"Morons,
Golfers and Other Members of the Family"
Mark
10: 13-16
First
Presbyterian Church
Reverend
Dr. J. A. Ross Mackenzie
October
4, 2009
World
Communion Sunday
One month ago, Flora and I were in the
I predicted in advance that the conversation that
Sunday would be about four things: (1) the morons who are presently running the
British government; (2) golf (first played at Dornoch in 1616); (3) family
(Andrew and Adeline’s three children and wives were there); and (4) church.
There’s a medieval cathedral in Dornoch, made famous nine years ago when
Madonna and Guy Ritchie had their baby Rocco baptized.
The following day, in a throng of television crews, photographers,
journalists, and fans, Madonna and Guy went to nearby
I was right in my prediction, and so, with thanks
to Andrew, here in the first sermon I’ve preached since then, the themes are
government, golf, family, and church.
First, government.
Every Sunday for hundreds of years people like us have prayed for the
government. Surprise, surprise, over
the long haul it has worked. Now I am not naïve.
We are in what Economist
magazine calls the worst global recession since the 1930s, and the likeliest
shape of the next few years is a long, flat bottom of weak growth. Too
many people are poor, ill, or hurting for us not to be deeply concerned.
But I’m a historian by trade.
When you take a long look over the centuries and generations, you find
that the circle of moral consideration - the circle of compassion - gets larger
and larger. This is not because we
are all moral people. It’s because the penalty for not enlarging the circle of
compassion and bringing in the hungry, the thirsty, and the strangers produces a
lose-lose catastrophe. Everyone
loses unless the circle of compassion is widened. That’s straight Jesus,
Matthew 25:
I was hungry
and you fed me,
I was thirsty and you gave me a drink,
I was homeless and you gave me a room,
I was shivering and you gave me clothes,
I was sick and you stopped to visit,
I was in prison and you came to me.
That’s why we need to
be concerned about health care. Let
us assume that the critics of the present administration are correct, and that 5
million only, not 35 or 40 million, lack health care in this country.
Gene Debs, the socialist, often in jail himself for
striving to enlarge the circle of compassion, famously said, “While there is a
soul in prison, I am not free.” So
we might equally say, “While there is one sick, we as a nation are not
well.”
So Sunday by Sunday we keep praying
for our nation. We pray for things to get better. If there is a high rate
of morons in the government, we need to pray more. Here is my political
theology in a phrase: If you pray “thy
kingdom come on earth” over generations and centuries, don’t be surprised if
it does.
Golf.
The origin of golf, according to legend, is the game shepherds played
with sticks, hitting round stones into rabbit holes on the links of St.
Andrew’s.
The morality of golf is simple: don’t cheat.
No other game offers more opportunity to cheat when others probably won’t
notice. You can edge your ball on
the fairway on to a friendly tuft, in a really deep bunker you can throw your
ball out rather than use a wedge, and on the green there’s the little known
putter water-suctioned marker replacement. (Don’t
ask.)
The morality of golf is the morality of life:
don’t cheat. If you don’t cheat
- at golf, or some of you, cheat on your spouse (22% of men and 14% of women
do), or some of you cheat in a test (40% of students cheat at college do, with
no apology for it) - if you don’t cheat, it doesn’t mean you are a person of
honor. But it’s not a bad place to
start. Cheating, let me warn you, is
a neighborhood you don’t want to go into, because odds are you’ll get
mugged. Not cheating is Morality
101. Our task is to get to graduate
school on treating people with respect, compassion, and truthfulness.
Third topic: family.
On the way south from brother Andrew’s home we stayed a couple of days
near the site of a place that doesn’t exist anymore.
There used to be a railway station at the village.
In a siding there was a small, old railway coach that had been turned
into a holiday coach with bunks, kitchen, and a place to sit.
We used the station for the bathroom. We belonged to the class known as
middle class poor, and that was for several summers our place to stay—mother,
Granny Anderson, three boys and a sister.
We had the river
The gift of family is the greatest
human gift there is, I think. Families
have been central in the way Christians through the centuries have thought about
the church, and what it means to be truly human.
Living in a family takes virtues like patience and kindness, sometimes
hard to summon when limbs and moods collide, but it’s the place where we learn
the best lessons for life: there are rules it’s best to obey, who gets the top
bunk doesn’t the possessor superior, and the magic words are please
and sorry.
Lastly, the church. I’ve
lived and worked so long in the church that I could have become totally
disillusioned. But I haven’t.
There are two reasons.
First, the people. At its
best, the church is just a family, too, and some in this family we call church
talk the hind legs off a deacon, and some would make you apply for early
cremation, and some would make Jesus want to drink gin out of the cat dish.
But most of them most of the time make you feel, “I want to be with
you. I want to be beside you in this
place that may not be heaven, but at times we can feel the breezes of
It’s more. For all its
failures, for all the hurts it has done, for all the nonsense that passes for
Christian theology at times, there’s something about the church that draws us
inexorably on. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,
he of The Little Prince, gets close to
it:
"If
you want to build a ship, don’t summon people
to
buy wood, prepare tools, distribute jobs, and
organize
the work, rather teach people to long for
the
endless immensity of the sea. "
And
often enough here in church we get it - just that glimpse of a Mystery that
draws us towards itself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest
in that endless immensity we call God.
Amen.