On Commitment
By Charles Rush
February 4, 2001
Genesis 12: 5
hen
I was writing my dissertation at Princeton Seminary and teaching at Rutgers
University, I pastored the Princeton Baptist Church. It sits right on Rte. 1
and Washington Rd., a colonial clapboard rural church that has been sadly
eclipsed by the traffic and strip malls of suburban New Jersey.
The
parsonage was also on the corner. It was originally a Tavern and Inn. Little
surprise that I lived in a bar, I know. Our house was built in 1808. Thomas
Jefferson was the President of the United States. Back in those days, you could
get a meal, board your horse, a tankard of beer and a room for the night- all
for a quarter.
I read
the original petition the owner of the tavern made for his license to sell beer
and board guests before the Civil Magistrate in Trenton. He had to prove that
he possessed 8 straw mattresses and provender for 20 horses and a steady supply
of beer. At the time, Rte. 1 was called the Post Road. It was a bold new
experiment in our young nation to open a road that would allow a regular and
steady flow of mail delivery from Washington all the way to Boston. Our house
was one of the first businesses to spring up along that thoroughfare. It was
far from a sure deal. The owner at the time asked the judge if he would join
him in prayer. The court stopped its proceedings and asked God's blessing upon
the fledgling enterprise. It went something like this. “Almighty and most
beneficent Lord. We pray thee thanksgiving for thine unmerited favor, so
lavishly bestowed upon us in these latter days. We humbly beseech that that
Thou might continue Thy favor and grant sufficient traffic to sustain a common
life of commerce and trade. We pray in Thy gracious name. Amen.” When I read
that 182 years later, some 60,000 cars were traveling daily past our house. Be
careful what you pray for.
Very
little had been done on the house, as often happens to parsonages of small
churches. The bedrooms still had numbers on the doors. When you looked through
the window panes, half of them were the original swirling glass that you can
sorta see through. We renovated a bathroom and found a pewter plate, fork and
knife in the wall. A workman had eaten his lunch, forgotten about the dishes
and sealed them in the wall by accident. Imagine a man doing that. In the attic
of the house, you could sleep cheap, a nickel a night for a mattress on the
floor. I found a girls boot with the laces in it under a floor board. I wanted
to call up her mother from 200 years ago and tell her that the boot that was
lost- ‘where ever did you leave that boot Lisa May'- was finally found. The
mystery solved.
One
day, Archer Vaughn came to see me at the church. He was 92, born in 1899. He
was a classic Princeton man of his generation- sported a bow tie with gold rim
glasses. I commented on the road noise on Rte. 1. He said, “it wasn't always
like that. My family moved to Princeton from Trenton in 1915. We came right up
Rte. 1. We walked the whole way behind the horse drawn carriage. First came the
cows, then all our earthly belongings on a couple of wagons. I was behind the
whole caravan driving the chickens and the goats.”
I
liked Archer Vaughn quite a bit. I took him with me one time to visit Marion
Opdyke in the hospital. They knew each other in High School. They were
reminiscing about people they dated 75 years ago. I said to them, “you have
lived through quite a lot of change in one century, what is the one single
event that you participated in personally that was the most awesome?” They didn't
have to think but for a minute and they both had the same answer. “Seeing an
airplane for the very first time.” I bet that was pretty awesome. Archer's farm
is now the parking lot for the Princeton Junction train station. I've seen
plenty of photographs at his house of New Jersey in the 40's and 50's. Even in
the 50's the vast majority of farm fields around Princeton were still plowed by
mules. Now they are all planned suburban neighborhoods.
Occasionally
I would have to see the Dean of Graduate Studies at the University. At the
time, their office was in Nassau Hall where they held the 1st
Continental Congress. I never tired to walking up the circular stair case, the
stone steps worn down from so many feet over time. I couldn't help but imagine
these rooms filled with George Washington, John Adams, and wonder about the
excitement and anxiety that first generation must have felt starting out on a
brave new experiment in government.
We
had a grave yard at the church. The oldest names were mostly Dutch because they
were the original settlers in our area. Then the names change to English after
the Revolutionary War. And you can see that half of the Dutch people anglicized
their names to fit in. I could look out my office window and look over two and
a half centuries of people that had gone before me. I think it is important for
Ministers to look out over grave yards and if you come to my office here, you
will see that my desk faces the Memorial Garden. Every once in a while, I would
look up from my desk, where I spent many hours writing, and I would see someone
standing in front of a grave, sharing a conversation, leaving some flowers.
Occasionally,
I would walk through the grave yard. We had regular grave stones and we also
had little square monuments that had a simple S or D on them. There were so
many of these little square monuments, lots more of them than regular grave
stones. They were children that died at birth or shortly thereafter. I would
stand in the same place where grieving parents stood 200 years ago, still
trying to make sense out of the senseless, trying to recover hope and meaning
in the midst of numbing pain.
We had a very simple sunrise
service on Easter every year in that church at dawn, out in the grave yard.
