LHE ORDTNARINESS OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE
| January 19, 1992
8:30 and 11:00-a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
' 1.Corinthians 12:4-11
, Luke 3:3-14

"And the crowds asked him, 'What then should we do?!
~Luke 3:10 (NRSV)

I often wonder how much graduating seniors remember of the
Speeches made on commencement day, a typical one of which can
produce a torrent of rhetoric. I've been there... One time I
delivered the baccalaureate sermon, in fact it. was the first time
I had been invited to do it. The sermon I produced and - preached
was substantial, heavy. It was about the truths and values and

world and culture and institutions the nervous graduates were
about to enter, etc., etc. It went on for a while, you might
Say. 0

After lunch, we were at commencement. I was on the platform
in a black robe on a very hot afternoon. . The speaker, I recall,
‘was from the State Department. He said about the same thing I
said in the morning, without the Bible stories. . Instead he told
a lot of stories from his field experience. He too went on
awhile. =

class had chosen the Head of the English Department and I. = -not
alone I know ~ sighed, tried to readjust my seat and dug in for

this time with illustrations from Shakespeare, T. 8, Eliot,
Chaucer perhaps. Some of us were praying for a miracle, like
rain. And we received a miracle, not rain. The Professor. ‘stood ©
up and said: a : : :

"I have three things to say...

"Learn more than you know now, because what
you know now isn't really very much.

"Don't forget your family.

"Stay healthy. Don't drink toc much and
don't make yourself ill with stress.

"Pp, Ss. Send your children to Muskingum
College."

And he sat down. The audience was stunned and I, again not
alone, thought, "Is that all?" and of course realized quickly
that the graduating seniors had heard nothing that day any more
‘important than that -

-learn more;
-don't forget your family;
-~stay healthy.

It happens on occasion. Joe Paterno, football coach at Penn
State, was invited to address the university commencement. It
was the year Paterno had turned down a very lucrative offer to
coach the New England Patriots and his decision was discussed a
rot and was criticized in some quarters. So his speech is a good
one, but the crisp, brief conclusion is one of the best. I've ever
read. He said:

"I tell my team: 'keep hustling. Go all out
on every play no matter how bad things look,
because if you keep hustling something good will

‘happen. And usually it does.'"

There is something of this dynamic - brevity, simplicity,
profundity in deceptively, uncomplicated bits of advice and
surprise, almost disappointment. There is something of that
going on in the incident recorded in the third chapter | of the
Gospel according to St. Luke which we heard this morning.

It is one of my very favorites. I am intrigued by it.

We're not sure what to make of this John the Baptist charac-
ter. We're not even sure we like him much. He's so fanatical,
tough, uncompromising, and peculiar - eating locusts and wearing
a loin cloth. I don't even remember which one it was, but in one
of Hollywood's attempts to tell the story of Jesus, he was played
with a kind of terrible frenzy by Michael York; and Michael York
screaming almost convulsively at a group of very uncomfortable
men and women is the image that pops into my head every time I
think about John the Baptist.

1/19/92 2

Luke is getting us ready to meet Jesus. - God's son :- savior
of the world. And we're not sure what all this John’ the. Baptist
material has to do with that. a ae

John comes out of the. desert, preaches "Gospel;," which. in
this case is a radical condemnation of the way people are living
_and a radical. call to repentance and.conversion, symbolized by
baptism. John calls his listeners snakes scurrying for a hiding
place before a spreading fire - not a terribly comfortable. meta-
phor. Se 2 : a wo

John made the Romans very. uncomfortable... They watched him,
arrested him and executed him in short order. John. baptized
Jesus - made Jesus uncomfortable enough to. step into the. water: of
the river one day and begin his work. _ : Odes

--This day John was going on about God's coming judgment and
the ax at the root of the tree and snakes fleeing... .and-the
crowds asked, "What shall we do?"

You might have expected him to say:

"Sign up and become a part of the new commu-
nity I am organizing," or "come along to our
desert monastery and live a life of purity in the —
wilderness," or "join the guerrilla movement," or
"lay down your life," or "send in a check to keep
this ministry going." = cons

It was, after all, a powerful. and defining. moment which. he
had created by the compelling passion of his preaching. So it is
a surprise - a let down actually - when they ask, "What. shall we
do?" and he says: Co —— Wohl

"If you have enough food and clothing for ©
yourself, share some with those. who do. not; and if
you are a tax collector, don't. cheat; and if.you. |

are a soldier, don't take advantage.of.your au- .-:
thority; and everybody, don't, take what isnitt..
yours; and be content with what you have."

John had an opportunity to propose radical change and chose
instead to hand out a. few terribly ordinary bits of ethical.
~advice. SO , ed ; cane

Our assumption is that religious conversion is or ought to
be pretty dramatic. Our expectation is that tax collectors will
repent, quit being tax. collectors and become preachers. . Conver-
Sion ought to be dramatic, at least interesting. There was an
item in one of the journals I read recently about a New York
Times interview with Claudette Colbert who just turned eighty-
eight, starred in sixty-seven films and worked as an actress for

1/19/92 3

Seven decades, was married to the same man, quite happily, and

about who no one knows any scandal. There is, obviously, no
autobiography forthcoming. No publisher, no public, would touch
such an ordinary book. Ordinariness is not very interesting.

