Living Inspiration
By Charles Rush
October 14, 2012
Isaiah 40: 31, 41: 10 and Psalm 27: 1 and with Romans 8: 37-39
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en you are tunneling through the jungle of your actual lived life, it is usually confusing to distinguish the blessing from the curses. It is all just a great jumble. Later on, looking back, you or your biographer can explain how the circuitous labyrinth of the events of your life were all secretly weaving together this beautiful tapestry of meaning and worth. So in the meantime, hang in there and live for the wonder and the inspiration that you get here and there from time to time.
Because the
actual facts of your life may just as well read like that of an American from
an earlier era.
He spent his childhood working on the family farm, with long
days of back-breaking toil.
His mother died when he was 10 years old, leaving his father
to raise the children.
He went to work for a businessman who ran the business into
the ground, leaving him unemployed.
He ran for the Illinois state legislature and lost, finishing
8th in a field of 13.
He signed a note to buy into a general store with a friend;
within a year they were out of business
He fell in love and became engaged to be married, only to
have her die unexpectedly. He was heart-broken and severely depressed
He fell in love again and married. He had 4 sons, 3 of whom
died before reaching adulthood.
He was finally successful in getting elected to the state
legislature and made two attempts to become speaker. Both times he was
defeated.
He wanted to run for Congress but he failed to achieve his
party's nomination.
He ultimately won a seat in Congress. But when he wanted to
run for the Senate, he couldn't muster the votes and withdrew.
Finally, however, he ran for the highest office in the land
and Abe Lincoln became the 16th and many consider our greatest
President of the United States.
It isn't about
the fame and it isn't even necessarily about leaving our mark on history, but
stay true to what you know you are supposed to be about, as confusing and
muddled as that can be at times. Let bloom inside you what you are meant to be
and be the change that you want to see in the world around you, whether it
seems like it is all coming together or whether it seems like you can't seem to
win for losing.
When I was a
child, my grandfather used to repeat for me what became my favorite Proverb,
sometimes at night when my grandparents tucked us in bed. He would say,
“Without a vision, the people perish”. Of course, I couldn't understand what
that meant to him. But when I was older and he told me about being unemployed
during the depression and make a living playing pool, carrying my mother in and
out of smoky bars (in a bassinette) in the South because his wife was the sole
bread winner for a couple years, when he told me about the family farms going
under during the price controls of World War 2 ran our wholesale businesses
into bankruptcy- and having to move alone with his young wife to the City of
Memphis to stay alive, I got a sense of how difficult his life had been for his
ego.
When I was a
child, I remember waking up before dawn on the days we were fishing, and I
would see him awake with the light on at the kitchen table, beginning the
morning in prayer with no one around. He never talked about it. Years later,
when I'd gone through enough personal setbacks and disappointments, I realized
that he'd learned to start every day by invoking the spirit that he needed to
face difficulty. I realized that he had to get on his game face and think the
right things because otherwise, the events of his life might have swamped him.
He was calling
up the vision again to himself, because his was the one life he could control.
That is what is meant by the scripture that we read earlier from Isaiah that
says, ‘those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount
up with wings lie eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and
not faint.” With a vision, we can do fantastic things and endure that which
would do us in.
That is the
experience that people have that was described in the other verse from Isaiah
we read, “Do not fear, for I am with you… do not be afraid for I will
strengthen you, I will help you.”
Who could not
reflect on that this week, reading the headlines about Malala
Yousafzai, the fifteen year old who was shot for
leading a movement to stop the Taliban from keeping women ignorant in rural
regions of Pakistan.
“Malala Yousafzai one of the
daughters of Swat Valley, is no ordinary school girl. She was only eleven years
old when Pakistan's Taliban overran the picturesque region and turned it to
smoldering ashes in 2009. Education for girls was banned and they were ordered
to quit school and stay home. To further terrorize the region, the Taliban
burned down more than 400 schools for girls. But, Malala
would not quietly retreat and disappear into the shadows without a struggle.
