The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost - August 21, 2005
The Rev. Dayle Casey The Chapel of Our Saviour Colorado Springs, Colorado August 21, 2005	Proper 16 - A Isaiah 51:1-6 Romans 11:33-36 Matthew 16:13-20

The most astonishing discovery of the year 2005 is that the world is flat. The earth may have been a sphere for centuries, but today it is flat again. So says Thomas Friedman in his “brief history of the twenty-first century,” the publishing sensation of the year.

In a nutshell, what Friedman means is that the economic playing field is now level once again. Twenty or thirty or forty years ago, if one were to ask which person had the greater economic advantage, a genius in a poor family in Bangladesh or India or a B-minus student in Des Moines or Dubuque, if a person had a choice of the economic advantages of the poor genius in Bangladesh or the B-minus student in Des Moines, he would have chosen, says Friedman – hands down – the advantages of the to B-minus student in Des Moines.

In those days, all the strong economic indicators were anchored on this side of a spherical world, and the Third World was safely out of sight on the other side. Everything then worked in favor of the B-minus student in Des Moines. The U. S. economy and industrial infrastructure were mature and still relatively solid, and the political system in the United States was still relatively stable. Get a high-school diploma, add perhaps a gentleman’s-C college degree, find a niche somewhere in the system, be willing to work creditably, if not brilliantly, and income and even a comfortable retirement were clearly within reach. In those days of the un-flat world, serious economic competition from Mexico or China or Indonesia seemed unlikely. For Americans, granddaddy’s economic coattails were long, even for those without family pedigree or brilliant minds. “Made in the USA” was still the preferred label on most cars and electronics and blue jeans sold in this country. “Made in Korea” had not been thought of. “Made in Japan” was a joke.

But in the 1990’s, argues Friedman, the tables turned, and the world is flat. The computer and the internet have exported equal opportunity to lands far beyond the United States. Today, he says, the economic advantage belongs not to the unambitious B-minus student in Des Moines, but to the poor, but bright young man in Bangladesh, because the future belongs to the intelligent, the ambitious, and the innovative, regardless of where he lives. The advantage belongs to the person of vision and boldness, to the person who sees opportunity, who is ready to grab it, and who is hungry enough to pay the cost of seizing it.

Electronic communication has woven the earth into a world-wide web of opportunity on a level playing field. And the opportunities are equal, because any intelligent young person in China or Korea or Bangladesh who can put together enough money for a laptop computer and combine it with his own intelligence, with his own personal initiative, and with the Third World’s hunger for jobs and income, can compete – and is competing – for the markets and jobs and money and power of the world. Employment and wealth are rushing toward those with vision and ambition who are willing to take the risks of innovation, not to those who just want to clip the coupons of a tired and unimaginative American manufacturing base and reap the benefits of an education in self-esteem rather than in mathematics, physics, and history.

Forty years ago, I read an article about an ambitious young man in America that astonished me. His name is H. Ross Perot. In 1957, Perot, then twenty-seven years old, loaded his family and everything they possessed into their Plymouth sedan and moved from Texarkana to Dallas, where Perot took a job as a salesman for IBM. A year or two later, IBM told Perot and the other IBM salesmen that their sales commissions would be limited to a certain maximum figure for a fiscal year. And since Perot had already earned that amount in the first six months, he figured it wasn’t worth his while to stay on at IBM. So in 1962 he set out on his own. With only his own ambition and a $1,000 dollar stake from his wife’s savings account, he created and incorporated Electronic Data Systems, and within a few years, under Perot’s entrepreneurial leadership, EDS became a multi-billion-dollar corporation. But what astonished me about the article I read in the mid-1960’s was not that Perot had been become phenomenally rich in a very short period of time. Quite a few people had done that. What really got my attention was what Perot said he did when he discovered that he had earned his first billion dollars. He disinherited his children, he said, because he did not want to deny them the opportunity he had had. Now that, friends, is a person who truly believes in equal opportunity!

Now all this has a religious and spiritual point, the very point Jesus is making today. “Who do people say the son of man is?” Jesus asked his disciples. “Well,” they replied, “some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” “But what about you?” Jesus asked. “Who do you say I am?” And Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the son of the living God.”

The point is that in the life of the spirit, in the life of faith and love and hope, the life of meaning, the world is flat. None of us can live for long on the spiritual capital of others, either on the spiritual capital of our granddaddies or on the capital of the spiritual system called the Church. Faith insists upon equal opportunity. What others say about the meaning of life, what others say about faith and love and hope and the future, is of limited value. Sooner or later in life, it becomes our turn to respond. What about me? What do I say? And what do you say? The spiritual coattails of our ancestors will not support us much beyond childhood, any more than their economic coattails can command the future. Faith and hope and meaning belong to those who are hungry, and who have eyes to see and ears to hear.

Now it’s helpful to remember that Jesus asks his question – “Who do you say the son of man is?” – while he was making his way to the Cross, where he knew he would soon give up his life in this world. As son of man, as a human being, Jesus knew that his pending and inevitable death raised questions of meaning and destiny for him, as death does for all human beings. “Where do you think we’re headed? What does it all mean? What hope is there?” he asked his disciples, as he asks us again today. “Who do you say the son of man is?”

Jesus knew with the psalmist that

Before the mountains were brought forth,
or the land and the earth were born,
from age to age you, [O Lord], are God.

You turn us back to the dust and say,
“Go back, [O son of man], O child of the earth.”

For a thousand years in your sight
are like yesterday when it is past,
and like a watch in the night.

