This morning I’d like to continue our theological exploration--of the idea that the presence of God may be found in the unexpected place or person, often the last place you would look. Despite the fact that the story of Jesus’ birth in the manger is now one of the most cherished of the gospel stories, it was an event that would have been easy to miss at the time. This devotion to the Christ child has certainly increased with the movie Talledega Nights and the character of Ricky Bobby who likes little baby Jesus best of all, and prays to him. “He grew up…he was a man,” his father in-law complains. But it’s all for naught with Ricky Bobby.
“Dear Lord baby Jesus, lyin' there in your ghost manger, just lookin' at your Baby Einstein developmental videos, learnin' 'bout shapes and colors.”
Ricky Bobby then goes on to thank God for his smokin’ hot wife and his sons Walker and Texas Ranger.
This chapel talk is about two people, two very unconventional characters—and not Ricky Bobby (I’ll save him for another day). The first is Robert Sullivan. Robert Sullivan is an explorer and writer, but not the usual kind. His specialty is the Meadowlands. Yes, that’s right, the Meadowlands in New Jersey: a former glacial lake that has been receding for the last 10,000 years, becoming the swampland you know now--and at one time the largest garbage dump in the world. You’ve driven past it on the way to somewhere more important: Newark Airport possibly, maybe a discount mall, or you went there for a Giants or Jets game. The Super Bowl this year will be at the Meadowlands, but no one will mention the wilderness around Met Life Stadium, before or during the game. It’s like it doesn’t exist. Robert Sullivan is obsessed with the Meadowlands, and I met him just about fifteen years ago in Portland, Oregon. Like Henry David Thoreau, he wanted to get back to nature, but he chose the most unlikely spot in the United States, maybe the world. The comparison with Thoreau, however ironic in talking about an EPA waste site, became absolutely just when Sullivan found that the Meadowlands did, in fact, have a Walden Pond. It’s just that no one ever went there; no one even looks at the map of the expansive swampland. So Sullivan decided to go on his own Thoreau wilderness adventure, exploring the Meadowlands for weeks at a time in a small canoe.
Here is Sullivan’s adventure and vision in his own words in his book The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures on the Edge of a City.
“Sometimes, I sit on the top of Snake Hill until dusk, and I spread out my maps and marvel.
I marvel that I am in the middle of a thirty-two-square-mile wilderness, part natural, part industrial, that is five miles from the Empire State Building and a little bit bigger than Manhattan.
I marvel that the land before me was called ‘a swampy, mosquito-infested jungle…where rusting auto bodies, demolition rubble, industrial oil slicks and cattails merge in an unholy, stinking union,’ by authors of a 1978 federal report, and that now it is a good place to see a black-crowned night heron or a pied-billed grebe or eighteen species of ladybugs, even if some of the waters these creatures fly over can oftentimes be the color of antifreeze.
I marvel that on the edges of the Meadowlands there are places that are stuffed with people (some blocks in Union City have the highest population density in the United States) but that in the middle of the Meadowlands there are acres and acres of land where there aren’t people at all…
On the top of Snake Hill, I am on mysterious ground that is not guidebooked and that reads like a dead language…I am in the middle of a place that forces of progress have perennially targeted but have never managed to completely control, a place that people rush past on their way to the rest of America, a place they spit at with their exhaust pipes. There, with the sun burning through smog and lighting up the reeds, with eight lanes of traffic providing backup, I sing the Meadowlands. I am the dot on the Meadowlands’ exclamation point.”
To go out in a search for peace and enlightenment in the Meadowlands of New Jersey is absurd—it’s completely crazy (which is exactly what Sullivan’s wife thought by the way). But that’s what Robert Sullivan did, and that’s what he found. All of the madness of our culture and world was right on the edge of a wilderness, almost totally unexplored. That boggled Sullivan’s mind. He found peace, renewal, and the unbelievable power of nature still pulsing in the Meadowlands, even as man’s so-called ingenuity is destroying our natural environment. Mother Nature is still a very powerful lady. Sullivan is a wise man of our time, finding renewal, inspiration, and peace in the last place anyone would look. It’s as crazy as going on a vision quest at Kent in the middle of winter, but a new spring is being born with every step you take right now.
