March 13, 2016 Fiddler: Funambulism 101 Rev. Dr. John Ross Bible Reference: Selected Passages (Fiddler on the Roof cast sings Sabbath Song.) Sermon: A Fiddler on the Roof. Sounds Crazy, No? But here in our little village of Anatevka, you might say that every one of us is a fiddler on the roof, trying to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking his neck. It isn t easy, and how do we keep our balance? We have come to learn over the last five weeks that Fiddler on the Roof as a stage show is a microcosm of life. We have come to learn over these past five weeks that Anatevka, as a fictional little village in the early years of the twentieth century, encompasses many of the same struggles we know in our communities now. We have come to learn over these past weeks that Tevye, Golda, their five daughters, their friends, their neighbors, even the rabbi as characters represent each and every one of us, just trying to keep our balance in life. You might say that every one of us is a fiddler on the roof, and you would be correct. Let us pray: Gracious God, be with us in these few moments of contemplation as we look not only to the words that we have heard from scripture but as we look upon our own lives. Amen. How many of you know the name Philippe Petit? Show of hands. (A few hands go up.) Immediately, Philippe Petit. How many, not very many. Come on, get the hands up. Okay, all right. Didn t look like very many. So, let me help you. Okay, Sven (pointing to audience), you got it? Let me see if I can help you. Philippe Petit may be one of the most famous funambulists ever. Does that help you? If you don t know what a funambulist is, it doesn t help you at all. Who knows what a funambulist is? (Raises hand.) Oh, that doesn t count. I know you looked it up because you made the bulletin. A funambulist is a tight rope walker. So, funambulism is the practice and experience of walking tight ropes, where ever they may be. Now, Philippe Petit on August 7, 1974, after months of planning and scheming and calculating and practicing, along with his crew, spanned the 200 feet between the two twin towers of the world trade center, and for 45 minutes, Philippe Petit held captive the attention of thousands of onlookers from below and from countless windows of those buildings. And for 45 minutes, he walked back and forth, eight times, that tight wire between those sky scrapers, taking times to kneel down on one knee. One time, even laying flat on the wire, conversing with gulls was one of the reports that came, and taunting the police that were waiting for him on either end of the wire. A remarkable day, really, and just this past fall, Robert Zemeckis released a move about it. It was called, The Walk. True events in history. But, Philippe Petit was a funambulist for show and as a stunt, but for Jesus, for Tevye and for the rest of us, walking a tight rope is no stunt. It s what we call life. We all live on a tight rope that we call life. In fact, you might say every one of us is a funambulist on the roof, and Sabbath is how we keep our balance. Sabbath by definition is the strict observance of a day of rest on the seventh day of the week from sunset Friday night to Sunset Saturday evening. Straight out of the book of Exodus, the fourth commandment of the Big Ten, it says, Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. Remember the Sabbath, as if we might forget to do it. Perhaps the greatest
tradition for Tevye and his fictional friends in Anatevka. Certainly the greatest tradition in the Jewish faith for good reason. You know that it s been said that more than the Jewish people have kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept the Jews. But, it s just as important for us, just as important within any religious tradition and within any healthy life. Even though we spent the entire season of lent last year on this single topic, there s no way we could look at the stage show Fiddler on the Roof and not take time on Sabbath and particularly this Sabbath Prayer that you just heard sung out to you. We couldn t do Fiddler without remembering the Sabbath. So, I just have two words for you today, two words of encouragement, words that come straight out of the song you just heard. First, the opening line of the prayer that says, May the Lord protect and defend you, and then the closing line of that Sabbath prayer that asks God to favor us with happiness and peace. What does it mean for us to be protected and defended, and what does it mean for us to seek happiness and peace, and what does any of that have to do with Sabbath? Well first - protect and defend. For a fiddler on a roof or a funambulist on a wire, protection and defense means to keep your balance. For anything other than that is certain death and certain destruction. Either you fall off the wire or you fall off the roof. You fall out of synch with your life. You fall out of your home. You fall out of your family. There are countless ways in which we can loose our balance. So, to be protected and to be defended and to pray for protection and defense is a prayer for balance. Now in these modern, recent days, we can t talk about balance in life without remembering the name of this one guy, Nigel Marsh. Nigel Marsh was a successful career man by any measure. At a very young age, he had risen in the ranks in