12.16.07 What is the Magic of the First Time
WESTMINSTER PULPIT
The Rev. Dr. David Thompson
December 16, 2007 “What is the Magic of the First Time?”
Text: The One sitting on the throne spoke and said: Behold I make all things new…Revelation 21:
I can remember as a boy in England how excited I got at Christmas. Christmas Eve I always got so excited that I got an asthma attack. Why? Because Father Christmas was going to come. It was truly magical. I would wake up and there on my bed would be a stocking crammed with things to eat and to play with. It was there by magic. I remember the Christmas Santa brought me a small telescope which I played with for hours and always kept close to hand in case, in case I suddenly needed to see better…Did you have a magical childhood?
Why is the first kiss so often fondly remembered? Why are so many of the first times in our life so beautiful that we want to recreate them again and again? Can we recreate the past? When we try to recreate the past beautiful experience will we ever find that beauty of the first time again?
Deepak Chopra in his Book of Secrets says: “Do you remember the first time you tasted ice cream? If not, look at a very young child encountering and ice cream cone. The look on the child’s face tells you that she is lost in pure delight. But the second ice cream cone, although a child may beg and plead for it, is slightly less wonderful than the first. Each repetition pales by degrees because, when you return to what you already know, it can’t be experienced for the first time.”
What is the magic of the first time? Is it curiosity? Is it wonder? Is it being fully aware on the present because we are interested? Is it fantasy? Is it the anticipation? Is that why we try to duplicate the feeling and is it the loss of some of these elements that make the magic pale with each repetition?
I was talking to a woman in the supermarket who wished me a Merry Christmas. She said, “It’s the children who make Christmas special. We do it all for them!” I wondered after she walked away if she was suffering from the loss of the first time magic. Do you feel a little jaded around Christmas? Perhaps you have no one around at Christmas and the celebration of Christmas is a bit over the top, too commercial and the first time experience, when it was good, is now a long time ago and you can’t get back there even if you wanted to.
But then there is the nasty experience of the first time as well. Garry described to me this week his first time experience of going to war. He said it was absolutely terrifying. He was going to a place where people wanted to kill him—NOT a pleasant time. So isn’t it perhaps good that we have difficulty duplicatiing some first times? What is going on with us and the first time?
The Bible can help us a lot here. There is a great text often used as a call to worship: “This is the day that the Lord hath made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.” Each second, each minute, each hour, each day is in fact new. The second, the minute, the hour, the day has not happened before. That is a good thing or we would be dead! It also shows up the tricks we play with ourselves with the calendar. Yes there was a first Christmas. Yes we can try to recreate it. But the past is gone from us. We can’t actually get back there.
I used to love to drive old cars. I had a 1950 Ford convertible and when I was in it I was back in the 1950’s, back in the memories. All inside the car it was the same, but the world outside was not the 1950’s. It’s just a little like that at Christmas because in our heads are many Christmases, some good, some bad, some magical and some with heartbreak. I guess we can choose which to conjure up and I guess if you are like me you would prefer to remember the good ones and perhaps a first time in those good times.
I was alone in England once and very poor. It was Christmas and I was walking to St. Paul’s Cathedral. As I went up Fleet Street the bells of St. Paul’s began to peal and drew me inexorably with an excitement that I had never felt, up the hill to St. Paul’s for a performance of Handel’s Messiah. The whole experience was breathtakingly beautiful as the sound rolled around that magnificent acoustic. I thought I was in heaven. Can I duplicate that again? Maybe to some degree, but most likely not. Does that mean that I shouldn’t try because it is the second time? Isn’t ice cream good the second time?
I guess the trap comes when we want so hard to get back to the first time that we close out the present and refuse to listen to new ideas. This happens a lot in churches when the seven last words of the church are we have always done it this way and we lose flexibility when someone comes along with a new idea. Take a good look at our Christmas tree this year. It was Martin Luther the Reformer who introduced the Christmas tree. He put candles on it, and they still do this sometimes in Germany even though it is as dangerous today as it was then. At Westminster we always used to get a real tree for Christmas. It was a tradition. We always decorated it with the same decorations every year. But time and priorities change. We now have a synthetic tree with lights on in that are not as dangerous as candles used to be. And this year there is a first time for us. After one of our members returned from New York, she gave us a card from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was a Christmas tree with a crèche below it. Now this first time is bringing together two Christmas symbols – the tree and the crèche and all up the tree are angels and on the top is an archangel and above her a star. This is a first time and it is beautiful.
