Beyond the Patio

Who are We and What in the World are We to Do?
John 1:29-42

About thirty years ago, a priest by the name of Jack Woodard, who was at that time a consultant at the national office of the Episcopal Church of the USA, talked to a group of both laypeople and clergy at a conference in Manitoba. During his speech he told the story of a meeting he had with a young man.

He said that he had been invited to preach on a Sunday in a parish in Long Island. In the “glad-hand-line” after the service, this young man said to him ‘Father Woodard, I’d like to talk to you sometime in the coming week. I have a problem”. Jack assumed that the problem was perhaps a marital breakdown or something like that but later he realized that his assumption couldn’t have been further from the truth.  They did meet for lunch in Manhattan the next week and the young man took him to a club and when we had disposed of the waiter he said,

“I was fascinated by what you said Sunday that was hopeful-about an emerging new Church …. My problem is that I am 34 years old, I have 120 million dollars and I don’t know why. Furthermore, the Church is not helping me find out why”.

Now after Jack dropped his soup spoon and shook a bit, he was able to realize that this young man was not asking him to tell him where he could send cheques, he was asking a very deep and profound and anguished vocational question, in the deepest sense of Christian vocation. Behind his question was a desire to find out who he really was and what was he to do in the world. “. Jack was only able to say to him,

“I have no idea what to say to you. I’ve never even met anybody who had 120 million dollars. Let’s just become friends. I do get around the country and encounter some exciting things once in a while and let’s see what happens”.

Some very interesting things happened after that, one of which was that this young man began to spend a night a week working with narcotic addicts in east Harlem.  After he became involved in this way he enabled the building of a whole new building there and helped establish a program of narcotics addiction treatment. At that particular time this treatment centre was beyond anything that Jack had seen anywhere else in the country.

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I suppose the question that the young man was asking is a question that we all ask at some time or another. We struggle with who we really are as human beings and how are we to live in the world. I suppose that many people in the world might answer that we are to work continually for gain, fame and fortune, reproduce our species and greedily devour the resources of the world. That answer does not satisfy us at the deepest level of our lives and in fact this selfish pursuit has the danger inherent in it.  It will probably destroy the world as we know it. What many people have found, no matter what religion they are associated with, or whether they have not religious allegiance, is that there is a Divine Spirit within us. No matter how they may describe this Spirit or what name they might give it, it lies latent waiting to be born and nurtured in us and when that happens we are empowered to work for the betterment of the world, for the well being of all human kind, and to act with great compassion sharing the world’s pain, in ways that we could scarcely imagine before such a birth. In other words, we discover the light that enlightens everyone who comes into the world, and we bring that light to bear anywhere that we might find ourselves. I think of that quotation by Martin Luther King Jr.:

“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgment.  Life’s most persistent and urgent questions is, What are you doing for others?”

King points out that we have a new sense of greatness, that is in our service to humankind:

“Everyone can be great.  Because anyone can serve.  You don’t have to have a college degree to serve.  You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve.  You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve.  You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve. You don’t’ have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve.  You only need a heart full of grace.  A soul generated by love”

Also, what Mother Teresa of Calcutta said at one time:

“You must first see and analyze the need, then, do all in your power to meet it.  One step, one person at a time.”

I think that is what the young man in our story found. He was moved with divine compassion, saw and analyzed a need, became involved by sharing the suffering of one person at a time in his volunteer work, and went from there to establish ways of meeting the needs of many addicted and suffering people in his community.

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I believe that is what we come across in the reading from John’s Gospel today that the world found in the person of Jesus a new kind of humanity, one that was united with God, and the kind of life that came through this incarnation was one that was summed up in the words, “behold the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”.  The lamb of God conjures in our minds many images.  There is the lamb of the Passover which is associated with the liberation of the Hebrew people from slavery.  There is the lamb sacrificed in the temple to overcome the separation between ourselves and God. There is the lamb referred to in the prophets that suffers and sacrifices on behalf of humankind.  There is even the horned lamb connected with the struggles of the Maccabees that appears as a symbol of conquering majesty and power.  So the picture of the lamb sums up for us the liberation, love, sacrifice, suffering on behalf of others and the triumph that is found in Christ like life. The picture we have of the first disciples is that through the time spent with Christ they discovered that same Divine Spirit in them and they were given the power to to do same work of liberation, love, sacrifice, sharing the suffering of the world. They knew that the Spirit of Christ lived in them

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There is a challenge to us facing the Lamb of God in Today’s Gospel. I find this challenge expressed in the words found in an article entitled Cheap Talk about an All Powerful God

One Christian writer has said, “All cheap and easy talk about a God of sovereign power who is in control of a world in which there is so much poverty, suffering, and injustice is obscene. All self-confident talk about a powerful church that has the mandate and the ability to change society with this or that conservative or liberal social/political agenda or with this or that evangelistic program is increasingly absurd in a disintegrating church that cannot solve its own problems, much less the problems of the world. The only gospel that makes sense and can help is the good news of a God who loves enough to suffer with and for a suffering humanity. And the only believable church is one that is willing to bear witness to such a God by its willingness to do the same thing” 
(Shirley Guthrie, “Human Suffering, Human Liberation, and the Sovereignty of God,” Theology Today, April 1996, p. 32). As quoted in material from www.esermons.com

No matter where, how or when we meet that God who loves enough to suffer for a suffering humanity, We know who we really are as human being and what in the world we are to do.

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