| No Cut on That Take |
March 19, 2000 |
Anyone listen to the game yesterday afternoon from 3 to 6? I held
out hope that the Wildcats might beat Wisconsin until there were only
2 seconds left and there was a 3 possession lead.
The University of Arizona Wildcats men's basketball team... heavily
favored... the number one seed in the Western conference, fell to
Wisconsin.
We all know the welcome for the wildcats will be much
smaller than the one they would have received if they'd won the
national title again.
And now we are going to have to think about how we think
about losing. A couple of weeks ago we talked about how
we don't model our own losing well to our children.
And here we are with an up-front opportunity to talk about losing
again.
We know what to do with winners... we lift them up, we grant them
privilege, we call them great, and they become even more independent.
But we don't know what to do with losing. It is counter to the
American dream, it is counter to working our way up the
ladder, counter to pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps.
The bible does have some words to offer to us... Jesus tells a
story
(Luke 15:11-24)
of a young man who goes to his father, says,
"Father, I'd like my half of the inheritance now." In other
words, I no longer need you.
The text tells us the young man went to the place where winners
congregate and began to live like a winner (on money that came to him
by not a lick of his own winning.)
But nonetheless he lived like a winner... high style,
drinking like a winner, dressing like a winner,
running in the fast lane like a winner, sleeping around
like a winner, throwing down bills with his winner friends like a
winner... the text calls it loose living. We call it independence.
Whatever we call it it is the same thing...living like we've no
responsibility to anyone but ourselves.
And he had one problem, he wasn't really a winner... he was spending
his daddy's money.
And in the end, when dad's money ran out he took a job...slopping
hogs.
And that is not the job of a winner and he is quickly brought to his
humility. The text says he came to himself...that is, he realized who
he really was. He stopped pretending.
He was hungry.
Said to himself, "I could go back and get a job as a servant in
my father's house...
at least I'd have a place to sleep and food to put
in my belly."
And so he sets out, all the way making peace with moving from
independence back into dependence.
And while he was a far distance out, his father (who had
been watching for him) came running out to him...and, I think,
tackled him in the dirt, hugged him, kissed him
and them lifted him to his feet and walked him back home.
Said, "Put a ring on his finger, put the finest robe on him,
kill the fatted calf... for this my son was lost and is now
found."
This child of mine was lost in independence and winning... but now
is in my care, dependent on me for his feeding... let's party!
I think the bible offers us a great precedent of what we might
think about winning and losing.
Read the text for today...
Mark 9:2-9
Peter.
He's peering at Moses, Elijah and Jesus. This is a
career-maker. This is a story to be retold! This
picture is worth a million words... But there's a problem. No
camera. No film. No nothing.
We can sympathize with Peter's predicament.
Let's be frank: Peter would've done us all a big favor if he had
been better prepared.
Today we could visit his shrine -- the mountain-top retreat
center... the one built to immortalize the moment if only he had been
ready.
Imagine your grasp of history without Abraham Zapruder's 26 seconds
of film, shot with an 8-millimeter camera on November 22, 1963.
We'd be stuck with Oliver Stone's revisionist montage in his film JFK.
Or without the grainy footage of Neil Armstrong taking "one
small step for man" replete with scratchy audio.
Or without your LP of Tommy, the world's first rock opera.
It's a good thing that The Who is now available on
redigitized and remastered compact disks -- along with every other
LP in your collection - because it is increasingly difficult to
locate a working stereo phonograph.
And if you own a copy of I Love Lucy classics on Betamax,
forget it.
Those eight-tracks of Tony Bennett?
Worthless, unless you have borrowing privileges at the Museum of
Obsolete Machines.
The Zapruder film, the Apollo 11 footage, the census data
stored by the government -- all risk disintegration or obsolescence in
the new millennium.
We can launch photographs of the kids through cyberspace, but we
are losing the photographs of our own childhoods, not to mention our
ancestors' childhoods, due to humidity, sunlight and general aging.
This hurts. It hurts because we have such a hunger to hang on to
history.
As many of our parents have aged, their storage closets -
left unexplored for decades - have become fascinating
excavation sites revealing both the history of their own families'
precious moments and the history of home movie cameras:
the 8-millimeter camera, the Super 8, the camcorder, the Supercam,
the Digital camcorder, the MX Pro Mixer with Fire Wire Technology.
These closet digs show that the first generation of parents
wielding home movie cameras did a pretty decent job at documenting
Christmas morning and birthday parties, graduations and weddings.
And clearly today's parents are following in their footsteps by
dutifully documenting all the usual life-changing moments of their
children as well - those transformative transitions from fetus to
newborn, from crawler to walker, from preschooler to kindergartner.
But, because film today is less expensive or because we're more
self-absorbed than ever, postmodern parents also capture those
NOT-so-special moments:
little Amber eating French fries, sitting in the wagon, banging on the
piano,
digging in the dirt, rolling in the leaves, playing with the
telephone, wearing a hat,
smelling a flower, holding a book, watching TV, singing a song,
throwing a ball,
kicking a ball, sitting on a ball, dropping a ball .... you get the
picture.
