Sunday, July 31, 2022 | 10:00 a.m.

Who Matters?

Joseph L. Morrow
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 85
Genesis 18:20–32

This American Life host Ira Glass tells the story of his friend Sonari, a business reporter, who found himself eyeing a pair of shoes he was eager to buy (515: Good Guys, www.thisamericanlife.org/515/transcript). The problem is they were just too expensive. But he kept circling around the store, you know in that non-discreet way, where you want to examine every detail of something, but don’t want to be drawn into a sales negotiation for it. Well, finally Sonari got the nerve to go up to the register and attempt to buy a pair of shoes that were way out of his price range. Except he had a trick up his sleeve. As a reporter, he once interviewed a professor of negotiation out of Columbia University in New York who told him about something called the Good Guy Discount: the idea is that someone who comes across as a good person—irrespective of your gender—draws out in the seller the desire to be gracious, and voilà, you get a discount.

Sonari apparently didn’t think it was going to work but figured there was nothing to lose. So, he goes up to the cash register, shoes in hand, in a bout of enthusiasm and says, “Hey, is there a good guy discount?” And the seller goes, “What?” Sonari said, “Well, you’ve seen me here all day. You know I want these shoes. It’s tough for me,” He goes on and on explaining himself. Suddenly, Sonari said the seller looks sincerely across the cash register and says, “I’ll tell you what, brother. And he swiped the card.” 25% off the employee discount card. Sonari was stunned. His audaciousness paid off.

Now before we have a whole congregation fanning out across Chicago and parts unknown seeking out good person discounts, I want to acknowledge, as Ira Glass does in recounting the story, that such a gesture can come across as pushy and self-serving, putting employees in tough spots. But you have to admire the gumption of someone asking for a discount just for being good. There is something in the spirit of this age we live in that we root for such outcomes. We love the audacious persistence of someone who dares to be an exception to the rule, who presumes the possibility of a discount or a way out of sticky predicaments.

To do so takes a fighting spirit and someone who doesn’t take no for an answer. Someone like Abraham presuming a good guy discount before God in order to bail a city out of deep trouble. Now biblically, Abraham is far from alone in epitomizing the drive to fight it out. David faces off against Goliath and later his mentor Saul. Esther refuses to back down against Haman’s murderous schemes in Persia. Even Jesus is not beyond picking a fight if the cause is righteous. Simply ask the money changers in the Jerusalem temple whose tables he brazenly topples over. Biblical figures are not afraid of being contentious with each other. But Abraham has a whole other level of swagger to challenge the Creator of heaven and earth.

Now the first thing to wonder about the one who picks a fight with God is why would God be interested in fighting back. A few weeks ago, we collectively saw the first few images captured by a new instrument that humanity has unfurled in the realm of the stars. The James Webb Space Telescope, launched Christmas Day 2021 and now fully operative, sent back some late Christmas gifts: image after captivating image of distant stars and galaxies that have never been seen before as well as those we only previously saw dimly. In all, it has given us a glimpse into more than a million galaxies. It is incredibly hard to fathom, to think of the enormous numbers of stars as we circle around just one of them. To think of the vast distances, not only in space but in time, that we are covering as we peer into these images made available to us. As these stunning images made their way across social media, I was surprised by how emotional the reactions were to such lofty pictures. Post after post recited words from the Qu’ran, philosophers, and the memorable words of the psalmist: “When I consider the course of the earth and stars, who is humankind to be mindful of them?” (Psalm 8).

Or if you prefer the wisdom of funkadelic musician George Clinton, this universe is “so high you can’t get over it, so low you can’t get under it, so wide you can’t get around it.”

In other words, to view creation and existence at such a scale is to realize the foolhardy nature of suggesting humans can have a reasonable argument with the Creator of so many wondrous things.

This idea that God is so transcendent as to be unknowable has shaped religious perspectives for millennia across many different cultures. And it is particularly influential now, because the European Enlightenment that spawned the character of modern institutions also saw God in this detached way —the clock maker who wound the world up and just let it go. And that distancing of God and human beings has brought with it a certain kind of despair and anxiety to find meaning in a world where God appears as distant as the farthest galaxy.

That desolation feels acute when we begin to consider the suffering of the world, the lengths to which we claim what we want over others as if no cosmic agent of justice is watching. Looking to the skies many say, what does it matter what I do or leave undone? Twentieth-century German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in reflecting on his own country’s capitulation to the Fascism of the Nazis, put it this way: “We became silent witnesses to iniquitous acts. We have washed our hands in much water. We learned the art of dissimulation and ambiguous speech. We were worn down and even grew cynical as a result of excruciating conflicts.” He closes his indictment with these piercing words: “Are we of any use anymore?” In other words, do the acts of human beings amount to anything worthy of being counted? If our hearts are impure, what good are we in the vast creaturely repository of our Creator. This is ultimately where our separation from God leads.

