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| Come Thou Fount Jeremiah 8:18-9:1
To enter the life that comes to us in the sound of a human voice, that, too, is a soulful thing. The tragic hero of Melville’s great novel Moby Dick is Captain Ahab. He is frightingly like the Nazi Dictator, Adolf Hitler, a hundred years ahead of his time. Near the obliterating crescendo of his fictive life, Captain Ahab faces his soul and longs for the mere sight of just a human eye. He cries out to his first mate named Starbuck for just such a redemption: to gaze upon a human face with human eyes. It’s amazing to me to think that God has given us such a powerful gift – that we can really redeem another soul by giving them our open eyes! Horribly, Captain Ahab’s world has become less than human in his mad quest for violent revenge. He is the archetype, of, the mono-manic – he has one eye on one thing only, his narcissistic revenge. Ever since this whaling captain of the 1840’s lost his leg to the great white whale named Moby Dick, even since that loss of his leg, life has become for Ahab “all about him.” If we had a comic-book version of this great novel the little quote in the air over Ahab’s head would be “It’s all about me.” And that’s how he’s lost sight of human life and lost his soul. For, you see, it’s not that he’s not surrounded with the very thing he longs for – the sight of human eyes (indeed Herman Melville created a Shakespearean parade of wonderfully human people and faces in this long book: Queequeg. Stub. Ishmael and the Little Boy Pip). Ahab does not see the souls in these human faces because he does not look at them with human eyes himself. And there is a reason why he’s lost his ability to see another’s face (and since we all struggle with his sin, we all struggle against this “all about me” world-view, it’s crucial to learn the reason why Ahab has lost sight of his humanity and others and the two eyes of salvation available to him, to us.) The reason is: we become, all of us, like the things we focus on. While it may be true that we are what we eat, it’s more subtly true, and awesome, we begin, and end, looking like the world we look at. That may sound abstract. Melville makes it simple to see when he pictures for us the whale itself, the great white violent and wildly destructive Moby Dick. Like all whales, this leviathan can not see ahead, can not look forward, does not have that one redeeming feature we so soulfully look for: two eyes together. Two eyes together is the icon of our humanity – what we seek in each other, in our children, in babies, in our dying elders, in our animals, our cats, our dogs, “etc., etc.” The whale, of course, looks out of the side of its neckless head. Its bifurcated vision – a camera on each side – leaves it up to its brain to make one sense out of its two-worlds view. Melville’s depiction of the empty mad gaze of the whale’s one eye is frightening. But even more frightening is how in his total focus on killing his victimizer Ahab becomes – in his soul – as one-eyed as the whale he looks for. The lesson here is stark, yet vital like a lot of the theological world view of the Protestant 16th Century Theologian John Calvin. We like to make fun of old-fashioned Calvinism. Herman Melville carried on a life-time struggle against the depression-inducing impact of Calvinism. Hence his character Ahab. My mother was a Calvinist. All Presbyterians are. (My father had a Lutheran soul.) My mother used to say, semi-Calvinistically, “Choose your ruts carefully, you’re going to be in them a long time.” “Cheery thought, mom!” But Melville’s point, and mine, for the sake of our souls, is, similarly, “choose what you focus on, what you look at and look for, carefully because you are going to look like it, see like it, feel like it, be like it, for a long time.” This is a stark truth and it is really nothing less than a spiritual law: your soul begins to look like what you look at. We can get away with avoiding knowing that for a long time because it’s not all that easy to see a soul. To visualize spirit, at least at first. A happy version of this law is that when we look for and at good things our soul gets beautiful. Asher Durrand, the great painter of the Hudson River Valley, believed that. It’s not unlike how people really do begin to look like their dogs. Cats are a bit more evasive spiritually, but people begin to act like their cats, believe me! Abraham Lincoln was comically embarrassed about the oddnesses of his face, a face which alternately could look coarse and almost ugly to his day, or almost mystic and etched in the better angels of our nature. He said himself, one day, to his secretary, John Hay, about an evil looking politician visitor, “After the age of 40 a man (a person) is responsible for his face.” There it is again. That law. We bear a soulful responsibility for the spirit of our faces, not our features. That’s biology and genetics, but the spirit that comes through to others from our faces. You can see a noble beauty in the faces of people in recovery from alcohol or drug addiction. They have seen hell, and have seen a way out of hell. You can see a bloated deadness in the face of people who can’t stop looking for a drink. And, of course, because we can work too much and shop too much we can begin to take one of the spiritual features that come with such focus: something hard and empty. Look in the rear view mirror of the face of the driver behind you. Now, there is one reason and one reason only for us to be involved in mission, and that is so that we look at a world beyond our own “me.” And even better, more importantly, so that we see the faces of others, the faces and eyes of others as they struggle themselves to have a human face, with human eyes, lit from within by a real soul. That is why my influence on mission in this church is on partnerships with people in other places, places where their souls are in their eyes in a way we need to see. Like many of you, I have found such soulful eyes among the Navajo and other Native American Indians. So I say we need to be in face to face relationship, partnership, with such as them, because we need some soul. I had a wonderful talk, this week, with two of RUC’s long-time members, who both said their very lives were changed by the mission partnership this church had with churches in Kenya, Africa, through the Presbyterian Church. One of these great RUC souls searched fervently to find some photographs taken, then and there, of those smiling soulful faces. In this spiritual law of how we look like – in our soul and face – what we look at and for, there is some magical corollary: There is some spiritual link between smiles and souls. Someone should research that link: The smile to soul, soul to smile, spiritual link.) So often people will first say about partnership missions, “Why, there are people here at home that need our help, we shouldn’t go overseas to help others when we have such need at home!! “Well, yes, that is, I think, true: but we are those people! We are the local, soulful, needy. And there are faces and eyes in South India, in Sri Lanka, that connect to Indians and Sri Lankans here as well. There are faces in Guatemala and Mexico that also connect to Latino, Latina, faces here. But we are the ones who need to look, who need to stop, stop in the name of love. Look, look into soulful eyes Listen, listen to the sounds of other human voices. Let us listen to the soulful cry of the prophet Jeremiah. “Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored?” O that my eyes were a fountain of tears and my head a well spring of water!” (From Jeremiah 8:27). Can you see Jeremiah’s eyes in such soulful sorrow? Jesus could. Jesus loved the words of Jeremiah and Jesus weep over Jerusalem. Can you see Jesus’ eyes as he wept? And can you see him smile and look up, and lift his spirit as he sees you coming towards him, sharing his sorrow, sharing his love, sharing his soul? Jesus said, in our scripture today, that we can not serve two
masters, only one. We can not serve God and wealth. Not both. Only
one. It is as stark a spiritual law as was ever spoken. The joy
is that we feel our soul when we serve God. It makes us smile.
We actually feel our soul when we serve God. Let us look and listen
for that! Amen.
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God
Is Still Speaking www.stillspeaking.com |
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