The Reverend John E. McGinn, Rector

Saint John’s Episcopal Church

Sandwich,  Massachusetts  02563

 

June 8, 2008                                                                                                                           4 Pentecost

St. John’s Day

 

The lesson today is taken from the New Testament, the material that’s pertinent to St. John the Baptist.

 

A little boy was taken to the dentist because he had a cavity that needed to be filled.  “Now, young man,” asked the dentist, “what kind of filling would you like for that tooth?”  The youngster thought for a moment and replied, “chocolate.”

 

Now that young man is what I would call a positive thinker.  It seems to me that we don’t hear as much about positive thinking as we used to.  Some of you will remember, when under the influence of the late, great Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, positive thinking was the rage  - ‘If you can think it, you can do it’- was the basic message.  Robert Shuler repackaged Dr. Peale’s message as ‘possibility thinking.’  But Dr. Shuler’s son is now taking the lead in that ministry, and it seems to have lost some of its steam as well.  And yet, who can deny that a positive attitude is an important element in successful living.

 

Some of you probably saw a movie a few years back that embodied the power of a positive attitude.  It was the true story of a University of Notre Dame football player named Rudy, and the movie bore his name.  If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it.  It was 1974 when Rudy walked on the Notre Dame football team.  The head coach at the time was Ara Parseghian.  Rudy grew up in Joliet, Illinois, and he was the third of fourteen children.  Rudy didn’t have the physical ability to make the Notre Dame team or any other major football team for that matter; but he had a dream, and he never quit trying to bring that dream to fruition.  He would  say that he treated every practice as a real game.  Over time, he won the respect of his fellow players.  He worked so hard at his dream that at the end of his senior season the entire team rallied to his support and demanded that the coach put Rudy in a game.  It was the closing moments of the last game of Rudy’s senior year.  The crowd in the football stadium got wind that Rudy might finally get his chance, and the stadium echoed with the repetitive cheer, “Rudy, Rudy, Rudy!”  And when Rudy got his chance, he made an outstanding tackle.  His cheering teammates carried him off the field, and no other player since has been accorded that honor at Notre Dame. 

 

We are inspired by such stories.  People who have a dream - people who think positive thoughts - people who conquer seemingly impossible odds.  Mind over matter, it is sometimes called; and many of us believe there is something to it.  Our attitudes can effect our destiny.  “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he,” we learn in Proverbs.

 

Many doctors and nurses believe that older people die simply because they think it’s time for them to die.  They give up, as it were.  Others with a more hopeful attitude seem to live long and vigorous lives. 

 

There was a study at the State University of New York which tested this hypothesis.  A psychologist began suggesting to fifteen healthy eighty-year- olds in a New York City nursing home that they could have a happy and long life, and seemingly, it worked.  On average these people lived an average six-point-two years longer than a matching control group who didn’t get the encouraging messages.  They also had fewer illnesses.  Their attitude about their lives seemed to have made a difference. 

 

Our attitude may determine how long we live or how quickly we die.  It also may determine how successful we are while we are living.  Back in the 1950s there was a fascinating experiment that I read about.  Researchers took a two-hundred-gallon aquarium, and they filled it with water and put in a fish called a northern pike.  The northern pike is known as an aggressive predator, and every day they dumped in some minnows - these were the pike’s favorite food.  The pike had all the minnows that it could eat.  Then one day they divided the tank in half with a piece of glass.  On one side was the pike; on the other side were the minnows.  Now the pike had a problem - it couldn’t get to its prey.  It swam into the glass time after time trying to get to its meal.  Soon the pike gave up and swam around in circles.  Then the experimenters removed the glass.  Now the pike and the minnows were free to go anywhere in that aquarium tank that they chose.  Guess what happened to the pike.  It kept swimming around in circles, and it starved to death.  Its favorite food was right there swimming along side of it, but it had been conditioned to believe that food was no longer available, and so the pike starved to death.

 

Motivational experts tell us that human beings are somewhat like that northern pike.  A negative attitude can act like a glass wall, keeping us from our dreams.  If we believe we are losers, we will be.  If we believe that we can’t do it, usually we are right.

 

The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life.  Attitude to me is more important than facts.  It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes.  The remarkable thing is that we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day.  We cannot change the inevitable.  The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude.  I am convinced that life is ten percent what happens to me, and ninety percent of how I react to it.  And so it is with you, we are in charge of our attitudes.

 

Now our attitude can have a drastic effect on our destiny, and yet even the most dreamy-eyed of us know that there is a limit to how far a positive attitude will take us.  Something else is needed.

 

In the 1960s China went through what is called the cultural revolution under Mao Tse-tung.  The major feature of this revolution was the outlawing of all intellectuals and anyone else who had Western connections.  Mao’s henchmen tried to reprogram the nation’s mind by making all citizens memorize Mao’s quotations; and by memorizing those quotations, a person was taught that they could do anything.

