HARD CHOICES

September 22, 1991

8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan

Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
James 3:13-18
Mark 8:27-37

"For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit
their life." ~-Mark 3:36 (NRSV)

What do you want to be when you grow up? The question
never leaves us. Or, perhaps more accurately, we find ourselves
answering it - all our lives.

It comes at us early, and sometimes we learn how to
answer and how not to answer because of the reactions of those
who ask it of us. And sometimes what we want to be is powerfully
shaped by the ones who ask the question and who respond to our
childish answers either with approval or disapproval.

I recall, for some reason, a discussion in a Sunday
School class. I must have been ten years old. The teacher
asked us what we want to be when we grow up and I answered: "J
want to be a baseball player." To this day I recall the teacher
painstakingly explaining how unrealistic and unlikely that was...
how very few ever make it to the top... how irresponsible it was
to pin your hopes on it, something so remote, etc., etc. I'm not
sure it's the only reason I never Played for the Pirates - but it
was a learning experience.

In a time when second and third careers are not uncom-

mon, "What do you want to do when you grow up?" is a relevant
question.

And ever for those of us who probably will not choose
alternate careers, the question points to a deeper dilemma -

namely that life is, ina sense, always asking/demanding that we
choose who we will be.

It is a question of profound importance. It may be the
question. It is a question being asked in a particular way by
feminist writers. "What does it mean to be a woman?" And the

popular writers of the new men's movement are also asking what it
means to be a man today.

In the current bestseller, Fire in the Belly, "on Being
A Man," by Sam Keen, there is a provocative section about work
and identity. Keen is a philosopher, author, editor of Psycholo-
gy Today, and before all that, a professor of Theology at a
Presbyterian Seminary, although you will not find that mentioned
on the dust jacket of the book. He maintains that old defini-
tions of what it means to be a man don't work anymore,.and that
in the wake of:a decade or so of feminism, men have some catching
up to do. His book is about men but it is certainly not exclu-
Sively for men. Keen and other writers about contemporary men
and manhood, maintains that ever since the industrial revolution
took adult men away from home to earn a living, boys who have
spent most of their time with women, have been deprived of con-
sistent adult male role models, and traditional rites of passage
into adulthood. The culture has stepped in and done inadequately
what fathers, uncles, grandfathers, village elders used to do.
Listen to him on this matter of identity.

"Preparations for the male ritual of work begins
even before the age of schooling. Long before a
little boy child has a concept of the day after
tomorrow, he will be asked by well- meaning but
unconscious adults, 'What do you want to be when
you grow up?! It will not take him long to discov-
er that 'I want to be a horse' is not an answer
that satisfies adults. They want to know what men
plan to dado, what job, profession, occupation, we
have decided to follow at five years of age! Boys
are taught early that they are what they do.

"Our rites of passage, include the games which
prepare men for the battles of business and
life... the first full-time job...and then getting
a credit card. "The credit card," Keen says, "is
for the modern male what killing prey was to a
hunter... The Visa Card is an insignia of member-
ship, a sign that the system trusts you to spend
what you have not yet earned. In modern America
going into debt is an important part of assuming
the responsibilities of manhood. Debt, the will-
ingness to live beyond our means, binds us to the
economic system that requires both surplus work
and surplus consumption. The popular bumper
sticker 'I owe, I owe, so off to work I go,' might
well be the litany to express the dilemma of
modern men and women." [p. 51-53]

Keen, poet Robert Bly and Chicago psychologist Robert
Moore, like the feminist writers before them, are holding up for

a

our careful inspection today, the models of manhood and womanhood
which powerfully influence us. Their work is important. They
are asking about our basic identity as men and women who live and
move and have being for seven or eight decades in the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries. They are asking the human question -

"Who are we? Why are we who we are? Who will we be when we grow
up?"

Sam Keen and those others are joining a growing chorus
of voices suggesting that our models are wrong and that if our
identity is defined in economic terms alone, profits, consumer-
ism, acquisitions, security, we are working with a very low and
inadequate model of our humanity. The word "economist" itself
has evolved. Originally it meant manager. An economist was one
who managed a household with simplicity and efficiency and with-
out waste. People who paid serious attention to domestic manage-
ment used to be called home economists. Significantly the Uni-
versity of Iowa recently changed the name of its Home Economics
Department to Consumer Science. [Keen, p. 225] Keen thinks we
do answer the identity question in economic terms... Jesus asked

simply "What does it profit to gain the world and lose your
soul?"

