Live in the Extremes
(a sermon I preach to myself)
The Scripture Reading
Matthew 11:18-19
For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, “He has a demon;” the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, "Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!" Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.
The Homily
What is life for? Why live it? How does one live it?
We, the human species, adept enough to create microchips and satellites, fumble about when confronted with what appear to be the simple, or maybe not so simple, but at least the most important questions.
Christians, a designation I won’t part with, often serve up as trite and reductionistic answers as anyone. I've been searching the scriptures and whatever else I can get my hands on for decades looking for compelling answers to these questions. Over time the following ideas have emerged and gained traction. I share them here because I wanted to see them articulated in the following fashion. Writing is my favorite way of working out what I think or believe which in turn tends to inform how I hope to live. If any of this is useful for anyone else, great. If not, discard. I’m preaching primarily to myself.
My thesis:
a Christian path through life is meant to wholeheartedly embrace this paradox: our existence is at once an experience of utopia and dystopia, and the way to live your life in the here and now is to have a faith that throws you into the waters of these extremes with systematic intentionality that looks like wild abandonment.
Step 1.
In the realist sense imaginable, this life should be embraced as a utopia. (!)
Yes
utopia.
A healthy Christian will make a hedonist look boring. And there have been some great hedonists over the years. Salvador Dali once said, “I don’t do drugs, I am drugs.” Pick your decade's wild child- the 80s Madonna, her later, brief boyfriend of the 90s, Dennis Rodman, or Lil Wayne in the aughts or Miley Cyrus emerging shortly thereafter. Or. Pick someone who is perhaps less wild but seemingly living with a more holistic joy. Someone like Kevin Hart or Hugh Jackman. Pick a person- the bridge to the ubermensch.
When you think of someone who attacks life like a famished madman, a fervor for testing and tasting everything all at once, who do you think of? Who seems to take the deepest drag of life’s delicacies, never seeming to exhale?
I propose that a Christian living the faith out with integrity, as God intended, will cook these examples.
The reason
A supernatural attunement to the gift of the present moment and beauty. Everything is pregnant with potential and radiance and wonder.
On balance, a healthy Christian will engage in more activities than any hedonist would and, more important still, it will be the minutia that will pop with flavor. A Christian is a philocalist who can see beauty in often hidden places. A xenophile curious about everyone everywhere. An unashamed lover of life. L’Chaim!
So how could you tell the two apart?
You might not.
But if you could perform a magical surgery and peak into the human heart you’d discover a hedonist not only sees the pleasure as an end in itself, but actually worships the pleasure. Lives for the pleasure. A Christian also sees pleasure as an end in itself.
But the Christian sees more.
For there is more.
She recognizes another layer of complexity and richness to the experiential pleasures, making good things better, like adding real whip cream to already perfect peach pie, or like smothering butter cream frosting with crumbled Oreos over a moist chocolate cake.
She sees the pleasures as gifts from the Maker, and her heart swells with gratitude towards the Maker. The gratitude completes the pleasure. That which seems full becomes even fuller. The gratitude is a sharing between creature and Creator. And we all know that the only thing better than experiencing something awesome, is experiencing something awesome with someone you love.
Maybe this emphasis on gratitude seems like a trivial shift. But I’ve experienced the shift and its seismic. It redirects the actual worship away from that which is created and towards the Creator and the result is an expansion of pleasure into ontological fulfillment.
So I lament how we Christians have abysmally undersold the potential and the intensity of the pleasure God intended for us. Or even how we have restricted it to the pleasure derived from serving and loving others, which I totally concede is the greatest of all pleasures, but I don’t believe it was meant to be the only pleasure. In many church traditions Christians have had a weird allergy or fear of pleasure. The self-justifying religious instinct couldn’t help but to interpret the Scriptures through the lens of law instead of gospel, but this is a digression for another time.
Right now we are focusing on utopia.
We are asking, “Why did God make the universe? Why did God make humans?”
Humans are not the center of the universe, but they are a center
For centuries theologians have argued that God wanted to expand the circle of love. You might say he wanted a bigger family around his table. More children.
But God didn’t plop the children down in a celestial dining room with no doors or windows,
Instead
What God decided was to make an extensive playground called earth.
God wanted his children to enjoy a playground. God had fun designing the details. The purpose of earth has to be, in large part, an arena for play and beauty and joy and love. And creativity… in an incredible act of open handed love God made us sub-creators, creatures able to design and build near infinite permutations of this adventure called life.
Robert Capon has a line that I’ve meditated on for years and captures pretty much everything I’m trying to communicate.
It goes like this
“Creation will always be more gratuitous than it is useful.”
More gratuitous than useful
More gratuitous than useful
More gratuitous than useful
More gratuitous than useful
More gratuitous than useful
More gratuitous than useful
God doesn’t need us, but God wanted us.
