"What Do Americans Want?" | The Rev. Peter Sipple | November 8, 2020
Proper 27, Year A | November 8, 2020
Wisdom of Solomon 6:12-16
Psalm 70
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
Matthew 25:1-13
In the Presbyterian Church in which I was raised, the preacher would often provide a sermon title. If I were asked to provide one this morning, it would be What do Americans want? One thing I learned from this election cycle: nearly half of those who voted may view the means of getting what they want differently from me; but I’m convinced that the ends they are seeking are the same as those you and I are seeking. And what are those ends? All Americans want to be valued; to be trusted; to be loved; and to find that life has meaning. No matter who she voted for, or whether or not he voted, most all of us want these things.
The second thing we learned is that no political party or president will achieve these ends for us. We the People must find the means to achieve them ourselves. How do we do that, given how divided we seem to be? We use qualities that our national character is noted for: industry and initiative, forthrightness and hard work; we continue to try to reach agreement in small groups, making incremental steps forward with patience. We draw on the qualities that have distinguished our national character, qualities we hold in common and want to be known for elsewhere in the world: honesty, generosity, compassion and courage, and the pursuit of justice for all people. These qualities of character define what nearly all Americans would choose to govern our social and political interactions. And it’s important to remember that these values are not just American: they are central to the core teaching of the world’s major religions.
Given our understanding of the teaching of Jesus, you and I as Christians should have a head start in achieving these basic human wants: being trusted, valued, and loved; and finding that life has meaning. Our Episcopal Church continues to stand for the radical Gospel—a core teaching that calls for us to love God and love one another. We learn that our Christian example, Jesus, came to serve and save the lost, the disheartened, the disenfranchised. He showed us how we might live in a realm of God’s making as we reach outside ourselves to regard the conditions of others as if those conditions were our own. Jesus pictured us joined in love with all of God’s people, united by our enjoyment of one another’s company, free of the suspicions and hatred that can undermine human society. In this realm of God, what we enjoy when we find it in close friends is what we’ll enjoy in those we are only learning to know.
And so, one of the ways Christians can continue to lead the progress toward that realm of God is to recognize our connectedness to others, including to the generations of believers who preceded us. We just celebrated All Saints’ Day: its theme is not only our spiritual link with past generations, but the discovery of what we share with others in Christ: our common humanity. We who revere Jesus believe that we share that common humanity with those who worship God in ways different from our own. We can rejoice and meet in the areas of overlap rather than permit distinctions to separate us. Young people around the U.S. are demonstrating initiative—showing their elders the way—as they uphold their faith in the context of a pluralism far greater than we have experienced. Technology brings the other, the outsider, into closer proximity to us. We can be threatened by those new to us, or we can learn from them. With the electronic age generating a confusing variety of conflicting messages, it’s all the more important to discuss how to achieve our wants while recognizing that others will do so differently. In this way we can expand the center and draw in the extremes, acknowledging that God moves in and through our world in a variety of forms. As Parker Palmer has written: “When faithfulness is our standard, we are more likely to sustain our engagement with tasks that will never end: doing justice, loving mercy, and calling the beloved community into being.”
In our quest to fulfill basic human wants, we encounter values that together we can uphold as a people. In his sermon for All Saints’ Sunday, the Presiding Bishop Michael Curry put it eloquently: “Our ideals, values, principles and dreams of beloved community matter. They matter because they drive us beyond service of self alone, to commitment to the greater good of us all. They matter because they give us an actual picture of God’s reign of love, and a reason to struggle and make it real. They matter to our lives as people of faith. They matter to our life in civil society. They matter to our life as a nation and as a world. Our values matter!”
One of those values, generosity, is a defining trait of Americans. Physicians, nurses, hospice staff members and other caregivers, exhausted from a grueling routine of service, keep offering expertise and talent to Covid patients; they represent a way of giving that inspires the rest of us, don’t they? Generosity and serving others occur together, and they both grow out of gratitude. Christians recognize—indeed our liturgy emphasizes—that giving to others is a spiritual expression of gratitude for being called by God into service—for the privilege of working as God’s surrogate—God’s hands and feet, Christ’s heart and hands. Giving—heart-felt giving—is inherent in our nature as human beings, since we are created in the likeness of God. Generosity finds individuals across this country helping to meet the core human wants of others they do not know and will never see. Studies of altruism find that giving brings a sense of pleasure and spiritual growth; it offers a means of fulfilling the basic human wants of being trusted, valued and loved. Acts of altruism give meaning to our lives.
Much is now being written about finding ways to fulfill basic human wants in small community groups rather than through large sweeping governmental gestures. If you agree that people who voted differently from you want, as we do, to be valued, trusted, loved, and find life meaningful, what can we do together to achieve those ends? David Brooks put the matter succinctly when he noted: “the voters reminded us yet again that the other side is not going away. We have to dispense with the fantasy that after the next miracle election our side will suddenly get everything it wants. We have to live with one another…Let’s fight our moral difference with books, sermons, movies and marches, not with political coercion.” Living with one another begins, or rather continues, where?? Well, for example, right here in this parish community, as we engage in conversations about how each of us is finding the means to be valued, trusted, loved. About the ways that life’s overall meaning transcends job losses, family illnesses, separation and even death. We can carry our concerns, doubts, and questions into other small groups, albeit with masks donned, as we engage those who may look on life differently. There are virtual communities abounding; some will offer the chance to learn how others are achieving the ends of being trusted, valued and loved.
It may well be that our nation’s best chance to heal will be achieved at the grass roots level, the way the body’s overall well-being improves with the healing of a local infection. Yuval Levin, the editor of National Affairs, contributes these final thoughts: “We tend to look at forms of breakdown in our society in terms of what they produce: anger, cynicism, a rejection of tradition. But we would be wise also to consider what they implicitly demand and yearn for: responsibility, integrity, and, above all, solidarity. Our national politics needs these, too. But they will come from below—from local and state government… and from civil society, where we encounter one another on a personal level. We cannot stand with our arms folded and hope we’ve finally elected the people who will deliver [responsibility and integrity]. [Achieving those ends] must begin with us, where we are. They start when we see problems around us as reasons to think creatively about how to act together: to help people who are short of food in this pandemic, to organize schools that will teach our children what our community cherishes most, to help our neighbors feel respected and safe, to care for our environment… Different Americans will have different priorities. But pursuing them effectively requires understanding those priorities as our responsibilities and approaching our society in the first-person plural—speaking less about “them” and more about “us…” Some of the deepest troubles of this moment require us to see our society as the sum of our affinities and obligations to one another, and so to heal what’s broken from the bottom up.”