SUNDAY SERMON

August 29, 2004
Proper 17, Year C

Church of the Holy Communion
The Rev. Gary D. Jones

Gospel: Luke 14:1,7-14

A few months ago, I told a story about an extraordinary time in my life. I was a very young and inexperienced priest, serving as vicar of a church in East Tennessee that was so small we were meeting in a warehouse. The one bathroom was directly behind the music stand that served as our pulpit. Well, suddenly and very unexpectedly I found myself in Washington D.C., having lunch with two other men - the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Dean of the National Cathedral. One day I had been talking with my senior warden about whether we could afford an automatic door closer for the one bathroom in the tiny church, and the next day I was trying to pretend it was perfectly normal for me to be joining in a conversation with these two eminent clerics about an upcoming visit of the Queen of England to Washington National Cathedral.

Well, I didn't tell you the whole story, and I was reminded of the most important part of the story when I read today's Gospel lesson.

You might remember that it was a complete accident that I ended up at this lunch with the Archbishop of Canterbury. I didn't belong. I didn't know anything about royal etiquette and these men were certainly not seeking my advice on the Queen's visit. But it just happens that the interim dean of the national cathedral was Sanford Garner, who had been my rector when I was a boy. He had watched me grow up and has continued to be my mentor to this day. Sanford had invited me to spend a week at the College of Preachers in Washington, and it just so happens that the day I arrived, Sanford was to take the Archbishop to lunch and invited me to join them.

Of course, the way Sanford put it when I got off the plane that day was this, "How wonderful to see you. But we have to hurry. The Archbishop of Canterbury is here, and he wants to have lunch with you." Of course, I just knew he was kidding me, until we pulled up to the hotel where the Most Reverend Lord Donald Coggan was staying, and his Grace actually hopped in the car with us. My favorite part of the story is that after we were seated in the fancy dining club where we were to have lunch and Lord Coggan excused himself to wash up, Sanford leaned over to me and said, "Isn't this great! Two hillbillies from Tennessee having lunch with the Archbishop of Canterbury!" For all of his urbane dignity, Sanford has never lost his sense of playfulness and wonder.

Well, the part of the story I haven't told you yet is this. Throughout our luncheon conversation about the Queen's upcoming visit to America, Lord Coggan was of course informative and knowledgeable, but he did not become fully engaged and animated until he turned his attention to me and asked about my wife and children in East Tennessee, and about the people in my tiny church.

The archbishop seemed to have little interest in talking about religion; he wasn't interested in my professional accomplishments. He was simply interested in my very ordinary life and in the people of my small church. He wanted to know about Nancy, whose husband had died. He wanted to know about Ann, a young woman with mental illness who was struggling to live a more independent life. And he was especially interested in how Cherry was managing to get along with a new baby and an inexperienced priest as her husband. And it was then that I realized what made Lord Coggan a holy man. He loved and found genuine joy in all people, and he was no more impressed by royalty than he was by the real lives of the people he met in the grocery store or on the street.

When Jesus went to a supper party that day in the home of a prominent Pharisee and saw how important it was for the guests to choose the places of honor for themselves, he used the occasion not just to talk about good manners but to reflect on one of the greatest barriers to the peace of God that passes all understanding. Because as long as we are concerned about proving ourselves or being worthy in God's eyes, we miss the most important truth revealed in Jesus:

There is nothing you can do to make God love you more. And there is no sin so horrible that will make God love you less.

But this is hard for us to believe. The story of our lives, it seems, is the story of our constantly striving to better ourselves, the story of our inability to be satisfied, the story of our restlessness, as St. Augustine put it, until our souls can finally rest in God.

In a new book entitled Status Anxiety, a book which I highly recommend, the author examines the question of why we seem so concerned to rise to respectable and even imminent/honorable places in society. You might think the reason for our constant striving would be because we always seem to need more money. As J. Paul Getty said when he was asked how much money was enough, "Enough," he said, "is always just a little more than I have." Our appetite for money seems insatiable - when we finally reach an income level that we had been striving for, being certain that this would be more than enough, it's not long before it turns out that we in fact seem to need a little more.

Others think our constant striving is about our desire for power or prestige. But the author of this new book reaches a very different conclusion. We seek to rise in society, he says, not in order to get more money or power, but in hopes that people will love us more:

"To be shown love," he writes, "is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to," and our failures are forgiven. This is the strongest motivator and impulse in our life - to be noticed, to believe that someone truly cares about us, … to feel loved.

And conversely, as the great psychologist William James wrote a hundred years ago, there is no greater hell than to go unnoticed by society. To enter a room and realize that no one cares to turn around, to speak and have no one answer, to feel so insignificant that no one cared what we thought or felt or did with our lives, …. This is the cruelest state to which a human being can descend, James wrote, and the most horrible bodily torture would be a relief by comparison.

And so we jockey for positions of honor, not for more money or more power but because of the deepest desire of our hearts, to be noticed, accepted and loved. The problem, of course, is that any love or attention that comes our way as a result of our wealth or achievements is not really love at all.

The wealthiest friend I have ever had, heiress to a tremendous family fortune and a prominent physician in her own right, once confided years ago the deepest, secret insecurity of her heart:

"Gary," she said, "so often I wonder whether people really care about me, or if they just care about my money."

It's the same in prosperous countries all over the world. As the great spiritual writer Henri Nouwen once said, "At times, I get the feeling that, under the blanket of success, a lot of people fall asleep in tears. And the question that perhaps lies hidden most deeply in many hearts is the question of love. 'Who really cares about me? Not about my money, my contacts, my reputation, or my popularity, but just me?'" (Letters to Marc… p. 43)

This is why Jesus told us to befriend the poor, the maimed, the lame, and the blind - not because of what they have to offer us, but simply because it is our nature to love; we were created to love each other, not each other's accomplishments.

And maybe more importantly what Jesus was saying was this. You and I are the poor, the maimed, the lame and the blind. We may be fabulously wealthy or notoriously powerful, but the bottom line truth, as the prophet Isaiah says, is that "all flesh is as grass. And the grass withers, and the flower fades," …. Whatever our wealth or accomplishments, the truth is that we are the poor, the lame and the blind.

And we are the ones whom God has invited into a love relationship, into what Jesus called "abundance of life" or "the Kingdom of God." The Christian life is about accepting this invitation from God and discovering that the places of honor have no more love or peace or joy than the lowest places. It's not about getting everything we want but about wanting what we all already have. Because, as Jesus said, the kingdom of God is not in that promotion; the kingdom of God is not in that new car or new house; the kingdom of God is not in a relationship with a new lover; instead, "the Kingdom of God is within you." (Luke 17:21)

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