September 2, 2007

Proper 17/Pentecost 14
Luke 14:7-14

THE MUSIC OF FAILURE ...

All great companies know exactly what they're in business to do. Dairy Queen makes ice cream, Firestone makes tires, Microsoft makes money (for someone), Toro makes snowblowers - and a good little local company named Nonin makes digital oximeters to slip on your finger-tip. The display will show the oxygen saturation of your blood, your heart rate, and probably your political affiliation, too. (Well, two outa three ain't bad for our own Mr. Isaacson!)

The best successful companies concentrate on their core strength and mission. In that famous scene not long after Easter - Jesus with a benediction (a mission statement) for the people gathered on the mountain top - he told them exactly what they were to do: "Go, therefore, and make disciples." Not make omelets, not make speeches or widgets or policy. Make disciples.

And whenever we've focused on that as the Christian church, or as a congregation, or as individuals, we've honored our core values and practiced the mission. We've made disciples, we've been disciples ourselves, and it shows, it... makes a difference... in our behavior and relationships. That's the common theme in each of the Scripture pieces we read today, what I told the children earlier, and in that "parable" that Jesus told one night at dinner. From bottom to top, the mission of the church and its values are efforts shared by all.

In the late 1940s, the minister at Riverside Church in New York City was a famous man. These days only true old-timers and some pastors know the name, but in the 40s he was a national household word and literally thousands of people came to Riverside Church specifically to hear Harry Emerson Fosdick preach on Sundays. (No comment from me on this Labor Day weekend about how times have changed!

One weekend when the church was already basically full, an usher escorted a couple down the aisle and stopped partway. "I'm sorry," he said. "It looks like there's no place for the two of you to sit together. If you'll sit here," he said to the man, "I can take your wife to another place farther up." The husband agreed, and sat down.

When the person who was already in the pew looked over, he saw to his surprise that the man who sat down beside him was John D. Rockefeller, Jr. It was Rockefeller who had first put into words the vision of building Riverside Church, and it was his open checkbook which made the dream come true. The whole cathedral would not have existed except for him. And he was a great support to Dr. Fosdick. If anyone deserved a better place to sit in that church, it was Rockefeller. Yet there he was, toward the back, sharing a hymnal with his seatmate. [1]

To really get that into practice, that level of discipleship and humility, takes considerable reminding and relearning, however. St. Luke actually wrote two books in the New Testament. One has his name, of course; the other is Volume Two, the Book of Acts, the story of the early church, how the first Christians would pool their belongings, someone would sell it for them and invest the proceeds, and everyone shared funds as anyone needed the money. Later in the story, the list of St Paul's colleagues included a number of women's names, including one who, I believe, was even called an apostle.

That's the way the church began, but....

More than any of the other gospels, Luke's story of Jesus concentrates on the dangers of wealth and the proper use of money. I wonder why; what was going on behind the scenes in the church he served? Among the four gospels Luke is unique for his emphasis on social justice for women, the poor, and foreigners. Why's that? Why would Luke tell those particular stories; were there equality or discrimination issues in the church?

Luke's Jesus talks often about making room for everyone - today is another example. Today's story is almost back-to-back with words a chapter earlier: "Those who are last will be first and the first will be last." In the story today, the phrase about maneuvering for "the place of honor" is literally "taking first place" in the sense of "We're Number One! (And we're gonna stay there!)" And in Greek, Jesus' original word "guest" means "a person called to dinner" and "host" is "the One who invites, the One calling you to come." That sounds suspiciously like God-language to me, especially in that setting of the wedding banquet which is one of the Bible's favorite image of the kingdom of God.

So what's goin' on here behind the scenes? You're probably already there ahead of me. Those Christians probably needed reminders about women because they had settled back into the paternalistic patterns of their culture. They needed stories about lepers or money because their default reaction was, avoid the yukky and go for the gold. They preached equality at church after church they practiced "We're Number One." Luke's mission? Remind them of the stories of the Role Model. Remind them that it doesn't require First Place or Head Table or a trophy shelf. Remind them that humility and high impact are not opposites.

In a book entitled The Music of Failure, Bill Holm described the town's piano player, an elderly spinster named Pauline Bardal. She was famous in the town of Minneota, Minnesota for her frighteningly poor playing of the keyboard. "She had never learned true fingering," he wr1tes. "She did not so much strike the keys as slide with painstaking slowness from one to the next, leaving sufficient time for the manual rearrangement of the bones in her [gangly and arthritic] hands. This gave all her performances a certain halting dignity, even if sometimes questionable accuracy." [2]

Behind her back, Pauline was the subject of derisive humor for both children and adults and her music not widely appreciated. But Bill Holm remembers her with respect and admiration. "She owned nothing valuable, traveled little, and died alone, the last of her family... always poor, never married, living in a shabby small house if not as a domestic servant in others' homes, formally uneducated, gawky and not physically beautiful... Pauline, in American terms, was a great failure."

But she introduced Bill and many others to music they would never otherwise have heard - Bach, Chopin, Handel, Debussy, Rachmaninoff. "Even on a farm in rural Minnesota," he writes, "you deserve the extraordinary joy of hearing such music for the first time, as if composed in your presence, only for you. I heard it that way, under Pauline's hands. The Minneapolis [sic] Symphony playing Beethoven's Ninth in the parlor could not have been so moving or wonderful as Pauline's sluggish Largo in her front room."

Today Bill Holm is one verse in the collection of Pauline Bardal's lifetime master work. He is a world traveler, he is a poet, and his is a musician. He was called into a life of beauty and wonder by a failure who finished in last place - and it's music to our ears to listen to her story.

I make no case for our own sloppy work as music teachers or as teachers of faith, which is what anyone of us is over the age of 8 or 10. I don't believe that because you or I are not first place, high profile, head table people, we don't have to do our best in this church or in this community. But I also don't believe that if we're not at the top or close to it, we've failed at something. Faithfulness is a whole lot more important than what others think of us. If you can make some kind of music, even if that's only a hum or a whistle, or if you can't make music at all but you applaud when others do, you haven't failed at all. Remember Pauline Bardal. A life of beauty and wonder has been created for you, and last place there is as good as first.

We know what we're here to do. The Twins should be playing baseball. Budweiser brews beer. Politicians... well... But we know our role as the Family we call this congregation. Tell this community that Christ is Lord and his children can come home, all of them. And since the Host calls us to dinner at this Table (or "up there"), regardless of our skills or dress or this world's priorities, I think we should take that Host at his word, invite the others, too, and make sure there's room for them down here with us on the main floor.

Nate Castens
Chanhassen, Minnesota

[1] No info on this one; sounds like a Mark Trotter story

[2] Bill Holm, "The Music of Failure," (1986), pp. 59-65