A Fourth Church Sermon by John A. Cairns

January 25, 2004 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

A Reading on Purpose

John A. Cairns
Dean, Academy for Faith and Life,
Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 19
1 Corinthians 12:12–18, 26–27
Luke 4:14–21

Fortune cookies are not what they used to be. Have you noticed? The quality of the cookie hasn’t changed much, but the little piece of paper on the inside has been rendered useless by a new generation of “fortune writers” or whatever they’re called. You break apart the cookie and eagerly pick up the slender slip of paper only to read “Each day contains a ray of sunshine” or “People who live in glass houses should draw the drapes”—proverbs or aphorisms, sound advice or a quick smile, but nothing to cause you to look forward to tomorrow. What ever happened to the enticing “An important travel opportunity is coming your way” or the cryptic “Don’t be too quick to say yes tomorrow”? Didn’t we used to feel a sense of kismet—that somehow it was our fate to open that particular cookie, the one pointing in our direction? And then we’d speculate about when or how that enigmatic prediction might come to pass.

No, fortune cookies are not what they used to be, and without them, how are we to get our clues about life’s next chapter? About where we are going? Maybe that’s why life is such a puzzle.

Well, we can’t blame our psychic restlessness on the deteriorated state of fortune cookies. Still the desire to get a handle on our future—on our own “big picture”—is a challenging and continuing process for each of us. It sometimes gets phrased in grand and epic language that speculates on the underlying purpose of our existence, but more regularly, it is a subtle question that nibbles at the corners of our minds in off moments when we catch ourselves thinking—asking—“What is life supposed to be about?” The recurring and haunting nature of that question pushes us to find some sort of answer. And since fortune cookies have proven to be of little help, we scurry about looking for something else.

One extremely popular approach is a trip to Borders. You see it all the time—people wandering around a display table, picking up a book, reading the comments on the dust jacket or skimming through the table of contents. Then they’ll put it down and pick up another. This is not the fiction table. No one here is looking for a “good read” on their next plane trip. The constant hope is that some phrase will strike a chord, will suggest that these pages might just contain that clear and unambiguous word about life, about your life, my life. The hope that springs eternal is that we will catch a sense, an image, a picture of our true selves, that we will find a solution to our dilemma of what life is supposed to be about.

The underlying assumption here is that we are intelligent, thoughtful adults and thus are perfectly capable of discovering or devising our own answers to these “purpose of life” questions, given the right resources.

I don’t want to question that. I don’t want to underestimate or malign our abilities and insights. But there is the matter of where we look for answers. I feel obligated to make a comment on that subject—and then to tell you a story. My comment is—and I know you’ll all be surprised to hear me say it—that the Bible has a lot to say about our life’s purpose, a lot to say on the subject of what life is supposed to be about. So perhaps we should spend more time with the Bible and less time wandering around in Borders! Now, I know that’s a word you expect to hear from a pulpit. It’s the kind of line you only half hear, sort of like “And now a word from our sponsors.” But today there is a story that goes with my word of biblical encouragement.

I was in a conversation recently with a couple of church members, deeply involved people who are around here a lot. I can’t remember the exact subject of the conversation, but at some point, one of them said, “Well, you know what they say: ‘The Lord helps those who help themselves.’” My officious nature got the best of me and I replied, “Most people who say that think it is a quote from the Bible, but it isn’t.” “It isn’t? I always thought it was.” “Well,” I said offhandedly, “we probably need to get you all into some Bible study so you can learn what it says and what it doesn’t.”

There was no quick retort, no reply of any kind, just exchanged glances. Suddenly the mood in the room shifted. It was as if I had suggested walking barefoot through burning coals. “What’s the matter?” I asked. It took a little while—there was a lot of hemming and hawing—but when we finally got to the reason for their reaction, it went something like this: It was their assumption that if they started to do serious Bible study, they would soon become just like those people whom they could not abide—people who have a biblical quote for every circumstance, who are fanatically self-assured, and who treat any challenge to their pronouncements as clear evidence of heathen leanings!

