"Searching After the Right Things"
Offering a faith that transforms in an age of narcissism
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, January 6, 2008
Text: Revelation 21:1-6
The Associated Press had a fascinating article a few weeks ago. It was about a group of psychologists and psychiatrists who worked together at San Diego State University to develop something meant to be a judge of human character. They created what is known as the “narcissistic personality inventory.” The idea behind this was that they would trace how narcissistic, how self-loving, generations are and compare one generation with another.
Their study concluded that our society is moving ever more toward narcissism. Our continual bombardment by literature and music that tell everyone, “You are okay; you are special; you are marvellous; you are the most important person there ever was,” has led to a society that is starting to believe these mantras.
The group members were concerned because they believe narcissism actually does damage and produces bad things. Their study found that narcissists are more likely to have romantic relationships that are short-lived, at risk for infidelity, lacking in emotional warmth, exhibit game-playing, dishonesty and over-controlling, violent behaviours. They also noted that this type of narcissism is being manifested in our use of technology. Even the names of web sites such as MySpace, Facebook and YouTube, which enable people to put themselves out there to the world, suggest narcissism. More often than not, the things people post and the discussions they have are simply about themselves. We are becoming a self-absorbed society, putting ourselves out there. The study's authors argue quite rightly that there is a place for a degree of self-love and self-respect, but that narcissism is a pejorative sense of what that self-love can become.
I want to talk this morning about the church - I do not want to talk about the narcissism of our age! The problem is that I can't talk about the church without realizing how, at times, there are those within the Christian community who want to feed this narcissism. The logic, on the part of some, goes in the following way: Many self-loving people have needs. Some of these needs are spiritual and existential: “Who am I? Why am I here? Does God love me?” These people are, in a sense, seekers. They are people who want to find solutions for their lives to make themselves feel better.
The next leap in logic is often to want to market the Christian faith just to help meet the needs of the narcissists. People believe that what the church should do is package the gospel in such a way that it is acceptable to a narcissistic generation. This leads us to make the needs of a self-loving generation the starting point in our talk about God and the ministry of the church. The end result is that we create and market a faith to meet the needs of people who sometimes are narcissistic.
There is a problem with this, because what happens if narcissists are actually seeking after the wrong things? What happens if their lives are so distorted that they cannot see the need for change? If the church simply markets the faith to try to appease a self-loving generation, does it not do a disservice both to a narcissistic world and the gospel the church preaches?
I think it does. I think there are many places, and I have read numerous articles about this, where you can have churches if you continually feed the beast of narcissism and make people feel better about themselves. When we do this, we are doing something profoundly conservative - “small c” conservative. We are preserving the status quo! We are allowing people to be as they are - nothing transformational, nothing liberating, no change. We are simply making them feel good about the state of things.
The Christmas story followed by the story of the Epiphany shows us that you can go searching for something, and God will surprise you with something different. The Magi, in the story in Mathew's Gospel, went looking for a king. They followed a star and they came to what? A manger! They saw a child in a lowly state. Before they knew where they were, they were thrown into the vortex of a political struggle with a corrupt king who had been co-opted by the Roman powers of the day and did not want his power threatened. The Magi had to walk away from him. Why? It was because they had gone looking for a certain thing, but they had found something different. The Gospel of Jesus Christ surprises us and actually changes us once we find it. It is not simply a case, then, of leading people in a certain direction and saying, “Here, everything is okay.” Sometimes it is not.
Between Christmas and the New Year, I go on a pilgrimage. My pilgrimage is not to a holy site; it is to a bookstore. I spend half the day in this bookstore. I love to see what the new titles are. I don't read anything; I just want to see what new books are out there. I scanned all of them and found one that was very appealing titled, How You Can Be a Better Person. I picked it up and started to read it and thought, “No, this isn't for me. I don't want to be a better person. I am a minister! How can I be a better person? Aren't we perfect already?” Then I read another book on how to be humble and thought, “Now, that's a book I should be reading!” There was a plethora of these books on how to be a good person, how to be a better person, how to improve. They were very attractive and I am sure some of them make a lot of common sense. But when I started to read the content, most of them (not all of them, some of them are transformative) just sort of affirm us in who we are and tell us, “Go with your instincts; go with your feeling.”
