Sermon Preached by
The Rev. David McMaster
Sunday, July 7, 2013
Text: Psalm 46:1-11; 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11
The opening scene of the 2007 film, The Bucket List, depicts a climber moving up the majestic, snow covered HimalayanMountains. The voice of Carter Chambers (Morgan Freeman) comments, “Edward Perryman Cole died in May. It was a Sunday afternoon and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. It’s difficult to understand the sum of a person’s life. Some people would tell you, it’s measured by the one’s left behind. Some believe it can be measured in faith, some say by love, other folks say, “Life has no meaning at all.” Me? I believe that you measure yourself by the people who measure themselves by you. But what I can tell you for sure is that by any measure, Edward Cole lived more in his last days on earth than most people manage to wring out of a life time. I know that when he died, his eyes were closed, and his heart was open.”
Perhaps you remember The Bucket List. Edward Cole (Jack Nicholson) is wealthy, cynical, elitist, without a friend in the world. Carter Chambers is a motor mechanic. He is highly intelligent, and with a good and wholesome, Christian family. In their mid-60s, as fate would have it, both wind up in the same room in one of the hospitals that Edward Cole owns, both stare into the face of cancer. After treatment, both are declared terminal with six months to a year to live. In the midst of the news, Chambers starts writing and Cole asks him what he’s doing. Carter Chambers was writing a list of things he’d like to do before he “kicks the bucket.” Cole likes the idea but sees Carter’s philosophical list as only half a good idea. He had better ideas and he starts writing on Carter’s paper: sky diving, kiss the most beautiful girl in the world, get a tattoo, race cars at Indy, go on a safari, see the pyramids and Taj Mahal. Cole is eager to begin and talks Carter Chambers into joining him. Money is no option for Cole and they set out to fulfil their dreams.
Since that film, “bucket lists” have become popular. Often, however, it takes something catastrophic to snap us out of the clatter and noise and things that so fill our lives. Most people I talk to are too busy to do the things they dream of. Dreams are almost always postponed for another time.
I started ask why? What are we doing that keeps us so busy. When you think about it, most people sleep seven or eight hours give or take. Most work for eight hours give or take. Professionals tend to work more. Travel to and from work in this city averages 45 minutes or more per day. Then there’s television. Last year the New York Daily News reported that the average American watches 34 hours of television per week, while the Toronto Star reported this year that the average Canadian watches 30 hours per week. Apparently, young people watch less TV but are online 30 + hours per week while adults spend 13 hours per week online outside of work according to 2009 statistics.
Then there are smart phones. I love my smart phone but sometimes feel that it is taking over my life. And, no wonder, apparently the average smart phone owner spends two hours per day on their smartphone. Only a little of that is actually making a phone call, most is tweeting, taking pictures, e.mailing, facebooking, checking sports news, regular news and stocks. Apparently, the average smart phone owner checks his/her phone for messages and stuff 150 times a day which make that, every six minutes if you allow time for sleep.
So think about it. When one puts all of the times together, when one thinks about sleep time, work time, travel time, online and television time, smart phone time, cleaning time, yard work time, etc. etc., it’s a wonder any of us have time to do anything, let alone live, fulfil our dreams, and do the important things. We are lost in a sea of busy-ness … and this isn’t just a problem for young people, nor is it just for people in the working world. Some retired people tell me that they are busier in retirement than they ever were. Sometimes, we need to stop; and how unfortunate it is that it is generally only catastrophes that seem to make us stop.
Reports have been coming in from Alberta in the past week about how the widespread flooding made their lives stop. People were forced to focus on the more important things in life. The same happened in Arkansas as a result of those tornadoes a few weeks ago, and for many, it happens when they encounter illness or death. Too often it is the catastrophic that forces our minds to think about life and how it really should be. Would that we could stop earlier and live our lives in completeness?
If there’s one thing the film, The Bucket List tells us, it’s never too late to start. It is never too late to live. I remember my mother-in-law, we used to call her Mim; in her 50s determined that she was going to live life a little differently. For years, she had been busy in a family business in North Carolina while also working ten days a month in Chicago. In the family business, they had always been associated with the aircraft industry and one day, she determined, “I’m going to fly.” Unknown to most of the family for a while, she started taking lessons. Then she bought one of the top-of-the-line Cessna airplanes. It was only when she started to race the thing and needed help to navigate that the story came out.
If that were not enough, on Christmas Day, c.1991, the wider family were gathered in the SmokeyMountains. The weather was beautiful and Mim made a great meal for the gathered family. Then she announced that everyone was to gather in the living room around the television. We all gathered and she plugged in a VHS tape. With no introduction, one thing or another, we started to watch her board a plane with all sorts of equipment on. A few minutes later, the plane was in the air and it became apparent that Mim was going to jump. We started looking at each other, then at her, then back at each other. Then there was the moment when she jumped out of the plane, with another guy behind her video-taping the whole thing. “Oh no, there she goes,” someone squealed. It was unbelievable to the younger generation. At our young age, we thought she was ancient, but there she was doing the things she dreamed of; living life the way she wanted to.
I’m reminded of a song that Garth Brooks used to sing entitled The River. Verse two goes like this:
Too many times we stand aside
and let the waters slip away
'til what we put off 'til tomorrow
it has now become today
so don't you sit upon the shoreline
and say you're satisfied
choose to chance the rapids
and dare to dance that tide
and i will sail my vessel…
'til the river runs dry.
Many of us need to live life, to live it more purposefully. Perhaps it doesn’t involve skydiving and flying, but there are other things, things we dream of, relationships we want to improve. There’s no time like the present. It’s never too late to live.
