The Need for Meaning

June 12, 1994

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Scripture: Mark 10: 17-27

Do you know what I think that guy was really looking for, that young man who assaulted Jesus on the street beseeching help? It’s a great story, isn’t it, an unforgettable story, one of the most vivid the Bible tells....We call it the story of the RICH YOUNG RULER..... Remember? He ran, he kneeled, he implored...The Record says he said, “Good Master, what must I do to have eternal life?”

Do you know what I think he was really looking for? MEANING...MEANING. He was asking for help in finding some meaning in his life. I’ve read that story so often...heard it preached on for as long as I can remember. IT FINALLY DAWNED ON ME WHAT IT WAS ALL ABOUT.

This guy was frantic...He had to have an answer. There was something missing, there was a vacuum at the center...He was running off in all directions at once, trying desperately to “put it together”, so he could cope.

The last thing in the world he was concerned about was an academic discussion....He wasn’t worried, then, about some distant, future time. He wasn’t worried about life after death at all, I don’t think. He was a young man. Young men think they’re going to live forever. He wasn’t even consciously thinking about theological issues at all.

HE WANTED HELP... He wanted practical, sensible help, NOW, in hammering out a purpose for for his existence. ‘What must I do?”.... you can almost hear his voice crack....WHAT MUST I DO TO HAVE ETERNAL LIFE?

Now “eternal”, you remember, in the Biblical sense, is never just quantitative word...it always has qualitative overtones. Eternal life, in New Testament terms, is always more than just unending, relentless, inexorable, ongoing continuation. That sounds sort of hellish, anyway.

NEW TESTAMENT ETERNAL LIFE IS ALWAYS FULL, RICH, ABUNDANT LIFE, overflowing, zestful life....It’s a life that matters, a life that has meaning, a life where you wake up in the morning ready to hit it.... the kind of life, I guess, every one of us would like to experience.

How can I find that, he was asking. I don’t have it now, and it’s obvious in your very demeanor, sir, that you not only have it, but you know how to give it away...HELP ME...I want to live, I want my life to count for something. I want it to have meaning...What must I do to have eternal life?

Who is this young man, anyway? Why does he look so familiar? Don’t you recognize him? I think I know who he is....HE’S ALL OF US. Paste your own name on him, or mine, and see if it doesn’t fit. Call him the embodiment of the modern spirit. Call him the personification of contemporary man or woman.

Call him just another striking example of the fantastic up-to-dateness of this remarkable Book. HE'S ALL OF US... a nameless, faceless rich young ruler, with so much going for him, symbolizes in his personal quest the thing nearly every one of us is looking for.

I’ve never known a time...indeed, I think there has never been a time when people have had more, in the way of possessions, things, material goods...never been a time when people, at least people like us, have had more power, more influence, more raw ability to do...and YET THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A TIME WHEN MORE OF US HAVE FELT EMPTY...almost as if some gigantic pair of scissors had cut out the center of our lives.

Like this boy, this young man, this rich, young ruler, we have everything, except the spark to make it mean something. We can DO, but we don’t know WHY We can GO, but we don’t know WHERE. We can GIVE, but we don’t know HOW. We can ACCOMPLISH, but we don’t know WHAT. Isn’t that about where we ARE?

We have enormous ability....what we lack is AIM. We have enormous power....what we lack is the POINT. We have enormous potential....what we lack is PURPOSE. We have all kinds of means....what we lack is the MEANING.

And so we, too, become frantic....we run and hide and cavort. We knock ourselves out trying to entertain ourselves. We eat greedily the husks of trivial, time-consuming amusements...and then wonder why we don’t get any nourishment.

I like George Hunter’s story about Tex Evans....maybe you’ve heard it. Tex Evans died a few years ago. He was a Methodist layman from Texas... That’s why they called him “Tex”, I suppose.

Anyway, he was a character....Some called him the Will Rogers[1] of the Methodist Church. He could be entertaining, but he knew where he was coming from...He has his priorities straight. There was meaning in his life.

Once, George Hunter says, Tex Evans was asked to preach at a small chapel in the Baltimore Conference. When he arrived at the little Church, a group of men was standing outside, visiting. Tex joined them, and was told about the historical significance of a river just a few yards away. BISHOP ASBURY HIMSELF ONCE CROSSED THAT RIVER, right over there, he was told....He crossed it during a flood in order to keep a preaching appointment.

“Do you want us to tell you how Francis Asbury came across the river?”, they asked Tex Evans. “No”, he said, “I don’t care nothing about that. I don’t want to know HOW he came across. I want you to tell me WHY he came across.”

That’s the point. That’s the “rest of the story”, as Paul Harvey would say.[2] If the motivation, the purpose, the meaning is there, then the rest falls into place.

It hadn’t yet for this young man, and maybe it hasn’t yet for some of us. “Good Master, what must I do to have eternal life?”

One never ceases to be amazed at the pertinence of these old stories. Don’t tell me the Bible is an outdated Book. That’s nonsense. The rich, young ruler IS one of us, isn’t he?....and maybe in the way Jesus dealt with his personal search for meaning, there is a clue to how WE might discover richer meaning in our own lives. LOOK AT IT WITH ME.

