I received something curious in the mail this week. We get lots of curious mail at All Souls. I'm not even sure all of it is intended for us. We get mail addressed to the Church of All Sorts, the Church of Poor Souls, Also Church, even a couple of weeks ago to the Church of Ah So!
Another thing about the mail we receive. Maybe this has to do with the Holy Spirit, but almost every week something unsolicited comes through the mail that speaks directly to my chosen sermon topic. For instance, this week I am preaching on the second great commandment, to love our neighbor as ourselves. So I was not in the least surprised to receive a letter in the mail, indeed a package of 20 identical letters, each one entitled "With Love All Things Are Possible."
"This letter has been sent to you for good luck. The original copy is in New England. It has been around the world nine times. The luck has been sent to you. You must send 20 copies to friends or associates. After a few days, you will get a surprise. This is true even if you are not superstitious. We promise you, you will receive luck within four days of receiving this letter. Providing you in turn sent it out."
Reading the fine print, I could only file this letter in the "Please, don't do me any favors department." "Carlo Daodi received the letter and forgot that it had to leave his hands within 96 hours and he lost his job. Nolan Fairchild received the letter and threw it away; nine days later, he died."
As for those who knew better than to look this gift horse in the mouth and have their noses bitten off, the indicated rewards could, at best, only be described as mixed. Take Gene Walch. He got the letter, sent it to twenty friends, and two days later his wife died. This might strike you as bad luck. Not to worry. Just before she died, Gene received, $7,773,000,000. Such a deal. He didn't even have to share it. As the letter says, "With Love All Things Are Possible."
This letter got me thinking. It does sometimes seem that we are encouraged in this country to believe that with luck all things are possible. As if life were a lottery, a kind of all or nothing proposition.
You remember Jesus's story about the talents. A talent was a coin. A man goes on a journey and entrusts to one servant five talents of money, to another two talents, and to another one talent, each according to his ability. The man who had received the five talents went at once and put his money to work and gained five more. So also the one with two talents gained two more. But the man who had received the one talent went off, dug a hole in the ground and hid his master's money. When the man returns, he rewards them accordingly, putting the first two servants in charge of his property, and taking the one talent away from the servant who was afraid to invest and therefore risk losing it. "For everyone who has will be given more," Jesus concludes, "and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him."
Jesus is talking about faith here, not money. Yet, you can imagine how he might have replied to a fourth servant who said, I took my talent and purchased a lottery ticket with it. Had I won I would not only have doubled your money but increased it a million fold. This would make the fellow who buried his talent in the ground look like a winner.
You may have read the article on gambling in the Times last week. It includes the wrenching story of a woman who gambled away her retirement savings, and then maxed out her credit cards, and was down to her last ten bucks. Admittedly, this kind of gambling is a sickness, an addiction. But it is powered by our "all or nothing" mythos.
We have slowly moved in this country from a culture that honors the simple fruits and basic decency of the laborer, whatever field he or she might till, to a culture that defines success only in terms of conspicuous excess, of super stardom. Last week Ted Turner said that he sold TBS to Time Warner because he was tired of being small. Ted Turner was tired of being small! The rest of us, I suppose, should be tired of being microscopic!
Just think of what this does to us, what it does to our collective consciousness. From the far more humble and abiding notion that honest labor has its own rewards, that persistent endeavor in concert with others brings shared meaning and enhances the commonweal, we are subtly and not so subtly encouraged to view our own lives and life work as insignificant when contrasted with those whose good fortune -- often luck -- elevates them to the cover of People Magazine and reduces us to fatuous longing and a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction and insignificance.
Bill Clinton made the mistake of speaking the truth the other day, and has been back-peddling furiously ever since. He said the American people were in a funk, one that couldn't be explained by the state of the economy, which is fundamentally quite strong, at least as reflected in the lives of many dissatisfied, angry and frustrated Americans. I wonder how much of this has to do with the increasingly skewered way in which we view success.
There was a time in this country when success was viewed collectively, symbolized not by lottery winners and 10 million dollar houses, but by such things as barn raisings, where all the neighbors would gather for a day and build a barn on one of their properties. At the end of the day, there would be a great, bountiful feast. Everyone would contribute. Everyone would participate. Everyone would share the joy of working and eating together. At the end of the day, they didn't go home and feel diminished because one of their neighbors' barns was now bigger or newer than their own. They went home and felt good about how their little community had been enhanced, and the part they played in this.