We aren’t fixing the world or solving cosmic problems, we are children in an extravagant playground. The expectation is just that we share and get along, not that we solve the problems that haunt the lives of the supervising adults.
Another line I heard that has had me staggering backwards came from the thinker and tinkerer Kevin Kelly. In his graphic novel The Silver Cord, he was trying to get across how amazing it is to be an embodied creature in this world. How we take it for granted but how this is absurdly tragic. Instead, it would be rational to go ape shit indulgent and happily soak up every snippet of material existence. He said, “Why aren’t we smothering our faces in mango juice?” Why aren’t we in awe at the all the pleasures before us as embodied beings?
The comfort of a soft yet heavy blanket on a chilly evening. The warmth of a hug from someone we haven't seen in a long time. The thrill of a new experience. The intrigue in a mystery novel. The incredible high of a flow state. The scent of Korean Spicebush, or baking bread, or real vanilla, or a bouquet of basil or Sweet Annie from the garden or a freshly cut Douglas fir in early December, or my favorite late winter treat, when we finish maple syrup off on the kitchen stove and the thick maple moisture accumulates on the walls and runs down like dew drops from heaven. Most certainly Jesus enjoyed the aroma of the Baccarat bathing his stinky feet. A long drink of icy cold water after you've sweated your ass off. Laughing at a Nate Bargatze joke. The harmony of the Wailin’ Jennys singing One Voice. Beholding a majestic sunset, or being beholden by a thunderous black and blue wave overtaking a midday sky. The bedtime kiss bestowed on your cheek by your four year old daughter. Rain drops on roses or whiskers on kittens, make up your own list of what makes you smitten. Recognize the weight of glory in the air.
Life offers so much.
I want to live more awake.
Why am I not taking advantage of this Utopia?
I try to remind myself of it daily.
For too often I am a dull, pacified, indifferent, blinded creature- too often I settle into mindless routines.
It would be logical for a Christian to be extreme. To be an extreme pleasure enjoyer.
But how often am I living that logically?
Why has it taken a couple millennia before a Christian like Nadia Weber reminds us the clitoris is proof that the Maker has our pleasure in mind. Piety may be its own form of perversion.
Oh to dance naked in the streets, unashamed, like king David of old
unself conscious, blessed self-forgetfulness, lost in the joy of being and beholding, creating and receiving.
Why so serious?
Why do we put so much pressure on ourselves? How much of this pressure is just fabrication? Arbitrary fictions we enslave ourselves to when the playground is meant for play, not proving ourselves or building perfection.
Our phony righteousness has white washed the scriptures.
Why haven't we recognized the signs all along printed in the holy pages. Jesus' first miracle in John, saving a party by turning water into wine. Jesus dismantling religion at every turn- "go ahead, pick the grain on the Sabbath, people weren't made to serve Sabbath, but the Sabbath to serve people." Jesus is an extremist, demanding we be "perfect, like your heavenly Father is perfect," yet the very reason for his visit to earth is because we can no more be perfect than we can engage in time travel or evade death. Jesus knows this- "he who is sinless throw the first stone. So that is why I am here, to become sin so that you might become righteousness.” Not by doing the right thing, but by receiving the righteousness Jesus imparts. By receiving this gift. This gift that translates us out of the old paradigm of law and death into a new realm of grace and life.
Why haven't we recognized the signs all along printed in the pages of our holy scriptures? Paul said, "all things are lawful," but we focus on the "not all are profitable."
Or Peter, given a vision of the sausage coming down from heaven, eat Peter, I've made pig clean, I'm washing it in gravy, bake biscuits. Taste and see that the Lord is good.
The Son of Man has come eating and drinking.
That is all true. So true. More true than we dare to believe.
And so is this…
The same Jesus who said "I came to bring life and life abundantly" (and in Luke 24 says "do not let your hearts be downcast" which is quite literally a command to be lighthearted) said "those who follow me must take up the cross and lose their life."
Jesus embodied not just one extreme, but opposite extremes.
Jesus is the paradox.
He was the wealthiest and the poorest. He was befriended and loved and rejected and alone. He laughed and he cried. He is God and he is human.
Here is my point.
Jesus, the one who teaches us to celebrate and party, also teaches us to despair and weep. For the utopia converges and coexists with a dystopia.
Step 2.
Don’t hide from the dystopia.
Dystopia.
It started when I was a teenager. When I’d go into public places I would look at people and try to imagine their backstories. Imagine what brought their life meaning. I still do it on occasion.
Often I see people, and I look for a sign of life in their eyes and see little.
Sometimes I see their boring clothes, their shopping carts full of shit food, and I think about how many ugly homes, depressing and meaningless jobs exist, and wonder how people make it through their days.