My second wise man this morning is a guy named Billy Beane. That name may not ring any bells, but the movie Moneyball just might. Billy Beane is the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics. As Sullivan went looking for wisdom in nature, Beane went looking for a deeper insight into human nature by rejecting all conventional thinking about what is really happening in the game of baseball—and how best to evaluate players for a professional baseball team that didn’t really have money to spend. Moneyball the movie had wonderful performances by Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, as the general manager and assistant general manager who embrace a completely new philosophy. Moneyball the book by Michael Lewis is about the 2002 Oakland A’s, and the movie and the book are about their radical philosophy. Despite being a small market team, with dramatically smaller revenue than teams like the Yankees and Red Sox, the Oakland A’s are consistently in the baseball playoffs.
In Moneyball, Lewis explores the out of the box thinking of Beane. In the movie, Brad Pitt portrays Beane as neurotic, tormented, and inspired—he is on fire, all at the same time. So how did the A’s compete with a payroll that was generally one-third the size of large market teams? Beane and his Ivy League assistant have a completely different approach, one that turns baseball orthodoxy upside down. Their philosophy is a kind of baseball meets AP Statistics and Computer Science. The first assumption of this unorthodox philosophy is that we really don’t know what we’re watching when we watch a baseball game. One game is an insignificant statistical sample. Our instincts and observations are actually wrong. Beane puts into action a statistical model that highlights different statistics than the usual ones. He emphasizes on base percentage, slugging percentage, and especially walks—always going deeper into the count; then he goes out to find the players who produce best in the new statistical vision. Kevin Youkilis, formerly of the Red Sox, fits the Moneyball philosophy perfectly. At that time, Youkilis is playing for the Pawtucket minor league team, and the Red Sox become suspicious when the A’s are interested in their player, one whom they don’t particularly value. So, the A’s have to look for the hidden treasures, the players that other teams have overlooked, or thrown away, or failed to find in the first place. They’re out there. Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill become the dumpster divers of baseball. They can’t afford to go after the superstars and free agents; the sabermetrics, the new statistics, then point to the castoffs, misfits, or the people who have never been given a chance before. The A’s front office compares itself to card counters at a casino. As they implement their new philosophy, the baseball establishment laughs at them. But people are also very threatened by the new approach; they want it to fail. They need it to fail. It is amazing to watch the uproar when fearless non-conformists refuse to follow the pack. It makes you question why we believe the pack, any pack, is heading the right direction in the first place.
The new baseball philosophy also seems to be subtly changing the life philosophy of Billy Beane. He realizes money is not the most important thing in his life. As he looks for the unappreciated qualities in ballplayers, he embraces an unappreciated character in himself. Moreover, he finds a deeper sense of his life values…in the undervalued. His daring and audacity become strangely mixed with humor and compassion, both for himself and others. He is fighting a battle, successfully, where money, for the first time, doesn’t rule the world. He wins on the cheap. Beane is fighting the good fight, like Robin Hood of yore. At the end of the 2002 season, the Boston Red Sox want to steal him away from the Oakland A’s. He is the hottest general manager in baseball. The Red Sox offer him the richest contract for a general manager in the history of all professional sports. But he turns down the offer of $12,500,000 to stay with the little Oakland A’s, and to be near his daughter in California. He signs an extension with the A’s and makes around a $1,000,000 a year, before taxes. (This is just slightly more than me.)
The game, the life, that everyone else is watching may not be the true reality. We need to go deeper. When he was your age, Billy Beane was drafted in the first round by the New York Mets. He was offered a large contract and signing bonus as a high school senior. But he also had a full scholarship to Stanford University. Everyone told him to go for the money; that’s the way the world works. He has regretted the decision not to go to Stanford for all of his adult life. Billy Beane made a promise to himself never to make a decision based on money ever again. And he has kept it.
