The Meaning of Life

Sunday, March 22, 2009
4th Sunday in Lent
Preacher: Pastor Kendra Mohn



Readings:
Numbers 21:4-9
Ephesians 2:1-10
John 3:14-21

Audio sermon file:

http://fileresource.sitepro.com/filemanager/74/filecollections/742/A4C2B7BE-EF9F-9AAD-3179-51A15EC99BC3.mp3

Pastor Mohn confessed another of her moments when Erik asked “What are you preaching this week?” to which she replied “The meaning of life”. In what she called a weekly soup of personal conversations, on-line blogging and sermon preparation surrounding the weekly scripture readings, she found a voice of people hungering for an answer to “Why we’re here?” Is it for a comfortable retirement, a sense of self defined by our roles at work or in our family relationships …

Having been intrigued by the new Target ad campaign of redefining people’s sense of a vacation (spray-on sun tan skin colorant), Pastor Mohn elaborated on the sense of redefining ourselves. In the Old Testament and throughout today’s scripture readings there is the overriding specter that “things are not OK”. As we hear in Ephesians, we’re not OK., we’re dead through our trespasses, mired in sin, disobedient, living in the passions of our flesh, children of wrath.

People end up asking “How did we get this far away? How did we get this lost? It’s a huge question. And maybe part of the answer lies in having confused the meaning of life with the American dream. Pastor Mohn muses that she’s not against having dreams, but offer s this querie: As we chase ‘the proverbial American dream’, what answer do we find as we look in the mirror and ask ourselves, “If that’s all there is, where is the meaning in life?”

The dream that arguably posts the desirables as a two-person heterosexual relationship, a big house, 2 cars, a boat, the lake house, 2.3 healthy children who go to good colleges on full scholarship. When we’re honest with ourselves, we can hear echoes of it, desires for it in our own hearts and in our own actions.

The truth is not everyone has or even wants this dream. There are as many ways of living life as there are people living it. Truth is … if that’s all there is, we wind up right where we started.

There’s a great little picture book – Hope for the Flowers … self-described as ‘a tale – partly about life and lots about hope – for adults and others’ … in which two caterpillars, Sprite and Yellow come upon a pile of caterpillars rising into the sky as far as the eye can see. “Do you know what’s happening?” one says to another. “I just arrived myself. No one has time to explain. They’re so busy trying to get where they’re going – up there,” came the reply. “But what’s at the top?” Stripe asked. Again, the reply:”No one knows that either, but it must be awfully good because everyone’s rushing there.” There’s only one thing to do reasons Stripe and he jumps right in. Caterpillars climb atop one another, pushing, shoving, and knocking each other indiscriminately off the pile in an all-out effort to “get to the top”. Eventually Stripe pushes through the clouds only to find there’s nothing “up there”. “High up there”, he concludes, “only looked good from the bottom”. And he climbs back down.

Pastor Mohn said it very similarly:

“If that’s all there is, we wind up right where we started.”

It’s a zero-sum game, you only climb the pile if you’re willing to knock your neighbor off. Our neighbor becomes our obstacle, our enemy rather than our brother, only someone in the way of our realization of “what’s up there”.

So Stripe heads down the pile telling everyone he sees that “there is nothing up there” and that they would be so much the better for building cocoons; that they could fly if only they become butterflies. “I saw a butterfly – there CAN be more to life,” Stripe realizes.

The pile of caterpillars climbs on, ignorant of the beauty contained within each of them. The Israelites carried to freedom by God, find themselves complaining about the food on the road. Invariably, when we are distracted from what God says is the true meaning of life by the little things along the way – that is when the snakes come.

But we have a collection of at least a pair of the Bible’s most powerful and most quoted verses that say we are saved nonetheless.

Ephesians 2:8 … What God has already done … “For by grace you have been saved through faith and this is not your doing; it is a gift of God – not the results of works, so that no one may boast.”

Ephesians 2:10 … Who we are and what our purpose is … “For we are what He has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God created beforehand to be our way of life.”

Caterpillars were born to be butterflies – not climb piles of pillars.

There’s no mention in Ephesians about the boat, the college scholarships, our partner, our security, vacation or what’s presumably “up there”. Our cocoon, the beauty of the butterfly within lies in God’s purpose for us all – to serve our neighbor.

There is a wonderful movie called The Peaceful Warrior (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OchAhzYrQNw&feature=related )in which a young, talented college athlete seeking a spot on the coveted Olympic team can “only see gold”. He is befriended by an older and wiser man named Socrates running “a gas station”. Frustrated that the man does not ascribe to his passion for “possessions and material things”, the student spouts off:

“If you’re so smart, why are you working in a gas station?” to which Socrates replies:

“It’s a service station. We provide service. There is no higher purpose”

“Than pumping gas?”

“Than service to others”

In a story that so reminded me of that exchange, Pastor Mohn recalled a vivid memory of raking leaves with her Dad when she asked him “What’s the meaning of life?” to which he replied, “Well, you’re not going to find it standing around thinking about it. You’re not going to figure it out worrying about it or wondering about it.”

We find it only when we are Christ present in our neighbors’ lives, when we give so someone else can live, when we stop striving for “the gold” long enough to slow down and find out what’s going on all around us, when we live our lives for the sake of our neighbors, our siblings, our family.

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only son, so that everyone who believes in Him may have eternal life.”

Just as God did not take the snakes away from the Israelites, but rather offered another route around the obstacle, God did not take away sin from the world, but offered His only Son to give us “a go around”. He offered this supreme example of how to live in service to one another.

THIS is the gift from God – the meaning of life – to give freely and fully, to become the butterflies he intended us to be, not caterpillars in search of “something up there” worth climbing over our brothers to attain … to become the peaceful warriors we were ordained to be, those who see the beauty of a body in flight on the gymnastic rings, a human butterfly, not a competitor to vanquish and conquer, to take from.

This is the meaning of life – but you have to “exit the pile”, and “leave the gym” to travel to the service station or the tree where lies the open cocoons … where, like a small caterpillar named Stripe or a young man named Dan, with counsel from a companion named Yellow or Socrates … we finally ... “slowly seemed to understand and somehow knew what to do”.