See With New Eyes
First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost – September 16, 2007
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
[texts: Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-18/1 Timothy 1:12-17/Luke 15:1-10]

It was several months ago that Rob, Sam and I spent a retreat day together to work out how our fall programming would look, including this sermon series. We came up with the titles and then last week I got this Time magazine and then the events surrounding remembering 9/11 came to mind and I took a long hard look at the title and the texts and still decided that the Lord had something for me to say about seeing with new eyes.

The cover story for the September 10th issue of Time is entitled “A Time to Serve.” It reports on a growing movement toward a national volunteer service program to help us deal with the problems of an educational system with some severe problems – 38% of fourth graders unable to read at a basic level, escalating cost of health care and the problems of health insurance – 47 million people are uninsured, and the ongoing difficulties of finding common ground as an increasingly diverse nation. The story led off with this quotation: “As the Constitutional Convention of 1787 came to a close, after three and a half months of deliberation, a lady asked Dr. Franklin, ‘Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?’ ‘A republic, replied the Doctor, ‘if you can keep it.’” What is true of the republic is also true of the church. And there’s the issue and the point – can we keep it? Can we see with the new eyes we need to become and act as the Lord’s free people?

Back in 1941, some sixty-six years ago, this country faced its date that will live in infamy, but the enemy on that date had a face and the world was a very different place. Still, the events of that day took a country slowly rising from the effects of an economic depression and indifferent to the world around it and made it a player on the world stage. Historians have talked about America losing its innocence at that time. As a nation we had to look at ourselves in a new way and to see with new eyes and it made a difference in how we thought of ourselves and how we approached the world. We now say quite similar things about September 11, 2001. It would be better, however, if we came to remember that day, along with the days and the years that follow, as the time when indifference was lost and the common good, perhaps even an uncommon good, was found. It is, again, time to see with new eyes; as it is every day.

Jeremiah’s prophesy about the destruction coming to Judah and Jerusalem wrenches one’s insides after the events of 9/11 and of the past few years that our country has been engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq. We must not, however, try to read our situation into this text, or any other text of Scripture. Quite frankly, I fear that too many of my colleagues in ministry have been guilty of misreading the Scriptures when it comes to events and times like these. Sometimes they try to get them to say something that isn’t there. We cannot look at the loss of life and the destruction in New York City or the nation’s capital six years ago, or the loss of life in theatres of war, and simply say it’s a pay-back from God because we are stupid children who have no understanding…skilled in doing evil, but do not know how to do good. We would be better served to think of it in terms of God’s care for what God has created and God’s concern, even God’s sorrow, when evil is visited upon God’s poor people. If anything, the events we remembered this past week and our ongoing situation should move us beyond indifference to the suffering of others and toward the common good.

“How difficult and elusive is the common good!” Ethicist Karen Lebacqz’ exclamation catches both the challenge and the frustration of the search for the common good. The ever-expanding possibilities offered us by science and technology seem more than equally matched by the challenges of an ever-shrinking world. That the world has shrunk considerably should be patently obvious with every passing day; especially as the media reminds us of the global economy (concerns of lead in paint on children’s toys made in China, produce from central America, the list could be endless) and the Internet keeps us almost instantly connected (at least when it works!). The situation in which we live, with its increasing complexity, renders the concept of the common good every more difficult, ever more elusive.

Long ago Aristotle defined the common good in the Ethics. He wrote:

For even if the good of the community coincides with that of the individual, it is clearly a greater and more perfect thing to achieve and preserve that of a community; for while it is desirable to secure what is good in the case of an individual, to do so in the case of a people or a state is something finer and more sublime.

The common good, then, is what occurs when individuals learn to move beyond individualism. It is the governing principle of a society that seeks more than mere freedom. The common good is one of the foundational principles underpinning the American governmental experiment. I would suggest, however, that there is a greater foundation principle, an uncommon good if you will, which appears even more elusive and difficult, but is far more necessary.

The uncommon good is found in Jesus’ parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin, recorded in Luke’s Gospel. In those parables I see us being called to see with new eyes and to see not as we have been accustomed to doing, but to see as God sees. For in those stories we learn of God’s care for all of humanity. It’s not enough, we hear, to fold ninety-nine sheep, all one hundred must be brought to safety. It’s not enough to head to the bank with nine coins in hand when there are ten. We are told that there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who have no need of repentance. This doesn’t imply that there hasn’t been joy over the ninety-nine or the nine, however. Their care is certainly not neglected, because God’s care is for the ultimate wholeness of all that God has made.

This is the uncommon good: the search for the one and the care for the many. Here we find something that goes far beyond mere cost-benefit in the service of the majority. In these simple stories of Jesus we see something finer and more sublime than anything Aristotle ever conceived. Here we see the all-embracing love of God, a love that is willing to risk everything to bring us all into relationship. In my mind, to see with new eyes means to look at everything from the perspective of the common good.

