I Come to Bury John Wayne
Stewardship 2011: Better.Together Grateful for Community
Sermon from October 16, 2011
By Chris Satullo
Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 24, Year A
Matthew 22: 15-22
I come to bury John Wayne, not to praise him.
Now you may ask: Why bring up an actor who died in 1979? And bury him? Didn’t they take care of that three decades ago?
Here’s why I’m digging up the Duke:
To me, he’s a handy icon to talk about America’s cult of individuality, and how it clashes – really clashes – with the theme of St. Martin’s stewardship season, Better Together.
And clashes, painfully, with the theology of a church community living, breathing, and acting together as the Body of Christ.
Now, you may say you’re no fan of John Wayne. You may never have seen Rio Grande or Rooster Cogburn, so how could those movies influence how you think or behave? You’ve never fancied yourself like the Duke, roping a calf with casual ease, facing down a passel of bad guys on a dusty street, six-shooter in hand.
But once a powerful notion gets into our nation’s cultural bloodstream, it’s hard to keep it from seeping everywhere. The cult of the individual is one of those.
We all watch movies and TVs, read books. We’ve all seen dozens of plots where some solitary hero, whether Wayne or one of his dozens of successors, is driven by some inner light to uphold honor, bravery, and justice. The plot’s whole point is to show how this lone individual triumphs over the huddled, cautious and cowardly pack.
We have been schooled, over and over, to root not for the posse, the group effort, but for the fugitive seeking to outwit it.
This is a powerful notion in our culture, that the extraordinary deed is usually the work of the extraordinary individual – not of communal enterprise. Look at the fulsome eulogies for Steve Jobs; you’d think no one else of any intelligence or insight ever worked at Apple.
The delusion that the individual succeeds fully by his own heft, without any role for luck, government, or community, is widespread.
Our airwaves and our legislatures seem full of people who were born on third base and imagine that they hit a triple.
Such people have always existed. And in Jesus’ time, his radical call for communal caring was a real challenge to all their assumptions, their comfortable arrangements.
In today’s Gospel, we see the usual suspects trying to snuff out the threat that Jesus posed. The Pharisees seek to trap Jesus with the ultimate trick question, basically an ancient version of: When did you stop beating your wife? If Jesus agrees that Jews should pay the Roman poll tax, he’ll look like a cowed collaborator in oppression. If he says no, he’ll look like a rebel outlaw suitable for delivery to the Roman authorities.
Yet Jesus dances out of the trap with ease, with the famous line about giving to Caesar that which is Caesar’s.
Jesus is being subtly revolutionary here, of course. If you parse the situation properly, what belongs to Caesar is dwarfed by what belongs to God. Even mighty Caesar of all-powerful Rome controls only a provisional pittance of what really matters. By contrast, what belongs to God, what God gives us freely, what we owe to him, is vast and eternal.
I don’t have to even break a sweat, do I, to relate this Gospel to Stewardship season?
For us, Caesar equals all the many demands, strains, and temptations of the secular, workaday world.
In our secular society, right now, there is quite a war of Caesar vs. God going on. One sign of it is what I call the battle of the pronouns.
The pronoun I, the self-regarding, libertarian, individualistic I, is quite ascendant. We and Us, in the sense of communal bonds, communal responsibility, communal caring, are struggling for their foothold.
The “I” relies on a particular trick to minimize its duties to the We.
In this trick of rhetoric, We, as in We the People, We the Community, We the Church, somehow becomes an It and a Them. Something alien, something to which no allegiance is owed.
Government, for example, no longer can count on being accepted as the legitimate expression of our common will as We the People. Many Americans talk about their government now as though they were the ancient Jews under the yoke of Roman occupation, suppressed by a brutal, foreign power. This hostile entity, this It, is viewed as run by a shadowy, perverse Them who aim to enslave.
This is silly, but it is everywhere. And I’m afraid the mindset of turning Us into It or Them can infiltrate any of us, at any time.
Why? Times are anxious and overwhelming. Acting as if our broadest shared identity, our We, were really an alien It or Them – well, that’s a great trick for avoiding communal responsibilities we’re not sure we want to take on.
You’ve noticed, I’m sure, how many voters now recoil at the idea of any taxation; they don’t want to render under Caesar even what is clearly Caesar’s. How much tougher, in such times, will it be for God to get Her due?
Now, I doubt that many members of St. Martin’s are tax rebels. But there is little doubt that, in these scary economic times, the worries of the secular world are too much with us. There is anxiety. There is loss. And want and hurt. People juggle multiple jobs, multiple stresses. Even middle-class households sense they’re but one accident, one illness, one bad break from the chasm.
In such times, it’s hard to come to St. Martin’s looking for peace and succor, and to be told: You must do more. You must dig deeper.
