NOTE: I am putting my weekly sermons on the church website. It will be on for two weeks (usually posted on Friday) and then placed in the Archives area by date. You can download in a matter of seconds.
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Saturday, August 27, and
Sunday, August 28, 2005
“Moses on the Run”
Reverend Larry Gerber
In Japan, young men who can’t commit, or are unable to deal with stress, are withdrawing from society and shutting themselves off from the world. Reminds us of Moses — until God calls him out of his funk.
Japanese writer and television personality, Yoko Haruka, has a dim view of love and marriage.
In Japan she says, husbands work late and then go out bar-hopping with their buddies. They expect their wives to stay home and clean house. If the kids are brats, then it’s the mother’s fault. If he has an affair, it’s her fault.
Japanese men don’t get it. They propose with lines like, “I want you to cook miso soup for me the rest of my life.”
Japanese women aren’t buying.
And it’s causing up to one million Japanese men — who are totally bewildered by the new female assertiveness — to slip into hikikomori, an affliction characterized by withdrawal from society, and thoughts of suicide.
They’ll shut themselves up in their rooms for weeks at a time, preferring isolation to integration. Easier to battle one’s own demons alone and in the darkness, than to attempt to interact with impertinent Japanese women who insist on having a real life of their own — with or without a husband.
Reminds us of Moses, who after a spectacular career in the court of the Pharaoh, succumbs to the pressure and flees to the desert.
We’re going to talk about hikikomori Moses, or “Moses on the Run” if you will. But, first let’s talk about hikikomori Mann — as an example.
Hector Mann. Remember him?
Everyone thought he was dead .... Hector Mann had not been heard from in almost sixty years .... Few people seemed to know that he had ever existed.
Those are opening sentences of the recent novel, The Book of Illusions, by Paul Auster, and its story gives the expression “keeping a low profile” a whole new dimension.
The story, set in 1988, is the tale of two men broken by the hard realities of life. One is the narrator, college professor David Zimmer, and the other is Hector Mann, a silent-film comedian who had disappeared without a trace in 1929 and who was considered long dead.
Zimmer’s life has been upended by the death of his wife and two sons in a plane crash. He spends his days in an alcoholic stupor, contemplating suicide, and essentially burying himself alive.
One night he sees a clip of an old Hector Mann film on television, and it makes him laugh — for the first time since the death of his wife and children. Mainly to keep himself going, Zimmer decides to research the films of Hector Mann, and ends up writing a book about them.
After his book is published, Zimmer receives a letter from a woman claiming to be Mann’s wife, stating that the actor is still alive, has read Zimmer’s book and would like to meet Zimmer. She invites Zimmer to fly out to their ranch in New Mexico. Although Zimmer is skeptical that anyone who has been off the radar for nearly 60 years could still be around, he eventually accepts the invitation and learns the story of Mann’s disappearance.
Back in 1929, Mann, who was a rising star in silent films, had been engaged to one woman while dallying with another. When his fiancée accidentally shoots his lover, Mann feels responsible. To protect his fiancée, he buries the body of his lover, and then, taking a false identity, he leaves town. Since no one makes the connection, Mann is never pursued. Nonetheless, as atonement for his guilt, he vows never to work in the public eye again. Instead he labors at lowly jobs until he finally meets a woman who not only recognizes him, but also marries him.
This woman has enough income to support them, and they settle in New Mexico, with Mann taking her last name and keeping his head down. After life throws another curve at them, she sees her husband sinking into despair, and so she proposes that he begin making movies again. Actually, Mann is desperate to get back into movie making. For years, he’s been thinking of new movie ideas, but because of his vow, he feels he cannot follow through on them. What they finally settle on, however, is that he will make the movies, but never screen them for anyone — on the idea that if you make a movie that is never shown to an audience, the movie doesn’t really exist.
So that’s what they do. They build the sets and editing rooms on their ranch, and with the help of a couple of close friends who are sworn to secrecy, Hector makes more than a dozen movies over the next several years. To keep his promise, however, he stipulates that upon his death, all copies of the movies are to be burned without anyone seeing them.
There are more twists to the story, but Zimmer becomes a witness to all of this. He meets the old man, who dies the next day, and Zimmer sees Mann’s wife burn the films. Except for what Zimmer now knows, the last public knowledge of Mann is from the day in 1929 when he walked away from his life. In the end, Zimmer finds that what he has witnessed enables him to restart his life, and he goes on, traveling in new directions, but now siding with the living.
