HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR On the Importance of Being Ordinary Over the past few years, while working on my recent book, The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic, I became fascinated with how the author of John’s gospel develops the characters in his narrative. There are more memorable characters in the Fourth Gospel than anywhere else in the New Testament. The disciple Thomas is simply a name on a list in the other gospels, but in John, he becomes a doubter, placing the term “Doubting Thomas” into our language. John also includes a whole series of other crucial characters about whom none of the other gospels seem to have heard. Among them are Nathaniel, the “Beloved Disciple,” Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman by the well and Lazarus. These characters are so beautifully drawn that they not only become indelible, but their uniqueness raises the possibility that they are more symbolic figures than they are actual people of history. In this gospel, they also appear to represent different kinds of responses to Jesus. When one reads John deeply enough, each character seems to become a personality type whose diversity is sufficient that everyone can identify with one of them. Today I want to lift one of the Johannine characters out of the text and present him to you, my readers, as a possible role model, at least for some of us. His name is Andrew and I call him “The Patron Saint of Ordinary People.” Before the Fourth Gospel appeared, the only thing the New Testament tells us about Andrew is that he was the brother of Simon Peter, who everywhere in the New Testament, is portrayed as a leader. Andrew was thus one with only reflected status, primarily known by his relationship to another. Quite often in our still patriarchal world, women are known only as the wives of their husbands, and children are sometimes identified only as the son or daughter of a famous parent. This was the role of Andrew. Those whose primary identity is derived from a more famous person are not necessarily the stars, they are rather the ordinary people. While we continue to live in a culture of heroes, the world actually turns, I believe, on those who are ordinary people. Reading a history of World War II one might get the impression that America fought and won that war with only three soldiers: Eisenhower, MacArthur and Patton. Yet everyone knows that wars are won or lost not by the generals, but by the fighting, bleeding and dying of the foot soldiers, who are normally nameless. Before John’s gospel was written Andrew was a foot soldier, an ordinary person, identified only by his relationship with another. The Fourth Gospel then adds to that scant biography three short but telling stories. In the first chapter of John we are told that Andrew, the ordinary man, brought his brother to Jesus, thus making possible Peter, the extraordinary man. It was Peter, not Andrew, who was destined to become the first leader of the Christian community. In the sixth chapter of John’s gospel Andrew is the one who brings to Jesus the lad with five loaves and two fish. Given the dimensions of the crowd of thousands that needed to be fed, this gift was hardly a drop in the proverbial bucket. Andrew, however, was one who understood that no person’s gift was so small or insignificant that it could not be used and thus felt that it must be appreciated. The story says that Jesus took this gift and used it to feed the multitude. In the twelfth chapter of John’s gospel we are told that a group of Greek foreigners come seeking Jesus. This would make them, by Jewish standards, Gentiles, who were unclean, uncircumcised, non-Kosher and non-Torah observing people. It is Andrew, we are told, who becomes their guide, for no task is too insignificant for him to undertake. So through the dark streets of Jerusalem Andrew led them to the place where Jesus was. At that moment John has Jesus announce “My hour has come.” He then says: “Now the Son of Man will be glorified.” When I am lifted up on the cross, Jesus continues, “I will draw all people to me” and then the world will know “I AM,” then the world will know the meaning of God. Once again Andrew is the expeditor. He is always an ordinary person, but because he did the ordinary thing, great things seemed to happen all around him. No one is unqualified for this kind of role. Take a moment to recall a critical turning point in your own journey and remember who it was who stood with you at that moment, the one who might have said just the right word causing you to choose one path over another and you now recognize that your whole life was determined by that decision. Was that critical person not just an ordinary man or woman? At the risk of being an exhibitionist allow me to relate an intensely personal story that illustrates for me the role of the ordinary person. My father died when I was 12. My mother had not finished the 9th grade in school and thus had little ability to replace my father as our family’s bread winner. We soon fell into rather precarious poverty. For about two years, I was little more than a radically lost, insecure adolescent. Then someone came into my life through no action on my part. My church in Charlotte, North Carolina, chose a new rector. The year was 1946, World War II had come to an end, and the man chosen had just come out of the navy, where he had served as a chaplain on an aircraft carrier in the South Pacific. I do not know the process that enabled him to be chosen, but I do know that this choice determined the course of my life. This man was different from any minister or priest that I had ever known. First, he was only 32 years of age. That fact alone broke my priestly stereotype, for I had never known a priest who wasn’t old. I thought one probably had to be at least 80 to be ordained. Second, he wore white buck shoes. I had never known a priest to wear anything but black. lace-up oxfords. Third, he drove a Ford convertible. I thought priests only drove hearses. Finally, he had a stunningly beautiful wife. I thought clergy wives were dour, wearing only dark brown and navy blue with their hair in a bun at the back of their heads. This woman, however, was dashing and bejeweled. She even smoked cigarettes in a long golden cigarette holder. She was the most