`
In the new Moneyball philosophy this morning, what is the undervalued part of your character that needs to come out? What is overvalued in how the world sees you? How can you find God in the unexpected places of your life? Where is your Meadowlands? It may be right next to glamorous Manhattan, but you don’t even look in its direction.
What is important to you about your own identity is not necessarily what is important to God. God doesn’t care about the prep school or college sticker on your car (though he/she does root for Kent, and not Taft, and certainly not Hotchkiss). God doesn’t care about how much money you have. The gods of wealth, success, and beauty that we chase every day will not only disappoint us when we attain them. They also shape how we see, or fail to see, each other right now as true individuals, as children of God. They shape how we judge another person’s character: especially the one who is different from you in the area of race, class, religion, age, gender, sexual orientation, or any other category or label that separates us.
And what you overcome is more important than what you achieve.
You get to spend the rest of the year, and the rest of your life, finding your answers, seeing how you want to play this game called Moneyball, which doesn’t have to be about money at all… or baseball for that matter. But it can certainly include little baby Jesus. You can play it by your own philosophy, not someone else’s. This chapel talk was about two wise men from our time. Maybe you’ll be the third one – the wise man or wise woman with your life decisions and philosophy, and the future to come. Our human instinct will always tell us to land on the safe ground--the familiar landing of our own comfortable identity and habits, the quick labels of who we were in the past. Don’t just be willing to land where you have been before. Take a leap of faith instead in 2014.
Your leap of faith this year may just be the moment when you finally learn to fly.
Shake and bake.
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Monday, January 13, 2014
The Gift of the Magi
This afternoon in chapel, it is easy to feel disoriented. There must be a few more days of vacation to get our bearings before returning to Kent. Has Christmas break really come and gone? Is it actually 2014? Am I really back at school? Did it have to be so cold this week? Why is chapel at 4:00 instead of in the morning? …not that I’m complaining about that, but…well, maybe I am complaining as I sit here right now. It’s what I do best. Oh, and why did we come back on Monday instead of Tuesday as we usually do? I don’t want to forget that little point.
There seems to be no shortage of things to blame for the feeling of disorientation. Travel, airlines, family, holiday commercialism, the calendar, the weather, and Kent School with a full week of classes behind us. But I, for one, blame the game of football—college football, not the NFL-- for the lost feeling that I have on this twelfth day of January, 2014, which is also the first Sunday after the Epiphany. By the way, does anyone know the score in the 49er game? For all of my life, New Year’s Day has been a day of sacred football—all day and into the night. New Year’s resolutions could always wait, because there were still college football bowl games coming at you all day, finishing off with the Orange and/or Sugar Bowl games at night. For a few years now, the Bowl Championship Series, the not very intelligent brain child of the NCAA, has prolonged this glut of football, laziness, and endless commercials until the 4th or 5th day of January, but this Monday’s national championship game between Auburn and Alabama didn’t happen until January 6th. I love college football, but I didn’t even watch the game because I was getting back in the seven day swing of Kent School. That’s just plain wrong—the football part of it. Oh, and the national championship was played at the Rose Bowl, which means that there were two Rose Bowls this year. It all makes no sense. This is not progress, but it’s here.
So, this afternoon I am, hopefully, going to help you get your bearings. As I mentioned, today is the first Sunday after the Epiphany—the feast where we celebrate the arrival of the wise men, or magi as they’re sometime called. In our present state of disorientation, it is easy to feel like we missed something—that the real spirit of Christmas passed us by, and we’ll just return to our old habits here at Kent. The happy new year has already lost its glow.
Our lives are complicated. Just the travel plans of Kent students are complicated enough, and not everyone in our community is back—even now. And so this afternoon, I wanted to return to a simple story that stops us in our tracks with the changing nature of God, who enters our lives to dwell with a new wisdom, even when the new seems to quickly lose its luster.
The story is “The Gift of the Magi,” by the writer O. Henry.
“The Gift of the Magi” is as strong and simple, as humble and spare, as the story of the birth of a child in a manger. This homily will be short and sweet because that’s what this story is. But it is a small treasure, when you open it up.