Mann’s story parallels that of Moses. Raised by Pharaoh’s daughter, Moses too was a rising star. But then, like Mann, Moses found himself on the run following a death. And Moses buried himself alive in Midian, sheepherding for Jethro. This deliberate obscurity continued until the burning bush encounter, and there the correspondence between Mann and Moses ends, for Moses, albeit kicking and screaming, rejoins the living.
How many people, like Moses and Mann, have consciously chosen to retreat from the promise of their early years? There are people who have looked at the talents God has given them and concluded, “No, it’s too risky to use them” or “I don’t deserve them” or “I don’t want them” and who then move off of the main stream to hunker down to live out their years in hikikomori anonymity. Perhaps you’ve attended your high school reunion, as Jane and I have in the past two years, and have been surprised by how certain people, who were brimming with possibilities when you were classmates, have seemed to settle for so much less.
You may recall an old Peanuts cartoon where Charlie Brown says to Lucy, “There is no heavier burden than a great potential.”
Moses’ story should get us thinking not so much of fulfilling our promise as of choosing to live, of remaining engaged in the things that bring meaning and contribute to the overall welfare of our corner of the world.
We’re talking about returning to the engagement with life even after the encountering things that knock us down badly.
Of course, a certain amount of wound-licking is appropriate, but we can lose the rest of our days in that enterprise, and that’s a real loss.
The burning bush is the big difference between Moses and Mann and Japanese men. Moses and Mann already had two acts in their lives — the first a period of success and rising, the second a period of obscurity and hiding.
But at the bush, God calls Moses to a third act, a period of engagement and working. We can speculate whether Mann could have been called to a third act as well. As described in the novel, he is not a religious man and seems to have no sense of God one way or the other. Yet he never reconsiders his withdrawal decision. He has buried his life, so Act II is the finale.
With God’s help, though, Moses discovers that God has given him his life to be used in ways that contribute to God’s purposes.
For us, the choice is not simply shall we do God’s will or not, but do we choose to live or not to live? Do we choose involvement or disengagement, ongoing living or protracted suicide?
There is no doubt that Moses understood the choice in stark terms like that. Years later, when he had finally gotten the people of Israel to the gateway of the promised land, he addressed them in what would be his final instructions. He says: “Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the LORD your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you ...” (Deuteronomy 30:19).
Choose life! Choose to live!
Moses, of course, lived centuries ago, and Mann is a fictional character, but consider a contemporary of ours who had to make this choose-life decision.
Elie Wiesel was born in Transylvania in 1928 into close-knit Jewish community, but World War II changed his life forever. At age 15, he and his family were sent by the Nazis to Auschwitz, where his mother and younger sister perished in the gas chambers. His father died at another concentration camp, and Wiesel himself ended up serving time at four different camps. After the war, he spent a few years in a French orphanage.
As an adult, he became a journalist, but his way of dealing with the horror he had lived through was to never speak of it. In fact, he vowed never to do so. While writing for one newspaper, however, he met Nobel laureate François Mauriac who encouraged him to break that vow. In making that decision, Wiesel had to relive the pain of his past, but he did so, realizing the story had to be told to deny the Nazis a posthumous victory, to honor the last wish of victims and to protect the future of humanity from such evil reoccurring.
In time, Wiesel wrote the novel Night, which related experiences of Jews in the camps. He went on to write 40 additional works dealing primarily with Judaism, the Holocaust and the overall fight for morality among all peoples. He became a U.S. citizen, was later appointed chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. He continues to work and speak for justice yet today.
In his book, Messengers of God, Wiesel speaks of the choice facing each of us:
According to Jewish tradition, creation did not end with man, it began with him. When [God] created man, God gave him a secret — and that secret was not how to begin, but how to begin again. It is not given to man to begin; that privilege is God’s alone. But it is given to man to begin again, and so he does so, every time he chooses to defy death and side with the living. [emphasis added]
It is always a temptation when wounded by life to get so focused on our personal problems that we don’t contribute to the larger communities of which we are a part. But Moses’ call is a challenge for any of us who are hankering for hikikomori, and who are tempted to drop out and let the world deal with its problems without our help.
The message for us is to choose to live.
Not to begin, but to begin again!
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Source:
Auster, Paul. The Book of Illusions. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2002.
The hikikomori discussion is found in USA Today, June 3, 2004, 17A.
Wiesel, Elie. Messengers of God. New York: Random House, 1970, 32.