PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE: “THE MASTER OF ONE TRUE SENTENCE MISSES THE MASTER AND ONE TRUE SAVIOUR”
By: Ron Woodrum
One of the greatest American authors was Ernest Hemingway. He lived from 1899 to 1961. He was a Nobel Peace Prize winner and known for great novels such as The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and the Old Man and the Sea. He was a literary genius. Hemingway lived his life in a way that would be the envy of any person who had bought into the values of our modern society. He was known for his tough-guy image and globe-trotting pilgrimages to exotic and far away places. He was a big-game hunter in Africa; a Bull Fighter in Spain; and a man who could drink the best of them under the table. He was married four times and lived his life seemingly without moral restraint or conscience. He was born in Oak Park, Illinois, and spent his first 18 years in the Chicago area. He was a journalist during WWI and WWII which played a role in that Nobel Prize. He had fortune and fame. Yet on a Sunny morning in July of 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho, at his home he took his life with a shot-gun blast to the head! While he was a journalist at the Kansas City Star he learned write in a distinctively stripped-down prose style that would later characterize his works. He became known as “the master of writing one true simple declarative sentence”. When someone praised him for his artwork he responded, “From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those ou cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.” Yet toward the end of his life this is how he summarized and viewed his life: “I live in a vacuum that is as lonely as a radio tube when the batteries are dead, and there is no current to plug into”.
Not only does Hemingway stand as a symbol of the bankruptcy of a self-managed life, but he also models for us another reality that very few know about. Ernest Hemingway grew up in a solid Evangelical Christian home in Oak Park, Illinois. Both sets of his grandparents were devoted Christians. His paternal grandparents were both graduates of Wheaton College, an evangelical Christian College in Wheaton, Illinois. They served as missionaries, and were very close friends with D.L. Moody. His father’s brother was a medical missionary to China, something his father, who was a physician in Chicago, always felt called to do, but never was able to follow through on it! Mariam Mandel, in her book Death In The Afternoon, tells about how young Ernest grew up in the Church. His mother led a choir, in which he and his two sisters sang. She said of Ernest, he was monotone, and did not have a beautiful voice like his sisters Marcellene and Ursula. She also wrote about how after the age of 18 he left his family, abandoning his family faith, for all the big wide world had to offer a young man, in the early years of the new 20th century! He abandoned the Midwest for Paris; Bull-fighting in Spain; Game-Hunting in Africa; Fishing in Key West, Fla. and Havana Cuba. She also said that although he rejected their faith, he still retained the need to believe in something-horse chestnuts, rabbits feet, luck, and even turned to Catholic Dogma. But his father, who also commited suicide, battled psychological problems of depression, and it must have been in the DNA of Ernest as well. As a young man Hemingway had the opportunity to follow the Jesus he had been introduced to an entirely different conclusion. But his youthful enthusiasm for Christ was soon soured by the lure of the lesser challenges. He walked away from the path of discipleship. The point of this perspective is not to focus on Hemingway’s life-but yours and mine. We must make sure that the lure of the lesser loyalties do not cause us to stray from the path of following the one true Master and Saviour. Authentic Christianity is composed on non-negotiated followers who are progressively moving toward Christ and who understand all of life and all of this world in the context of His teaching and His truth. If we aren’t cultivating a living, vital relationship with Jesus Christ, then we, too, can respond as Hemingway did when either life’s questions are agonizingly unanswerable or when our inner impulses are too seductive for us to resist. Religion, rituals, and rules, as a point of allegience, is never enough to keep us unflinchingly loyal. Never think that we too cannot fall to the lure of the lesser loyalty! Today’s message is about-A LEADER GREAT ENOUGH TO FOLLOW. It will deal with the ingredients of what that following consists of.