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Happy
Birthday to You
by the Rev. Rich Smith
April 29, 2007
Ecclesiastes 2:1-11
The best opening line for a sermon I ever heard was, “I
have agonized over this sermon all week.... and now it’s your turn!”
That’s how I feel today, this being the seventeenth anniversary of my
39th birthday, and all week I knew I’d have to face it today! Now I’m
not really complaining or bragging. I’m not bragging, because I can’t
take any credit for having a birthday – after all, every single one of
you has had one in the last year, so it’s pure grace, something we
didn’t earn. And I guess I shouldn’t complain, either, since arriving
at another birthday is also pure grace, and as someone once said, it
sure beats the alternative.
Still, as the years pile up, one does begin to wonder if the saying
“life begins at 40" isn’t some sort of public relations ploy, or as
they now say, “60 is the new 40,” so in a few years I can do 40 all
over again. It didn’t help when I discovered that those who label and
catagorize such things say that “Middle Age” really begins at 35,
called “early middle age.” At 45 one enters “middle middle age,” and
then at 55, it’s “late middle age,” so by that measure I’m well into
it, coming down the home stretch into geezerdom. Actually, I always
thought of middle age as being “about ten years older than you are.
It’s the stage when your hair begins to turn from gray to black, or
even begins to grow back; when you spouse tells you to pull in your
stomach and you already have; when you’re not inclined to exercise
anything but caution; when your back goes out more than you do; when
you can do as much as you always have but would rather not; when you
realize that instead of going out at night in search of a new, hip
joint, what you really need is a new hipjoint.
Plainly, as the birthdays pile up, there is a sense of loss, a
realization of one’s own mortality, an anxiety about the future, a
feeling that maybe the best days are behind. There is a sense of
frustration, especially for those in the sandwich generation, as
expressed by Sam Levenson’s comment: “When I was a kid, they told me to
do what my parents wanted. When I became a parent, they told me to do
what my kids wanted. When do I get to do what I want?” Or as Mark Twain
put it, “Youth is such a wonderful thing, it’s too bad it has to be
wasted on the young!” And so we have mid-life crises. It happens to
people who have been trying to make it all their lives, working hard,
struggling to get ahead, to achieve some status or satisfaction, who
discover that they are not immortal, that life has its limits, and they
begin to wonder what it has all been for.
Many of you probably read the best selling book by Rabbi Harold
Kushner, back in the early 80's, When Bad Things Happen to Good People.
Later, he wrote a sequel, which he called, When All You’ve Ever Wanted
isn’t Enough, in which he asks, “Is there anything more to life than
just being alive – eating, sleeping, working, having children? Are we
no different from insects and animals, except that we are cursed with
the ability to ask, ‘what does life mean?’ ....It’s a hard question to
answer, but an even harder one to avoid answering. For a few years,
perhaps, we can put it off while we are distracted with education,
career, and marriage decisions. In those early decades other people
have more to say in our lives than we do. But sooner or later, we will
come face to face with the questions: What am I supposed to do with my
life? How shall I live so that my life will mean something more than a
brief flash of biological existence so to disappear forever?”
Kushner tells of a discovery he made in a butterfly museum of a
creature called the “moth with no mouth,” a species of caterpillar that
lays its eggs and then changes into a moth with no digestive system, no
way of taking in food, so that it starves to death within a few hours.
Nature designed this moth to reproduce, to lay eggs and pass on the
life of the species. One it has done that, it has no reason to go on
living, so it is programmed to die. And Kushner asks, “Are we like
that? Do we live only... to perpetuate the human race? And having done
that, is it our destiny to disappear and make way for the next
generation? Or is there a purpose to our existence beyond simply
existing? Does our being alive matter? Would our disappearance lave the
world poorer, or just less crowded?”
Kushner wrote this book several years before Rick Warren did his take
on the same topic, which turned out to be the best selling religious
book of all time (other than the Bible itself), The Purpose Driven
Life. Maybe Kushner needed a better publicist.
These are the questions of mid-life, and they can be brought to the
fore by many things, some of them sudden like a health crisis or the
empty nest, others slowly creeping up like my ever more painful knees.
