Sermon for
Year C

April 22, 2007

Easter III

The Rev’d Lloyd Prator
St. John’s in the Village
New York City

Patricia Highsmith wrote a novel in 1950, which was later produced as a film, Strangers on a Train , directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and written by Ms. Highsmith and Raymond Chandler. The novel tells the story of a young man named Guy Haines, whose personal and professional life are on the verge of great success. But he has a problem, an unwanted wife, Miriam, who vacillates about divorce. Guy meets a stranger on a train, a psychopath named Bruno who has a father he would like killed. Bruno proposes that each man kill the others unwanted person, thus increase the chance of getting away with the murder because motive would be obscured and alibis could be arranged in advance. The book is different from the film. In the book, both murders are carried off: Bruno kills Guy's unwanted wife, Guy dispatches Bruno's troublesome father. Being a psychopath, Bruno is untroubled by having strangled Guy's wife. But being a somewhat more morally sensitive person, Guy is destroyed by his guilt.

As his personality disintegrates, he comes to increasing desperation and despair about what he has done. He muses in these words:

" I have no great respect for the law, he remembered he had said to Peter Wriggs in Metcalf two years ago. Why should he have respect for a statute that called him and Miriam man and wife? "I have no great respect for the Church", he had said, sophomorishly to Peter at fifteen. Then, of course, he had meant the Metcalf Baptists. At seventeen he had discovered God by himself. He had discovered God through his own awaking talents, and through a sense of unity of all the arts, and then of nature, finally of science -- of all the creating and ordering forces in the world. He believed he could not have done his work without a belief in God. And where had his belief been when he murdered? He had forsaken God, not God him. It seemed to him that no human being had ever borne or had needed to bear, so much guilt as he, and that he could not have borne it and lived unless his spirit was dead already and what existed of himself now only a husk." (Page 178-9, Strangers on a Train , W. W. Norton, 1950).

What had existed of him now was only a husk. A husk is an empty shell, with the edible clam or oyster or scallop inside reduced to an inedible, decaying corpse. What Guy Haines discovered because of his careless, amoral and detached life was that he was a shell; the essential part of him inside had died. He had been killed by guilt.

Elsewhere in the New Testament, Paul the apostle would say, of the human dilemma, that the wages of sin are death and the sting of death is the law. An odd remark to make, in Eastertide, that most glorious of the Church' s seasons but in fact, death hovers over human life in dozens of forms. Some of the worst kinds of death are the deaths that do not literally kill us. Some of the worst kinds are those that leave us empty husks, like Guy Haines. Not all of us, I devoutly hope, will be brought down by the unbearable guilt of having murdered another person and got away with it. But most of us, in one way or another, at one time or another, will know what it means to discover that

one 's life has turned into a husk, with nothing living within.

Two such examples appear in the readings today. The first is rather cosmic in character, the story of the conversion of Paul by being struck blind. But it is the second one, the more prosaic one, to which I want to turn today. In the Gospel, Jesus meets people who are worn down by the burden of unproductive work. They had been out all night and not caught a single fish. These fishermen should be the patron saints of everyone who has ever put all of his hopes into a career and then found it, after the long hard night of a life's work, unproductive. It can be work that turns out to be an empty husk; it can also be a marriage, a love affair, a set of moral values that prove wanting, or an understanding of God that turns out to be vapid and empty. Empty husks come in many forms. You may have found your own.

Christianity places a high value upon the things of this life, such as work, vocation, loving, covenant, morals, and spirituality. But these are the things that wear out and disappoint us. Particularly if we give them priority of place in our lives.

That night, Peter and his friends had a career crisis. Their nets were empty. What they had put their trust in, had failed them. They needed something beyond themselves.

In the narrative from the novel, remember that Guy Haines had a religion of his own crafting, something many of us do these days. Such a faith gathered strength from his own talents, his appreciation of art and nature, and his growing sense of his own achievements. Religions like that tend to run out of steam -- about the time when those who craft them strike their first personal or professional obstacle. At such times, we realize, if we are honest, that we don't need to remember our achievements and our histories more clearly. We need not better memory, but a better God.

And that is what our faith offers us. Do go cast your nets, cast them frequently, and rejoice in a good haul of dozens of different types of fish. But when your own resources are depleted, and they will one day be, you will need to cast your net in another place, and for many of us, that place is God. Not the god of our own intellect, the god of science, the god of art and beauty, but the God who can gather us up when our husks are well and truly empty, and fill them -- not with the mollusks of the deep, but with the good fish of every sort which come alone from God.

This is Easter. It is the time when we think of those empty husks that are our own dark places. It is the time when we consider the one who has the power to fill them with new life.