Those of us gathered sang “Christ our Lord is Risen Today” right there in the
middle of the grave yard. If you listened hard enough, you could hear our
voices were joined by a whole chorus of people who had gone before us who were
blessing us. Our singing started off
pretty weak and feeble. I always imagined it joining with all those in
that grave yard, then with other churches and their graveyards, going more and
more broadly, going further and further back in time. It starts off slow and
timid but it picks up momentum pretty quickly. After a short while, it is such
a mighty liturgical singing procession that our individuality becomes
insignificant. We are just lucky to have been drafted into this great long
procession that is way bigger than ourselves or our life. And that is probably
the way that we should see ourselves and our role in the wider historical drama
that we are privileged to participate in for a short while.
I
think about that at the outset of great new beginnings. They are always filled
with uncertainty, exhilaration, second guessing, excitement, fear, unknowing. I
love the line in our text this morning “So Abraham and Sara took all the
possessions they had gathered… and they set forth.” We are not privy to any of
their discussion. Abraham hears God speak to him that God will bless him if he
goes to settle in another land. We don't get to hear Sara's reaction to that.
“Abraham, how do you know that was God. Could just be indigestion.” “Why can't
you be happy like all the other husbands here in Haran?” We don't get to hear
any of his self-doubt, though I'm sure it must have been there. All we have is
the moment of commitment. They set out. At some point, you have to take the
plunge and step out in faith.
Who
could have known. From that one simple act of commitment to God, 3700 years
ago, a movement would start, and a movement from that and a movement from that,
so that today, we are still not only reading a story about that act of faith,
whole religious traditions have sprung into being and formed lives around the
meaning of faith, from this one couple.
We are
starting off on a new venture here. We are going to create some sacred space
for our children, their children and generations to follow after them. Young
Jack Radutsky, aged 4, I wonder what the world will look like for his children?
When you think that PC's didn't exist twenty years ago and the internet was
just a dream a decade ago, it is really hard to imagine what our world will
look like in 40 years.
We are
going to put up a space for those kids to wrestle with what makes for a
meaningful life. We are going to need a sturdy structure for them to grow in
because I hope that a generation from now we are giving our children some
sturdy values that they can rebel against and eventually come home to live by.
I hope we will be forming some sturdy characters to negotiate a rapidly
changing world, some sturdy people who can live eternally in the midst of
change. We are going to put up a beautiful building with some space for doing
art and drama so that we can nurture spiritual creativity in its many media. We
are going to need a beautiful space to spawn spiritual creativity. We are going
to put up an accessible building, so that all may find a way to enter. We are
going to need an accessible building in a world of pluralism. We are going to
create a space where all may enter in and come together and worship through our
many different gifts and expressions.
We
don't ask people around here to make a commitment all that often. I'm actually
looking at this whole building project as a time to make a commitment to each
other, to our church, to God, to the next generation. We are going to put up
something we can be proud of whose influence will extend much farther than what
we can imagine. Commitment is a great thing. It
lives way beyond just you.
In the
movie Family Man, Nicholas Cage plays the role of a Wall Street Shark.
The movie opens on Christmas eve. His firm is orchestrating a hostile takeover.
They are at the morning meeting handing out assignments and he calls for a
meeting at 10 p.m. on Christmas eve- a little harsh even for Wall Street
standards. He is 40 something, single, has a massive, hip apartment to die for,
30 hand tailored suits, a Ferrari, and he is surrounded by people that take
care of his every wish. They are not friends, these are the people that either
work for you or you have to tip at Christmas time. He has sexual liasons with
people he hardly knows. He has no obligations that he does not choose. His
world is set up to cater to his needs alone.
In an
instant, he is catapulted into another world that he could have been, had he
married his girlfriend in college. In that world he didn't get the M.B. A. in
that world. Instead, he went to work for his father-in-law, selling tires in
Union, New Jersey. He lives in a modest middle-class house, has friend that
shows off the new lazy boy lounger that he just bought, and the highlight of
his week is bowling league and the block party. (We have to do something about
our image out here in Jersey). These parties only have domestic beer and
pretzels. His has three kids that are constantly destroying something. His
whole house is just controlled chaos. He and his wife have almost zero privacy
and zero time for each other alone. It is Macho Male, A-Type, Wall St. Shark's
worst nightmare and he wants out, out, out…
But,
he can't leave. He has to change diapers, do the laundry, wear tacky clothing,
have his in-laws over for holiday dinner. Over the course of a few days, he
becomes changed. He realizes that what is most important is to have someone to
love and share your life with, to invest yourself in children and the next
generation, to have a real community of people that love you, know you, care
about you, and share their lives with you. If anyone in Hollywood had asked the
Minister, I would add to get it that this is the primary way that you actually
see the face of God, in the face of all these other people, in the ordinary and
profound ways that we get one another through the joys and difficulties of this
life. And you can't do that without making a commitment.
My
colleague Rabbi Horn, says “show me a person's commitments and I'll tell you
who they are.” We are what we have our committed ourselves to be. I want you to
give to this campaign in a way that reflects your values, no more and no less.
I want each and every one of us to make a commitment. We are going to do
something beautiful together and put up a space that will be meaningful and
important for generations to come. It is not about the building per se, it is
about being part of the people that are formed and shaped by our community of
love and grace. It is about giving back in recognition of what this community
continues to mean to us. It is about spreading love, grace, and hope down the
generations.
My hope
is that 100 years from now, someone will be visiting our Memorial Garden,
remembering a loved one, and they will stop outside the front of the building we are about to build and wonder
what kind of people cared that much to do something so well and they will feel
blessed.
Amen.
