Heroes
- Details
- Created on Sunday, 18 January 2009 00:00
- Written by Angela Herrera
{player 2009-01-18-11am-sermon.mp3}
If you were to run into Leon McLaughlin, chances are he would be shining shoes, which is what he does for a living in Seattle. Stooped over oxfords ($3.50) and boots ($6) McLaughlin meets all kinds of people. And while he is doing that, he also dreams up ways to use his extra money. Having spent some of it in the past on traveling, Leon told a newspaper reporter recently that he had once met a Mexican woman who told him a story that got him thinking. The woman told him about a time when an American tourist asked to use her restroom, and while he was in there, accidentally let the water out of her tub. The tourist had no idea, she explained to Leon, that the water he let out was all the water she had for the month.
Leon got to thinking about this when he returned to his shoeshine business. He got to thinking about how easy it is to get water in Seattle, and about all the children in the world who don’t have access to clean water, and then he got to thinking about what he could do to change that.
When I think about this myself, I have no idea what the answer is. The countries where people have no clean water seem very far away. How do I find out what they need? How do I figure out how to get them what they need? How do I know it will work? Here’s a question for the kids in the congregation today: when you guys don’t understand something, or you don’t know how to do something, how do you figure it out?
[Ask questions, read books, go to school, Google, whatever].
I’ll bet Leon did a lot of those things. He especially must have had to ask a lot of questions to think up what he eventually did, because what he eventually did was get clean water to some kids who needed it. He found partners in a group of people who wanted to do the same thing, and they took a trip to the country of Bolivia and found out that if people in the town of La Niña had water filters, they could get clean water for themselves and they would stop getting sick all the time, and their lives would get easier. So Leon used the money he had saved to buy filters. He took them down there. And it meant so much to the people of La Niña that they called him a hero.
When I told my husband I was going to preach about heroes today, and I asked him who he thought of as one, he called Leon a hero too.
Pam talked this morning about the strength, weakness, and tragedy of a hero. You could say Leon’s strength was his ability to figure things out. His weakness was that he is only one person. (He overcame that by finding partners). But what about a tragedy? I don’t know if Leon had already proven his strength by overcoming a tragedy in his life. But it’s definitely a tragedy for children not to have water.
Even the first tragedy a person faces can be the one that calls them to action. Something can suddenly present a hero with a mission—a call to action that fills her with courage and determination, which you can have even if you feel scared at the same time. But what kind of situation? People need rescuing from all kinds of things. And these days, especially in our country, lots of times tragedy boils down to other people’s behavior.
In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell talks about the figure of the tyrant-monster. He calls that monster figure a “hoarder of the general benefit,” and says, his “inflated ego is a curse to himself and his world—no matter how his affairs may seem to prosper.
Self-terrorized, fear-haunted, alert at every hand to meet and battle back the anticipated aggressions of his environment…the giant of self-achieved independence is the world’s messenger of disaster. …Wherever he sets his hand there is a cry for the… hero [who] will liberate the land.
There are lots of ways to interpret this in light of our world today. Who is the tyrant-monster? The elected leader? The Wall Street cheater? Life- and justice-denying businesses? That’s a start. How about the ones closer to home?
Now, in case any kids are getting nervous, I want to say something about the idea of monsters. It’s a pretty useful one. It might not seem like it, if you’ve ever been laying in bed, and suddenly you had a thought that led to a thought about monsters, and then—even though you know there aren’t really monsters in your room—the idea was so scary it made you feel scared anyway. And once you have that thought, you can’t get rid of it on purpose very well, can you? You have to wait until you’re—almost accidentally-- NOT thinking about it, and that’s when you feel better. Let me just tell you that this happens to adults, too, only the things that are monstrous to us are a little different. People can behave like monsters, or we can face a monster of a problem. Like racism and white privilege, which Margie tackled in a wonderful sermon December 28th. If you missed it, go online and listen to it, or ask for a copy of it. It was a really important one.
[pause]
With monstrous problems and monstrous elected officials and monstrous CEO’s, we hear in our land that cry for the hero.
Now we are on the cusp of a new president, someone who is already a hero in some ways, and whom many of us hope will be in other ways, too. And the timing is really magical. It’s Martin Luther King Jr day on Monday, the day before the inauguration, and he was one of our country’s greatest heroes. Still is, even though he died so long ago. It got me thinking. Just like there are different kinds of monsters, there are different kinds of heroes.
