"Character"
Tried, Trusted and True Endurance produces character, and character produces hope
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Text: Romans 5:1-11
There can be little doubt or argument that this has been the summer of Barrack and Hilary, the summer of Palin and McCain, the summer of Bolt and Phelps, the summer - in Toronto - of rain. It has been the season of China, oil prices and listeria. It has been the summer filled with many, many things.
Throughout it all, I have learned a great deal, as I am sure you have as well. In observing this changing, dynamic couple of months, much has filtered through our minds and souls. But there is one thing that perhaps I've observed more acutely than ever before - that is that all of this emphasizes the importance of character.
As I watched the Olympics with great interest, I was fascinated by all the stories, the great achievements. People breaking world records, an individual winning more medals than any one person has before, many great accomplishments by people we had never heard of but who are now foremost in our minds. Yet, in the midst of all the podium celebrations and personal bests, it has become obvious that behind many of them there has been a struggle against adversity. Some of those struggles are well-known. Whether it was Eric Lamaze overcoming addiction; Natalie Du Toit from South Africa, who had lost part of her leg; kayaker, van Koeverden who lost a race and everyone thought he was no good, only to come back in the next one and win a silver medal. Whether it was people who had dived many times before but were finally able to get the medal they deserved, many had to overcome tremendous obstacles.
Often what we see is only superficial. We see the performance, the last great event but we often don't see the work and dedication that went into the performance. Sally Jenkins wrote an article that appeared in The Toronto Star quoting Mark Twain: “The weakest of all weak things is a virtue which has not been tested in the fire.” What we see when we watch the Olympics are the virtues but we don't see the testing in fire. Often, overcoming those problems, challenges and setbacks requires a great deal of character.
Foremost in my mind is the story of Carol Huynh, who was the first Canadian to win a gold medal at the Olympics. This diminutive woman from British Columbia triumphed in wrestling, and overcame great odds to win. What many people don't know about Huynh is that her parents came to Canada as Vietnamese boat people, Vietnamese boat brought here and settled by the United Church of Canada. They had nothing, literally nothing, when they arrived on these shores and were embraced by the church. Huynh credits that moment for a great deal of her success, for she was but a very small child. In all her struggles, she realized that her parents, first generation Canadians, had no money and they both had to work almost 24/7. She bemoaned the fact that her parents had hardly ever been able to see her perform, except by sneaking away from work to look through the back door when she was at Simon Fraser University. Her mother saw her perform once, her father never, until she went to the Olympics.
The family and the native community where she lived raised enough money to send her parents there. The first time the parents saw their daughter perform in public was the gold medal performance at the Olympics! After all they had been through, imagine how their hearts must have been beating!
We don't know, do we, what goes on in people's lives to help them achieve great things. So often, it is superficial. I have despised all this talk of how some of the athletes are going to get incredible endorsements for millions of dollars. There are Olympic athletes who finished way down the list, and we have no idea what adversity they had to overcome to simply be there.
We are often superficial. That is why I have always loved the words of Martin Luther King in his great speech that has been alluded to many times this summer: “I have a dream that [people] will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.”
There's that word again. Character is not simply the ability to overcome problems; it is not merely the ability to override obstacles that have been placed in your way. There are many people who do that and they sometimes do it for selfish reasons. No, there is something deeper about character. The depth I'm talking about was captured by the Apostle Paul in the Book of Romans. A marvellous piece, many consider it the greatest theological tome of the New Testament. Chapter five contains an incredible line: “Endurance produces character, and character produces hope.”
You must understand that the people to whom Paul was writing were fledgling Christians in the Roman community, and Rome at the time of Paul was a place that superficially had it all. It had the most incredible buildings, the coliseums, the magnificent pillars, the courts of law. Yet, around it there were slums with incredible poverty. It adhered to many gods, the pantheon of the gods, but it didn't believe in any of them. It had the most wonderful structures of law, philosophy and politics, yet in its heart it was morally bankrupt. It had a great sense of being a world power, yet it felt threatened by this group of Christians who followed a Nazarene Jew and it persecuted the heck out of them.
