One place I am quite sure I can stay away from is the National Museum of Beverage Cans. No matter how many times I may travel to and through Nashville, Tennessee, whether it be on Baptist business or as an accidental tourist, I feel quite certain that I can avoid even so much as a swift glance toward the National Museum of Beverage Cans.
I just wouldn’t be interested. As far as I am concerned, when you’ve seen and crunched one eight-ounce Diet Pepsi can, you’ve seen and crunched them all. But, amazing to say, that is not true for the folks who have created this monument to American thirst-quenching. According to the news reports, one day someone in the family brought home an unusual-looking beer can, and they kept it, and then there was another, and another, and still others …and they became a thousand, and now more than five thousand different kinds of beverage cans.
The can collection just about took over the home, of course, and so when the family moved to Nashville they took their collection with them and built a special building to house it. And gave it a new name - the National Museum of Beverage Cans. And they have not quit -- by no means have they quit. They press on, trying to make it complete -- trying to find those elusive, rare cans that are a little different from what they now have. They press on, toward the goal of having one copy of absolutely every variety of beverage can ever made in this country!
Well, to each his own, they say. But I cannot help wondering what will become of all that one day. Man and Dad will get old and will die, and who will take care of 5000 empty cans? How will they decide what to do with stacks and stacks of "tastes great" and "less filling"? Will the kids take up the cause? Will Junior inherit the beer cans and Sister the soft drink cans? Will long-lost cousins show up, claiming a few hundred as their share? Will they unload it all on the local Baptist church and ask for a tax deduction?
Or will someone determine that the whole mess needs to go to the recycling center, where it can be melted down – which, on Earth Day, seems to me like the proper thing?
One person’s pursuit is another person’s problem. One person’s collection is another person’s concern. And what one person may press on to complete another person finds out is just pressure. What one person invests his life in and commits himself to and strives for, someone else may find is nothing but a flimsy facade and a burden too bulky to carry.
Today many of us find ourselves the recipients of a legacy of one sort or another from those who have gone before us. I’m not talking about the will or the property; I’m talking about a personal inheritance. I’m talking about how those who have been here before us and whom we have lost have affected our lives. They’ve left us something to deal with.
This thing you’ve inherited: is it worth pressing on for, or is it just something that makes you feel pressed? This legacy we have received from those who have gone before us: is it a worthy heritage, which gives us challenge and a goal and a sense of moving in the right direction? Or is it, after all, just an unnecessary burden that presses us down and keeps us from becoming?
There is a difference.
Let me say it again: what we have received as a legacy from those whose memories we honor today can be a challenge to us, it can urge us to press on. It can be a powerful stimulant to us to press on to complete what they gave themselves to. And, if that happens, we will complete our grieving successfully.
But it is also possible that we might receive a beverage can museum! We might have received a legacy that is nothing but a worry and a burden. We might have received something that is nothing but pressure, something that presses us down and holds us back, and if we do not get rid of that, we will keep on grieving.
On this Day of Remembrance, then, as we honor the memories and the legacies of those who have gone before us: are we pressing on, or are we just pressed?
I
The Apostle Paul gives us a pretty good idea of what it feels like to be the heir to a pressure heritage. Paul can report with real eloquence everything he inherited from those who had gone before him. He tells us quite clearly that he knew what his parents and his culture and everything else had given him and expected him to carry.
"I was circumcised on the eighth day (that is, I got the prescribed and proper start in life), of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless."
In other words, Paul is saying, whatever the folks who went ahead of me wanted me to be, I agreed to be. I accepted the whole ball of wax. I-was born in Israel, so I agreed to accept all of Israel’s culture. I was raised in an elite echelon of society, so I took on the mannerisms of that group. I knew my place.
And more than that, Paul is saying, I did what those who trained me wanted me to do. I became what those who went before me expected me to be. I became a smug Pharisee, I became a zealous persecutor, I became a self-righteous legalist.
Paul says, I pressed on toward all the things others before me wanted me to be, and guess what? What did it amount to? It was a beverage can museum! It was pressure rather than something worth pressing on for. I did everything they wanted me to do, but it wasn’t worth anything, not really. Listen:
’’Whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish...””
Friends, the first step in completing and resolving our grief will come when we wake up and recognize that in so many ways we are playing out other people’s expectations of us, and many of those expectations don’t mean anything.
Have you ever heard about folks who maintain in their homes a room that is exactly as it was when someone, now deceased, lived there? The room is maintained as a shrine, and no one is allowed to disturb it or to change it.
As sad as that may be, it is not nearly as sad as those of us who maintain rooms in our lives that are memorials to those who have gone before us. Some of us stay in jobs that someone else chose for us, and we think it would be disloyal to change. Some of us stay with life habits that Mom and Dad chose for us, and we feel it would be a sacrilege to grow out of them. One well-meaning person kept telling my mother she should not move out of the home my father had prepared before his death, because he wouldn’t have wanted her to!
But do you know what all that is? Those are all beverage can museums! When we maintain memories in meaningless ways, our grieving is unhealthy. And it’s just pressure. It’s just something to press us hard. And like the Apostle Paul we ought to write that off as a loss, and get on to something else.
