“The Bearable Lightness of Being”
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Text: Isaiah 60:1-5
It was like the starting grid of a Formula One race. Three of us were lined up outside the X-ray department at the hospital. To my left, with rather small wheels, was a lady on a stretcher, to my right a young man in a wheelchair with larger wheels and in the middle, me, with my walker and my piddly little wheels at the front. We were waiting expectantly to have our names called, and we waited, and we waited, and we waited to have our name mentioned so we could finally go and have our X-rays done. Naturally, as one can imagine, lining up in such a fashion, conversation broke out between the three of us.
The lady on my left was actually quite ebullient and full of joy. She had just received some very good news, and the good news was that in fact she did not need the operation she was anticipating, that some minor procedure would follow and that she would be able to go home in a day or so. Her son, who was beside her, was full of joy and laughter and lightness. He was ecstatic at the good news.
On the right, however, was a younger man. He was there with his wife and his little daughter. He looked somewhat sanguine, attempting to be bold and to go through things, but you knew from his face that there was a deep melancholy and a deep sadness to him. His daughter tried to cover it up. Her mother actually went a few blocks away and brought back an IKEA yogurt cone to make the little girl happy. At one moment, the little girl was dancing around with the yogurt cone and accidentally stuck it in my ear. Unfortunately, you can't lick your own ear, which was a real disappointment! So, I wiped it off and we laughed, but there was this underlying sadness, for this young man had had his knee described by a radiographer as looking something like cottage cheese. He had been an accident, and his leg was badly crushed. There was gloom, there was sadness, and there was heaviness.
I couldn't help but contrast the melancholy of that young man and the ebullience of the son and the mother next to me. For one, there was a sort of lightness to their countenance; to the other, heaviness and darkness and a foreboding future. Therefore, when I was reading not long ago, and some of you have given me some wonderful reading materials over the last few weeks, a book by Milan Kundera, the Czech writer, called The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I realized that he was struggling with this very dichotomy of the lightness and the heaviness of being.
Kundera, in his novel that he wrote in 1982 about Prague in 1968 when the Communists arrived, is really a book dealing with a philosophical idea by the philosopher Nietzche, who believed that life is in a sense circular, and that you lived your life, but you could always repeat something. There was always an opportunity to do something over again, and that life went 'round and 'round. What this led to was the sense that nothing was really important: there is no need for responsibility; there is no need to take seriously what you are doing for you will always have a chance somewhere else to put it right.
It leads to a form of nihilism and some of the characters in Kundera book are nihilists. I have been told not to see the movie - it is a little out there! But, in a sense it captures the nihilism and the perverseness of not taking life seriously, of lightness and frivolity. Some others of Kundera's characters are heavy. They feel the burden of life. They feel the power of fate and responsibility. They are worried and concerned about the new totalitarianism that is representing itself in tanks in the streets of Prague. There is this heaviness. There is this worry and concern.
At the end of the book, you conclude there is no way of dealing with these two extremes of lightness and heaviness. There is no real way out of it. People will experience different things at different times in their lives, sometimes lightness, sometimes heaviness, and some have a proclivity for one over the other. Now, you might be saying, “Well, why is this important for Christians to think about on Epiphany Sunday? ” Well, I think it is important because we ourselves need to come to terms with the extreme lightness and heaviness of life.
I think the Church, in bearing witness to Jesus Christ in our world, needs to understand the implications of heaviness and lightness. But, also as Epiphany, I believe that the light shines on all of it. Let me set out my case before you. I believe we all experience the lightness and the heaviness of being. But, what I suggest to you is that the very presence of Jesus Christ and the very power of faith in Him, transforms both the lightness of being and the heaviness of being. The light of Christ shines on every facet of human existence and transforms it, and, that is what I want to show you this morning.
Before I do, we have to take a step back. We have to look at the foundations of all of this. In our passage from the Book of Isaiah, Isaiah is writing to the people of God at a time when they are returning from exile, when they had been banished, when they had been driven out of Zion, when they were no longer a people in many ways. Isaiah is celebrating the fact that the people are coming home to Zion, and that Arte Xerxes, the Persian King, has made it possible for this return, and therefore there is joy. There is a new day for Israel. “Arise and shine,” he says, “your light has come!”
For Isaiah, it was a new dawn, a new day. The light of God had shone on his people. He hadn't forgotten them. When they were in exile, He was there for them when they needed Him. God had done great and wonderful things. But Isaiah also believed, and this is absolutely critical, that the nation had a mission as well, a new mission, that they should let their light shine then among the other nations.