You sweep us away like a dream;
we fade away suddenly like the grass.

In the morning it is green and flourishes;
in the evening it is dried up and withered.
........
The span of our life is seventy years,
perhaps in strength even eighty;
yet the sum of them is but labor and sorrow,
for they pass away quickly, and we are gone.

This is truth – is it not? – truth no son of man likes to hold in the front of his mind, so for much of our lives we slide the fact of our mortality into the backs of our minds. We would just as soon forget the truth, or deny it. But as he walks his way to the Cross, Jesus will not let us forget it. He asks us his questions: “Where do you think we’re headed? Who do you say that I am? What does it all mean? What hope is there?”

And there is another truth, a truth imbedded, but not explicit, in the psalmists’ words and in the fact of our mortality, a truth which we really have to think about in order to recognize and accept it, but a truth that can make a difference in our lives if we choose to see it as Jesus’ saw it: Life is a gift, not a right.

We Americans especially hide this truth beneath the words we use to speak. “Right to life,” we say, using words carelessly, preferring our own proud notions to the Word of Scripture. But the truth is that we are mortal. We die. We are turned back to the dust, we are swept away like a dream, we fade away suddenly like the grass. There is no right to life; life is gift, gift pure and simple. There are not two ways about it, the Scriptures insist, the Word made flesh insists.

“So teach us to number our days,” the psalmist adds, “that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.”

Next Friday we will bury Muriel Tjostem, one of our own who died this past Friday and has now left this world, and us, at age 96. Despite her stroke of six or seven years ago, Muriel enjoyed a long and good life. Because of strength she was granted a full quarter of a century more than the expected span of years. And now, with her return to the dust, there is once again no escaping Jesus’ questions: Where do you think we’re headed? Who do you say the Son of Man is? What does it all mean? What hope is there?

Last month we buried another of our own, Dr. John Hays, a physician, a healer. Before his funeral, a friend and former patient recalled fondly that Dr. Hays was a consummate diagnostician, that “he could deliver the message, the hard facts, when he had to.” Three times, she said, he had saved her life. “Many times,” I added in my sermon at his funeral. “Many times Dr. Hays was instrumental in helping to restore health, the gift of life, to patients, for which they were, and are, I am sure, appropriately grateful. For much of his life he delivered not only the message, but also the means, of healing.”

But Dr. Hays also knew, as all physicians know, that theirs is only a measured healing, a healing for a time. For mortal life is lived in time, and, in time, Dr. Hays knew, the facts of life would catch up with him, as they do with all of time’s children. It was, therefore, no surprise to Dr. Hays that, in time, his own body began to fail. And Dr. Hays, the consummate diagnostician, squarely faced the facts, the facts he had known all his life as a doctor, but which were ever more doggedly and immediately implied by the question he asked me as his own health continued to fail: “Who heals the physician, who heals any of us, when the physician’s bag is empty?”

Dr. Hays was indeed the consummate diagnostician, not only of the body, but of his own soul. He faced the facts. Time was catching up with him. He knew that life is not a right, but a gift, a fragile gift for which not only physical healing, but salvation, is in order, if we are to live. And so, when I took him Holy Communion each month during the declining years of his life, he never failed to express his gratitude to me for the support of the prayers of the Church, and he never failed to express his gratitude to God for the spiritual nourishment of the Body and Blood of his Savior, his healer.

Where do we think we’re headed? Who heals us when the physicians bag is empty? The world is flat when it comes to questions like these. “Some say John the Baptist” and “Some say Elijah” are answers that won’t cut it for us much beyond childhood. Our granddaddies’ answers, even the answers of the Church, can help us only to a point. Faced with the facts of life, face-to-face with truth in a flat world where faith insists on equal opportunity, each of us must answer for himself: “Where do you think we’re headed? Who do you say the son of man is? What is the meaning of it all? What hope is there?”

The witnesses can point the way, of course. The witnesses say that the son of man was transfigured in their presence, and that he then went down from the mountain and resolutely walked his way to Jerusalem, where he met face-to-face with the facts of life and the spiritual opportunities of the world. The witnesses say that Jesus insisted that life was not “just one damned thing after another until you die, and that’s that.” They say that he insisted that life has meaning and purpose, and a destiny, and that its meaning and purpose is to love God, the Giver of life, with all your heart and mind and soul and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself, to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And the witnesses say that in order to show them how to do that, the son of man washed their feet like a common servant, because, he said, the son of man came not to be served, but to serve. And then, because he loved them to the end as he loved God and as he loved himself, he loved them to the end; he gave his own life for their sake, because, he said, that is the meaning and purpose and destiny of life.

And they grieved for him, because he had been swept away like a dream, he had faded away like the grass, he had passed away quickly, and was gone. But then, on the third day, they say, they did not find his body in the tomb. And later, they insist, he appeared among them as one raised from the dead, which is why the Church, too, will insist next Friday that “to your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended; and when our mortal body lies in death, there is prepared for us a dwelling place eternal in the heavens.”

Where do you think we’re headed? Who heals us when the physician’s bag is empty? What is the meaning of it all? Where is our hope? These are the questions that faced the disciples as they walked their way to Jerusalem and the Cross with Jesus.

But in a flat world, in the world of faith and love and hope and meaning, no one, not even the Church, can answer them for another. Granddaddy’s answer, too, like the answer of “Some say,” is no help at all. Faith insists upon equal opportunity.

“So what do you say?” Jesus asks again today.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen