April 27, 2008
Sixth Sunday of Easter (Year A)
Rogation Sunday
Acts 17:22-31; 1 Peter 3:13-22; John 14:15-21
I'd like to share with you this morning an interview I heard with the Washington Post columnist, Gene Weingarten who recently won a Pulitzer Prize for outstanding journalism. The award winning article he wrote is entitled, “Pearls Before Breakfast,” and in it Mr. Weingarten described the outcome of a special concert given this past January at a Washington D.C. Metro station.
The scenario came about as the result of an incident that occurred a couple of years ago when Mr. Weingarten was passing through the D.C. Metro and saw a keyboard artist playing there, who he thought was really very talented, and yet, no one paid any attention to him. Mr. Weingarten thought to himself, “If Yo-Yo Ma himself were there, people would pass him by.”
And so, to prove the point, he tried to get Yo-Yo Ma to play his cello in the D.C. Metro and see what would happen, except that Yo-Yo Ma turned him down. So he went to plan B, and invited a young virtuoso named Joshua Bell. Mr. Bell was intrigued by the idea and agreed to do it. So they arranged for him to play his violin and though he was not paid for it, he apparently played that morning as if he was being paid a million dollars. As Mr. Weingarten described it, here was “one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made.”
A child prodigy, Joshua Bell started playing violin at about 4 years of age. He plays more than two hundred international bookings a year and the cheap seats go for $100. Most recently, he was awarded the $75,000 Avery Fischer Prize for Classical music. In other words, he's a GIFTED musician.
So, on a Friday morning in January, just before 8 a.m., this renowned violinist arrived at the L'Enfant Plaza Metro station in DC dressed in jeans, a golf shirt, and a Washington Nationals baseball cap, and played his very expensive Stradivarius violin for the morning commuters. Most people passing through this station are government employees (strategists and policy analysts – well-educated people). It's important to note that the D.C. Metro is a very nice facility. It's clean, well lit, easy to navigate; the trains are quiet on the tracks; the complete opposite of the Boston T system. The concert lasted all of forty-three minutes in which Mr. Bell performed six classical masterpieces. And in that brief time span, 1097 people walked through the area where he played.
Of the 1097 people passing through the area, a grand total of seven individuals stopped for a least a minute to listen to the music. Everyone else, all 1090 of them, kept right on going. They were so focused on their tasks and to-do lists that they either didn't see Joshua Bell performing there or they just couldn't have been bothered; and they kept on going assuming he was just another street performer, kind of been-there-done-that attitude. A few people dropped some coins and bills in his violin case as they hurried by thinking he was just another average guy trying to make a few bucks that morning.
In reflecting on the event, Mr. Weingarten surmised that it's not that people are unsophisticated boors, and not that we can't see beauty, but that we're in too much of a hurry and we're not about to notice something absolutely spectacular that we're passing by.
Now, not everyone fit that description. There was one man who stayed for nine minutes. He was someone who had played the violin himself years earlier. He didn't know Joshua Bell, but he was the only one to realize that he was listening to a truly gifted violinist. And at the end, he humbly walked up and deposited $5 and rushed away. He was interviewed by a reporter from the Washington Post, as were all the spectators, and he said that he had wanted to be a concert violinist himself. And in walking away from Joshua Bell, he was walking away from the man he once wanted to be.
There was a mother and her three year old son. She was in a hurry to drop her son off at daycare and get to work, so she positioned herself between the child and the musician to reduce the distraction, but to no avail. Her son, like every child that passed through the area, looked with great curiosity and wanted to see more.
And there was a man working at Au Bon Pain on the other side of the doors from where Mr. Bell was playing and he stood on his tiptoes at the edge of the shop to try to hear the beautiful music, but he couldn't go and check it out.
Of the folks that walked on by, a few acknowledged the performer's presence by tossing some spare change in the violin case. In total, Joshua Bell collected $32.17 for his mini-concert. People actually threw pennies at Joshua Bell.
When the experiment was over, Mr. Bell was asked what it was like for him. He replied that he was astonished by the silence that followed the end of each piece of music; not because he expected people to recognize him or to applaud him for his great talent, but more that people might just acknowledge that music had just been played. I found his response to be humble and grace-filled in that he didn't get angry with people for not noticing his effort, but instead he recognized that people are busy and didn't expect a concert to be going on in the Metro. It was something totally out of the norm of their everyday experience and therefore they could hardly be blamed for having tuned it out.
