“That Same Small Town in Each of Us”

• Scriptural Reference:Luke 1:46b-55
• December 16, 2007

The traditional four Sundays of Advent usually follow the themes of Peace, Love, Joy, and Hope. You’ll notice that we’ve been emphasizing different themes this year at WGBC. Our first Sunday called on us to develop and attitude of wakefulness. You see, without wakefulness, there can be no real and lasting joy. Last Sunday, we were called on to “rethink.” Without serious rethinking, we will never know peace. Next Sunday, we’ll speak of courage. Without courage, you really don’t have what it takes to love. This Sunday, we speak about trust because the roots of all hope sink deeply into the good, rich soil of trust.

Think of Mary. No one had more reason to quake in her shoes. She possessed less power and authority than any being above a beast of burden. Here was a teenaged girl in a society where pious men often uttered prayers of thanks in the temple that God had not made them either a gentile or a woman. She had no rights apart from either her father or her husband. She was poor, without rights, without independence, without the freedom to choose her own destiny, AND she was pregnant out of wedlock. These are circumstances you and I spend our lives avoiding. If we found ourselves in those circumstances, most of us would probably not be too hopeful concerning the future.

Yet read the words of Luke 1:46b-55. These words constitute a set of lyrics attributed to Mary and traditionally known as “The Magnificat.” The lyrics gush with hope and confidence.

My soul praises the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

For he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant.

From now on, all generations will call me blessed,

For the Mighty One has done great things for me – Holy is his name.

Hello, Mary! Earth to Mary! Are you paying attention? “He has done great things for you”? Right now, if the righteous people in town had their way, they’d have you outside the city limits standing in the stoning pit. You’re nothing, girl! How in God’s name can you say that future generations will call you blessed?

Those are logical questions we might ask Mary, but really, those questions don’t really stem from derision – they rise out of our astonishment. What is it that gives this girl such confidence even though she’s apparently mired in a sticky social mud that would such most anyone under? She hears our questions, nods her head knowingly, and just smiles at us.

I think Mary can be so confident because she doesn’t look in the direction of the society around her for her happiness. She has risen above the dreams of the crowd. She has dreamed God’s dream and her soul can never be so small as to be oppressed by the expectations of the society around her. Mary’s perspective has grown larger than her own life. She sees the sweep of history – “he has brought down rulers from their thrones” – and knows that it’s not about her. It’s about God’s dreams, God’s desires. She trusts this God whom she knows. That trust gives her hope.

Psychologists tell us that basic trust is one of the most important developmental tasks a child has. If that basic trust doesn’t develop, the rest of life will be fraught with difficulties. Erik Erikson observed this in his book, “The Stages of Man.”

The first stage, Trust vs. Mistrust, occurs from approximately birth to one year. Erikson defined trust as an essential trustfulness of others as well as a fundamental sense of one's own trustworthiness. He thought that an infant who gets fed when he is hungry and comforted when he needs comforting will develop trust. He also said that some mistrust is necessary to learn to discriminate between honest and dishonest persons. If mistrust wins over trust in this stage, the child will be frustrated, withdrawn, suspicious, and will lack self-confidence. (Wendy Sharky)

Trust and trustworthiness are perhaps the most essential ingredients of a functioning and happy society. The reason why we need laws and regulations lies in the simple fact that we don’t trust everyone to do the right thing. This is why we have a hard time achieving hope in much of today’s society. The social contract seems to be breaking down. You hear people nostalgically recollecting times in their old home towns when the doors were never locked and you could leave your keys in your car.

Don Henley and Bruce Hornsby’s song, “End of the Innocence” expresses this sentiment. “Who knows how long this will last/ How we’ve come so far so fast/Somewhere back there in the dust/ That same small town in each of us.”

“Lawyers dwell on small details since daddy had to fly.”

The end of the innocence implies so much that we lament. Any deep thinking parent dreads the day when the child will let fly with that fowl word at the dinner table that you know they didn’t learn at home. There is a huge pain that shoots through the breast when you realize that the wider society has gotten its talons into your child’s soul. That’s when you have to count on the trust that child developed in those first years when no one had a claim on his or her soul but you and God.

This is one reason why some people resist change. They lament so deeply the loss of that “small town” in their memory. They don’t believe anything to come can be anything close to as meaningful as what was in the past.

