Father John E. McGinn, Rector
Saint John’s Episcopal Church
Sandwich, Massachusetts 02563
June 24, 2007 Pentecost
4
This sermon is taken from
Galatians, chapter 3, verses 26-29.
There is a time-honored story
which comes from the French Revolution.
King Louis XVI and his queen were condemned to death, and they were
escorted to the guillotine in a public square in Paris where they were
beheaded. The mob was not
satisfied. “Bring out the prince,” they
cried, “He is next.” The young boy was
terrified. He was only six years old,
but he was next in line to be king of France.
In the mind of the crowd, he had to be eliminated. According to the story, the young prince
stood on the platform trembling in his black velvet coat. The mob screamed, “Down with royalty,
eliminate all royalty, kill the prince.”
And suddenly a shout came from the crowd, “Don’t kill him; killing him
is too good for him. It will only send
him to heaven, and that is too good for royalty.” I say, “Turn him over to Meg, the witch. She’ll teach him to be a sinner, and when he
dies, his soul will go to hell. That’s
what royalty deserves.” So according to
the legend, that’s exactly what happened.
The officials turned the young prince over to the witch. The vile woman tried to teach him foul
language, but every time she prompted the prince to be profane, he would
stubbornly stamp his feet and clench his fist and shout, “I will not say it, I
will not speak that way. I was born a
king, and I will not speak like I live in a gutter.”
That story is probably
apocryphal, but I think it speaks to the lesson today from the epistle. Paul writes:
“You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For all of you who are baptized into Christ
have clothed yourself with Christ. There
is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free male, nor female, for you are all one
in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ,
then you are Abraham’s seed and heirs according to the promise.
Now my question this morning
is: Do you know who you are? You are a child of God. Nothing else in this world matters. Are you male?
Irrelevant. Female? It doesn’t
matter. Are you from one of the better
families in our town. Good for you. That gives you many advantages in our
society, but it means nothing when you
stand before God. It will not get you
inside the gates of the kingdom. Not at
all. Jesus died for our sins. Jesus has accepted you as part of his family;
and that is all that matters in this world.
Because of His amazing grace, you and I are children of God.
Howard Thurman was Dean of
the Chapel at Boston University. He was
also the first African-American professor at that wonderful university. He inspired many of the leaders of the civil
rights movement including Martin Luther King, Jr. Howard Thurman attributed much of his own
sense of dignity and vocation to his grandmother, a former slave. His grandmother repeated to Howard a message
that she had heard in worship. Over and
over she told him, “You are somebody, you are somebody.”
It is terrible when a person
believes his or her life doesn’t matter.
We see it all the time. Just
recently in our town, we read about and heard about a young man who had just
graduated from Boston University who took his own life. How sad.
What a tragedy! And the teenager
who feels that he doesn’t fit in; the adult loner who keeps sabotaging his or
her relationships; the older person who wonders if it wouldn’t be better for
everyone if he or she went ahead and died.
There are many people in this
world who don’t think their lives matter in the great order of things. It is sad; and saddest of all is some of
these people are here in church this morning.
There are some people who feel that way about their lives: unconnected, unimportant to anybody else in
the world. Unbelievably, some of these
people have parents who care for them, a spouse who adores them, children who
look up to them, good friends who really care about them. But somehow they have had something happen in
their lives that has convinced them that they are unworthy, unloved, unfit to
dwell in society.
One of my favorite authors,
Flannery O’Connor, once wrote a story about a boy who went up the attic and
drew a circle with a big F in the middle.
He drew this circle with a big F in the middle because he hadn’t been
doing well in school. Then this young
man did something tragic. He hung
himself over the F, a big F: failure. That is how he viewed himself. I wonder how many of us view ourselves as Fs;
as losers, as misfits, as failures. Don’t
let the world ever do that to you. It is
a lie. What a great service it would be
for humanity if every person who made someone else feel small, or insignificant
or unworthy, could be held accountable for their words or actions.
ABC news science editor,
Michael Guillen, tells about being part of a famous experiment in cooperation
with the former anchor of ABC news, the late Peter Jennings. The subject of the study was racial
prejudice. In one of the segments they
did an experiment featuring a school teacher and a large group of
students. The teacher began by dividing
the school children into two camps: blue
eyes (or bluies) and brown eyes. Then
she proceeded to tell the children that blue-eyed children tend to be slower
and clumsier and dumber than the other kids.
And to reinforce the lesson, every time a blue-eyed child made the
slightest mistake, much to the delight of all the brown eyes, the teacher said
something disparaging like, “What else would you expect from those children
with blue eyes?” Amazingly, after just a
few minutes of doing this, most of the blue-eyed children would thoroughly cow
and some were even in tears. If you don’t
think such things happen in the real world, you are being naïve.
Many people have been beaten
down by the world, and here is what the much-respected writer, Henry Nouwen,
said. Henry was a great, great
writer. Unfortunately, he died a few years
ago, but I think that this is one his most moving passages that he wrote: “The world tells you many lies about who you
are, and you simply have to be realistic enough to remind yourself of
this. Every time you feel hurt, offended
or rejected, you have to dare to say to yourself: ‘These feelings, strong as they may be, are
not telling me the truth about myself.
The truth, even though I can’t feel it right now, is that I am the
chosen child of God, precious in God’s eyes, called the beloved from all
eternity and held safe in an everlasting embrace.’ “
I really believe that people
who discover they are really somebody in Jesus, find it very easy to let other
people know that they are somebody as well.
I believe that is the meaning of Christian evangelism. It is not just about getting people’s names
on a dotted line as members of the church.
It is about letting the world know that because of who Jesus is, and
what Jesus has done, we all matter.
Every one of us: old and young,
male and female, rich and poor, black and white, gay and straight, married and
single, Anglo and Latino. We are all
children of God.
Many years ago, I made a
visit to the Mystic Planetarium. The
astronomer there is Don Truenergy, and Don has been a friend of mine for over
twenty years. Don would always lead one
of my confirmation classes. I would take the confirmation class there from St.
Paul’s in Southington. When we were there, as he opened up the planetarium to
them, he would talk about God as creator and all that God created. He would talk about the planets and the
stars, and it was just a wonderful presentation. What I discovered from listening to Don
Truenergy, is that you and I are made literally from stardust. Our wonderful human bodies are made of matter
that was once a star. Perhaps on a scientific
level that isn’t terribly exciting, but on a metaphoric level, it is mind
blowing.
We have the Genesis story
about Adam being created from earth, and we have the scientific story of
humanity being created from the stars.
And that reminds me always of the words of St. Paul in first Corinthians
fifteen: “The first man was from the
earth, a man of dust. The second man is
from heaven. As was the man of dust, so
are those who are of the dust, and as is the man of heaven, so are those who
are of heaven. Just as we have borne the
image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven.”
Now these words were written
by the apostle, Paul, to the church in Corinth nearly two-thousand years
ago. We’ve heard that we were created
from the dust of the earth, but have you ever thought of being stardust? You are somebody. Because Jesus has come down from heaven, you
are now part of His family, the family of God.
Amen