GOD'S CURIOUS CHOICES John M. Buchanan
Luké 577-11 Broad Street Presbyterian Church

February 6, 1983 Columbus, GH

So very much of the life you and [ like its shaped, influenced and
determined by the power of celebrity. There is a fine young basketball
player for Georgetown University, named Patrick Ewing, whose affectation
is a plain gray T-shirt which he wears under his uniform. Sure enough,
at a 7th grade basketball tournament in which I was involved yesterday
most of the young centers wore a T-shirt under their uniform.

When E.T., that friendly visitor from outer space, was lured inte
the world of human beings by a trail of Reese's Pieces, that hitherto
relatively unknown candy became a best seller. And when Clark Gable
took off his shirt, revealing a bare chest, modest and traditional American
men took heed and for a whila the sales of men’s underwear shirts dropped
dramatically.

Even religion - or especially religion - is swept along by the same
tide...When President Nixon's Assistant, Charles Colson, wrote a book
“Born Again", and President Carter used the same terminology, and an
assortment of movie stars and professional athletes made public confession
of the same kind of faith experience, the “Born Again" phenomenon began
to have a major impact on the ecclesiastical landscape.

The need for heroes and heroines is not new, nor is the public adora-
tion and celebration of the gifted and the strang. But it is healthy,
on occasion, to acknowledge that for most of us, life will be ordinary
by these criteria. Thus, it was almost with a sense of relief that I
read recently about a new organization, "The Dull Men's Club”. The gender
designation is not significant I assume, in that there seem to be as
many dull women as dull men in the world. The founder and president
of the organization, Mr. Joseph L. Traise, says that it is for "The mil-
tions whe do not waar designer jeans, are not listed in Who's Who, never
joined a fitness club and wear pajamas to bed." The club's only publica-
tion will be “Who's Nobody in America”: a list of some 230 million names.
If you are wondering if you qualify for membership, Mr. Traise suggests
the following "Duliness Exam":

You are dull if...when someone mentions ERA, you think they're talking
about Earned Run Averages, potato chips, or real estate.

..-if you refer to the person with whom you live as your husband or wife;
...1f you have ever been a member of a bowling league.

Onty slightly less facetiously, Mr. Traise says his organization
is necessary because “Behind every flashy facade sits a fastidiously
competent drone whe keeps the whole ship afloat.”

That part is anoverstatement, but essentially true, of course. Most
of us will not be the President of the country, or the company, or even
the PTA. Even in this gathering, it is true that the vast majority will
not become Chief Executive Officer, will not be recognized much for out-
Standing accomplishment, will never come in first. Celebrity is something
most of us experience from a distance.

~2-

We have done that a lot. We have also prettied up the scenario along the
way. Nothing is further from the ordinariness of it all than the classical nativity
- with modest, white-robed virgin, sweet smelling hay, lovely stable. In fact, it
was very dirty. It was a barn, They were there because they were a pair of nobodys
from an obscure village nobody cared about. It was probably utterly dark: Mary
gave birth ta her chiki and there was no light. There was no hot water, no towels,
ne sheets.

The actual scene would have been rough and most ordinary. It was not, in
any sense, what one might perceive as a “religious” event, It is so hidden under
layers of Christmas customs, nativity scenes, and Hallmark cards so as to be virtually
invisible - but in the original story the birth of Jesus is so very ordinary it requires
someone to point out, cali attention to, the fact that there is something of great
significance happening in the ordinary event of human birth. The somebody, of
course, is the angel. It's the. angel's task throughout to point to the deener signifi-
cance of what appears to be common. If you have ever had the privilege of looking
at great art in the presence of someone who truly knows a Iot about it, you have
experienced what angels do - pointing to the importance of nuances and details
that you and | are inclined not even to notice.