The Book of Ecclesiastes warns us, though, not to idealize the “good ol’ days.” In chapter 7:10, the Preacher says, “Do not say, ‘Why were the old days better than these?’ For it is not wise to ask such questions.”

Once when I was working in the psychiatric clinic at the University of Louisville Medical Center, I got with my teacher and supervisor, Wayne Oates, to review how I was caring for a particular person. I told Dr. Oates that among other things, the patient I was seeing seemed terribly disillusioned with life. “Well,” Oates said, “if you’re living with an illusion, it’s a good thing to be disillusioned.”

I don’t need to get into the specifics of what was going on with the young man in question, but after inspecting the situation more the young man and I came to the conclusion together that indeed, he HAD been living with an illusion and what he was experiencing with his tremendous sense of despair was simply the grief of losing his imaginary world.

That same small town in each of us never did exist. Ozzie and Harriet might have been real for a few people but not for anyone I knew. My own mother went into the work force in 1957. From the time I was three years old, I was in child care, kindergarten, and came home to an empty house. Some of you might think I’m warped and in many ways I am, but not because of the fact that “Father Knows Best,” never characterized my raising. In fact, it’s doubtful whether “Father Knows Best” characterizes my current situation. We do ourselves and our current world a huge disservice trying to get it to correspond to a world that never existed. We’ll never be able to get the present to correspond to that internal image/ideal we carry with us. If we think somehow that’s what we’re supposed to achieve, we’ll see our hope dissipate like morning mist under a summer sun.

Mary had no illusions. She had no false props. No social scaffolding had ever been constructed for her benefit. In many ways, she and females like her WERE the scaffolding on which the male dominated society built itself. She only knew the weight of the whole thing crushing her. She was hopeful because she knew that Reality Himself had declared that scaffolding to be rickety and condemned it. God was building something new and she knew she was at the center of it.

I was talking with a friend the other day. He asked me how Melissa was doing at Radford and I told him about how Melissa has decided not to follow in her dad’s path when he was a freshman. Melissa attends class, studies, and is making good grades. He laughed remembering himself how he hadn’t exactly hit the ball out of the park his first year in school, either. Then he grew thoughtful. “They sure grow up fast, don’t they?”

Mind you, this sort of talk always makes me uncomfortable. Yes, they DO grow up fast and it only seems like yesterday when they were young, and all of a sudden I’m repeating all the clichés I heard older people using back when I was younger. Little did I know . . .

Then he surprised me. He said, “Did you ever toss her in the air?” His eyes had a far away look in them as he stared off toward the horizon. I knew what he really saw as he talked about it. He saw that little girl, brown hair all askew, standing on top of an eight-foot wood pile behind their North Carolina home near Cullowhee, in the North Carolina Mountains. There she stood, poised on the edge of some wobbly logs, arms outstretched to either side, giggling uncontrollably as she launched herself out into space. And for a brief second, she was suspended in mid-air, utterly fearless, completely joyful. Why? She knew that her dad would catch her.

My friend sighed. “We loved that game,” he said.

I remembered how Melissa and I would do almost the same thing in our back yard in Winchester.

“Where is she now,” I asked.

“Well, she graduated from Mars Hill College and got her MD from Wake Forest. But did she go into private practice? No, instead, she’s working with Doctors without Borders in Nicaragua in a very poor village in the north eastern section of the country, up where there’re few roads and precious few utilities. She’s been there ever since some hurricane hit a few years back.”

“Wow,” I said, “I admire that.”

He sighed again and we sat in silence for a few minutes. I felt like I needed to make him feel better, or something. Anyway the quiet had gotten a little awkward for me, the eternal extrovert, so I said, “Things sure can change, can’t they? We never know what our kids’ll end up doing.”

“Yeah.” Then he didn’t say anything for a few minutes. This time, I just kept my mouth shut.

Then he said, “Really, when you think about it, it’s just like it was on that wood pile.”

I said, “Huh?”

“Sure. She learned that her father would catch her. When she went to Nicaragua she threw herself off the wood pile. She learned that her father would catch her, and so she knows that’ll still happen.”

Hope doesn’t come by trying to reclaim that same small town we somehow imagine used to be. Hope comes when we toss ourselves off the wood pile and discover that our Father is always faithful to catch us.