Other sermons   

            Early last week I spent several days at Lancaster Theological Seminary with a group of parish ministers who are nearing retirement. There were fifteen of us and we spent a good deal of time listening to one another’s stories. In my small group was a pastor named Joan. Her father had been killed in World War II when she was an infant. Her mother then married a man who became an abusive husband and step-father. Joan fled the family to live with her grandmother. She struggled through poverty to eventually earn her high school diploma. She went to work, married and raised a family, and worked her way through college. When she said she wanted to be a minister she was told that career was only for men and be content as a nurse or teacher. But she didn’t give up on her dream and eventually attended seminary, was ordained, became a parish minister, and later on went back and got her doctorate. Joan is in her third successful pastorate, a church that had been notorious for chewing up and spitting out ministers. Now she was in her sixteenth year. She had transformed the church. Joan comes across as the kind of plainspoken small-town woman you’d meet taking your order behind a lunch counter, or at the old Tastee Diner. Cheerful, blunt, friendly, unassuming. And yet in a matter-of-fact way, she told us a story of overcoming enormous barriers to achieve her dreams. She appeared to be without resentment or pride. She really didn’t think of herself as a feminist or a revolutionary. Several of us just listened to her with open mouths. When we suggested she was a trailblazer, she looked embarrassed and said, “I never thought of it that way. I just wanted to have the kind of life that ordinary people have.” For some reason, at that point, I remembered the words of the teacher Lois and I had in India. He said that true saints are very rare. But when you meet them, the remarkable thing is that they are so ordinary. Uncommon, yet ordinary. Finally I said to Joan. “You know, it occurs to me that people who are not privileged growing up yearn to be like everyone else, to be ordinary. And people who grow up privileged are never happy being ordinary; they have to be extraordinary.” And she said, “That’s right. All I ever wanted was to be like everyone else. But I had to work hard to get there.”

            Since that conversation I have found myself mulling over the relationship between privilege and achievement. Is the drive to achieve among the under-privileged, the marginalized for whatever ever cause – race, class, disability, sexual orientation – is the drive to achieve for them different from the drive to achieve among privileged children? One group sees achievement as a means to enter fully into the life of a community. The other sees achievement as a way of being better than others. Obviously, that is an over-simplification, since individuals are unique and that transcends any situation; but, I wonder if in our culture there is a kind of tyranny of the extraordinary. To be extraordinary wins high praise; to be seen as ordinary is an insult. Even in humble Lake Wobegon, “All the women are strong, the men are good looking, and the children are above average.” It is urban legend that parents of privilege start early preparing their infant children for Harvard. Privilege is a reality. While sitting in my dermatologist’s waiting room last week, I picked up a copy of Forbes Magazine. The ads and articles had to do with matters such as where to hire a private helicopter or small plane (with pilot included), remote and exotic vacation spots (with all the amenities), the latest hedge fund advice. And there was a long article on the return to popularity of the liquor absinthe, a high alcohol drink that is illegal in the U.S. The French impressionists and people like Oscar Wilde and Ernest Hemingway liked it. The article informed one about where to obtain absinthe and how to serve it correctly. I don’t think ordinary people read Forbes.

            Our teacher said that true saints are rare and ordinary. And yet in our culture to see oneself as ordinary is a sign of failure, unless – I am suggesting – you are not privileged and are at the margins of society. In listening to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” I was again struck by how much he talked about not rejecting the American Dream but welcoming those into the Dream who had been excluded from it. Is there a difference between striving for excellence in order to be included, versus striving for excellence in order to be better than others?

            What light does our spirituality shed on this? At the heart of our Christian faith is the understanding that we are each created in the image of God. We are born beautiful and complete and lacking in nothing at all. But very quickly we are taught to distrust this truth. We get the message that there is something lacking. That something, whatever it is – intelligence, beauty, ability – that something must be earned, acquired, achieved. And when we start thinking that way, we become separated from other people and our world. Others are seen as competitors or threats. Our peace of mind is shaken. We see ourselves in comparison with others, not fully as ourselves. Then it is all about winning, overcoming, beating, surpassing others. We become so driven about this because it really is a spiritual matter – our very sense of our own self-worth is at stake. Success comes to mean conquest. And the pain of defeat is bitter.

            But then I think of my friend Rev. Joan. How is it that she has achieved so much, made her dreams come true, and yet is without bitterness or triumphfulness? And appears to be so ordinary? It must be that the qualities of sainthood are not really so much about achieving or attaining or standing out, as they are about letting go, emptying, and seeking to be connected and included. They are not about drawing a line between me and the world, but about widening the circle of inclusion and refusing to allow oneself to be excluded. It is one thing to believe that you are keeping me out of the community that I yearn to be a part of, and that I am going to fight you and overcome you, in order to force my way in. But it is another to say that I yearn to be a part of your community because I want to be in community with you and everyone. I don’t want to destroy you. I want you to take me seriously. I want you to realize what I already know about myself – I am good and beautiful and created in the image of God. And so are you. It is this spirituality that is at the very heart of the nonviolence of Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Jesus of Nazareth, the Buddha, Confucius, and so many others.

            But there is another aspect of this spirituality. Paul says, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.” Dr. King said that Christians are called to be “transformed non-conformists.” Does being ordinary mean being a conformist? No – especially if the norms of a community are superficiality, spiritual blindness, and oppression. When justice, compassion, and humility are absent, then Christians must practice transformed non-conformity.

            Here again I think of the achievements of Rev. Joan. I mentioned her church. Her example and leadership won over people who had forgotten how to love. She taught them to love by loving them. They had put her through the same trials as their former pastors, but she wasn’t buying it. She knew who she was. She was steadfast in not going along with their world-view. In this sense she was a transformed non-conformist in their midst. She was someone who did not return hatred for hatred, hurt for hurt. And they were transformed and the cycle was broken. Her strength came from knowing in her own experience what it was like to live without love, and therefore how important love was. Her love was steadfast in its inclusion. And she knew that though the impact of this transforming love is apparent everywhere, its source is not to be found in this world.

            This transformative love is really at the heart of Jesus’ message and person. And in Luke’s Gospel we get a glimpse of how unsettling and dangerous it is to put that kind of love into practice. We see how Jesus dashes the comfort level of his home congregation. He stands up in the synagogue of his own home town and reads from the scroll of Isaiah and teaches. At first his listeners are proud. They like what he says. The prophecy is fulfilled in their presence. He is their boy, so they must be special, too. But Jesus keeps going. He tells them God heals among those on the outside not the inside. Israel is the in-group, and God is always with the out-group. Israel took God’s blessing and turned it into privilege. And for that reason, God is helpless to do much with them. God comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. And that was Jesus’ message to his comfortable neighbors. So they threw him out of town.

            You have been hearing about polarities from our consultant Roy Oswald. Perhaps the hardest polarity for a congregation to face is the tension between nurture and transformation; between a sense of well-being and unease; between a message that comforts and one that afflicts. Jesus’ message of transforming love is for all. It is steadfast and inclusive. How we respond to that love tells who we really are. AMEN.