In January, we celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr Day. In February we will celebrate the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln on Presidents’ Day, and observe Black History Month. While we all owe a debt of gratitude to great historic figures for their great historic acts, we should also remember, as George Eliot wrote, in her novel Middlemarch, that…
The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.We are dependent not only on the historic acts of historic figures, but on the unhistoric acts of people who live faithfully, who do justly, who love kindly, and walk humbly with God. I’m sure you can think of someone who intervened in your life at a key moment. I am thinking of my sixth grade teacher.
In elementary school, I was an indifferent student, and an embarrassed reader. One day my sixth grade teacher called me to sit beside her desk and quietly explained to me that I would fail reading that semester, unless I read a book a week for the next nine weeks. I didn’t think that was possible. I didn’t come from a family of readers, we were avid watchers of television. As a child, I felt I was as much (or more) a part of the Brady family and the Partridge family as the Griffin family. I was sure I could not read a book a week, but my teacher was sure that I could.
So I went home that day, with a book from the school library, a book that my teacher recommended. When I got home, instead of sitting on the sofa for the usual fare of Gilligan’s Island, followed by Hogan’s Heroes and Star Trek, I sat in a chair and told my mom I had to read. And I read. The book was called Freaky Friday. That’s right, like True Grit, it was a book before it was made into a movie based on a movie! When Mom called me for supper, I was astonished to realize that I was one chapter away from the end of the book. I had read almost a whole book in a day, and I hadn’t thought I could read one in a week.
My sixth grade teacher changed the course of my life, by telling me I could do better. Through this simple, unhistoric act, she saved me—she became an agent of my salvation. I was saved from being a sixth-grade failure, and from whatever comes of being a sixth-grade failure.
Sometimes, people just need to know that they can do better. The apostle Paul knew this, and I believe that is why he began nearly all his letters with thanksgiving to God, for the people to whom he was writing. Sometimes he wrote to correct the people, sometimes to encourage the people, but whether to comfort or cajole, he first expressed his thanks for the people. In giving thanks, he was reminding them who they were. Not isolated individuals but members of one body in Christ; not powerless, but endowed with the power of the Holy Spirit.
Paul speaks to us through these pages, to remind us of who we are: We are God’s children, fed by God’s Holy Spirit, given authority to continue the work begun in Christ, saving the world in Christ’s name. We each have our part to sing, our role to play, our work to do.
We owe a debt of gratitude to the past, to the historic and unhistoric acts of the saints who have gone before us. And the best way to pay our debt to the past (wrote John Buchan) is to put the future in debt to us. Without ever expecting to collect interest, for all that we are we owe to others, who have themselves been agents of our salvation. Let us go, and do likewise.
