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 19^th 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