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[Silence] The following message for the moment is delivered by the Reverend Dr. Bruce Wheeler-Thielman. Today's sermon is the fifth in a series on "Give My Regards to Broadway." Number five, "Into the Woods."

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[Silence] Let us continue in worship by giving reverent attention to the reading of God's Word written. Ecclesiastes chapter three, I begin at the verse numbered one. "For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven.

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A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted. A time to kill and a time to heal. A time to break down and a time to build up.

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A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to mourn and a time to dance. A time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together. A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing.

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A time to seek and a time to lose. A time to keep and a time to cast away. A time to rend and a time to sew. A time to keep silent and a time to speak.

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A time to love and a time to hate. A time for war and a time for peace." What gain has the worker from his toil? I have seen the business that God has given to the sons of men to be busy with.

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He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's mind, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. And may God bless to us this reading from his words.

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Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. It is a good thing when someone comes to understand his or her own mind.

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Those two of us, of course, are the same. What troubles one is no temptation at all to another. What exalts one debases another. The sad fact is that most people have never had the courage

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to enter the inner sanctum of their own being, to look at the urges and the desires, at the fears and the compulsions, to look at the very meaning of themselves as they are. Well, four years ago, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine wrote a new musical.

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It was presented on Broadway and was a hit. It won three Tony Awards. Its primary purpose, of course, was to entertain. But its secondary purpose was to get people to enter themselves. The play is divided into two acts, and it is essentially the retelling of five fairy stories.

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There's the story of Cinderella, of Jack and the Beanstalk, of Rapunzel, of Little Red Riding Hood, and the story invented just for this play called The Baker and His Wife. Now, why did Sondheim and Lapine use fairy tales in an effort to get people to discover their inner self? Well, it's because fairy tales are exercises in self-discovery.

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Fairy tales reveal life as it truly is, a struggle, sometimes quite severe, sometimes glaringly unfair, sometimes filled with insoluble difficulties. But when courageously faced, it can be mastered, and out of it can come victory. Cinderella has to fight unfairness, but the ends are potential.

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Jack has to fight huge obstacles, gigantic obstacles, but in the end, he is the victor. The Baker and His Wife, they have a great longing in their hearts, and they have to work together to accomplish four things to accomplish them, but they do what they plan to do.

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Rapunzel is denied freedom, and yet finds within herself, through the use of her golden hair, the freedom that she was seeking. And Little Red Riding Hood must confront the deceit of a wolf, but in the end, outsmarts him. I ask you, since these stories are cowardice or silly or cockatrice, may I suggest to you that as long ago as Plato, that master educator said that education begins not with facts and logic, but with the telling of tales.

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Stiller, the great German poet, said, "There is a deeper truth in fairy tales than there is in much of life." G.K. Techerson, one of the great Christians of the latter years of the last century and the first years of this century, a man whose book, Orthodoxy, is still widely read and admired. Techerson goes on to say that fairy tales are the mirrors of the inner light.

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When Jack defeats the giant, he is defeating pride. Cinderella, Techerson sees as a kind of magnificat, he humbles those of low degree. Beauty and the Beast is the story of how nothing is really lovable until it is loved. Most recently of all, C.S. Lewis, talking about fairy tales, called them "spiritual explorations,"

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designed to let us see life from the inside. Every culture has tales of this kind, and in some of them, the tales are used as instruments of healing. Think of how children respond to fairy tales. They want them repeated.

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If you change a word, you're corrected. We might be fortunate enough to have the story read to them out of a book with no pictures, which gives them the opportunity to use their imagination. Now why do youngsters so enjoy fairy tales?

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Because fairy tales enable them to actualize, at least for a little while, the feelings of which they are otherwise afraid. You see, the giants that these little ones face are not Goliaths. They're their mothers and fathers.

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And it's nice to know that that can sometimes be the giant. A youngster feels often like Cinderella. He gets caught up in that family romance which is typical of most of us, but he then finds her way to something better than she dreamed about.

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Rapunzel seems to be helpless, but then finds in herself, through self-reliance, the use of her own golden hair, the freedom that she seeks. And little Red Riding Hood asks most of those who are older than she is. And children like to think when they're dealing with their parents and adults in general,

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or occasionally at least, they can do that. Fairy tales, you see, are ego-building, and I mean that in no negative sense. They strengthen the child's self-image. They give the child a spirit. And that's the reason Sondheim and Lapine have this play built upon five such tales.

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They call it "Into the Woods." And the reason they call it "Into the Woods" is that from Hansel and Gretel to Snow White to Rapunzel to little Red Riding Hood, the woods are always a place of mystery, a place of anxiety, of fear and delusion,

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a place where one meets the unknown, or one might say, the unconscious. What Sondheim and Lapine are saying is, come with us, and let us learn more of our secret selves. Let us learn more of the mystery of our own being, why we are what we are.

