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He's Our MiracleMarch 02, 2008 Fourth Sunday in Lent This past week there was a story in The New York Times sports section about a certain high school wrestler from Ohio named Dustin Carter. [1] Since I’m a sucker for a story like this I had wet eyes by the end. Carter is a unique competitor; 18-years-old and weighing in at 103 pounds, his legs end just below his hips, his right arm stops just after his elbow and his left arm is even shorter. At the age of five he suffered a devastating blood infection that required extensive amputations. But Carter is a stubborn competitor who has racked up a 41 – 2 record in his weight class, winning several tournaments in the process and establishing his position among the best wrestlers in the state. The context for the Times story was a recent match that went into triple overtime that secured his slot in Ohio’s annual statewide wrestling tournament. After the final whistle Carter scuttled to the center of the mat and let out two loud screams. “His family, wearing buttons with pictures of Carter, surrounded him as he galloped to his father and leaped into his arms. They cried into each other’s shoulders. The friends and family who surrounded them shed tears as well. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever felt such elation in my life,’ [his mother said]…” [2] We can only infer the issues that Carter has faced in his young life. His father reported that Dustin is fiercely stubborn. “‘I don’t look at myself as different,’ Dustin said… ‘I wrestle like anybody else. I go to school like anybody else. I can live on my own like anybody else. I can do anything anybody else can do. I don’t like people feeling sorry for me. Some people do.’” [3] After a competitive wrestling career in college he wants to become a nutritionist and motivational speaker. Sounds like he has all that he needs to successfully live into these goals. I noticed yesterday that AOL picked this story up in their frontloaded news with a link to Carter’s YouTube site if you’re interested. [4] You’ll find the link in an endnote on the online version of this message tomorrow. Dustin Carter’s story got me thinking about several things, especially the idea of entitlement. That’s a very loaded word within our culture, made all the more so when embedded within the political discourse, as in, the so-called entitlements of social security and health care, and so on. But bringing our vision lower, I have in mind this morning subtler associations with the word that occurred to me as I considered Dustin’s existential situation of living without legs or hands, and by comparison to most of the rest of us, how well he manages to do this without whining complaint – to the point of insisting he not be thought of as different from anyone else. Granted, we’ve been exposed to just a small snapshot of his life, and careful not to sentimentalize or over-dramatize, or otherwise exploit Dustin’s story, I couldn’t help thinking about the lie most of us tell ourselves much of the time pertaining to matters of what I’ll call “elemental entitlements.” This lie fuels the illusion that we deserve the various gifts and abilities we have as well as whatever we’ve managed to accumulate through the exercise of our various powers, and it fuels our public or private whining about whatever hasn’t come our way that we otherwise believe we deserve. As far as I can tell, this is a universal human condition with as many permutations as there are people. So, for instance, if we’re at least somewhat prosperous we believe we deserve it. If we’re not, we believe we deserve to be. In either case, it’s the idea that we deserve anything at all that captures my attention. This same lie sits beneath the story we heard Javier read from John’s gospel. It’s a great story which your pew Bible entitles, “A Man Born Blind Receives Sight.” As Frederick Niedner points out, “Most of us assume that we deserve the ability to see…” The logic of the Pharisees then led them to believe that “somehow this blind man, and everyone else like him, must have forfeited sight through some error in judgment. We’ll surely see to it that we never make that mistake.” [5] That’s why the disciples asked, “Who sinned?” Since we deserve to see, goes the logic, then someone must have really messed up. “Along with the delusion that we can keep our lives and control our destinies through [personal] rectitude, we live in the steadfast but patently absurd conviction that we deserve all the gifts that have come to us, including sight, hearing, taste – even life itself…” [6] We believe we deserve love and a reasonably uncomplicated life. This is especially true of those of us who have had access to more than life’s simple necessities, which would include most everyone here. Surely our political talk about the so-called social entitlements are laced with a patchwork of powerful projections of each of our latent ideas about our own deserved entitlements. I have no intention of wrangling over politics this morning and questions about who should get what when. And I also don’t want to discard notions of fairness and justice in the process. I simply want to make the point that most, probably all, humans function from the faulty supposition that we deserve anything at all, starting with life itself. I’m thinking here about our fundamental spiritual situation. It’s pretty clear in our story that the Pharisees think the healing this man received came on the wrong day, to the wrong person, from an unlicensed and renegade healer. Lost in the mix is the fact that the man can now, and for real, see. Even his parents get tangled up in the hidden discourse about who deserves what. They don’t want to find themselves on the wrong side of the community spirit. There’s a text in Deuteronomy that is often read during the Thanksgiving season. It comes as God’s word spoken through Moses to the Israelites, who says, “Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God…When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied and all that you have is multiplied, then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God….Do not say to yourself, ‘My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth,’ but remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth…” [7] We have not been on the receiving end of a wonderful array of gifts because we deserved them. But having whatever it is that we have, whether it seems great or small, we hold an awesome responsibility to live with an attitude of extravagant gratitude maximizing our options in a spirit of generous abundance. And yes, of course, this has ramifications about how we are to love our neighbors. When Tertullian, the third century historian exclaimed, “See how [the Christians] love one another!” [8] he referenced the early manifestation of this spirit within certain Christian communities. Could that be said of so-called Christian societies today? What we learn from our scriptures and tradition is that the proper orientation towards life has its root in the soil of a spiritual humility in which we acknowledge life is a gift from start to finish, however short or long it might be. That all our various powers are gifts. That God is the source point. This is one of the lessons we draw from the story of the blind man. Surprised as I read the sports pages this week, that’s the lesson I learned yet one more time from Dustin Carter. It was a counter-intuitive lesson. A surprising lesson. Humbling too. Dustin’s mother says of him, “He’s our miracle. He’s our son, our hero and our miracle.” The blind man’s parents did not arrive at that same conclusion so far as our story goes, but he, too, was an obvious miracle. As we all are from the perspective of what we have and are. Living, breathing, miracles, every last one of us, receivers of astonishing gifts. It’s all in how we look at things and what we see in the looking.
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