The Age of Exploration (Sermon 7/15/12)

Well... Here it is... I hope you enjoy...

Age of Exploration

            I grew up wanting to be a filmmaker and I’ve spent most of my life pursuing that dream. So what, might you ask, has prevented me from becoming a filmmaker? The short answer to the question is that God has had other plans for my life.

            When I graduated from high school, I went straight to film school. I bombed horribly. No matter how much I wanted to be a film maker, my heart wasn’t it. Here I was finally getting the opportunity to play with real cameras, lights, and other gear and the one thought that kept coming to my mind was, “Is this it? Shouldn’t I be doing something more with my life?”

            When my friend, Jay, told me that he was dropping out of film school to join the Navy, I told him that he was an idiot. But somewhere in the process of trying to talk Jay out of it, I had a firm push from behind to go out into the world and find the answers to the questions I’d been asking. I called Jay and told him that I was joining the Navy too.

            What I didn’t know then, but I realize now, is that I had just taken the first steps in my spiritual journey.

            It sounds kind of strange to say that a young person raised in a loving church family would have to go out there to find God, but then Jesus’s own story of the Prodigal Son probably wouldn’t ring so true. Even the author of Ecclesiastes admits to trying out all the real world has to offer before finding that such a journey ultimately returns to God. All people take spiritual quests. All spiritual quests end in God. Not all spiritual quests take you to Hawaii for three years, though, so I guess I was luckier than most.

            Of course, I had no idea that I was on a spiritual quest. I was, like most young people, merely trying to find my place out in the world. I only wanted to answer one simple question – what is my purpose in life? It seemed that any day I would find the answer to that question and that the rest of my life could begin in earnest – especially the part where I was making movies and winning Oscars. But the more I looked, the more I explored, the harder the question was to answer.

            At first, I tiptoed around the question. I read a lot when I was in the Navy. Not just the collected works of Heinlein, Asimov and other great Sci-Fi legends, but also classics like Dante, Shakespeare, Steinbeck, and the X-MEN. I also read about the history of Christianity and of Christian thought and started wondering which of the various factions of Christian theology was correct. I became obsessed with the idea of figuring out which words in the Bible were true and which were made up. It was all a chasing after the wind as I came to the conclusion that nobody really knew. I either accepted all of the Bible as valid or I didn’t. That wasn’t a terribly satisfying answer. I wanted truth, instead I got faith.

            I suddenly came to a crossroads of my young spiritual journey. If I couldn’t historically or scientifically verify the validity of every word in the Bible, did I believe in it? Did I believe in God? I was 20, living in Hawaii, completely on my own, and I didn’t have anyone trying to persuade me one way or the other. I could decide the answers to these questions all on my own. Not what was I taught… what did I believe?

            The answers to both questions were yes. I did believe the Bible and I did believe in God. In my case, the seeds planted here at Lakeside had landed on good soil.

            Now that I believed in God, I decided then and there to give myself over to Him. “Lord,” I prayed, “I’m completely lost here trying to run my life. If you can run the universe, surely you can take me where I need to go. From now on, you’re in charge. Lead on.” I think I suspected that God would reveal to me the answer to my questions then and there and I could get back to that award-winning lifestyle any moment, but, again, I was wrong.

            Instead, as no quest ever truly takes you where you were expecting to go, I began to develop a curious new question about God and my new found faith – in short, what about everyone else? What about people who never encounter a Bible? They are created by God. They live their lives. They die. Having never been given the opportunity to know Christ in their lifetime by being born into the wrong circumstances, were they doomed from conception to the eternal flames?

            I went to the one source that I was sure would have the answer to my questions. I finally read the Bible. Cover to cover. Word for Word. Not bad. Some boring bits, but on the whole – a pretty good read. It didn’t specifically answer my question though.

I sought out other books. I searched for answers. I prayed for enlightenment. Though it was only a nagging question that really had nothing to do with me, per se, since I believed in Jesus and I believed in God and I’d been fortunate enough to know Him my whole life, I continued to look for answers all the same. For some reason, the fate of the rest of the world plagued me. It just wasn’t enough for me for Christianity to be some sort of Golden Ticket to a fantastic chocolate factory, I really needed to know that anyone could have a relationship with Jesus whether they were ever formally introduced to him or not.

Of course, what I didn’t realize was that my spiritual quest was starting to affect my other life – the one that I live the other 99% of the time when I’m not trying to resolve deep theological questions. When I got out of the Navy, I tried film school again – only lasted six weeks this time. I changed majors. I studied writing for about two weeks, realized that I knew more than the teachers, then switched to History for a semester or two before settling on archaeology.

(As an aside, I suppose I really studied archaeology because I wanted to be Indiana Jones. If you can’t film them, join them.)

It came time to decide where to go to get my degree. I sent out college applications to all the state schools and universities in the west and Florida. Two days later, I got a package from Idaho State. I’d never even heard of Idaho State before I’d applied there. I was just being thorough. But again, I received that gentle nudge that told me that God had some sort of purpose for me to go there. So despite never having set foot in Idaho before, I went to school at Idaho State in Pocatello. Film school, as you can imagine, was completely abandoned at this point.

Though I was majoring in Anthropology in order to become an archaeologist, I found myself trying to resolve the religious questions that still lingered in my mind. Anthropology is the study of all people in all cultures, past, present, and future. In my studies of other disparate cultures from around the world and in different times, I began to see an interesting trend.

