What We Miss
The Rev. Dr. Skip Ferguson
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
October 9, 2016
What We Miss
Selected
Texts
The business
executive opened his newspaper
as he sat down to
his breakfast.
He scanned the
headlines on the front page
and then turned to
the business section.
A headline at the
top of the page caught his eye:
“The merchant of
death is dead.”
The executive read
the obituary in stunned silence,
read of a man who
had spent his life
building a large,
lucrative
international
armaments business.
The paper observed
that the man had become wealthy
as a result of his
singular focus on
“finding ways to
kill more people faster
than ever before.”
The year was 1888,
and the obituary was
that of Alfred Nobel,
the man who
established the Nobel Prizes,
the prizes we’ve
been hearing and
reading about the
past week
as this year’s
awards have been announced:
prizes for physics,
chemistry, and medicine.
In the coming week,
there will be prizes
for literature and for
economics.
Of course, most
famous,
is the Nobel Peace
prize,
awarded this year to
the president of Columbia,
Juan Manuel Santos,
“for his resolute efforts to bring his country's
more than 50-year-long civil war to an end,
a war that has cost the lives
of at least 220,000 Colombians.”
Nobel is famous not
only for the Nobel Prizes,
but also for having
invented dynamite.
He made his fortune manufacturing
arms and armaments;
as his obituary observed,
he was known
throughout Europe
in the later years of
the 19th century
as “the merchant of
death”.
The irony in this little
vignette
was that the business
executive reading
Nobel’s obituary as
he had his breakfast
was in fact Alfred
Nobel.
It was Nobel’s
brother Ludwig who had died;
the newspaper
incorrectly printed an obituary for Alfred,
who was still very
much alive.
still running his
large, profitable company.
It is not often a
person gets to read his own obituary,
or, like Mark
Twain’s Tom Sawyer,
gets to hear the
eulogies at his own funeral.
Nobel was deeply
troubled by the thought
that he might be
remembered as
“the merchant of
death,”
as a man whose focus
in life
was “finding ways to
kill more people faster
than ever before.”
The premature
obituary
spurred Nobel to
look at his life.
For all its marks of
success –
wealth, comfort,
security, respect –
he realized that
when he died
he wanted to leave a
different legacy,
a legacy of having
enhanced life for others,
enriched life for humanity.
And so, when he did
die in 1896,
his Will established
the Nobel prizes,
prizes awarded to
men and women
for their
contributions to humanity
in medicine,
science,
literature,
economics,
and especially for
peace.
Nobel peace
laureates include
Elie Wiesel,
Bishop Desmond Tutu,
the Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr.,
Dag Hammerskjold,
and organizations
such as the Red Cross,
Doctors Without
Borders,
and even the
European Union,
lately the subject
of harsh criticism,
but lauded 4 years
ago
for its ceaseless work
since World War II
contributing to “the
advancement of
peace and reconciliation,
democracy and human rights in Europe".
Nobel’s legacy is
truly extraordinary.
A newspaper’s
mistake,
an incorrect
obituary,
causing a man to
look deep within,
to think about his
life,
to think about his
legacy,
and then create
something to enhance, enrich,
to touch people’s
lives long after he was gone.
We all think about our
legacies.
As we age, we tend
to become more reflective,
as we look back and think
about what we’ve done,
what we’ve
accomplished in our lives,
with our lives,
what we will be
remembered for.
What are the parts
of our lives
that we are most
proud of;
what are the parts
of our lives
that have given our
lives meaning.
In his book,
“When All You’ve
Wanted Isn’t Enough”,
Rabbi Harold Kushner,
the author of the
classic,
“When Bad Things
Happen to Good People”,
wrote, “I believe
that it is not dying
that people are
afraid of.
[It is] something
else.
Something more
unsettling
and more tragic than
dying frightens us.
We are afraid of never
having lived,
of coming to the end
of our days,
with the sense that
we were never really alive,
that we never figured
out what life was for.”
