hate for us to lose the powerful notion of a judgment day just because we’ve outgrown the supernaturalism. And that’s one of the services that great literature and especially great drama serves: to remind us of these lessons we don’t want to hear, but can’t afford to forget.

One of my favorite plays is Peer Gynt, written by the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen in 1867. I’ll use almost any excuse to expose people to it, and it’s a natural for talking about endings. Ibsen was strongly influenced by the Danish existentialist Søren Kierkegaard, whose searing mark has been left on this play. It is a play I wish more people knew. I think it is one of the most disquieting plays ever written, perhaps especially for Americans.

It features, among others, Peer Gynt and a bunch of Trolls. Trolls are the way that Ibsen portrayed inauthentic human beings in this play, just as Tolkien portrayed them as Orcs – an idea he may well have taken from Ibsen. The difference between humans and trolls, mainly, is that they live by different mottoes. Trolls live by the motto “To thyself be sufficient,” while humans, in order to become humans, must live by the motto “To thyself be true.”

And Peer Gynt was a human who lived by the motto of Trolls. He became wealthy and influential as a shipping magnate. At the end of his life, he returned home, mostly to gloat. But what awaited Peer Gynt was Kierkegaard and Ibsen’s version of an existentialist Judgment Day. His ending was written for him by the voices of all that he had never become, the life he had never lived. The Judgment came in the form of voices that called to him as he walked through the woods. Listen to these words, and see if they aren’t scarier than merely supernatural creations:

We are the thoughts you should have thought;

Feet to run with you should have given us.

We should have soared skywards as challenging voices,

But here we must tumble like balls of gray yarn.

We are songs, you should have sung us.

A thousand times you have pinched and suppressed us.

In the depths of your heart we have lain and waited. . . .

We were never called forth-

Now we poison your voice!

We are tears-you should have shed us.

We might have melted the icicles that pierced your heart. . . .

But now the wound has closed over, and our power is gone.

We are deeds; you should have done us.

Doubts that strangle have crippled and bent us.

But on Judgment Day we shall flock to accuse you;

And woe to you then. . . .

(Act Five, scene Four: adapted from several translations)

After the scene with these horrible voices, Peer Gynt met the Button-maker, a strange character who had come to take Peer and put him back into the casting-ladle, to melt him down and try again to make what the Maker had intended to make in the first place. And what was that? A human being. That’s what Peer Gynt never was. He was never true to himself, and so he was never really a human being. He may have been sufficient to himself, but a human is what he was supposed to have been, and humans live by the motto “To thyself be true.” And so a human he was not, and the Button-maker has come to get him.

Now there, written in the fantastic language of Trolls and Button-makers, is a Judgment Day which awaits us all. This is the same message we get in stories like “The Lord of the Rings” or “Mona Lisa Smile” or a thousand other favorite myths and fairy tales. In the end, we don’t get to write our ending; it will be written by others we probably didn’t fool, even if we fooled ourselves. That’s the message of judgment, of justice. Kids might like it, but most of us adults start to feel a little uneasy, wishing for a bit less justice and a bit more mercy.

Now if you would rather have some mercy, let me read you a famous and controversial parable by Jesus. It’s a very strange story:

“The kingdom of God is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace; and he said to them, “You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.” So they went. When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same. And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around and he said to them, “Why are you standing here idle all day?” They said to him, “Because no one has hired us.” He said to them, “You also go into the vineyard.” When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, “Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.” When those hired about five o’clock came; each of them received the full day’s wage. Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage….” (Matthew 20: 1-16.)

This parable has confused many people, and has seemed manifestly unfair. But don’t look for an economics lesson, or a blueprint for workers’ unions. Look for a religious lesson, and a profound one. It is saying we can change our life any time we are ready to do the work, and no matter how late in the game we finally see the light, we can use that light to light our paths for the rest of the way.

In the movie “Mona Lisa Smile,” this is shown in the character of Betty, played by a wonderful actress I don’t think I’ve seen before. She was a formidable antagonist, brilliant and aggressive, playing the role which had been assigned her without ever looking into it to see whether the role was worthy of her life. It was a role designed to be sufficient to her, but not to be true to her. And so this beautiful young woman became a Troll.

She married; she played the phony role to the hilt, irritating everyone around her, including her husband, who began straying as soon as he could. When she finally saw the light, when she finally came to work in the vineyard of her own soul, that powerful character of hers shifted its center, and she went as resolutely in a new and more authentic direction as she had been going in a shallow and unworthy direction before. In religious language, she was saved. It took her awhile to go from troll to human, but when she saw the light, the whole light was still available to her, and she had the merciful chance to rewrite her ending before it came.

Thinking about endings gave me a new respect for the profound mercy of this old parable from Jesus: that all the way up to the end, there is time to change.

Once we’ve lived our life out, whether as human or as troll, the ending is out of our hands. It will be written, and we will be known, by the words spoken by others: others we never fooled as well as we thought we did. There’s the kind of justice that kids think they want.

But adults want mercy. So in the meantime, we have reached the end of another year, and it is a time to review, to see whether we have been true to our best selves, or merely sufficient, selling out the higher for the lower ideals.

Look at the work of fashioning a life, the work of taking ourselves and our lives seriously, as though it were working in a vineyard. The pay, the only pay there can be, is the reward of an authentic life that can walk through the woods late in our days without needing to fear those voices, without needing to fear them at all.

We may be early in life, in the middle of it, or living our last chapters. It doesn’t matter. Whenever we see the light of a more authentic life, it is there to light our path from then on. We get the full days’ pay whenever we finally show up to do the work.

Endings are tricky, because our ending will be written by others, in the same key as the life we have led. That’s judgment and justice. But while we’re alive, while we’re awake and attentive, we can make changes in our story, in our life, that can make all the difference in the days and years ahead. Montaigne was correct: if we will just live the life right, the ending will take care of itself. And for an end-of-year message, that’s about as good as true mercy gets!