Today, one of the most toxic repercussions of our all or nothing culture is that the many little things we can do to improve our world and enhance meaning seem like nothing when contrasted with both conspicuous individual success and with the equally conspicuous problems our society faces. When we view success in terms of a million talents, and the world in terms of a million problems, what does it mean for us to double our little two to four, or our little five to ten? I am not only talking about money. With Jesus, I am talking about faith. Faith in ourselves and one another. Faith that we can make a difference in the world -- in this world in which Ted Turner is tired of being small -- faith that what we do, especially that what we do together, really matters.
Fifty years ago and more, when neighbors got together and raised a barn somewhere in their neighborhood, they didn't solve society's problems. They didn't eliminate poverty. And they didn't win the lottery. All they did was help a neighbor. But don't you think that the meal at the end of that day was far more festive and satisfying than a billionaire's lunch, especially the daily power lunch of a billionaire who will never have enough. Remember, at the end of that meal on that farm, everyone had enough. Everyone was filled. They didn't go home in a funk. They didn't think that what they accomplished that day was nothing. They helped a neighbor. And that is everything.
This afternoon we are going to launch a new outreach program in this church, the Eldercare Task Force. It will join the Children's Task Force and the AIDS Task Force and our feeding programs to offer members of this church opportunities to participate in All Souls version of barn raisings. This may be the richest neighborhood in the world, but there are more than 25 thousand seniors in Yorkville alone who live below the poverty line. Can we change that? No. We can't spend our single talent, or two, or five, and win a million in a save the world lottery. All we can do is double two, or five. All we can do is try to save the world and ourselves from moral insignificance one neighbor at a time.
Does this matter? Does anything as small as this matter in a world where "big" people are tired of feeling small? Of course it matters. Just think of our scout troops. We started out nine years ago with a troop of homeless boys who lived at the Prince George welfare hotel. Several of those boys are now in college. One of them won -- I mean top ten, actually won -- the Westinghouse Science contest a year and a half ago. Does that matter? Does our AIDS Task Force matter? The support groups for professional women with AIDS, and teenagers with AIDS, and mothers whose children have died or are dying from AIDS. Does its advocacy matter? Does Joe Miller sitting on the city's AIDS Planning Commission matter? And all the people we feed, all the people we serve every week in this church -- that you feed, that you serve -- does that matter? Is it meaningful is a world where Ted Turner is tired of being small? Nothing, in fact, is more meaningful.
Why? Because we become neighbors. Not superstars. Not Masters of the Universe. Neighbors. We fulfill the second great commandment, which is not, I remind you, to win the lottery or to end poverty or to become one of the 100 people that everyone else seems so fascinated by. It is to love our neighbor as ourself.
Alone, individually, none of us will ever be as big, not any- where near, as some poor little billionaire. Nor, even at our best, can we, alone, individually, make this world we share a better, finer world. But together, with a bit of barn raising, we can enter the lists of the second great commandment. We can become neighbors. Not superstars, neighbors. And when we do the world will be changed, in part because we ourselves will be changed, lifted from our funk, given something useful and rewarding to do, privileged to share in the bounty of community, where everything that is good is shared, including our lives, which grow in circumference the moment we graduate from our tiny circles of self-absorption, and striving, and dissatisfaction, to participate in common labor and enjoy a common meal. Common not uncommon. Not magnificent or brilliant or fabulous, but common, in common, together.
One of the things I have realized this week as I thought about this sermon, is how much I am speaking, not only to you, but also to myself. I take pleasure in the fact that so many of you are giving so much of yourselves and your time in our outreach programs. And I take pleasure in the part I have played to help inspire their establishment, and sustain their expansion. All Souls is by far the most socially active church on the Upper East Side, and that is something all of our souls benefit from by having that association. But I have not done my part, not anything like I should, in actually participating in these programs. It has been five years since I served in the Friday Soup Kitchen or at Monday Night Hospitality. Eight years since I tutored a child. And yet, if, as I keep reminding you, each member of this church is also a minister, I need to remind myself that each minister is also a member.
So even as I invite you once again to sign up and do your part in one of our outreach programs, perhaps one that is long established -- they all need more volunteers -- or perhaps our new Eldercare Task Force, I also commit myself, bringing with this the shared commitment of the other three ministers, to take my place beside you in the weeks to come. I do this, by the way, not for you, but for myself.
One final thing. What I am talking about here is not an all or nothing proposition. It is a something proposition. We, I too, can each do a little something to raise a barn, to share a human feast with our neighbors, to love them as ourselves. It is not a matter of burying our talent lest we risk it, or blowing it away against millions to one odds. It is a matter of turning two into four, and five into ten. It is a matter of building up our common faith by investing ourselves in one another. It is how we can actually save the world, both the world and ourselves: one neighbor at a time.
Copyright All Souls Church, 1996