“The Gift of the Magi” is about a young couple, Jim and Della, who love each other very much. To both Jim and Della, there is no one more special, no person more beloved. No one who brings them closer to the goodness of God; that to love someone deepens the willingness to give of yourself, and to find depths that you never expected. To love completely is to give completely; love, true love, really doesn’t involve power at all. Like Mary and Joseph of old, the couple in the story is rich in love, but poor in possessions. They have little money to buy the perfect gifts to exchange on Christmas Eve. Yet because they love, they long to give wondrous gifts to each other.
Della has beautiful brown hair; long, flowing hair like a waterfall. Jim decides the perfect gift to express his love is a beautiful set of jeweled combs—tortoise shell with jeweled rims. But he can’t afford his chosen gift for his beloved. Not even close.
Of course, he goes and sells his only treasure: his gold watch. It will be a perfect Christmas; everything will fall into place this year like a dream. There is nothing to think about in the decision, no register of truer value to consider. He just gives. The watch is sold to express the “eternal now” that enters our lives during this season.
Della likewise is on the same page of the very short story. Jim’s most cherished possession is his gold watch, but he doesn’t have a gold chain to keep it in his pocket. She can’t afford a gold chain, and she has only a $1.87 to make her purchase, exactly twenty dollars short of the needed funds. But she can’t give up her image of the perfect Christmas, the perfect gift.
But there is a woman on her street who buys hair to make wigs (there’s one in every neighborhood, probably one who lives in your dorm. I’m pretty sure there’s a girl in North Dorm, and you can always sell hair at South Kent…just kidding, I made that up.). At any rate, Della’s long hair will get a very good price.
There is nothing to consider, no pause to hold back. She is sped by the animation of an open and giving heart. Like the impractical God who gives so freely into a world that scarcely notices, forgetting to scan the skies, or the neighborhood, for the unexpected gift.
Her treasure is her love, not the vanity of her hair.
Both Jim and Della, husband and wife, meet each other with their perfect gifts of Christmas. The reader and we this evening are wonderfully ahead of our Christmas couple.
Jeweled combs for hair that has been shorn.
A gold chain for a watch that has been sold.
And there we are, holding nothing but everything.
Imperfectly matched with their gifts, a circle of love is yet complete—fitted hearts like a figure eight of connection, warmth, and new wisdom. Feeling anew the love, the God, who chooses us, our lives as a fitting place in which to dwell. You got to have some soul in the new year. If you’ve already lost it, you can find it again. Your treasure is often in the unexpected place, sometimes the very last place you would look.
I will close with the sweet words of O.Henry to ring in the new year at Kent on a an ordinary Sunday afternoon in the dead of winter:
“The magi, as you know, were wise men—wonderfully wise men—who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle for two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts, such are the wisest. Everywhere they are the wisest. They are the magi.”
Happy new year. Happy Epiphany. And welcome back to school. Even in our bleak mid-winter, our hearts can still be warm with the love of God, and each other.
There seems to be no shortage of things to blame for the feeling of disorientation. Travel, airlines, family, holiday commercialism, the calendar, the weather, and Kent School with a full week of classes behind us. But I, for one, blame the game of football—college football, not the NFL-- for the lost feeling that I have on this twelfth day of January, 2014, which is also the first Sunday after the Epiphany. By the way, does anyone know the score in the 49er game? For all of my life, New Year’s Day has been a day of sacred football—all day and into the night. New Year’s resolutions could always wait, because there were still college football bowl games coming at you all day, finishing off with the Orange and/or Sugar Bowl games at night. For a few years now, the Bowl Championship Series, the not very intelligent brain child of the NCAA, has prolonged this glut of football, laziness, and endless commercials until the 4th or 5th day of January, but this Monday’s national championship game between Auburn and Alabama didn’t happen until January 6th. I love college football, but I didn’t even watch the game because I was getting back in the seven day swing of Kent School. That’s just plain wrong—the football part of it. Oh, and the national championship was played at the Rose Bowl, which means that there were two Rose Bowls this year. It all makes no sense. This is not progress, but it’s here.
