|
|
A Sermon by Donel
McClellan
A Sermon by Donel
McClellan
The Eyes of
Your Heart
Recognition of High
School Seniors
For Your Preparation
printed in bulletin:
VOCATION—There are
different kinds of voices calling you to different kinds of work, and the
problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of Society say,
or the Superego, or Self-Interest. By and large a good rule for finding out is
this. The kind of work God usually calls you to do is work (a) that you need
most to do and (b) that the world needs most to have done.
The place God calls you
to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.[1]
—Frederick Buechner
Yesterday our family was
in Seattle attending a commencement ceremony. We watched with considerable
pride as our son, Martin, received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Over period
of about fifteen years Martin has traveled from dropping out of Sehome High
School, to graduating Magna Cum Laude from Cornish College of the Arts. [Magna
Cum Laude is Latin for “You done good!”]
Although I hope that most
of you graduating seniors will be somewhat more direct in your pursuit of
academic and other goals, I must confess that I have learned a great deal from
my son who traveled his own pathway and fought for his own vision and
vocation.
Some of you high school
seniors have been very active in this congregation. Others have spent less
time here recently but are still treasured members of our church family. That
is the one thing I hope you will remember from this sermon. You are part of
our family and we love and support you. The church is a home to which you can
always return. You will always be welcome and you will always find
encouragement here.
The reason that you will
always be welcome here is that we know how much you are loved by God, and what
high hopes God has for each of you. Whether or not you believe in God at any
given moment you are loved and cherished by God.
Many of you have already
decided what you will be doing next year. Some may not have definite plans at
this moment. But whatever schedule you choose, your task over the next few
years is to choose what you will do in the world. The word for what you do in
the world is vocation. Vocation comes from a Latin word meaning to call.
A vocation is a calling. The big question is: Who is calling you?
It would be easy for me,
as your pastor, to say that it is God who is calling you. That is true at some
very deep level, but is isn’t very helpful to tell young adults to listen for
God’s call. How can you tell God’s call from some other voice?
Frederick Buechner wrote
the short piece I included on the front of your bulletins today. He also had
some helpful advice for a senior class he addressed at their graduation. He
said:
The voice we should
listen to most as we choose a vocation is the voice that we might think we
should listen to least, and that is the voice of our own gladness. What can we
do that makes us the gladdest? What can we do that leaves us with the
strongest sense of sailing true north which is much of what gladness is? Is it
making things with our hands out of wood or stone or paint or canvas? Is it
making something we hope is like truth out of words? Or is it making people
laugh or weep in a way that cleanses their spirit? I believe that if it's a
thing that makes us truly glad, then it's a good thing, and it's our thing,
and it's the calling voice that we were made to answer with our lives.[2]
It is a strange thing, but
to discover the voice of your own gladness you will probably have to do
something a bit odd. You will have to fail. How can you discover gladness
without trying some things that don’t work? We learn from failing.
It is OK to fail as long
as you realize that you are more than your failures. That’s where your church
comes in. We are here to remind you that you are a unique and precious
creation. In fact that is exactly the reason we read scripture and have a
sermon each week—to remind you and ourselves of how much we are loved by God.
The author of Ephesians
believes in more than what we can see and encourages us to look at the world
with a different set of eyes. We are invited to see with the eyes of our
hearts. The eyes of our hearts do not ignore the problems and tragedy in the
world. The eyes of our hearts are able to see past the ugliness of parts of
our world to what God is doing. The eyes of our hearts are eyes of trust, eyes
of hope. They see a shaft of light through the darkness.
The Letter to the
Ephesians is challenging us to imagine how God is working even if we can't see
it with our physical eyes. The eyes of our hearts see things our physical eyes
cannot. What we see with the eyes of our hearts is that God is mending,
healing, uniting all of creation.
Ephesians expresses the
vision in wonderfully poetic language: God will "gather up all . . . things in
heaven and things on earth". Think of it God will gather up all of the warring
nations, all of the squabbling denominations, all of the feuding families, all
of the broken pieces of our lives. What death has torn apart, God will bring
together. What hatred has ripped to shreds, God will bring together. What
ignorance has shattered, God will bring together.
The great themes of your
faith are healing, peace, justice and compassion. God is always at work in the
world accomplishing these tasks. How does God do that? God works through
people; people who believe in God and people who don’t; people who go to
church and people who don’t.
God invites all of us,
calls us, to join others who follow their gladness and seek peace where there
is discord, wholeness where there is brokenness, and beauty where there is
disorder. We do this by following a path which you have already begun and
which you will full of adventure and challenge. It is the path of life and it
is best seen with the eyes of our hearts.
Our son Martin collects
the work of British artist Tom Phillips. IN a paper he wrote he explained that
one of his favorite pieces is a picture of Samuel Becket, arguably the
of the greatest English playwright of the twentieth century. Tom Phillips
painted Beckett in 1986, while Beckett was in London directing a production of
his most acclaimed play, Waiting for Godot.
Instead of arranging for a formal sitting, Phillips came to the rehearsals of
the play to do preliminary sketches. That presented some problems.
…at the beginning I did
not know quite how to set about drawing him. I’m not a very good lighting
sketcher. To move in front of him would evidently have been an intrusion on
his work there. Sitting behind, trying to form a strategy, I gradually
realized that the back of his head was as eloquent as the front, and as
recognizable…Initially I positioned myself so that I caught some of the side
view of his face but settled in the end, in doing the most finished of the
drawings, for a full back view in which each of Beckett’s majestic ears is
seen to good advantage: they are after all the most sensitive ears for
language alive.
[3]
Indeed, the finished
portrait is of the back of Samuel Beckett’s head, as he watches an actor on
stage. Phillips finished the portrait with a quote from Beckett. It became my
son’s motto as he struggled through his four years of college. Samuel Beckett
said:
NO MATTER. TRY AGAIN. FAIL
AGAIN. FAIL BETTER.
As you move out into the
world, I invite you to fail better, to try such ambitious things that you push
yourselves to the limit.
I congratulate you not
only on your successes, but on the failures which taught you to try something
different.
I commend you not on the
answers you have found but upon the larger and better questions which you have
discovered in your studies and your lives.
I invite you, whatever
your beliefs about God to look at your world with the eyes of your hearts.
Amen.
[1].
Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking:
A Theological ABC,
New
York, Harper & Row, 1973, 95
[2].
Frederick Buechner in a graduation
address, as quoted in Ken Gire, Windows of
the Soul (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan
Publishing House, 1996), 71
[3].
Illustration from Martin McClellan, quote
from Phillips, Tom, Works and Text
Thames
and Hudson, London 1992 |