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Ask Why Five Times |
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Sermon by Rev. Thomas Schade
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Worship Service of October
6, 2002
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| FIRST READING |
Romans 12:2-3
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| From the Magnificent Defeat -- Frederick Buechner | |
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I BELIEVE that we know much more about God than we admit that we know, than perhaps we altogether know that we know. God speaks to us, I would say, much more often than we realize or than we choose to realize. Before the sun sets every evening, he speaks to each of us in an intensely personal and unmistakable way. His message is not written out in starlight, which in the long run would make no difference; rather it is written out for each of us in the humdrum, helter-skelter events of each day; it is a message that in the long run might just make all the difference.
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| SERMON |
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I can remember playing with my friends, this was in later elementary school, that we would pretend to fly around the world and bring food to starving children. Obviously, this was after I had been introduced to the problem of world hunger in my church and in my family and by trick or treating for UNICEF. I can remember running around my neighbor's backyard, arms outstretched, and looking down and seeing starving kids and landing and giving them food. I desperately want to laugh at this right now. I am fighting off making a joke. I want to stand over here, with you, and look at that little kid, with those ridiculous and outlandish plans, and look at it through a golden haze of nostalgia, like an episode of the Wonder Years. The psychologist Donald L. Nathanson says that, "shame is pleasure interrupted." That little guy was me, and I was having fun imagining myself feeding the world, and somehow that pleasure was interrupted; someone let me know that it was a silly game, that it doesn't work like that, that playing like that was playing the fool. So now, I am fighting off the urge to make fun of my former self. In the moment between the memory and the joke that I want to make is a feeling of embarrassment. I am embarrassed. I am embarrassed because when I was a little boy, I deeply desired to feed a starving world. I suspect that many of us are in fact, somewhat, ashamed or embarrassed about what is our most deeply held and most noble aspiration. After all, mature adults organize their lives around achievable goals, and learn to calibrate their ambitions to their actual talents and prospects. After all, when someone asks, "What do you want to do when you grow up?" you want to have an answer that at least sounds reasonable and doable, and pays the rent. So, If you could snap your fingers and do something in this world, and there was no chance of failure - what would you do? For whom would you do what? I asked this question the other day to the members of the membership committee of this church. It was an interesting discussion. At first, we were all laughing about it. Snap your fingers and anything you wanted would come true for somebody in the world. Snap! Every child has a home to live in. Snap! Every child is safe from abuse or neglect. Snap! World Peace. It's hard to take such an exercise seriously, because you feel a little like the contestants in the Miss America Pageant. "My platform is the end of nuclear weapons proliferation." But when you take the choice seriously - the one thing you could do, just by snapping your fingers, you are up to the question - where would I like to make a difference in the world, for whom would I like to make a difference, how would I like to make a difference? Another way to get at this question is to ask yourself what you would most like to be known for in your life? Another way is to look at our lives and to chunk up - to ask why five times? Why is something satisfying to us? If we are lucky enough to have a job from which we find meaning, why did we choose that job? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Not drilling down, looking at why a person is individually motivated to do some career or another, we usually end up in the cellar of our motivations, doing what we do because we want Mommy to love us. I remember an incident in my old career where we were doing one of these management training sessions for managers, and the group leader started asking this one guy why he did his job: "So Bill, why are you the manager of the network support unit?" "Why? Because I need to make a living to support my family. Sure, but why the manager of the network support unit? Because there wasn't an opening for a Vice President, and this is what I know how to do." "Sure, but why do you do this? " You
could see Bill starting to get irritated and antsy. But the question was
repeated. And suddenly, and it was about the fifth time the question why
was asked, something quite extraordinary happened. Bill hesitated and
he was at a loss for words, and you could see him searching his mind for
an answer. Then he turned pink and red. I could see him turn pink from
twenty feet away. He was embarrassed you see, by his aspiration. He got
all flustered and then he calmed down. And when he spoke, his voice was
different, how he was sitting was different - and with a perfectly calm
and resonate voice, Bill said that he did his job, because people called
him when their computers did not work, or couldn't connect to the network,
and he would go to their office, and crawl around on the floor under the
desk, and check this and check that, and then, he would figure it out
and he would be able to help them and get them working again. He could
use his knowledge to help them. He did his job because he wanted to help
people. His passion was to learn things, technical and complicated things
that other people wouldn’t know, and then use his knowledge to help people.