At the same time, I saw a young woman walking down towards the checkout, and her arms were filled with all these books on the New Age, the occult, mysticism, astrology and self-help. As I looked at her, I wasn't in any way condemning her. I just thought to myself, “Here is a person who is seeking and searching for something better in her life.” What must be going on in her heart and mind that she wants to draw on all of this to somehow do something in her life? Clearly, she is hungry and thirsty for something. Clearly, she is seeking something - no question about it! I just wondered whether or not she would find what she was looking for in those books.
That is the question I want to ask today. I think sometimes we do not search aright. The more narcissistic we are, the greater the likelihood that we are looking for the wrong things. So what should the church say to a world that is becoming more self-absorbed and self-centered?
First of all, we should say that people should seek after the things of God. That is the gospel that we offer. Near the end of the Book of Revelation, there is a tremendous apocalyptic vision of a new heaven and a new earth. In this passage, there is this little nugget that says, “Jesus Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.” In other words, the starting point is always Christ, not just our needs. It is the revelation of God in Christ, just as the end result is Christ. For the church, particularly the early church, the starting point was not just meeting society's needs; it was presenting the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, and presenting Jesus Christ himself. Believe you me, it was a time when having that faith was a matter of life and death.
We do not know when the Book of Revelation was written. A lot would depend on who you think the Emperor was at the time, because it was written to a group of Christians to give them a sense of hope and encouragement in the face of persecution. It could have been written, as some have said, during the time of the Emperor Domitian or Nero, Trajan or Vespasian. It could have been the Four Emperors or Titus. I tend to come down on it being written during the time of Domitian, probably around 81-96 AD. During that time, indeed throughout the reign of each of these emperors, Christians were facing a crisis and being persecuted.
John, on Patmos, wanted to offer them a new insight, a new vision of how they should live in the midst of a very dangerous, violent world obsessed with conflict and power. He said that if you follow Christ, if you believe, you will realize that there is a new heaven and a new earth, and that there will be, to use the phrase of the passage from Isaiah, “a new Jerusalem.” There will be no more sorrow, mourning, hatred or death - there will be what God intended for the world. John went on to say that this is actually being fulfilled in and through the grace of Jesus Christ. It is not as though you have to go searching for it; it is that you have to trust in it. Of course, this has been misunderstood throughout the generations. Some have said, “Well, was John really just suggesting that there will be a utopia, because we haven't seen it.” There are many people today who look at the Christian faith and see it as being anything but new. They see it as reflecting the old order, the way things were rather than the way things are.
John holds out the belief that what began in Christ will eventually be completed in Christ; the Alpha has come and the Omega, in the end, will be realized. In fact, all that we hope and dream for is actually at work in the presence of Christ. It is here, but it is not yet. It has arrived, but it is not yet consummated. It is fulfilled, but it is not yet complete. John said, “This is the faith of those who are hungry and thirsty.” The problem is that rather than embracing this vision, we still, as human beings in our self-centeredness, want to hold on to the old things: The avarice, immorality, hatred, self-absorption, lack of care for others and lack of faith. John wrote that those who do such things will die, because those things lead to death.
I don't want to speculate about what happened in the murder of a young girl this last week, the terrible stabbing in the St. Clair and O'Connor area. But this I do know: If somebody takes the life of another individual, at that moment they are absorbed with themselves. They are not thinking about the consequence of their action on someone else. So it goes with the narcissistic age. What actually suffers in the end is the other. By definition, the more we engage in self-absorbed pleasure-seeking, the more we desire things only for ourselves, the less we care for others.
