The Shipwrecked – Rev. Dr. Carol Kerr

This is the “Fable of the Deserted Island:” You are on a voyage of discovery. There is a storm. Your ship is wrecked; all are lost except for you. You wash up on an utterly deserted island. Though no other humans live on the island, there is plenty of food and water. But you are stuck alone on the island. Question: What would you do for the rest of your life?

Which would you pick?

1. Who would work on building a boat?
2. Try to adapt to their circumstances such as taking up shell collecting and classification, write poetry on the back of a palm leaf, sit quietly and watch the sun set?
3. Kill yourself. (Now if you think I am being negative here, when the Fable of the Deserted Island is posed to a college lecture class there are always some who come up with this option. These people think the prospect of living alone for the rest of their lives with nowhere to go and nothing to do as a fate worse than death.)
4. Shoot off some flares to catch the attention of passing ships.
5. Grab on to a plank that is floating by and hold on for your life.

The Fable of the Deserted Island is really a primer on life. It is a “get real” sort of question. After all, the planet earth is an island, spinning blue and white, alone in the universe. Some people look at that picture of the planet earth and think it is beautiful. Others look at it and exclaim, “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Not only are we alone in the universe (or at least there is millions of light years between us and whatever other life form there might be in some distant star or galaxy). There are many of us who feel utterly alone on this planet even though it is inhabited by 4 billion people. Here is a grim statistic, did you know that many more Americans are victims of suicide than homicide? Here is another grim statistic, every two weeks, on average, someone jumps from the Golden Gate Bridge, thee world’s leading suicide location.

Even though some of us do not feel alone all of the time, all of us feel alone some of the time. Most of us would pick “a” or “b” than “c.” That is most of us are the shell collectors, boat builders, sunset gazers than the bridge jumpers. There are times in all of our lives when we lift our heads and notice the circumference of the island we are on and are astonished how small it really is. These are times when we realize that “Life is short.” or wonder “What’s the point?”, or feel, “I’m stuck.” – Maybe I am shipwrecked after all.

Then there is option “d” which would be to shoot flares hoping that passing ships would notice. Our hope is not on the island. Rather our hope is in the possibility of catching the attention of something passing by.

It’s the Christmas season, why am I preaching this sermon about deserted islands and being shipwrecked? Well, Christmas season seems to be like a grand ocean liner with parties, and friends, and so many lights that it looks like a wedding cake floating on the ocean. These people have their own security systems, their credit cards, their nice homes,

In contrast, for some people Christmas is more lonely than any other time. For instance, some people come from dysfunctional homes. Getting together with the family means witnessing Dad getting drunk and more and more verbally abusive throughout the day. For others hanging the stockings means wondering where to hang, what to do with the stocking of their child who died last year. There are families divorced for the first time, who have had to split up the Christmas ornaments into two households. The husband has the star, the wife has the angel, and the kids have a tree with bare spots all over it.

Then there are people who just don’t feel very good about themselves. People who try to be “Good” but just can’t seem to do it. People where the issue has gone beyond whether they’ve been “naughty or nice” but have wandered into evil this year.

I went to a lecture by Steven Callahan who wrote the book Adrift. His boat sank off of Europe and was lost at sea floating in a life raft for 76 days. He said that ocean liners would pass within sight. But no matter how he shot off his flares they never saw him. It is hard to catch the attention of someone who is preoccupied with their own thing. These ships that passed by were on automatic pilot, steering for their destination, and not looking around. Calahan recalls the anguish he felt when he saw the ships sail off, his hope for rescue and for life, a shrinking dot on the horizon.

“a,b,c, and d” don’t seem to work that well. Which leaves that last crazy option of “e” – Grab onto a plank that is floating by and hold on for your life.

The shipwrecked have not other choice. I have discovered a wonderful show on line which is called TED. TED has experts from around the world to come and speak on their subject and pass on ideas worth spreading. Famous, accomplishes, and brilliant people come and speak on TED. One person they invited was Dr. Sunitha Krishanan who has dedicated her life to rescuing women and children from sex slavery which is a multimillion dollar global market. She described her own gang rape as a young teenager. She says that she was not so much traumatized by the event as terribly angry by the fact that no one was doing anything about it. She continued to tell gut wrenching stories about young girls even ages 3 and 4, who are raped repeatedly and sold into slavery. She is speaking in an opulent auditorium with oriental carpets on the stage and gilded statues with lavaish drapery. However, the slides she shows are of women with their throats slashes, faces beaten, and half dead from AIDS. Somewhere in the lecture she happen to mention that she herself has saved over 3,500 women and girls at which point the auditorium broke out in applause. But, looking at her facial expression I had the uneasy feeling that the applause was inappropriate. “Doesn’t it make you feel good?” the audience was saying. But, she did not smile, she simply stopped her pacing and stared back at them, saying nothing. Her expression at that moment is the expression I imagine most shipwrecked people would have on their faces who have clinged to their solitary planks and are washed ashore and have made their way to the stable in Bethlehem and kneel before the baby Jesus. It is not an expression that says, “I feel good going to church at Christmas!” For the shipwrecked are weaned from themselves and all they thought was important. The ship wrecked come to the stable seeking not to posses, not to have their self esteem built up, not for applause, or for a feel good moment. Dr. Sunitha Krishanan, did not save women who are sold into slavery, so as to gather trophies and put them on her mantel piece. The shipwreck make their way to the stable not to posses, but to be possessed by love and to serve justice. The Christian tradition has a spiritual word for these people, “the pure in heart.”

The Spanish author Jose Ortega y Gasset puts it this way:

The man with the clear head is the man who frees himself from fantasy ad looks life in the face, realized that everything in it is problematic, and feels himself lost. And this is the simple truth – that to live is to feel oneself lost. Whoever accepts this has already begun to find himself to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere because it is a question of his salvation, weill cause him to bring order to the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas: the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. He who does not feel himself lost is without remission; that is to say, he never finds himself, ver comes up against his own reality.

When the shipwrecked arrive at the staple they will see that Mary and Joseph and Jesus are ship wrecked too. After all, there was “no room in the inn.” And they were left to fend for themselves in a stable

God came down to this island of a planet not to be on an ocean cruser but to dwell with the shipwrecked. God became a shipwrecked on himself, as a babe utterly vulnerable, under millions of light years of darkness.

When the shipwrecked come to the stable they discover that it is not the deserted island that made them so alone, rather it was a deserted place inside themselves. In front of Jesus God finds this empty place and it becomes an opening for God to create something new. That is how Christ is born in us. The broken ones gaze onto the whole one, Emmanuel, who trusts them enough to let their planks become the very crèche upon which he lies. “I am so glad you came!” He seems to say.

I just thought of a final option if you found yourself on a deserted island. Option a, build a boat. Option b, make the best of it. Option c, kill yourself. Option d, send off flairs. Option e, grab onto a plank floating by. Option “f.” Make every desire is transformed into a pure and simple desire for Jesus.

The people on the ocean liner with all the lights and noise can miss it. But the one floating alone will witness….what? The northern lights washing even the vast starless spaces with color.