How did Jesus respond to one man’s plea for help? What did he say? What did he tell him to do to open his life to its potential fullness?

LISTEN TO THE VERBS... That’s the key to it....LISTEN TO THE VERBS. Go...sell...give.. come....follow. That’s the map. That’s the route to meaning.

Oh, I know that’s oversimplified....That’s too tailor-made. I know what the scholars say about this story. I’ve read the commentaries. You mustn’t overgeneralize this answer.

O.K. Maybe this was one man’s prescription for one particular hang-up. I’ll accept that. Maybe Jesus was not intending that this specific formula, for this specific man should be universally applied. I agree that the economic implications would be staggering if everybody did what this man was told to do.... One shudders to think what it might mean for banks, and credit unions, and even the savings accounts of poor and humble Methodist preachers.

BUT THE PRINCIPLE IS CLEAR. The verbs make it unmistakable. Beyond the particular problem this particular man had to work through, there IS something universal....In Jesus’ answer there is a fundamental approach to life which, if followed rigorously is guaranteed to produce meaning...this thing all of us, even across the centuries, are looking for.

Here is how I would state it. MEANING COMES PRECISELY WHEN YOU QUIT GRUBBING AFTER IT, AND BEGIN LOSING YOURSELF IN MATTERS BIGGER THAN YOU ARE.

Isn’t this, in the broadest sense, what Jesus is really saying.... Go... sell... give... come..... follow. All these verbs have to do with dethronement. They have to do with committing yourself as opposed to grasping for yourself. THEY HAVE TO DO WITH GETTING YOURSELF OUT OF THE CENTER, SO THAT SOMETHING larger and more enduring can come in and take its rightful place there.

I would suggest in what I think is in harmony with the spirit of Jesus that life really begins to take on meaning when you: ONE, belong to a group that is bigger than you....TWO, work at a job that is bigger than you....and THREE, when you worship a God who is bigger than you.

Now, without dragging it out, let me try to spell it out.

1) The most meaning-filled people I know are the people who have a richly developed sense of belonging. Life means something because the association means something... the group has a purpose bigger than just the individual.

Belonging to a family can be a precious thing....I am a Kennedy, or a Smith, or whatever it happens to be. AND I’M PROUD OF IT. My grandfather did this, and, by, golly, there’s nothing you can do or say that can take away from it..... He may have been a horse thief, but at least he had good judgement.

He stole GOOD HORSES... nobody in the county stole better ones.

It’s my family, you see. I don’t have to prove something or achieve something to be included. I’m automatically a part. I BELONG...My life takes on meaning because of that.

So on a larger scale with belonging to a nation. Living abroad as we had the privilege of doing for several years drives it home. It does something to your sense of patriotism to be in a foreign land. It really does.

People speaking a different language, observing different customs, eating different foods...You can’t hardly get grits and red-eye gravy in Guatemala. But you hang on to that passport. Every now and then you reach your hand into your pocket to make sure it’s still there. And then you land back on your own soil and see that American flag again on top of the flagpole.... waving in the breeze.... Call it corny if you want to... it does something to you. It makes you know you belong.

And for the Christian, I submit here is one of the deepest meanings of CHURCH....How impoverished, how malnourished is a purely personal Christianity... it’s not bad, exactly, it’s just incomplete.

Christianity, from its very start, has been a community activity...That’s what it is. It’s a fellowship, a group thing, a “koinonia”, to use the New Testament Greek word. It’s something to which the Christian belongs, and it is within the framework of that family, that association, that fellowship that God works his work in us.

It's important to belong to it, not because of the prestige we can bestow, but because of the nourishment we can receive. It’s good to be able to say, MY Church...It’s not perfect, just as my nation and my family are not perfect, but I’m proud of it. I identify with it....I BELONG to it, and I know that in its glory and success I share.

I think sometimes we make a mistake when in the name of hygiene we take Communion in those individual cups, and eat the bread as individual wafers. There are good reasons for doing this, of course, and I believe in sanitation, but the old way, remember, was to drink from a common cup, and to tear a piece of bread from the common loaf...

There was something good about that---one loaf, one cup, one body, one Lord, one people...it was a symbol that we’re not in this Christianity business alone...WE BELONG TO SOMETHING BIGGER, SOMETHING THAT TRANSCENDS US AND LIFT US OUT OF OUR LITTLENESS. We bring our hurts, our needs, our anxieties, our brokenness, our fragments…and share them within the family at the Table and receive strength and sustenance from each other and from God.

I belong...I belong to something bigger than I am... something that will outlast and outlive me. I may fail, but the Church will endure, and will take even my failure and incorporate it into its ultimate success.

On the tombstone of John Wesley in London, out in the garden behind the Wesley Chapel, you will find this inscription: God buries his workers but carries on his work.”

That’s it....To belong and be devoted to a movement that big is to know meaning.

2) Secondly, meaning comes when your job is too big for you.

