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Human
Anachronisms Gospel: John 6:56-69 Today’s Gospel reading recounts the story in which Jesus tells his disciples that his own life and ministry are the only true source of eternal life. Jesus seems to indicate that all of the religious tradition and practice that has come before him may certainly be helpful and interesting but, ultimately, it is not life-giving in any eternal sense. To the disciples this is a new and challenging revelation, one that they, understandably, approach with a wary sort of caution. “This teaching is difficult, who can accept it?” they ask him. “Does this offend you?” he replies, before going on to point out that, if indeed he is the Chosen One sent to them by God, then his words have an authenticity that forces us to rethink even our most treasured assumptions. Rethinking things about which our mind had been made up for years and years is not something that we human beings are very good at. Most of us see any new information or novel ideas, at least initially, as threatening. We, like the disciples, instinctively react with reluctance and resistance. This morning I want to talk to you about anachronisms--HUMAN anachronisms. Now, I know that anachronisms are not usually thought of as human beings. More typically, we think about objects or events that are strangely out of place in historical sequence. For instance, in the first part of the movie version of Lord of the Rings the camera happens to catch, just for an instant, this year’s model motor car passing the field where Frodo and his friend Sam are supposedly on a mystical journey in prehistoric England. Still, there are examples of human anachronisms, even in the Bible. St. Paul, for instance, refers to himself as being like “one born out of due time.” John the Baptist is perhaps a double anachronism since he dresses in the strange clothing of the ninth century B.C. prophet Elijah and yet, he goes about preaching a message about the future that will not fully come for hundreds of years after his own time in the first century A.D. Perhaps the most delightful of all human anachronisms comes not from the Bible but the imaginative pen of Washington Irving. Do you remember Rip Van Winkle? Rip was someone who lived in the Catskill Mountains of New York State in the latter half of the 18th Century. He lay down one day, intending to take a little nap and he didn’t wake up for twenty years! During those twenty years a lot of things changed. When Rip fell asleep he was a loyal subject of King George III but when he ended his snooze, the question was asked of him, “Are you a Federalist or a Democrat?” He had no idea what the question meant. You see, he had slept right through the American Revolution. Rip had never heard of John Hancock or Paul Revere or the First Continental Congress. Here was a man who is totally out of it because he had been sound asleep while the rest of the world had moved on. What I want you to do this morning is to imagine, with me, what a modern Rip Van Winkle might look like. Let’s think about a person who has been intellectually, socially and religiously standing still for the past twenty years. Scientists are pretty much agreed that the send half of the Twentieth Century was a period of unprecedented change--change in every conceivable dimension. One writer has estimated that the rate of change from the first half of that century compared with the second is of a factor something like 300 to 10. We could argue about how precise that estimate is but, just for the sake of discussion, let’s consider what that means. It suggests that society’s progress and growth in the fields of science, knowledge, religion, technology and medicine moved faster and further between the years 1990 and 2000 than these same fields of inquiry accomplished between 1390 and 1990! Just imagine that! Now let’s go back to our imaginary modern-day Rip Van Winkle. If he were to wake up this morning in 2003, presumably from an intellectual standpoint he would have, in effect, originally begun his little nap around 1403. Think of all the things he would have missed and how impossible it would be for him to comprehend today’s world. But, as you are pondering all that in your mind, let me just plant a few important considerations: How many of our contemporary ideas and institutions are holdovers from a previous era? How many groups and movements are hanging on to notions that long since have lost any relevance to our own time? How often do you and I, as individuals, lapse into ways of thinking that continue to control our views even though they may have long since been disproven or discredited? Now, with those questions in mind, let’s return to our modern Rip Van Winkle. Let’s try to get our heads around all that he has missed. If it’s true, as the text of one traditional hymn text reminds us, “New occasions teach new duties and time makes ancient good uncouth,” our friend Rip is, indeed, a human anachronism--a person who has very little awareness of the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Age of Revolution. In short, he has missed all three of the most vital gateways into the modern era. He’s on the outside looking in. He’s completely unequipped for understanding much of anything that’s going on these days. Think of it. First, he knows little of nothing of the new light shed by the Renaissance discoveries of Galileo, Da Vinci, Columbus, or Gutenberg. Secondly, the outcomes of the whole Reformation escape him, including the contributions of Luther, Calvin and Loyola. Third, he would have missed that great period of history even now not yet complete, the Age of Revolution--the American, French, Industrial, Emancipation, and Civil Rights--never even aware of Paine, Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, Lincoln or Martin Luther King. Well, that should be enough to give us an idea of what a human anachronism might look today. We’re talking about an individual who finds himself trying to live in the Twenty-first Century with a mind-set that became firmly closed to any new ideas or information somewhere back around 1700. This is a person who cannot help but perceive progress or change as threatening, one who wants to dig in his heels and try to keep things the way that always were. At the same time, this is a person who is alive and functioning right now--and every passing day drags him, kicking and screaming, further into a world that he neither understands nor desires. The disciples of Jesus are like that. Jesus tells them a truth that is so new and challenging that they have no context in which to understand or evaluate it. It is a revelation that is unthinkable in its implications, flying in the face of all inherited wisdom and experience. They stand back in fear, reluctant even to consider its revolutionary implications. They are wary and cautious. They say to him, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” The disciples are just the same as we are. It’s so hard for us right now in 2003 to re-think ideas that we have come to cherish as immutable. It’s hard to let go of notions that comfort us with their simplicity, their easy black-and-white definitions because we don’t have to think at all--we can sit back and repeat the same tired old cliches and act in the same old knee jerk ways. The problem for all human beings is exactly the same--for Rip Van Winkle, for our Church’s recent General Convention, for the United States of America, for George W. Bush, for our friends, for you and for me--we are ALL constantly in danger of becoming human anachronisms. None of us really wants to believe that new occasions teach new duties. We think that what was good and true for us will be good and true for our children. But that’s not the way life is. The truth is this: every day brings new insights, information and ideas. We can plug up our ears and turn our heads away but that doesn’t change anything. One day, some way or another, we will be confronted with the solid reality of change. We will have to acknowledge that if we haven’t kept up, if we’ve been taking a little nap, the world is rapidly passing us by. This is not a phenomenon restricted to the elderly. It can happen to a person of any age at all. We’re all free to shut down our minds and hearts to what is going on all around us. We can decide that we know everything we want and need to know about God’s truth--but that won’t keep God from continuing to “do a new thing.” Here’s the point: How do we stay awake and current? How do we avoid becoming a modern Rip Van Winkle? How do we remain open to God’s new revelation even if it may seem confusing and offensive? The answer to all those questions is right in our Gospel reading for this morning. Jesus gives us the clue in his response to the bewildered disciples who are locked into an old way of thinking that prevents them from moving ahead to embrace what God is trying to say to them in the present moment. The answer is relatively simple: continue to trust and follow Jesus even if where and to what you are being called seems foreign and unfamiliar. Jesus is the one who gives us the only first-hand knowledge of the being and purposes of God. He alone is free of the time-bound limitations that affect every one of us and which hinder us from understanding those new truths that God sends to grab hold of us and shake us into wakefulness in the here-and-now. Listen, once again, to the heart of the story told to us by John the Evangelist. It’s a voice coming to each of us Rip Van Winkles from across the centuries--coming with the power to set us free if we will only listen:
Amen. Copyright 2003 Calvary Episcopal Church Gospel: John 6: 56-69 |
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