The One Thing We Can Be Sure Of

January 21, 2007

Rev. Anthony David

Last Sunday was a change of pace in the life of our community, in that it was our first Sunday ever that worship was called off because of icy streets and dangerous conditions. But even if it had gone on as usual, change would still have been the order of the day. I was supposed to have preached a sermon on the spirituality of shamanism,

but when our church’s weekly email update, “Pathways Weekly,” came out, you might have read that I had been “called away” and that the Rev. Rob Moore had been scheduled to preach in my absence. All this was because I had learned, last week on Tuesday, that my Mother had died. She was 66. It was sudden and unexpected, like the death of my Father in 2001. I had to go be with my family, and that is what I did, all last week, and part of this one.

So I thought it appropriate that we get very basic this morning, and talk about the one thing we can be sure of: change. Lots of changes, recently. And the story we will use to focus our thoughts is a parable that the Buddha told a long time ago. Here it is:

A man traveling through the mountains suddenly found himself being chased by a huge hungry tiger. He ran and ran until he came to the edge of a cliff. There, with nowhere else to go, he caught hold of a thick vine and swung himself over the edge.

Above him the tiger paced, and growled. Below him he heard a sound, and looked down to see another tiger waiting for him at the bottom of the vine.

Then he heard the faint sounds of something scrambling out from the cliffside, coming close. Mice. Two of them: one white, one black. They positioned themselves just beyond his reach, and started gnawing at the vine. At this, the man started to panic; they were eating through it way too quickly. But then, something else caught his attention: a completely unexpected, fragrant smell. A wild strawberry, a big one, growing out of the cliff near by. Holding on to the vine with one hand, he reached and picked the berry with the other.

How sweet it tasted! 

**

And that’s our story this morning, about change. A parable that brings together odd images of a traveler, tigers, a vine, mice, and a strawberry. Inspired teachers like the Buddha, or Jesus, would often use parables, exactly because they say what they have to say in startling, memorable ways. Last thing they are is fast-food wisdom. Parables demand engagement, parables demand a relationship; and it’s when the student seriously wrestles with them that the result is far more than new thoughts but also a new way of being, a new feeling for life.

So now we turn to wrestling with the Buddha’s parable, and we’ll start with its initial image of the man traveling through the mountains. That man could be any one of us,

engaged in the average everyday course of life; and while his environment happens to be mountains, it could equally be traffic on 114, to or from Dallas; or it could be an evening in front of the TV, watching Grey’s Anatomy; or it could be math class at Grapevine High School; or it could be the regular Tuesday staff meeting at Pathways Church.

The man traveling through the mountain could be any one of us, doing ordinary, everyday things. And there is yet a deeper level of significance here. The man can also represent a certain state of being which is aimlessness, or of being a mere bystander to life. I’m talking about a time before one ever feels a need to ask, “Is this all there is?”—

a time before one senses a call to service, a call to stand up to cruelty and hate, a call that takes a person beyond narrow ego interests and opens them up to a larger life.

The state of aimlessness is a time and state before all such things happen. It means that the man in the parable, traveling through the mountains, has not yet found his spiritual path; his feet are not yet upon the way; he is not yet sufficiently conscious of the fullness of death, nor open to the Divine Plenty in this world.

But if the Buddha’s parable teaches anything, it is that this aimlessness can’t last forever. Big changes will come into our lives, and they will come as ferociously as a tiger. Changes like the death of a parent or a spouse, a divorce, an illness. Experiences of injustice that are like a blow to the head. This is how the tiger roars into life. Big change. And when it does, it does not matter one whit how many college degrees you have, or who you know, or even if people call you Pastor: you feel stripped to the bone vulnerable. You hear the roar, you see the teeth, and you run. That’s what it was like for me, when I got the call from my brother Tuesday of last week, that Mom was dead. 

Big change. It can happen any number of times in a person’s life, until the final big change of one’s own death, but the first time is always momentous, because that’s when a person is exploded out of aimlessness, and his or her feet are put upon a spiritual path. That’s what the first time does. It all starts with an ache, and a brokenness. It all starts with questions why. It’s like you’ve been living in a daze, and then some kind of tiger roars and brings your life to crystal clarity—fight or flight—and you can no longer be who you were, you can no longer do what you had been doing.

Suddenly your relationship to life changes. Before you, the dual complex reality of the human condition rises up and is finally known: joy and woe interwoven, abundance and scarcity in tension, life and death in a dance. That is the human condition. And it’s your choice how you will dwell in it, your choice.

The Buddha’s parable is about big change in life. But it’s also about small change as well. Not all changes are necessarily big, and in fact it’s the small changes that can worry and disturb us the most, in the same way that nothing else hurts like a stubbed toe. This takes us to the part in the parable where the man has swung himself over the edge of a cliff and is hanging there, and mice come and start nibbling away at the vine,

and the man is frantic, as frantic as the character in our drama piece today, suffering from change indigestion….

Can you relate to that? Change indigestion? I can. I know what it is like to find places of temporary safety and security in life and to try to make them more than that, and then always to be disappointed and frustrated. It’s change indigestion that is the clue for me.