The pathology of narcissism is that it not only destroys the individual narcissist, but also destroys others. John would say to our world, “Hold on to the vision of the Kingdom!” Jesus said, “Seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and then all these other things will be added to you.” But don't just start with whatever your personal needs are; start with the vision of the Kingdom of God inaugurated in Jesus Christ, for therein is health and life. That is what we offer to a broken, thirsty, hurting and self-absorbed world.
There is another dimension. It is that we should seek because we have been sought. There is a wonderful part in that passage in Revelation that says God has made his tabernacle among people. The Greek word is skene, which means “that which is God's dwelling place.” God's dwelling place, say the Scriptures, is with us. In other words, God has decided - and this is the critical point - to have fellowship with us; to come and dwell among us and be one with us. God has decided to have communion with us and be alongside us. This is what we say to a narcissistic, self-absorbed and sometimes very lonely world: God has come and dwelled among us and God is with us. John wrote a wonderful line in Revelation 21: “And he will be our God and we will be his people.” In other words, God has identified with us. My friends, I believe this makes a huge difference in people's lives. I believe this is the most transformative thing you can offer anybody.
Last week I was listening to an interview with one of my all-time musical heroes. I know I am showing my age now, but I loved James Taylor. About the only time I have been envious of one of my cousins - and might have even killed her - was when I found out that she had a ticket to hear James Taylor singing at Edinburgh Castle. She didn't offer the ticket to me, but that is another story! I loved James Taylor, so when he was being interviewed by Tavis Smiley on PBS, I was listening. It was one of the most magnificent interviews I have heard in my whole life, because James Taylor is a man who has struggled in his life with addictions, and his brother died because of addictions. James Taylor talked about the self-absorption of the world in which he grew up, but he made this fascinating statement:
The nature of human consciousness and the nature of knowing things, and the degree to which we are responsible for and in control of our own lives, is connected to this personal difficulty in a sort of lurid way. So I write songs about letting go - about surrender. I think of myself as a highly spiritual person, but without religion. I was never really given a religion or a religious experience or a community to sort of subscribe to, and I think I have missed the boat. I envy people who have a strong faith and a community of faith that they live in and with.
I know from reading about your (Smiley's) upbringing that this faith has been a huge rock, and a building block and grounding for your life. I had a very moral upbringing and spiritual in a sort of not very specific way. But one of the kinds of songs that I write is sort of like an agnostic spiritual - you know, a sort of hymn for people who are still looking and seeking a little bit.
Then he went on to say that the problem he has found in life is that so many people are seeking for things, but they are not looking for the right things. He said, “It's the human consciousness to look for trouble constantly and we find it!”
That is the problem, my friends: If people are troubled and therefore looking for more trouble, if they are self-absorbed and they want to have that self-absorption fulfilled, then they are looking for the wrong things. James Taylor is right. He is envious of those who have a faith. Why? Because it is faith that allows people to deal with the mystery of life. It is faith that allows people to stand outside of themselves and think about the needs of others. It is the faith, and he uses the word “community,” that supports, nurtures and gives light. It is faith that gives people a vision of a new heaven and a new earth and something better. It is faith that gives them belief in the fulfillment and consummation of the Kingdom of God in Christ. It is faith that makes life truly worth living.
I might plagiarize James Taylor for a moment, and do a Christian interpretation of one of his greatest songs. Substitute “Christ” or “God” for the word “me” and you will realize what I mean:
When you are down and troubled
and you need a helping hand,
and nothing, nothing is going right,
close your eyes and think of God
and soon he will be there
to brighten up even your darkest night.Just call out my name and you know
wherever I am, I'll come running
to see you again.
Winter, spring, summer or fall,
all you have to do is call
and I'll be there. You've got a friend.Ain't it good to know
that you've got a friend?
Where people can be so cold;
they'll hurt you and desert you,
and take your soul if you let them.
Oh yeah, don't you let them.You just call out my name
and you know wherever I am,
I will be there.
That is exactly what John was saying to the persecuted Christians in the Roman Empire: God would be there for them. Isn't that what we offer our world? Amen.