Click to hear this sermon sermon071014

I want to begin today by citing some events that were highly publicized over the last year.

The Right Thing: Seeds of Character - Genesis 39: 1-9; Philippians 4: 4-9 - October 14, 2007 - Cicero United Methodist Church - Everett J. Bassett

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I want to begin today by citing some events that were highly publicized over the last year. Each of them was an incident where somebody's action at a time of crisis was deeply questioned. One of them was an event of great potential for harm; the others were local tragedies. And I'm not really interested in criticizing the people involved, so much as I want to raise the questions, "When the heat is on, how can we assure that we are most likely to know the right thing to do? And then, how can we be sure to do it?"

The first incident I want to recall is the honeymoon trip of Andrew Speaker, a lawyer from Atlanta. Last spring Mr. Speaker was informed that he had a virulent strain of tuberculosis. This information came when he had already booked a trip with his new wife to Europe. He was advised by medical authorities not to travel - but he ignored the advice. While on the trip, he learned that the form of the disease he had was contagious, drug-resistant, and deadly. It was clear that he was a danger to people, and doctors pleaded that he surrender himself to health officials. Instead, he continued his trip, including getting on an airplane to Canada with 190 unsuspecting passengers.

The outcome of that story is familiar by now. Speaker, it turns out, was misdiagnosed; he doesn't really have the deadly form of the disease. But he didn't know that when he made his decisions. And so, when the whole story came out, he was blasted by the press, and hated by the public. And he didn't understand why. Here's a statement he made: "People are now sending me hate mail, like 'I hope you die,' or 'I hope your treatment is painful and as long as possible. You're a terrorist who needs to be eradicated.' I'm a good person," he said. "I've tried to live a good life."

And that's the moral dilemma. We have to be careful, first of all, judging the thought pattern of a man who has just been told he has a deadly disease. And I'm going to make a guess here - I would guess that it may very well be that you or I could meet Speaker and his wife at a party, spend some time talking with them, and come away thinking, "Good people. I like 'em." So how do you put together those two ideas - that someone can be a good person trying to live a good life, but also be someone who knowingly endangered the lives of hundreds of people? Failed to do the right thing?

The other incidents I want to refer to are more local - they happened on Oneida Lake - and were tragedies that happened a few months apart. Both involved speed boats that accidentally struck smaller crafts. Both were tragic events, and, in both cases, the drivers of the boat drove home instead of stopping to assist those they had struck. In both cases, there were burning letters to the editor, criticizing the action of those drivers. And, in both cases, there were also letters from people who knew the drivers and the others in the boats, and wanted to put on record that these are not bad people. They are good folks.

Again, I am not going to judge them. Some of you may know some of those involved personally. And the thing is, there is not a person here who can definitively say what you would do in such a situation, unless you've been there before. But again, we have this

dilemma: good people faced with a dreadful decision under dreadful circumstances - and not doing the right thing. Not responding in the right way.

That's what I want to talk about today. I want to say three things - the first is what I've been saying already - that we can't judge people who have stumbled in those critical moments, because we can't say for sure what we would do unless we've been there. If the chips were really down, and everything was at stake, would we do the right thing?

But despite that, the second thing I want to say is that there is a level of character that we can nurture within ourselves, and within one another, that can steer us in the right direction. And that level of character cannot be counted on in the critical moment unless we have nurtured it well in advance of the critical moment. We can't say for sure what our reaction might be; but we can say for sure: "This is who I want to be. And I want to cultivate this level of character within myself so that this is who surfaces when the big decisions have to be made." It has to be something we are paying attention to now, so that we can rely on it then.

And then the third thing I want to say is that God, and the wisdom of the Bible, can guide us to that level of character. This maybe surprising at first, because the Bible is a chronicle of people who, by and large, did not respond well to crises. Start with Adam and Eve, and then go through Abraham and Jacob and Saul and David and Peter and the disciples - all heroes of the faith. And every one of them had to repent for failing to do the right thing when the chips were down. The writers of the Bible did not sugarcoat when it came to human weakness.

But there are other examples - times when people rose to the occasion and displayed great character. .One of those certainly was Joseph. In our scripture lesson from Genesis, we see Joseph confronting one of the crises that so often tests the character of the people involved - a situation of sexual temptation. In particular, he is being seduced by a married woman. And here is the statement he makes in response: " ... with me here, my master has no concern about anything in the house, and he has put everything he has in my hand. He is not greater in this house than I am, nor has he kept back anything from me except yourself, because you are his wife. How then could I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?" Those are pretty stately words for what was more likely a situation of great passion and temptation for that young man - handsome man at his prime, a lonely foreigner cut off from his family, and here is the attention of a beautiful woman ­everything Hollywood has taught us says that he will give in to his youthful lust here.

But he doesn't. And surely that is because long before the critical moment, he had decided how he would behave if anything like that occurred. He had said: "This is who I am; this is who I will be." And he had stuck to it when temptation arose.

That's what I want to suggest we give thought to today. How can you and I nurture a moral character that would come through for us and lead us to do the right thing in a critical situation? I want to spend the next two weeks talking about that. And I think Philippians 4: 8-9 is a great starting point. It goes like this:

"Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable ... think about these things." The wording of that indicates that the apostle Paul knows the value of planting seeds in our hearts. "Think on these things," he says, and I think he means if you want to assure that you will make good choices in the critical moments, you have to plant the right seeds now. And the seeds to plant are the ones in this list - true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable. If those are the seeds that are growing inside you, then those are what will blossom up when your character needs to step forward the most.

Those seeds are not faring well in today's world. We don't expect truth and honor, for example, in many areas of our lives. In politics, in business, in law, in school, in sports ­the expectation is that people will say whatever it takes to get elected, or to close the sale, or to win the court case, or to pass the test, or to break the home run record. Rather than maintaining a moral standard, people are trained today to say and do what works. In such a world, people lose their way. Responsibility, morality, character - these words become old fashioned and impractical. You've got to save your skin. Honest people finish last. It's small wonder, then, that people come to the critical moment and don't know what to do. The Bible has a different standard to offer. The Bible teaches that those who plant seeds of truth, honor, justice, purity, and what is pleasing and commendable - these are those of character who will stand the tests of life.

On the night before he died, Jesus faced a great crisis in his soul. He went into the garden of Gethsemane to pray. His best friends couldn't help him; they fell asleep. A follower had betrayed him; all events pointed to his capture and death. He prayed earnestly, "Father... take this cup (of death) away from me." By most human standards, this would have been a moment when giving in could have been excused. He might have run; he could have changed his mind; the next day, standing before the most powerful one in the region, the one who could pronounce death upon him, Jesus might have reconsidered; told a lie, talked his way out of it. Who could blame him?

But instead, his character held firm. He said, finally, ''Nevertheless, (Lord), not my will but thine be done." It's too easy to say, "Of course he would do that. He was the Son of God." But he was also the son of frail, vulnerable man. And if we read through his life, we see how the seeds of character were planted for that moment in the Garden ­through prayer, through friends, through times apart for God, through thinking on the right things.

And that's what I want to invite us to do. Next Sunday I'm going to dig a little deeper into that reading from Philippians 4 - what does it mean to be true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable? Our Senior High classes are going to be discussing those things, and this morning the ushers have some reflection sheets for those who might want to look at them this week.

I heard someplace that there is a laboratory test that can determine whether you have real gold or not. You put hydrochloric acid on it; if it is fake gold, it will burn up; but if it's real, it will shine all the brighter.