The Rome in which these Christians lived was a dangerous, pernicious, violent place. Paul writes this great theological work to them, trying to encourage them to withstand the difficulties before them, to be able to overcome the obstacles placed in their way in order that they may bear witness to Christ and live the Christian life. In it he uses the word, “character.” In Greek it is dokimé, which literally means, “something that has been tested, a metal that has been tested for its purity.” Paul wonders if they have the character to endure and the purity that enables them to overcome their difficulties. But Paul is not just talking about the power to overcome; he understands that all of this is predicated on their faith in Christ, that character is more than just being able to traverse the problems that come along in one's life. As Christians, they are inspired by the power of God himself.
David Wells, the Christian theologian who writes from Gordon Conwell Seminary, suggests in his book on postmodernism that in today's world, we place a great deal of emphasis on what kind of personality people have and encourage people to be the person that they really are. He says there is nothing inherently wrong with that, but what is missing is talk of character. Character isn't to become the person that you are, it is to become the person that God wants you to be. It is not simply to be able to find yourself, because what happens if you, yourself, are corrupted by sin? No! Rather, character means having the power and grace of God working in your life.
Wells suggests that this type of character needs to be recaptured today in the training of our young people, in the way that we deal with the youth of our land, in the way that we deal with ethics, spirituality and church life. There is a need for Christian character. But what does this Christian character produce in us?
For Paul there is no question, it produces strength. I love that old hymn, we've sang it many times:
Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine!
O what a foretaste of glory divine!
The assurance this hymn talks about is the assurance that the death of Jesus Christ becomes our death, that the rising to life of Jesus Christ becomes our raising to life, that his ability to overcome the power of evil is a power that becomes our life. It is through the grace and love of God that we have great strength.
One writer once said, and I can't recall who, that life is a grindstone. And a grindstone can either wear us down and out or it can polish us and make us brighter. The difficulties that come along in our lives can do just that - they can wear us down; they can weaken us. There are many people in our society who really are feeling the grindstone of life. One need only talk to those who work in the auto industry in Oshawa and they will tell you they feel the wearing down of the grindstone of life.
You need only speak to people, particularly in the United States, who have lost the value of their homes and are paying mortgages on something that doesn't exist anymore. They feel the grindstone of life. Those who are having a hard time making ends meet because of the cost of energy are feeling the grindstone wearing them down. Or those who feel the fear, the uncertainty of the world order and what is going on, particularly in Europe and Afghanistan, wondering if we live in a secure world. They worry about whether or not they are going to be ground down.
There are many people who feel the grindstone. You might feel the grindstone. Where does your strength come from? For Paul, it is very clear - your strength comes from the Lord and it is the person with character who knows that, who has the strength to deal with the problems of life.
This summer I went back home to Britain and throughout my tours I visited a place I had gone to as a little boy. It was the first time I'd been back - I think the last time I was there I was 10 or 11, when I went with my bucket and spade to play on the beach. When we drove into the town of Whitby in Yorkshire, I was overwhelmed by the flashback to my childhood days. It was really incredible. I walked around town, saw the arcades where I used to play and went to the fish and chip shop, which is still there although under a different name, providing incredibly delicious and greasy calorie-filled fish and chips. Thank God some things don't change!
I saw that there were many other things around town that had changed. I hardly recognized it until I looked up and on the headland I saw the famous Whitby Abbey. I went up to the abbey for the first time since I was a schoolboy when I used to do brass-rubbings up there and I walked around. Now, as an adult and a Christian, I looked at the abbey in a different way. This is an abbey that has withstood tremendous problems over the years. It was originally led by St. Hilda, herself a marvellous, strong Christian who in the seventh century developed a prayer community up there. The great, venerable Bede wrote his ecclesiastical history of the Church in England from there; the council to the Synod of Whitby that brought together the Celtic and Roman churches to focus on the common cause of Christ rather than on their differences met there.
This is a place that has withstood time and even though it is now in many ways destroyed, the memory of its people still speaks to us. Indeed, Anglo Saxon England at the time of the abbey was a dangerous place, a place where Christians were persecuted, tortured and killed and buildings destroyed. The abbey was rebuilt twice and is even now a ruin. Yet, the people who were in there had a strength that kept the faith, kept the love, kept the message. What did they have? They had character: A character that was strengthened by the grace of Christ.
