"Spirit of Life - "Wings"

 

"Spirit of Life"

Spirit of Life, come unto me.
Sing in my heart all the stirrings of compassion.
Blow in the wind, rise in the sea; move in the hand, giving life the shape of justice.
Roots hold me close; wings set me free; Spirit of Life, come to me, come to me.

My sermon last week and this are exploring two companion phrases from Spirit of Life, by Carolyn McDade, one of our denominations' most popular hymns - "roots hold me close" and "wings set me free." Last week we talked about how our "roots," particularly our faith tradition, can hold us close by sustaining us and offering a sense of direction and illumination in times of distress and need. Most of us yearn for the stability that roots of faith give us.

But human beings need wings as well as roots. Our roots allow us a measure of safety and security. Today I want to look a little more closely at our need for 'wings."

But for a moment I'd like you to sit back and imagine that you are a creature with literal wings - imagine that you are a fledgling bird about to take your very first flight, and perhaps we can learn something important about what it means to have wings. It's spring and the weather is soft, and there is a slight breeze in the air. You can see and hear birds all around you, soaring, exploring, chasing one another in flight. Where do your parents go when they leave the nest, you wonder? And now the time has come for you to test your own wings. You know that it's time because you are being nudged to the edge of the nest. You are scarcely an inch and a half high, with the ground twenty-five feet below, suddenly you're not sure you really want to fly. You look down and gulp. Wings set me free? or, is it wings get me killed?

We human beings are different from these birds. We don't have literal wings, but there is something akin to wings within us that we can access - something that allows us to take off into the new and unexplored territory of our lives. But, unlike birds, we need to earn our wings again and again as we live. Testing our wings as we venture beyond the safe and the known doesn't just feel risky, it is risky.

Childhood is a time when we do so much of our growing in stature as well as character. Little kids have to do things that scare them all the time. When they are being encouraged to grow they may feel that they are being pushed out of their safety zone, rather like that little bird. Most adults appear to be in confident flight to them. But in some ways it gets a little harder for adults because eventually, the choice to leave the safety zone and the risks that go with it, they've got to weigh for themselves.

We don't need to become bungee jumpers or Nascar drivers to have a risk-filled life. We don't grow as people without being willing to go out on an occasional limb, by risking some discomfort and possible failure. That option is open to us, in little moments and even big ones, more often than we realize. When we are young our risk-taking threshold can be very low. Many children, for example aren't comfortable making phone calls to people they don't know, to say, store clerks or friend's parents. Any new territory can be scary. You may wonder why some children can be reluctant to call the bike shop to see if its open when they've been on the phone to their friends all day long! What is there to be afraid of in a simple phone call to a stranger? Perhaps, fear of saying the wrong thing, or the awkwardness of not knowing the right words. Perhaps being unsure of themselves feels too uncomfortable, and they simply don't like it.

There are so many small seemingly innocuous, awkward risks to be taken in childhood that feel big at the time. For example, the pressure against standing out in the crowd can be enormous for some young people. You parents out there, do any of you ever have trouble getting your teen to wear a coat on a cold winter day? The refusal usually has nothing to do with whether they'll be cold or not. The truth is, you'll be told, "No on wears coats!"

When we're older, we aren't prone to feeling those smaller risks that stem from peer pressure and custom. We outgrow all that..... right? Most of us don't. We save becoming a fashion risk for our old age - as the saying goes, then we shall wear purple.

There's a Biblical character that probably you haven't heard of that comes to mind when I think about taking a risk in the face of adult peer-pressure. His name is Zacchaeus. Zacchaeus was the wealthy, chief tax collector for the city of Jericho. Zaccheus was determined to see Jesus. he must have heard some great things about the man from Nazareth. When he found the crowds on the Jericho streets to be so thick he couldn't see this guy as he was passing through, Zacchaeus, who was short, climbed a tree to get a better view. Believe me, this was risky behavior for a man of his station. Zacchaeus was a three-piece suit, city kind of guy. Imagine a Boston lawyer perched in an elm tree at Downtown Crossing and you get a sense of what I mean. Larry tells me that at the Patriot's victory parade where nearly a million showed up, there were people perched in trees and on lamp posts, but they were all young, t-shirted and mainly drunk. The buzz about Jesus must have persuaded Zacchaeus that the man from Nazareth was not only special, but possibly important for his own life. He climbed out on a limb in more ways than one when he went out that tree to see Jesus. But his glimpse of Jesus wasn't the end of the story. Jesus noticed this man in the equivalent of the three-piece suit, greeted him and invited himself to dinner. Before the night was out, Zacchaeus had pledged himself to Jesus and never looked back. His life was changed forever. Jesus inspired people to their highest calling. The point of that story is that risk-takers were rewarded around Jesus. They sensed the presence of God around him. The point was, don't worry about appearances when your relationship to God is at stake. Now I wonder... if He had been in this town on that day and I had heard the exact same buzz, and if I had been equally interested, would I have climbed that tree? Would you have? Or would you have found yourself telling your grandchildren one day - O, Jesus, he came to Middleboro, and I was there, but I don't remember much about it.