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And to do this, we must go into the woods. Now, the first act of the play is devoted to that theme, "We must go into the woods." And here they are echoing the theories of psychology and also of physics. In the book of Ecclesiastes, the most famous portion is that portion sung a few minutes ago by the choir

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and then echoed by my reading. It's in this chapter that we come upon those beautiful, rigidness and balance phrases which are so captivating every time we hear them. I'm not this morning concerned with those words, however,

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but rather with a phrase which appears in the 11th verse. "God has put eternity into our minds." Unfortunately, that's a very bad translation. For the Hebrew word for eternity is the word "olam,"

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and "olam" has nothing whatever to do with time. "Olam" means an enigma, a puzzle, a riddle, something that is obscure, but that seems to be to a certain degree understood. What this verse is saying is this.

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God has made our minds, fashioned them in such a eclectic manner that they are a riddle to us when we seek to understand the way we are inside. Only God understands us fully. But, olam, we are able to try,

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and in our trying to discover some truth about ourselves, about our heart, and about our minds. There are many other places in the Scripture where this same truth is echoed. Remember in Scripture that the word "heart" and the word "mind"

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are often used interchangeably. And so we have verses like, "Out of the heart are the issues of life." Or, "As in water, faith answers faith. So the mind of a man reflects the man."

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Or this in Psalm, "Stand in awe and do not commune with your own heart upon your bed." Paul puts it this way in 2 Corinthians, "Examine yourself. Prove your own self." You see, if you put the call box into the Word, it knows that we need the same experiences that it was called in.

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We need to know that Cinderella, if she's strong enough, can make it to the ball. We need to know that Jack, if he's brave enough, can gain his victory. We need to know that Repentance can discover in her isolation that inner self which sets her free.

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We seem to see these processes of self-examination, especially in the light of the stories that are used in this play and are used in all of our lives, for we have all heard fairy tales since the time we were little ones.

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These things build our self-assurance. I remember seeing this sign outside of a psychiatrist's office in Los Angeles that said, "We specialize in people who have no idea of who or what they are." But then, we are the sum total of our experiences.

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But what's important about that is not the experiences, but how we respond to them. And we are better and stronger if we can understand why we have responded as we have responded.

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This kind of knowledge builds courage, and it leads to powerful believing. Now, there are various paths that we can take into the woods, into ourselves for self-understanding. We can go to a person who is professionally trained to lead us.

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And there are psychotherapists and the like who are marvelously gifted at God. And this is one of the most blessed areas of science that has advanced so far, particularly in the last decade. And those people can be of great help to us.

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We can enter into encounter groups that are either led by those who are spiritually or psychologically sophisticated. We can, through prayer, identify God and ourselves, identify the risks and the worries,

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the things about which we are proud in our lives. We can, through the searching out of Scripture, through Scripture search us out. The important thing is that no matter which one of these methods we use,

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we are honest. We must face what we discover inside. We must listen to the whispers in the woods. Because just as the fairy tale comes to sight,

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so we can know greater calmness and intelligence if we will go into the woods and discover who we really are. The last chorus in the first act reads, "You go into the woods where nothing clears,

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where witches and ghosts and wolves appear." Into the woods and through the fields you have to take the drink. Into the woods, into the woods, into the woods. Then out of the woods and happily ever after.

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Now the message of the second act, and the only other act of the play, is that when we go into the woods, we do not go alone. And what Sondheim and Lepine mean by this is that each of us has been influenced by other people,

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and we in turn have influenced other people. We are never altogether isolated. We are always, to a certain degree, what we are because of what our parents and our friends and our enemies

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and our teachers and our colleagues have done to us. Now I'm not suggesting, like B.F. Skinner suggests, that we lose all freedom and dignity because we are totally controlled by our environment.

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I'm not suggesting, nor are the authors of this play, any kind of determinism of that sort. But what is being said here, and what I am echoing and thinking about with you this morning, is this.

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The environment, that which surrounds us, does have impact on our lives. The quick recorders of our minds are always on so that everything that is done to us, whether it be an act of love or an act of cruelty,

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is recorded and helps us become what we are. Now the focus of this second act is the coming of the giantess, that is, the wife of the giant that Jack went up the beamstalk to kill. She comes down the beamstalk to try to find the one who killed her husband

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with the intention of killing him. And the different people who in the first act we meet only in the process of the fairy story, in the second act suddenly begin to show dimensions of their personalities

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that are not in the original story, but which lead us to think about life as we know it. The witch, for example, advocates expediency. "Give Jack to the giantess and then she'll go away and not bother us anymore."

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Jack's mother, who pleads for her son's life, but who is killed in an accident when one of Prince Charming's soldiers wounds her. Prince Charming, who turns out to be a coward. He says, "I was raised to be charming, not to be sincere."

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The baker's wife, who is killed in a natural disaster, what they call a footquake, not an earthquake, a footquake she stepped on by the giantess. And then there's the baker and Red Riding Hood.

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They are full of doubts about themselves. Now you see, these kinds of things, accidents, natural disasters, people who will do anything to gain their own goals, cowardice, doubt, these are all part of our experience.