For example, I have come to expect that the newspaper will be outside my house, at the curb, before 6am. My habit is to get up, get the paper, make coffee, and then read the paper. Simple. But when this little habit of mine is jolted—the paper isn’t there waiting for me—it’s like a train wreck. You’d think the world was coming to an end.

Do you have habits like this? You invest them with an expectation of permanency, and when the expectation falls flat, and the small changes come like the mice in the parable,

you feel horrible? Makes you angry, makes you panic?

Change indigestion can be especially severe when it comes to church. Church brings out our deepest longings for safety and security, for an anchor in the midst of changing tides, and this longing is real and powerful no matter how sophisticated one might be,

even if we can quote the ancient philosopher Heraclitus, who once said that the only thing that is certain is change, that no person ever steps in the same river twice.

We can quote Heraclitus all day long, and yet the deep need and dream for permanency is still there. So we don’t like change at church. We want to keep things the same, keep them regular. I’m saying all this because I wondered about you last Sunday,

when I was in my Mother’s home, packing up her things and helping prepare for the sale of her house. I wondered if you were OK. As justified as I think the decision was, to call off church, I wonder how that small change felt to you. It is but one example of the many changes that continue to occur at Pathways, and that will always continue….

There is just something about the human personality that makes us long for the permanent; and so we invest our places of temporary safety with the expectation of permanency, and we are always disappointed. It’s change indigestion. The mice always show up, and each small bite into the vine is but a foretaste of the big bites of the tiger below.

The Buddha’s parable packs a wallop. Big change, small change: change is going to happen. The man hangs in there, on the vine, in a way that is all too impermanent,

and we hang there with him. That’s us, too. So what now?

There are, in truth, two ways in which the Buddha’s parable could end: either in tragedy, or in triumph. And it all revolves around the strawberry.

Is that not the most amazing image in the story? Tigers and vines and mice are all striking and shocking images, but that of the wild strawberry is something else again. It’s there in a completely unexpected way, like grace; right there where the man hangs;

and right in front of my nose and yours as well. And here’s where I wish I could sit down with each of you personally and ask, What does this image of the wild strawberry bring to mind for you? Where does it take you?

For me, the wild strawberry is Wayne Adamiec driving all the way down to Palestine, last Saturday, in horrible weather, to be at my Mom’s funeral and play in the church’s band.

The wild strawberry is all the emails and cards and calls and meals and hugs that I have received from people in this church—all the thoughts and prayers.

The wild strawberry is kindness like this, which for me is a sign of what is highest in the human spirit, and the face and form of God’s love in this world. 

The wild strawberry. It is love. It’s the pictures that I found in my Mom’s purse, while we were going through her things, looking for important documents and papers as part of tending to her business affairs. In her massive purse that weighed (I swear) 12 pounds

and contained stacks of neatly folded up receipts from Wal Mart and Krogers, old church bulletins, recipes clipped out of magazines, five tubes of lipstick, and about a million pennies—amid all this, I found four pictures. Only four: One of my older brother, one of me, one of my younger brother, and one of my daughter.

Love never dies. That’s what the wild strawberry represents for me. A Divine Plenty that is in this world, in the midst of all change. A peace that passes understanding, the Spirit of Life that I have felt in nature, that I have felt in the arms of my wife and the life of my daughter, and in this holy place too, this space of worship, the Spirit of Life flowing in and through our songs and greetings and prayers and sermons and on and on.

This is triumph. This is the man on the vine, in the midst of everything, reaching out his hand, and taking that strawberry, and tasting its sweetness. Right now, together, this is what we are doing. We are doing it now, and we can do it wherever we go in our lives. Cut right through the change indigestion that steals so much of our life energy to the directly realized truth that, in every moment we live, there is a boundlessness that the Buddha knew as Nirvana, that Jesus knew as God, that saints and sages and wise men and women of all times and places have known—and we can know it as well, in whatever diverse ways makes sense to us as Unitarian Universalists. Wild strawberries are real. Wild strawberries exist. They are right before your very nose and mine; and all there is to do is reach out and take a bite. It can happen for you, right here and right now.

And so it’s a great tragedy, if we do not do this. If we are so caught up in the crises of big changes and small changes that panic is all we know and allow ourselves to know.

This is the other way the parable could end. Not with the man seeing the strawberry,

not with the man reaching out and tasting, but him never noticing it, him just twisting there in the wind, endlessly, without faith in life, without hope.

How many people today prove the truth of something the writer Pearl S. Buck once said: “To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.” That’s right. Have all the bread you want. Stuff your face. But if there is not a sense of larger hope or meaning, you’re starving. It’s just as psychologist Victor Frankl said: “Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how.'” But without a why, even the smallest changes can come in and sweep a person away. You just hang on that vine, and there will never be an enlightenment, there will never be an experience of the Divine, there will never be a taste of life’s sweetness.

The Buddha’s parable is a story that each of us lives every day, in one way or another.

Tigers chasing us out of our aimlessness and onto a spiritual path; mice chewing away at the regularities and expectations that order our days. But the way the story ends is up to us. Shall it be twisting in the wind, hopelessness, change indigestion? Or triumph, the taste of sweetness in our mouths? This is what I choose: I’ll pluck that strawberry, and I’ll eat.