"Have we been so successful at inculcating a culture of
economic individualism that we are losing our capacity for ethi-
cal citizenship?" asks a former vice-president of General Motors.
{Can We Keep Our Glorious Market in Its Proper Place?, Elmer
Johnson]

Matthew Fox, professor at Mundelein, says we have
become compulsive consumers, walking garbage cans espousing the
philosophy, "I buy, therefore, I am." [A Spirituality Called
Compassion, p. 193]

And the former head of NBC and Curtis Publishing pre-
dicts that "if our system fails it will be because the principle
compulsion of most people running American business today is to
make short-run profits... The disease is greed." [Ibid, p. 196]

I chuckled at Sam Keen's throw-away line that the world
today is divided between nations who suffer because their econo-
mies have collapsed and nations who suffer because their econo-
mies have succeeded. And I stopped chuckling when I realized
that the newspaper on Thursday morning documented the truth of
that observation. Page two told about unemployment and the
utter lack of consumer gocds because of the failed economic
system in Eastern Europe. Page three told that the United States
leads the free world in every measurable category of poverty...
education, per cent of population hungry, health care, life
expectancy. Page four told how hopeless it is to be young and
ambitious in Yugoslavia. Page five told how the teen pregnancy
rate in Illinois increased more this year than in any year in the

past two decades, Page six told about children abandoned and
Starving in the Horn of Africa. Page seven told about the

children who died in the most recent "drive-by" shooting in
Chicago.

So maybe it is time for the culture, the nation, to ask
about the basic definition of men and women which are operative
here, about what we choose to be as a people. And maybe it is
time for each of us to ask - who we are and why we are what we
are and who we choose to be when we grow up, i.e. in the years of
life we have left.

It was that kind of critical juncture for the friends
of Jesus one day when he asked them what people were Saying about
him. They told him that some were saying he was John the Bap-
tist, others thought he was Elijah. Both John and Elijah are the
ones who will announce and prepare the way for coming of the

Messiah in Israel. "But who do you say that I am?" he asked. And
Peter said simply, "You are the Messiah." But when Jesus goes on
to the persecution and suffering and death that will follow,
Peter argues with him. What is happening internally in this

familiar incident is that the question about the identity of
Jesus of Nazareth, the academic question, has become the exis-
tential question, the question of personal identity. Who he is
really means "Who do you choose to be?" As soon as Jesus starts
discussing the implications and the results of calling him Messi-
ah, Peter begins to back away. It's time for a hard choice. The
incident happens at the end of an extended period of traveling
through Galilee, teaching, healing, staying with friends, and at
the beginning of the period focused on Jerusalem, a time of
confrontation and conflict, of arrest and trial and execution.

It's time to decide who they will be. And so he puts.
it to them directly:

"If any want to become my followers, let them deny
themselves and take up their cross and follow me.
For those who want to save their life will lose
it, and those who lose their life for my sake will
Save it. For what will it profit them to gain the
whole world and forfeit their life?"

A cross to bear is sometimes the way we describe a
physical handicap, a recurring relational problem, a heavy family
“responsibility, but that is not what Jesus meant. To "take up a
cross" is to volunteer, to assume responsibility you don't have
to assume, to welcome tasks you have every right to avoid. "To
take up a cross" is to do the unnecessary, to accept for oneself
obligations the avoidance of which would cause no one to think
any less of us. "To take up a cross" is to invoke the "S" word:
sacrifice. "We scoff at saints who deny self and assume volun-

tary hardships" observes Elain Prevallet. [Weavings, May/June,
1991] We call it regressive ana sick, masochistic... bad psy-
chology.

To take up a cross and follow Jesus is to make a big
decision about who I am and who I will be. It is to make a very
basic philosophic affirmation about the meaning of my life. It
is to say that my own being will henceforth be established, not
as I find myself, look into my soul, become my own best friend,
take care of myself, indulge myself, but as I give myself away.
It is not a decision our culture has applauded recently.

