The Reverend Seth Ethan Carey
December 31st,
2006
First
Congregational Church, Glen Ellyn, Illinois
Firstconge.org
630-469-3096
We’ve all done things we aren’t proud of. Some, of course, are worse than others.
To present a fairly mild case—being as this is a family Sunday, after all—I’ll tell you a story I once heard about a preacher, one of those pulpit horror stories that are a dime a dozen when you train for the ministry. This particular preacher had been working the pulpit for a good many years when, on a whim, he got lazy and decided to recycle a sermon that he’d been especially proud of, one that he’d preached about twenty years previous, bringing it out of retirement from the depths of a rusty filing cabinet and brushing it off for another go.
At first, all was well. He launched into his message without missing a beat. The familiar anecdotes that he recalled with such fondness still brought a grin to his lips, and the edgy, irreverent tone of the sermon made him feel like the young, rebellious preacher that he was twenty years ago. But as he read aloud from the dusty, handwritten manuscript, he began to slowly realize that something was very wrong.
As the sermon progressed, the words on the page grew progressively more foreign to him. At first, he told himself that it was just the style of his prose, which had evolved tremendously over the years. But before long, he found that he was shocked and appalled by some of the things that were coming out of his own mouth, unable to believe that he had ever made such statements in public—indeed, that he was doing it again at this very moment.
In the end, he couldn’t continue in good conscience. After a long pause, he shamefully announced to his congregation, “I’m sorry, but I no longer agree with the things I just said.”
The jig was up. He was a sermon recycler, and everyone knew it.
***
I have in my hands a copy of a sermon that I preached
about three years ago.
I have to confess that I no longer agree with the things
that I said that day. But at least I figured that out before I tried to recycle
it.
Not that I would have tried to recycle it, of course.
I have to admit that I am still rather fond of the title: “The Key to Surviving a Nuclear Blast.” If only all sermons had such practical advice to offer!
Still, I just can’t get behind the message. It was a sermon on the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, in which God rains fire and brimstone on those twin cities and destroys all of its inhabitants, including a woman who nearly escaped but turned back to look at the last minute and was engulfed in the explosion. The whole point of the message was that we can only find peace in life by burning our bridges and abandoning the shameful memory of past failures—shedding our skin like a snake, if you will.
These are the final words of that melodramatic message:
“Set your eyes on the horizon, where God
waits for you. Set your past on fire, and get out of there before it explodes.
That, my friends, is the key. What would Jesus do? That’s what Jesus would do.”
I’m sorry, but I no longer agree with the things I just said.
***
If only it were so easy. If we could just set our past on fire, just stand there and watch it burn; move on without looking back. Because if we look back on our lives, we’ll all find memories that we aren’t especially proud of, things we’d probably like to strike from the record. Maybe it was something trivial, like your penchant for blue leisure suits in the 1970’s. Or maybe it was your haircut in the 80’s. Maybe it was something stupid, like a fistfight or a college prank. Or maybe you did something that you’re deeply ashamed of—most of us have. Maybe you hurt someone you love, or broke the law, or took one step past the point of no return.
No matter what happened in years past, there is a temptation—especially this time of year, when New Year’s resolutions abound—to burn our bridges and start with a clean slate. But while sins may be forgiven, we can’t deny that we’re the same people who committed them. We can learn from our mistakes, even from our pain, and those lessons can make us better people. But they don’t make us different people. You’re still you and I’m still me. We all have the power to rise above our shame, to learn from it. But if we forget our mistakes, then we will surely be condemned to repeat them. So we keep them with us, a part of who we are.
There is no imaginary nuclear blast to wash us clean.
The past remains—even if it does so in the past. Still, if we can’t burn it away, some of us might like to conveniently “misplace” it, or at least certain parts of it—beating up our siblings, throwing temper tantrums in the mall, and picking on our classmates—or rather getting picked on by our classmates, and then plotting elaborate and petty revenge fantasies. There’s a term for this misplaced childhood: it’s called selective amnesia.