What you need this morning, I propose, is not a sermcn on the incarnation
but an angel: to celebrate the mystery of God's love in a beman birth and, more,
to recognize this day the presence of God's healing, nowerful, reconciling love
in the ordinariness of your life,

To that end I wish to read, briefly, portions of short stories: one, simply
fun; the other, rather profound. The first is the delightful story, The Best Christmas
Pageant Ever: about an unruly, haphazard bunch of ragamuffins from the wrong
side of the tracks who take over the Christmas pageant at a proper Presbyterian
Church; and in ending up with the important parts give the pageant some new authen~
ticity. The pageant is on, the congregation is humming "O Little Town of Bethlehem"
and the two Herdman youngsters ~ the terrors of the town - are about to make
their entrance as Mary and Joseph...

"l guess we would have gone on humming till we ali turned blue, but
we didn't have to. Ralph and Imogene were there ali right, only for
ence they didn't come through the door pushing each other out of the
way. They just stood there for a minute as if they weren't sure they
were in the right place - because of the candles, I guess, and the church
being full of people. They locked like the people you see on the six
o'clock news - refugees, sent to wait in some strange ugly place, with
all their boxes and sacks around them.

"It suddenly occurred to me that this was just the way it must have
been for the real Hely Family, stuck away in a barn by people who didn't
much care what happened to them. They couldn't have been very neat
and tidy either, but more like this Mary and Joseph (Imogene's veil was
cockeyed as usual, and Ralph's hair stuck out all around his ears). Imogene
had the baby doll but she wasn't carrying it the way she was supposed
to, cradled in her arms. She had it slung up over her shoulder, and before
she put it in the manger she thumped it twice on the back.

= Be

God, according to this prophet, is going to use pagan Assyria to
discipline his people. The Assyrians neither believe in him nor care
anything about him. That fs an enormous assertion. God is going to
use a pagan nation to establish justice with in his chosen nation. Later,
in a portion of the book of Isaiah written during the exile, Cyrus the
Persian is called the Servant of God. In this case Cyrus defeats the
Babylonians and send the Jews home to the promised land. He is not a
believer, but the prophet clearly believes that the Lord God is using
Cyrus and is deeply involved in the decision Cyrus is making. One of
the more ambitious motifs in the Bible is that God's commitment to justice
is $0 strong that he uses even nations which otherwise do not seem to
have much te commend them, to establish it...1t may make you and me squirm
to be told that popular revolutions against oppressive dictators ~ even
when financed by the United States - fall into this category, but the
suggestion is consistent with the Bible.

God makes some very curious choices, through the birth of an trifant
to a poor, unmarried couple, and that son's growth and maturity on the
perimeters of his culture to his own vocation which was noticeably lacking
in power, public esteem and respectabililty. His own choices come through
the second lesson this morning. “I will make you fishers of men," he
tald his friends.

Who were they and what did they have that attracted Jesus to them?
It is the mystery of election again, because they weren't much, really.
They were fishermen mostly. And while some scholars romanticize them
by suggesting that their trade equipped them with special gifts of
strength, patience, judgment, and courage, I confess that that always
sounded contrived to me. We would have recruited a good corporate
organizer, a planner, an accountant, a banker, several rabbis. and the
best P.R. firm in Galilee. We Presbyterians need the constant reminder
that in intellectual, organizations, theological terms the disciples
were modest, to put it mildly. They hadn't heard about jong range
planning, management by objectives, nor the Trinity, nor Incarnation.
They hadn't the foggiest notion of a Christology, or an Ecclesiology.

Jesus saw something in them, each one of them, which had potential
usefulness in his kingdom. It was, I am coming to see, something latent,
something which was hidden and had to be called out of them. And whatever
it was he saw in them, I believe it was something they needed to develop
in order to bacome whole human beings.

They became his disciples and whole human beings when they said
"yes" to him: not when they passed an exam in Bible and theology, but
when they took the couragious step of acknowledging that they had bean
chosen and decided to go with it, to follow where it was leading.

It isn't always conscious - this dynamic we are discussing...Young
men and women who are registering their intent to become ministers and
are being taken under care of Presbytery, must answer this question:
"Do you, as far as you know your own self, believe you are called to
wittauyg? It is a difficult question, an embarrassing question. Who,
after all wants to presume to stand up and say God chose me?