Date
Sunday, February 11, 2018
Sermon Audio
Full Service Audio
It is fitting that this Black History month I begin with a quote from a man, who in the reconstruction period in the United States after the Civil War, was one of the most ardent voices for change. Today would have been the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Nelson Mandela and friends of mine in Cape Town gathered at St. George’s Cathedral with many others to celebrate. When I look back to figures of his ilk in the nineteenth century, I think of Booker T. Washington, who was without doubt one of the most significant voices in the midst of Jim Crow America and the race laws after the Reconstruction. He was born a slave, but rose above it to create a community of people who wanted to lift up slaves during a very difficult time in the world, and did so by creating a coalition with businesses, academics, clergy and churches, to help them find their footing in a just America. Though criticized and often seen by others like W. E. B. Du Bois as not being strong enough, Washington was nevertheless one of the legends of the anti-slave movement. He said: “If you want to be lifted up, lift up someone else.”
Those words might sound like warm apple pie with cinnamon. They may seem obvious and hardly worth repeating, for who really can argue with lifting up others if you want to lift up yourself. It is almost axiomatic if you are a Christian that you are going to embrace a phrase like that easily. That seems to me to be one of the great motives and movers of our faith, yet in reality, we know it is not easy to hold that conviction. There are so many people today who need to be lifted up in a society that is becoming fragmented again, with a core of racism running through it. People who are in need of care rather than reprisal, forgiveness rather than judgement, and peace rather than the fear of war and retribution.
There are many who are in need of being lifted up. Some of these people need to be lifted up physically because of some disease, or illness, starvation or poverty. Some need to be lifted up spiritually, unsure in their faith. Some lost the passion, and some never had it. Some live in poverty and find themselves scraping to make a living. Others are psychologically distressed, concerned for the wellbeing of themselves or others. They see people who are ill and want to do something to help. There are people who need to be lifted up. Unfortunately, that notion of lifting up the other sometimes gets lost, even in the myriad of views that are espoused as religious, where religion is seen more about lifting yourself up than the lifting up of others. In our self-obsessed world, there are those who turn to religion for the sake simply of lifting themselves up no matter what the cost may be, not paying mind to the second part of what Booker T. Washington said: that if you wanted to be lifted up, lift up someone else. In that atmosphere of false religion, which abounds in our world, what Washington said was radical.
This morning, I have two texts from the Bible that I think are inspirational for us when we are dealing with the words of Booker T. Washington. The first are from the Gospel of Luke. You probably have heard them before, and heard it again, it is the story of The Good Samaritan, and Jesus dealing with the question of “Who is our neighbour?” In the story of The Good Samaritan, as I suggested in a sermon on it a year or two ago, there are probably two neighbours here: there is the Samaritan, who goes out of his way to help the man on the side of the road, and then there was the beaten man on the side of the road, who was also the neighbour, in need of neighbourliness. The parable of The Good Samaritan stands as a message that would illustrate that Booker T. Washington was right.
The second I have chosen is from the Book of Galatians Chapter 6, verses 9 and 10, where Paul is writing to the young Christian community in Galatia. This is what he says, and this is what I want to dwell on this morning: “So let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest-time, if we do not give up. So then, whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all, and especially for those of the family of faith.” Paul is addressing a crisis within his own church; people are becoming weary of doing good. They are tired of it. They feel beaten up and rejected by society. Even the religious groupings are oppressing them. There are the legalists on the one side, who only want obedience to the law and fulfillment of the law, and then there are the licentious Greeks, who say that anything goes. The Christians are in the midst of this, and they are pulled by these opposing forces, and we are in a world, are we not, where those forces seem to be at work. On the one hand there is the libertarian world that says, “Go ahead and express yourself; be true to yourself and do whatever you want”, and then a legalistic society that crushes you for doing it. The Christians found themselves caught in the middle of all this. They want to live good, upright, honest lives, but they want to do it by sharing and caring for others, and they are getting criticized for it. They are weary, and it seems that they are not getting the rewards they are looking for. So Paul says to them, “Let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest time if we do not give up.” In other words, don’t think about lifting yourself up first, but think first of lifting up someone else.