In hearing this story, maybe it's the pastor in me, but I immediately thought of God - not that I equate Joshua Bell with God, but in the sense that God is the Almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth. And God gives us everything (our lives, homes, our jobs, children, our gifts and abilities, everything), and yet, how often we go through our days missing out on the beautiful music that God plays for us each and every day. In hearing about the meager collection of coins tossed in the violin case, I thought about the “pennies” we throw at the feet of God with our offerings.
Just as Joshua Bell and his music seemed to be invisible to the majority of people rushing through that Metro station, how much of life do we miss, rushing through the day to day activities with nary a thought about the God who made us and placed us on this earth and without whom we would cease to exist?
We live in a world today that is very similar to that which the Apostle Paul found in his missionary journey to Athens, Greece, thousands of years ago. At that time, people had set up all kinds of idols and worshiped all manner of gods and goddesses, seeing them as insurance policies for good luck. And just in case they forgot someone, they built a sort of catch-all altar and dedicated it to the unknown god.
When you stop and think about it, can we say that are our lives so different today? Granted, we don't have idols set up everywhere that we physically worship, but there are plenty of things that capture our allegiance and in which we place our trust above and beyond God.
We worship success and kill ourselves at the altar of work, sacrificing family and friends, to accumulate all the latest and greatest gadgets that money can buy; we worship money; we worship status. And the idols are not limited to our adult lives. Speak to any middle or high school student and there's a whole pantheon of idols to worship in the youth culture -- young girls worship “Ana” the goddess of anorexia. How many lives are shattered seeking to serve the idols of beauty, popularity, and athletic or scholastic competitiveness as young people feel pressured not to be themselves, but to be the BEST, because being yourself isn't good enough. This is the message the idols of society teach, but is this the message we want our young people to learn?
Like the people of Athens, we in this country are an extremely “religious or spiritual” people. But being spiritual isn't what it's all about. Paul's message, proclaimed to the Athenians, also serves as a reminder to us that God is the Creator of all -- giving life and breath to all things. In God, we live and move, and have our being - without God there is nothing. And for the Athenians that's what they believed, that you live out your days and then you die, and that's it. There's nothing more. But Paul dared to speak the Good News that God has made himself known in the person of Jesus Christ, the one who was killed by human hands and yet resurrected by God; the One who lives in us and with us as he promised and has made us God's children.
As Christian brothers and sisters we believe that in baptism, we are adopted as God's own people and marked and sealed with the cross of Christ. And every Sunday, we gather together invited to come to the Lord's Table to share in the body and blood of Christ, to be reminded that the Son of God, our Savior, lived and died, and was resurrected, and therefore opened the way for a relationship between us and God. And that relationship gives us many choices: The choice to live as people who run through the day unconsciously on autopilot; or as people who live in the moment with awareness of God's awesome presence in the most unexpected places and moments of our days.
Getting back to my earlier illustration, God is the master musician who plays for us all, not just one valuable violin, but a whole symphony of sound in this awesome concert hall that we know of as planet earth. Sometimes the music is sweet and melodic as in the times of joy and celebration in our lives. And at other times, the music seems to screech and grate becoming more difficult to listen to as reflected in the struggles of our lives. Being a child of God means recognizing that the symphony is made up of the whole range of music, the bitter and sweet.
Here in America, when we don't like the music, we have the luxury of changing the station and listening to any number of other more pleasant sounds. But sometimes that scratchy music is the sound of our brothers and sisters in the world who are in need - people in Haiti rioting over the lack of food; people in Iraq and Afghanistan faced with constant war; people in Gaza living in humanitarian crisis. The list goes on and on around the world and in our own backyards as neighbors struggle to buy food and pay their bills. We may have the luxury of changing the dial, but these people don't. They are stuck in the sound and wait for us to be the hands and heart of God sharing from our great wealth.
Indeed life is made up of the bitter and the sweet. Speaking of the bitter, there's talk that we're entering an economic recession which will cause us to curtail our activities and spending; but such a recession should not cause us to cut back on our faith. Recession or not, we are called to love God in Christ. And as Jesus said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” In summary, the commandments say, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and strength; and Love your neighbor as yourself.”
An economic recession need not diminish our love for one another, or the expression of that love. God invites us to join His passion for the world and give from our hearts to love one another.
Amen.
The Rev. Melissa Buono