And a lot of what we call “mid-life-crisis-type behavior” may simply be
a way of avoiding the hard questions. Are Mick Jagger and Keith
Richards, still prancing on stage (and off) in their mid-sixties,
inspirations? Or examples of supreme avoidance? If I don’t age, or
admit to it, then I don’t have to answer the questions. As long as I
can pretend to be immature, I won’t have to worry about the meaning and
purpose of my life. I can just have fun with it, and it will go on
forever!
Now much of this may be simply a symptom of modern times, for
throughout much of history, most people did not live long enough to
have a mid-life crisis, much less the leisure to reflect on it if they
did. In many parts of the world that is still the case. But our
scripture lesson tells of a man who is going through exactly that.
Ecclesiastes is the name of both a book in the Bible and the title of
the man who wrote it. He was a teacher, a sage, a philosopher, who
lived several centuries before Jesus. He is a man of middle age, who is
bitter, weary, and frightened. He is a man desperately afraid of dying
before he has learned how to live. Nothing he has ever done, nothing he
will ever do, makes any difference, he feels, because one day he will
die and then it will be as if he had never lived. “The fate of the fol
is destined for me as well,” he writes. “To what advantage have I been
wise? That too has been futile, because the wise man, like the fool, is
not remembered. As the succeeding days roll by, both are forgotten....”
All is vanity.
In this little book, Ecclesiastes tells the story of his life. He
writes of his joys and his frustrations, all the ways he tried to be
successful and make something of his life, and of all the reasons why
he never found the answer to the question of what it all means. He
shares his innermost fears and frustrations in a way that no one else
in the Bible does.
Now, he was apparently a man of many talents. In his youth, he was
something of a boy wonder, saying, “I multiplied my possessions. I
built myself houses and planted vineyards... I gained more wealth than
anyone before me.”
But he learns that wealth is not the answer. He understands that he can
lose his money as easily as he has gained it – this well over two
millennia before the stock market. Or he could die, and someone else
who never worked for it will inherit it. He has seen rich people spend
their wealth foolishly, he has seen them get sick and spend their last
years in a misery which all their wealth could not ease.
So like many a rich person, Ecclesiastes gives himself to pleasure,
eating and drinking and carousing and sampling all the other
distractions that money can buy. “I said to myself, come I will treat
you to merriment. I ventured to tempt my flesh with wine... I withheld
from I eyes nothing that they asked for... But that, too, was futile.”
When he is young, he has no problems spending all his time on pleasure.
After all, like all young people, he has unlimited time, years
stretching before him, and he can afford to squander some of them. But
as he grows older and his time becomes more precious, he comes to
understand that a life of uninterupted fun is only an escape from the
big questions. Fun can be the spice of life but it is not the main
course, because when it is over, nothing of lasting value remains. And
now with time becoming more precious to him, this man who wrote those
memorable words, “To everything there is a season and a time for every
matter under heaven,” begins to suspect that most of the good times are
behind him, and what lies ahead is mostly a time of worry. Kind of like
the lottery winner I heard about who turned up broke. He spent a lot of
his winnings on horses, liquor, and women. “The rest,” he said, “I
spent foolishly!”
So, Ecclesiastes turns to philosophy. He sets out to test the proverb,
“A wise person has eyes in his head, but the fool walks in darkness.”
Again, what he learns is that the wise may indeed see more clearly, but
what they see is the unfairness and injustice of life. “What good is it
if I am wise and my neighbor is foolish?” he asks. Our lives will end
the same way. All my learning and all my good deeds will die with me.”
And then, at last, and with some hesitation, he turns to his faith. “I
will be pious. I will follow all the teachings of my religion and look
for that sense of peace and tranquility which has been promised the
pure of soul.” Like many of his middle age, looking back on a life of
struggle and conflict and looking ahead to an uncertain future,
Ecclesiastes gets religion. But it is a rather narrow and legalistic
sort of religion, and he realizes that even this cannot save him from
death.
Eventually, and through much persistence, he works through his crisis
and concludes that even though his experience and all the evidence
would lead him to believe that life is futile– a striving after wind –
there is yet something deep within him that will not allow him to
accept that conclusion. And so finally he writes, “Go, eat your bread
with enjoyment and drink your wine in joy, for your action was long ago
approved by God. Let your clothes be always freshly washed and your
head never lack ointment. Enjoy happiness with a woman you love all the
fleeting days of life that has been granted to you under the sun.
