The Reverend Seth Ethan Carey
February 11th, 2007
First Congregational Church, Glen Ellyn, Illinois
www.firstconge.org
630-469-3096
I’ve never been there, but I hear the desert is a lonely place; nothing but burning sand and empty highways, their miles marked by dying petrol stations from the land that time forgot. But it’s always held a romantic appeal for those who’d rather be alone. For messiahs and mavericks, it’s always been a means of escape from the world. But the lonely hell that they find there is sometimes worse than the troubles they leave behind.
When Jesus went into the desert to pray, he was harassed by the Devil itself. And the same has been said of the early Christian hermits, those mystics and ascetics who sold everything and fled civilization and built lonely huts in the desert, where they purified themselves by eating stale bread and salt, scourging themselves with thorny branches, and fighting back the demons that came to taunt them in the small hours of the night.
Christian history is filled with many such wild tales of the so-called Desert Fathers, including one legend about a man called St. Antony who lived in some of the most desolate regions of the Egyptian wilderness. Antony lived alone, and he ate almost nothing at all. He denied himself food, human companionship, every pleasure except for the pleasure of prayer. He refused to accept visitors, as they only distracted him from his purpose. And when he grew tired of sleeping alone on the floor of his lonely room, he’d occasionally spend the night locked in an ancient tomb inhabited by an army of evil ghosts and wild animals.
I guess he was just glad for the company.
In a sense, St. Antony was a lot like one of those spaghetti western heroes of the 1960’s—high-plains drifters who dwelled in the lonely space between ragged frontier towns, the kind with signs out front to mark their dwindling population. They carried six-shooters and drank whiskey from dirty glasses, and they had cool names like “Horse,” and “Preacher.” And of course there was Clint Eastwood’s infamous gunslinger from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly who had no name at all; Like St. Antony, that wanderer was yet another man who found refuge among the leering vultures and sun-bleached bones of the uninhabited desert wastes, a nameless hero on a horse with no name.
He was another outlaw, another man who was profoundly alone.
***
The prophet Jeremiah is yet another portrait of loneliness. But he lacks the gunslinger’s grit, his “danger is my middle name” attitude, which is probably why he never starred in a bullet-riddled Western. I’m willing to bet there are a lot of men in this room who grew up with fantasies of being as tough-as-nails as Clint Eastwood; perhaps some of the women, too.
Of course no one ever says, “I want to be like Jeremiah when I grow up.” But I’ll tell you, he was pretty tough in his own right.
Jeremiah was a prophet of the Lord, and a good one too; maybe a little too good. Armed to the teeth with condemnation, he berated his fellow Judeans for their idolatry and their oppression of the poor. He told his own people that their precious Jerusalem would soon be a ghost town, that they would be conquered by Babylon and dragged off in chains to its heathen city. And what’s worse, he told them that they deserved it:
“By your own act you shall
lose the heritage that I gave you, and I will make you serve your enemies in a
land that you do not know; for in my
anger a fire is kindled that shall burn forever.”
Now, if I was that unsympathetic in the pulpit, you probably wouldn’t like me very much. And Jeremiah fared no better; everyone hated him. Like St. Antony and Clint Eastwood’s nameless bounty hunter, you might say Jeremiah was a man apart, a lonely shrub in the desert.
Hermit, gunslinger, prophet—what all three of these figures have in common is the degree of their isolation. They all wandered in uninhabited wastelands of the world—or of the heart. But what really set them apart? Was it St. Antony’s rigorous prayer life? Was it the flash of Clint Eastwood’s guns, the menacing glow of his cigar? Was it Jeremiah’s bleak prophecy of exile and death?
Perhaps; or maybe, like spoiled kids on the playground, these guys just don’t get along well with others. Maybe that’s why, in the words of Jeremiah, they’ve been cursed to “be like a shrub in the desert,” and to “live in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land.”
Or in other words: Those who can’t see past themselves—those who can’t imagine a world beyond the confines of their own flesh, those who have no empathy for others—are doomed to inhabit an uninhabited world; a ghost town, if you will, with a population of one.
***
The human ego can be very dangerous. I have long studied the nature of evil—from the ruin of angels to the unspeakable horrors of genocide, I have struggled to understand the pathology of sin, the root of its disease, why people do the horrible things that they sometimes do. And after years of research, I believe I have finally discovered the root of all evil. It was right under my nose all along. It was right behind my eyes.