Encouraged by her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, who started and headed the girls' school which Malala attended, she reached out to the world with the help
of modern technology, not accessible to many girls in that region. She pounded
out a detailed account of her daily struggles in her anonymous BBC blog. She
feared acid attacks to her face and worried for the safety of her family. In
her blog, she recalled the night when the family awoke to the thundering of
gunfire and were forced to flee their home and she also tells of the horrors of
seeing headless bodies strewn in their path.
“Malala's identity, thus far hidden, was revealed when the
Taliban were driven out of Swat Valley. Her powerful blog posts were recognized
and she was awarded Pakistan's first National Peace Prize for youths. At twelve
years of age, Malala's stand, not to let religious
extremists squash her dreams of getting an education, got international
attention and she met with Richard Holbrooke, President Obama's Special Envoy
to the region and appealed for U.S. help. Sponsored by UNICEF, the outspoken
girl also led delegations to speak to local politicians about children's
rights. Her initial dream was to be a doctor and help people but as she met
with politicians, she developed a new dream. She told reporters that she wanted
to become a politician because her country was in ‘crisis.' She hoped to serve her
country and help bring change.
Malala stands on her father's strong
shoulders for guidance and support. A brave and forward thinking man, Ziauddin Yousafzai was chosen as
Peace Ambassador by the U.S. State Department a couple of years ago. During his
stay with close friend Zebu Jilani, founder of the
grassroots movement, Swat Relief Initiative, Malala's
father spoke of his daughter's dreams and her desire to make a difference.”[i]
An extraordinary
young woman and our thoughts and prayers are with her in the midst of her
tragic and senseless attack. In her case, the attack did not have the simple
tragedy her attackers hoped for. I was very moved to read that the entire
country of Pakistan is rallying around her in prayer and they are rallying
around her cause. Sometimes these things take on a life of their own, a
seemingly spiritual life that brings people together around the world. Probably none of us here had ever heard of her
8 days ago or even knew there was such a movement in Pakistan, but I suspect
that a decade from now, every single one of us will remember the name Malala Yousafzai, and hopefully
we will see her win election in her country with a college diploma in hand. May
God help her.
We've all known
for the past couple decades that the single most stabilizing thing that could
happen socially in every country around the world is that we have a world-wide
women's movement, liberating what Nick Kristoff calls ‘the other half of the
sky' for useful economic development that leads to stabler,
stronger families, that invests in children, that encourages broader democracy
and participation by more and more people. We all win with shared power and
open doors for opportunity. I kept thinking that women in the West would start
it, women like Melinda Gates, who could really fund a big project. Perhaps, God
will strengthen the ordinary women like Malala Yousafazai and it will happen in quite a different way
after all. How odd of God?
We need the
inspiration of people like Malala in our lives. It is
the divine energy that wakes us up from the doldrums of our lives. Remember a
time when you were really inspired for a moment, perhaps when you had a break
through idea, perhaps when you met just the right team of people you needed
around you. I was with an old friend this week and he has unexpectedly fallen
in love again at mid-life, didn't think that would happen to him. Last time I
saw him he was tentative, withdrawn, drinking too much, just blah. Now he has
confidence coursing through his veins again; he is dreaming new dreams and
ready to step out and accomplish them. That time when you were inspired. Do you
remember the way you bounced out of bed in the morning, ready for the gym because
you had so many ideas going that you needed to process them internally? Do you
remember the irrepressible optimism, the sense you had that things will just
work out this time around, you just know it. It is such a great feeling. The
philosopher Jacques Maritan used to call it the ‘elan vital', the ‘life force' that give
us the zip and zest that makes our life worth living.
It is one the
main things we come together to cultivate in our life together, to remember
what we are really supposed to be about when we aren't just killing time or
spinning our wheels. And we value being part of this community, in large part
because we are surrounded by people that are really interesting and really
talented and who really want to make a difference…
So when a group
of us got together about 6 months ago and we started to think about what Christ
Church is all about, what is the magic of what we do together, inspiration was
one of the three things you all told us that was special about our life
together. It is not only the fact that we come together to lift it up every
week, to remember it in sermons, it is also the way that it runs through the
whole community as a kind of cantus firma, the musical motif that pulls
together all of these different voices and makes them pull together into a
coherent whole.