several different companies. By the age of 40, he realized that none of it meant anything to him. His life was entirely out of balance. He was estranged from his kids who were still very young, hardly knew his wife, and he named his first book, after taking 10 years off to study this whole thing of balance, he named his first book Fat, Forty and Fired. His second book, with a better title, was Fit, Fifty and Fired Up. His third book was Overworked and Underlaid, but we re not going to deal with that one today. What Nigel Marsh did is he took seriously the words of St. Benedict from the fifth century. These were St. Benedict s words of encouragement to his followers. He said, I d like all of you to pause for a moment, you wretched weaklings, and take stock of your miserable existence. That d be a good sermon, wouldn t it? You wretched weaklings! Take stock in your miserable existence. I mean, but that s kind of what we have to do to get serious about balance in our lives. And that s the first thing that Nigel Marsh says we need to do. We need to take it seriously. We need to have an honest discussion about out lives and our culture and about the ways in which we measure success and the things that we pursue every day of our lives. He s the one that says, We work hard at jobs we hate to afford things we don t need to impress people we don t like. Does that just about sum it up? But at a serious level - and he says we need to take it seriously, - he says that most careers are fundamentally incompatible with a healthy work-life balance. And that s not to just take the retired people or the student side of the equation. We re all working toward world life-balance the real world. We all have to work. We all have to go to school. We all will retire and wrestle with what do I do with eight hours a day? We all have to balance that with what s healthy inside ourselves. Nigel Marsh would say that, you know, we don t take it seriously when all we do is declare Friday as casual day in the office. That doesn t really get to the heart of the matter.
In one of the passages that was read out, Jesus goes to Nazareth, where he was brought up, where he went to the synagogue for Sabbath, it says, as was his custom. To take this idea of Sabbath and of balance seriously, it has to be a custom. It has to be a regular part of who we are and what we do. Otherwise, we are not taking it seriously. Another thing that Marsh says is that it s totally up to us. Neither the massive corporations nor the little private small businesses that we own are going to care about our lives. No one is going to care about our lives for us. It is not their job. It s our job. It s up to us. The government s not to get this done for us. If we decide that balance matters and that Sabbath is one way to keep that balance, if we don t design our lives, some body else will design it for us, and then we may not like it, and then we don t get to complain about it. There s nothing worse than people that complain about things that they have chosen or created for themselves. Nothing less attractive than that in all the world. So, if you don t like the design of your life, do something about it, because at the end of the day, it is up to us, as it was with Jesus. Time and time again in scripture, when he goes away, when he takes that break, when he goes up into the mountain, he s choosing to do that. And he s setting an example for those around him. Another thing that Marsh encourages us to do on this idea of balance is to elongate the window within which we see and judge our balance. Okay? Here s the best way to understand what I m talking about in this case. Think in your head about the perfect day in your life. What would it look like? Start to imagine what that would be. For today, it would have been to sleep in for another hour. That s where today would have started as a perfect day. But you re here. So, hang in there. What would a perfect day look like? Get a couple of those things at least in your mind about what the perfect day would look like. Now even incomplete and sketchy, that perfect day, how many times does that ever happen? Let s face it. It never happens. There s no such thing as a perfect day. So, we gotta look at a longer period of time to seek and judge our balance. One day is too short, but waiting until we retire is too long. I think both in the creation story and in Jesus ministry, we see that each day and each week, and even into each month and each quarter and each year, each of those segments should contain all that we need for healthy, balanced living. Wayne Muller put it this way. He said, when we breathe, we do not stop inhaling because we have taken all the oxygen we will ever need but because we have all the oxygen we need for this breath. Then we can exhale, release the carbon dioxide and make room for more oxygen. Sabbath, he says, like the breath, allows us to imagine we have done enough this day. We have to elongate that window in which we see and judge our balance. Protect and defend is a prayer for balance. Take it seriously. Remember it s up to you. Don t try to get it all done in one day. That s the opening prayer. Now the closing prayer, the closing line is a prayer they sang it out, Favor us, O Lord, with happiness and peace. Are there two things that we all yearn for more than those? Happiness and peace. I read up on an article this week about a study that Harvard has done that asked the question what keeps us healthy and happy, basically the same question as the prayer from the Sabbath prayer. Now what s remarkable about the study is that it s been going on for 75 years. Have any of you heard about this? It s an amazing study. 75 years they ve been studying 724 men. It started out with 724 men that they chose in the 1930 s from
