Have you ever noticed how some movies, or Netflix series, instantly resonate, while others are just too much trouble to figure out? Seventeen years later and I’m still not sure “Lost in Translation” even has a point, and the only reason people “oohed” and “aahed” about it was someone with the last name Coppola directed it.
Have you ever been to an art museum and stopped at a random painting that caught your eye? After about thirty seconds, you decide to read the little plaque, and it says, “Oil on canvass; a portrait of a walnut.” And you step back, and sort of scratch your head, thinking, “That’s a walnut?!?”
Do you remember the old Rorschach ink blot test? I actually had to take it as part of my psychological evaluation in seminary, and I knew if I wanted to pass, I had to say, “it’s a bat.” But what I saw was clearly a two-headed angel cooking bacon (I didn’t say that, because there was a mental hospital on the opposite end of campus!).
Or think about the first time you joined a book club. Do you remember how you felt totally insufficient when people starting sharing their “takeaways” from the novel that you thought really was about swan traffic on the River Thames, but everyone else in the room clearly understood was as a profound expose of emotional and erotic repression?
The real reason things like this happen every day all over the world has everything to do with something called perspective – being able, or unable, to understand something from the point of view of another person. And perspective can change everything.
Today, in the sixteenth chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew, it is St. Peter who lacks the ability to see in any other way than what is right in front of him, and Jesus rebukes him, saying, “You are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
I want to talk about just two things today: our perspective and God’s perspective – everyday, human perspective and divine, eternal perspective.
And I want to make my case by doing what may seem like a really weird exercise (hey, remember I’m the guy who saw an angel cooking bacon). And I’m doing this, because, again, perspective can change everything.
Okay, let’s do it like this. Take a few seconds – not too long – and imagine that you, not your children or spouse, get to write your own obituary. Hey, you get the last word.
I know it sounds strange, and maybe even creepy, but just indulge me. I’ll be quiet for a few seconds. Go ahead, write in your mind what you want printed in the Herald Tribune:
Most of us would love something like this: “She loved her family and her parish church, Church of the Redeemer, she was entirely devoted to her husband of seventy years, she planned and hosted many charitable and civic galas, worked tirelessly to establish St. Swithin’s Home for the Infirm, and she will always be remembered for her quick-wit, smile, and hospitality. She died peacefully in her sleep.”
Suffice it to say, the obit I’ve just read is written from the perspective of how we’d like others to remember us.
Now, let’s do the same thing over again, but this time let’s change perspective and write an obit as we many of us secretly see ourselves. And let’s pretend that the Herald Tribune has a fact-checker for the obits. Only the brutally honest things get printed – the real truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, so help me God. No fake news:
“Not even the booze and barbiturates let her escape memories of what she did that night sixty years. She never forgave herself. Others saw a woman with her act together, but she felt only flaws and failure – guilt, and grief. Every day was yet another trip around the all you can eat anxiety buffet. Tom said she died in her sleep, but we wonder if she overdosed.”
The problem with both of these obits – the problem with this whole morbid exercise – is that it turns out that 99.9% of all the obituaries you’ll ever read, whether they are sappy, sweet or shockingly salacious, are all written from a terribly inadequate perspective – from a human perspective. Do you remember Lady McBeth’s perspective? She was the worst; talk about a limited, dour perspective:
Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
But God’s perspective is altogether different.
Eliot may have been leaning into this in Burnt Norton, when he said:
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present
Because God is eternal, everything is always present to God. What a unique perspective!
So, I have one final exercise. Let’s change perspective yet again, and let’s give the Son of God the first and last word of our lives from His perspective:
She took one look at me and all her brokenness, her confusion, emptiness, rejection, shame and guilt were no more. She found out that I really am the friend of sinners – that I am He who “gives to the thirsty [water] from the spring…of life without payment” (paraphrase on Revelation 21:6). I am the Alpha and the Omega. And I declare “it is finished.”
I love how the late Brenan Manning put it in what has to be his best book, The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out:
Do you believe that… Jesus loves you beyond worthiness and unworthiness, beyond fidelity and infidelity—that he loves you in the morning sun and in the evening rain—that he loves you when your intellect denies it, your emotions refuse it, your whole being rejects it. Do you believe that God loves without condition or reservation and loves you this moment as you are and not as you should be?”
My very deepest prayer is that you and I find the faith to answer “yes,” because saying yes means that you and I will begin to see things from a different perspective: as God really sees them – as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.
Remember, perspective changes everything.
Sermon preached by the Rev. Charleston D. Wilson
Church of the Redeemer
Sarasota Florida
13th Sunday after Pentecost
30 August 2020