The most tragic people I know, I think....certainly the most unhappy people, are the people with unchallenged potential. They’re the WASTED people, the people whose life COULD count for something, but who have chosen, either deliberately or by default, to fritter away their talents on trivia.

The woods are full of them, and so are many of our churches. They never undertake anything significant, and then wonder why they’re bored.

Well, a job too big for you will rescue from that fix. It’ll rescue you because it’ll drive you to your knees and force you to look outside yourself for strength. If I may be permitted this confession, I don’t think I pray more fervently during the week than in those moments just before the worship service begins when people are coming into Church. I can stand back there behind the screen and peek through a hole. That’s when I do some heavy praying. I see people filing in... AND I KNOW MANY OF YOU NOW....

I’ve learned some things. I know some burdens you’re carrying, some loads you’re trying to hold up. Here’s a family with this problem, and a person struggling with this situation.....grief, loneliness, illness, a child you’re agonizing over, a decision you have to make...and God only knows what more that I have absolutely no knowledge of...all coming to Church.

Who am I to presume to break bread to feed you? How can I have the gall to think I can speak for God to your need? It’s too big a job, and I don’t have the capacity within myself to handle it.

Yet who could be so lucky? I wouldn’t trade jobs with anybody I know. I mean that. The very size and scope of it force me to go beyond myself and to rely on resources that I don’t innately possess. I do not honor the position, I know that, the position honors me, and in the pursuit of its impossible demands, meaning comes.

Our Roman Catholic friends have in their tradition the wonderful legend of St. Christopher. Do you know the story? A man named Offerus, a giant of a man was stationed at the edge of a river to help people get safely across. One day at the height of a flood, a child came.

Offerus, which name in Latin means “bearer”, one who bears, or carries, something, put the lad on his chest, and all the way to his neck, nearly sweeping both of them away. Finally, staggering to the far shore, Offerus put the boy down safely on dry land, only to discover that he had carried the Christ Child.

So the legend goes. Thus his name was changed to Christ-Offerus,...Christopher, one who carried Christ.

The real loveliness of the story, I think, is this. IT WAS PRECISELY THE BURDEN ON HIS BACK THAT SAVED HIM. But for the weight he had to bear, he was doomed. The load steadied him, and got him through.

We need jobs big enough to drive us beyond ourselves. Whether they be volunteer jobs we assume for the sake of others, or a response to God’s vocational tug on our lives, we need jobs tough enough to push us beyond where we think we can go. It’s then that meaning comes.

3) And finally, really in summary, meaning comes most fully and redemptively when you give yourself to the worship of a God who is bigger than you are. That’s the crux of it, and that’s what Jesus was saying... go, sell, give, come, follow.

When you finally let God do what He wants to do with you....When you finally stop insisting that YOU have to be the one to decide the agenda and the program...

MEANING SOMEHOW EMERGES, and the really beautiful thing is that from that time on nothing external that happens to you ultimately can dislodge the security that meaning provides. Let me recommend a book to you. It’s Dr. Victor Frankl’s book, “Man’s Search for Meaning”....It was originally entitled “From Death Camp to Existentialism.” It’s a true story, the account of Dr. Frankl’s experience during the 2nd World War. He was a German Jewish psychiatrist, who was shipped by boxcar at Hitler’s orders to the concentration camp at Auschwitz, the one made famous, or infamous by the gas chambers, and the ovens.

He tells how life there, if you can call it life, was reduced to the level of sub-animal existence.....how they were thrown into a room where the only warmth, even in the winter, was that provided by their own bodies....how they were forced during the day to work outdoors in freezing weather, how they were given only potato soup, made from rotten potatoes to live on.

He tells how everything they had, rings, personal effects, even their clothing, every strip of it, was taken away from them so that they literally had nothing to call their own.

BUT THERE WAS ONE THING, AS HE TELLS IT, THAT THEY COULDN’T TAKE AWAY. There was one thing they couldn’t touch. They could reduce conditions to the level of unendurability, all right. BUT THEY COULDN’T DETERMINE THE ATTITUDE WITH WHICH EACH MAN WOULD RECEIVE THOSE CONDITIONS.

And there were some who simply didn’t break. There were some who went through it all, even to death, with a dignity that simply transcended the tyranny.

And Dr. Frankl says at the end, paraphrasing Neitszche, “A person who has a WHY for living, can put up with almost any HOW.” And he says further that those who did come through it, and finally got back to some semblance of normal life again knew in their hearts that there was nothing in the world they ever needed to be afraid of again, except GOD.

A person who has a WHY for living, can put up with almost any HOW.

I guess that’s the clue to what we’re talking about. MEANING. In the final analysis it isn’t something you fashion. It’s more something that grasps YOU.

When you belong to a group that is bigger than you. When you work at a job that is bigger than you. And when you give yourself to a God who is bigger than you,.....meaning comes, and the rest doesn’t matter anyway.

“What must I do to have eternal life?”

Go, sell, give, come, follow...and nothing can separate you from his love.

--

[1] Will Rogers was an actor and humorist in the 1900s. 

[2] Paul Harvey (1918-2009) was a radio broadcaster who ended his Saturday shows with a segment entitled-“The Rest of the Story”.