Christmas Eve services are like this. We always want to celebrate Christmas Eve and let me tell you we all have very definite opinions about how to celebrate Christmas in church! This year’s service at 7 pm will begin, we hope, with a cello solo from Yom Kippur the Great Kol Nidrei. It is a piece full of a great passionate longing to be at one with God. At the end of the Scripture readings we will finish this year with Isaiah the prophet’s vision for the world. Much of the service will be retained because we expect it and look forward to it. That is all good and as it should be. But it will also contain a planned first time balance.
Deepack Chopra points out something wonderful that has only recently come out of new medical science. It is the phenomena of apoptosis or programmed cell death. He says that, although we don’t realize it, all of us are dying every day right on schedule in order to remain alive. The cell carefully reverses the birth process: it shrinks; it destroys its basic proteins, and then goes on to dismantle its DNA. He says that, when you read this graphic account of a cell sacrificing itself so methodically, you can’t help being touched. Yet the mystical part is still to come. Apoptosis isn’t a way to get rid of sick or old cells, as you might suppose. The process gave us birth. As embryos in the womb, each of us passed through primitive stages of development when we had tadpole tails, fishlike gills, webbing between our fingers, and most surprisingly too many brain cells. Apoptosis took care of these unwanted vestiges – in the case of the brain, a newborn baby forms proper neural connections by removing the excess brain tissue we were all born with. Apoptosis does not end in the womb however. Our bodies continue to thrive on death. Whenever any cell detects that its DNA is damaged or defective, it knows that the body will suffer if this defect is passed on. Fortunately every cell carries a poison gene known as p53 that can be activated to make itself die. Chopra says, “Death cannot be our enemy if we have depended upon it from the womb.”
He says, “Consider the following irony. As it turns out the body is capable of taking a vacation from death by producing cells that decide to live forever. These cells don’t trigger p53 when they detect defects in their own DNA. By refusing to issue their own death warrants these cells divide relentlessly and invasively. Cancer, the most feared of diseases, is the body’s vacation from death, while programmed death is its ticket to life. . . The mystical notion of dying every day, as St. Paul used to talk about, turns out to be the body’s most concrete fact.”
Now for the thunderclap of truth from Deepack and it is all about the relationship between death and the first time, and the little girl with the ice cream cone. He says that the bargain we made with the first time we made with our ego, and it is this: “To keep I, me, and mine going on the same habitual tracks was a bad bargain – we have chosen the opposite of life which is death.”
So some truth: There is the magic of the first time. But trying to replicate that first time in every detail can lead us to neurosis, for in fact every day is new. As the Scripture says of Jesus: Behold I make all things new. To try to replicate the first time is to try to live in the past in the present which is simply not do-able.
Second truth! “This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it!” Today, thank God, is a brand new day, full of possibilities, and FIRST TIME POSSIBILITIES!!!
Now to the words of the historical Jesus that tell us how to solve the problems that are before us – of nostalgia, of longing for the first time and of living in the present moment. In a very strange reference Jesus says, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the Kingdom of Heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure things new and old.”
This happens to be a major answer to life. The first time is the new and, when we try to replicate it, it is the second time and has lost some magic. The solution is to seek both the new and the old as a way of living in the present moment. When we get stuck in the past as many of us are in some way or another, particularly at Christmas, the answer is to bring out the treasures of the old and new treasures! Did you lose the love of your life and the wonderful Christmases you had together with your family or friends, and you are in mourning every Christmas seeking that first time again and failing?
How did you have that first time that was so memorable? You risked the new experience and were blown away.
“Every scribe who has been trained for the Kingdom is like a householder who brings out of his treasure things old and new.” Last year’s harvest produced seed. But the seed has to be planted in new soil, the old and the new together. Bring out old wine in old bottles and new wine in new bottles. Keep them together, for the old wine is good but not forever . . . and the new wine ages and gets better because it is becoming the old wine. So as we age we can get better if we recognize that the process of life and death that gave us birth also give us ongoing life.
Then the one sitting on the throne spoke and said: Behold I make all things new. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.
Do you want to have a joy filled Christmas? Bring out treasures from your storehouse of things old and new. In the new you will have the possibility of that memorable first time! In the old, the celebration of the memories of that old first time gets strangely blended into the present moment and forms another very first time in the dance of life!
“It is the “not yet” in the now, the taste of the fruit that does not yet exist that hangs the blossom on the bough.”
But there is more. This is the season of the year when we celebrate the birth of the One who in himself is the first and the last.
Out of his great heart there flow treasures both old and new. Do you know Him? To know the Alpha and Omega is to fall in love in a perpetual first time.
Thanks be to God.
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