Hey Jude
a sermon given by the Rev. Roger Paine
on All Saints Sunday, November 4, 2007
at The First Parish in Lincoln
To listen to this sermon click here.
“Lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for.”
– Clarence Darrow
“...take a sad song and make it better...”
– From ‘Hey Jude’ - The Beatles
READINGS:
1. Our first reading is from a speech given on the floor of the United States Senate in the 1939 film, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” James Stewart plays the role of Mr. Smith, who is about to be voted out of the Senate because of false accusations against him. In what is considered one of the virtuoso scenes in 1930's films, he stages a one-man, 23-hour filibuster to defend his proposal for a national boys’ camp. Here are a few of his lines:
I've got a few things I want to say to this body. I tried to say them once before and I got stopped colder than a mackerel. Well, I'd like to get them said this time, sir. And as a matter of fact, I'm not gonna leave this body until I do get them said.
It's a funny thing about men, you know. They all start life being boys. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if some of these Senators were boys once. And that's why it seemed like a pretty good idea for me to get boys out of crowded cities and stuffy basements for a couple of months out of the year... get boys from all over the country, boys of all nationalities and ways of living. Get them together. Let them find out what makes different people tick the way they do. Because I wouldn't give you two cents for all your fancy rules if, behind them, they didn't have a little bit of plain, ordinary, everyday kindness and a little lookin' out for the other fella, too...
But of course, if you've got to build a dam where that boys camp ought to be, to pay off some political army, and if you think I'm going back to tell those boys in my state, “Forget about that camp,” well, you’ve got another think comin’. A guy like me should never be allowed to get in here in the first place. I know that!
I guess this is just another lost cause. And you think I'm licked. You all think I'm licked. Well, I'm gonna stay right here and fight for this lost cause even if this room gets filled with lies. Somebody’ll listen to me. Some...”
Right in the middle of that word, Mr. Smith collapses unconscious to the floor and is carried out to the cloakroom. He has been on his feet, speaking non-stop, for almost a day. Here ends the first reading.
2. Our second reading is from The Letter of Jude, which I had never noticed before. It’s in the New Testament right before the book of Revelation, and it’s just one chapter – 25 verses. Jude is warning the faithful about people in their midst who are “grumblers and malcontents...following their own passions...” Here is a little of what he had to say about them:
These people slander whatever they do not understand. They are loud-mouthed boasters, flattering people to gain advantage. They are waterless clouds carried along by the winds; autumn trees without fruit, twice dead, uprooted; wandering stars, for whom the deepest darkness has been reserved forever. But you, beloved, build yourselves up on your most holy faith; pray in the Holy Spirit; keep yourselves in the love of God; and have mercy on some who are wavering...
– Selected from Jude 1:10-12, 16, 20-22
The Victorian poet, Matthew Arnold, called Oxford University “the home of lost causes.”
In fact, I think every school should be the home of lost causes,
because if we’re going to learn what we need to from the past,
we can’t always assume that the winning cause must have been right.
History is written by the winners, and you hope the winners’ causes were honorable and just,
but we know that sometimes it’s the losers who were on the side of the angels,
so our schools should make us dig deep and understand what the losers were fighting for.
All their losses have inspired a rich literature of books and films about the noble Lost Cause –
Clarence Darrow’s famous line that “lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for”
became the theme for the film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
So what are some of the lost causes worth fighting for?
What would you put on your list?
On most days, world peace feels like a lost cause –
but that doesn’t stop us, every Christmas, from singing out our hope for peace on earth.
Is ending hunger a lost cause?
Is feeling safe in the aftermath of 9/11 a lost cause?
Is plain-spoken truth a lost cause in a world of commercial and political spin?
The poetry of the noble Lost Cause is that we don’t really think the cause is lost.
Not once and for all.
Because we can’t bear to think that.
What the lost causes we care about have in common is their idealism and their compassion –
their improbable but compelling vision of a world that chooses peace over war,
a world in which everyone has enough to eat,
a world in which no child dies of a disease we can’t cure.
We know the odds are long.
But we can’t bear to think that these causes are really lost – and so we hope, and we fight.
When I first started thinking about a sermon for this morning,
I knew I wanted to talk about lost causes – because there are so many of them –
and I knew this was All Saints Sunday, so I wondered: is there a patron saint of lost causes?
And sure enough, there is: it’s St. Jude.
The scholars are not sure who Jude was or where he came from,
but the Catholic tradition believes he was one of Jesus’ cousins,
and we know that Jude was a missionary for the early Christian church.
He traveled around the Mediterranean, encouraging converts and new church starts.
He was, by all accounts, a gentle man, but his life ended violently in the year 65:
he was beaten to death in Persia, which is modern-day Iran.
For many years after his death, Jude, because of his name, was confused with Judas,
the disciple who betrayed Jesus, so believers wanted nothing to do with him,
but he finally started gaining followers when people realized who he really was.
Here in America, St. Jude was adopted by the city of Chicago in the 1920's,
where he was very popular among newly-arrived immigrants,
and today he is the patron saint of the Chicago Police Department.
Now I don’t know whether the Chicago police think of themselves as a lost cause,
but Jude’s brief letter in the New Testament is about persevering in very difficult situations,
and that’s why he has become known as the patron saint of lost causes.
Lots of hospitals are named after him,
the most famous of which is St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital in Memphis,
which specializes in treating children with terminal illnesses.
You call on St. Jude when all else has failed,
and if you believe he intervenes, if you believe he has helped you,
then the custom is to thank him in writing.
As a result, “Thank you, St. Jude” shows up regularly in the personals columns of daily newspapers.