among teen age boys, some of which were enrolled at Harvard and some of which were coming out of the poorest of the poor neighborhoods of Boston, and they started tracking them 75 year ago. The study is still happening. It s on its fourth director, and there s only about 60 of the original 724 men are still alive, and they re all in their mid-90 s. They ve had 2,000 children plus, and they began to study their wives along the way as well so that it would be a complete sort of a study, and these men went on to be factory workers, lawyers, doctors, one of them even the President of the United States. They experienced the full gamut of life all to ask and answer the question, What truly makes us healthy and happy? We don t have to look back anymore and guess about what makes us happy and healthy. We have a long run of scientific research that s based not only on questions and answers, but on brain scans, blood tests, every thing you can imagine, and it all points in one place, one direction. What keeps us healthy and happy is good relationships period, end of study, end of finding. Physically, emotionally, spiritually, all of our health and happiness and longevity comes from that one single thing good, resolved relationships. The Sabbath prayer for happiness and peace is a prayer for relationships, the kind of relationships we witness through Tevye and Golda and their daughters and the whole community of Anatevka, but we know that that s just fiction. When we look to our own lives we ask questions like of our millennials right now, a recent survey showed that 80 percent of millennials, the number one thing that 80 percent of them want to have is a lot of money. The second thing, like 50 percent, the second thing of millennials, they want to become famous. Now before you re too quick to judge our current young people, do you know what the answer to the same question was in the mid 1930 s when they started this survey? Same answers. The guys back then wanted to make a lot of money, and they wanted to be famous. So, this thing of being distracted by the wrong thing is nothing new, and it doesn t belong to some generation that we think is just greedy and lazy. It s not fair for our young people to judge them in that way. We all miss the mark on this relationship thing, in part because it s hard work and in part because it takes time. In part because we have to make ourselves vulnerable to really to there and grow there. Anatevka s Sabbath prayer for happiness, healthiness and peace makes relationships a priority that happens in the context of Sabbath. Jesus knew this as well. Jesus invested himself in 12 people, his disciples. The rest of them, you heard Allen with the introduction to scripture, the rest of the time Jesus was pushing people away to get his own time, but he invested himself deeply in meaningful, fulfilling relationships, and even when they failed him, he stuck with them. And right here at Wayzata Community Church, we have been given a golden opportunity to build and experience meaningful, resolved relationships that advance the good news of God s love and grace. I was in tears before the service even started this morning. (Long pause.) Listening to Ellie (Sanford) sing and then watching the cherubs, realizing that those little cherubs are going to be up there singing like Ellie was, like tomorrow, and I love the fact that the number one goal of all of the children in youth ministry is relationships. It s a relational ministry. That s why we get the best and the brightest of the adults in the church to commit to a year or four years or even more to build relationships with these kids, cause that s what s going to matter. In the end of their days, they re not going to remember what Bible verses they memorized. They ll remember the people that were with them when they struggled through the worst that life could bring them. Relationships it s what it s all about. It s Sabbath, a time apart from work, a time apart from the business that gives us a chance to build relationships that matter, that endure and that
are resolved. Wayzata Community Church. Community is more than just our middle name. It s our call. And it s our response to the great command to love God, to love neighbor and love yourself. Tevye was right when he said every one of us is a fiddler on the roof. Every one of us is a funambulist on the roof because we all live life on the high wire. Sabbath is how we stay on the high wire of life, protected and preserved by balance, where happiness and health is found in relationship. So, let me close by reminding you of those simple terms. Let us pray: May the Lord protect and defend you. May he always shield you from shame. May you come to be a shining name. May the Lord protect and defend you. May the Lord preserve you from pain. Favor us, O Lord, with happiness and peace. Oh, hear our Sabbath prayer. Amen.