God had brought them back to Zion in order that they might be able to go out into the world and bear witness to the presence of God and the grace of God. “Arise and shine, your light has come!” It is fascinating that in Hebrew, “shine” and “light” are forms of the same word. The “light” of God had come, but now the people themselves must “shine” so that they themselves must now carry on this wonderful good news that had come their way.
Now, all of this paves the way, I believe, for the advent of Jesus of Nazareth. Although hundreds of years later, it is clear that the people of Israel had forgotten to shine for God, they had forgotten that God had set them free, and Jesus emerges in the midst of a nation that was oppressed and burdened, this time not driven out of their country, but rather taken over by the Romans. This time, they were being misled by some of their religious leaders, who were imposing the heaviness of the burden of the law on their shoulders and they were feeling oppressed by it.
The different New Testament writers describe the experience of Jesus arriving. John, for example, in the beginning of his Gospel says, “And the light has come into the world, and the darkness cannot put it out.” For John, then, the light of God is shining in the person of Jesus. For the Synoptic - Matthew, Mark and Luke - it is a sense that everything that had been promised in the Old Testament has been fulfilled: the hopes and the dreams of the people of Israel are found in this one person, Jesus of Nazareth, and that he is described as “the light of the world” in those Gospels as well.
In the text that I read, Jesus lays out very clearly what it means for him to be “the light of the world.” He speaks words that if you were a Jew in that time you would understand very easily, for indeed yokes on cattle were everywhere. He says, “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” He is saying to the people: “Look, you are feeling oppressed right now. You are feeling as if there is heaviness upon you. You can't find any lightness, and any lightness that you do find is a lightness that doesn't fulfill. But, I have come to take that burden off you, to set you free, to liberate you from what binds you, to set the captives free.” I am sure Isaiah must have been just cheering in heaven, going “Arise and shine, the light has come. Jesus, you go and tell them!”
Now the question arises, how does the coming of Jesus, how does the arrival of this light affect those who live with the lightness and the heaviness of existence? Well, for those who live with lightness, it transforms them. By lightness, I mean those who take a flippant approach to life. There are those who think, “Well, it really doesn't matter what I do. I always have a chance to undo it.” There are those who are absorbed with themselves and their own pleasures and those who find no meaning and real purpose to existence except to find pleasure and that the world is nothing more than a party, and it is a party that just has to keep going and going. There is the continual need to have lightness and to be somehow flippant about human existence.
In the time before the exile, there was that flippancy. Isaiah had certainly commented on it. When the kings and the queens of Israel had led the people astray to follow idols and to believe that pleasure was the most important thing and to forget about God and to forget about justice and to forget about righteousness and just live as you want to live. And look what happened! Lightness can have devastating consequences.
Even in our own era, we see this nexus between a narcissistic age and a materialistic age. A narcissistic age that loves itself, and thinks the love of self is the greatest love of all, and materialism, which is this continuous means of feeding that narcissism. It becomes an insatiable need. One need only to have gone out on Boxing Day this past year just to see how the whole of the Christmas experience has meant nothing to people, they just wanted to consume, they just wanted to take in as much as they could for as little as possible for a momentary sense of gratification.
The problem with the lightness of being, with narcissism, with materialism, with the love of pleasure without responsibility, with a flippant attitude in life is that if you believe that is what life is about you have to then sustain it. Just look at people around Christmas-time. Everybody seems to be fretting and doing everything they can to make Christmas happy or pleasurable, and we create this false giddiness. I don't know about you, but I do! You know, you have got to look happy. Everything has got to work out right. The meal has got to be perfect. Every member of the family has to get along. The turkey cannot be overcooked or undercooked: it must be just right for everybody!
There is that sense that we want to have and we want to sustain joy and sometimes manufacture it and those who follow the lightness of being have a terrible burden, and the burden is to try and keep that silly, giddy happiness alive. But, you know, and I know, that when a crisis comes in life, that lightness cannot keep you going. No matter how much you hide behind things or pleasure or a false front, you know that behind that front there is a deep, deep seriousness to life.
I'll never forget that in my first pastoral charge in River John in Nova Scotia having the news the first graduation weekend that I was there that a young girl in my church had been killed in a car accident outside of Truro because the teenagers themselves had been drinking before they started to drive. The young woman, with her life dissipated, and those in the car were changed forever. It is not just the extreme cases of the lightness of being that actually cause us to have great concern, but it is the guilt that sometimes comes later on in life when you realize that you have lived all your life for yourself, all your life for your own pleasures and gratifications and you have not contributed one wit to the good of others or to society.