In “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” Jeff Smith needed St. Jude with him on the floor of the Senate.
For those of you who have never seen the film, and as a reminder for the rest of us,
the story begins when the governor of Illinois appoints Jeff Smith, who is a local hero,
to serve out the term of the state’s junior senator, who has just died.
Mr. Smith is so wide-eyed and innocent that he’s almost goofy,
and the corrupt party bosses choose him because they believe he will be their patsy,
not because he can be bought, but because he won’t understand what’s happening.
On his arrival in Washington, Mr. Smith is dazzled by the monuments, and he visits them all.
He’s a country boy, but he can quote the Founding Fathers from memory.
And in the Senate, he proposes a national boys’ camp in his home state – he has the perfect site for it.
But the governor who appointed him and the other senator from Illinois
have been paid off by special interests who want to build a dam on that site –
a dam that will serve no one, but the project will line some deep pockets.
I found this story line oddly reassuring.
I’ve been so crestfallen by what’s going on in Washington
that it actually made me feel better to realize that a film about Congress, made in 1939,
could feel so up-to-date: today’s problems are not new.
And although Mr. Smith is hokey, he’s a breath of fresh air – and he learns fast.
He uses a Senate procedure, the filibuster, to force his colleagues to listen to him.
And when he goes after the corrupt party bosses, he could have quoted St. Jude:
“These people slander whatever they do not understand!
They are waterless clouds carried along by the winds,
loud-mouthed boasters, flattering people to gain advantage.”
Mr. Smith is fighting for a lost cause, he gives it everything he’s got, and he collapses to the floor,
they carry him to the cloakroom, but in the end, the truth comes out –
the bad guys crumble and the lost cause is won.
It is, of course, a movie, but even so, the lesson in it is:
when you decide you’re going to fight for a lost cause,
you go in knowing you may well fail.
But you also know that they’ll have to carry you out, because you’ll never give up.
Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley say that if you haven’t failed, you’re not trying hard enough.
Michael Jordan, who may be the greatest basketball player ever, has said,
“I’ve missed more than nine thousand shots in my career.
I’ve lost almost three hundred games.
Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the winning shot and missed.” (Farson, 31-32)
I think it’s interesting that he actually kept count of all his misses.
He says that’s why he did so well: keeping count made him that much more determined to do better.
Last month, the New York Times’ columnist, Tom Friedman visited five colleges –
Auburn, the University of Mississippi, Lake Forest, Brandeis and Williams –
and the students he met were “much more optimistic and idealistic” than he thought they’d be.
He says, “Whether it was at Ole Miss or Williams or my alma mater, Brandeis,
college students today are not only going abroad in record numbers,
but they are also going abroad to build homes for the poor in El Salvador in record numbers
or volunteering at AIDS clinics in record numbers.”
All the fear-mongering in the wake of 9/11 has not kept them from traveling.
Mr. Friedman says, “They are rolling up their sleeves and diving in deeper than ever.”
If they seem less politically engaged than their 1960's counterparts,
it’s because they are more engaged in making a difference
in the villages and in the lives of everyday people.
They see many of today’s politicians as a lost cause, but they’re right there with Mr. Smith:
what matters is “a little bit of plain, ordinary, everyday kindness,
and a little lookin’ out for the other fella, too...”
One year ago, a banker from Bangladesh won the Nobel Peace Prize.
His name is Muhammad Yunus, and he started a new category of banking known as micro-credit,
giving small loans to poor people with no collateral,
people who could never qualify for a conventional loan.
This program has made it possible for millions of people in Bangladesh, most of them women,
to buy everything from cows to cell phones and start their own businesses;
the number of poor people helped by micro-credit is now well over 100 million world-wide.
A hundred million people who were thought of as lost causes,
whose lives were changed because one man had an out-of-the-box idea
and made it happen in his home country.
The average loan to all of those people is $200 U.S. dollars.
The young people who handed you your Order of Service when you arrived this morning
want to do a service project together sometime during the church year.
We’re looking for ideas.
We know we can’t all be innovative bankers, like Muhammad Yunus.
Our service may be more the peon kind – and the world needs that from us, too.
In that spirit, I want to close by reading a few lines from a letter I’ve kept on file for 40 years.
It’s from a college student named Karen, who I met when I was at Yale.
She organized a group of volunteers from New England
to go spend two summers living and working in a small village in Mexico.
During their first summer they dug latrines to help reduce the spread of disease.
In their second summer, which was 1967, the “Summer of Love” in San Francisco,
they built a town plaza.
Here is what Karen wrote not long after she arrived in the village of Calixtlahuaca that second summer:
“Returning to a village is like nothing I have before experienced –
everyone cried and declared our return a miracle.
I spent two days talking with all the ‘great important hombres,’
and everyone was very frank for the first time, and this will be a summer
of living as equals rather than our last year’s position as ‘the noble ones.’
The people in the village seem older and poorer –
perhaps that is because the wonder of the mountains and sky are over
and what is left is the reality of the poverty –
the heavy weight of corn on an eight-year-old’s back.
But a good doctor has come – he rides around town on a bike, wearing a Ben Casey shirt,
and really works for the two hours a day he is here,
and the space is cleared for the plaza – the latrines smell, a testament to their use.
A man has shown me his lettuce, planted with care –
hopefully a new business for him in a village where all one eats is corn.”
I believe St. Jude was there with her and her team of volunteers and those villagers, cheering them on.
In the song, “Hey Jude,” the Beatles sing this memorable line: “take a sad song and make it better.”
That’s what Karen was trying to do down there.
That’s what any of us are trying to do when we fight for a lost cause.
And the church, like the university, should be the home of the lost cause.
Amen.