[Context, Martin E. Marty, 11/20-27/91]

Now there are some things going on here that the scholars
want us to see. First of all the inclusiveness. Luke is getting
us ready for Jesus and one of the things he most wants us to know
about God's son is that he is the savior of all people, not just
a few. So that cast of characters includes tax collectors:
gquislings, traitors, Jews who did the Roman's dirty work and who
everybody loved to hate. And soldiers... that is, Roman sol-
diers, occupying soldiers, gentiles, enemies. This is an improb-
able inclusive religion. All are welcome: men and women and
children - not just men, gentiles - not just Jews, Greeks, sin-
ners, soldiers, prostitutes, lawyers and politicians. And please
note Luke's consistent focus on public behavior. The response to
God's grace is not private piety, certainly not a retreat from
the world. It is public, economic, social, and political.

“*Share what you have with the poor.
*Don't cheat, lie, steal.
*Don't take advantage of others.

Simple? Sometimes not so simple. Sometimes it seems that
religious people have more than a little trouble with basic
things like kindness, compassion, understanding, tolerance.

Mary McCarthy said somewhere that as far as she could see,
"religion made good people a little better and bad people a
little worse."

Sometimes it's not so simple in a culture which is becoming
as pluralistic and diverse as ours is. Sometimes it seems that,
for one reason or another, the simple moral maxims which guided
us in the past are simply out of date, irrelevant.

In a speech here two weeks ago, University of Chicago histo-
rian, Martin Marty, talked about a dynamic which he predicted
would occur and which has - namely the tribalization of American
life on racial, ethnic and religious lines.

Marty once wrote that the issue for religion is the way it
always wants to become a "tribe" designed to define who the
insiders are and to keep everyone else out.

"Tribalization has a bearing on how we live.

If people are to coexist, there must be civility,
even at the cost of conviction." [By the Way of

1/19/92 4

- Response, p. 86) The committed are often not.
_ Civil, Marty observes, and the civil are uncommit= -
ted.

- There is, is there not, a lingering suspicion that the
fanatics, the zealots, are the only true believers? There is a
world-wide turn to fundamentalism, the characteristics of which
are an absolute conviction about what is true and good, anda
total commitment to excluding variation. . It really doesn't
matter whether it comes from Islam or Christianity, from the
Right or Left politically, from the McCarthyism of the 50s to the
Political Correctness of the 90s, the result is the same - the
Sacrifice of civility, tolerance, compassion, in the name of
conviction. me. ee Fhe ee

We can't afford that. We can't afford David Duke's racism,
“or anybody's vision of a homogeneous, Anglo-Saxon republic which
_Gisappeared sometime around the turn of.the century, any more
than we can afford the rap music threat which proposed. burning
down Korean grocery stores in the ghetto as a way to establish
racial justice.

. How. are-we ever going to talk about abortion,

: Marty asks, when what. we euphemistically call a.
_ debate is really an "uncivil war between bearers:
-. Of bumper stickers who divide the world into two
camps." [Ibid, p. 100] ee

In a review of an important book, Culture Wars, The Struggle
to Define America, Alan Wolfe observes that: "on the basis of |
political. ideology Americans are willing to tolerate fantastic —

abuses. of. public. trust." _- [See Context, 1/1/92]

And so we witness high. government officials who - in the:
name of ideology, lied.to the country and the Congress, destroyed
the evidence, and undercut the law of the land - rewarded by

public adulation... large, adoring audiences and congregations
“wherever they speak. 7 ee re od os

“SO maybe John's advice isn't so.simple after all. Share,

don't cheat, don't take advantage. Perhaps here is where civili-. —

zation stands or falls. Perhaps here at the moral bottom line,
the ordinariness of life, is where a culture's viability is
established or destroyed. oe oh co

One thing is certain, it's where-most of us: do our living.
Most of us will not have the opportunity to be moral heroes or
heroines... Most of us. will not respond. to God's claim on our
lives by dropping what we are doing, selling all and becoming
missionaries, because we can't actually, can't that is to say,
without walking away from people who count on us and need us and
whose lives are in some sense, our responsibility too. Some of

1/19/92 — 5

us have to find a religion and a spirituality and a discipleship
which makes sense where we are and has something to do with
keeping on keeping on.

The late Karl Rahner was one of the most distinguished
churchmen and theologians of the century. He wrote:

"The demands of everyday morality are not
easy at all. Everyday life as it is already asks
of a lot of us."

We know about that. Integrity defined by income tax re-
turns. Compassion defined by a relationship with an aging parent
who is not at all nurturing or maybe even loving or kind to us

any longer. Justice defined by entering a voting booth and
casting my ballot on some basis other the my own self-interest,
or tax rate. Loyalty defined not by a heroic testimony and

martyrdom but by staying with a relationship through difficult
and unsatisfying times. Discipline defined by not leaving with-
out trying. Devotion defined by not giving up on the kids.

It's what the motion picture, "Grand Canyon" is about: a
successful white lawyer helped and probably saved by a black man
Simply doing his job; a gang~-banger saved by the white man
trying to find some way to say a simple thank you to the black
man; a marriage saved by a baby... The fact that Simple, ordi-
nary kindness, consideration, honesty, loyalty... are, as a
matter of fact, not simple at all, but always miracles.

Rahner wrote:

"To keep on through dull, tedious, everyday
existence can often be more difficult than a
unique deed whose heroism makes us run the danger
of pride." [Meditations on Hope and Love, p. 22]

The Ordinariness of the Christian Life - that's where it is
for most of us, slugging it out day by day, trying to make ends
meet, and to be as good as we can at what we do, and to use what
we have responsibly, trying to be honest and kind and just.

Rahner wrote:

"When we are true to our conscience...God's
kingdom comes to us just where we are, living
quite ordinarily, carrying on patiently."

"What shall we do?" they asked the preacher. What shall we
do? "Live it out," is the answer still: live it out with com-
passion, kindness, integrity - the ordinariness of the Christian
life. Amen.

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