by Rev. Thomas Disrud

A sermon given January 7, 2001

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

OPENING WORDS

We come together in this new year

bringing our hopes and our dreams

our longings and our fears.

May this be a place where we bring our whole selves,

a place where we find beauty and inspiration,

a place where we look to the future with hope.

Come and let us worship here together.

One day, a man and his wife, both in their early 60s, are at a garage sale. They are looking at a long table full of stuff, and they see an old lamp—it is pretty ugly and tarnished, a little dented up. And yet they are intrigued. It looks like a genie lamp, and they decide to buy it. They get it home and polish it up and find that it really is quite a beautiful lamp. They stand admiring it when all of a sudden a Genie appears. She has been trapped for many years and is very happy to be freed.

She tells them how thankful she is and grants each one of them a wish—anything they want.

They think about it and the get pretty excited. The wife goes first. She decides her wish is to have a trip around the world, everything first class, to all the places she has ever dreamed of going. The Genie says fine. The wish will be granted. She closes her eyes, and—poof—there she has it. The tickets and all the plans. She can’t wait to go.

Next it is the husband’s turn. He thinks about it. He looks a little embarrassed.

What is your wish, asks the Genie? "Well, what I’d really like is a woman who is about 30 years younger than I am."

"Really?" asks the Genie.

"Yes," says the man.

"Now, are you really sure that’s what you want?" she says.

"Positive," says the man.

"Well, OK, if that’s what you want," says the Genie.

He closes his eyes, and poof, the Genie works her magic. He opens his eyes to discover that he is now 90 years old. Yes, indeed, he now has a wife who is 30 years younger than he is.

Be careful what you wish for.

Most of us at one time or another have probably thought about what our one wish would be. It might involve travel, or sudden wealth, or the restoration of health for ourself or someone we love.

Some of us may wish for a broken relationship to be mended, or we may wish for something more global like world peace. It may be all we want is to look like Brittany Spears or Brad Pitt—fantasies can take many forms.

Wishing for things we don’t have is very human.

I have a little game I play in my head when I’m in an art gallery or a store surrounded by beautiful things I usually can’t afford. I think to myself, if the owner were to come up to me and say I could have any piece I wanted, what would that piece be?

And after playing the game for many years now, I have to say that it has never come true. And yet, I still have fun playing it.

Most of the time such wishes don’t get much further than our imaginations. We think about how much better our lives might be if we had this or that happen to us. Things always seem better somewhere else or with something more.

Of course when we do hear about such wishes coming true, it isn’t always a happily-ever-after result. When somebody wins the lottery, too often a couple years later they are either divorced, or broke after a spending binge or just plain miserable. The fantasy doesn’t always have a happy ending.

And yet the wishes remain, probably because there’s almost always something in our lives that we’d like to change. And so we imagine our lives differently.

Take the ancient story of King Midas.

King Midas appeared to have just about everything, a wife and daughter, a palace, lots of wealth. And yet he felt discontented, he felt there was something lacking in his life.

One day he finds a creature in his garden that is drunk. The creature’s master is the god Dionysus, and he begs Midas not to send him home right away. Midas agrees to let the creature stay if he will entertain Midas with stories for a week. After a week the creature goes back to its master Dionysus, who is so happy to see him that he offers Midas any gift he can name.

Midas thinks about it and finally asks that everything he touches be turned to gold. His wish is granted and he can’t wait to try it out. He goes to the garden and touches a rose, and it turns to gold. He touches another rose, and then another and soon the whole garden is golden. But it is not long before he realizes that yes, the roses are shiny and beautiful, but they are also no longer alive and fragrant. They are not moving in the breeze.

Midas soon realizes his mistake, but it is too late. He tries to stop his daughter from embracing him, but he can’t and she is turned into gold. He can’t have food or drink, because as soon as it touches his lips, it turns to gold.

Midas goes back to Dionysus and tells him what a terrible mistake he has made, how he realizes how greedy he has been and asks for forgiveness. Dionysus tells him to go to the river and to wash himself. Midas does this, but the current of the river is so strong that it nearly washes him away. In the end, when he is on the other side, he is not sure if it has worked. But then he looks at how the water sparkles, and he sees bits of gold on the bottom of the river, and knows that the spell has been broken.

"I have learned my lesson," he says, "and I am content."

The lessons we learn in life may not always be so clear so quickly. It usually takes some time before we can get enough perspective to know if what we have wished for and what has happened has actually been a good thing. Over time, what we once thought of as a blessing may actually turn out not to look like such a good thing. And it may also be that something we regretted at the time turned out to be just the right thing. We can’t always know how we are going to look at something down the road.

When I graduated from college I was looking at jobs in a remote part of Texas, in Chicago, and in Duluth, Minnesota. I was clear at the time about one thing—that I wanted to live in Chicago. Problem was, the job in Chicago held the least appeal. It was editing for a small magazine targeting treasurers of large corporations. Lots of stories on the best way to account for interest. Could have been fine, but I can see now it was not the job for me. But at the time I really wanted that job and was willing to do just about anything to live in Chicago.

Looking back, I know it is good that job did not come through. I would not have been very happy, and it may be that I would not have eventually found the path that was right for me. But today I look back and laugh about how disappointed I was. I would have never predicted it at the time. And I don’t know what would have happened if it had come through. Maybe I would have eventually ended up in just the same place.

