LIVING THE ABUNDANT LIFE

April 29, 1990

8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan

Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
1 Peter 41:17-23
John 10:1-10

“Y came that they may have life, and have it abundantly."
-~John 10:10b (RSV)

Abundant Life... it is what we all want. In one way or another it is
what we are working so hard to achieve. It is what we hope for our
children. We may define it differently, but we rejoice when life is lived
abundantly and we despair when it is not.

That sentiment is wonderfully expressed in a popular current play,
"Shirley Valentine."

It's a poignant and powerful moment when Shirley says...

“I'd lived such a little life. And one way or another even that
would be over soon. I thought to myself, my life has been a crime really -
a crime against God, because I didn't live it fully. I'd allowed myself to
live this little life when inside me there was so much more."

And it was a great and powerful moment when, in the the middle of the
drama of his own life, Jesus said: "I came that they may have life, and
have it abundantly."

That's what Christianity is about, actually - abundant life, “life in
all its fullness," another version translates it. “Is there life after
death?” might seem to be the quintessential religious question. But for
Jesus of Nazareth a prior question, an even more relevant question was, "Is
there life before death?" And somewhere in the counterpoint between
Shirley Valentine's grim but recognizable description of the human
condition as “living a little life... when there is so much more..." and
Jesus' strong statement that his purpose had to do with an abundance of
life, is where most of us are, I believe.

The play is not about religion in any traditional sense, but as is
the case with much good theater, the thematic material is absolutely
religious, particularly if we are listening to Jesus on the topic of

Abundant Life. Shirley Valentine is a uiddie-aged British housewife,
mother of two young adults, takes care of her working husband,

has a glass of wine or twa alone in her kitchen as she prepares the eveninp
meal, and in the absence of anyone else, talks te the wall.

She asks: “What happened? Bid something happen or was it just that
nothin happened? They got married, they made a home, they had kids and
brought them up. And somewhere along the line the boy called Joe turned
into 'Him,' and Shirley Valentine turned into this and what I can't
remember is what day or week or month it was when it stopped being good."

A friend invites Shirley to accompany her on a holiday trip to
Greece. It is unthinkable that she shovid do something so bold, exciting,
without her husband who, it appears, is incapable - or unwilling - to boil
an ege. She does it, an act of courageous self-affirmation, a reaching for
her dreans, although she never does tell her husband. The sweetest part of
her dream is to sit one day by the sea, sipping wine in a land where the
grapes are grown and it is there, alone, on the veranda of a Greek tavern,
that she reflects so poignantly... in a way I thought was commentary on
John 10.

“I mean for weeks, I'd had this picture of myself, sittin here,
drinkin wine by the sea: I even knew how I was gonna feel. But when I got
to it, it wasn't a bit like that. Because when 1 got to it, I didn't feel
at all iovely and serene. I felt pretty daft actually. A bit stupid and
awfully, awfully old. What I kept thinkin was how I'd lived such a little
life. An one way or another even that would be over soon... {the
importance of this motif was evidenced by handkerchiefs materializing in
the audience} I thought to myself, my life has been a crime really - a
crime against God, because I didn't live it fully. I'd allowed myself to
live this little life when inside me there was so much. So much more that
I could have lived a bigger life with -— but it had all gone unused and now
it never would be. Why - why do I get all this life, when it can't be
used? Why - why do I get... all these feelins and dreams an hopes if they
can't ever be used? That's where Shirley Valentine disappeared to. She
got lost in all this unused life."

Jesus said, "I came that they might have life, and have it
abundantly." And that moment in "Shirley Valentine" reminded me that
Christianity is about living the abundant life, now, in this world, within
the perimeters of history. That the promise and hope of the Gospel is
about love more powerful than death, an eternal love. But the focus--— the
place of impact, the essence of the act of God's becoming incarnate in the
man Jesus, is the way that shapes, molds, colors, deepens, recreates,
converts and fills up to the very brim this life I am now in the process of
living.

I learned that personally from a friend, as often happens; from a
friend who had challenged me. Her name was Mary. She and her husband were
good friends, strong, committed people. Mary had been pushing me, needling
me a little bit, urging me to be more forthright and aggressive in support
of a cause to which she was totally committed and about which I was, for a
variety of reasons - not all of them good - lukewarm. After a Sunday
morning worship service, when she had let me have it, she called on Monday

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morning. “There's something you do not know about me," she said. "I have

cancer. f've had the surgery and the treatments. I feel all right. It's
gone... bul there are no guarantees. fF may live six months or twenty
years. Bul whatever [ have left 1 intend to live it. I used to be shy,

reticent, kept my opinions to myself. No more. When I care about
something I say it. You see, there is nothing in this life that scares me
any more,"

On the morning J received that cal] I sat at my desk a jong time
thinking about how much of life we let slip through our fingers simply
because we are afraid to live it; how much love we carry around in our
hearts unexpressed because we never got around to it, or were afraid of the
vulnerability which occurs every time we say "I love you"; how much passion
for great causes we carry in our hearts because we never took the time to
pursue it, or were afraid of what our friends might think, or how our
career would be affected; how many hopes and dreams we hide in our hearts,
putting them off for some safely vague future when we'll be free enough or
comfortable enough or secure enough to give them a try.