But the scandal of the biblical portrayal of God, which begins in these stories of Abraham in Genesis, runs through the Exodus and Exile, and into the Gospels and letters of the Christian testament, is this nagging insight that in sight of such vastness, small things still matter. In the eyes of the God of heaven and earth, seemingly irrelevant creatures and marginal human beings have great dignity and worth. And if we are to take Abraham’s dialogue with God as indicative, God seems to care about individual lives. “Would you for the sake of fifty individual lives, forgive the sins of thousands?” asked Abraham. And God essentially replied, “Uh huh. In fact, I would.”

Apparently, what individuals do, for better or worse, is enough to change the course of events. And though it is not addressed in this particular passage, that attention to the individual is also why God seems to care about the particular sins of Sodom and Gomorrah. Many have wrongly perceived those sins to center on sexuality, but scripture carefully considered directs us toward sin as a lack of hospitality to Abraham’s nephew and angelic visitors predicated on a culture of voracious greed. The prophet Ezekiel says this of Sodom: “She and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease but did not aid the poor and needy.” It is the way we treat the stranger and immigrant among us that says much about who we are and may, in turn, seal our fate.

The individuals both inside and out of the community are caught up in what Dr. King referred to as the single garment of destiny. Each of us, no matter our social identity or point of view, is part of an interdependent reality from which there is no exit. We must, as the poet W.H. Auden wrote, “Love one another or die.”

There are days when my anger at the intransigence of so many who would thwart the ways of justice and kindness boils over. When I wish there were an escape hatch through which I could jettison myself and those I love from the clutches of those who refuse to do right. There are also days when the diversity and sometimes incoherence of viewpoints in our community and the public square becomes discouraging. It seems we can’t galvanize ourselves to agree on what is most essential. In those moments, I try to remember what writer Richard Rodriguez once said of his church. He said of his community, “We believe a multitude of hazy, crazy things. Some among us are smart; some serene; some feeble, poor, practical, guilt-ridden; some are lazy, some arrogant, rich, pious, prurient, bitter, injured, sad. We gather in belief of one big thing: that we matter, somehow. We all matter. No one can matter unless all matter.”

To believe that we all matter chafes against the impulse of a society that has said some of us matter more than others. It cuts against the grain of a society that has created laws and policies and spun stories that reenforce that inequity. But to believe we all matter is nevertheless biblical when we find an Abraham who is willing to face off with God and fight for every single life that can be spared. Not only is it each life that has inherent dignity and worth, but what each one does matters, and what each one leaves undone also matters.

Yesterday, many of us in this congregation gathered to give thanks for the life of the recently departed Reverend Kent Organ, husband of our former associate pastor Reverend Vicky Curtiss. As we recounted stories from his life. Reverend John Thomas, former President of the United Church of Christ, shared in his sermon a poignant passage from Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians: “Therefore, since through God’s mercy we have this ministry, we do not lose heart.”

Kent’s ministry—his interracial integration efforts in Mississippi schools, his intentional launching of an interracial church with an African American co-pastor, his tenacity in helping congregations through their exodus journeys—all of this was a commitment to the ministry of reconciliation. And Kent’s ministry was also a witness to taking heart despite the setbacks and disappointments in working through intransigent systems and communities. But to take heart, as I consider it, is not just a matter of encouragement, as the phrase idiomatically suggests. It’s also a matter of expanding the center of our caring—not just the closest few or those who get it right, but everyone upon the face of the earth.

Some commentators suggest that it is not so much Abraham the fighter that is testing God, but that God—whose character is righteous from the beginning—is testing Abraham, testing him to see for what and for whom he will fight. Testing him to see if the qualities of a compassionate and just God accord to God’s chosen instrument of blessing for each and every nation. So the questions Abraham then asks of God end up being the ones God asks of us: In what do we believe? Whom are we willing to let suffer? What communities, neighborhoods, and social groups are we going to let come undone? Whom are we going to condemn and cast off as irredeemable?

The temptation is to find the few who are righteous and deserve our love or charity, wrap our compassion around them, and be done with the rest. But God, in this passage, is willing to hold off, not yet separating, in the words of Jesus, the wheat from the weeds. God has faith in the mighty few who are capable of not just bearing good fruit but saving the whole garden. Do we have such faith in one another?

What I’m talking about is a faith that is committed to the proposition that each of us is worth saving. Even if our political score card ain’t right, each of us is worth saving. Even if we were born without papers or in what someone erroneously considers the wrong zip code, each of us is worth saving. Even if we don’t have the GPA, the 401K, the credentials that measure up by the misleading standards of our world, each of us is worth saving in the eyes of God. And God has not yet given up on us. But will we give up on each other? May God give us the heart to say no. Amen.