I am sure all of us at some point in our lives, maybe even right now, feel weary of doing good. Maybe it is just that we are all getting a bit of cabin fever and fed up with ice and snow, cold weather, putting on boots, putting boots on our dogs, getting our children out, getting our cars working in the snow, getting the mud out of our tires, and the salt off our pants! I am sure we all feel that way a little bit, but that’s not the issue, right? It is the notion of being weary of our actually doing good. This is the issue. There are probably two and possibly more reasons why we hurt and why we become tired. But I think a lot of it originates from two problems, and one of them is a lack of responsiveness. We have all faced it at some point in our lives when we try to do good, to lift up others, only to find our actions received no traction.
The problem may rest with ourselves, for it seems that in wanting a response, and becoming weary when we don’t get one, means that we are being calculating rather than simply caring. By “calculating” I mean trying to weigh up the measure of the fulfillment of the response against the effort we have put in to the caring in the first place. We think that at the very least there should be some reciprocity. It doesn’t work like that! The world doesn’t work like that. The New Testament didn’t work like that. In The Good Samaritan there is no recognition whatsoever on the part of the beaten man as to how he responded to the Good Samaritan. There is no account of it. There is probably a reason there is no account of it, because in the scheme of Christ and in the light of the Gospel it doesn’t matter – you care regardless of whether there is a response to your caring.
Unfortunately, we as human beings overly calculate. The great Albert Camus in his work The Fall tells the story of a lawyer – and I am not picking on lawyers now, just so you know, but it happens to be a lawyer – who was walking along the banks of the canal in Amsterdam and sees a woman who, for one reason or another, has probably been thrown into the canal. The lawyer thinks, “What should I do?” He looks at this woman and thinks that as a prominent member of society, he probably should do something. But the more he dwells on it, the more he recoils from the idea, and thinks that if this woman was a woman of ill repute and he was seen to be rescuing her, he would be associated with her. Then he thought, “What happens if she has been the subject of violence? Maybe the people who had been violent to her will be violent to me. Maybe I shouldn’t get involved in case there is a cost to me.” He calculates and moves on. Camus said, “You know, there are people who are like that.” In other words, there are people who are more interested in calculating their own concerns and their own welfare than responding to the need in front of them. They decide they are not going to be engaged in the problem. Well, my friends, if we calculate our goodness, we will become weary of doing good. If we are looking for a response always to what we do, we will get worn down.
There is a second component to the origin of our weariness, and that is the problem that we have in what I call “carping criticism”. Clare Boothe Luce and later Oscar Wilde said, and you have heard this before: “No good deed goes unpunished.” It seems sometimes that there is almost a direct correlation between doing good and then receiving criticism for having done it. This was a problem that the Galatians were having. They were seen doing good and punished for doing it. Do we know anyone else in history who experienced the same thing? I think we do. When Jesus of Nazareth healed people on the Sabbath, what kind of criticism did he receive for having healed a blind person and a lame person on the day of the Lord. Or, when he associated with the tax collectors and the outcasts, with the Matthews and the Zaccheuses and the Marys. Who got criticized for having brought them back into the household of the Lord? Jesus himself! Who paid the ultimate price for doing the good and the right thing but Jesus of Nazareth. One can conclude: “No good deed goes unpunished.” Sometimes people are just jealous, as they were with the Galatians. There were other religious and non-religious groupings that looked at the Galatians and what they had, and despised them for having it. It was painful, aggressive, and hateful. Do not assume that in doing good you will receive a reward for having done so. The world does not work like that.
What is the antidote? Are we going to be weary and know the reason why? No, by no means! Paul makes it clear there are two responses to this, and the first is the power of community and the other is the power of Christ himself. Not being weary is dependent on community. Some years ago, I had the great privilege – and I am not name-dropping now – of sitting down with the Archbishop of York in a coffee shop. The Archbishop, John Sentamu, is a South African and a great guy – a fascinating man! There were a number of us talking to him, and in the conversation he gave an image of the church that has stayed with me. He said, “The Church is more like a chorus than a solo.” In other words, the life of the Christian and the doing good of the Christian is not a solo event; it is not just about us. When we become weary, we need each other. When we become downhearted, we need a community around us that takes us to a place above our own self-absorption and self-interest.
