Searching for Answers to Life's Final Questions
What has come into being in [Jesus Christ] was life,
and the life was the light of all people John 1:3-4 (NRSV)
A Sermon By The Reverend O. Thomas Miles
Silver Spring, Maryland 20910-4123 - Copyright 2008
* * * * *
Among the numerous thresholds
a person crosses in this life,
certainly one is this:
the threshold
where our two final questions
merge like two streams
into one surging
rapid-filled river.
The two questions
ask about life and death.
You might express them differently,
but the questions
seem to go something like this:
Have I lived a worthwhile life?
Does a destiny await me
beyond my death?
When you read
the four gospels in the New Testament
you discover
Jesus addressing both questions.
Indeed, it is safe to say
that only in Jesus' teachings
do we discover insights
that satisfy our questions.
Those questions
hint at their presence
with poignancy
in Edmund Waller's
(1605-1687) poem:
"The soul's dark cottage,
batter'd and decay'd Let's in new light through chinks
that time has made.
Stronger by weakness wiser men become
as they draw near too their eternal home:
Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view,
that stand upon the threshold of the new."
Jesus frequently spoke about
the old and the new.
The apostle Paul
echoed Jesus
when the apostle
wrote about
becoming
a new person in Christ.
The New Testament book called Revelation
centers its message
around newness.
Booth Tarkington,
in his short novel,
The Magnificent Ambersons,
made into a movie by Orson Welles,
addresses life's two questions and
the idea of oldness and newness.
Tarkington does this
through the person
of Major Amberson
as he muses about
his known past and
his unknown future,
about what is old,
including himself,
and what the newness
he hopes with uncertainty
lies ahead of him.
Tarkington gives us this picture
of Major Amberson.
After he returned home
from the American Civil War,
the Major had,
in Tarkington;s words,
"'made a fortune' in 1873
when other people
were losing fortunes."
The fortune was large enough
to create "magnificence"
for the Ambersons
that, unfortunately,
did not survive their times.
While he still had his fortune,
Major Amberson
silently mused
about his life.
"He worked at his ledgers no more
under his old gas drop-light,
but would sit all evening
starring into the fire,
in his bedroom,
and not speaking unless
someone asked him a question.
"He seemed almost
unaware of what
went on around him,
and those who were with him
thought him dazed
by Isabel's death,
guessing that he was lost
in reminiscences and vague dreams.
"'Probably his mind
is full of pictures of his youth, or
the Civil War, and
the days when he and mother
were young married people and
all of us children were
jolly little things-
and the city was a small town
with one cobbled street and
the others just dirt roads
with board sidewalks.'
"This was George Amberson's conjecture,
and the others agreed;
but they were mistaken.
"The Major was engaged in
the profoundest thinking of his life.
"No business plans
which had ever absorbed him
could compare in momentousness
with the plans that absorbed him now,
for he had to plan
how to enter
the unknown country
where he was not even
sure of being recognized
as an Amberson-
not sure of anything
except that Isabel (his dead wife)
would help him
if she could.
"His absorption
produced the outward effect of reverie,
but of course it was not.
"The Major was occupied with
the first really important matter
that had taken his attention
since he came home invalided,
after the Gettysburg campaign,
and went into business,
and realized that everything (emphasis mine)
which had worried him or
delighted him
during this lifetime
between then and today-
all his buying and building and
trading and banking-
that it all was trifling and waste
beside what concerned him now."(1)
Later, as the Major
talked with his grandson,
the youth asked the Major,
"'Do you want anything, grandfather?'"
"'No-no.
No. I don't want anything . . .'"
Then, a few minutes later,
the Major said,
"'I wish-somebody could tell me!'"(2)
The Major does not tell us
what he wishes
somebody would tell him-
but we can well imagine.
Perhaps we have said the same thing-
wishing someone would tell us
the answer to life's
seemingly unanswerable questions
such as:
Why pain and suffering?
Why inequities of goods and health?
Why strife when
peace offers
a better way?
Why the many traumas of
the mind and soul
that sometimes
make life a bitter pill?
Why mental illness and
its life-wrecking power?
And the list could go on for days.
With one exception,
no one comes to us and
gives us answers--
or at least gives us
the balm of faith.
The exception, of course,
is Jesus Christ.
But his teachings
do not provide answer sheets
for all of life's questions.
According to John's
account of the gospel
Jesus did not come
to give us answers:
He came to give us life
in the midst of the darkness of
life's unanswerable questions..
"What has come into being
in [Jesus Christ] was life,
and the life was
the light of all people."
Jesus provides us with
only a partial answer.
This seems to be true
because life defies definition.
Jesus' first clue
relates to the idea that
material things-and
the more the better-
constitute life.
He told his disciples,
"Take care!
Be on your guard
against all kinds of greed;
for one's life does not consist in
the abundance of possessions."(3)
Discussion of the current crisis
in the mortgage business
no mention was made of greed-
possibly on the part of both
some mortgage businesses and
homebuyers who
demanded more than was
wise or prudent.
Now Jesus' words ring with
a truth that cannot be denied.
He did not say
things are evil or
things are not necessary or
things do not serve
a useful purpose.
He simply said that
if you look for life
in what you can accumulate,
you will be the victim of
your self-generated disappointment.
Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius
wrote in his private meditations:
"Remember this,--
that very little
is needed
to make a happy life."(4)
Jesus' second hint about life
hits home without denial:
he addressed the idea of worry.
"Therefore I tell you,
do not worry about your life,--
you of little faith?"(5)
Extremist often interpret
these words as meaning
don't prepare for emergencies.
Here, Jesus talks about anxiety,
that debilitating frame of mind
that in itself
works against a sense of security.
Here, Jesus does not say
do not prepare;
he merely dubbed worry
as counterproductive.
He put all of us to the test
when he asked:
"And can any of you by worrying
add a single hour to your span of life?"(6)
Among the most difficult words
Jesus spoke about life,
perhaps none threaten us more than these:
"For the gate is narrow and
the road is hard that leads to life,
and there are few who find it."
Few people would say
they have not found life-
not necessarily as they prefer it
but certainly
to a certain measure of fullness.
How many persons,
we might imagine,
live deceived
by their own imaginings
about their lives.
But Jesus does not
leave the matter there:
He leaves us with
further wonderment when he seems to warn us that
"Those who find their life will lose it . . ."(7)
What a paradox!
I grasp and cherish
what I think is life
and even though
I seem to have it,
I actually have lost it.
So how do
I know beyond
a shadow of a doubt
that what I possess
is life as Jesus perceived it?
John, in his understanding of Jesus,
offers this guidance:
"Do not work for the food that perishes,
but for the food that endures for eternal life,
which the Son of Man will give you."(8)
In those words
we find the answer
to our two final questions.
Have I led a worthwhile life?
Will anything I have done
endure the ravages of time?
Does a destiny await me
beyond my death?
To that question
we have a promise
rather than an answer:
"I am the resurrection and the life.
Those who believe in me,
even though they die,
will live, and everyone who lives and
believes in me will never die."
Neither Major Amberson,
nor any member of his clan,
mentions knowing
any answers to life's final questions.
Do you?
1. Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons (New York: The Modern Library Paperback Editon1998), 216-17.
2. Ibid., 224.
3. Lk. 12:15.
4. Meditations, VI, 67.
5. Mt, 6:25-30.
6. Mt. 6:27.