That guilt settles in on some of Kundera's characters in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It is this crisis, this sense that “I have lived my life for all of this and now what?” For all the great pleasures I have had, I don't have relationships that last. And so, sometimes the lightness crushes down. But, the light of Jesus Christ comes to those who feel this unbearable lightness of being and says, “Look, I am here to forgive you, not to tell you that life is circular and just keeps on going, but actually for you to start anew. If lightness has not given you what you hoped it would give you, if lightness has not sustained you through crises and difficult times, my yoke is easy and my burden is light, and I will forgive you.”
Jesus came to give people a new purpose, the purpose that the people of Israel had from the beginning: to bear witness to the light of God's grace, to know and to experience the power of the Creator, to give people a sense of the wonder and the awe and the joy of God, not just in the lightness of being, but in the power of the being who made the light.
You know that I love poetry. On some dark days over the past few weeks I have been reading all my old chestnut favourites, and I was reading William Wordsworth Excursion, and there is a young boy who finally in his life goes out into the woods and he sees the wonder of nature around him. This is what Wordsworth writes:
Such was the boy but for the growing youth what soul is his
When from the naked tops of some bold headland
He finally beheld the sun rise up and bathe the world in light
Wrapped into still communion that transcends
The imperfect offices of prayer and praise
His mind was a thanksgiving to the power that made him
It was blessedness and love
What a contrast this is from those who are wrapped up in themselves and their perpetual need for lightness! To see the light of the Creator and to recognize the light of the Creator and to enjoy the light of the Creator! This for Wordsworth, through nature, was the greatest thing. For us, through Christ, it is the ultimate thing. For those who have felt unbearable lightness, there is the light of Christ.
What about those who feel the heaviness? What about those who are burdened by life and its sorrows and difficulties? What about that young man in that wheelchair next to me? I know that it is often said that a pain shared is a pain relieved, and that if you tell someone about your pain that somehow it will feel better. I have been practising that over the past few weeks, and I have become the source of pain, especially for dear Marial. If she hears another report about the state of my hip, I think she is going to go out into a snow bank and drown herself! There is only so much goodwill that a person can generate in one life! I apologize, Marial! And, to anyone else that I have grumbled and complained to, please understand it is only because I am a narcissist and I can't get over it!
No matter how much you try to share it, deep in your own soul you feel the pain. It is yours; no one else's. You go through it. Others may feel it and experience it and support you in it. You feel it: loneliness. The burden of loneliness! It is the same thing. One thing I really missed this Christmas - I missed the trees and playing Herod and all the great fun we have - but I really missed going to the shelters around the city as I usually do every Christmas, because sometimes by seeing and talking to the people who are in the shelters, you realize and it brings home to you just how one small incident, one minor mental problem, one indiscretion or one addiction can alter a person's life to the point that they end up in places like that. You realize the heaviness of life and the burden that is there.
Sometimes, one experiences the guilt of the burden of religion and of the law. Sometimes religious people feel heaviness and not joy, not light, not peace. To all those who feel heaviness and to all those who are burdened by something in this life, Jesus breaks onto the scene, and just as he transforms lightness, he transforms heaviness. He says, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light. Let me come and take it from you. Let me lift it from you so that you do not have to experience it. Let me just take it from you.”
Is that not the great promise that the Messiah brings us? Is that not the great hope of Christianity? Is that not the great peace that countless millions of people experience in Christ? This burden has been lifted. The burden of the law, the burden of pleasure, the burden of anxiety, the burden of pain, the burden of fear, the burden of loneliness, the burden of having no meaning in life. Christ, all of a sudden says, “Let my yoke take it. My burden is light. I can take it for you.”
There is one last thing. To those who are experiencing the unbearable lightness and are disaffected by it, to those who are feeling the burden or the heaviness of life and cannot stand it, Jesus, just as Isaiah hoped for Israel, wanted people to have a new mission, he wanted to have a new light to shine in the world.
There is a wonderful story that I read not long ago by Leonard Sweet about a missionary who was home on furlough, having been in a place where he has taught young children. More than anything else, he wanted to take back to them a globe and just simply place it in the classroom and show them the countries of the earth. So, he went to a store, and there were many different globes, but there were two that really stood out, and the sales clerk said to him, “Well look, there is this globe, which is very good and excellent, but there is this other one that has a light in the middle of it, but you have got to understand that the lighted world costs more.” The lighted world costs more!
If you and I, as the children of God, want to see people living in the light of Christ, if we want to see the fulfillment of the rise and shine of Isaiah and his hope for Israel, then we have to have the cost of letting that light shine through us. This is surely the purpose of Epiphany. This is the goal of Christ coming into the world: that his light might shine and that light might shine in you, and that in shining in you, those who experience that unbearable lightness and those who experience the burden of heaviness might find the power of true life. Amen.