Shirley Valentine reminded me again of something I learned personally
from that telephone conversation, and have learned from over and over
again, namely that in spite of what Jesus said on the topic, Christianity
generally is not regarded as a resource for living abundantly. In fact, it
is often part of the problem: “To be religious" is assumed to be limited,
a bracketing of life, a turning away from life. The Simple truth is that
what traditional religion there is in the Bible is not portrayed very
positively. Throughout the four Gospels, particularly the Gospel of John,
religion is one of the burdens of life with which people must contend.
Religious people, Scribes and Pharisees, are the villains in the story. In
the Fourth Gospel, Jesus enhances human life wherever he goes, and the
religious people object. Jesus makes water into wine to keep a wedding
party going, restores sight, heals the lame, is characterized by John as
living water and bread of life. In fact, Jesus restores and enhances the
gift of life dramatically all the while, without ceasing. There is a
steady, consistent, objection by the religious authorities: "Yes, it's
nice that the man can walk but it's the Sabbath... she's a sinner... all

these people are unclean, so, untidy... and they don't go to church, or
keep the Sabbath."

The simple, uncomfortable reality of the New Testament is that
religion is one of the reasons people are prevented from living abundantly.
Throughout the New Testament, but particularly in the Fourth Gospel, the
story is a kind of on-again, off-again, running argument between Jesus and
religion which increases in intensity until it comes to the crucifixion
which, particularly as John tells it, was a skillfully engineered religious
scheme.

Religion in the New Testament often appears life-limiting, life-
denying, a grim, tight-lipped, scowling affair, a maze of rules and laws
and restrictions and requirements. Religion leaves people like sheep
without a shepherd, said Jesus. Or, rather, sheep with a thief imitating a
shepherd. And that, more than anything else, seems to have made him angry.
Angry enough to pick up a whip and drive the purveyors of this kind of
life-limiting religion out of the temple. Angry enough to look them in the

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eye and tell them they are like the thief who pretends to be a shepherd and
leads the sheep to their demise. In contrast, he says, "JI came that they
may have life, and have it abundantly."

Part of the challenge is that religion, the very context in which we
are pathered this morning, has a way of becoming a deterrent to abundant
living: that instead of enhancing life, religion often hems it in, limits
and restrains it under a mountain of rituais, rules, and customs.

But another challenge is a cultural context in which there are plenty
of available and enormously attractive definitions of abundance. Consider,
for instance, the public observance this past week of the sad demise of
Crate & Barrel from the corner of Chestnut and Michigan - to rise again,
several blocks to the south. The pilgrims were there all week. Last
Saturday, in order to purchase - at half price - the icons of abundance,
stylishly designed and packaged, they stood four deep all day, in a line
which began at the corner, extended west a block, then south, then east on
Pearson. When a celebrant finally made it inside, the Holy of Holies, and
emerged with the precious item, he or she would hold it high, in the
gesture of victory, and the crowd would share the exuberance of the moment
by cheering. Sunday, Earth Day, they were back, at dawn's early light,
with folding chairs, newspapers, thermos bottles of coffee. All week they
returned, to stand in line and wait.

American culture in the past decade decided that the abundant life
was abundant in the goods and gadgets of consumerism. In an article on
“Baby Boomers" in the Tribune, Jane Ciabattari wrote, “If the Depression
attitude was 'You can't have everything,' and the post-war expansionist
period created a shared credo, ‘You can have everything,’ the 1980s taught
us 'You should have everything.'"

We bought into that... We spent ourselves and our country into a
black hole of debt that our children's children will have to pay back. We
watched that mentality express itself in a junk bond empire whose sole
product was to make a few fabulously wealthy, shaking to the very core
savings and loan institutions, and adding to our bill ~ now due — sums of
money beyond our wildest imagination. We even watched it emerge again in
religion as the televangelists promised that God really wants us to have it
all, wants us to be comfortable materially, that God will bless those who
give generously, that a contribution is actually an investment which will
turn a tidy profit, and the money poured in.

While religion has traditionally been life-limiting, the 80s saw an
amazing new phenomenon, a religiosity which simply reflected the almost
spiritual commitment to consumerism which was characterized as the New
Narcissism.

A very sensitive article in The New Yorker last week looked again at
the P.T.L. collapse.

