Character Formation
By Charles Rush
(My thanks to Michael Usey)
November 11, 2012
Matthew 25: 31-40
[ Audio
(mp3, 6.4Mb) ]
ere
is nothing like a natural disaster to remind us of what we don't have going on. One of the kids from the neighborhood came over to ask me to look at their family's generator because they couldn't get it to work and Dad was out of town. I get over to the house and the kid tells me that the engine won't run. Oh boy, small engine mechanic I'm not, but I'm getting better. So I turn the lever to on, put it on choke, pull the chord, starts up roughly, I adjust the choke and it is purring like a kitten. The kid looks at me in amazement like I'd just done open heart surgery with a penknife. I just smiled at him and said, “Wake Forest” as I was thinking to myself, “This kid has never actually ever started a motor and doesn't know that you have to set it on choke when it is cold because he's never been asked to mow the grass or anything like that.” Oh my.
It brought to
mind the number 650 because 100 years after the end of the Roman Empire in 550,
the people living in the eternal city had completely forgotten how to smelt
bronze and all of the other technical complexities that made Rome the greatest
civilization in history. They were technical pygmies and the Dark Ages began.
Sometimes I shudder that we could become spiritual pygmies in short order if we
had to actually unplug from civilization and live on our own, with just
ourselves, again.
This morning's
text is wonderful because the King separates the ‘clueless' from those ‘on
cue', the goats from the sheep. I'm particularly drawn to the later group in
the story, the sheep, those that are ‘on cue'. They are “self-unaware” people with true humility and character and
they just don't really think of themselves as special. They say, “When did we
see you hungry, naked, in prison, or sick?”
Psychologists
have categorized the way we perform tasks into at least four levels. The first
level is the unconscious incompetent. Like the name implies, at the most
basic level, we can't perform the task but we don't know that we can't perform
it. On the spiritual domain, there are a whole lot of people in metropolitan
New York in this category.
I reached
adolescence on the tail end of the hippie era, completely immersed in the music
and the concerts of that era. In some ways, the whole era reached it's fruition
in the music of the Grateful Dead, a musical genre that a friend of mine
described twenty years later as ‘structured chaos'. Grateful Dead
concerts were sometimes not so much a set of songs as one long jam that had no
beginning or end, just a perpetual now. And you didn't so much dance to the
Dead's music as sort of writhe standing up. Or just float around. Of course, at
Grateful Dead concerts most people were floating around which made floating
around easier. I thought I was dancing. Now, I'm not sure what I was doing.
Then, it felt like dancing. It was unstructured movement set to unstructured
music in an unstructured life, so I thought I was ‘in the groove'. None of the
girls I dated ever told me I couldn't dance, so I didn't know that I couldn't.
That is unconscious incompetent.
As I said spiritually, you know a lot of
people like this. They work around you. They so don't know, they don't even
have an idea that they don't know. One of Jackson Browne's songs has a line,
“I'll be a happy idiot, and struggle for the legal tender.” It is an option
that quite a few people give serious effort to living. They just pretend that
there is no substantial spiritual dimension, stay focused on just getting
through the ‘to do' list, chipping away at promotion, stay focused on looking
good, enjoy good dinners, good vacations, don't talk about anything deeper than
sports or gossip or the New York Post. They just enjoy their toy collection,
their little dog that fits in their purse, and they try to be happy.
The good news of
the bible is that God comes after us even though so many of us live in this
thin prism of reality. There is a wonderful line from St. Paul that says ‘while
we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Today we would amend it to say,
“while we were still clueless, God cared for us.” It is very hopeful promise in
scripture.
The second
level, described by our psychologists, is conscious incompetent. On this
level, you still have no appreciable skill, but now you know it. Several years
after Jerry Garcia had receded into mere memory, I had several small children
and other forms of structure, my wife suggested that we take some dancing
lessons, to bloom into a new way of being. With a dozen or so other people, we were
instructed by a little fireball Jewish woman named Freda… “And a one and a
two… One, two, three.” The music was on. We were following our steps. Freda
would yank the record and scream across the gym, “Chuck, what are you doing?”
I'd say, “I'm feeling the music.” Freda would say, “don't feel it,
count it… You look like a giraffe in heat.” Then she would walk across the
gym, pull me out where everyone in the whole class could observe how not to do
it, and walk me through a painful exercise in utter failure. Jaws went slack.
Eyeballs rolled. I knew I was hopeless and just grateful that I didn't have to
date anymore. I was grateful just to be a Minister because Minister's get a
free pass on dancing. They don't have to dance and no one will think they are weird.
So, I thought, I just won't dance in public anymore, just writhe privately with
the Grateful Dead on the headphones. That's not so bad.