The poet Robert Bly has written a book about being a
man that is also a bestseller. It too, is not exclusively for
males and addresses our common humanity with wisdom and wit. Bly
uses male archetypes, and the work of Chicago psychologist Robert
Moore as the basis of his discussion. I found myself thinking
about what Jesus said to his friends about losing and saving
their lives when I read Bly on the "Warrior."

The poet hopes that modern men will recover the "inter-
nal warrior" which is in all of us... not the violent warrior...
but that place in all men and women, capable of anger at injus-
tice, that fierce fighter inside which is ready to stand up for
one's own. Bly Suggests that what we need are angry men who will
not tolerate drug dealers preying on their little ones.

Bly says a true warrior is in service to a purpose
greater than himself: a transcendent cause - which he calls a
"True King."

Listen to the poet and please substitute female pronouns
aS appropriate:

"When a warrior is in service to a True King... he
does well and his body becomes a hardworking
servant which he requires to undergo cold, heat,
pain, wounds, scarring, hunger, lack of sleep.
The person in touch with warrior energy can work
long hours, ignore fatigue, do what is necessary
to finish the Ph.D. and all the footnotes, endure
obnoxious department heads, live sparsely like
Ralph Nader, write as T. §. Eliot did under a
Single, dangling light bulb, clean up filth as St.
‘Francis or Mother Teresa, endure contempt, disdain
and exile as Sakharov did." Tron John,

p. 150-151]

Jesus said: "Take up your cross. If you lose your
life for my sake you will fina it... what will it profit to gain
the whole world, if in the process you lose your soul?"

It is a gross misuse of the words of Jesus to hear in
them a diatribe against hard work or profit, for that matter.
There is a sense in which taking up a cross, volunteering for
unnecessary responsibility, is always hard work. Sometimes it is
not even very visible or dramatic. Jesus was not recommending
martyrdom. The dailiness of bearing a’ :cross: means a way of
living, a basic orientation, a determination that the meaning of
my life will be located somewhere outside myself. It will, in
fact, mean working very hard.

James Autry, CEO of the Meredith Corporation, has written a
remarkable little book of essays and poems on management under
the title, Love and Profit. One of them is "The Meaning of
Rich." Autry reflects that we used to think $64,000, or $50
a week for the rest of your life was rich. But...

"Money comes and goes,

and so does the meaning of rich,

but most of us retired before we learned
that nothing pays off

like having work to do."

[p. 48]

And profit? If we know anything about economic sys-
tems, it is that systems that do not generate profit and capital
do not provide basic goods and services for very long, that

whatever else an economic system does it must encourage people to
work hard.

The incident between Jesus and his would-be disciples
very simply defines the nature of that decision which, in one way
or another, confronts every one of us.

Who will we be?

What True King will we serve?

The shape of that will differ for each of us.

For one it will be coming here weekly to tutor a young-
ster,

For another it will mean giving up a Saturday to work
at Cabrini-Green. ;

For one it will mean attending yet another planning
meeting when the TV beckons.

For another it will mean speaking a word of compassion
and justice in an environment where that word will not win
friends.

For one it will mean staying with a relationship and

trying again and for another leaving a relationship and starting
again.

For one it is returning to a task that needs doing and
for another finding, perhaps for the first time, a cross to pick
up and carry.

It means volunteering... It means doing what you don't
have to do... It means giving more than you are required to give.
It means investing your life fully.

<x If you are fortunate you already know that and are in
some. way doing it. If you are blessed you have work to do;
something for which you live, something or someone so important
to you that you forget yourself and die a little or a lot. If
you are truly blessed and fully alive - you are giving yourself
to a child, a parent, a friend, your students, your clients,
your patients, a stranger, the helpless, the homeless, the sick,
the prisoner. The very essence of Christianity - the essence of
what he taught and lived and died expressing is just this: if

you lose yourself for his sake, you will gain your life, your
soul.

When you give your life to him, or when you give it to
others, which is always very close to giving your life to him -
something mysterious and incredible and very good happens to you.

You get something back. it's called your soul, your self, your
life.

Jesus - the Christ, promised that one day.
All praise to him.

Amen.