Another thing that is produced in those who have the character of Christ is peace. I was fascinated recently as I listened to an interview with Donovan Bailey just before sprinter Usain Bolt was about to set the 100 metre record. There was a moment, just a moment, in which everyone was waiting for the great Jamaican to get down in the block. Bailey said, “You cannot run the hundred metres quickly unless you are relaxed, and what Bolt has is the ability not only to run, but to relax.”
I think the Apostle Paul understood that. He doesn't mean relax in the sense of sit back and chill. He talks about something else. At the beginning of chapter five he writes, “We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” It is that peace that enables people to withstand the tribulations of life. It is that peace of knowing that one is secure in God that enables one to run the race of life. Therefore, it is what happens from within that enables one to cope with the exigencies of life.
I was reading a book this summer in a book store called, The Good War. It describes how, in 1942, the merchant navy took weapons and supplies from North America over to Europe during the war. David Wilson writes a fascinating piece in this book about being on a ship that encountered a massive storm. This storm was about to destroy the ship, which was being tossed to and fro. That was bad enough, facing choppy waters in the mid-Atlantic. But when your entire cargo is Sherman tanks and their armaments, this exacerbates the tension! In the midst of all the tossing, they had to make sure that they kept these tanks level and stopped them from shifting from one side of the ship to the other.
Wilson says, “Often it is not the problems without, the storms of life, the difficulties that beset us that are the problem. Sometimes the dangers come from within.” So it is with life, and it is the peace of God that enables us to endure; to have character; to have hope. And all of this is based on a third thing, which is grace. Character is predicated on Jesus Christ and the gift of grace. For the Apostle Paul, it is not, as I said before, simply overcoming. It's not just having fortitude or guts, it is having Christ in your life. That is why he says, “And may the love of Christ pour out in your heart.” It is this love of Christ that is the great, sustaining principal of our existence.
I believe, my friends, that it is that faith, that grace, that ultimately forms our character. If there are some who say that you can have a society that is good on the basis of trying to inculcate some values, I would say that is not enough. What is required is a character that is formed by God. I love what Karl Barth said in his great commentary on the Book of Romans in the 1930s: “If a person has God, they have the fullness of life.”
This summer, the best thing I read was a sort of simple wisdom for rich living by a woman called Oseola McCarty. She was born in 1908 in Hattiesburg, Mississippi to a family of slaves. As a young girl, she couldn't continue her education because her father died and she needed to go to work at an early age to bring in money for her family. Working with her aunt, her grandmother and her mother, they brought in people's laundry. She did this all her life - even after her mother, grandmother and aunt had died. In 1968, she was all alone in the word but she continued to do the washing until she was 86 years old. She put money away, 50 per cent every time she got paid, and she spent the other 50 per cent or gave it away. At the age of 86, her bank manager phoned her up and said, “Oseola, we need to talk about your future plans and your retirement days. I want you to look at your account.”
So, for the first time in her life, she looked at her bank account and she had $250,000 in it. So what did she do? She phoned up the University of Mississippi and donated $150,000 of it to a scholarship fund for black children who wouldn't otherwise be able to have an education. This woman, because of her generosity, gave away nearly everything else as well. She said, “I never had it before, so why would I need it now? I've learned to be content with everything as it is. Why should I now worry? I would rather someone else succeed.”
Oseola McCarty received an honourary doctorate from Harvard University in lieu of all the education that she hadn't had. She was awarded the Congressional Medal by the president of the United States. And she really arrived when she was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey. She was asked, “What was the source in your life? You lived with almost nothing for 80 odd years.”
She said,
I have had one source that has kept me going all these years and his name is Jesus Christ. I have had a bible that has shown me the way and how to live and treat others. You might try to put me on a pedestal now. You might think that I'm a great person now, but I'm not. I owe it all to one source and one love, and his name is Jesus Christ.
You know what? Oseola had something else. She had character. May we have the character of Christ as well. Amen.