Beyond Your Wildest Dreams

"Beyond Your Wildest Dreams"
1 Corinthians 2:9-15

The American novelist and poet, Gertrude Stein, on her deathbed, asked, "What is the answer?"  Then, when there was only silence from those gathered around the bed, she asked, "In that case, what is the question?"  It's interesting to me that such a person would ask those kinds of questions.  She was an American who lived most of her life in Paris.  She hosted a Paris coffee shop type meeting place in her home, where the leading figures of modernism in literature and art, such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, and Henri Matisse would meet.  Even rubbing shoulders with famous authors and artists like that, you'd think she'd pick up on some vital truths, by which she could live her life.  Instead, at the end of her life, she was still looking for the meaning of life.

Most people don't realize it isn't in the answers that the meaning of life is found, but in asking the right questions.  The chaplain at the college where my daughter attended, Azusa Pacific University, decided he'd try what Lucy from the comic strip Peanuts did.  Remember Lucy set up a booth with a placard across the top that read, "Psychiatric Help—5 cents."  The chaplain set up a booth for a week with the placard that read, "Spiritual Help—5 cents."  He said the most often asked question was, "What is the meaning of life?"

And that's the problem.  No one is asking that question any more.  Even if they ask the question, they are looking for the answers in the wrong places.  As Eugene Peterson wrote in his book, Run With The Horses,

The puzzle is why so many people live so badly.  Not so wickedly, but so inanely.  Not so cruelly, but so stupidly.  There is little to admire and less to imitate in the people who are prominent in our culture … People, aimless and bored, amuse themselves with trivia and trash.  Neither the adventure of goodness nor the pursuit of righteousness gets headlines.  (page 11)

Peterson has pointed out one of the main problems of our culture:  we have no role models who have found powerful and profound answers to that question (What is the meaning of life?), and are living those answers out in their daily lives.  Instead, we put the pictures and stories of self-infatuated movie stars and athletes on the covers of magazines, and those are the people youth and adults yearn to be like.  Somewhere along the way, we have left behind something important.

There have been a lot of high schools that send groups of kids to New York City to experience a Broadway play or some such thing.  One such group of kids were in the Big Apple, experiencing big city life.  They stayed at a bank of rooms on the 25th floor of a hotel.

When they got back from a long day of sightseeing, they went to get their room keys.  But they were told by the desk clerk that the elevators weren't working.  They could either wait till the problem was repaired or take the stairs.

One group of students decided to hike up the stairs.  They decided to pass the time, each of them were to tell one of the funniest stories they knew.  So up they went, laughing and giggling at each other's stories.  When they got to the 24th floor, one of the kids sat down on a step and just started laughing and laughing.  "What's so funny?" one of the other kids asked.
"You want to hear the funniest story?" he replied.
"Yeah," they said.
"The funniest story is that we forgot to pick up our room keys at the front desk."

How awful to get so far along in life, like Gertrude Stein, when you get to a certain climactic point, you have not acquired the "key" that will open the doors, or give you the answers to the questions that stand before you.

So many people expend so much energy climbing the stairs of life, but when they get close to the top they find out they are ill-equipped to go the rest of the way.  Stuck on a step in the stairwell, faced with the prospect of not being able to go any further.  Or having to back down the way they had come, retracing all their previous steps, life becomes meaningless, worthless, and purposeless.

Paul wrote to the Corinthian Christians, (and we need to pay attention here), don't let that happen to you.  Don't major on the minors.  Don't live a small life.  Don't live so that later on in your life you have to retrace your steps and start all over again.  Don't get yourself confined by all the wrong questions and all the wrong answers to the right questions.

Paul leads us to Scripture, which is where we find the right questions and the right answers to the right questions.  Paul wrote:

But, in the words of Scripture,
"Things beyond our seeing,
things beyond our hearing,
things beyond our imagining,
all prepared by God for those who love him",
these it is that God has revealed to us through the Spirit.
(1 Corinthians 2:9, NEB)

The world gives us answers to the questions of life that make us settle for so little.  We become anesthetized, we become so content with what is not life.  That's what the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning protested when she wrote prophetically so many years ago,

What frightens me
is that men are content
with what is not life at all.

But God, through the Holy Spirit, says Paul, has offered us life beyond your wildest dreams.  You cannot even conceive in your mind what God has for you, it is so awesome.  God's Holy Spirit is the key that allows you to open the door to all that God has for you.  Don't you want to find out?  The Holy Spirit stands at the door, just waiting for you to approach, so that all that God has for you, all the meaning life was intended to have can be opened to you.

In Charles Dickens' great book, A Tale of Two Cities, one of the characters is a Doctor—Doctor Manette—who has been thrown in the Bastille prison wrongfully.  He nearly forgets who he was, what he was, and becomes a cobbler.  While there for a number of years, he mended the shoes of the other prisoners and the guards in his little stone cell.  Good fortune comes his way.  His daughter, who has not known the whereabouts of her father, finds him with the help of some family friends.  Dr. Manette was released.  (That's the pictured scene on the front of the bulletin.)

Dr. Manette's daughter represents the Holy Spirit in this novel, at this point in the story.  She has effected the freedom of her father so he could become what he was meant to be as a gifted surgeon and more.  But when Dr. Manette got to his home, he built a little cell out of stone inside his home.  He moved into that little room to live out his days and do his work, as a cobbler.

The cobbler in Dickens' novel, like many real people, became conditioned to a life lived in small ways.  They lock themselves up in cells of their own making, whether they be of stone, or of their own Spirit-less giving up.

Similarly, there are people like Ninus, the legendary king of Assyria.  Ninus had an ocean of gold and loved to party.  So he stayed within his palace.  He never went out at night to gaze at the stars.  He never went out during the day to feel the warmth of the sun on his face.  He never went out on the rooftop of the palace to look out at the world rolling out to the horizon line.  He never did any of those things because he said they made him feel small.  As long as he could stay within the confines of the little world of the palace, he could feel large and important.  Life had meaning.  But what a small life and what a little bit of meaning.

What God has for us, through the Holy Spirit, is a world of meaning bigger than the wide world you can see.  But we lock ourselves up in dungeon cells, or palaces of puniness, closing ourselves off from the "more" that God prepared for us.  Paul tells us, through this letter to the Corinthians, that there is more to life than what we see, hear, and know—even beyond anything we can imagine.

A woman, at a previous church I served, stood at my study door and cried out, "I want to see life!"  She cried out these words in a tone of utter despair, and I have heard her words echoed in so many people's lives.  "I want to see life!"  She had seen life all right, but nothing like God wanted her to see, and had ready for her.

Do you want to see life?  God's Holy Spirit wants you to have the kind of life the deepest part of your heart yearns for.  Come to the Holy Spirit and answer the Spirit's one question:  Do you love God?  Do you utterly and unashamedly love God?  When you can answer, "Yes," life and meaning will be yours beyond your wildest dreams.