Wizard Against Nihilism
The fresh fancy telescope images of the universe that have been flowing into my news feeds are breathtaking. They can also lead to feelings of insignificance. The more we know of the universe the smaller we do seem. Plenty of stars die every single day, and smart people tell us that our own star, our sun, will run out of hydrogen in about 5 billion years. The philosophy of nihilism has several definitions but in a general sense all you need is to think about the word annihilated. To focus on humanity as directionless and drifting in a universe where all be shifted into new phases of matter, therefore they ask – does anything that we do really matter?
Our four lessons today share a deep and profound question about where our soul and our consciousness is. Not whether it resides inside our body, but what are we attending to because what you focus on will be in the end, the story of your life. Jesus’s foil today, the not good guy in this parable story: I will call him the Wizard – not as in Hogwarts, but Oz (and to be honest the Wicked lens more than the original). This Wizard perhaps lived in a nihilistic way. Something about how he didn’t seem to care until after he had left this life. Nihilism, and a couple other isms and ishnesses. The devastations and challenges we share, both those that we have caused and those that exist regardless of fault, they are mountains to climb and haystacks to sort. This Wizard, maybe he shuddered at the mountain, and so projected his self-image onto the big screen to escape from the rough vulnerability of feeling so tiny and so fragile before it all. This Wizard has given himself over to being ruled by his base hungers: money compliments, publicity, and so on. Time and stuff are limited and so he believes he must take what he can get in this life regardless of virtue, morality, or the true cost of living in such a way.
Or maybe I have cast the Wizard to simply. Maybe they are a character of despair, under pressure of so much expectation to excel and study and be the best in all the externals, while feeling so overwhelmed and alone that they lose the ability to make sense of the gates through which they walk. A person who is lost and weary and too desperate to meet the grinding expectations of earth that they don’t focus on what really matters, the kind of loving service that could have brought healing and purpose. They don’t wonder about it until it is too late. Both Wizard versions think they can find freedom, or the lead in the race to freedom, but it is in reality, it is a sickness, a moral and spiritual slavery. The Wizard’s choices are the fuel of all the sinful contests of human life of all the struggling with neighbor all our rivalry, self-harm and warfare.
Sometimes mercy and hope and love and generosity can feel like saccharine yellow brick road triviality. But they are not because they are an echo of God’s very self. As vast and daunting as the universe is so far we know of no other organism that knows it. Dolphins are supposed to be pretty smart, but the best I can tell they don’t have novels or telescopes. The very fact that we are aware of so much, conscious of the beauty that we create, and possessing the knowledge of the devastation we foster, our ability to understand it’s just one hint of why you matter we matter, how we live and move and act matters. The reality is that we don’t live in the story of the theory of the big bang (well we do) but thinking about it that way doesn’t always help. We live in the story of our birth to our death and our legacy. This is the story that this Wizard is confronted with. If you were at the end of this life: would you be one of these Wizards or would you be the Lazarus? Or maybe a minor role somewhere else in the scene? Encountering God at the end would God know that you lived as if life mattered: Hands-on service, humility, generosity, responsibility?
All we have is right now and this story and we are called to be curious and active in healing our life together: locally and globally. We hear the voice and do not wait to be agents of Jesus’ mercy for our story. Let us be an echo of God’s love God’s mercy God’s purpose. This whole chapter of the epic story of the dance of the stardust, in it we may seem small, but it is wonder-ful, it is not meaningless – because we make it meaningful.
This sermon owes much of its pattern and reflection to this post by the amazing John Green, ‘Against Nihilism’.
Image information: https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/035/01G7DCWB7137MYJ05CSH1Q5Z1Z?page=3&filterUUID=91dfa083-c258-4f9f-bef1-8f40c26f4c97