The author quoted columnist Dave Barry, who noted that the people who
were happily sending in money and supporting the Bakkers were not
marginalized, ignorant and poor — but solidly middle class.

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The success of P.T.L., says Barry, rested upon the fact that its
leaders personalized "a very appealing, convenient moral philosophy that

flourished in the 80s... "You can't do pood with others unless you feel
good about yourself, and you can't feel good about yourself unless you have
a lot of neat stuff." [Reflections, Frances Fitzgerald, 4/23/90, p. 50]

Sometime in the late 1980s it began to change, says pollster David
Yankelovich. The October crash may have had something to do with it, or
the junk bond debacle, or the savings and loans collapse, or maybe we just
learned the truth... i.e., consumerism becomes idolatry and doesn't work.
Whatever precipitated it, it would appear that we have learned that
abundant living is not adequately defined by having a lot of "stuff." We
learned that you can have it all and still be poor; have full pockets,
pantries and bank accounts and still feel empty; be comfortable and ill at
ease; be full and yet hungry,

Now the pollsters and the sociologists and the artists are telling us
there is a hunger of the spirit. A “yearning,” Walter Bruggemann calis it.
"It is the resilience of the yearning that causes people to dress up in
their heaviness and present themselves for the drama (of worship) one more
time." [Finally Comes the Poet, p. 15] People come to church, says
Bruggemann, after you penetrate beneath all the superficialities of custom
and social expectations, because they yearn - we yearn — for abundant life.

Well, if living the abundant life does not mean having everything you
want, furnishing your life with discounted Crate & Barrel accouterments,
what does it mean? What is it that the Scribes and Pharisees are missing?
What dees Shirley Valentine need to find herself - to start living her life
again?

It is not “neat stuff." It is not simply the excitement of sex, she
discovers, although that is very nice. It is not even living forever in
the dream, sipping wine beside the sea.

What Shirley Valentine needs - what we all need ~ is the gift of
abundant life... for that is what it is; not a prize to be earned, but a
gift to be received. What we all need is good news - Gospel. And that,
the Christian faith proclaims boldiy but carefully, is what we have been
given... carefully because Gespel is not another list of religious rules.

Gospel is good news that the Shepherd is not a thief. The Shepherd
is good. The Shepherd is God's son - who loves us: who lived for us and

whose own life demonstrates what abundant life is, if we will but look at
it.

The components of abundant life, I would propose to you, are three:

One - Living the Abundant Life becomes possible when you know you are
loved; when you know the love of another human being which affirms your
very being, accepts you as you are, and will be for you and with you
tomorrow come what may; and in the absence of that other, which is the way
it is for some of us all of the time and all of us some of the time - to
know that in Jesus Christ, the creator God loves you like that.

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Two - Abundant Living begins to happen when you know yourself to be
loved, enjoy yourself as loved, feel free and secure and good enough about
yourse]£ to risk loving back: that human being who loaves you for starters,
the church, or city, or political party, or social cause which is in your
heart: when love makes a lover of you and you begin to live for others,
giving instead of receiving, serving instead of being served.

If there is a single consistent response to this church's 25-year-old
Tutoring Program it is that it has blessed the tutors. It is designed to
enhance the lives of students by helping them learn and that it has done
and does, effectively, faithfully, creatively. But the ones whose lives
become more abundant because of the program are by no means students only.
That is our secret. It is true even for people who are not interested in
religion because it's Gospel. Abundant living begins when we Live out of
our love.

Three - The lesson I learned from Mary: living the abundant life
begins when we know there is nothing we need to fear. Two weeks ago this
church and churches all over the world were full of people who needed to
hear that in spite of the reality of suffering and tragedy in the world
eloquently symbolized by the crucifixion of God's son, and in spite of the
reality of death - the death of dear ones, their own deaths ultimately -
there is no reason to fear. Churches are full on Easter Sunday,
understandably, because without that affirmation, there is a hollowness to
every proposed abundance of life. But in its wisdom, the ancient Christian
church came to call it the Season of Eastertide; not just one day, but an
entire season of the calendar: Faster, when the abundance of the
earth itself is evident once again... a whole season upon which to build
the rest of the year, out of which to live the rest of life... a season
which begins on the first day of the week in the early light of dawn at an
empty tomb and spreads outward to all the world and forward to all the time
ahead.

A season to remind you that the shepherd is good: he knows your
nane...

A season to remind you that you are loved with a love stronger than
death. ;

A season to remind you that you are free to love others, this world,
your neighbors whoa need you, God who made you - with all the passion in you
and all the possibility and hope.

A season to remind you that you are safe. There is nothing to fear.

“I came," he said, "that you might have life, and have it
abundantly."

Amen.

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