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A School for Character
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis September 16, 2007, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Isaiah 30:8-26 John 3:1-10
Since last we were all together in one place, God only knows the ways in which each life here has unfolded. As a shepherd of this flock, I have been privy to the most obvious turns in the road as well as let in on a few of the more dangerous cliffs necessarily dared alone and apart from one another over the summer just past. Perhaps that is why I am not so taken with the hoopla of homecoming this year but rather rejoice in our returned hold on one another for Christ’s sake. To wit in these months: babies were delivered and miscarriages borne in silence; children grew by inches and injuries; the young graduated and are gone off to college; first born have left the nest empty and set out for what seems like the far country of life on their own; dear ones were laid to rest amid tears and fierce hope; both by miracle and sheer determination were ills abated or else it was that the darkness deepened; estrangement broke the promise of a lifetime for some, while for others (who walked up this aisle) life together joyously has just begun; a diagnosis out of the blue turned the heart inside out, the future upside down; the ravages of age, of course, chose not to take the summer off; neither did war or politics give us any rest; now one among us has been deployed to Iraq; others face the future without work to do; and more than one second mortgage appears to be too much to bear. The point is that though we may have been on summer vacation from school and work and worship, the school for character has remained in session. Since birth we have been enrolled and, I believe even beyond the grave, we will continue to become the persons God intended us to be…or not…until, at the last, chastened and changed, we are presented perfectly ourselves before the throne of grace. I bid you, therefore, on this morning of our Homecoming, imagine that the Teacher of the school for character has asked for an essay not about what you did over summer vacation but about the person you have become. Three things must be said at the outset about the school for character in which we are becoming ourselves. The first word, contrary to the divisions of nations, races and creeds, is that our character is wrought, our soul made, in the one-room schoolhouse which is this planet, where we are equally subject to the world as it has been made. In the context of God’s creation that is reliable and not prone to almighty intervention, we become who we are. That is to say, “Things always fall down rather than up in this particular corner of the universe. Fire is always hot; ice is cold. Sunshine, rain and snow, seedtime and harvest come in patterns that we can anticipate and in large measure describe.” [Leith] Augustine called conditions in this common classroom “providential naturalis, the processes established by God in the world [from the beginning] that were natural” and on which we may now rely. But then, said Augustine, God introduced into the universe reason, “and thereby inserted an element of novelty such that there was added an order of human choices.” Thus the second word to say about the school for character is that we wake into this consistent, intelligible classroom as creatures who are able to step outside ourselves in order to discern what we are to be and do. We can transcend ourselves and, from a critical distance, decide to arrange human life in this way or that, for good or ill. We are endowed with “minds, affections and wills” that are available for works of “compassion, love and mercy” or for the pursuit of selfish gain and the denial of another’s humanity. We decide every day, in this regard, who we will be. Instinct and impulse do not tell the whole human story. Neither do the vicissitudes of nature account for all of the human condition. We bear responsibility for our behavior in the classroom! Then the third word takes us to the heart of the matter, for though in the school for character we are responsible, we are not in charge. “The same consistent patterns of the universe which ensure that automobiles can be driven safely,” notes theologian John Leith, “also are the occasion of terrible accidents. In human affairs the consistency of the universe has both its benign and also its terrifying qualities.” Because there are no favorites in the classroom, because the order of nature is impartial, because God has left us free to choose, because the unseen Teacher “makes the sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous,” our character unfolds as we come to terms with the things that befall us. We are only beginning to unravel the reasons, but apparently our characters are schooled not only as we find ourselves in the bloom of health but also as we persevere in the face of cells multiplying wildly; we discover our metal not primarily on a mountaintop above the fray, but in the thick of the battle for peace and justice and human dignity. When the earth quakes, the heart stops, the ozone escapes us and, in all these events the grave insinuates itself as a definite limit to the human existence of all who are privileged to become themselves in the school for character, we begin to understand that it is the bread of