by CCW | 3 May 2015 14:44
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[1] 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.
And, especially so with the internet as she observes. “With the internet we are always looking for something quick. A quick laugh. A quick idea. A quick solution.” This is the closest it comes to even the beginnings of the possibilities of a moment of thoughtfulness, of reflective wisdom. “You have infinite paths to take,” she proclaims, “and one weird time you took a path that led you to me.” Aha, the paths led us to her. Why? Because “I’m silly and fun because that’s just how I choose to see the world.” Wow, so profound – not. “Because,” I suppose, “I’m just Jenna.”
Yet nothing lasts, it seems. Sadly, instead of wisdom and learning that might begin to ask deeper questions about life and purpose, about goodness and truth, she ends by giving us all the finger – quite literally – along with a nihilistic ‘f**k –you’ about her life and ours. So much for “look around you.”
I have troubled you with this account because it strikes me as a telling feature of the soullessness and emptiness of our culture which stands in such stark contrast with the Gospels of Easter. Instead of narcissism and nihilism, there is redemption and purpose. But it has entirely to do with getting beyond ourselves. It means confronting the emptiness of ourselves and “the devices and desires of our own hearts.” “Because I go to the Father” is nothing like “because I’m just Jenna.”
The Resurrection sets us in motion to God and to one another. It makes life worth living to know that we have an end in God and that his life in us is the measure and the truth of our own lives and our freedom. We can only live for one another when we live to God. At issue is not simply “what is it right to do” but more importantly “what is it good to be”. The epistle of St. James’ reminds us: “of his own will he brought us to birth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first fruits of all his creation.”
The Resurrection is new birth, new birth in us, dying to ourselves and living for God and for one another. Without that we are dead in ourselves, closed up in the tombs of our souls, paralyzed in our fears and unable to reach out in care and concern for one another, lost in the emptiness of our own vanity; all that remains is giving one another the finger.
Our morality becomes an empty morality; after all, “the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God” without this deeper and religious sense of identity. Throughout the Sundays in Eastertide, Jesus is at pains to counter our fearfulness by preparing the disciples for the fuller meaning of the Resurrection. His going from us is the condition of his being with us. He is preparing them for the radical truth of his Resurrection. It is this. He is going to the Father. The radical otherness of God engages our humanity and we are lifted out of ourselves and beyond our petty vanities.
“Because I go to the Father” is the recurring refrain of the Easter season. Everything is gathered into the motions of the Son’s love for the Father in the Holy Spirit. The whole life of the Son, eternally and incarnate, we might say, is towards the Father. By virtue of his death and resurrection, we are being drawn into the motions of that perfect love. The Comforter is the Holy Spirit, the bond of love of the Father and the Son bestowed upon us by the promises of the Father and the Son. All the comings and goings of our lives find their place and their meaning in the comings and goings of the Son to the Father through the Holy Spirit.
This constitutes a challenge to our world and to us. The world, today’s Gospel tells us, is “reproved” or convicted of “sin” – that is to say, for acting as if there is no God (such is our worldliness, “because ye believe not on me,” our atheism); “reproved” or convicted of “righteousness” – meaning that what is right and true is not to be found simply in our own ambitions and desires but only in the spiritual relation and identity of the Father and the Son (“because I go to the Father”); and “reproved” or convicted of “judgment”, because all that stands against God and his will must be shown to be ultimately empty and futile (“because the prince of this world is judged”).
“The Spirit of truth,” Jesus says, “will guide you into all truth.” There is truth and we are to walk in its paths, “lov[ing] the thing which thou commandest, and desir[ing] that which thou dost promise,” as the Collect puts it. We are called to lives of sacrifice and service “among the sundry and manifold changes of the world.” But how? By keeping our hearts fixed on the things of God “where true joys are to be found.” We only live when we live for God and for one another and not for the fading and flickering images of the YouTube world.
The Risen Christ is the counter to all our fears. He is in our midst. He would not, as he says, “leave [us] comfortless.” He would not leave us empty but filled, filled with his love without which we are truly empty. The love that sets us in motion in lives of service and sacrifice is the love of the Father for the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit, the love that is resurrection and life. Christ has entered into the depths of our humanity in all its sorry array of suffering and death to bring us into the fullness of his joy and life. Such is his death and resurrection for us. It is the ultimate counter to all our fearfulness and to all the sadness of our empty souls and culture. It’s not just Jenna, or you or me. It is about our being with Jesus whose whole being and life is towards the Father. And that is our hope and prayer for Jenna and for ourselves.
Fr. David Curry
Easter 4, 2015
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2015/05/03/sermon-for-the-fourth-sunday-after-easter-6/
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