Sometimes we
find it hard to hear what other people are genuinely saying to us – either hard
in the sense of difficult, or hard in the sense of painful, and sometimes hard
in both senses at once.
Somebody comes
up and makes a remark about the weather – and all that we hear, or allow
ourselves to hear – is a remark about the weather. “Looks like we might be getting
some rain later” is all that gets through to us, but what he’s really
saying – and sometimes we know this and sometimes we don’t – is maybe “I’m lonely. Will you talk to me”. Or
maybe “I know that you’re lonely, and I
want to try and talk to you”.
But in our
deafness, we don’t hear that. We hear the talk about the weather, or the crops,
or the family or the ailment but oftentimes we miss what they mean. And more
often than not, what they mean is: “I
want you to listen to me. I want you to know me.”
When we speak,
we’re not just communicating information. We’re also communicating something of
ourselves,
Most of the time
we’re too busy, or too deaf to pick that up in our conversations, but every now
and again something reaches our ears that goes a little deeper.
The writer Fred
Buechner tells of a time he went shopping with his wife, and as they stood at
the checkout she berated him for adding a tub of full fat cream to the conveyor
belt when he was trying to lose weight. “Oh
well – you only live once” he said.
“And then it
happened” – he writes. “This thing that broke for a moment through my deafness.
It was a hot, muggy afternoon and the cashier had been working hard all day and
looked flushed and hectic there behind her cash register and the racks of
sweets and chewing gum and TV guides, and when I said “Oh well - you only live once” she broke into the conversation and
what she said was “Don’t you think once
is enough?” – That was it.
And of course,
they laughed as she’d intended them to laugh. But afterwards, as he thought
about it, Buechner found himself wondering where those words had come from
within her. What was she really saying? Was she saying “I’m sick and tired of this job”. Was she saying “You’ve no idea how hard my life’s been
lately”. Was she saying “I feel
trapped, and I don’t see any way out”?
“You only live once” he said. “Don’t you think once is enough?” she replied – straight off the
cuff.
Gets you
thinking. Especially on a Sunday like this, when a good number of us are here
because someone we love experienced too little of life, rather than too much of
it.
Why would she
say those words?
Well I guess we
all know the weariness that can accompany our living at times. There are spells
when life seems almost entirely drained of music or colour. Circumstances weigh
us down; responsibility narrows our horizons; the drudgery of routine saps us
of joy. Life, in those times, gets reduced to the business of simply getting
through the day. If you’re speaking out of that place, small wonder that one
life seems enough, or more than enough.
Or sometimes
we’re just so busy that we miss life even as it happens to us. We’ve got a full
schedule, a busy day, a host of commitments at work and at home. But the danger
is that life then becomes a game of join the dots between those different commitments;
getting from one meeting to the next, one appointment to the next; one task to
the next as fast as possible. Kiss the kids on the forehead at bedtime and then
get back to it again.
In the middle of
that, even the best and most energetic of us find ourselves wondering if this
is the life that we really wanted to have.
“Don’t you think once is enough?” she said. And for that kind of life, I
guess maybe she’s right.
But here’s the
thing. All of us know that life has more to offer than that. We’ve tasted it.
We love; we
create; we tend and grow; we nurture, we laugh; we share; we worship; we play;
we pray.
There are things
we can happily lose ourselves in for hours and hours and they’re as unique as
our fingerprints. For me it’s playing guitar or shaping words in poetry. Some
of you run, some of you garden, some of you walk, some of you read; others love
company or being with family, or travelling, or music.
We cherish those
God-given moments and experiences, and when they’ve passed, we cherish the
memory of them because they are what makes life worth the living.
And there enough
of them, scattered throughout our days like little diamonds, to make the
leaving of this life hard to bear for everyone concerned.
Hard for those
who have lived out their days. Harder still when someone’s taken young and
still with so much living to do.
“Don’t you think once is enough?” she said.
Of course once
isn’t enough. It’s not nearly enough. But on this side of eternity, it seems to
be all we get.
And if that were
the end of the story, it would also be the end of hope.
I don’t decry
the work of the humanist folk who take funeral services. I’ve always believed
that as a minister, my job in a funeral service is twofold. To do justice to
God and to do justice to the person who’s passed on, and I can’t fault the
humanists on how well they do the latter.
But at the end
of the day, no matter how much bonhomie and celebration there is of the life
departed, a humanist service is devoid of hope. In that worldview, the person
you loved, in his or her entirety, has ceased to be.
And as the
Apostle Paul once said – ‘if for this
life only we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men’.
But in Christ,
the Christ who IS the resurrection and the life, the Christian dares to hope
for more than that.
Fred Buechner
puts it this way: “Once before, out of
the abyss of the unborn, the un-created, the not-yet, you and I who from all
eternity had been nothing became something. Out of nonbeing we emerged into being.
And what Jesus promises is resurrection, which means that once again this
miracle will happen, and out of death will come another realm of life.”
We live in a
cynical, secular age. Any talk of life after death is written off as mere comfort
for the gullible. But it’s a brave man who from this side of the chasm dares to
tell us what’s on the other side, when he’s never actually crossed over
himself.
I came across
this wee story the other day which made me smile.
The story is
that there were two babies in a mother's womb – we’ll say there was a boy and a
girl.
"Do you
believe in life after delivery?" asked the boy.
“Of course” said
the girl. “There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to
prepare ourselves for what we’ll be later on.”
"Rubbish,"
says the other. "There’s no life after delivery. What would that kind of
life even look like?"
"I don't
know” said the girl. “But I’d guess there’ll be more light than here. Maybe
we’ll use our legs for walking and eat using our mouths?"
The boy laughed.
"That’s nonsense. Walking’s impossible – you know that! And eating with
our mouths? Are you kidding? We get fed through the umbilical cord, and any
fool can see it’s not long enough to stretch very far.”
"Well I
think there is something more than this, and maybe it's different from how
things are in here." said the girl
"Wishful
thinking” said the boy. “No one’s ever come back from the other side. Delivery’s
the end of life. Once you’re gone, you’re gone.”
"I don’t
think so" says the girl "I think we’ll see mother and she’ll take
care of us."
"Mother??"
You believe in mother? Where is she now?”
“She’s all
around us. It is in her that we live. Without her this place wouldn’t even be.”
"I don't see her” said the boy. “And
until I can see her I’m not going to believe that she exists”.
When it comes to
life on the other side, we are all still in the womb. None of us have crossed
over, and none of us can speak with certainty . But there is one who can speak
with certainty about the afterlife. He died on a Friday and was raised on the
Sunday, and it’s in his name that we gather here today. And it’s his voice that
I choose to listen to.
And he tells us:
“I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even
though he dies. And whoever lives and believes in me will never die”
“Do you believe
this?” – he asks Mary, whose brother Lazarus lay in the sleep of death.
This morning he
asks you and me the very same question. “Do you believe this?”.
May God give us
the faith to echo Mary’s answer –
“Yes Lord. I
believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the
world”.
(This sermon draws from a sermon by Fred Buechner called 'The Killing of Time')
