Sunday, August 2, 1998

The Rev. David Smock

"Yearning for Respect"

I have often reflected on the enormous amount of effort that is put into the preparation of sermons each Sunday by thousands of clergy. Most of them are preaching on the same lectionary passages. Thousands will be preaching to only a handful of parishioners in the pews. And yet each one will spend hours preparing that sermon. I have discussed with Joey about how there must be some more efficient way of preaching the gospel. I have recently come upon various internet sources such as http://www.sermonhelp.com/ which offer ready made sermons for each Sunday based upon the lectionary lessons. I thought I would try them out for this Sunday to see if there was an easy way to prepare for Sunday morning - by using someone else's sermon. But as I read what is offered, I realized that there is no real alternative to the current system, however inefficient it is. To be good and authentic, a sermon needs to not only include a study of the scriptures, but also a deeply personal reflection, interpretation, and application to contemporary life. There are no apparent shortcuts!

The first year and a half after I graduated from college I worked and lived in East Harlem as deputy director of the Narcotics Program of the East Harlem Protestant Parish working with hundreds of heroin addicts who lived in East Harlem. I was particularly drawn to a young man in his late 20s by the name of Joe Sweet who seemed to have gotten his life together and to have put heroin addiction behind him. As he was embarking on his new life, I thought I would explore with him what his aspirations were and I saw many career and personal options open to him. I asked him what he sought for himself in life. What were his goals and his ambitions? He said that he had only one goal and aspiration and that was to achieve self-respect and to be respected by others. I was completely taken aback. How could such a limited goal constitute his life's ambition? I failed to realize that I took self-respect for granted. I took for granted the degree to which my family and friends and my Christian faith had enabled me to attain self-respect at an early age. I also failed to realize how much self-loathing and community condemnation Joe Sweet had been subjected to during his years on the street as an addict.

I recently read an account by the author and essayist, Ptolemy Tomkins, about why he shaved all his hair off when he was 16. "One afternoon in the fall of 1978, when I was in the first week of my junior year of high school, I asked my mother to drop me off in front of the Italian barbershop I had been visiting since boyhood. Once stationed in the chair and staring at myself in the big, wall-size mirror, I surprised Enzo, the barber on duty that day with a fresh request. "Take it all off, please." Enzo raised his glasses. "All if it?" "Yup. All of it."

There were no other bald students walking around my high school that fall, and as a result of my stop at Enzo's, I changed overnight from just another overtall, undercoordinated blur on the periphery to someone with a bona fide image. I had officially become "weird." People who before had paid no attention to me now visibly shied away when I passed them in the corridors; others boldly approached and asked me about my appearance. Did I have head lice. Was I receiving shock treatment?

As Enzo reluctantly ran his razor over my head, I watched the "me" that everybody thought they knew so well fall away in clump after clump onto the linoleum. The sensation was pleasurable and refreshing on an almost physical level.

The results of this one-step attempt at self-transformation were as immediate, and as oddly gratifying, beyond school as they were within it. From anguished concern (my mother), to flat-out irritation (my father), to the countless fleeting looks of puzzlement, amusement or general discomfort that I saw in the eyes of all the shopkeepers, bus drivers and neighbors I passed in the course of a day, I found myself registering in the consciousness of just about everyone I came into contact with. Which, of course, was the point. Among all the other separate selves out there in the world, I was now a force in my own right: a genuine and irreducible "me" in a sea of indefinite and unknowable others. And with each raised eyebrow, I was given a fresh reminder of this.

In a weird sort of way, he was seeking self-respect and in a weird sort of way he achieved it, at least temporarily. For the first time, he was unique among his peers.

Traveling through India immediately after India detonated its nuclear tests, Tom Friedman, the principal foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, finally realized what these tests were all about. They were about India achieving self-respect. One physician told Friedman, "This nuclear test was about self-respect, and self-respect is more important than roads, electricity and water. Anyway, what did we do? We exploded our bomb. It was like shooting a gun off into the air. We didn't hurt anybody." In another column Friedman wrote that Indian politicians, when you scratch them, will tell you these tests were the only way for India to get what it wants most from the U.S. and China: R-E-S-P-E-C-T. "I finally realized the depth of this sentiment when I went to see a saffron-robed Indian human rights campaigner, Swami Agnivesh. Surely, I thought, he will disavow this test. But no sooner did we sit down on the floor of his simple Delhi house than he declared: 'We are India , the second-largest country in the world. You can't just take us for granted. India doesn't feel threatened by Pakistan, but in the whole international game India is being marginalized by the China-U.S. axis.'"

