The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

"More Than An Individual Decision"

The Rev. Stephen Elkins-Williams

A line from a newspaper column jumped out at me this week. It said simply, “This is more than an individual decision.” It could have been referring to many recent news stories. One could easily say that of Bernard Madoff’s alleged decision to create a fraudulent investment pool, bilking clients of $50 billion. Thousands of investors, from the very wealthy to average citizens to benevolent foundations and those they serve, suffered great losses and drastic consequences from this one, catastrophic individual decision. This statement could have been made about various public officials who, we learned recently, have not paid their share of income tax, leaving others to shoulder that burden and discouraging the rest of us by their example. “This is more than an individual decision.”

That statement could even have been made from a different perspective about Captain Sully Sullenberger’s heroic landing of his plane on the Hudson River. His entire focus was not on himself or his reputation or preserving the plane for the airlines, but on the safety of his passengers. He knew that his action “was more than an individual decision.” This week Elwin Wilson of Rock Hill, SC, flew to Washington to apologize to Congressman John Lewis for his racist attitudes and behavior. Forty-eight years ago, when Lewis came to Rock Hill as one of the freedom riders of Martin Luther King Jr. and tried to enter a “Whites Only” waiting room, a young Elwin Wilson beat him up. He had been working up to his public anger by keeping at his home a black baby doll hanging from a noose. But gradually over the years remorse began to eat away at him, and he has now apologized not only to Representative Lewis, but also to the entire town of Rock Hill. “I want to love people,” he said, “regardless of what color.” He knows what damage he caused others, and now he hopes that his example might strengthen others to do what is right. Both his actions in May of 1961 and his recent taking responsibility for them and making amends to those affected were more than individual decisions. For good or for ill, what we do, public or private, affects us all.

The story commented on by the newspaper columnist was none of these, although it could have been about any of them. It was referring to a mother of six children’s decision to have further “infertility” treatment, resulting in her giving birth to octuplets. The female columnist rightly bewailed the complete lack of regulation of fertility technology – parents wanting to adopt go through much more scrutiny – and drew attention to the enormous financial price tag being run up in that neonatal unit. This mother’s desire for further children and the cooperation of her fertility specialist in the face of all common sense should have been much “more than an individual decision.” What we do, for good or ill, affects us all, and inherent to our identity as human beings is the communal dimension of all that we do.

Frederick Buechner writes in The Magnificent Defeat:

Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality—not as we expect it to be but as it is—is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only when there really is, in just this sense, love.

Today’s scripture readings reinforce that mystery. Paul lives out his commission to preach the Gospel, not with a “one size fits all” approach, but tailoring his message to his listeners so that God’s word can find them where they are. Jesus spends his time, out of compassion, with those who are sick or possessed with demons, freeing them from their afflictions. Also out of love, he goes to a lonely place and prays, not out of mere self-interest, but to be in union with his Father that he might better serve others. It is interesting to note that the Evangelist makes a special point of saying that after Jesus took Peter’s mother-in-law “by the hand and lifted her up, and the fever left her, … she served them.” Healing and new life and energy are not just individual gifts, but ones for the whole community. We also are given our lives and our health and our resources that we might serve.

In some ways, in our society we have been growing in our grasp of this communal dimension of our identity and existence. Racial justice, while still far from complete, has been a manifestation of our growing awareness that in John Donne’s words, “no man is an island” and that we do not lead isolated lives. Even the banning of second hand smoke and the requirement to wear seat belts are a result of increased awareness that so much of what we do “is more than an individual decision.” The major struggle of the environmental movement is to help us learn that our lifestyles and our consumer decisions affect, not just those around us, but those on the other side of the world and those far into the future. Perhaps one positive outcome of the current economic crisis is to instill more deeply in us how much our lives depend on one another and that we cannot be satisfied simply to make sure that our own economic needs are met, but that in Buechner’s words, “our lives do flow into each other as wave flows into wave.”

Some years ago Garrison Keillor read “A Letter from Jim” on his weekend radio show, “A Prairie Home Companion.” In that letter, his friend Jim confesses to him that he had been planning to take a trip to a conference with a female co-worker for the purpose of entering into an adulterous relationship. He had already kissed his unsuspecting wife and children good-by and had gone outside to wait for his friend to pick him up, when he began to have second thoughts:

As I sat on the lawn, looking down the street, I saw that we all depend on each other. I saw that, although I thought my sins could be kept secret, they would be no more secret than an earthquake. All these houses and all these families, my infidelity will somehow shake them. It will pollute the drinking water. It will make noxious gases come out of the ventilators in the elementary school. When we scream in senseless anger, blocks away a little girl we do not know spills a bowl of gravy all over a white tablecloth. If I go to Chicago with this woman who is not my wife, somehow the school patrol will forget to guard an intersection and someone’s child may be injured. A sixth-grade teacher will think, “What the hell” and eliminate South America from geography. Our minister will decide, “What the hell – I’m not going to give that sermon on the poor.” Somehow my infidelity will cause the man in the grocery store to say, “To hell with the Health Department. This sausage was good yesterday; it certainly can’t be any worse today.”

Jim concludes, “I just leave the story there. Anything more I could tell you would be self-serving, except to say that we depend on each other more than we ever know.”

I Corinthians 9:16-23; Mark 1:29-39