What a strange reality. Regular churchgoing folk who had been scared away from the Bible by those whose use of it had turned them off, had disgusted them. Regular churchgoing folks whose approach to those haunting questions about the purpose of life was to wander around the tables in Borders and to ask their friends and acquaintances what they were reading, because the Bible had become off-limits for them.

Trust me on this: our reason for promoting regular study of the Bible is not to turn you all into overzealous, verse-quoting marketers of faith formulas. Rather, it is to provide us with insight into who we are meant to be, to provide insights to help us deal with life’s perplexing questions.

Take, for example, the passage we read from Luke a few minutes ago. Jesus, returning to his hometown of Nazareth, goes into the synagogue, and as a visitor, he is given the opportunity to read the scripture for the day. So he reads a passage from the book of Isaiah that says, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Then he tells those who are gathered there that this passage—this word of prophecy—is beginning to be accomplished right then and there. It is a moment of dramatic significance, for as Fred Craddock explains, “The event announces who Jesus is, of what his ministry consists, and what his church will be and do” (Luke, p. 61). Those who were present in that synagogue got a glimpse of what God was all about and what they too would be about if they followed this Jesus. Here were words of purpose. What Jesus read spoke to the questions of that day—and this.

So years later, we can hear these same words speaking to our questions about life’s purpose. After hours of searching through advice columns and best seller lists, after endless cocktail party conversations and journeys up and down the information highway, we find ourselves drawn back to what for many of us are our roots, back to the Bible that we had left behind or had surrendered to the surgical slicing of the fundamentalists. And we discover that it holds some clear answers to our most perplexing questions.

What life is supposed to be about is bringing good news to the poor and release to the captives. Really? But what if that is not my thing? What if I don’t have a lot of contact with the poor and the oppressed and the captives? Oh, but you do! You meet them around the tables in Borders. You hear their questions in the water cooler conversations at work. You see them on the bus pouring over the “Dear Abby” column. And you discover them sitting in the pew beside you on Sunday morning. In their faces, in their attitude, in their words, are the questions—questions of how and when and why, questions of purpose. They are the ones held captive, the ones who are desperate for some good news.

And let’s not get too self-assured here. This is not a time to talk about us and them. We are all part of the questioning multitude. My journey—our journeys—go on. Our questions are always in the process of finding answers. What we have to offer is not resolution, but a resource, a path toward purpose, an idea, an insight, an image, to work from, to build on.

For Paul that image was a body, a body composed necessarily of many different parts: eyes and ears, fingers and toes, bones and organs. Our purpose, he said, isn’t to turn everyone into two ears. That would be contributing to the very oppression we are charged to overcome! Nor is it to praise some parts to the detriment and devaluing of others. Indeed each part of the body has its unique purpose, and by its uniqueness, it makes its contributions to the functioning of the whole. And as that whole body functions together, we each discover our importance, our purpose.

So what is my purpose? What is life supposed to be about? It is not enough to be able to say that life is good and that we are surrounded by—part of—a nice group of people. The answer to these questions needs to be something that we can understand, write down, work from. It needs to be something we can grab hold of, hang on to. That kind of an answer will not show up in a self-help book or a chat room or pop out of a fortune cookie. Most of these sources can’t and won’t tell you what those folks in Nazareth heard. They won’t tell you what we heard today. That “the Spirit of the Lord is upon us,” that we have been appointed and anointed to a particular task: to bring good news to the poor and oppressed, to set the captives free. Some might refer to it as an assignment, a challenge, but I think it is also appropriate to refer to it as our particular purpose, our answer to that lingering, inescapable, haunting question: “What is life supposed to be about?” It is about understanding that we are not orphans adrift in a hostile world. It’s about being able to share with others the good news that we are all part of the body, that we are loved and valued. It is about demonstrating that there is a place at God’s family table for everyone, that beyond doubt and struggle and pain and fear and oppression, there is hope—and in that hope we find our purpose, we discover the way we are all intended to live. We know this because—the Bible tells us so.

Amen.