Sermon: The Church in the World Today

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The Church in the World Today

By Charles Rush

May 21, 2006

[ Audio (mp3, 6Mb) ]

ong with today's scripture, I would add a story that Julie has repeated for our children. A Navajo grandfather who once told his grandson. ‘Two wolves live inside me. One is the bad wolf, full of greed and laziness, full of anger and jealousy and regret. The other is the good wolf, full of joy and compassion. All the time, these wolves are fighting inside me.' ‘But grandfather,' the boy said, ‘Which wolf will win?' The grandfather answered, ‘The one I feed.'"

I've been at this calling long enough that I'm starting to have a fairly good intuitive feel of the broad cultural challenges that are facing us spiritually. I got some indication of that a couple years ago when I wrote a letter to the other Ministers in town on the subject of "Sports creep". I had been hearing from Dad's that they were experiencing the weekends as more hassle than enjoyment as they were coaching one of their kids while their wives were running the other two to a different set of games, longer and more intense meetings on Friday nights for coaches (after a fairly thorough week of work frustration). I was hearing from Mother's that these same weekends were fractured and frenzied for the family and that Sunday nights were just becoming a kind of decompress moment before you started it all over on Monday morning.

So I wrote this letter to the other Ministers and Rabbi's in town that suggested we request no games scheduled until 1:00 p.m. on Sundays so that families could at least have Sunday mornings to be together- if they go to church fine, if they choose to stay at home and be a family also fine. I had heard of one community in Minnesota that achieved this. They called the movement, "family friendly scheduling".

A few of my colleagues liked the letter enough that they reproduced it for their Sunday inserts for the bulletin. It so happened that a writer for the Associated Press lives in Summit and read it while waiting for worship to begin. He called me on Monday for a couple quotes, wrote an article, and the Boston Globe liked the article so much, they put it on the front page of the Sunday paper.

Some guys from Sports Illustrated were in Boston that Sunday, read the article, and gave it to Rick Reilly, who writes the back page for SI. Little did I know that this is one of the most widely read weekly features in all of the press. Rick called the office, got a quote from Julie as I was on vacation, devoted his entire article to my movement and concluded, "I'm with the Reverend on this one."

The guys at ESPN read the Sports Illustrated article and asked me to come on their morning talk show "Cold Pizza" where I was again given very receptive treatment by the biggest sports zealots on the planet.

What followed was about 60 calls from "Talk Radio" all over the country requesting an interview about the 'Movement' I was starting and how they could get their communities organized to get involved. Wisely, I declined these interviews, as I had no movement, just an observation. But I did tune in to a few of the shows and listened to parents all over the country complain that their lives had become unmanageable, that they were scheduled to the teeth, and that this was all becoming more responsibility than enjoyment and that they felt like they had no down time.

They also described some unintended consequences, like young mothers, explaining that it was quite difficult for their preschool children to play in an unstructured manner, that they wanted their parents to organize their activities and they needed officials to adjudicate disputes, that their capacity for imaginative play appeared to be diminishing. Grandparents called in to complain that they were feeling shut out of their grandchildren's lives because sports schedules canceled their plans to visit. Parents noted for the first time that their children were 'dropping out' of sports as sophomores in High School because the pressure and work took the fun out of the sport. Referee's noted the increase in incivility among parents and fans, and a level of emotional investment in the outcome of the games that was untoward and unbecoming.

I was a bit surprised that what I thought was probably a phenomenon of suburban communities on the East Coast was in fact a broad trend all across the nation. And I realized very quickly that it would be quite difficult to address directly because 'traveling team' schedules meant that any change would have to be agreed upon not just by a couple townships but the whole state, indeed the whole region. And what I thought was just a problem of exurbia, the lack of adequate playing fields, was the same argument everywhere as to why we had to extend the playing schedule earlier and earlier to encompass more and more of the weekend.

That was four years ago. And since that time, we have added a couple more leagues, so that winter is now fuller with indoor soccer and basketball, and spring and fall have lacrosse for the youngest ages. I suspect that if we could step back from this and see ourselves in the wider picture, we are probably inching over that fine line between involvement and obsession in sports and scheduling our lives. Aristotle would ask the question like this, "Are you controlling your kids in sports or is sporting schedule controlling you?" He used to note that the real key to internal 'well being' (eudamion) was balance- not too little of anything, but not too much either. Virtues become vices when they are out of balance.

Last year, our poor field at Franklin school, and this was replicated in practically every town in New Jersey, was worn out from overuse. It was something of a biblical metaphor that we need a Sabbath- even slaves and pack animals are given one day off in the Bible so they don't wear out. Of the many solutions proposed from artificial turf to alternative field development, not one of them suggested a sabbatical from competition. Neither did any 'letter to the editor' or any impassioned speech to the Town Council note the irony of our situation, despite the fact that this is obvious to everyone.

And this phenomenon is having a direct impact spiritually because at the moment, families are choosing between church and sports and sports are winning… I am told that the most popular Mass at St. Teresa's is the 5 p.m. Mass on Sunday evenings, the lone down time of the weekend. And I have had a couple of serious conversations with people that say they wish we had Church on Thursday nights, so they could attend. At the moment, I'm not sure what the answer is, but I am sure that if this trend continues, Church will have to change to survive.

More broadly than the institutional survival of the Church is the spiritual question that is raised about who we are becoming and what we are raising our children to become. I think it was significant as a metaphor for our generation that the Duke Lacrosse scandal happened to raise this question at just this time.

I'm only interested here, in one dimension of that story, the question of character. There are a host of other important questions like how is it that in the past decade or so, hiring strippers for parties has become 'main-streamed' with our young people to the point that they are now advertised in the yellow pages? Or, how is it that the media covers these things?