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These are true of us. In the woods, we have a tendency to blame these things on other people and to make claims for ourselves that are not so, or to deny things about ourselves that are in fact so.

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We sometimes blame God. We sometimes offer other people up as sacrifices for our own losses. We do in large measure whatever we can to protect the false understanding of ourselves that we have,

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that we're better than we think we are. What we're talking about here is nothing less than the sinful state of humankind. Part of the enigma of the mind is this, that we are revealed to be tied to one another.

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And here is where the value of a fairy story comes in again. Because you see, some parents refuse to let their children hear fairy stories and thus make a big mistake. They deny to their youngsters the opportunity through these stories to prepare for life.

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They deny these youngsters the opportunity to express their feelings and emotions. And when you can't express your feelings and emotions, you bury them down inside. And the deeper you bury them, the more trouble they cause.

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Others have left their footprints and their fingerprints all over us. And we have left our footprints and our fingerprints on other people. And that's the reason Sondheim and Lapine are saying to us, "When we go into the woods, we do not go alone."

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And that's where the play ends. But that's not where our understanding as Christians ends. For we understand that when we go into the woods, we not only go in marked by others and having marked others,

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but if we're honest, if we truly search out why we are what we are, why we do what we do, why we say what we say, why we think what we think, the acts of which we are ashamed, the doubts we're afraid to mention, the hidden anxieties that terrorize us in the night or perhaps in the day,

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the cowardice with which we will not face challenge, all of these things, all of these things, this darkness of the woods, this inner distance, this enigmatic circumstance of life in which we find ourselves, that is sometimes so ugly and unharmonious,

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all of this, when we go into it honestly, we go into it with God, with someone who loves us no matter how unlovable we discover in the woods that we really are, that even the ugliest, he is ready to touch with beauty. You see, when you walk with God, you really don't have to be afraid to go into the woods.

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I ask you to hear me this morning for the sake of your own spiritual and mental and physical health. When you honestly confront God, you inevitably must honestly confront yourself. You have to go into the woods. And when you get in there, having the light of God and the love of God about you,

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you've got to wrestle with what you find there. And by his grace, defeat it and so advance. In the woods, where witches and wolves and giants and cowards are, it takes a God of love to strengthen us.

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And out of that strength can come self-acceptance. And out of that acceptance can come the peace which passes all understanding. Recently I moved from a larger place to a smaller place, getting ready for my retirement. And I was confronted with a whole lot of problems. I had too much furniture.

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What do you keep? What do you throw away? How do you take things that weren't designed to go together and put them together so that they look like something that you can tolerate? How to create an atmosphere around you that gives you not confusion but order?

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I was caught up in all kinds of lack of harmony, all kinds of disarrangement. But I have a friend named Paul Gigler. Paul is an award-winning decorator. He owns Wildwood Studios here in Pittsburgh.

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And he's incredibly gifted. He can walk into a situation which is unmet and turn it into something which is very marvelous. This has to go, this has to go, that has to stay, that has to stay, put that there, put that there, over there. And in a matter of minutes, where there was disharmony, there is harmony.

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Chaos turns into calm and habit turns into a home. Well, God is the master interior decorator. He takes what we are, when we're honest enough to really look at what's inside, and ready to let go, he takes what we are

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and enables us to become what he wants us to be. His own sons and daughters, a cave in the earth, the heirs of the infinite, a royal priesthood. The God who made us out of nothing. Take that inner nothingness we sometimes feel and give to us value and worth and peace.

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In short, to use three of the most blessed words in our faith, he restores our soul. The play ends with all the characters standing on the stage and singing, "Into the woods you go again, you have to every now and then. Into the woods, no telling when, but be ready for the journey.

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Into the woods you have to break, but that's the way you learn to cope. Into the woods to find your hope of getting through the journey." And if that's on too poor a level for your interest, then let me instead quote five lines written by one of the most brilliant young theologians of the 20th century.

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He is 39 years of age, was executed by the Gestapo in a Nazi concentration camp just two days before the camp was freed by the Allied forces of World War II. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, shortly before his death, wrote, "Who am I, this or the other? Am I one person today and another tomorrow?

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Am I both at once a hypocrite before others? Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, that I am thine." And when you know that, you never have to fear anything. You will meet in the woods.

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Let us pray. Our Father of each of us at this very moment could be turned inside out so that everyone about us could see all there is to us, what we think, what we say, and what we do.

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If all of it was revealed with perfect openness so that nothing that we want hidden remained hidden, nothing we wanted to conceal would be unrevealed, if we could do this, we would be ashamed. Were it not for the truth that you love us as we are,

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and you are willing to help us to become what you want us to be, help us to know in those moments when even our own conduct confuses us, our conversation seems a delusion, and our deepest thoughts are very dark,

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help us even in such times to know that you are love, and that you are with us, and therefore we do not have to be afraid. We can become, and we can help other people in the woods become,

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that for which the whole creation waits on tiptoe. We pray in the name of that one who climbed the wood to lead us out of the woods. Amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]