Even when I see the pretty people, with their nice clothes and cars, their fancy vacations, I can’t help wondering how much their veneer of sophistication is hiding an inner emptiness. That they too are lonely, they too are trying to fill an inner void with more toys and trinkets and expensive experiences? Do they see their tanned skin turning leathery? Do they see how brief their triumphs were? How utterly meaningless when viewed from any wider lens?
Dust in the wind. Everything is dust in the wind.
Even the best lives fly bye bye to crash 6 feet under like everyone else.
And what are we to make of the countless tragedies that befall more than a few unlucky souls? Small insults to large trauma, abandonment, unkind words from parents, personal failures, accidents, divorce, stagnation. Stress. Weariness and exhaustion. Boredom. Decay. Loss of memory. Loss of friendships.
But it gets worse.
Acute myeloid leukemia in a six year old. The loss of a child.
Cancer. The mother fucker of all mother fuckers. Cancer deserves all the profanity we can muster. I’m confident Jesus thinks so.
But speaking of Jesus, how can God stand by amidst millennia of famine, wars, torture, genocide, infant mortality, and malaria? So much of history feels like it belongs in a horror film. Is that a refutation of God’s heart? Or of God’s existence? Some interpret it as such.
Others are baffled as well but committed to the belief that God too abhors evil. That as mysterious as the presence of evil is, to assign it to God is unjust speculation. But either way, evil is here, among us, with us, and even worse, in us. That is no longer interpretation of the facts but observation.
Zoom into the individual human heart and the landscape is irredeemably bleak. Who doesn’t experience profound insecurity and loneliness?
Why do we promote ourselves and take care of number one and ignore the plight of others?
How can we justify our purchases with the knowledge that others are literally dying due to lack of resources? Even though we may love family and be generous to friends, even the best of us live out our days mostly in self-serving fashion. Most of us don’t even know how to process our pain.
On some level, we all are the victims of trauma.
We bury it.
We numb.
We distract.
And on another level, we are all the perpetrators of trauma.
We bury it.
We numb.
We distract.
We have hurt those we love in profound and lasting ways.
We have been hurt in profound and lasting ways.
Is there a balance sheet? Does it all come out awash in the end?
We all want to be enough. We think it will make us loveable and if we are lovable then maybe we will receive more love.
We all want to be loved.
More.
More than we currently are.
We live in a dystopia.
There is not enough love to go around and our tanks are never full.
But if we undress reality and stare at the cold naked facts it bares too much.
Victor Frankl probed the psychology of meaning, despair, and death.
How do people find the will to live? Joan Didion talked about the “shallowness of sanity” in the face of death.
To understand the depth and breadth of our present and real dystopia is to call into question why we choose to live at all.
Not a rhetorical question: Why do you choose life?
Maybe most people find that the dystopian nature of our existence is balanced by the utopian nature first described. Maybe we hem and haw back and forth. Maybe we live schizophrenic existences.
Or maybe most of us sense these things on a subconscious level, but aren’t able to work out what this means for conscious living.
Maybe we are perplexed creatures.
Maybe we are lost beings.
Maybe it is easiest to numb the pain
To doomscroll
To entertain
To not question
Maybe we don’t believe there are answers
Or there is a path
Maybe the average person does wrestle with these things, initially, but gives up at some point. Concedes. Accepts.
Moves on.
For whatever reason I seem incapable of this. Too weak maybe. Too dogged by the desire for answers. Too afraid and too hopeful.
There remains an unbearable lightness to life even in the presence of the weight of glory. Neither seems to cancel the other and seldom can we stand balanced on some kind of middle ground.
A cloud of unknowing cuts both ways, the trivial is as mysterious as is the serious, the darkness hides but so does the light. Sometimes the light blinds us more than the darkness. Sometimes the brightness leads to an abyss. Even grace may for some long time be experienced as torture. How little we perceive or how slanted is our sight.
Better are my days when I look in the mirror with suspicion but hold white-knuckled to the promises of God. For the promises of God reignite life with meaning. Amidst the darkness and the light, we gain outsider information, information to give direction to those lost in the darkness or the light. In the place of meaninglessness is revealed dystopia and utopia, a call for love and mercy.
Point 3.
The extremes cannot be reconciled by us, nor experienced simultaneously, we must learn to travel back and forth and not get stuck in the middle.
Both utopia and dystopia are reality. And reality is real whether we acknowledge it or not. To some degree reality inhabits us whether we inhabit it or not. But I believe to be fully alive is to actively engage reality. When we rejoice and mourn, when we hope and despair, when we delight or denounce we are exercising the gift of life.
Life is in the extremes.
Not the middle.
