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The Class of ‘77
A sermon by Dr. Jim
Somerville
Pastor, Richmond’s First Baptist Church
Richmond, Virginia
March 8, 2009
The Second Sunday in Lent
Mark 8:31-38
The Phillips Exeter
Academy is one of those fancy New England prep schools that was founded just
after the American Revolution, one that has been busy building its reputation
ever since. It’s a place with ivy-covered brick buildings, where boys walk
across campus in coat and tie to attend classes where they sit around enormous
oak tables discussing politics and Proust, and eventually trudge off to Harvard,
Princeton, and Yale to make their parents proud. Although I am not that kind
of person and never have been, I somehow ended up at Exeter. That’s a story in
itself, but it’s not the story I came to tell this morning. That story is about
a letter that came to my house not long ago. It was a letter from Margaret
Spencer, correspondent for the Class of 1977. She was asking me to please share
a little bit of the news of my life so she could type it up for the class notes
in the quarterly bulletin. She was begging, actually, because it’s been so long
since I’ve sent any news of any kind to Exeter, but there’s a reason for that:
The competition is just
too intense.
When I read through the
class notes in the bulletin I find that my classmates have been up to all sorts
of interesting things since we graduated back in ’77. Charlie Singer, who used
to listen to “American Top 40” every Sunday, is some sort of executive vice
president at MTV. His roommate, Jamie Trowbridge, took over his father’s job as
publisher of the popular Yankee magazine (popular if you are a Yankee,
that is). Tom Parkinson and his brother started the Peapod grocery delivery
network. Steve Frary now owns the Oriental Trading Company, the one that sells
all those tacky plastic prizes they give away at elementary school parties. And
Carl Stork, the guy who used to work with me as janitor in the Academy library,
went to work for a little company called Microsoft and recently bought a
professional baseball team.
As glamorous as it is to
be the pastor of Richmond’s First Baptist Church, it is a very different life
than that led by some of my classmates. They send in their news all the time,
with pictures of the family skiing in the Swiss Alps or snorkeling in Tahiti.
They talk about their book deals, their business deals, their latest
professional triumphs. They say things like, “Loving our new vacation home in
Singapore!” or “Stop by next time you are in Athens!” So, I’m reluctant to send
my news to Margaret Spencer. Every time I read the class notes my own perfect
life seems to pale by comparison.
I went to Exeter when I
was fifteen years old and I like to joke that I got there on the
“poor-preacher’s-kid-from-West-Virginia” scholarship. I don’t know if that’s
what they really call it, but I did go on a scholarship. They have such a huge
endowment at Exeter that they only start to ask the financial questions after
you’ve been accepted. If you have money and can pay the tuition, then you do,
but if you don’t have it and can’t, then you don’t. I didn’t and couldn’t. But
it seemed like everybody else did and could. I could walk down the hall of my
dormitory and point out the rooms of kids whose fathers were heads of
corporations, bank presidents, and foreign dignitaries. I had never seen so
much affluence in my life, and it made me feel that much poorer. Before I came
to Exeter I had gone shopping at the Goodwill store in Charleston, West
Virginia, the fancy one, but these kids’ entire wardrobes came from Brooks
Brothers, Saks, Abercrombie and Fitch. Still they were nice enough to me, and
one of them invited me home for Thanksgiving break.
His name was John and he
lived in Manhattan. We took the chartered bus to New York along with about
thirty other kids from Exeter, and then took a cab over to his parents’ condo on
Central Park West. Central Park West, I say, where they owned an entire
floor of a building that looked out over the park. I didn’t know enough at that
time to be impressed by the location, but I was impressed by the fact that when
we got off the elevator we stepped out not into a hallway, but into the kitchen
of John’s house. The next morning he and I took that elevator down to
the ground floor and walked out through the front door where the doorman, who
knew John by name, blew his whistle and a cab came around and took us to F.A.O.
Schwartz, the world’s biggest toy store. It was like that for the rest of the
time I was there: we took cabs everywhere we went and we went to fancy
restaurants, Broadway shows, and expensive stores. I took it all in just as you
might expect a poor boy from West Virginia to do—gawking up at the tall
buildings and saying “gollleee!” about every two minutes.
On Wednesday night John’s
dad drove us out to their place in Connecticut, an old gristmill that had won
lots of awards for the architect who turned it into a home. It was beautiful,
and comfortable, and when we sat down to Thanksgiving dinner the next day it
looked like something from the cover of Bon Appetit. The cook had slaved
through the day to get everything just right. I don’t know that I had ever
eaten a better meal. So it might not surprise you that during the dessert
course I decided this was the kind of life I wanted to lead. I wanted to do
whatever you had to do to make this kind of money, so I could live in a swanky
condo on Central Park West, and take taxicabs everywhere, and go to Broadway
shows, and then come out to the weekend place in Connecticut. I went back to
Exeter determined to study hard, believing (along with everyone else who was
there) that if I got a good education I could get a good job and make a lot of
money and buy a lot of things and be deliriously happy for the rest of my life.
I think I’ve told you that
my dad, who was a Presbyterian minister, had taken what amounted to a vow of
poverty when he went to work with the poor in West Virginia. Mom used to tell
me that he could have made plenty of money, but this had been his choice,
to come live among the poor as one of them to see what he could offer in the way
of help. He thought it was the sort of thing Jesus might do. So, we lived in
this old, white farmhouse up on a hill. It, and the 28 acres of land that came
with it, had been priced to sell at 4,000 dollars when we bought it and the
first time my dad walked through the house the floorboards in the living room
gave way under him. The house didn’t have running water, and so we carried
buckets from a well up on the hill and used an old outhouse that had a beautiful
view of the valley. I hadn’t thought about any of this much before spending a
week in New York, but when my friend John called and said he would like to come
spend a week with me I panicked. As I looked around and pictured John coming
there, spending a week in that house, living with my family…well, I tried to
talk him out of it.
