Sermons for the Month
Summit Fever
DATE: May 2, 1999
SERVICE: Easter V
TEXT: 1 Peter 2:2-10"To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN Right now, the Khumbu Glacier on the southwest face of Mount Everest in Nepal is teeming with activity. It's the site of the Everest Base Camp at 17,500 feet, and expeditions from all over the world have gathered to make an assault on the world's highest piece of real estate. It's climbing season. This is the month when, if the summit of Everest is going to reached, it needs to be done now. Although in Nepal it is now dark, in the very early hours of the morning, still you can be certain that at this precise moment, climbers are stirring from their tents at Camp One, 19,500 feet; Camp Two, 21,300 feet; Camp Three, 24,000 feet; or Camp Four at 26,000 feet. A typical attempt on the summit will begin around midnight from Camp Four. Even now, climbers are getting into several layers of underclothing, overshirts and windproof and goose-down jackets, slapping on crampons with two-inch steel spikes on the soles and toes, packing their gear, stowing bottled gas, and grabbing an ice axe, climbing rope, caribiners, pitons, hammers and related items. It is also the third anniversary of the most disastrous climbing season on record. On May 10-11, 1996, a fast-moving storm caught climbers who had pushed for the summit against every convention of mountaineering wisdom. Caught in that storm they were unable to make it down to safety. When the climbing season was over, Andy Harris, Doug Hansen, Rob Hall, Yasuko Namba, Scott Fischer, Ngawang Topche Sherpa, Chen Yu-Nan, Bruce Herrod and Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa had perished on the mountain. Ironnically, that season of climbing has been captured by the IMAX camera crew, and was also recorded by Jon Krakauer in his riveting, best-selling book, Into Thin Air, a personal account of the Mount Everest disaster of 1996, also available at the video story. Last year Linda and I saw the IMAX version at the Lake Lakes Science Center in Cleveland last year. Krakauer was part of the guided ascent of the mountain that turned tragic when a rogue storm blew in without warning while several teams were still high on the peak. Some made it to the top, but only because they pushed on past the turnaround deadline of 2 p.m. The rule was if the summit was not reached by then, the climbers were supposed to turn around no matter where they were and descend back to camp. Yet, inexplicably, some of the climbers decided to push on to the summit, not arriving until as late as 4:30 p.m., where they were hit by 70-knot winds and blinding snow on their descent. A freezing Krakauer, who had reached the summit before the deadline, collapsed in his tent, hallucinating from exhaustion and hypoxia, but he turned out to be one of the lucky ones - when the storm passed, five of his fellow climbers would be dead, and the sixth so horribly frostbitten that his right hand would have to be amputated. "Later," writes Krakauer, "people would ask why, if the weather had begun to deteriorate, why had climbers on the upper mountain not heeded the signs? Why did veteran Himalayan guides keep moving upward, ushering a gaggle of relatively inexperienced amateurs - each of whom had paid as much as $65,000 to be taken safely up Everest - into an apparent death trap?" Krakauer goes on to say that "over the previous month, Rob [Rob Hall, leader of Krakauer's expedition] had lectured us repeatedly about the importance of having a predetermined turnaround time on our summit day - in our case it would probably be 1 p.m. or 2 p.m. at the very latest - and abiding by it no matter how close we were to the top. 'With enough determination, any bloody idiot can get up this hill,' Hall observed. 'The trick is to get back down alive.'" (Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air [New York: Anchor Books, 1997], 5, 190). Ironically, and tragically, Hall apparently broke his own rules and paid the ultimate price. Risk it all! Go for the gusto! Snatch it with authority! And why? Because it's there! And if I go for it then I know that I'm alive. I know that I am OK. I know I am acceptable. That's the answer; that's the rationale. No need to pause, nor reflection. I need no distance of perspective nor depth of analysis. I need neither projection nor introspection. It's there - I climbed it. Been there, done that. Risked it all. Went for the gusto - grabbed it and took home the trophy, brought home the bacon. That is the attitude of so much of our society today. Get it while you can. Live so powerfully in the moment that daring becomes the measure of depth, and conquering provides the adjustment of character. "You only go around once in life, and therefore you'd better go for all the gusto you can." That's the philosophy; that's the prospect. Granted the Mount Everest climbers were much more cautious. Yet, even with all the planning and preparation, the years of experience climbing in super high-altitude conditions, even these mountaineers were not immune to summit fever. So much of the challenge of life today comes to us in terms of immediacy. Live for the day. Do it now! What a story we can tell when we get back home. Use it or lose it. Most of us are not as crazy at those mountain climbers. But we still have our own moments of summit fever. Get the sale. Make the deal. Do one more thing. Get it all done by six. Live for the moment. And yet the Scriptures teach something very different. The Bible says live for eternity, "All flesh is like grass, and all its glory like the flower. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord endures forever" (1 Peter 1:24-25). Now this is not a sermon on caution. On the other hand, how tempted we are to live for the present glory and miss the promise of eternity. This temptation is real because of our frailty, our insecurity, our lack of self-worth, or self-esteem. Most if not all of us wonder whether we are measuring up if not to God's standards, then to our boss's, our spouses, our friends, even our kids. Peter knows, and Peter's God knows, our insecurities dictate much of what we do. So to compensate we try to paint noble pictures of ourselves with deeds of derring-do masquerading as ordinary challenges of life. We want others to believe the press clippings of our self-projection that tell the tales of social conquest and personal achievement. And so we relive our daydreams as we retell stories of scoring the winning touchdown, making the final shot, emerging as superwoman or being interviewed as the latest Horatio Alger, success stories that project us as secure, victorious and self-sufficient. Our stories of meeting and overcoming the mountain before us assure us we are alive and we have won. But how treacherous the ground upon which we stand when we plant our flag in triumph over a land that is still shifting under our feet. So Peter writes. Peter pleads. The Spirit sighs, the Bible breathes: "Beloved, I urge you as aliens and exiles to abstain from the desires of the flesh that wage war against the soul" (2:11). Our text declares that our basic tendencies toward fulfilling our personal privileges - our personal passions to go for the present power and grab for the glorious gusto - are the fever, the summit fever of a disease raging against our soul, our inner being, the essential you. "To go for it because its there" is not enough to give our lives meaning; indeed it's a lie of the highest order and sin of the first magnitude. If we climb the mountains before us, believing that the satisfaction, even the joy comes in the triumph itself, we will always discover that the conquest only breeds the desire for more. Winning for the moment plays into a game of never-ending challenges that never let us rest. How can we rest? We have willingly infected ourselves with summit fever of the soul. More. Higher. Better. Faster. Bigger. This fever never lets up. It afflicts us in the streets and in the suites. We can catch it in condos and in ghettos. It is a symptom of the rich and the poor, male and female, city and suburb, town and country, farm and factory, office and arena, boardroom and classroom. • You've seen it in the manager who is so wed to his work that he neglects his family. You know many retired workaholics who have lamented, "I wish I'd spent more time with my family." You know few if any who say, "I wish I'd spent more time at work." • You've seen it in the ministers who are so driven to please everybody, often as a way of feeling good about themselves, that they burn themselves out and pastor on automatic pilot. • You've seen it in the woman who has allowed society to trick her into thinking her life is incomplete, not without Christ, but without a man ("When are you going to get married?" says the well-meaning church member) and rushes to fulfill herself through an unsatisfying relationship. • You've seen it through the young man who believes his manhood is quantified in his sperm count, and "because she's there" referring to the female before him. And the whole time - they miss it. You miss it, we miss it. The quest, the challenge, the mountain, represents a challenge to my soul which may destroy me. Sill I rush to grab the gusto, and it kills me - it destroys me. Why? Because I no longer recognize the symptoms of my diminished capacity to think and reason. I don't see the consequence. In grabbing the thing immediately before me, I succumb to the temptation to believe the Polaroid. That's right - the Polaroid. I've got the Polaroid, but God's got the video. I have the flash picture, but God has the big picture. My pause button only gives me the instant - God has the whole movie, from intro to The End, from "In the beginning," to "Maranatha." There is a consequence - there is a price. How tempting it is to abandon spiritual principles for a momentary desire, only to find ourselves dying on the way down. "Because it's there" is never enough of a reason to live. "Because He lives" is always the reason to live. As we approach the season of the Holy Spirit, we remember that it is not we who go for the gusto, but that in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, it is the Gusto who comes after us and possesses us. We do not seek the ultimate, but the Ultimate seeks us. We do not pursue the summit, but the Summit pursues us. We do not look to the conquest for our victory, but the Conqueror gives the victory to us. It is God - Father, Son and Holy Gusto - who secures our identity and conquers our mountains. Not "Because it's there" but "Because He lives." He is risen. (He is risen indeed!) AMEN