I thought about this last week on Thursday night, right here in this church. It was just a microcosm of Christian community, in my opinion at its very best. I had come in to host some academics at an event to support an academic enterprise. I realized that I had lost some of these people, and went around the building looking for them. I went into the Sanctuary to see if they are wandering around there and I heard magnificent voices and the piano playing, getting ready for Songs of Love and Passion. It was wonderful to hear voices working in harmony with one another and the beauty of the piano, which in an empty church was crystal clear, and I thought, “I will never find my guests. I am just going to stay here and listen to the music for a while.” But then I felt guilty, so I went down to the auditorium only to realize that Alcohol Anonymous was meeting. I thought, “Oh, great! I am going to have one of my friends, an academic, stop in an AA meeting and not know where they are!” I peered around the room trying to find them and I don’t see them there. I thought of all the hundreds of people who are being cared for, supported and nourished in the place. Then, I came upstairs and smelled food, and thought, “Wow, food! I’ll go where the food is.” Only to find young people studying Alpha and getting ready for Confirmation, watching a video about Jesus Christ, and volunteers and staff helping lead. I was overwhelmed by the message that I was hearing on the video, and thought, “No, I can’t stay here! I still haven’t found anyone yet!” I wandered the halls and I got everyone together, and I thought to myself, “How important this notion of chorus, rather than solo is!” We become weary when we think we are doing things on our own, as opposed to when we are doing them with others.
The last image I have was clearly an image that runs all the way through Galatians: spokes in a wheel. The spokes in the wheel get closer together as they approach the hub. This was something that I had heard years ago. The inverse is also true, that the spokes grow further apart the more they move away from the hub. You see, what draws people together, what forms community is the hub, and the hub in the Galatian Church was Christ. It was He who was the foundation; it was He who brought them together; it was He who was at the centre. The closer to the hub, the closer the spokes are to one another. What an image that is for the Church, and when we become weary, is it not the hub that draws us closer and closer together?
I read a story years ago in a magazine about a young woman called Linda. Linda was driving from Alberta to Whitehorse at the end of fall, when the roads are treacherous in the Yukon. There can be fog or mud, snow or ice. There she was in her little Honda Civic driving all the way from Alberta up into the Yukon. One night, she stayed at a motel in the hills, a remote place. She told the proprietor what she was doing and that she wanted a 5.30 am wake-up call. The proprietor said, “Are you mad? Are you going to drive this little car up to the Yukon on these roads right now? Oh, you are crazy!”
She said, “No, no, my friends in the city told me I would be all right doing this.” (City people don’t know anything, do we?!)
Anyway, at 5.30 am she gets up, gets breakfast, and there are two truckers there. The truckers come over and say, “Hi, where are you going?”
She said, “I am driving to Whitehorse.”
They looked at her and they looked out of the window and said, “Are you going in that?”
She said, “Yes, I am. I have been told I will be just fine.”
They said, “Okay, all right, it is time for a hug.”
She said, “Thanks, gentlemen, but I am really not interested in a hug right now. That is not what I am looking for.”
They said, “Oh no, sorry, you misunderstand us, when a trucker says ‘a hug’, it means one truck going first, the car behind it, and the other truck behind it.”
So they go in convoy, they don’t go alone, and the one in the middle is protected by the one in front and the one behind. One to pave the way to make sure the road is fine; one to be there behind to make sure that they are safe and have not strayed.
When I read that, I couldn’t help but think what an image that is of what Christ does for the community that loves him. It is not always easy to do the right thing. It sometimes means going into difficult places. It sometimes means being weary because of a lack of response, or opposition. But we do not become weary if we remain in touch with the hub. It is the hub that draws us together, brings the spokes close together. It may sound a bit corny but it gives us a hug. I like what Booker Washington said, “If you want to be lifted up, lift up someone else.” We know it is right, because of Christ! Amen.