 

Now Nian Chang was a medical doctor before the cultural revolution, and after it, she was banished for seven years in solitary confinement.  She lived in wretched conditions, and her constant cold developed into bronchitis.  She requested medical help, knowing from her medical training what was wrong and what needed to be done for her.  A young man came to her and quickly decided she had hepatitis and that he would need to check her blood. 

 

Listen to Nian’s chilling words.  “I was astonished.  Any ignoramus with no special medical knowledge would know I had bronchitis, possibly verging on pneumonia; not hepatitis, an inflammation of the liver with symptoms entirely different from mine.  Now what sort of doctor was this young man?  I bent down to look at him through the opening of the small window, and I saw a country lad no more than twenty years of age in a soldier’s uniform.  I realized that he was not a trained doctor at all, but had been given the job because Mao Tse-tung had said, ‘We must learn swimming from swimming,’ and the young man was simply carrying out Mao’s order to learn to be a doctor by being one.

 

“There were many reports in the newspaper of cases where untrained hospital coolies were said to have performed operations successfully after mastering Mao’s quotations.  And during an operation, revolutionaries anxious to prove the magic of Mao’s words, remained in the operating room reciting quotations from the little red book of quotes from Mao, while the untrained doctor struggled with a patient.”

 

Can you imagine being operated on by a doctor with absolutely no training?  I don’t know about you - I believe strongly in the power of positive thinking - nevertheless, if I had to choose between a doctor with the right attitude or one with the right skills, I would choose skill any day. 

 

Nian Chang reports that when Mao himself needed medical attention, experts trained in Western universities were bundled into special planes and flown to Beijing, often hastily removed from the countryside where they had been exiled to perform hard labor.

 

Positive thinking is great, but there are limitations.  It can’t cause us to do something we can’t or be something we aren’t.  It would be easy to think of our patron saint, St. John the Baptist, and today we celebrate that saint at our services.  We might think of him as our ultimate positive thinker.  You know, he actually believed that he was a messenger from God, that he was preparing for the Lord, he was preparing for the Messiah to come.  John’s cries for repentance and for preparing resulted in a dangerous situation for him, and finally resulted in his death.  Yet John did not waiver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but with strength in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what God had promised.

 

I don’t know if you remember the story of Pinocchio, the wooden puppet that wanted to be a real boy.  It was in Pinocchio that Jiminy Cricket sang that wondrous hymn of hope…it’s one of my favorites.  “When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are; anything your heart desires will come to you.”

 

And that’s part of our cultural psyche.  Your dreams can come true, and all you have to do is believe and to work really, really hard.  But the truth of the matter is that John the Baptist wasn’t a positive thinker in the strict sense of the word.  It would be a mistake to use him as an example as to how far inspiration can carry you.  Positive thinkers have faith in what they can do.  John the Baptist had faith in what God can do, and that is the critical difference.

 

It is wonderful to believe that by having the right attitude we can have a positive effect on our lives.  As I said, it may affect how long we live and how well we live, but it is even more wonderful to know that we have a loving God watching over our lives who will help us to be what God has created us to be.  This is better than all the positive thinking in the world.

 

In closing I want to share with you a very personal thing.  Last Sunday Bishop Cederholm came here to visit St. John’s.  When he got here, he seemed very distracted; and so he said to me that he had just received a very difficult phone call.

 

Bill Heuss is the rector of St. David’s in Yarmouth, and Bill is the sixty-seven years old.  He has been a priest in the Episcopal Church for thirty-seven years, and he has been at St. David’s in Yarmouth for fifteen years.  In two weeks, he was going to retire from that position.  As he got up last Sunday morning to prepare to go to his eight-o’clock service, he found that his wife of thirty-two years had died during the night of a heart attack.  I can’t imagine - because I know my wife and I have been married thirty-eight years - I can’t imagine that happening at that particular time like that.  I know I have given my life to helping other people and being there for them; and to think that Bill has done that for thirty-seven years - he was just totally devastated.

 

I went on Friday evening to Yarmouth to the Hallett Funeral Home to see Bill.  When I got there, and I saw his wife in the casket - I had just been with her and her husband just a couple of weeks ago at a wonderful retirement party that we gave for her at St. Barnabas in Falmouth - I was overtaken with grief.  Bill and I were weeping together as we hugged one another, because I think we share so much in terms of our life as priests.  Over the years we have met many times together because clergy meet on a once-a-month basis, and we talk about the joys and difficulties of ministry.  But there he was - at the end of his ministry - without his beloved wife.  As we were hugging and weeping together, I said to him, “Bill, I am so sorry for you.”  And, you know, he said to me, “I know that God is with me.”

 

And I hope that each of you knows that God is with you.  I hope that each of you has a positive attitude.  There are many benefits to believing that, no matter what, you can do it if you try.  But even more than a positive attitude, I pray that each of you has the faith of John the Baptist.  I hope you trust in a God who will never forget you, will never forsake you, and who will give you all the blessings that God intends for God’s children to have.

 

Now, no matter how much you and I can accomplish with the right attitude, with God’s help we can accomplish much, much more.

 

Amen