All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores,
NC
January 29, 2017
Thomas E. Wilson, Rector
Aren’t
You Tired of Being Normal?
The
question for reflection today is “Aren’t you tired of being
normal?” A normal person is one who fits in, who goes along with
the norms of the culture. In 1960 there was a play that opened off
Broadway called “The
Fantasticks”, and it
ran for 42 years. For years I had the original cast recording until I
just wore out the grooves. It was a product of its time, and one
character, the young girl Luisa, sings a song of how she wants “Much
More” out of life. She sighs: “Please God don’t let me be
normal!”
As
you may remember from my class on the Introduction to the Gospel of
Matthew, Matthew sees Jesus as the new Moses, the one who leads his
people into a new promised land - a land not of geography but of
living in the Kingdom of the Heavens here on earth, wherever that
might be. Matthew remembers that, like Moses, Jesus as an infant had
to face oppression from an evil ruler who, out of his own fear, tried
to kill Moses and ended up killing a lot of innocent children. Like
Moses, Jesus leads people to a mountain where he will give them a new
law to rule their hearts. Moses brings down Ten Words – the
Commandments - and then he elaborated on those ten words to his
people as a way to live a faithful and happy life. In today’s
lesson, Matthew has Jesus sit down on the mountain and speak Ten
Sentences - then he elaborates further on them to his people as a way
to live a faithful and happy life. We call these ten sentences the
Beatitudes, which is Latin for “blessed”, a variation of the
first word in each of the blessings.
The
word “blessed” tends to have churchy feeling to it - like “Oh
poor me; getting God’s reward for all my suffering!” - but it was
actually the way the Church translated the Greek word “Makarioi”,
which means “happiness”. Happiness is understood not as a result
of things going our way, but happiness is a choice that we make - for
no person, place, or thing has the power to make me feel anything,
much less happy. If you want to live a life of frustration, then try
making it your goal to make other people happy. They alone have that
power. People become happy when they are able to choose to see the
world in a different way.
The
Gospel stories use a lot of healing of the blind episodes as a
metaphor for people being able to see the world in a different way.
Our first lesson is from the Prophet Micah, one who is a “Seer”,
a person who sees the world with the eyes of God. In the lesson,
Micah sees all the religious activities - people prancing around
Temples and passing judgment on other people’s behavior - as ways
of attempting the outward and literal fulfilling of the Commandments
and their elaborations. Micah sighs, seeing them as missing the
point, and he sums up his vision with the words: “God has told you,
O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord
require of you but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk
humbly with your God?”
Matthew
remembers Jesus suggesting that all of us need to be “Seers”,
people who see that this is not just the Kingdom of the earth in
which we live, but we live in a Kingdom of the Heavens right here and
right now - if only we will open the eyes of our hearts and see what
true happiness looks like.
“Blessed
(Happy) are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
To be poor in spirit means that you need a power greater than
yourself to make it through the day. I don’t have to pretend that I
am perfect. I don’t have to compare myself with others. I can
forgive myself and them, being merciful to them and, in so doing, am
changing my past. OK, I screwed up and have been hurt in the past,
and I carry some of those scars in my life and body. I will always
remember them, but they no longer have the power to give me shame or
guilt. I am not a victim and I am no longer a victimizer. I am free
from the power of that past, and I can see it for what it was - a
journey into love, a recovery from self-centeredness. The power of
the past has been broken and changed; the present is free to do
justice, love mercy; and walking humbly with my God; and the future
is to be able to rest in God’s peace. That is my definition of
happiness or blessedness.
Some
who continue to see the world as a place where shame keeps us from
disrupting “business as usual”, where competition is thought to
be the fundamental rule of nature, where the desire to protects one’s
own privileges is believed to be foremost, that one’s ego ought to
be the center of one’s own universe, that greed is good, that we
have no responsibility to do justice, but only to follow the lawful
order that benefit us, and that smart people don’t do mercy, might
call my definition maladjusted and for losers. However, I find that I
am in with good companions in the company of losers like Micah and
Jesus.
Almost
sixty years ago on April 25, 1957, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr. gave an address in Nashville, Tennessee on “The Church’s Role
on Facing the Nation’s Chief Moral Dilemma”, urging us all to
become “maladjusted” as the church urges us to do justice, love
mercy, and walk humbly with our God. We do not do that by demonizing
our opponents but by loving them so that they might see the world in
a different way, as a place where the Kingdom of the Heavens reigns
and where all of God’s children are connected to each other. 11
years later on April 4, 1968, he was killed because he refused to be
well-adjusted as he continued to be citizen of the Kingdom of the
Heavens. In 1957 he said:
But
the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the
creation of the beloved community. It is this type of spirit and this
type of love that can transform opposers into friends. The type of
love that I stress here is not eros,
a sort of esthetic or romantic love; not philios,
a sort of reciprocal love between personal friends; but it is agape
which is understanding goodwill for all. It is an overflowing love
which seeks nothing in return. It is the love of God working in the
lives of humanity. This is the love that may well be the salvation of
our civilization.
My
hope for you is that you will be happy to be maladjusted enough to be
a citizen of the Kingdom of the Heavens here and now in this nation.
Aren’t
You Tired of Being Normal?
Echoing
one Fantasticks’ lead’s sighs,
“Please
God don’t let me be normal”,
help
me be a maladjusted abnormal
standing
against as injustice thrives
as
power working hand and glove
pushing
its own unfair advantages;
let’s
not be content with bandages
but
work on solutions based in love.
Give
me courage not only to mourn
hearts
being broken, but strengthen
me;
holding to hope as to lengthen
the
times of joy soon to be reborn
when
we forgive and make a peace
as
our unhappy arrogances do cease.
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