"A Higher Calling"
A Sunday Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Thomas C. Leinbach
June 8, 2008 - Harwich, Massachusetts

Preaching Text: "As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Mtthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, 'Follow me.' And he got up and followed him." (Matthew 9:9)

Among the many activities normally associated with June, graduation is right up there. And along with graduation exercises invariably comes the dreaded, take-your-medicine-type commencement speeches! We've all known the sheer weight of sitting through any number of exhortations to self-fulfillment, nostrums oozing with over-idealized sentimentality! Each year the newly graduating class is offered a steady diet of clichés and platitudes about being true to themselves, pursuing their passions and not letting the world define them. The sky, invariably, is but the limit!

To be fair, from all accounts, giving a commencement speech is among life's more difficult challenges. After all, with everything that's ever been said by countless speakers throughout the ages, what one new or interesting thing can be said?

Which is not to say that graduation speeches haven't changed over the years. In a particularly insightful op-ed piece this past week in the New York Times, columnist David Brooks points out just how much attitudes have changed in terms of what it means to grow up in our world, attitudes naturally reflected in what's being said in today's commencement speeches.

Using Abraham Lincoln as an example, Brooks begins by pointing out that Lincoln at one time in his life was suicidal. Unable to eat or sleep for long stretches at a time, Lincoln, according to a new biography, would show up at the Illinois statehouse "irregularly, hollow-eyed, unshaven, emaciated - an object of pity to his friends and of derision to others." He was known to withdraw from life and was plagued with terrible fits and terrors.

Later, Lincoln looked back on this period of his life with shame, characterizing it as a time when he had lost the "gem of my character." Eventually he pulled himself out of it, came to terms with "his weaknesses," and learned to "control his passions and achieve what we now call maturity."

According to Brooks, Lincoln's approach to his dilemma is representative of a very different way of looking at maturity, at least in terms of how we today tend to view it. Lincoln was, to be sure, a product of his era, an era which defined maturity as successful conquest of the self. The underlying assumption was that human beings are born with sin and that the transition to adulthood necessarily had to do with mastering one's untutored, lower nature.

"You can read commencement addresses from the 19th and early 20th centuries," Brooks writes, "in which the speakers would talk about the beast within and the need for iron character to subdue it. Schoolhouse readers emphasized self-discipline. The whole character-building model was," as he puts it, "sin-centric."

Having been taught to strive for self-discipline, self-improvement and the up-building of character, Lincoln eventually succeeded in subduing and overcoming his youthful difficulties and challenges.

Yet this concept of maturity (as self-conquest) didn't survive long into the 20th century, Brooks contends. Rather than viewing sin as a natural condition one had to struggle with and overcome, the modern approach emphasizes instead a student's "inner goodness and curiosity."

"Self-discovery," says Brooks, "replaced self-mastery as the primary path to maturity."

The modern assumption is that we are born without sin. And because of this, maturity has more to do with removing any and all impediments that otherwise stand in the way of self-actualization. Rather than identifying and subduing humanity's inherent weaknesses, we are encouraged to liberate the unsullied goodness of the inner self - that it might tumble forth unimpeded. Thus, in a complete 180 degree turn, weakness becomes repression. Maturity is manifest in the free, unfettered self, rather than in the subdued, conquered self of Lincoln's day.

Relating this to politics, Brooks argues that too many of our nation's modern leaders rise to power confident in their talents while remaining unaware of their "underappreciated flaws." We elect these same politicians for their virtues, he says, only later to be confronted with their vices as are made manifest under the stresses and strains of the office (he cites, for example, "Clinton's narcissism" and "Bush's intellectual insecurity").

"It would be nice," he concludes, "to have a president who had gone to school on his own failings. It would be comforting to see a president who'd looked into the abyss, or suffered some sort of ordeal that put him on a first-name basis with his own gravest weaknesses, and who had found ways to combat them."

In the end, Lincoln's age was a lot closer in thinking to our biblical faith than not. In fact, in Western Christianity, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, salvation itself is premised on the very idea that we need to be forgiven. In Eastern Christianity, the emphasis is slightly different, focusing more on healing, healing from a disease that afflicts our human nature. Either way, the implication is clear: that something within us is broken and that only God can fix us (thus Jesus as "physician").

Jesus, it seems, always was able to cut through outwardly visible things to see inside the human heart. When he encounters Matthew the tax collector on the streets, what he sees what others failed to see. He sees a man who had allowed his basest instincts to rule his life. He sees a man who had succumbed to the lure of greed and money; a man who had lost sight of the god-given potential within him. Perhaps the "gem of his character" was all but lost.

Antiquity believed (as did those in Lincoln's day) that human beings are born with great potential, potential to live character-filled lives, even godly lives. But without self-discipline and hard work, without others encouraging them or guiding them, human beings too easily fall into the common ways of the world, ways that feed our basest instincts.

We turn on the television and are confronted with some of the lowest of human nature. We see sex sold as a commodity to sell everything from tooth paste to carpets. Vulgar images are displayed prominently everywhere for even our most innocent children to see.

Status, money and all the other easy lures beckon and prompt. Without self-discipline and self-control, one easily can be driven by our lowest appetites into all manner of evil, which Lincoln knew well.

So when Jesus sees Matthew, a man known otherwise as a rapacious scoundrel and extortioner, he is able to see beneath the outward appearance, seing his hidden potential, potential for the highest things in life.

In Genesis 12 we see a turning point in scripture. After having lamented the very life God had created, and wiping out every evil by means of the Flood, God calls Abraham to be the bearer of a new hope: salvation. Salvation becomes God's main focus. It becomes God's greatest desire: to redeem all of life, life otherwise bent on brokenness and evil, offering every human being, no matter who they are or what they have done, forgiveness, healing and wholeness. And in so doing God offers each of us a higher calling, a calling (or vocation) that reaches and extends out toward the riches of God.

Centuries later, Jesus becomes the culmination of that which God began in Abraham, bringing forgiveness, healing and wholeness (salvation) to the whole world.

If truth be told, each of us yearns to know this same divine salvation, for the wholeness Jesus the great physician offers. Matthew, lost from within and hated from without, accepts Jesus' offer and follows him. The offer is for a whole new life, one based on higher, loftier things, a life born not only by the healing mercy of God's

steadfast love in Christ, but a life sustained and made beautiful by means of self-discipline, self-mastery and character-building.

Amen.