One kind, like a superhero, or a firefighter or police officer, or even an ordinary person who saves someone else from harm, swoops in and saves us from something. They show up on the scene at just the right time, and they make things better. This week we saw a bunch of them in action on the news. There was a steady pilot, and all those first responders who joined him in saving the passengers whose plane made the most skillful crash landing imaginable into the Hudson River on Thursday. The mayor of New York described the pilot by quoting Hemingway’s definition of heroism: “Grace under pressure.”
That’s one kind of hero.
And then there is the kind of hero who, instead of swooping down, rises up. And that kind of hero, instead of saving people, helps them find the courage and strength to save themselves. Martin Luther King, Jr. Gandhi. Cesar Chavez.
There is a tendency in our country to take a consumerist or service approach to leadership. “What can you give us?” We’d like a leader who can fix the economy. Fix education. Fix healthcare. Some who are filled with hope for Barack Obama, are filled with hope that he can fix things. He represents the change they’d like to see, and now that he has been elected, they are pretty sure they’ll see it. People who really don’t like Obama can be in the same camp. Yesterday a woman on the radio confessed that she is still afraid Obama’s presidency will turn our country into a Muslim one. She doesn’t like what Obama represents, but remarkably she seems convinced of his power to swoop down and make it happen.
And then there is another group that isn’t against Obama, but is cynical about him, about change, about hope itself. They don’t believe for one minute that he will be able to make a difference in Washington. They say he lacks the connections, he’s too new, he’s too different. He’s too polished, he’s too perfect, he’s a phony. At first glance they seem to be the opposite of the ones who think Obama can make a difference, but in reality, they are exactly the same: both groups are looking for the swoop-down hero, the kind who doesn’t ask us to change, but just rescues us from our monster. It’s just that one group thinks they’ve found one, and the other group does not.
Yesterday on NPR, Scott Simon interviewed will.i.am, the front man and producer of the musical group The Black Eyed Peas. He’s also the one who made Obama’s campaign speech after losing Iowa into a song with the same refrain, “Yes We Can.” Scott Simon asked Will how Obama could possibly live up to the high expectations people have of him. There is so much invested in his success. To which Will replied, “You meet the expectations by keeping the people involved. People have to be invested in the success. Obama isn’t just one person. The concept of Obama is ‘we.’”
“All progress is precarious,” said Martin Luther King, Jr., “and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.”
This isn’t a sermon to sell you on Obama. He can’t do anything on his own. It isn’t a sermon to ask you to become the next Martin Luther King, Jr, the next Wonderwoman, or even the next Leon McLaughlin. It’s a sermon to invite you—you there, who have been listening, your heart beating steadily, your breath rising and falling in harmony with your neighbors, to invite you to have hope. So many of our young people have been reared on a politics of disappointment: scandal and corruption, forecasts of gloom, dismally low approval ratings. The politics of hope needs a voice.
Some people think religion should stay out of politics, and I know what they mean but right now we need hope not to wane and any religion that’s worth getting up for on a Sunday morning is a religion that reminds you of and fills you up with hope.
We are theists who know that God’s work on this earth must be done by our hands; and that the story of Jesus is a story of hope breaking into historical time and leaving a lasting mark to remind us of what is possible;
We are atheists and Universalists who know that salvation comes not from above, swooping, but from within and among the people;
We are agnostics and seekers who perhaps know nothing for certain except that the most meaningful lives are the ones that are bound up with work of love and hope.
Hope, which the fifteenth century Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides defined as belief in the “plausibility of the possible” and not the “necessity of the probable.”
The “plausibility of the possible” and not the “necessity of the probable.”
We will make way for the hero that we need to the degree that we allow ourselves to hope, and to the degree that our hope imagines not the solitary hero, but the kind whose apparent weakness—that he depends upon the people—becomes his strength.
“People’s hearts… have to be affected, and shored up, and changed,” says the civil rights activist and teacher, Julius Lester. “Change comes from people. Change does not come from one individual.”
May the softening of our hearts, and the rising up of hope, become our strength.
http://msnbc-1005096.newsvine.com/_video/2009/01/09/2294310-a-shoe-shiner-with-a-global-agenda