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September 17, 2006, Pentecost 15, All Souls' Episcopal Church

The Search for Excellence
Mark 8: 27 – 38 

Albert Einstein once wrote some advice to a friend: “Try to become a man of value.”   The Spartans of ancient Greece are remembered in history as the most courageous and effective soldiers of their era. Despite a very small population, Sparta put armies in the field which always influenced military outcomes to an extent far beyond mere numbers. This state of affairs was due in part to the fact that every male citizen of Sparta was liable for military service from his 20th to his 60th year. But more importantly, Sparta was strong and important because she demanded, and got, excellence from her fighting men. They were taught individual responsibility and duty. No one owed them anything! “To be good was to be strong and brave; to die in battle was the highest honor and happiness; to survive defeat was a disgrace that even the soldier’s mother could hardly forgive.  ‘Return with your shield or on it.’ –was the Spartan mother’s farewell to her soldier son.

 All of Sparta expected excellence and discipline from its fighting men.   And because this search for became a part of the tiny nation’s day by day life, she always received the excellence she sought. 

.In St. Mark’s account of the life of our Lord, we read that one day Jesus asked His disciples and the people who were following Him, to draw close so He could speak to them.  When they had done so, He said this:  “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”

 Those were extremely harsh words.  Many found them so then, and it is no different for us today.  “Deny yourself.”  “Take up your cross.” ….. hard words!!  And yet, when we think long on these words and the demand of such words, it slowly becomes clear to us that our Lord was simply involved in the search for excellence. 

And Jesus was involved in such a search because the kind of spiritual revolution that He was demanding could only be brought into the life of mankind by a small army of followers who had self-discipline, were terribly focused, and who were devoted to excellence in spiritual matters.  To get that kind of greatness, our Lord had to ask for it, and finally, demand it.   Nothing less than a strong striving for spiritual quality could bring about His revolution.  

 The roots of the spiritual search for the highest and best within us can be found in Old Testament times. For instance, we see it in the life of Moses. He was desert-hardened and spiritually disciplined many years before God sent him to free his fellow Hebrews in Egypt.  This Spirit is also seen in those same Israelites, who had to wander forty years in the desert, until a new generation had grown up, desert-born and desert-tough, and spiritually structured and fit to take the Promised Land…remember their forefathers when they came out of  Egypt?  As the book of Exodus tells us, they “murmured against Moses.”  “After all, Moses, we did have food as slaves”…..They were accustomed to being “kept.”…… but with freedom, obviously, comes responsibility. They lacked individual responsibility…but in forty years, they grew a new attitude and spiritual strength! 

 We see this search for excellence also present in Gideon’s adventure, when he kept reducing the numbers of his fighting band until only the very finest fighters were left.   And this spiritual search is present in fiery form in the divine messages of all the prophets.

 In the New Testament, the search is intensified. For instance, in the life of  St. Paul we see the final product of this quest shining brightly as we listen to all He endured for the sake of his calling from God. He “denied himself and took up his cross” with beatings, stonings, lashings, shipwreck and imprisonments.  And this tough brave little Christian asked for the same type of quality from his fellow Christians. He did not want mediocrity nor would he accept it! The Christian congregations he began and nurtured would grow in strength and spiritually until they took over an empire for the Christian faith.  

 All of church history, and certainly until this day, has more or less been this search for spiritual excellence.  The Church itself courageously moves forward with rock solid Biblical faith believing what the Bible says, or slips backward into cultural mediocrity and relativism. This is all according to whether or not the promotion of spiritual excellence is advancing or declining. Today, this is the central issue of controversy within our Episcopal church.  The Apostles, Saint Paul, St. Augustine, St. Francis, Livingstone,  Schwitzer, Bonhoeffer, Mother Teresa, and thousands of unsung and unnamed others, all the products of God’s search for spiritual goodness, strength, and responsibility are those who move forward not only for the cause of  Christianity, but for civilization as well. 

Actually, all history, ancient or modern, sacred or secular has pages in its books that include a search for goodness and quality of sorts.  Pythagoras, the ancient Greek who most of us know only because we were forced to learn his theorems in Geometry, actually did many things.  One of those other things was that he organized schools of students into almost monastic-like communities.  And these communities were not only directed toward learning, they were schools that sought excellence in everything, most especially moral excellence.  For as the 20th century historian Will Durant tell us:  “At the close of each day they were to ask themselves, what wrongs they had committed, what duties they had neglected, what good they had done.”  Would that all of us could do the same!!

In the days of the Second World War when Sir Winston Churchill took over the leadership of his England, as you know, all that he offered men and women was “blood, sweat, and tears”…. But, he also said, “Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because it is the quality that guaranties all the rest!” Jesus never sought to lure men to Him by the offer of an easy way; He sought to challenge them, to make them self-reliant, to waken the sleeping chivalry and courage in their souls, “He came not to make life easy, but to make men great.”  Jesus Christ calls each of us to some form of greatness.  And, you know, whether we wish to acknowledge it or not, this search is a part of each of us.  Why?   Because each of us is a child of God in His Image; we were each created to do better, to learn more, to improve….or, as I quoted Einstein at the beginning ”To be a man, (or woman), of value.”

 These urgings may be latent feelings, but they are there.  They come to the surface in strange places.

   In a New York City newspaper, there was an article a number of years ago that reported that in everyone of New York’s 6,000 subway cars, above the seats and windows, between ads for cockroach killers and ear lobe piercing, there is poetry.  “An excerpt from Dante’s  ‘Inferno,’John Keats, ‘Ode to Autumn,’ an Emily Dickinson poem,  the first stanza of  T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, verse in Spanish and English  from Octavio Paz.

 Each is printed lovingly and evocatively on the same kind of placard usually reserved for paying advertisers.  With an audience of 3.3 million riders daily, this is no obscure intellectual exercise. This is art for the masses, and judging from the public’s response, it may just be the best thing that happen on the subway since the invention of graffiti-proof cars.  The program, called “Poetry in Motion”,  began after the Transit Authority president, saw poems on the London Underground and wondered why New York couldn’t do the same. Many different poems have appeared on the trains, and the TA has received hundreds and hundreds of letters and calls and requests for copies.

All of us, young or old, have very deep feelings which need to be fed. All of us have spiritual feelings more profound than religious knowledge, spiritual feelings even more profound than religious faith…….All of us have this inner light. How we must daily strive to let our light shine brightly for the world to see. This feeling within, this “seat of the soul” needs to be fed, yearns to be fed with spiritual food and seeks to excel. So much talent and excellence is lost to the world for want of a little adventure in our souls. As a baptized Christian, we are individually responsible to pray to God for His Power and Grace and, with Spartan courage, to deny ourselves, take up our cross and to try!……. Try with extra prayer time, try with a good deed, try with more family time, try with a new discipline, or, just for starters, today, come to the Fall Fair and try with one of the ministries available here at All Souls. Doing any of this, my friends, we acquire by-products. These by-products are more happiness, more fulfillment and more inner peace and we know that we are doing the right thing!.

There is a touch of the infinite in every one of us!
It’s there! It can not be denied!

May we each, with God’s Grace, allow it to blossom!

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