From these very disparate situations, of a recovering heroin addict, of a sixteen year high school student in suburban American, and from the gamesmanship of international power politics, you can see how powerful the urge is for self-respect and how universal and deeply human it is. Much of the cynicism that we may feel toward those who behave weirdly or detonate atomic weapons derives from the fact that most of us take self-respect for granted and don't comprehend how compelling it can be for those who don't enjoy it. Someone shaving his head is harmless, but the case of India and Pakistan demonstrates how distorting and potentially dangerous this obsession with self-respect can become.

While most of us do enjoy self-respect to the extent that we are not exhibitionists or do dangerous things to gain attention and to build our image, we nevertheless crave the approval and the notice of those around us. Many of the things we do are motivated by a desire to gain status and attention and to puff ourselves up, both in our own eyes and the eyes of others.

What does our scripture lesson of the day have to say to us about this. Psalm 107 says: Some wandered in desert wastes, finding no way to an inhabited town; hungry and thirsty, their souls fainted within them. Then they cried to the Lord in their troubles, and the Lord delivered them from their distress; he led them by a straight way, until they reached an inhibited town. For he satisfies the thirsty, and the hungry he fills with good things."

True and sustaining self-respect comes from God. God lifts up those souls that have fainted. God sets them on the path to an inhabited town. True self-respect comes from God's love for us and from the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. And we can carry God's love to others; through our love for others we can help them to love themselves. If those around Joe Sweet and Ptolemy Tompkins had shared more of God's love with them and helped lift up their fainted souls, they would have known the genuine self-respect that they craved.

The passage we read this morning from Colossians tells us to strip off the old self and cloth ourselves with the new self, which comes from being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. Through the Gospel and through the power of the Holy Spirit and the example offered us by Jesus Christ, we have the possibility of achieving a new self, being a new creation. And this new creation eliminates status distinctions. There is no longer Greek and Jew, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all. No longer does India have to detonate a bomb to prove that it is the equal of the U.S. and China. There is no hierarchy of world or personal status and respect. We are all of one being in Christ, all new creations.

And the passage we read from Luke adds the final dimension to a discussion of self-respect. We are likely to focus our attention on what will puff us up and make us look good in the eyes of others and in our own eyes, whether that is wealth, or power, or status, or a bald head or an atomic bomb. But those who store up such treasures for themselves will have nothing available to them on the day of reckoning. The passage from Luke urges us to focus on what is basic and what is essential.

The other day, I sat wondering how large an office I would be allocated in the new building the Peace Institute will move into in October and in turn how much status and respect I could command from others. As I was engaged in this exercise of self-aggrandizement, I saw a picture of an 89 year old woman, Lucille Mone, in Spencer, South Dakota. A tornado had just made a wreck of her home and of nearly all the other homes in Spencer. Six people were killed and 150 others were wounded. But after the tornado passed, Lucille returned to her wrecked house in hopes of salvaging the false teeth of her husband James. The picture shows her sitting bewildered and forlorn in the one chair remaining in her living room. As she looked frantically for her husband's false teeth, she told the reporter. "They were Omaha teeth. You can't get them in South Dakota." "They were Omaha teeth. You can't get them in South Dakota." It was one of the most poignant and forlorn pictures I have ever seen. And I was coveting a large office in our new office building. Jesus calls on us to rethink the treasures we accumulate to build our status and self-respect.

Sometimes a child can be the best instructor and the best model for setting priorities and identifying what is important in relating to others and in building our self-image and our self-respect. One of my closest colleagues at the Peace Institute is a lawyer named Neil Kritz, who directs the Institute's rule of law program and works particularly in Rwanda and Bosnia. Neil travels to these places with some regularity. The difficulty of these trips is compounded by the fact that Neil is an Orthodox Jew and a cantor, and he has to carry all his kosher food with him from home in his suitcase. But this does not deter him. Neil also has two small children, one of whom is two and the other five, and he feels guilty in leaving them at home whenever he travels, especially since the children miss him so much. Earlier this year when Neil was preparing for a trip to Bosnia, his five year old daughter asked if he would take one of her toys and give it to a child in Bosnia. And Neil did that. And now whenever he travels his daughter gives him a toy to take to a child in the country he is visiting. And she feels a connectedness to his travels and she feels a connectedness to the children of these distressed lands, and she ministers to these children through the gift of her toys.

At the end of our earthly days and even in our present days, we are confronted with the question of what really counts. What is really valuable? How do we calculate our true worth? Upon what have I built my self and my self-respect? Am I a new self and a new creation and does my self-respect come from my relationship with God? Have I been willing to share my most valuable toys with others in need, or have I instead tried to show off by having a large office, or shaving my head bald, or by detonating an atomic bomb? In the end, it is God that lifts up those who have fainted and it is God that gives us a chance to build a new self. Amen

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