“We’ll Always Have Paris”                  Vance L. Toivonen

READING                   Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14; 2:18-23

Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. I, the Teacher, when king over Israel in Jerusalem, applied my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven; it is an unhappy business that God has given to human beings to be busy with. I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind. I hated all my toil in which I had toiled under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to those who come after me -- and who knows whether they will be wise or foolish? Yet they will be master of all for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This also is vanity. So I turned and gave my heart up to despair concerning all the toil of my labors under the sun, because sometimes one who has toiled with wisdom and knowledge and skill must leave all to be enjoyed by another who did not toil for it. This also is vanity and a great evil. What do mortals get from all the toil and strain with which they toil under the sun? For all their days are full of pain, and their work is a vexation; even at night their minds do not rest. This also is vanity.

READING                   Margaret J. Wheatley, Finding Our Way

America has embraced values that cannot create a sustainable society and world. We organize too many of our activities around beliefs that are inherently life destroying. We believe that growth can be endless, that competition creates healthy relationships, that consumption need have no limits, that meaning is found in things, that aggression brings peace. Societies that use these values end up, as do all predators in nature, dead.

SERMON

Sermons are opportunities to highlight the important people that impact our lives, and our world. Therefore, I have chosen to begin this Sunday’s sermon by focusing on three individuals who seem to have significantly impacted the landscape of modern society. I am speaking, of course, about Lindsay Lohan, Brittney Spears, and Paris Hilton. I figure there should be enough enlightenmentment there for us to savor for the next 10 minutes or so. I mean, there must be something really, really essential about these three young women for us to be spending so much of our time and energy in this culture analyzing them from every angle.

I understand that Michael Moore was scheduled to be on Larry King Live the same night Paris Hilton was released from jail. Michael Moore would have been on King’s program talking about the health care crisis in America, and fielding calls from viewers who may have interjected personal stories about how the health care system has not worked in their favor. This would have been, in my opinion, a terrific use of airtime on a prominently viewed network. But! “Oh my God!” said the CNN suits. “We can get the first interview with Paris Hilton! Get Michael Moore on the phone! Tell him to stay home tonight! Tell him we’ll reschedule him at a later date, when we are sure to have lower ratings anyway! Tonight! Tonight is going to be a ratings coup! Everyone will be watching CNN tonight! We’ve got Paris Hilton!”

And you know, we’ll always have Paris, or others like her. We certainly don’t want to fill our television screens with the likes of Margaret Wheatley, whom I have never seen on a talk show. Her words in today’s second reading confront us with our misguided priorities. Why would we want to sit in front of our television screens and examine our personal and corporate behavior, when we can more easily throw our collective stones at societies baddies, like those three misbehaving brats Lindsay, Brittney, and Paris?

I know that I am to a great extent preaching to the choir. But we have to wonder how it is that we have come to live in a culture that so relishes self-distraction. Maybe this is just some sort of social medication for the pain of realizing what a mess we’ve made. Or worse, we could be like Solomon in all of his kingly wisdom, and give ourselves over to utter despair at the meaninglessness of it all. Why are we here? What’s it all about? Whatever shall we do to absolve ourselves? Isn’t there someone who can save us?

We stand on the brink between giving ourselves over spiritually to what Eckhardt Tolle calls The Power of Now, and throwing ourselves headlong into the abyss of pure nihilism. At least this is where I find myself. When my brother asked me the other day, “Why are we here?” I said simply that there is no why. All we have is this moment, and the next moment, and the next moment, and so on.

Eckhardt Tolle asks, “Have you ever experienced, done, thought, or felt anything outside the Now? Do you think you ever will? Is it possible for anything to happen or be outside the Now?…Nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now.” (Eckahardt Tolle, The Power of Now, p. 41).

How freeing it is to live like this. I wish I could say I have given myself over to this entirely. But the truth is, there is something that holds me back, something that keeps me from immersing myself completely in this moment. It is, I suppose, mostly fear; fear that emerges from my memory of the myriad moments in my past that have not gone according to my plans, wishes, or desires; fear that there might be a painful thought or memory lurking if I do not otherwise distract myself; fear that this pattern of unfolding moments will send me into an unknown future far from my control. The evidence is overwhelming against my coming days and moments turning out exactly the way I would like. And the final word on my life is a death that awaits me like an insidious surprise.

No wonder Solomon concludes, “Vanity of vanities. All is vanity.” Dealing with the Now can be fraught with emotions I do not wish to feel, thoughts I do not wish to think, ideas about life and the world that are different from my own, and invitations to behavioral changes I do not wish to make. And why would I go to all that trouble anyway? All that’s in it for me is a life of pain and vexation, according to wise king Solomon. My life is saving up, and building my little castle, my little life, my little corner of the universe, and then protecting it from all manner of intrusion. And then, as Solomon reminds me, I end up leaving it all to others. Why work so hard for it in the first place? Why protect it? Does it matter?

The title of the sermon is a double play on words. Do you know where it comes from? It comes from the film Casablanca. Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman play characters that have moved in and out of each other’s lives, and with these words realize they are facing yet another departure. They live together as a couple only in moments. Paris was one of those moments, a fond memory they share, a memory no one can ever take away from them. They have the memory, they shared the moment, but they do not have each other. The universe allows them only occasional moments together, moments to connect, and then disconnect.

This is what we have, moments together. We connect and we disconnect. We move in and out of each other’s lives. And the thoughts, feelings, and energies we generate when we connect determine the world in which we live. Reality is born from these moments of connection. It’s all we have. In this case, we could say, we’ll always have Hope. Hope gives us a place to connect, an opportunity to connect. It is not ultimately about Hope, but the connection we make with one another, and what grows from that connection.

There is a difference, I think, between the time we spend in this room, and the time we spend in the fellowship hall following the time in this room. I think this time in here is ideally an opportunity to connect with the God of our understanding, to bring to consciousness the fact that we are all intertwined with the divine, somehow. And even though we do not fully understand this, or grasp it; even though we have nagging questions that will haunt us ‘til the day we die, we come, and we wonder together, and we sing praises together to this God of our varied and sundry understandings.

The coffee fellowship, and all of the other small group activities listed in our bulletins and newsletters, create environments for living in the moment together; moments we imbue with meaning not so much by what we do, as by the being together in and of itself. Margaret Wheatley says this is how we can change the world. She writes,

For as long as we’ve been around as humans, as wandering bands of nomads or cave dwellers, we have sat together and shared experiences. We’ve painted images on rock walls, recounted dreams and visions, told stories of the day, and generally felt comforted to be in the world together…The simplest way to begin to find each other again is to start talking about what we care about. If we could stop ignoring each other, stop engaging in fear-filled gossip, what might we discover? (Margaret Wheatley, Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future).

America does not have to be as Margaret Wheatley describes it in the second reading today. When we begin to empower one another through being together and conversing, we will begin to realize that there is more possibility in an us than there is in a me. This is how we will solve the health care crisis. It will not be through the electorate, but through the power of moments that we create, moments ripe with our stories of how we ourselves, or loved ones, have received less than adequate care. We will not stand for the cumulative effect of these stories, and we will be moved to action. ‘What action?’ can only be answered in a moment that has yet to be experienced.

We’ll always have Paris, and Lindsay, and Brittney, and any number of other distractions from the simple fact that there is power, and pain, in moments that we share together. We all need solitude, and alone time; but there is power when our energies collide. We will always have Hope, a place for that collision of energies to occur as we re-create reality by being in the same place, at the same moment in time.