In the movie "The Family Man," Nicholas Cage plays a Wall Street financier who spends his time brokering deals, making money, being powerful, and admiring his collection of very expensive suits. He seems to have it all. Then one night he happens to be in a convenience store during a robbery, and he meets a man destined to change his life by asking him a question. We wakes up the next morning, not in his Manhattan high-rise, but in a house in the suburbs of New Jersey. He has a wife, two kids and is a manager at a tire store. He sees the life he would have had if he had made a different decision years earlier.

And at first he is horrified at what he sees. He is not thrilled with changing his first dirty diaper or experiencing the daily details of the tire business.

But it is not long before he also starts to see all the wonderful things in this life that he has missed. He sees how the woman he left years before adores him and the wonderful children they have together.

The movie ends with a suggestion that he—and therefore all of us—can have it all. It might just be that he can have both his present life and also eventually have the what-would-have-been life.

Of course, real life usually isn’t like this—and that’s probably why we go to the movies in the first place.

We don’t have the luxury to go back and see what might have been. In the end, we only have our imagination and the clarity and perspective that can come with time. The rightness or wrongness of decisions may be very clear.

But just as often things won’t be right or wrong but simply as they have been. It may be we would neither change them nor keep them. They just are the way they are.

If there is a secret of life, it is probably found in the complexity of all this. Whether a given decision was right or wrong, we will never know. But for some of us, we may always be asking the question. And sometimes we might even overdo it.

A Non Sequitur cartoon in the newspaper last week shows a man high up in the mountains with a large pack on his back. He is kneeling before a guru and asking her to tell him the meaning of life. Her response is clear: "The secret of life is listening to your mother in the first place and not wasting your time climbing mountains to ask silly questions."

Indeed, it may be some of us spend too much time asking questions. In doing this it may be we miss simply seeing what is around us. It is easy to look outside ourselves for answers and in the process miss what is apparent right in front of us.

If we are too busy wondering about the past and the future, we may miss out on exactly what it is we need in the present. It may be the very thing we are wishing for is happening right in front of us and we have missed it.

We can’t control most of what happens in life. And when we make decisions we can’t always know how those decisions will look with some perspective. But what we do have is some control over our response to a given situation. We can either choose to open ourselves to the learning that might come, or worry about what is in the future and miss what is happening in the present.

This is the time of year when we find ourselves making resolutions. We pledge to lose weight, to spend more time with our families, to be more efficient with our time, to get a plan in place for what we are going to do with our life. We realize that another year has come and gone and we are determined not to let another one come without shaping up and getting our house in order.

Resolutions are fine, but there’s a danger in how we look at them. If we come at them trying to fix ourselves, we may get stuck on what needs to be fixed, and lose sight of the fact that we are whole and precious, and that what we have is good and valuable. We may find ourselves wishing for things we either don’t need or things that won’t help us get very far. Maybe the reason why so many resolutions don’t come to pass is that we are asking for the wrong things.

Here are a few things we might wish to cultivate in our lives:

A deepening sense of ourselves as whole.

A deeper sense of how we are interconnected with others.

An acceptance that we are not always going to be able to understand why things happen the way they do.

Nurturing a sense of trust that we will find what it is we need to sustain us each day.

That we approach life taking nothing for granted.

And if we can do this, we might have lessons come our way that we don’t expect. It may be that all kinds of wishes will be fulfilled—even some we don’t know we want granted.

A story.

The great Rebbi Zusia prayed every morning before breakfast, "God, please provide me with food today." His servant grew angry this stupidity. "Why does he pray to God for food? I am the one who brings him cakes and tea every morning." So the servant decided to not bring the food the next day. Early the next morning the Rebbi set off before dawn dressed in his ragged coat and worn boots. Crossing a bridge, he fell into the mud.

A man, thinking the Rebbi was no doubt a good-for-nothing thief, turned away and did not help him. But the man felt guilty afterward and inquired from a merchant whether he knew this vagabond who had fallen in the mud.

The merchant said, "It is the Rebbi. He is a Holy Man. He cares nothing for the adornments of this world." Ashamed, the man decided to make amends by bringing the Rebbi his breakfast. The servant was astonished when immediately after the Rebbi’s prayer a man brought fresh cakes and tea to the door of the house. He says, "It could be no other than God who answers his prayer."

Words of George Abbe:

Wait for these things beside the river landing:

A slow bird rising through the slanting rain,

New moons and mists that give us understanding,

Long twilights, when the shape of hills is plain.

Wait for these things beside the river landing,

For they will come to you against your will,

Filling the longing unawares, commanding

The swift impatience of the blood to still.

At the end of the story, Midas announces that he has found contentment. In learning a very difficult lesson, he looks at his life in a very different way. He sees and smells the beauty of the live roses. He recognizes joy in the embrace from his daughter. He knows the simple pleasure of food and drink.

And what about our own lives? In the sunshine that cuts through the chill of a winter day, the rain that gently falls on the roof. In the shout of a child as she opens a gift. In the fulfillment of a job well done. In the embrace of someone when we are mourning a loved one’s death. We find our way and we might even realize that this is more than we could have wished for. We close our eyes and say a quiet prayer of thanksgiving.

May this be so. Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of life, hold us in this hour. Help us to see the wonder in each day, in each moment. Help us to be aware of how we are connected to this wonder, how it moves though us and in us and among us. Help us to trust in that mystery we will never fully know. Help us to always be open to surprise. Grant us wisdom and courage on the journey. Amen.

BENEDICTION

May your new year be full of blessings, large and small. May each of your days be filled with wonder and hope. Go in love and go in peace.

Copyright 2001, by Rev. Thomas Disrud.  All rights reserved.