When I look deep down and ask myself what I really want out of life, one answer keeps coming back over and over: I want meaning. I want significance. I want fulfillment. When I look deep down and ask myself what I really want for my life, I know that the accumulation of things is not it. These can be destroyed in an instant, as the California wildfires remind us. I know that the achievement of fame is not it. Just a few moments this week working on one of my hobbies, family history, reminded me of how fleeting are the memories we leave behind. No, what I really want out of life is not material accumulation or memorable achievements: I want meaning. I want significance. I want fulfillment.
And so does every human heart. I once heard a lecture by Victor Frankl, a Viennese psychiatrist and a Jew who had survived the Nazi death camps. His thesis was that the only thing that kept the prisoners in the death camps going was the will to meaning. The will to meaning, that profound human need to have mattered. Without that, Frankl said, people just die. It’s about feeling significant – not so much about what others think of you, but about what you think of yourself.
So how do we get there? By what avenues can we reach that lively sense of significance? What are the roads we may take in order to find a refreshing spring of vitality in our hearts?
Some of you are old enough to remember that romantic 1954 movie, “Three Coins in the Fountain.” In that film, three young women working at the American Embassy in Rome each respond to the legend that said that if you throw a coin in Trevi Fountain, you will return to Rome. By the way, that legend is alive and well, enough so that even now, every day coins worth about five thousand dollars are thrown into Trevi Fountain. The city cleans them out every night and uses the money to feed the hungry. But: “Three coins in the fountain, each one seeking happiness; thrown by three hopeful lovers, which one will the fountain bless?” It’s about seeking fulfillment.
Two weeks ago we began our sermon series, “Prime Numbers” as a way to see some basic ideas about God. Using the Letter to the Romans in each case, I said about God the Creator, the first person of the Trinity, that we were first to thank God – to experience Him, not analyze Him. God is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be experienced. First thank God.
And then last week we thought about the second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ. We acknowledged that weakness and sin and even hostility toward God are the harsh human realities, but that through the sacrifice of Christ we have a second chance to become what God intended us to become.
And so today, the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. Using our prime number, three, we are going to explore three ways – by the way the name Trevi as in “Trevi Fountain” means “three ways” – three ways through which people try to find significance. Three coins, three wishes, tossed with wistfulness into the misty fountain. Which one will bring blessing?
I
One coin that people spend in order to find significance is the coin of behavior. We work at being good, and think that will bring fulfillment. We work at behaving ourselves, and hope that at the end of the day we will feel satisfaction at having broken no laws, having made the right decisions – we’ve measured up. We throw out the coin of good behavior and hope it will pay rich returns of self-satisfaction.
Now I’ve known any number of people who operate this way. They will tell you in a heartbeat that they are pretty good folks. Like the citizens of Lake Wobegon, they think of themselves as strong and above average and good-looking. So good behavior is expected to bring fulfillment.
But the Bible shoots that down. Paul says that that is setting the mind on the flesh, and that to set the mind on the flesh is death, because we cannot do what we know we ought to do. The Bible tells us what many of us already know, and that is that merely being good, even if it were possible, does not bring satisfaction. It does not bring fulfillment.
Now, I grant you, being good may bring something other than fulfillment. It may bring smugness. Doing things right may bring self-righteousness. But not joy, not meaning. I know. I’ve been through that. You see, I love being right. I enjoy being correct. There is something in me that gets a charge out of pointing out other people’s errors and touting my own correctness. I am the guy who, if you write a paper, can spot a typo from a mile away and will gleefully draw a red circle around it and push it across the desk at you. I am the fellow who, if you speak a grammatical error, cannot keep from correcting it immediately, loudly, and pompously. I know all about being goodie-two-shoes. And it does not satisfy. It does not bring meaning. It only stirs resentment, it only damages relationships. Paul says it, “The mind that is set on the flesh … cannot submit … to set the mind on the flesh is death.”
Jesus taught this too. Jesus told a story one day about two men going into the Temple to pray. One of them stood and prayed, says Jesus, “within himself” – a telling phrase if ever there was one – prayed within himself, “Lord, I thank You that I am not as other men are.” And Jesus insisted that this man went home unreconciled, unhappy, and unfulfilled.
No, spending the coin of good works will not bring meaning. Merely trying to be good enough is doomed to dismal disaster. “To set the mind on the flesh is death … we cannot submit to God’s law” on our own.
II
So what other options are there? What other coins can we toss, hoping to buy that elusive spring of joy, that wonderful surge of significance? If I cannot be good enough to find meaning, what else is there?
This is church, so let me suggest the obvious. People try to find fulfillment in religion. People invest in worship attendance and church activity and religious busyness to find satisfaction. Will that work? Will that bring meaning? Isn’t this what you would expect the preacher to say – “Get busy in church”?
Except that Paul punctures that balloon too! Paul speaks of the law as the law of sin and death. He means by that the pattern of religious life he knew in Judaism. Paul is skewering the religion of his day. He is talking about the way Judaism so heavily invested in rules and laws, to which people were expected to be obedient. The assumption was that you will find a satisfying relationship with God and a fulfilling life by following the religious system. But Paul says no. Paul says that won’t work. The law, the system, religion, brings sin and death. It brings unhappiness.
Does that sound strange to you? Is that a new idea? Four hundred and ninety years ago this week, a young Augustinian monk named Martin Luther nailed to the door of the castle church in the Saxon university town of Wittenberg a heavy-duty document. On that screed Luther proposed some ninety-five theses that he offered to debate. Among these myriad of propositions, one key theme stands out: that it is not the church and the things the church requires that bring vitality. Religion will not save. In fact, Luther’s own life story illustrates his point well.