Spiritually,
this is usually an awakening moment. Several years ago, someone called me to
process a funeral. He was in his early thirties, a colleague had died in a car
accident, right out of the blue. He went to the funeral. He gets to the funeral
and he hadn't been to a funeral in probably twenty years. He didn't prepare
himself at all. It was a Greek Orthodox funeral and the coffin was open and
everyone filed passed the casket, some of the people kissing the corpse- as is
the custom in a Greek Orthodox funeral. He files past the coffin, stares at his
colleague, his mind goes blank, he stands there for a long moment, finds his
way back to his pew, repeating the same line over and over to himself, “What
am I doing? What am I doing? What am I doing?” He didn't have any answers
to his question which cause him to feel mildly nauseous and sat there in a
blank stare for the rest of the very long service. He had this sinking
emotional/spiritual moment that he wasn't sure what he was living for, what he
would leave behind, what the point of his existence was really. Later he was slightly guilty that the whole
time at the funeral for someone else, he was absorbed with himself, but he couldn't turn off those questions even
if he wanted to. It just suddenly crashed over him that he knew he didn't know
and it was very frightening. These are spiritually awakening moments when you realize
that you don't have a clue. Very sobering really.
The third level
is conscious competent. I am nearly open to this stage with dancing. I
got the brochure from the 92nd Street Y and noticed a number of
dancing classes that were offered. I checked again to make sure none of them
were taught by a woman named Freda.
This third level
is where the religious practices of Lent come into play. Christians have
recognized the importance of developing spiritual disciplines in order to
develop spiritual competence in the formation of our character. It is the
principal reason that the institution of the Church exists. We come together
weekly for worship and instruction because few of us are strong enough or
informed enough to do this on our own. Furthermore, Christianity by it's very
nature, as our text reminds us today, is a social faith. It is compassionate
community meeting the needs of other people, practicing the meaning of
tolerance week in and week out when we don't see eye to eye on important social
issues, working together on becoming inclusive, doing the things that make for
reconciliation and forgiveness, learning together what it means to work for
justice and peace, learning how to support one another in tragedy and death.
The disciplines
of Lent ought to facilitate the practice of these things that strengthen
spiritual formation. It is true that certain forms of renunciation in Lent can
become important aids to spiritual growth as the Catholic tradition holds.
Giving up something that you rely on constantly can remind you of the
difficulty of self-control and develop strength of self-direction and the need
to regularly and often filled with God's vision to re-direct desire. Likewise,
it is true that being intentional about prayer and meditation can ground you in
a centered way that makes you stronger going through tribulation and trial.
However, the
Church could do a lot more towards developing the character skills that we know
are important. Of all religions, we ought to be the one's offering courses in
the skills of listening. We ought to be the one's teaching people the mechanics
of reconciliation and putting them into practice in our homes, in the
community, in our places of vocation.
And as our
passage reminds us today, the Church ought to be the one's structuring
opportunities for service and compassion towards people in need, the homeless,
the imprisoned. Collecting food and toiletries like we've been doing and will
be doing in the next couple weeks is an obvious but important place for growth
in this regard. We need to be reforming ourselves in this direction.
Which brings me
to the fourth stage: Unconsciously competent. The King in the parable
today lifts up the sheep in the parable as such an example. They are what we
hope to become. As my friend, Michael Usey has said, “It is not only that the
sheep didn't recognize Jesus; they can't even remember when they might have
helped him. Their loving the people around them has become so much a practice
with them that they are unconsciously doing it.”
This is the
point, ultimately, of our Christian lives. You want your life with God to seep
so deeply and completely into your character that you just live well, embody
compassion, empathy, and support for others, without having much thought
directed at yourself. You just become it.
I was watching
the master Isaac Perlman teaching violin to some really talented young
students. They had obviously practiced their piece over and over, working
deeply on the technical aspects of the piece for the great teacher. They had
worked through the disciplines. And their work was stunning. Then Perlman said,
“Now, put away the sheet music, close your eyes, and let the emotion of this
piece run through you. Let the emotion of the music express itself.”
Spiritually, that
is congruence. The disciplines of the spiritual life are important to help us
structure our character. But the point is to let the Spirit of God channel
through us and radiate out to those around us that we might become the face of
the Christ to others. This spiritual work is not a deprivation but a
fullness, not a work but a grace.
Like I said, it
is a funny thing about these natural disasters, they bring out the great in us,
but they also bring out the small. We get so used to flipping on a switch and
having everything just light up that we actually have to do for ourselves like
the thousands of generations before us, we realize just how spoiled and
spiritually out of shape we have become. A little frustration and set back and
we come all undone.
Let us turn
ourselves again to the true source of maturity and strength, God above, the
source of all our compassion, strength and long-suffering. The bible tells us
that “God so loved the world that He gave us His only begotten Son”. God loves
us beyond our human limitation, unconditionally. May we so draw from that love
that we become a beacon of light when the times are dark and may we so shine,
that others see in us, the glow of hope and strength. May God lift you up on
eagles' wings, may God bear you on the breath of dawn, may God make you to
shine like the sun and hold you in the palm of Her hand. Amen.