But he came anyway;
driving down the next week in the new car his parents had bought for him. He
got there on my dad’s birthday and sat with us at the table for the birthday
dinner. I couldn’t help comparing the meagerness of that meal with the
abundance of the Thanksgiving dinner I had shared with John’s family. And then
my mom brought out the cake, which looked embarrassingly homemade, and we all
sang the birthday song and watched Dad blow out the candles. I kept glancing
toward John to see how he was taking this—birthday dinner with the Clampetts—but
he seemed to be fine, smiling and singing along with the rest of us. But when
Dad started to open his presents I remembered what I had bought for him, two
weeks earlier. Dad used to drive all over the place in those days in his old
car with the vinyl seats and no air conditioning. I would watch him get out of
the car sometimes on a hot summer day with his thin, cotton shirt glued to his
back with sweat. So I had seen this ventilated plastic seat cover at K-mart
that allowed the air to circulate between the driver and the seat and I had
thought it would be perfect, especially at the bargain price of three dollars.
But that was before I knew John was coming—John, who probably bought his dad a
new Rolex for each wrist.
The closer Dad came to
opening my gift the more I squirmed, and when he finally took the paper off I
was mortified. Anybody in the room could see that it was the cheapest gift of
all, and yet Dad made this huge fuss over it, looking me in the eye and telling
me how thoughtful it was and how much he appreciated it. It cost three
dollars, for crying out loud, at K-mart, and yet he acted as if I had
given him a new car and not just a flimsy plastic seat cover. I couldn’t even
look at John. I just sank lower and lower in my chair, wishing I could
disappear.
But a funny thing
happened. After spending a week with my family in the squalor of our West
Virginia home John wrote a letter to my parents telling them how grateful he was
for their hospitality and how much he had enjoyed the week. “It was wonderful
to be with your family,” he said, near the end. “And I have to say, honestly,
that in all my life I have never felt more loved.” My parents appreciated the
letter and let me read it, and I could hardly believe my eyes. I looked at that
last line over and over again, the one where John said he had never felt more
loved, and then I began to remember how it had been at his house. I was too
overwhelmed by the luxury to let it bother me much but John and his parents
really didn’t get along. He would yell at his mother and she would get quiet,
chopping vegetables in the kitchen with a pained expression on her face. John
hated his little sister, as far as I could tell; they fought constantly. And at
that beautiful Thanksgiving dinner I had watched as John’s father drank glass
after glass of red wine and began to fold up as if he were made of wet cardboard
while John’s mother sat at the other end of the table and glared. I hadn’t
wanted to see it at the time, but it was there: lots and lots of money; very
little love.
Our Gospel lesson for
today comes just after Jesus has asked his disciples who people are saying that
he is. “John the Baptist, Elijah, or one of the other prophets,” they answer.
“But you,” he asks, “who do you say that I am?” And Peter answers, “You
are the Messiah.” And then Jesus tells them what it means to be the Messiah:
that it doesn’t mean sitting on a big, shiny throne in Jerusalem; it means
suffering and dying. Peter can’t believe it. It is so contrary to the way the
world works that he takes Jesus aside and begins to rebuke him, but Jesus won’t
have it. He won’t let himself be tempted by a worldly vision of success. “Get
behind me, Satan!” he says. “You are not thinking the things of God but the
things of men.” And then he turns and says to the crowd, “If you want to come
after me you have to deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me.” And
then, if you will allow me to paraphrase, Jesus says something like this:
“Anyone who wants to be somebody in this life will end up being nobody, but
anyone who is willing to be nobody for my sake and the sake of the gospel will
end up being somebody very special indeed. What good would it do you to have a
condo on Central Park West or a weekend place in Connecticut if, in the eyes of
God, you were still nobody? Wouldn’t you trade all that and more for the look
in his eyes when he says, “You are my beloved child, in whom I am well pleased”?
During that week in New
York I thought we didn’t have anything. I thought my dad had given it all up to
go into the ministry. But as I sat there looking at that letter I began to
reconsider. It occurred to me that you could have everything money can buy
without having the things that matter most. It occurred to me that my friend
John would have gladly traded all the luxury of his life for just a little bit
of the love in mine. And in that moment—holding that letter in my hands—I made
a decision about the kind of life I wanted to live. I didn’t go to an Ivy
League college, and a few years after graduation I did something very few Exeter
alums have ever done: I went to seminary, and studied to be a minister of the
Gospel.
Early in 1997 I got a
letter announcing the twentieth reunion of my high school class and asking if I
would fill out a form and return it so they could put together a reunion
scrapbook, with pictures and information from everybody in the class about what
they had been up to in the past twenty years. I remember filling out that form
and thinking how strange everyone would find it that I had become a Baptist
minister, all those classmates who had gone on to fame and fortune. And at the
time, of course, I was pastor of a small church in a small town in North
Carolina. Most people have never even heard of the place. But down at the
bottom of the page they asked me, “What lessons have you learned since leaving
Exeter?” I thought about that for a while. I remembered those days and the way
we all thought we knew what success would look like. And then I wrote: “I think
I have learned the truth of Jesus’ life-changing question: ‘What does it profit
a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’”
—Jim Somerville
© 2009
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