Of Heroes and Gifts

1 Corinthians 12:1-11; John 2:1-11

January 17, 2016

You received “a gift” when you came in this morning. No big deal. Then you found somebody else who has the same gift. Still, nothing too big about that deal either. It was a set up. A game. Contrived. Unreal.

I’ll grant you all that.

And – at the same time, I will insist on this: every one of these gifts is real, and you have been given each of them to some degree or another: kindness, generosity, peace, faithfulness, gentleness, goodness, patience, joy, love. These are the gifts of the spirit, and we all have them.

You might ask, “so what?” Well, this is what: we have been given what we need sufficient to the day. That is to say, we have the gifts we need to face the challenges of our time.

Like many of you, I listened to more than one David Bowie song last week, and his “Heroes,” from my teenage years, has been running through my mind all week. “We could be heroes, just for one day.”

After all, we have been given gifts sufficient to the day.

That song was apparently inspired when Bowie saw a young couple kissing at the base of the Berlin Wall during the dark days of the 1970s – their simple, human gesture of love in the face of the ugliness of totalitarian authority struck Bowie as heroic, but also as a gesture any one of us could make. We have been given the gift of love. We could be heroes.

We could be, but I’m afraid that as soon as we engage the narrative of hero we wind up letting ourselves off the hook for facing the challenges of our day. Rather than engage, we are content to wait for a hero, a savior, to lift us up in triumph over whatever threatens or oppresses.

We tend to believe that heroes are bigger than life. They are, somehow, fundamentally different than we are. They have gifts we cannot possibly have. We can’t be heroes, is, in fact, what the hero narrative tells us.

Today is, of course, the Sunday of the King Day holiday. Talk about American heroes in pretty much any context, and it won’t be terribly long before King’s name is lifted up. By pretty much any measure, Martin Luther King, Jr. was an authentic American hero.

Or, at least, we have made him into one. We’ve carved him into stone, literally, in some cases, and there his dreaming ended.

But the dream of a distant day when “this nation shall rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed” that all of us are created equal – well, what of that?

I want to suggest several things this morning about heroes and gifts and the rest of us.

First, the dream only has life insofar as all of us live into the gifts we have been given. Indeed, King was only able to use his remarkable gift of prophetic preaching to give voice to the dream because so many others were already using their gifts.

Most of us know the names of a few of them: Rosa Parks, Ralph Abernathy, John Lewis. Some of us know the names of a few more: Jimmie Lee Jackson, James Reeb, Viola Liuzzo – martyrs from the Selma march. No one recalls the names of countless thousands of others who showed up at the meetings, sang the songs, did logistics for the marches, arranged bail for imprisoned, made the phone calls, fetched the lunches, and all the other small but significant aspects of a movement to realize a dream.

One of my favorite small stories of the Civil Rights Movement happened before anyone outside of his church and family had ever heard of Martin Luther King, and before anyone beyond the African-American community in Montgomery had ever heard of Rosa Parks.

Parks had just been arrested for refusing to give up her seat on the bus. Her act was deliberate and long-anticipated by the small circle of Montgomery black activists Parks worked within. The night of her arrest, Montgomery’s Women’s Political Counsel called for a one-day boycott of the local bus system. Jo Ann Robinson, a member of Dr. King’s congregation at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and a leader of the Women’s Political Counsel, made up a flyer to circulate across the city. That night, four of her students from Alabama State College, who had the college students’ gift for pulling all-nighters, made 52,000 copies of the flyer and delivered them to bus stops, hair dressers, barber shops, and other institutions in the black community.

The rest, as they say, is history. But were it not for the willingness and late-night work of four college students, whose names are lost to history, there would have been no boycott the next day so successful that it became the Montgomery Bus Boycott (in capital letters), no Montgomery Improvement Association to coordinate on ongoing boycott for more than a year, and, thus, no need for a 25-year-old preacher to lead that association – and himself – into national prominence. Absent those four kids, we might never have heard about the dream.

We can be heroes. If just for one day … or night. Though, of course, there is nothing heroic about making copies, or about going to meetings to make plans, or just showing up for the work you are called to. Or, perhaps, there is nothing more heroic than that.

Too often, we miss the point of the stories that shape us, and, in missing the point, we miss the invitation and the opportunity to live into the gifts we have been given to meet the challenges of our day – for such an invitation lies at the heart of the stories that shape us.

Take the story from John’s gospel about Jesus at a wedding in Cana. If we read this as merely a miracle story we at once elevate Jesus to the great pedestal of hero and messiah – a perch far beyond our reach before which we can only bow in passive worship. But, if we attend to the details and reach a bit deeper, we can discern a call to use the gifts we’ve been given.

It is always important to acknowledge that the gospel of John is thoroughly symbolic, and richly so. The images in this story point first to Jesus, himself, as the new wine given by God. At the same time, the story invites us into the practice of ridiculously generous hospitality – after all, who saves the best wine for last?

Finally, the setting for this story is crucial. Jesus is in Cana – a Gentile community.

In other words, at the very beginning of John’s gospel Jesus is carrying good news beyond his tribe, breaking down the barriers that defined his culture, reminding his people that they had been given all they needed – gifts sufficient to the challenges of their day.

In reminding us of these gifts, Jesus invites us to share a dream – a dream of a time when good news – radical generosity, boundless grace, the miraculous love of God that sets us free from all that binds – will be for all people. We are part of that dream, and we have been given the gifts we need to live into it.

We don’t need to wait for our heroes to come down off their pedestals. We can share good news here and now, where we are, with what we’ve got. Good news – that ancient but still revolutionary news that the love of God is for all people – good news sets us free from hatred, from fear, from violence, and from so much else that binds us in our own brokenness.

And, as we share this good news, we do speed up that day when all God’s children – “black folks and white folks, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of that old spiritual, ‘free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we are free at last.’”

Amen.