Life isn’t for
accumulating wealth,
for accumulating
power,
for accumulating prestige.
That bumper sticker
you see from time to time,
the one that says,
“The One Who Dies
With the Most Toys Wins”
is wrong.
What we long for, Kushner
writes,
is the feeling that
our life matters,
that our life has
meaning,
meaning that isn’t
found in goods,
in possessions,
in money,
in prominence,
in the twins Fame
and Fortune.
Most of us are
familiar with words from the third chapter
of the Old Testament
Book, Ecclesiastes.
That’s the chapter
that begins with:
“For
everything there is a season,
and a
time for every matter under heaven:
a
time to be born, and a time to die;
a
time to plant,
and a
time to pluck up what is planted;”
For as familiar as
we might be with those words,
words made famous by
the song,
“Turn, Turn, Turn”, written
by Pete Seeger,
we are not as likely
to be familiar
with the rest of the
book.
It is an odd book in
many ways,
a book one biblical
scholar calls,
“baffling and
wrong-headed,”
a book that many
scholars wonder
why it was ever
included
in the Hebrew
Scriptures in the first place.
The author of the
book,
a man referred to in
the Hebrew as Qohelet,
or the Teacher,
writes in a tone
that evokes
worn, world-weary,
cynicism.
As he aged, he
realized that those things
he thought mattered
most in life
really did not
matter:
things like wealth, possessions,
and success.
Listen to the words
of the Teacher:
“I made great works;
I built houses and planted vineyards for myself;
I also had great possessions of herds and flocks,
more than any who had been before me in Jerusalem.
I also gathered for myself silver and gold
and the treasure of kings and of the provinces;…
So I became great
and surpassed all who were before me in Jerusalem;…
Whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them;
I kept my heart from no pleasure,
for my heart found pleasure in all my toil,
and this was my reward for all my toil.
Then I considered all that my hands had done
and the toil I had spent in doing it,
and …, all was vanity
and a chasing after wind….”
(Ecclesiastes 2:4-11)
As Rabbi Kushner
observes,
“The need for
meaning
is not a biological
need
like the need for
food and air.
Neither is it a
psychological need,
like the need for
acceptance and self-esteem.
It is a religious
need,
an ultimate thirst
of our souls.”
We thirst for
meaning,
we long for meaning;
we long for richness
in our lives,
richness that cannot
be satisfied
by the things of
this world.
We don’t need to establish
a Nobel Prize
to give meaning to
our lives.
Think about what the
prizes recognize and honor:
the effort by
someone
to touch another
person’s life
in a way that
enriches, enhances,
heals, helps,
reconciles, brings
hope.
Isn’t that how our
Lord Jesus Christ
calls us to live our
lives as his disciples?
Isn’t that what we
do here at
Manassas
Presbyterian Church?
Serving, not being
served;
reaching out to
others,
especially those
with needs;
feeding, nurturing,
healing, welcoming;
Taking seriously our
Lord’s call
to wash one
another’s feet
just as he did.
As our Lord has
taught us,
“Do not store up for
yourselves treasures on earth,
where moth and rust
consume
and where thieves
break in and steal;
but store up for
yourselves treasures in heaven,
where neither moth nor
rust consumes
and where thieves do
not break in and steal.
For where your
treasure is,
there your heart will
be also.”
(Matthew 6:19-21)
Qohelet finally
learned that lesson,
that what matters
most in life,
what gives meaning
to life,
what he had missed
as he chased success,
was living by God’s
word,
God’s will
and God’s way.
Alfred Nobel had to
read his own obituary
to learn that lesson.
We have our Lord,
the head of our
church,
who teaches us now,
here in our church,
calling us to lives
of meaning, richness,
fullness as we
follow him,
building a legacy in
each of our lives,
building a legacy
that is this church,
a legacy built on
the grace and love of God
given us in Jesus
Christ.
AMEN
posted by Rev. Dr. Skip Ferguson @ 11:00 AM