Six years ago I was hopeful that we had seen an awakening of our nation to its uncommon good. All of us have heard the stories, small and great, of kindness and sometimes of absolute heroism. My reading of Luke will be forever stamped with the televised image of a New York City police officer again putting on his ‘turn-out’ coat to go back into the rubble. When the reporter asked if he was going back into the smoking ruins, he answered, “It’s my job. There are people in there.” The dedication of those who sought the missing, even as the days passed and reason told us that we should think otherwise, was a sign both of hope and of encouragement.

At the time I believed that what we saw in people rallying and reaching out was more than mere patriotism. Rather it was an expression of true human communion, a communion reflective of the one we’re to have with God. Jonathan Edwards, the Congregational minister and theologian of the 18th century, wrote that God’s own happiness consists in communion, as well as the creatures.’ God’s uncommon good is in God’s desire to share life with us and the ordering of all creation toward mutual happiness. For this happiness to be achieved means that all of creation should be brought into God’s loving embrace. Even when faced with tragedy or a seemingly overwhelming task, we’re to be about that task of bringing the world into God’s embrace.

These words of Jesus, then, speak both to those who are with God and those who have rendered themselves lost to God by turning to their own agendas and goals. The common good would say look to the majority, look to the ones you have in hand. The uncommon good says search until the lost sheep is found not just until dark. The uncommon good says sweep until the coin is found not just until the broom wears out. The uncommon good says keep searching the rubble even if it seems unlikely one more is alive. The uncommon good is grace in action; it is a willingness to be extended so that wholeness may be achieved.

The uncommon good is what Paul tells Timothy when he recounts God’s mercy in his own life. He was lost, he was a man of violence, one who persecuted God’s very people and yet God didn’t give up on Paul. Here we’re reminded that we can’t give up on The world, can’t give up hope that it can be a better place, a place of peace and justice for all people everywhere. After all, hasn’t that been at the core of the American project? Our forebears saw this new land, this experiment in democracy as a city set on a hill for all the world to see. Now, how we react to the violence done against us, how we react to the attitudes displayed toward us, how we conduct our affairs in the future will tell the world what kind of people and nation we really are. On a sad, sad day six years ago and on the days following it, as more than one writer said, we began to see. Now the task remains for us to continue to demonstrate the commitment to the common good and to continue the pursuit of the uncommon good.

What we have been through six years ago and what faces us in the days, weeks, and months ahead reminds us of the difficult and elusive task we undertake. We can achieve the goal only if we see the oneness we have as a people, regardless of religious faith. As this is a church gathered by covenant, so are we a covenanted, a federal, republic. We can achieve the goal of the uncommon good only if we work together as covenant communities in true mutuality and affection.

Our part in this great finding of the uncommon good is to be Christ’s body in this place. The body must work together and constantly seek wholeness. Our happiness, and even God’s if we believe Jonathan Edwards, is wrapped up in our continuing to grow in relationship, in mutual care, and in unconditional love. It is the hope of terrorists to separate, to confuse and demoralize. Those misguided men – their misguided leaders who continue to be holed up in caves, hiding, hypocritically and opportunistically using the fruits of the culture they wish to destroy – wanted to rip apart a society and have us turn on each other out of fear. We cannot, we must not allow them to win. Rather, we must reconsecrate ourselves to the search for the uncommon good; we must dedicate ourselves to the task of seeing with new eyes, the eyes of faith, the eyes of love.

The search for the uncommon good may appear difficult and elusive to us, but the truth is that it is really discovering that which already exists. For you see the uncommon good, love, is God’s very nature and God is here among us – if we see with the eyes of faith. We saw it six years ago in story after story of love, concern, and personal risk-taking in the face of disaster and danger. We saw it again this week in the concern for memory. Perhaps we did lose our innocence again, in a dramatic and a painful manner, on 9/11, but if it leads us to lose our indifference, then the deaths and the heroic acts will not have been in vain. Something happened in those days following that tragedy that made a huge difference; now, six years later, we need to ask ourselves yet again what we can do to sustain the difference.

You see what we discovered six years ago is far more important, because in the days and weeks following 9/11 we rediscovered the primacy of the common good. The renewed concern for volunteerism is a spark, a hope that we can indeed reinvigorate the search for the common good and sustain it as we find it. Ben Franklin, lapsed Congregationalist he may have been, was right when he said that we had ourselves a republic “if you can keep it.” The only way we can keep it is by continuing to search, to work, and to strive for the common good. Please God, may it begin here in a renewed dedication to our faith life, here on Church Street and across the nation. May it begin with the way we care for each other and seek to give of ourselves to make our Church and community better places. May it begin here with us so that we might have eyes to see that behind it all is God. We may continue the search, but it is the uncommon good which has found us, if only we open our eyes to see it.