Sermon: “Wherefore Art Thou, Utopia?”

“When I was a boy of fourteen,” Mark Twain once famously wrote, “my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.”

To be honest, it took me a little longer to figure this out. I was probably about 25 or so.

You see, I thought all the problems of the world, and there were many – the Vietnam War, the assassinations, the race riots and, a bit later, Watergate – were caused solely by my parents’ generation and their ill-management of the world. I, on the other hand, was as pure as the wind-driven snow. I had it all together, so why didn’t the older generations? How could they not see what I saw? How could they have allowed things to get so out of hand? It was inexcusable.

Some years later I read the life story of Thomas Merton, the cloistered monk and renowned Christian author, who had been a brilliant, academically high-achieving young man living a kind of jaundiced, profligate lifestyle. He was cool, detached, worldly, and fashionably cynical – a real sophisticate. He valued aesthetics and big thoughts. And his highly refined critique of society was downright scathing.

Then, one day, sometime in his 20s, he had a revelation of sorts. He figured out that he was, in short, a sinner, that he was imperfect and, thus, not really all that different from those he had so dismissively criticized. For the first time he realized he was a member in good standing of sinning humanity and, thus, a part of the problem himself.

Though no Thomas Merton, I too came to realize that I was not nearly as flawless as I’d assumed (shocking, I know!). My high-minded idealism might have carried me along all those many years, but I finally had to admit that I had fallen woefully short of the very ideals I had so grandly and self-righteously cherished.

Out of this admittedly painful experience, a minimum of two truths emerged –important truths. For one, I figured out that the sins of society are but the sins of each of us writ large. Because we all are sinners who necessarily fall short of the glory of God (as well as our own lofty ideals), is it any wonder that any society we might create would be imperfect also? How, in fact, could it be otherwise?

The second revelation was similar to the first, and yet another thing which ought to have been obvious – that my parents were sinners too, though not in the way I previously assumed. They were not, in other words, the kind of sinners who thoughtlessly and unjustly designed the imperfect world to which I was so opposed, but merely the kind of sinners each of us is.

Which is to say that I came to realize they were, at their core, good people trying their best. No, they weren’t perfect, but they had worked within the inherent limitations and weaknesses all of us do, both personal and familial, and had attempted to give my siblings and me the very best upbringing they could manage. Did they fall short? Of course. But did they give us a loving and stable home for which I am today profoundly grateful? Absolutely. As obvious as this would seem, it gave me a new understanding as well as the ability to forgive.

This proved a formative step forward in my personal growth. It forced me to grow up, to accept the necessary challenges and responsibilities that go with adulthood, instead of lamenting that life hadn’t granted me the kind of utopia to which I somehow felt entitled.  

I was forced to reassess the very meaning of life, to recalibrate my goals, and to embark on a new life path that admitted compromise and sacrifice, the hallmarks of adulthood, but the bane of the immature and the adolescent.

Sadly, I’ve known any number of people who seem never to have gained this insight, who hold onto childhood slights with an almost perverse delight, who nurse past injustices to the point where life effectively loses all its joy. Worse still, many habitually blame others for their own less than optimal life choices. It is, needless to say, no way to live.

That said, it’s not all that surprising that we humans seek perfection in life and find ourselves expecting, if not demanding, utopia here on earth.

That’s because each of us was born to know perfection. It’s in our very DNA. It’s the way God made us. It lives deep within.

Ask any child. They know instinctively that brokenness and sin are entirely unnatural. Love, peace, and comity is how every child believes life ought to be.

As a case in point, years ago, while Linda and I were watching TV with our then young granddaughter, Autumn, one of the characters on the show suddenly became enraged. Visibly shaken, Autumn shot us a fearful look and asked, tentatively, “He’s angry, right”? This display of anger really upset her. She knew, from deep within, that we are not meant to live in discord.

And yet we do.

Last week, we recalled the Transfiguration, that startling moment of godly transcendence and otherworldly perfection – the proverbial “mountaintop experience.” There we got a glimpse of life as it ought to be, where God’s holiness is experienced full-on.

Naturally enough, the disciples wish to remain in this rarified state forever, hoping to build permanent dwellings there. Yet, as we know, this is not to be. For it is somehow not our place to live in perfection. Given this, Jesus then directs them, and us, down the mountain as he sets his face, we are told, toward Jerusalem and the Cross.

The lesson? That in this life we are given only a glimpse of what shall be. Yet in this we gain insight into the holy, the divine, thus sustaining us for the sometimes-difficult journey ahead. In short, knowing the future’s glorious end serves to light our path in even the darkest of valleys.

Recently, a childhood friend told me he’d listened to an internet podcast where the topic of discussion centered on trust or, perhaps I should say, its absence. The podcaster pointed out that though we all begin life in trust, along the way that trust is broken, repeatedly betrayed, compromised, and even lost.

Put in theological terms, this describes the “paradise lost” experience common to us all, at which point we are banished to a broken world “east of Eden,” where our everyday life is lived, where perfection is fleeting, and where we must now make our way through its numerous minefields and pitfalls.

Which brings me, finally, to the third and most important insight I gained as a young man when finally I admitted my sin. I came to understand, in short, that through the Cross our relationship with our Creator, severed in Eden, is restored fully, and in this, for the first time, we are shown the path forward in reclaiming a paradise once lost.

In other words, instead of putting our trust in the things of this world to lead us to the perfection we were born to know, we now must learn to place our trust in the promises of God alone. Another word for this kind of trust, by the way, is “faith.”

The Good News, then, is that we are granted new hope. We need not live in the podcaster’s despair. For the innocence we seek is not to be found in going back, as if that were possible, but forward, as children of the light, as children of God. This world’s dead ends, in other words, for the Christian, are but the jumping off point for a new life in Jesus Christ.

Thus, in this time of Lent, we are invited to humbly admit our helplessness as well as, in turn, our radical need for God. Only then, with open hearts, are we in a position to receive the blessed gift of new life. Our faith, then, shall lead us home, to our true home, to that place where God lives and reigns forever and where the perfection we were born to know awaits. Amen.