But how is it that some of our country's best educated, most rounded leaders for tomorrow make the judgment that at an official team event, the way to bring us all together is to get unconsciously hammered and watch a strip tease? It is tempting to dismiss this as 'boys will be boys' but that misses this subtle, but significant question about leadership. And this question was posed to the top Administrators at Duke.

Their response, off the record, was important. Without diminishing their responsibility in any way, one of them made the comment that the University is not the place to begin working on character. It needs to start in Middle School. He said, in effect, 'it would be helpful if we were sent students that had better fundamentals of character to begin with.' You will not likely get any administrator to go on record with that remark, but I have an intuition that this is a widely shared conviction on college campuses these days. My sense is that it is a tacit admission that our present culture of sports competition with broad cultural and travel exposure and the best education available, is not quite enough. It is missing something significant… character. We need something more for effective leadership in the next generation.

I'm not far enough along on this to have a solution but I would throw out a couple thoughts and dreams to get us all envisioning on some possibilities.

First, the Church. This is one of our principal responsibilities and we are doing some things that are important but it is not enough. We are good at giving our children opportunities for service, folding in working with the homeless as a regular part of growing up at Christ Church. We are good at developing spiritual values to live by in worship, in sermons, and we are making this more and more the focus of our Christian education. We want to equip our families with more practical traditions that they can develop at home to reinforce these values in the most organic way. But what we are doing is not enough.

On my most imaginative days, I have a dream of developing a leadership academy for our young people. Especially in communities like ours, where we know that a high percentage of our young people are going to grow up to be our country's leaders, we need something like this. It would be a complete program over 4 or 7 years that would be modeled on programs developed in Athens and Sparta that focused on developing character for leadership. You probably know that the Greeks focused their pedagogy to the end of developing excellence of character. The disciplines of sport were focused this way but their education had a whole other dimension that we omit that worked on moral development. It not only established moral and spiritual values but put young people through a series of exercises so that they could develop good habits as Aristotle used to say. They need opportunities to flex their moral character, to fail, and to start again.

Education is power, as people often note, but we actually aspire to more than that. We aspire to develop leaders. What are the qualities that make for great leaders?

You probably know that the United States Army asked themselves just that question and developed a list of values that permeate everything they do. Their list has seven values: Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless service, honor, integrity, and personal courage. For Community leaders, we might come up with a slightly different list of values but the importance of them should not be underestimated.

Anyone who has spent time with our country's military officers is immediately impressed with the degree to which they talk about ethics. Several years ago, I was privileged to be part of the 45th National Security briefing that brings together a couple hundred Colonel's and Generals with a couple hundred Civilian leaders for 3 days of discussion of issues facing our country in foreign affairs. What was interesting for me to observe the first day was the way that the Civilians were concerned about practical issues and power issues but the Officers kept pressing the question, 'What is the moral justification for this action or that action?' 'What is the moral implication?' Military people were just much more articulate on the moral dimension than were Civilians. We set the bar too low for ourselves.

The Atlantic Monthly featured an article a few years ago on the widening gulf between the culture of the Military and Civilians on precisely this issue. The author was concerned that if present trends continue unabated, the military would lose respect for the civilians they serve which would be dangerous socially.

We can raise the standard, but not if it is merely a voluntary effort, not if ethics is just an option. Just before his untimely death, the President at Rutgers University, Edward Bloustein, was about to propose making Ethics an interdisciplinary requirement for every student at the college. It was an important first step.

More than that, I wish it could be accompanied by a mandatory boot camp for character, an idea that has yet to be proposed by either party.

As some of you know, I had a personal humbling experience, watching my number two son enter the military rather than attend college right away. He was a nice kid, an affable kid, but I couldn't get him to take school seriously, had a stack of detentions of book thickness, barely one step ahead of the law… Auggh! He goes to Fort Benning for boot camp, graduates, I go down for closing exercises. The company commander dismisses his platoon to visit with their families after standing at attention for an hour. Some of the soldiers shortly assumed the 'at ease' posture until their family members got to them. My son remained at full attention until I was right in front of him. I called his mother on the phone with the good/bad news. I said 'honey. The Army did in 12 weeks what we were unable to do in 18 years.'

But you know what, after teaching college for many years, I've hardly ever met a freshman boy that was actually mature enough for the freedom they experience that first semester at college. That is exactly what they do not need at that point in their life.

What I wish happened is that everyone in the country went to 18 months of a service draft, military service would be one option, non-military service the other option, but everybody would be put through a 12 week boot camp at the beginning which would instill and require a similar set of disciplines and values. We have plenty of national projects that our young people could work on together. The point would be to develop a structure for service and leadership and instill habits for independence and respect.

It would also mitigate the economic segregation that has been growing over the past couple decades. If you grow up in Mountain Lakes, go to private school, do service projects in third world countries with other prep school kids, go to college, then law school and move back to Chatham, you have never known anyone well, except people just like you. We are actually drifting back towards the class stratification that defined New York in 1900. One of the best characteristics of the generation that served our country in World War 2 was the manner in which farm boys from Iowa were forced to interact with urban kids from Brooklyn. Spiritually, socially, it was healthier for them to come together as ordinary Americans.

I recognize that it is far from likely that these things will ever come to pass, but there is some value in reflecting on them if it gets us to collectively ask the question, 'what kind of leaders to we want to produce in this next generation?' 'How can we instill values that make for character that we want to be around, nay respect, going forward? We are reaping what we sow, and we should not be satisfied with the moral and spiritual crop that we are producing right now. I trust that we can pray together towards this end, talk together, implement structural changes that make for holistic character. It is simply too important to let it remain just one option among many. Amen.