One family here in Tucson took inventory of their efforts and found
they had captured more than 1,800 minutes of videotaped footage and
over 3,000 still photographs of their daughter Courtney's life.
Courtney is only 6 years old.
Can YOU say, "Overexposure"?
Unfortunately, Courtney may clean out her own closet 40 years from
now, only to discover countless faded photographs and a mountain of
obsolete cartridges with no working video machine to play them.
Technology is moving so quickly that, sooner than we expect, our
painstaking documentation of life may be rendered a waste of time. A
total waste. Time and cost equals history lost.
Optical disks, considered innovative only a decade ago, will soon
be indecipherable, because the system used by archivists to transfer
and store documents and images onto optical disks is no longer
available.
And although data systems can be transferred to newer, sleeker
programs, data migration causes new problems: Numbers do not always
transfer from one system to another without significant errors.
We're losing our grasp on history.
This, despite the fact that more and more people are documenting
more and more information every day.
You better believe that if President Kennedy rode through Dallas
today, Abraham Zapruder would be among HUNDREDS of ordinary people
preserving the moment on film!
The "memory book" business is booming as we search craft
stores for the latest in acid-free paper and "bookkeeper archival
mist."
The "home movie to videotape" business is thriving, as
the Bell and Howell generation are warned that "gelatin
emulsion" could be eating away at their priceless memories!
We want to preserve every special moment, and yet ...
armed with camcorders in one palm, hermetically sealed
scrapbooks in the other arm, and countless files filled with
images and personal data in our computers, I purport we are in danger
of missing something even more monumental?
Missing - in our craving to capture it - the God-given moment
itself?
This Christmas my parents gave us a camcorder, hoping that we would
record all the moments of their granddaughters lives to send to them
in the Midwest.
So Christmas morning I began taping... and made the painful
discovery... there is a vast difference between being an observer and
being a participant.
To carry a camera puts something between you and what is happening.
Peter, of course, had no camcorder, no digital
camera, no hand-held micro tape recorder to capture the
extraordinary moment he witnessed along with James and John.
It was literally a mountaintop experience, a once-in-a-lifetime
experience for three ordinary Joes who, as disciples, were still
searching for a clue.
Peter, understandably, was absolutely awestruck.
It was to have been a quiet retreat, a time apart from the
crowds, but an extraordinary event was unfolding, a moment in history
so sacred that Peter, as Vice President in Charge of Doing Something,
had to do something.
So he proposed building a booth or kiosk or shrine with sidewalks
and walls - whatever - to preserve the moment.
The thing about Peter... he is not emotionally and spiritually
present... he was physically present
But his mind was busy thinking of ways to be useful and
efficient and noticeable...
Peter is the patron saint for those of us who can be with
our spouse and children or a group of friends, with wonderful
opportunities before us to experience God moments... but our
brains are busy thinking about all the stuff we've got to
do...the project at work, the cleaning around the
house, the car work, places we need to go, clock we need
to watch, shows we need to watch...
and thus we are not emotionally or spiritually present enough to
see the God moment for what it is...sacred.
A cloud dimmed the moment, however, before Peter could throw
anything together. Out of the cloud a voice: "This is my Son,
the Beloved; listen to him!"
(Mark 9:7).
Isn't that the basis of intimacy, of a good relationship... listen.
Don't start talking, telling them how important you are, telling
jokes to convince them you're God's gift to comedy, making profound
comments to impress them with your insight and importance... forwarding
e-mail that you didn't write to people you want to think highly of
you...
Shut up. Just listen. Be present.
God didn't say: "Get a shot of the three of them over by that
cedar tree."
Didn't say, "Be sure to capture the moment!"
Just, "Listen to him." Bummer.
Like tourists who see Paris through their viewfinders, Peter, who
wanted to keep the moment from passing, was in danger of passing the
moment.
Let's face it: We, too, are easily distracted. Our
lives are noisy.
Televisions, radios, VCRs, DVDs, quad speakers, telephones,
construction tools, computer games and crotch rockets fill our world
with incessant sound.
Hard to hear the voice of God these days.
Just as cameras can be programmed to print the date on the
film in order to remember exactly when an event occurred, Mark's
gospel tells us that Jesus took Peter, James and John up to this
mountain exactly six days after reminding them that "those who
want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life
for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel
will save it"
(Mark 8:35).
It's not a bad idea to ask ourselves, "What are we really
losing and what are we really keeping, in the big
picture?" What will it profit us to preserve our life's
history, if we forget the fundamental reason for remembering?
I want to call a halt on this memory mania.
God's advice is to listen... out beyond the honking, speeding,
screaming, headlining world...
Listen to the children, listen to life, listen for the sacred,
divine the divine.
And the big one. Listen to Jesus.
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