They say you climb out on a limb because that's where the fruit is. That's the hope. But what if conditions hadn't been right for Zacchaeus and the only result of the day was that some of his business contacts now thought he was losing it? There's always the possibility of falling flat on our face the way my mother fell when she jumped off the piano. (Children's Presentation) We have to earn our wings again and again.

When I received my acceptance to divinity school I remember calling Elizabeth, my minister, who had encouraged me to apply, to give her the news. Harvard Divinity was her alma mater. She was so happy for me. I can still remember her voice as she said, "I remember getting accepted. And what I knew was that I was going to be a student at Harvard University, and that would last until I became a minister.' She said this as though she were remembering a powerful dream of having found herself in paradise. I didn't want to tell her that this wasn't how I felt, because I didn't want to spoil the moment for her. But in reality, I was so scared I got diarrhea.

Wings can set you free but they take courage and determination to operate, and there is a potential for self destruction. Therefore, we tend to associate courage with heroes.

One of the many results of September 11 was a national readjustment of our concept of hero. Before September 11 we tended to refer to our movie stars and sports figures as heroes. But they were admired more for their fame than for any brave deeds or noble qualities.

Fame isn't heroism. Heroism has something to do with taking risks and having to summons up the courage. Winston Churchill once said that heroism is closely tied to responsibility. He knew the heroism of the ordinary English citizen during World War II. Our fire fighters and policemen who risked everything to perform brave rescues on September 11 were ordinary citizens who didn’t shrink from their duty in spite of fear or life-threatening danger. We are asked by life's circumstances to assume a certain amount of risk of a different magnitude for one cause or another every single day. Assumption of high risk for a very good cause is what we call heroism.

If Churchill is right that heroism is tied to responsibility, then we know why a firefighter should be seen more readily as a hero than a sports figure. Those of us who are not firefighters, policemen or military may feel statistically exempt from having to run into a burning building or confront an armed enemy in the line of duty. And so we are. But that does not mean that opportunities for heroism are not available to us. We live with a certain element of risk every day. We are all afraid at times. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, " The weight of the Universe is pressed down on the shoulders of each moral agent to hold him to his task. The only path of escape known in all the worlds of God is performance."

We exercise courage when we confront our fears. Our children, who harbor their own fears, and who can feel the weight of the universe as much as we do, understand this. Yesterday's Globe ran a full page of essays on the meaning of courage written by eleven year olds from the Boston Public Schools as part of a literacy program. What was brought home to me from their essays is that courage is being displayed all around us day after day, with much of it going virtually unnoticed. Their writings are eloquent testimony that give us a better understanding of the risks overcome by ordinary people every day.

Eleven year old Ashley Blackwell from the Harbor School writes that courage is when you make the best of a tough situation and when you don't let anything get you down. In this case, the courage Ashley describes is her own. When she was seven, Ashley discovered that she has Turner's Syndrome, a disease that stops you from growing. Ashley has been living courageously with Turner's now for four years. Now she needs to take painful injections of growth hormone every day and she is still gets teased for being short. But when that happens, she just smiles and says, "I'm proud to be short." There may be those of you who think that living with a disease doesn't take courage because Ashley has no choice. But Ashley has plenty of choices. She has chosen an optimistic attitude, she accepts her painful regimen, she chooses not to feel sorry for herself, and she chooses to stand tall. That's alot to have accomplished between the ages of seven to eleven. She has earned her wings.

Abby Arcadipane from the Mario Umana/Joseph Barnes School writes of befriending a girl who was in tears because she was being teased. This was brave, she said, because it meant standing up to her best friend and other classmates she hung out with. She risked losing their acceptance. But she is glad she did.

Laura Dabel from the Robert Gould Shaw School wrote: "My story is about a person that I think represents courage. This person is my father. If you're thinking that he saved me from a fire or something, you're wrong - it's alot deeper than that." Laura's father was not in her life until her mother died five years ago. When he showed up Laura hadn't wanted to go with him, but he made her. Ever since, he has tried to be both mother and father to her. Laura says they still disagree once in a while, but she also writes that without him she would be lost. She sees him as a hero, and Winston Churchill, I think, would agree.

It was May Sarton who said that one must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being. When I hear the words from Carolyn McDade's hymn, Spirit of Life, "Roots hold me close, wings set me free," my feeling is that both phrases, in a way, call us to the same thing. Our roots, or our faith tradition, steady us in a storm and point the way to truth and justice. But it is our wings that that help us, in both the little moments and the big, to act when we are afraid. These words are a prayer unto themselves. They call us to the best within ourselves and the courage to act in accordance with that. "Roots hold me close, wings set me free. Spirit of Life, come to me, come to me."