So, this afternoon I am, hopefully, going to help you get your bearings. As I mentioned, today is the first Sunday after the Epiphany—the feast where we celebrate the arrival of the wise men, or magi as they’re sometime called. In our present state of disorientation, it is easy to feel like we missed something—that the real spirit of Christmas passed us by, and we’ll just return to our old habits here at Kent. The happy new year has already lost its glow.
Our lives are complicated. Just the travel plans of Kent students are complicated enough, and not everyone in our community is back—even now. And so this afternoon, I wanted to return to a simple story that stops us in our tracks with the changing nature of God, who enters our lives to dwell with a new wisdom, even when the new seems to quickly lose its luster.
The story is “The Gift of the Magi,” by the writer O. Henry.
“The Gift of the Magi” is as strong and simple, as humble and spare, as the story of the birth of a child in a manger. This homily will be short and sweet because that’s what this story is. But it is a small treasure, when you open it up.
“The Gift of the Magi” is about a young couple, Jim and Della, who love each other very much. To both Jim and Della, there is no one more special, no person more beloved. No one who brings them closer to the goodness of God; that to love someone deepens the willingness to give of yourself, and to find depths that you never expected. To love completely is to give completely; love, true love, really doesn’t involve power at all. Like Mary and Joseph of old, the couple in the story is rich in love, but poor in possessions. They have little money to buy the perfect gifts to exchange on Christmas Eve. Yet because they love, they long to give wondrous gifts to each other.
Della has beautiful brown hair; long, flowing hair like a waterfall. Jim decides the perfect gift to express his love is a beautiful set of jeweled combs—tortoise shell with jeweled rims. But he can’t afford his chosen gift for his beloved. Not even close.
Of course, he goes and sells his only treasure: his gold watch. It will be a perfect Christmas; everything will fall into place this year like a dream. There is nothing to think about in the decision, no register of truer value to consider. He just gives. The watch is sold to express the “eternal now” that enters our lives during this season.
Della likewise is on the same page of the very short story. Jim’s most cherished possession is his gold watch, but he doesn’t have a gold chain to keep it in his pocket. She can’t afford a gold chain, and she has only a $1.87 to make her purchase, exactly twenty dollars short of the needed funds. But she can’t give up her image of the perfect Christmas, the perfect gift.
But there is a woman on her street who buys hair to make wigs (there’s one in every neighborhood, probably one who lives in your dorm. I’m pretty sure there’s a girl in North Dorm, and you can always sell hair at South Kent…just kidding, I made that up.). At any rate, Della’s long hair will get a very good price.
There is nothing to consider, no pause to hold back. She is sped by the animation of an open and giving heart. Like the impractical God who gives so freely into a world that scarcely notices, forgetting to scan the skies, or the neighborhood, for the unexpected gift.
Her treasure is her love, not the vanity of her hair.
Both Jim and Della, husband and wife, meet each other with their perfect gifts of Christmas. The reader and we this evening are wonderfully ahead of our Christmas couple.
Jeweled combs for hair that has been shorn.
A gold chain for a watch that has been sold.
And there we are, holding nothing but everything.
Imperfectly matched with their gifts, a circle of love is yet complete—fitted hearts like a figure eight of connection, warmth, and new wisdom. Feeling anew the love, the God, who chooses us, our lives as a fitting place in which to dwell. You got to have some soul in the new year. If you’ve already lost it, you can find it again. Your treasure is often in the unexpected place, sometimes the very last place you would look.
I will close with the sweet words of O.Henry to ring in the new year at Kent on a an ordinary Sunday afternoon in the dead of winter:
“The magi, as you know, were wise men—wonderfully wise men—who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle for two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts, such are the wisest. Everywhere they are the wisest. They are the magi.”
Happy new year. Happy Epiphany. And welcome back to school. Even in our bleak mid-winter, our hearts can still be warm with the love of God, and each other.
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