There’s another scene in The Bucket List that struck me. In the midst of having fun and engaging their dreams, Carter and Edward Cole sat at the top of one of the pyramids in Egypt. Another item was checked off their bucket list as Carter started telling Cole about ancient Egypt. He mentioned the ancient civilization’s view of the afterlife and how the gods would ask two questions of the dead at the entrance to heaven. The first was, “Have you found joy in your life?” The second, “Has your life brought joy to others?”
Have you found joy in your life? And has your life brought joy to others? Cole thought for a time and couldn’t come up with anything. He was a businessman who served the almighty dollar, a powerful man who could do whatever he wanted. That had affected his relationships and particularly his relationship with his only daughter. He thought he could run her life too. He didn’t like her spouse, and when the spouse ill-treated her, he talked to a man, who talked to a man, who made the spouse “go away.” Not kill, just “go away.” The daughter was furious with him. Their’s was a vexed relationship anyway, but this? She told her father, Edward Cole, that he was now as good as dead to her and Cole hadn’t seen her in years. That sort of thing played out in all of Cole’s relationships and when he was in hospital earlier, not a soul came to visit him. He had little joy in life and brought none to others.
We all need joy in our lives and joy seems to come in relationship. When we compare Carter’s side of the bucket list to Cole’s, the more philosophical, Carter chose things that bring joy. He wasn’t as interested in gallivanting and doing “stuff;” he wanted to “laugh until he cried.” He wanted to “do something good for a total stranger.” He wanted to “witness something majestic” – all things that occur best in relationship. It’s never too late to live and it’s never too late to uncover joy in life with the people around us and those closest to us.
It took some doing but Carter convinced Edward Cole to make up with his daughter and there’s a scene in which he is introduced to the young grand-daughter he didn’t know he had. He took her in his arms and kissed her. He remembered the list, he took it out and scratched off, “Kiss the most beautiful girl in the world.” – now that’s joy.
So it’s not too late to live, and not too late to find joy. There’s one other thing that we need if we can ever get around to finding it. That thing is finding meaning, finding purpose, and uncovering what life is all about. Mark Twain said that “the two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” Bernard Levin, perhaps the greatest English columnist of his generation, once wrote an article called “Life’s Great Riddle, and No Time to Find Its Meaning.” In it he spoke of the fact that in spite of his great success as a columnist for over twenty-years, he feared that he might have “wasted reality, his reality.” He wrote:
To put it bluntly, have I time to discover why I was born before I die?...I have not managed to answer the question yet, and however many years I have before me they are certainly not as many as there are behind. There is an obvious danger in leaving it too late…why do I have to know why I was born? Because, of course, I am unable to believe that it was an accident; and if it wasn’t one, it must have a meaning.
We all need meaning. The great Russian thinker and writer Fyodor Dostoevsky was apparently quite a character in the earlier part of his life. He made many mistakes in life and suffered for years in prison doing hard labour. Some would have been angry about it and filled with hatred toward the powers that had taken away so many years; but deep down, Dostoevsky still felt good about his life and, in his later novels, was able to communicate a tremendous grace and forgiveness.
To give you an inkling of his experiences, at one point Dostoevsky was arrested for belonging to a group judged to be treasonous by the Tzar Nicholas I. After 8 months of imprisonment, he and a number of other political prisoners were brought out to a courtyard and subjected to a mock execution. The prisoners, of course, did not know this was staged by the Tzar and, as the sentence was read, “Death by firing squad,” the hearts of the men dropped. Dostoevsky, however, almost instinctively, whispered to a man standing nearby, “We shall be with Christ.” The other man laughed nervously. Three of them were selected to die first. The words, “The wages of sin is death,” were pronounced. The three were tied to posts while the others looked on. They heard the words, “Ready, aim!” The soldiers raised their rifles and at that very moment, a horseman galloped up, with a prearranged message from the Tzar. It said, “The Tzar mercifully commutes your sentences to hard labour.” Dostoevsky and the others had peered into the mouth of death and while other men got angry, and one mentally imploded, from that moment on he lived life differently. He already had faith but during his imprisonment, it grew greatly as he read the only book allowed, the New Testament. For Dostoevsky, life became something precious, and his faith and belief in immortality brought him through the years of hardship. According to Philip Yancey, Dostoevsky came to believe that believing in immortality is the only way to conceive this life as anything but meaningless.
The apostle Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, “But you brothers and sisters are not in darkness…you are children of the light…let us not be like others, who are asleep… but let us put on faith and love…and the hope of salvation…For God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. He died … that…we may live …encourage one another….”
Great words! … It is never too late to live; it is never too late to find joy in life; and it is never too late to find what it is we are here for. “You are not in darkness,” says the apostle about what God was doing. It’s a simple message that Paul preached - God wanted a relationship with human beings from the beginning. Sin broke that relationship, Christ restored the possibility of our original purpose. Now, something far greater than anything we know lies before those in Christ Jesus. We can begin to taste it right now. That’s why Jesus said, “I have come to give you life, and that you may have it more abundantly.” Christ gives life and eternity, and that makes everything different. And, perhaps, if we can just get off the merry-go-round that is too often mistaken for life, if we can just take a little time to be still, we can find the real stuff, the eternal stuff, why it is we are here and where we are going. …It’s all about this relationship that God wants with us. And in that, there is true peace, joy, hope, and meaning.
Amazingly, in The Bucket List, Edward Cole found life and, perhaps, salvation. The film opens and closes with the words, “by any measure, Edward Cole lived more in his last days on earth than most people manage to wring out of a life time. I know that when he died, his eyes were closed, and his heart was open.”
It is my hope that even now our hearts would be open; open to life, open to the joys of life, open to God, and open to the eternity that is ours in Jesus Christ. That’s why we are here and where we are going.