Beyond the Mirage--November 11, 2022
"But strive for the greater gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way." [1 Corinthians 12:31]
So, first a spoiler alert or two [consider yourself warned]: The Maltese Falcon turns out to have been a fake. "Rosebud" was just a child's sled and gets burned with the trash before anyone can find out its meaning for Charles Kane. The Monty Python boys, all dressed up in their knightly Arthurian garb, never find the Holy Grail. And nobody ever learns what's causing the mysterious glow from the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. The main characters in all of those movies might spend all their energy and passion trying to find before the credits roll, but in the end, none of them turn out to have been worth all the fuss.
That's because every last one of those fictional objects is a MacGuffin--that is, they are objects that characters in a story strive after to move a plot forward in a story, but which don't really matter in the end. Sam Spade could have just as easily been tracking down a statue of a Burmese Stork or a Tibetan Owl, and the story would have played out identically. "Rosebud" could have turned out to be the name of Orson Welles' childhood puppy, and the Monty Python troupe could have all been hunting for spam and eggs rather than the Holy Grail, and that movie would have worked the exact same way. It's a stock storytelling device to have an elusive object that everybody's after in the movies, and it's a fine way to move a plot forward, sure. But in the end, the objects themselves are illusions that disappear in a puff of smoke--they are, as Bogey famously said about the Maltese Falcon, "the stuff that dreams are made of." But dreams are less than a mist--they vanish into thin air because there's nothing really "there" to them. You can spend a lifetime on a quest striving after a MacGuffin, only to find you were seeing a mirage. That's the nature of MacGuffins.
And of course, in real life, we like to imagine we are leading much more meaningful and purposeful lives than those kinds of empty quests in the movies. We "know better" than all those characters on the silver screen than to strive and chase after lost treasures and mythical objects, right? And yet... we do seem awfully tempted to spend our lives on the more respectable MacGuffins of the twenty-first century. We go chasing after ambiguous things like "success" or "prosperity" or "social-media influencer status" or "security" or "the American dream" or... "enough". And they either always seem just out of reach, or when we grasp them they turn out not to be what we had hoped for. But we keep striving and seeking them, I suspect, because deep down we feel such insecurity that we think we need to prove our worth to the world by reaching at least some of those supposedly worthy goals. We just can't admit to anybody that we've been wasting our lives chasing mirages.
There's a spiritual equivalent to all of that MacGuffin hunting in the name of acquiring the "best" and "greatest" spiritual treasures. Paul has been talking about it here in this chapter--we so easily turn our God-given gifts of the Spirit into objects to be sought and strived after, as though we were in a competition to get the most or have the best. And isn't that just like us? God gives an abundance of good gifts, talents, abilities, and skills among us, for the common good, and we end up sizing up the gifts we think are most important and go angling a way to get the "good" ones. And we do it, thinking that we are pleasing God because the things we are after are "spiritual." Sometimes folks pour their energy into getting power and authority--either in the Christian community, or using their faith as a stepping stone to higher prominence in the wider world. Sometimes people strive after roles of influence, or positions that get applause from others. Sometimes we fool ourselves into thinking we can impress God [as if we needed to] by our spiritual disciplines and moral achievements. But here's a secret, and something of a spoiler alert: it's all just the same old MacGuffin quest dressed up in its Sunday best.
Paul's point here in this verse is that for all the talk of spiritual gifts that God has given to each of us, those gifts themselves aren't meant to give us our worth. We aren't ranked by the gifts we have, and we can't do anything to trade with someone else for a gift that they have. So spending our energy chasing after any MacGuffins, whether the ones we use to play church with, or the ones the wider world tells us to strive after, is waste of time and energy.
So what are we to do then? If I shouldn't spend my life striving after what the market or the TV or my social media tells me I should want, and if I shouldn't strive for the things that I think will make me a spiritual superhero, what should I do with my life? Paul has an answer for that, too. He is about to point us toward a "still more excellent way." And if you know this passage from First Corinthians, you already know [spoiler alert] that it is love. Paul is calling us to leave behind not just our MacGuffins of success or popularity, but also to leave behind the entire notion that life is a quest where there's some "other" thing we are supposed to be seeking after. Rather, we are made most fully alive, right where we are with what we have, when we walk the way of Love, which is always the way of Jesus.
And as we'll see in the coming days, love really is a whole way of life--it's not about striving for something else we think will "fix" all our problems or give us success on the world's terms. It's about reorienting the way our lives work, so that they are no longer built around questions like, "How do I reach the level of success or influence that I want?" but rather, "How can I love more fully and deeply in this moment, and participate in Christ's joyful life by doing that?" That's the "more excellent way." And it really does involve that we stop "striving" for lesser things, because it turns out the things that are worth striving for aren't "out there" beyond our grasp, but right at hand in the chances in ordinary ways, right here and now, to love.
Today's a day to be done chasing after prizes, and instead to turn toward the people God has placed around you and in your life, and to dare to love.
That seems a good way to spend a day... or a lifetime.
Lord God, lead us on your still more excellent way. Lead us more fully into love.
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