You can’t always get what you want
Preacher: Revd Dr Donald MacEwan, University Chaplain
Readings: Proverbs 1:20-33; Mark 8:27-38
Last week, with many parents in chapel, we reflected on a song by The Who from 1965 – Talkin’ ’bout my generation. This week, with most parents safely dispatched home, it’s time to get a bit more up to date, jumping forward… four years to 1969, when the Rolling Stones released You can’t always get what you want. If the track by The Who was a mid-60s blast for youth, against the old, the powerful and the square, the Rolling Stones’ song, towards the end of the decade, is a rueful recap of those 60s dreams. The verses explore what people wanted, hoped for, expected, perhaps even enjoyed through those years – free love, progressive politics, mind-altering drugs. But Mick Jagger hints that these youthful dreams have been disappointed, that the decade of hope is about to burn up in a dull blaze of respectability. No-one can get no satisfaction any more. You can’t always get what you want.
I confess: this song is a million miles from most conversations the Chaplains and I have had this week. Not that many students have shared with me their desire to explore free love and mind-altering drugs. But the overwhelming mood has been of anticipation, for subjects, friendships, sport and passions, for leaving home and becoming, properly, grown up. And, truly, that anticipation is realised in countless lives of students here – I’ve witnessed it over and over again.
But I’ve also witnessed disappointment – any returning student will know what I mean.
Not every grade will be a perfect mark. Some feedback may suggest thinking differently, or delving deeper into the topic.
Not every reading will be brilliantly written. As the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard wrote, If one enjoys reading, one must be resigned to many disappointments.
Not every printer will print in the three-minute window you have to get it printed and delivered.
Not every flatmate will be charming, funny or sensitive or even like you.
Not every coach will select you for the first XI or XV.
Not every morning will dawn mild and sunny.
Not every crush will find you irresistible.
Not every staff member will get everything right in their information to you.
Not every student will agree with your views on Scottish independence, trans rights, the US election or war in Gaza.
In other words, this may be a bubble, but reality has a habit of breaking through.
And that’s true in the Bible as well. The Old Testament passage set for today in the lectionary is from Proverbs 1, which we heard read earlier. I was tempted to quietly ditch it and choose something more upbeat instead. Some story saying God is nice and life is easy and let’s be nice to all the nice people around us. But then I realised that this is maybe the perfect day for a dose of honesty.
The passage is the voice of Wisdom. Not quite God – but in this part of the Bible, a God-like voice, expressing God’s view, personified in female form as Wisdom. And she is, it has to be acknowledged, on the curmudgeonly side about many people. No sugar-coating from Wisdom.
They are simple, as in thoughtless, careless, lazy. They are scoffers, sniggering at others, mocking people who follow Wisdom, complacent in their echo chamber of fellow-simpletons. They are fools, seeking the quick fix, the easy hack.
That’s bad enough, but according to Wisdom, their folly will be pretty consequential: leading to calamity, panic, distress and anguish. It’s a brutal message, far more frightening than any of the careful guidance found in Online Matriculation many people here have been diligently working through recently. I certainly missed the slide in the module Training in good academic practice saying:
Waywardness kills the simple,
and the complacency of fools destroys them.
This is a tough message to open the Martinmas Semester. Is this the reality of University life? You can’t always get what you want – or more like – You’re heading straight for disaster. Is there no hope as we begin a new semester?
Yes, of course, there is. Look again at Proverbs. Wisdom may rail against the foolish, but there is a different path which leads to a much better place. It’s the way taken by those who listen to Wisdom. Here is what she says:
I have called you…
I have stretched out my hand…
Those who listen to me will be secure
and will live at ease.
For Wisdom that means being open to God, listening to scripture, living a life of faithfulness and goodness. And, all those years later, I have found her words to be true in my life, that there is a security and ease in living by faith. Faith, like folly, is consequential, giving confidence and comfort no matter the inevitable disappointments of life in the Bubble and beyond.
But it strikes me, at the beginning of an academic year, that her words could also guide us, regardless of faith. Could calling on Wisdom, and listening to her, mean something like taking time in our lives? Reading, and reading carefully what is actually written. Listening, and listening to others attentively. Hearing the birdsong, seeing the leaves turn, touching the stones of these beautiful buildings, feeling the sand beneath our feet. Could it mean being patient – with those who make mistakes? With people whose passions and prejudices don’t quite match up to our passions and prejudices? Patient with ourselves, when instead of perfection, we produce the partial, the patchy, the passable, the pedestrian?
After all, this is what Jagger sings:
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometime you’ll find
You get what you need
The New Testament passage set for today, which was read by the Principal, seems so different, but just as in Proverbs, there’s a similar desire for the quick fix, the easy hack. It’s another bracing text for a semester start.
v. 31: Then Jesus began to teach them that the Son of Man (i.e. he himself) must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.
Peter, his disciple, can’t stand this thought and rebukes him. Maybe he told him he was wrong to believe it. Or wrong to share it. Either way, Jesus calls Peter out – You are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.
God’s love, found in Jesus, doesn’t choose the quick fix, the easy hack. God doesn’t fix creation so that randomness, change, pain and death, loss and extinction don’t happen. God doesn’t zap the sin before it takes place, or take away its consequences by pressing undo. Instead, he enters the world in human form, a creature in creation, and engages deeply with our humanity from the inside, listening, experiencing, suffering and dying. If anyone knows that you can’t always get what you want, it’s the eternal God whose love lets creation be itself, and so mess things up. The divine thing is the human thing.
And for Jesus, taking that path himself means that anyone who follows him, takes a pretty similar path in their own way. Resisting easy popularity; taking the slow route of faithful service; patient with the profound imperfections of the world, faith communities, and ourselves; recognising what we have to let go.
We sang the story of John Honey earlier. A St Andrews student, who was sitting here within these walls one Sunday morning, and who took the path to the harbour, a path of service, of patience, and of giving up his own safety. He heard Wisdom’s call; he denied himself; he took up the cross.
Well, that’s quite a message for Week 1. And yet, why else are we here? Why be a student if not to go deep into the subject from AA4003 The Archaeology of Ancient Rome to BL2308 Vertebrate Zoology?
Why come to this place of wise teachers if not to listen, to make the lectures, to go the library with centuries of learning right there?
Why not take a year – or four – to explore faith, perhaps to learn to be a Christian, not as a quick fix but slowly, in worship, prayer, in discussion, trying – failing – and trying again?
Why not recognise, as Peter did eventually, that life is richer than surface achievements: that it’s about commitment as much as congratulations?
Of course, there will be disappointments. As Chaplains, we hear students and staff share daily with us, in confidence, about their setbacks. A poor grade. A ghosting friend. A pressurising parent. A community less committed than we’d like. A silent God. A messed-up self. But in many ways, it’s these upsets which form us, make us who we are, and are the context for how we grow, in life and in faith. God is with us, through them and in them: the God who shared our life in Jesus, who was rejected, suffered, even killed, and was then raised to life. God is with us.
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometime you’ll find
You get what you need
END