sophisticated woman I think I had ever met. I was so deeply drawn to this couple that I volunteered to do anything that enabled me to get closer to them, so I became the only acolyte in my church willing to serve at the 8:00 a.m. communion service. I was not a good acolyte– faithful, but not necessarily competent. My new rector was on the more catholic side of the Episcopal Church and he believed that no one should receive communion without fasting from midnight on. He worried that a bit of undigested toast might corrupt the body of Christ received at the Eucharist. So I came to that service fasting. At that time in my life, however, I was delivering the Charlotte Observer to about 150 houses each morning. This meant I would rise at 4:30 a.m., go to the corner where my papers were dropped off, fold them so that I could throw them on to the lawns of my subscribers, and, then, with my bicycle basket filled, I would set out to deliver them. I arrived home about 6:45 a.m. in sufficient time to shower, dress and catch a bus to my downtown church to do my acolyte duty at 8:00 a.m. By this hour of the morning, however, I was absolutely famished, but still committed to that fast. In the 1928 Prayer Book liturgy, my church used at that time, there was something called the “Prayer for the Whole State of Christ’s Church.” It was two pages long and reminded me of the mercy of God in that it seemed to me to endure forever! Inevitably, before we got through that prayer I began to feel strange, light-headed and very warm. Then I would either faint dead away and have to be carried bodily out of the sanctuary or else I would turn green and throw up leaving my offering at the foot of the altar. I never made it through that prayer. One of the reasons I championed Prayer Book revision in my adult career was to get rid of the “Prayer for the Whole State of Christ’s Church.” Despite this weakness in both my flesh and performance as an acolyte, my rector continued to want me to serve and when that 8:00 a.m. worship was over and I had recovered my equilibrium, this man and I would go half a block up the main street of Charlotte to a restaurant, have breakfast together and talk. I do not recall what we talked about, but I do know that in all my adolescent life, this was the only time an adult talked with me. I had many adults who talked to me or at me, but he talked with me. He even listened to my immature ideas; he asked questions to help me clarify my thinking. It was such a simple thing to do, such an ordinary thing, but to this lonely and lost fifteen year old boy, it was powerfully important and life-giving. I adored that man and wanted to be as much like him as I could be. He became the model for my life and I found my vocation to be a priest in my relationship with him. Was the man a great person? Was he even a great priest? Well, he was to me, but that was not how he was judged by the world. The world saw and judged him to be an ordinary man with ordinary weaknesses. After I left Charlotte to begin my university education he left our church in Charlotte to become the rector of a church in Louisiana. There he fell into an addiction to alcohol. It got so bad that he was finally removed from the priesthood. He died thinking of himself professionally as a failure, but he was a vital person, a change agent to me. The truth is that he was just an ordinary man who simply took the time to talk with a lost teenager. It was something that anybody could have done, but he did it. He was an Andrew. Most of us will not be generals who win battles or elected officials who will rise to political power. We may not become the chief executive of either a small business or of a great corporation, but we can make a difference, a profound difference in the lives of those around us in ordinary ways just by being sensitive, just by being a friend, just by saying the right word at the right time in the right circumstance. We can all be Andrews, the Patron Saint of ordinary people. ~John Shelby Spong Read the essay online here. Question & Answer Jack from Oklahoma writes: Question: I have heard you support the Unity Church for many reasons. One popular belief, held by Unity, is reincarnation. Do you believe it is possible for persons to be reincarnated? Answer: Dear Jack, Unity appeals to me because of that church’s positive view of human potential and because they do not wallow in guilt and sin as so many Christians seem to do. I have met people in Unity who are inquisitive about reincarnation, though this is clearly not a core teaching of the Unity movement. Prior to writing my book on Eternal Life (Eternal Life: A New Vision-Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell), I made an intensive study of reincarnation. I came out of that study completely agnostic about that question. It seems to me that reincarnation plays the same role in Eastern religious thought that heaven and hell play in Western religious thought. I feel its primary function is to control life here and now. Instead of reward and punishment being meted out in some place after life like heaven and hell, it is meted out in the next incarnation. Sinful people come back as lower caste people or sometimes even as animals. I am not interested in playing the game of judgment. I found no evidence that supports the idea of reincarnation and most of the evidence cited is anecdotal and, to my mind, bogus. It is more a human hope than a human reality. So put me down in the negative column or at least the unconvinced column. I would rather try to master the meaning of the life I have than to speculate about some future or past reincarnation. My best, John Shelby Spong Announcements Common Dreams 3 Conference Midwives of Change:Progressives Shaping Religious Communities From: September 19, 2013 to September 22, 2013 Manning Clark Centre, Australian National University Canberra, AUSTRALIA Common Dreams http://www.commondreams.org.au Click here for more information Any questions or concerns, please contact us at support@johnshelbyspong.com or 503-236-3545. Copyright © 2013 ProgressiveChristianity.org, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you have a membership at johnshelbyspong.com. Our mailing address is: ProgressiveChristianity.org 708 Broadway Suite 105 Tacoma, WA 98402 Add us to your address book .