The middle is no man’s land. It is a vacuous negation.
The wasteland.
Oil city.
Bullet city.
Tyrannically controlled water city.
A survival for no purpose but to survive.
Middletopia is the lukewarm water that isn’t hot enough to cook good food and isn’t cold enough to be refreshing on a summer day. Middletopia brings real living to a halt. A Specialized bike can get you from point A to point B without greenhouse emissions while burning off excess calories. And a Jaguar F-type can get you from point A to point B in a matter of minutes with style. Both have their places and may serve a purpose. But swap the peddles off the bike and the engine of the car and you’ll be stuck and stationary. Middletopia blends utopia and dystopia and in so doing loses touch with reality.
Whoever awakens to what is really surrounding us will be drawn into the extremes.
Grieve for those who seem lost in the middle, grieve for them even more than those who seem lost in dystopia. The middle is the true wasteland. It is the closest to nowhere because it is hiding from a reality comprised of extremes.
In the extremes we find purpose.
Purpose to truly enjoy whatever can be enjoyed. To relish food and sex, the arts, the quotidian and the minutia as well as the parties and the celebrations, the friendships, and all that can be conceived of as the utopia of creation.
But also purpose to help one another endure the pain- to be vessels of mercy amidst dystopia. Mercy Amidst Dystopia, which makes for a nice acronym -MAD. I tell myself that when I’m not embracing life’s utopian gifts, I want to be about administering mercy amidst dystopia. I want to be living a MAD Life. I want to be righteously MAD. Not running away from the sorrows, but grieving with others and attempting any bit of kindness to soften the blows.
I want to learn to swing back and forth between lament and laughter, leisure and the hard but rewarding work of coming to the aid of others.
For reasons beyond the scope of my imagination
The dystopia seems to make the need for love and mercy more acute,
More poignant,
Maybe more potent.
Love relieves pain, lightens the load
Love carries us through life’s hells
And for that reason love and mercy is the best antidote to dystopia
However, two enigmas persist. First, often there is not enough love going around
Second, even love succumbs to death.
I don’t understand why that is the case, just that that is the case
Which leads me to the concluding note- our purpose is ultimately not to fix the dystopia.
We are not saviors
And not just because we are too small and the problem too large
If that were the case maybe technological advances could someday deliver us
No.
We are not saviors primarily because we are a part of the problem
We need saving.
When I said the same Jesus who
Teaches us to celebrate and party
Also teaches us to despair and weep,
I did not disclose the key part of the story.
Christianity is not a religion as people popularly conceive of it.
It is not about constructing a path to God or following a rabbi or the creation of a moral community.
Sure, Jesus lectured, but that was his side hustle.
His main gig was infinitely bigger.
It was conspicuously hidden in the meaning of his name: “he who saves his people.”
Jesus’ mission was all about dystopia and utopia.
He came to deliver us from evil (re: dystopia), and usher in a new creation (re: utopia)
Death and Life
The heart of the gospel- the cross and resurrection of Jesus
This is the key to unlocking the meaning of the universe. It is not some list of virtues or moral code, it is news that God is making all things new.
Don’t conjure up golden harps and a white puffy cloud paradise filled with stuffy people worshiping a white bearded God. Rather, enumerate all the sights, sounds, smells and pleasures you can imagine and times that by a billion and try fathoming union with God and the unabridged reign of love for all eternity … and now you are getting closer to God’s plan
This is the fairy tale promise of God that I believe in.
I believe in God’s promises. I believe in the person and work of Jesus and the indwelling of the Holy Ghost.
I want to believe in it every time I thank God for the laughter of my children, the beauty of my wife, the warmth of sunshine on my shoulders, the immensity of a starry night sky, the thrill of traveling to new places and the comfort of resting in familiar spaces. This is why we say grace and we say grace again. This is why we end meals with a benediction of cheesecake. The utopia that is, is grace 1.0. The utopia coming through Jesus is grace 2.0. Grace 1.0 kindles present affection. Faith holds onto God’s promises and looks forward to grace 2.0. For it is a grace to come that will finally eliminate our pain, loneliness, sin, and even that motherfucker cancer.
Again, Robert Capon said it so well, “Half of earth’s gorgeousness lies hidden in the glimpsed city it longs to become.”
The harmony we yearn for, our deepest longings, are not fictions but facts inscribed in the human spirit by the intention of God. This life is like a wild safari, it is breathtaking and rugged, and can end very poorly. But whatever twists and turns and tragedies our stories entail, there is an epilogue that brings the resolution we long for.
Marilynne Robinson wrote
“And I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.”
And something else I hear the Spirit whisper. “Even if you fail to live fully into the extremes, even if you remain a dulled and myopic man, grace will persist…someday it’s shine will break through.”