You see, Martin Luther had bought into the world of sixteenth-century religion. The church of his day had told him that he needed to perform certain acts of contrition, and so Luther had gone at that with a vengeance. In fact, so the story goes, in the city of Rome where our Trevi Fountain is located, he had climbed the Spanish Steps on his knees, hoping to feel release from his deep-seated guilt. But it failed. Every religious act that the church commended Luther tried, but he still felt miserable.
And so from the mind and the insight of Martin Luther, studying this very Letter to the Romans, comes the great truth that we celebrate on this Reformation Sunday – that justification comes by faith and not by religious acts. That the way to God is not by working the system but by turning the heart. Religion itself is not the way to fulfillment.
Let me be sure that you do not hear this as some kind of Catholic-bashing. It is not. Today even many Roman Catholics agree that the church of the sixteenth century had lost its way and that Luther recovered a great truth. No, I am not Catholic-bashing when I say that religion is not the way to joy. Many of us create systems and hope that systems will bring us happiness. Many of us make religious practice a substitute for authentic faith.
When I was a boy growing up in a Baptist church in Louisville, Kentucky, we dutifully filled out our six-point record systems at Sunday School – anybody remember this? So many points for attending, so many for being on time, so many for having read your daily Bible readings, so many for having read your quarterly. And then, not satisfied with a good score on the six-point record system in the morning, we came back at night for Training Union and its eight-point record system, which wanted to know if you had a part on the evening’s program and if you brought your tithe! How much all of that challenged my ten-year-old soul! If I could just get all fourteen points marked every Sunday, one Joseph Miles Smith will be recorded on the books of heaven as having been a busy, busy Baptist! But you know the little couplet, don’t you, about all that? You know what is said about all that busyness? “Mary had a little lamb, it would have been a sheep. But it became a Baptist, and died for lack of sleep”!
Is religion the point? Is doing church the point? Church is important, yes, certainly; religious practice is valuable, of course. But these things are the means to the end and not the end in itself. For Paul insists that religious systems are the law of sin and death and do not bring fulfillment on their own.
Brothers and sisters, if you want meaning, you will have to look beyond being good and you will have to look past being religious. These ways do not bless. They do not satisfy. Three coins in the fountain, which one will the fountain bless? Not the way of forcing our wills to do what they cannot do. And not the way of a church that requires obedience and thinks that that is spirituality.
III
Hear the good news. Hear this deeply, hear this in your very core: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death … to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.”
To one theme I return again and again, and that is the theme of a relationship with God. To be a Christian is to be in right relationship with God. To be saved is to be reconciled to God through the sacrifice of Christ. And to be fulfilled is to live in the Holy Spirit of God, to have at your side the companion of eternity. To be truly and genuinely alive is to feel the presence of the life-giving Spirit. “He who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.”
Frankly, words fail me to describe how this feels. I cannot fully explain it, nor can I give you a formula to achieve it. We cannot just call up the Spirit and make Him do something for us. He simply is. He comes. He brings life. We bring faith and toss that into the fountain, as it were, and He brings life and refreshment. Words fail as I try to proclaim this. But maybe a story will bring it home.
Mitsuo Fuchida was most excited on that day that shall live in infamy, the 7th of December, 1941. He was General Commander of the Air Squadron chosen to lead a force of 360 aircraft to bomb Pearl Harbor. I need not recount for you how hellishly successful Mitsuo Fuchida’s efforts were. Throughout the remainder of the war, he saw a great deal of action on behalf of his divine Emperor. But when the war was over, and his cause had lost, he felt a deepening discouragement.
On that day of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Corporal Jacob DeShazer, United States Army, was peeling potatoes at his base in Oregon. But he heard the news, he threw down his kitchen utensils and, with hatred in his heart, went looking for the instruments of death. DeShazer volunteered for a secret mission under General Jimmy Doolittle, designed to retaliate by bombing Tokyo. Doolittle’s Raiders completed their mission, but DeShazer’s plane ran out of fuel, and he had to parachute into enemy territory, where he was taken prisoner. For forty interminable months DeShazer was imprisoned, with his hatred for all things Japanese growing every day.
There was a Bible in that prison camp, and Jacob DeShazer began to read it. In that Bible he learned that his sin, his hatred, was separating him from God. In his little cell, DeShazer received Christ and began a new spiritual life, one filled with joy despite the circumstances. When the war ended, the soldier once filled with hate returned home, studied to be a missionary, and soon went back to Japan to bring the gospel to those he had once despised.
As for Mitsuo Fuchida, still unhappy, he was summoned one day to Tokyo to testify in the war crimes trials. This miserable ex-pilot stepped off the train and was offered a pamphlet by someone. The pamphlet was called, “I Was a Prisoner of Japan”; its author was Jacob DeShazer. As Fuchida read, his heart was moved by the words of Jesus, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Fuchida knew that his religion, Shinto, offered nothing like that. The air squadron commander prayed to receive Christ, and lost both his bitterness and his misery.
All of that would be enough. But the Spirit of God had something more. The Spirit brought together Mitsuo Fuchida and Jacob DeShazer. They became good friends and eventually colleagues in ministry. Think of it: one had bombed and killed at Pearl Harbor, with nationalistic pride. The other had bombed and killed in Toyko, with vengeance. They could never have accepted or forgiven one another. Nor could they ever have found joy and fulfillment. But the Spirit .. the Spirit gives life and peace. The Spirit dwells in us and overflows from us. Life and peace!
Three coins in the fountain? Three ways to look for meaning? Oh, we will never be good enough on our own. Nor will we ever find in religion our soul’s satisfaction. But, As the hart panteth after the waterbrooks, so thirsts my soul after Thee, O God. I throw my little coin into the Spirit fountain and I return, not to the eternal city, but to the eternal One, my heart’s home.