The brain screams, quietly: You’ve got to be kidding me? How can I give any more? Why should I?
Here’s why. And how.
Because Us and We are better than I, It, or Them. Every time, in every way.
The individualistic mythos in which we Americans have been steeped struggles to accept this, but it’s true.
When you give to St. Martin’s in any of the avenues of time, talent, or treasure – when you write a check, stay late to fold up the chairs after an event, bring the Sacrament to a sick parishioner, or use your gift of teaching to open the Gospels up to an 8-year-old – you are not just giving to an It named St. Martin’s, or a Them called the Vestry.
You are giving to an Us, a We, which is not a thing separate from you. You are an intrinsic part of the Us, and the Us in time becomes part of who you are.
And the power you gain by being part of this Us thoroughly trumps the value of holding yourself apart, warily judging, begrudging It or Them your tribute coin.
The political philosopher Michael Sandel put it well. He said: “Together, we may come to find a wisdom we could not find alone.”
Together, we may come to find a wisdom we could not find alone.
Together, we are better than we are alone.
It is the knitting together of our experiences, our desires, our hurts, our dreams, our gifts, and our faith that creates, under the name of St. Martin in the Fields, a force to heal the world. It is a force far greater than I or you could ever generate alone, hunkered in our individual silos.
This is the mystery that is called the Body of Christ. St. Martin’s is one expression, just one, but a rich and supple one, of the Body of Christ; one way of bringing grace to a hurting and hurtful world.
Let me expand on Sandel’s statement.
Together, as St. Martin’s, we may come to heal as we could not heal alone.
Together, as St. Martin’s, we may come to teach as we could not teach alone.
Together, as St. Martin’s, we may come to witness for justice with a power we could not muster alone.
Together, as St. Martin’s, we may come to make a joyful noise we could not make alone.
And, never to be forgotten, as St. Martin’s, we may come to find laughter and fun we could not find alone.
Now, to be clear, I am one of the worst among us at letting the demands, the cares, the silly goals of the secular world suck the energy out of me. I cannot point to a single time when I thought I was doing enough to heal the world.
But since Eileen and I joined St. Martin’s, 20-some years ago, we have come to feel part of all that everyone at St. Martin’s does to bring the Body of Christ to a skeptical, angry world.
Whether it’s Greg Williams planting vegetables at Jubilee School, Terry Clattenberg and Roxanne Coleman leading a mission to Guatemala, Danielle Read organizing overnights at the homeless shelter, the Stephen Ministers bringing their healing touch, we feel a part of it, because we are part of the Body of Christ made visible by this congregation. We are part of it, in some small way, by way of our support of stewardship.
St. Martin’s is an Us we chose, led by God’s grace. St. Martin’s is an Us that shatters the barriers of It and Them that we all put up to avoid doing what we should to heal the world.
So when we put in our annual pledge, we are not giving to an It called The Church or The Diocese. We are not giving to a Them named the Clergy or the Vestry.
We are giving to sustain, support, and empower an Us that is very much part of our identity, an expression of our very best selves. We are giving to an Us that we hope will help heal the world more fully than we could ever manage on our own limited behalf.
One last thought:
I said I’m always dissatisfied with what I manage to do to heal the world. We need here, in our joint selves as the Body of Christ in Philadelphia, to be equally restless.
When someone learns I am a member of St. Martin’s, what do they say? Most often it’s, “Oh, you’re that beautiful church next to the Cricket Club.” Or: “Oh, you have the most wonderful choir.”
Now, it’s a very fine thing to worship in a place as historic and lovely as this. It’s an even better thing for that worship to be as gorgeous as our music program makes it.
And in the proposed budget for 2012 that your stewardship will support, we take strong steps to improve maintenance of our property. We sustain and secure the place of our fabulous choirs in our worship.
But I yearn to hear people exclaim something else when they hear the name of St. Martin’s: “Oh, your congregation does the most powerful work in our community.”
Sad to say, I don’t hear that much. Partly it’s because we have long hid our light under a bushel, done what we do quietly. Partly it’s because we really don’t do all that we could, with the gifts that we have.
Next year’s budget addresses those lacks, too. It bolsters our communications efforts dramatically, so that our works might be known and inspire more good to happen. And it aspires to increase meaningfully, even in these scary times, our ministry to the community, to extend the reach of our healing hand in the Body of Christ.
John Wayne, six-shooter in hand, is one kind of traditional American hero.
Together, we, the people of St. Martin’s, can be an altogether different and more useful kind of 21st century hero to our city, which desperately needs more heroes in its midst.
Together, we can be better than we can be alone. With God’s grace and guidance, let us do what we can, together, to heal the world.