Incidentally, there is one man whose childhood actually did get misplaced by no fault of his own. That man is Jesus.
***
The scripture from Luke’s gospel that we heard this morning is the only biblical reference to Christ’s adolescence. We never hear anything about what happened to Jesus from the time he was born to the time he began his ministry some thirty years later. The majority of his life story is suspiciously vacant, as though someone literally did set it on fire, melting the pages of his biography that might have found their way into the New Testament. All we have is this one story about Jesus as a teenager, sneaking away from his parents to hang out with the rabbis in the Temple.
I find it amusing; the way people often interpret this story. They often make Jesus out to be quite the rebellious youth—running off on his own, doing his own thing, talking back to his parents, and so on and so forth, as if to remind us all that Jesus made mistakes when he was young, too, so we shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves for the things we might have done.
But really, if this is the worst thing Jesus ever did as a teenager, then I fail to see the inspiration in this story. Essentially what we have here is a story about a kid who sneaks out of the house so that he can go to church—for three whole days.
You parents out there should be so lucky.
But I’ll let you in on a little secret. There are a handful of other legends out there, stories about the boy Jesus that didn’t make it into the Bible; and for good reason, too. They come from an imaginative book called the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, an apocryphal text that most biblical scholars write off as utter nonsense. This infancy gospel is basically an account of Jesus’ childhood, and his attempts as a young boy to control his awesome powers.
But from the way it reads, you’d think it was the infancy gospel of the Antichrist. Whenever anyone criticizes him or gets in his way, Jesus retaliates without mercy. On the first page alone, the five year old Jesus puts a curse on one of his neighbors, makes the boy’s parents go blind, and kills another young man for bumping into him on the street. Every time Jesus acts out, someone goes and complains to his parents, warning them that they’d better learn to keep him in line. And Mary and Joseph beseech him, “Why do you do such things, that these suffer and hate and persecute us?” And Jesus replies like the good son he is: “For your sake I will hold my peace… But they shall bear their punishment.”
It’s like a bad movie. It’d be hilarious if it wasn’t so creepy.
***
For what it’s worth, the young Jesus does learn to control both his temper and his powers, using them to heal injured children, raise the dead, and even to assist Joseph in his carpenter’s workshop. And we also need to remember that those horror stories from Jesus’ childhood are absolutely not true. They’re nothing more than a product of the grim medieval imagination.
Still, they do serve a purpose. They remind us, perhaps better than our own scripture, that Jesus may well have made a few mistakes in his life, too. He was a human being, after all.
At the very least, we know that he suffered. And that suffering on the cross, even unto death, became a part of who he is. Just as everything we do, everything we feel, becomes a part of us. Our good and our evil, our triumph and our defeat, they all add up to who we are. These are the things we carry.
And we don’t have to be embarrassed, or ashamed. We can be ashamed of things we’ve done without being ashamed of who we are—human beings that make mistakes. If we can learn to forgive, then we won’t have to forget.
***
When I was about seven years old, I did something I’ll never forget. It was small thing, hardly a crime against humanity, but it’s stayed with me. I was at a florist with my mother, and I was eying a rack of teddy bears. One teddy bear, in particular. It was dressed as a tennis player. I said nothing, but I wanted it pretty bad.
When we got home that day, my mother surprised me by giving me one of those teddy bears—but it was the wrong one. This one was dressed as a gymnast, not a tennis player. I wanted the tennis player. And I told her so, screaming my lungs out at her, hurling angry words like rotten fruit, at this poor woman who just tried to do something nice for her son. In that moment, I was the most ungrateful brat the world has ever known.
The hard news is, even though I’m ashamed of my behavior, I’m still the same person. I’m more mature. I’m more grateful. But I’m still me.
And the good news is, I’m still me. Because God loves me. God always did. And God loves you, no matter what you’ve done, no matter who you’ve been. Even in those moments of your childhood that you’d rather misplace, even in those years that you’d just as soon burn, even in those moments of sheer stupidity that you’d rather forger.
Even in the New Year—in the future—when we do it all over again.