adversity and the water of affliction that make our existence both precious and precarious. Here the astute student, who recognizes the pointlessness of the question “Why me?” will ask, “Why has the classroom been made in this way, impartial to the good and the evil alike?” Said the Puritans as if for a morning such as this, “The reason must be that God designed the world not for human comfort but as a school for character, as a vale of soul making.” Likewise wrote Unitarian William Henry Channing, “I do not say that God can find no school for character but temptation, trial and strong desire; but I do say that the present state is a fit and noble school. You, my hearers, would have the path of virtue from the very beginning smooth and strewed with flowers; and this would train the soul to energy?” Put another way, God could not create a perfect human being because you and I were made to become perfectly ourselves only by way of the “decisions of the human heart.” Without thought, Abbey is perfectly the dog she was created to be; the yellow jackets waiting for us outside are perfectly the insects God intended. But at issue for human beings “is not what happens to us” said Augustine in so many words, “but how we respond to what happens to us.” Nowhere has this lost truth been more powerfully developed than in Victor Frankl’s now classic little book entitled Man’s Search for Meaning. Writing out of his own experience in Auschwitz, where his father, mother, brother and wife died or were sent to the ovens, Frankl insists that no matter how difficult the course set before us, human beings always have the freedom to choose their attitude. Though even more than the freedom to choose our attitude, said Frankl, human beings are given the responsibility to seek out life’s meaning especially when life’s circumstances have left us powerless, tempting us to define ourselves over and over again as victims to whom a good life will forever be owed. For Frankl, human beings were made by God to dwell purposefully in the world. “I wish to stress” he writes, “that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within [the self]….Being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone other than oneself--be it meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets [one’s] self—by giving oneself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human we are”: the more we become the persons we were born to be. All of which finally brings us, belatedly, to this Homecoming Sunday and to the fact that though we have never left the one-room schoolhouse for character, we have likely neglected the text given to tutor us in the art of becoming human. You and I live not by our wits but by God’s Word spoken through the law and the prophets, fulfilled and made flesh in Jesus Christ, proclaimed and interpreted rightly only as we are gathered. The particular text before us this morning was first a text in the hands of Judah as Babylon laid siege to Jerusalem, destroying the place of God’s dwelling on earth and leading God’s people into exile. It was, as Walter Brueggemann has said, the null point of Israel’s existence. Fear marked their common lives leading up to the exile and had rendered them unable to step outside themselves in order to discern what they were to be and do as God’s witnesses. Instead they “devised desperate schemes to secure their borders, priests and prophets lost their ear for God’s word,…rulers made covenants with death….” When Isaiah comes on the scene, he is shouted down by voices that prefer lies and delusions rather than the truth. “The choice” writes Old Testament scholar Christopher Seitz “is between trust in God and trust in some other form of human security, as simplistic as that sounds. Over and over Isaiah repeats the same theme: trust in the Holy One of Israel or be doomed to the collapse of your iniquitous schemes.” Isaiah’s text is addressed to a nation, but we also may hear, in his words, God’s Word to us, to the persons we are becoming on this Sunday not of exile but of return. “He will surely be gracious to you at the sound of your cry; when he hears it, he will answer you,” says Isaiah and the God made known in Jesus Christ has heard you. “Though the Lord may give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, yet your Teacher will not hide himself any more, but your eyes shall see your Teacher,” the same Teacher who bid Nicodemus and bids you be born of him anew. “And when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left, your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, ‘This is the way; walk in it.’” That Word has become flesh and calls us to surrender the selves we set out to be without Him that we may be born anew in Him. In the end, Victor Frankl tells the story of entering Auschwitz with the manuscript of his book, his life’s work, hidden in his clothes, such that when he surrendered his clothes, he surrendered who he was in the world. In turn he “inherited the worn-out rags of an inmate who had already been sent to the gas chamber immediately after his arrival at the Auschwitz railway station. Instead of the many pages of my manuscript,” he recalls, “I found in a pocket of the newly acquired coat one single page torn out of a Hebrew prayer book, containing the most important Jewish prayer, Shema Yisrael.” Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one. Welcome home! |