One of us on the
committee one time pulled some images off the website, images of all of us, and
they were remarking what a wonderful and broad range of people we really are
blessed to know here and we were reflecting on what it takes to have such
diversity cohere around community together. And we realized that what makes our church a special place is the people that gather
here, that our primary strength is the diversity and creativity of all of us.
What we value so much about our life together is the way that we actually
inspire each other and this is really what we are hoping to achieve by being
together.
Taking that one
step further, we realized that what makes the community interesting and
beautiful is that there isn't just one symbol that brings us all together. It
is more the way that we personally interact with a common symbol, like the
cross… It is not one picture but a collection of many pictures taken together
as a composite. Some of them are serious, some weighted with tradition, some
are quite playful, and others use tradition almost against itself as a kind of
moral critique. Some are whimsical, some incorporate new themes never really
developed before.
How like Christ
Church! We come from many different experiences, some of us here because we've
been raised religiously all our lives, some here quite in spite of the way we
were raised religiously as children, some of us just curious, some of us knowing that we need better grounding, even if
we aren't quite sure what that means. Together, we aren't going to tell you
about the one way that you need to follow because that worked for me, or
because that is what the tradition teaches, or because that is just what
Christians believe.
No, what we are
going to trust in is that together we can create something that is an
inspiration for our community in our area of the world for the challenges that
we are facing today. We are going to trust in the Holy Spirit to guide us, for
God to come and help us with the vision, and that the composite portrait will
be so much richer and meaningful. We are going to trust in God and lean on each
other.
And we hope to
make each other stronger, inspiring each other to our better selves, our higher
selves.
That has been my
experience. Over a decade ago, we had a gay couple come to the Church and ask
us to bless their union. We don't have a set rule to follow on these things
like most of the other churches that simply said ‘no, No or Hell no”. We
decided to take up the issue and think it through for ourselves and see what
the community would say, each of us studying the issue and trying to apply the
tradition in light of a new world situation. I say it was new because two
decades ago, gays wouldn't even come asking to be blessed, they already knew
the answer.
So, we read the
bible, read about sexual orientation, had people speak from Parents and Friends
of Lesbians and Gays, heard our own congregational members speak about growing
up gay, and even held a forum for our High School kids to talk about what the
climate is like for teens in our area for young gay people.
The day came
that we had to vote… I preached a sermon that day on reconciliation, on how we
have to take a stand and right after that be ready to reach out to those we
love that disagree with us, to remind us that the love which binds us together
is more certain that our moral judgments.
The Chair of the
Eboard got up and read the proposal to bless gay unions and we had one person
get up to speak for the motion, an elegant woman of 75 who spoke with sincerity
and eloquence. We had one person to get up and speak against the motion, a
thoughtful and respected leader in our town who spoke with sincerity and
eloquence. We voted. It passed about 85-15.
That day, after
a year of deliberations, I canceled coffee hour and we all just went home. It
was the one and only time I've ever gone home after church with my family.
At the time, we
had teenagers, rambunctious teenagers, with an attitude, who liked to give the
Old man a hard time like children of Ministers will do. As parents, we were in
the middle of the rebellion phase.
We got to the
driveway in the van. I turned off the key and just sat there for a moment in
quiet. From the back of the car, I hear my oldest son, the most difficult of
all my kids. He says out loud, “Dad, I'll never say you didn't stand for
anything.”
I'm sitting
there realizing that I really, really needed to hear something like that. I'm
realizing that actually, I'd been secretly hoping to hear that my whole life
from my kids. I'm realizing how really rare that moment is. And you know what?
I realized that this is where it really matters doesn't it.
Maybe we'll
stand for something, start a world-wide movement, and make our mark on history.
Maybe circumstances just won't come together and we'll live with a quiet
integrity that no one will particularly notice at all. But if our families, our
loved ones, the people that we really care about recognize us for a moment of
spiritual integrity in the context of social ambiguity, that is really the
point.
Brothers and
sisters, pray for each other that we might inspire one another. Join us, get more deeply involved with each other that this place
might be your laboratory of community, encouragement and creativity. And may we
all live more profoundly because of the common movement of the Holy Spirit in
our very diverse lives, weaving together a richer tapestry of meaning and worth
than we can actually see in the middle of our lives. Peace, strength and honor be with you. Amen.