So far, every culture in every time has had religion. Humans, it seems, are by their very nature religious beings. While most scientists have tried to explain this fact by suggesting that as social creatures we need the connection that religion gives us to one another, or that religion is some sort of reflexive response to primitive stimuli like thunder or death or other things that primitive minds can’t explain without science to show the way, I began to wonder if humanities need for religion wasn’t something internal – some part of their very make up.

C.S. Lewis postulates in his book, Mere Christianity, that all human beings, having been created by God, are bound together by a desire to return to God because He is that feeling of perfection humans strive to attain. Though I hadn’t read C.S. Lewis at the time, I had arrived at a similar theory. If the soul really does exist, then humanity throughout history, would always feel the urge, the need, to seek out God. For those not born into Christianity, the desire to find God would still be there – but it would manifest itself in a way that was culturally significant to that particular person. In other words, a Christian would worship God, a Muslim, Allah, a Buddhist, Buddha, a Native American, Coyote, etc... All would be seeking to find God and to worship him, but they would do so in a way that they could understand and that they were taught.

I knew that I was on some pretty unstable ground. My teachers were already warning me about using my Christian upbringing to answer scientific questions. Trying to write a thesis in which I explain that all religions are essentially the same thing would have been the very short end of my anthropoligcal career. But I knew that the thought was important. If everyone on the planet is a child of God and everyone yearns to get back to God, to be closer to their creator, then all sincere religion, all sincere seeking, all spiritual quests lead to God – the one and only God. No matter what shape that quest takes, all of these yearnings are yearnings after the same thing.

We – all of us, all of them, everyone – are exactly the same in our desire to find God, to find love, and to be truly happy.

In this, in all my studies and readings and explorations during and since college, I have only found two people that have the right answer to humanities ultimate goal and how to achieve it – the author of Ecclesiastes and Jesus of Nazareth.

The author of Ecclesiastes, reputed to be King Solomon, tells a story of a spiritual quest that takes him to the very ends of the Earth in search of the answer to the question that plagues him – what is his purpose here? As you may recall, Solomon was gifted by God with divine wisdom. He begins his book about this quest by saying that everything we do here is meaningless – that all of our efforts to find satisfying happiness on our own, whether that be through hard work or leisure or wealth or pleasure or escape – that all of these attempts are a complete waste of time. The truth, he says, is that we all live and we all die and nobody is exempt. Everything else means nothing… EXCEPT our relationship with God.

Jesus said, “Sell everything you have, give it to the poor, and come and follow me.” And the rich man walked away very sad because he was very wealthy. Isn’t that a great punchline. He walked away sad. Why did he walk away sad? Because he was very wealthy… Think about it. We assume that the Bill Gates’ of this world are extremely happy – ecstatic even – because of their vast wealth. But here is Jesus saying that this rich man who has done everything in his power to conform to the religious doctrines of his day, who was considered a righteous man by other people, this man walks away sad because of the vast wealth he has in the bank. Imagine someone giving you a million dollar bill and you burst into tears, and cry out,” Oh what cruel fates! How will I ever give away all of this money?”

This is, I think, the crux of the question. After all my years of searching, after all my questions, after all my explorations, I believe more than ever that Jesus is our Lord and that His way is the only way because of this passage. Because Jesus is saying that the only way to achieve immortality, to find love and happiness, is to let go of everything this world has to offer – all of the false hope, all of the false love, all of the false promises of security and power – to drop it all / give it away because it is utterly meaningless, and then to follow him and become a servant of love to your fellow human being. And it doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, and it doesn’t matter where you were born, and it doesn’t matter how you were raised or what you think you know about the world – all of that is a chasing after the wind – what matters is that you leave it all behind and do as Christ does.

Jesus of Nazareth is the only religious figure who teaches this selfless love. At Idaho State, I took a course of Western Philosophy from Plato to Nietsche. It was a worthless class in that after we learned everything about a particular philosophy, we also learned why that philosophy was wrong, invalid, and did not conform to reality. As I learned the entire knowledge base of secular humanism, it occurred to me that the one philosophy that could not be refuted was the one taught by Jesus of Nazareth.

Love your neighbor can’t be refuted. And you can’t tell me that those people who follow this philosophy – no matter what their background or upbringing – aren’t the people the Jesus is talking about when he says, “For I was hungry and you gave me something eat. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger and you invited me in. I needed clothes and you clothed me. I was sick and you looked after me. I was in prison and you came to visit me.” Jews, Gentiles, Samaritans, Romans… in the end, it is what’s written on our heart that defines us.

At Idaho State, I learned all sorts of things about life and religion and respect for other cultures. But when it came time to go for my Master’s Degree in Religious Anthropology, I had another major revelation – there are no jobs for religious anthropologists. The formal side of my spiritual quest came to an end, but even after I came home, I continued to follow Christ wherever he led me.

He returned me to Lakeside finally after a nice long prodigal journey of my own. I came back to join the choir… and maybe have a few cookies every Sunday. That plan lasted all of one half choir rehearsal. I joined the bell choir. Then I became an assistant youth leader. Then I was asked to join Session. Then I became the head youth leader. I went on mission trips. I went to Kenya. I became a deacon. And God continues to lead me into places I never expected to go.

In fact, long after I had given up on any thought of film school, I was approached by two of my youth group kids. They wanted to make a film and wondered if I could help them. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Faith, as it turns out, is the assurance of things hoped for. I got to make my film. My journey has finally come full circle.

Every single one of us is a child of God. Every single one of us yearns to be reunited with Him. We all search for love. We all search for Happiness. Since all love and happiness comes from God, we all search for God. And if we are fortunate in our search, we will discover God in service to others.

Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, mind, body and soul. Love your neighbor as yourself. Everything else is meaningless – a chasing after the wind.

Amen.