Sermon - Pentecost 23 2008

Christopher McCandless with the "Magic Bus" where he died

I preached this sermon on Pentecost 23 (October 19) 2008. The text from the Gospel included the memorable encounter in which Jesus was challenged about whether it was right to pay taxes. He replied by asking them to consider whose face was on the coin (Caesar's) and said, "‘Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s" (Matthew 22:15-22). Teasing out the meaning of this riddle is not as straightforward as it would appear, as it requires us to have discernment enough to look past things as they are in themselves and into our relationship with those things.

It's a complex theological dilemma that I attempting to explore. Lots of moving pieces. To make it easier I examined the real case of a man who renounced all worldy goods, yet seems to have been careless with his own life. I was speaking of Christopher McCandless, who starved to death in the wilderness of Alaska attempting to find wisdom in a Thoreau-like odyssey. I can see why this would be appealing, but his effort was flawed--not just because it resulted in his death, but because of the hubris inherit in the attempt. Consider this statement by a local Park Ranger (Peter Christian):

I am exposed continually to what I will call the ‘McCandless Phenomenon.’ People, nearly always young men, come to Alaska to challenge themselves against an unforgiving wilderness landscape where convenience of access and possibility of rescue are practically nonexistent […] When you consider McCandless from my perspective, you quickly see that what he did wasn’t even particularly daring, just stupid, tragic, and inconsiderate. First off, he spent very little time learning how to actually live in the wild. He arrived at the Stampede Trail without even a map of the area. If he [had] had a good map he could have walked out of his predicament […] Essentially, Chris McCandless committed suicide. (source)

What does it mean when a spiritual quest becomes so self-centered that it causes the kind of pain that only the death of a child or brother or friend can cause?

I'm reminded of Franz Khafka's short story, "The Hunger Artist." It's a parable about Art and the Artist but it also about the kind asceticism that is beyond self:

He might fast as well as he could—and he did—but nothing could save him any more. People went straight past him. Try to explain the art of fasting to anyone! If someone doesn’t feel it, then he cannot be made to understand it. The beautiful signs became dirty and illegible. People tore them down, and no one thought of replacing them. The small table with the number of days the fasting had lasted, which early on had been carefully renewed every day, remained unchanged for a long time, for after the first weeks the staff grew tired of even this small task. And so the hunger artist kept fasting on and on, as he once had dreamed about in earlier times, and he had no difficulty succeeding in achieving what he had predicted back then, but no one was counting the days—no one, not even the hunger artist himself, knew how great his achievement was by this point, and his heart grew heavy. And when once in a while a person strolling past stood there making fun of the old number and talking of a swindle, that was in a sense the stupidest lie which indifference and innate maliciousness could invent, for the hunger artist was not being deceptive—he was working honestly—but the world was cheating him of his reward.

Many days went by once more, and this, too, came to an end. Finally the cage caught the attention of a supervisor, and he asked the attendant why they had left this perfectly useful cage standing here unused with rotting straw inside. Nobody knew, until one man, with the help of the table with the number on it, remembered the hunger artist. They pushed the straw around with a pole and found the hunger artist in there. “Are you still fasting?” the supervisor asked. “When are you finally going to stop?” “Forgive me everything,” whispered the hunger artist. Only the supervisor, who was pressing his ear up against the cage, understood him. “Certainly,” said the supervisor, tapping his forehead with his finger in order to indicate to the spectators the state the hunger artist was in, “we forgive you.” “I always wanted you to admire my fasting,” said the hunger artist. “But we do admire it,” said the supervisor obligingly. “But you shouldn’t admire it,” said the hunger artist. “Well then, we don’t admire it,” said the supervisor, “but why shouldn’t we admire it?” “Because I had to fast. I can’t do anything else,” said the hunger artist. “Just look at you,” said the supervisor, “why can’t you do anything else?” “Because,” said the hunger artist, lifting his head a little and, with his lips pursed as if for a kiss, speaking right into the supervisor’s ear so that he wouldn’t miss anything, “because I couldn’t find a food which I enjoyed. If had found that, believe me, I would not have made a spectacle of myself and would have eaten to my heart’s content, like you and everyone else.” Those were his last words, but in his failing eyes there was the firm, if no longer proud, conviction that he was continuing to fast. (source)

You see, spiritually masterful seekers--people like the Desert Fathers and Thomas Merton and St. John of the Cross adopt a discipline such as fasting or silence with a detachment that makes their answers to the question, "Why do you do this?" difficult to hear. Ask a mystic that and they are likely to give you a shrug and an answer like, "I do it because it is there to be done." They aren't being flippant, and there is a certainly skillfulness and intentionality in their choices. And yet, and yet they value these practices little next to the surpassing value of knowing God. Do you see the difference between this approach and that of Christopher McCandless?

Here's another example. When you are teaching someone to shoot a pistol for the first time they inevitably hold the gun too tightly (for fear of dropping it with the recoil, I suppose). The tension makes the shooters arm shake a little, throwing off the aim. As the student gets used to shooting they learn to relax the grip and achieve a kind of relaxed firmness. Firm but relaxed. That's precisely the kind of way we should be holding best spiritual tool, our own lives, in our hand.

Christopher's mistake was becoming too attached his fantasies of how he would attain wisdom to pay heed to the several wise people who tried to give him advice that would have saved his life.

I guess you can tell this dilemma strikes close to my heart. I know what this struggle is like. I'm the guy that spent 24 hours naked in the woods once because I wanted to know "what is necessary." Well, in turns out that shoes are pretty damn necessary! Anyway, here's the sermon...



Here's a direct link to the MP3 file...

-t