I don't think he knew that until someone asked him why five times. My friends, what we are talking about here is our passions - our noblest aspirations - where we want to make a difference in the world. Maybe this will bring the subject into focus for you. One of the writers I have been reading on this subject says that most people's passion falls into one of three categories. The first was a people passion, an affinity. For example, there are people whose passion is children. They want to teach children; they want to guide children; they want to play with children. Their response to any great social problem that we confront is to look to see how it impacts children. When you say "homelessness", they think "homeless children". And they look to children as the solution to most problems. You ask them about racism, they answer that the key is teaching the children properly. On the other hand, there are people whose passion are older people. When you say "homelessness", what they think about are older people on the streets, older people unable to keep their own homes. Some people are concerned about youth, or young families, or gays and lesbians, or people of a particular nationality or ethnicity, or people who are mentally ill. Some people’s passion is an identification with certain kinds of people. The second kind of passion is a "cause" passion. Some people have passions for causes and issues. Gun Control, peace and non-violence, campaign election reform, abortion, "the decline of family values", poverty, free enterprise, globalization. This is pretty clear to most of us, because we know people like this. Sometimes they are pains in the neck, because they harp on and on about their passionate commitment to their cause. The third kind of passion is a passion for a role. Some people gravitate toward a certain role, no matter what situation they find themselves. My co-worker liked to be the helpful Mr. Wizard, who knew all the hard stuff that no one else knows, and use it to help them. Other people want to be the compassionate friend, the one who makes a warm and intimate space where people can share their inner thoughts and feelings. And you know how some people want to always be the organizer, whether it is a work party or a wedding reception. Some people want to be the one person that everyone knows and is the connecting glue of any group of people. Some people want to be the inspiring one. Somebody else wants to be the truth-teller, the kid who just has to mention that not only is the emperor not wearing any clothes, but also that he really, after all, truth be told, not really all that good looking. Everybody has a passion, a deep aspiration, something that they are called to do or be in the world. These are the deep rivers that flow beneath the surface of our lives. Most of what we do are in fact, often pale shadows of what we really want to do. We play ourselves small, most of the time. But, I believe, that when a person doesn’t play themselves small, but lives out, embodies that inner burning, not only does he or she do the most good in the world, but is also the most effective, and is the most satisfied and happiest. Each person brings a passion, and that passion is the answer to the question of where? If we are united, as our covenant says, for the service of all, where is one called to be of service? Where are you called, where are you compelled to make a difference? These passions are a part of our callings. They are not universal - not everyone is passionate about the same thing. Where they come from and why we have them, and why we have this one and not the other are unanswerable questions to some degree. You can try to build a complex theory of psychological, sociological and physiological causation for them, and I am not against that effort, but I doubt that we will ever really know. To my way of thinking, it is just as useful and accurate to say that they are gifts from God, callings from God, deep urgings from the furthest reaches of the cosmos. I had a professor of systematic theology, Dr. Ellen Charry, she is now at Princeton School of Theology, and she, insistently argued that the most important thing in theology was to ask the right question -- what is the spiritual question that people really have on their mind. And she would say that people are not worried about most of the questions for which the church has answers, like how to get to heaven, how do I avoid damnation or even eternal death, or even how did all of this, get here in the first place. The question, she says, that confronts persons now, is this: "Who am I? I mean, who am I, really?" The spiritual quest is to be able to see yourself as God sees you. To see yourself as God sees you. I ask you to live for a just a moment with that question -- that picture in your mind -- looking at yourself as God must see you. Imagine that. I know that when I can imagine myself under God’s gaze, what comes up for me first is my shame. I am aware of feeling that if God were to take a good long look at me, God would not like me, and I am slowly learning to put that burden down, that is my stuff, and the stuff that comes from living as we do, and not God’s. Putting that aside is, to use Paul’s words, to not conform to the world, but to be, someday, transformed by the renewing of my mind. Do you think that God does not see the burning coal of passion that glows within you? -- that foolish desire to feed the hungery, comfort the afflicted, heal the sick, tend the babies and comfort the dying, to loosen the bonds of injustice. Of course, God does, for I believe that God placed it there within you. And I believe that God is waiting for you to know it and name it and start to live out of it. Patiently waiting. For you to claim it as your purpose in life. Patiently waiting. Like a parent watching a child learn to walk. Patiently waiting. For churches to become places where people learn to not play themselves small. Patiently waiting. Like parents watching their children choose their major. Patiently waiting. For churches to stop turning people away, to stop turning people out for this event or that service, but to start turning people ON to live out their passions in the service of all. Patiently waiting. Patiently waiting. |
| BENEDICTION |
| If you have come today needing comfort, may you go secure in the knowledge of the love, human and divine, that surrounds you and holds you. If You have come needing beauty, may the words, the music, the sights and smells of this hour, linger with you. And if you have come needing to come closer to God’s presence, go now fulfilled. It is as steady as the beating of your own heart, as near as your own hands. Go in the service of all. Amen |