Making a Difference

I have been thinking this week about the legacy that people leave. One of the features of the pastoral care with Phylis Kelsey and her family this week has been some remembering Fr. Sheridan and his ministry at St. Thomas. He left a mark on this church. I talked about this legacy in the context of the saints Friday at Miller’s. Academic communities have plenty of these folks. Sewanee had enough of them. Abbo Cotton Martin was one of these people who had taught my father and still captured the imagination of the community twenty years after his death. Culver had many teachers like this as well. Six or seven years ago, I went to visit Dr. Daryll Beach at Miller’s.

Daryll Beach was a guy who taught Chemistry at the Academies from 1965 – 2000. He was in the Salvation Army – a Sgt. Major. This is the highest ranking lay leader for the community, and so he was like the Sr. Warden for us I guess. When Daryll died, the Salvation Army announced he was “Promoted to Glory.”

Daryll was a guy whose life was dedicated in many ways to helping others. We heard about the impact he had on generations of students. He was always happy to have students at his home, and so lots of them made it a second home while they were at Culver. He and Darlene fed students and took care of them. He was the consummate teacher and when the Science Department came to see him at Miller’s, he got in a wheelchair to give them a lesson about how to teach.

“You have to care for the people in your classes.” he said. “They may not remember much of the chemistry when all is said and done, but they will remember that you cared and took care of them.”

Let’s think about our Gospel lesson for today. When Jesus and his disciples arrived in Capernaum, Jesus asked, “What were you arguing about on the way?”  “But they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another who was the greatest.” They were quiet because they were embarrassed. They were thinking about themselves, and after all the teaching Jesus had done, they were being selfish and not thinking of others. They had every reason to be embarrassed about this.

But Jesus didn’t shame them. He didn’t shake a finger in their faces and say, “Bad disciple!” Instead, he gave them his prescription for greatness. He told them how to be great in God’s eyes. He told them how to become truly great.

So what was this prescription for greatness? Did he tell his disciples to study hard and get good grades so that they could get a good job and earn a good living?

Did he tell them to take a course on management practices to lead efficiently?

Did he tell them to practice their public speaking so they could run for office and become powerful?

None of these are bad things. In fact I think that making good grades and managing efficiently and being able to speak persuasively are very good things. They may be very good things, but they are not what Jesus told the disciples to do in order to be great.

Jesus took a small child in his arms. Then he said:

“Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me,

and whoever welcomes me

welcomes not me but the one who sent me”

When Jesus said, “welcomes not me but the one who sent me,” he was talking about God. He was telling his disciples that doing something for Jesus was equal to doing something for God, and doing something for God was how to become truly great.

Furthermore, Jesus was saying that the way to do that was to do something for a child. Why would that be? Why a child?

I will tell you another story, and then I will come back to this question.

I was listening to NPR the other day while I was driving, and I heard the story of Tierra Jackson on StoryCorp. She was staying at a homeless shelter with six other family members in Chicago. She had a 90 minute bus ride each way to school, and she did not have money for school supplies. Her aunt sent notes with her to school. She gave this note to one teacher, and the next day the teacher brought a bag with everything she needed. Tierra did know how to say thanks for a gift so huge to her.

Tierra said she did not know how to accept it. She said the teacher never treated her differently. It helped transform her life, and when the story was recorded she was a junior in college with a part-time job to support her mother and her brother.

Now why did that teacher help Tierra? Answer this question, and you know why Jesus told the disciples “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me”

Children need our help. Without adults, children die. Children need us to provide food, clothing, and shelter. Children need us to love them, and children need us to show them how to live.

Children can’t pay us back. That teacher that gave Tierra those school supplies did not do that with the expectation of getting something in return. She did it because she could and because Tierra needed some help. She never treated Tierra as if she owed something. Children have nothing to give us but their love, and we have to be willing to give when we don’t expect anything back.

So Jesus was saying, “If you want to be great, help someone who needs help, and do it with no thought of return.”

The late Henri Nouwen was a Roman Catholic priest and author whom many of us would call truly great. For one thing, he was a remarkable writer. He had a lot of insight into human nature and what it meant to me a servant for God. Nouwen spent much of his life caring for people who couldn’t pay him back.

In his book, Gracias! Nouwen tells of visiting a state orphanage in Peru. There were about a hundred children there––living in terrible circumstances. The children were fascinated by Nouwen. They had seldom seen a grown man, so they stroked his forehead, saying, “What a large forehead!” They wanted to see his teeth and his tongue. He says:

Very soon I was transformed into a climbing tree.

The kids tried to climb over my knees, chest, and shoulders to the top,

and at one point there was a line of ten little ones

waiting for their turn to climb the big man” (Gracias! page 50).

Would you call that greatness? Jesus would!

We are called to make a difference in the lives of others. We are called to serve Christ by taking care of the helpless.

The questions for us as Christians and for us as a Church are these:

  • How can we become great in God’s eyes?
  • What are the opportunities we have to be like Daryll Beach or Tierra’s teacher?
  • How can we live more like Henri Nouwen?

I have said these words in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Sermon preached by Fr. Tom at St. Thomas, Plymouth
September 20, 2015; Seventeenth Sunday of Pentecost

Proverbs 31:10-31
Psalm 1
James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a
Mark 9:30-37