Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Easter
“Because I go to the Father”
There is at once a fearful and a sad emptiness to our world and day which the YouTube Fanfest in Toronto, perhaps, illustrates. Jenna Marbles has issued her 200th YouTube video. Her YouTube Channel has over 15 million subscribers. Her latest and perhaps last YouTube is a kind of good-by. It captures wonderfully the narcissism and the nihilism of contemporary culture. It begins with her “want[ing] to share some thoughts” with us. But what are those thoughts? A series of rather trite clichés; trite but true which is the nature of clichés, I suppose. “Because to me, I’m just Jenna. That’s all I am,” she says. But there are questions. What are they? Our questions to her, she thinks. “What are you going to do next? Where is this all leading? What about your future?” To which she replies with disarming honesty and sincerity, “The truth is, I don’t know.”
There are the pressures about having plans and goals. But as she says, “what if your goals are vague? Like mine.” What are they? “To be happy. To laugh every day. To experience life. To find love and loss. To just feel what it feels like to be a human being. To feel alive.” All rather commonplace, a tad sentimental and, perhaps, a wee bit poignant but no doubt undeniable. We are likely all suckers for them. Yet, as she says, “where do you go with goals like that?”
“People associate being lost as something bad. Fear is bad. Confusion is bad. But it’s not,” she claims, “It’s life. Because the way I see it, no one knows what they’re doing. Ever.” True enough, I suppose. Our confusions can be the beginning of learning and living; so too, with fear, especially, “the fear of the Lord” which “is the beginning of wisdom” from the biblical perspective. But if people think they know what they are doing, they’re lying, she says. “No one knows what life has in store. You can take some steps towards what you want. But you can’t control where the cards fall.” True enough, too, I suppose. So then what? With respect to drive and desire and ambition, “people focus on how to get somewhere they’re not right now,” she observes only to ask, “what’s wrong with the step you’re on?” while falling on her face. And then, like the sentiment of a Hallmark card, she advises. “Look around you. Don’t miss what you have today. Your friends. Your family. People you love.” Okay. All rather sweet and cute. But then what? The sad recognition that her time in the limelight may be coming to an end. “The novelty of me has worn off” she says, rationalizing that “we get tired of people every day.” “And that’s okay,” she says, trying to put a brave face on it but wrestling with the transitory nature of fame and glory. Sic transit gloria mundi, she might have said more profoundly. So it’s not all Jenna any more. So passes the glory of the world. Those that live by the image, must die by the image.