It’s me.
Or rather, it is I.
The ego, that is. That part of us all that says, “I think,” or “I want,” or “I
need.” That part of each of us that looks out for me,
myself, and I at the expense of all others. Now, to be fair—I recognize that
the ego is a necessary survival mechanism. It tells us when we’re hungry, or in
pain. But it also builds a wall between me and you, a sort of psychic barrier
that locks you out—and locks me in. Every time I become more important
than you, empathy flies out the window. And the potential for evil is
born.
As children, we have very little command over the ego—we haven’t learned to control it yet, for the sake of living in polite society. That’s why infants will shamelessly howl during all hours of the night if they’re hungry, or lonely, utterly oblivious to the frustration and insomnia that they foster in their parents. Yeah, you know of what I’m talking about. Indeed, the ego itself is very much like a screaming child, its cries echoing through our minds as we go about the day.
And it makes it hard for us to be empathic, hard to appreciate where other people are coming from.
***
I have to admit that I sort of feel like I’m preaching to the choir here—some of the most empathic and understanding people I’ve ever met belong to this church. You express it so well, in your dedication to serving the homeless, your determination to round up Christmas presents for impoverished children, your persistence in praying for the sick. The empathy that you extend to those in need is, honestly, impressive.
But I wonder—do we extend the same mercy to everyone? It’s not always easy to empathize with the politician who makes bad decisions, or the religious fundamentalist that tells you you’re going to burn in Hell, or the person who takes the last parking space when you're already running late. That, my friends, is a real challenge.
In fact, there was an amazing story in the news a couple of years back, true story, about two people that actually got in a fight over a handicapped parking space. Harsh words were exchanged, and the shouting was so intense that it drew a crowd of onlookers. One of the men was leaning on a cane and the other was sitting in a wheelchair, and they seemed to be arguing over who deserved the parking space more. Well, you can only imagine the surprise of the crowd when the man with the cane suddenly pulled a full-length sword out of the handle and advanced on the guy in the wheelchair. And surprise turned to all-out shock when the man in the wheelchair responded by drawing a .45 Desert Eagle like it was high noon…
Miraculously, no one was injured. But while completely true, I think this story also works as a metaphor for the battles we wage with one another. Of course I don’t expect anyone in this room would go to war over a parking space; but I suspect we all keep a few weapons concealed in our hearts, just in case things don’t go our way. We want to help the helpless. But do we help the people who get in our way? Does anyone?
***
“Love your enemies, do good
to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.
If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also.”
That's what Jesus said. It doesn't mean that if we're being abused, we have to stand there and take it. What it does mean is that if we can’t see where other people are coming from, if we can’t let down our guard, put aside our ego, and walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, then we isolate ourselves. And we inhabit a proverbial ghost town, where other people are no more than two-dimensional phantoms, cardboard cutouts, somehow less real or less important than we are. Perhaps writer Aldous Huxley described this scenario best in his book The Doors of Perception. He said,
“We live together, we
act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are
by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified
alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies
into a single-self-transcendence; in vain.”
And that’s often how it is. But that’s not how it has to be. I believe that we are all of us connected by a common bond of the spirit, divided only in mind and in flesh. And it is our duty—not only as Christians, but as human beings—to recognize that bond, to recognize the full three-dimensional reality of those around us, our loved ones and our enemies alike.
It may well be the most difficult thing that anyone can do. Because empathy is a kind of intimacy, and that means getting close to people. And getting close often means getting hurt. We’re like porcupines that way—yearning to be close to each other, but afraid of what it could mean.
It so happens that a lot of porcupines live in the desert, just like St. Antony and the gunslinger—and they’re no stranger to loneliness, either. The needle-sharp quills that cover their body can make their mating rituals deadly. To achieve union, they have to learn to let their defenses down, to retract their knives, to forget themselves—even for a moment—for the sake of the other. And that's what turning the other cheek is all about.
We could be like that. Or we could forsake the world and be alone, like wanderers in the desert. I'll never forget Clint Eastwood's toughest one-liner, because it expresses the gunslinger's guarded loneliness—his complete lack of empathy—so well. After being scolded for shooting an unarmed man, he replies without hesitation:
“Well, he should have armed himself.”
But maybe that's the problem. Maybe we arm ourselves a little too well.