Whatever it is in your power to do, do with all your might. For there
is no doing, no learning, no wisdom in the grave where you are going.”
Many centuries later, Reinhold Niebuhr was to write a prayer for
Alcoholics Anonymous which expressed the same sentiment (minus the wine
part): “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”
In other words, when we stop searching for the Great Answer, the
Immortal Deed which will give our lives meaning and instead concentrate
on filling our individual days with moments that gratify us, then we
will find the only possible answer to the question, “What is life
about?” It is not about writing great books, amassing great wealth,
achieving great power. It is about loving and being loved, enjoying
your food and sitting in the sun rather than rushing through lunch and
hurrying back to the office. It is about doing your small part for
justice and peace and loving the planet. It is about savoring the
beauty of moments that don’t last, the sunsets, the leaves turning
color, the rare moments of true human communication. It is about
savoring and not missing them because we are so busy and they will not
wait for us. No one on their deathbed has ever said, “I wish I’d spent
more time at the office!” Ecclesiastes spent most of his life searching
for the Grand Solution, the Big Answer to the Big Question, only to
discover that it’s like trying to eat one big meal so that you will
never be hungry again. There is no answer, but there are answers: Love,
and the joy of work, the simple pleasures of food and fresh clothes,
the little things that tend to get lost along the way.... When we come
to that stage in our lives when we are less able to accomplish but more
able to enjoy, we will have attained the wisdom that Ecclesiastes found
at the end of his mid-life crisis.
You know, I had heard, and have been discovering, that life may begin
at 40, but it gets better at 50 – or even 55, which I marked by getting
both my AARP card and my first Passport! This thing called “Middle Age”
- or even late middle age, need not be a time of impending misery or
mourning for what has been and will never be again. For once the
immature self has been let go, the new and better self can emerge. In
fact, I’ve seen studies that show that 50-year-olds consistently
possess a higher sense of well-being than 35-year-olds. They are more
at peace with themselves, happier and maybe even healthier than they
were a decade earlier because they are actually taking better care of
themselves. They often have better financial security, but are not
obsessed with it. They have a faith based more on trust in God than in
beliefs, are open to facing the questions and doubts that a mature
faith allows and invites, more willing to risk, to follow the leading
of God’s Spirit. They are secure in themselves and don’t need to prove
themselves anymore, and even come to the place where they don’t need to
mask their aging – they’ve earned those gray hairs and have a right to
wear them proudly. Gail Sheehy even calls this “the peak of life” which
it can be if you follow the advice of Ecclesiastes and those who
counsel: “Be flexible, seek adventure, keep an open mind, capitalize on
love, work, leisure and relationships.... Belong to people. Face facts.
Know you count.” Trust in God not so much as the authority telling you
what to do but as the Divine Power urging you to grow. Realize that we
are not so much human beings as we are “human becomings,” in process,
never finished, that God is calling you to keep growing and changing
and becoming all that you can be.
I want to conclude with the words of one of my favorite philosophers,
the late Dr. Seuss. He may not be someone you’re accustomed to hearing
quoted from this pulpit, but whenever I hear his words it takes me back
a few years, and today, of all days, I could use that, and maybe you
could too. It’s from his book “Happy Birthday to Me,” and it goes like
this --
If we didn’t have birthdays, you wouldn’t be you.
If you’d never been born, well then what would you do?
If you'd never been born, well then what would you be?
You might be a fish!? Or a toad in a tree!
You might be a doorknob! Or three baked potatoes!
You might be a bag of hard green tomatoes!
Or worse than all that- why, you might be a WASN'T!
A WASN'T has no fun at all. No, he doesn't.
A WASN'T just isn't. He just isn't present.
But you- you ARE YOU! And now, isn't that pleasant?
Today you are you! That is truer than true!
There is no one alive who is you-er than you!
Shout loud, "I am lucky to be what I am!
Thank goodness I'm not just a clam or a ham!
Or a dusty old jar of sour gooseberry jam!
I am what I am! That's a great thing to be!
If I say so myself, "HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!"
Last updated Wednesday, Februrary 29, 2008
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