I know a man who discovered, after he had grown up and functioned in the Christian ministry for a number of years, why it was such a terrible burden for him to do so. At the age of 45, doing his pastoral work faithfully and routinely, but disliking every minute of it, he learned something he had totally forgotten. It seems that his father had died forty years earlier, and at the time of that death, the father had called his five-year-old son to his bedside and had literally laid hands on him and had pronounced over him, "Go and preach the Gospel to every creature"
Now it may sound bizarre to you, but that child had taken that legacy on and had subconsciously lived it out. Not even remembering this incident at the age of five, he had gone to seminary. He entered the ministry; he worked as a pastor. But he grieved all the way! He found it a burden and not a joy, a pressure and not a challenge. And so this man, in order to complete his mourning and in order to live in a healthy way, left the ministry and struck out on a whole new career in counseling. You might even say that he left Christ’s church in order to do the work of Christ’s kingdom!
If you are having trouble completing your mourning ... if anyone here is having a difficult time wrapping up the grieving process and getting on with life ... may I suggest that this may be the cause? May I suggest that we will not get finished with our grieving as long as we continue to try to be what someone else wanted us to be? If after a six months, a year, five years, you find that you cannot shake the legacy, you find that it’s still a pressure point with you to be or to do what someone now deceased wanted you to be or to do, then may I suggest that it’s time to join the apostle Paul as he faced his heritage?
"Whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish...”
II
And then may I further suggest that the way to get on and finish your grieving is to press on toward whatever the living Christ has called you to be? May I further suggest that the healthiest way to get beyond your mourning is to grow into the goal which God has given you, you and you alone? Your own goal?
Says Paul, after he has grown past his background, "I want to know Christ and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death, and so ... to attain to the resurrection from the dead I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me ... in Christ Jesus."
Those of us who have watched death steal away someone we loved in this past year will know that death has a way of focusing our attention on what really matters. When death comes, we drop everything else and attend to what must be done. When that phone call comes, the pastor leaves off the business of writing newsletters and answering phone calls and visiting shut-ins in order to run to a home where death has struck. Death focuses our attention on the things that really matter.
And so I believe that as we today think about where we are as those left to live while others have gone on, we are called to focus on what really matters. We are called to rivet our attention on the ways in which our lives are to be spent. And we are called to leave the past behind and get on with what really matters most.
I firmly believe that God has called you to be you for today and for today’ s needs. He has not called you to live out somebody else’s dream, but to live out your dream. He has not summoned you to mourn over a past that cannot be changed. Rather he has called you to see what He has chosen for you, and to press on.
Did you hear Paul’s concentration on what really matters? Did you hear him zero in on what counts? This is healthy grieving: "I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me". I’m going to be what God wants me to be, not what Mom or Dad or somebody else thought I ought to be. "But one thing I do: forgetting what is behind … oh, listen to that …forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me..."
Forgetting what lies behind and pressing on toward the prize… A few weeks after the funeral some of you acknowledged some negative feelings about the one you had lost, didn’t you? After a while you got to the place where you could admit that this person you buried was not a total saint and was not always pleasant and did not always behave the way you would have liked. After a while you got to the place where you could be more honest about who he or she was. And that’s all right! That’s good! That’s healthy!
Now, however, it is time to take another step. Now it is time to put behind you some of those negative feelings; it is time to stop resenting and being angry. It I s time to get in touch with those feelings that hold you back ... and they hold you back because the person about whom you feel so angry is not here any more to hear them. Well, then it is time to join the great apostle in "forgetting what lies behind and pressing on toward the goal". It’s time to accept the forgiving power of Christ; it is time to know Him and the power of His resurrection.
Forgetting what lies behind ... and pressing on toward God’s call. Six of the ten persons we name today ended their days in nursing homes, surrounded by very little of their possessions, shorn of a measure of their dignity, feeble and infirm, unable for the most part to communicate clearly what was in their hearts. Most of them had, indeed, forgotten what lies behind. But I can tell you, because I knew most of them at least to some degree, that they kept to the end the goal before them. They kept to the end their knowledge of the risen Christ; they knew Christ and thus they knew the power of His resurrection. And they have won the prize.
Forgetting what lies behind and pressing on toward the prize …I shall not soon forget what one grieving survivor told me after a funeral service: “Pastor, we have buried her, and I loved her .. but right now I am totally in love with Jesus Christ.” To know Christ and the power of His resurrection, that’s the goal. No longer feeling pressed, but instead pressing on!
On Easter Sunday a children’s Sunday School class had a wonderful time. A creative teacher had saved up a bunch of those egg-shaped stocking cartons, and she gave them to the children to go out on to the church lawn and find symbols of the risen Christ. The assignment was to find something that reminded them of the risen Christ, to put it in the egg-shaped carton, and then to return to share and to interpret.
As you might expect, most of the children found flowers; one found a bird’s egg; another found some seedlings from a nearby tree. All of these were easy to understand and to interpret; all of these were signs of life. But young Philip was a severely retarded child, whose mental weaknesses were matched only by his very unhealthy physical body. Philip had wandered aimlessly all over the churchyard with his egg, and when he came back, there was nothing in it.
The other children, mean as kids can sometimes be, growled at Philip. "You didn’t do what you were supposed to do. You didn’t do the assignment. You never get anything right, Philip." But to the teacher’s amazement, Philip spoke right up and defended himself. "Sure, he said, I did do it. There’s nothing in it because it’s the empty tomb. Jesus is gone. Jesus is risen."
It was only two weeks later that Philip’s frail body failed him for the last time, and he died. And as the children’s Sunday School class filed by the small casket to pay their respects to their friend, who never got anything right, who didn’t do what they wanted him to do, who didn’t meet anyone’s expectations, each one left behind ... an egg-shaped stocking carton, empty.
"Whatever I had gained I now consider loss for the sake of Christ … everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord .. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection ... I press on toward the goal ... for which God has called me in Christ Jesus."
