August 31, 2003
The Power of the Ordinary
Allan J. Weenink

Back in the old days of China an emperor built a gigantic wall to defend the country against the barbarians to the North.  It stretched for miles and miles along the border, and was wide enough for chariots to pass on top -- its massiveness alone, a great deterrent against aggression.  The wall still remains one of the awesome wonders of the world.  Some here have walked it and the experience is beyond words.

Yet, despite its vaunted possibilities as a defense effort, the wall was in reality a failure.  The enemy did not go over it or around it.  They went through it.  They went through it by merely bribing a gatekeeper.  A simple act of disloyalty by one person, and a gigantic defensive network was rendered useless.  The moral of this fact of history is that an ordinary person may exert a tremendous influence knowingly or unknowingly.

The Christian faith and the heart of its message represents the positive implications of the influence of small things.  Jesus spoke not of tearing down or destroying but gave a new dimension to the importance of the ordinary by telling his followers they have been called to add a plus factor of significant influence to the affairs of life.

We human beings are obsessed by size.  Movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn once remarked that he wanted to make a film which begins with an earthquake and then works up to a climax.  He rightly assessed the popular attractiveness of the colossal.  If, however, one’s thinking is dominated by the gigantic events of our time, one can hardly avoid despair.  The world’s spectacular doings are in turmoil.  As George Bernard Shaw once said, “If the other planets are inhabited, they must be using this earth as their insane asylum.”  An obvious exaggeration which nevertheless gives one pause to wonder.

The Christian faith maintains its assurance, despite the world’s disorder, by centering attention on something else here -- not vast or noisy but rather quiet, unobtrusive, inconspicuous, subtle, but vital and tremendously powerful.  Jesus pictures his own reliance on this truth when he compared the kingdom of heaven to leaven.  A woman, he said, took yeast and mixed it with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened (Matthew 13: 33).

The penetrating change of that small amount of yeast affected visibly and substantially everything in the mass that it touched.  And that, said Jesus, is the meaning and purpose of everything I have given to you.  Even as the small subtle influence of betrayal and denial and deceit can devastate, so the other side of the coin is that wholesome, holy, and positive forces have their equal strength and influence.  One of the most necessary services which our Christian faith must render is to indicate the importance and power of us ordinary people in the circumstances in which we are and the influence, in actuality, which we really have.

One of the ancient writers of Biblical times showed that he knew the power of ordinary people when he said that without them a city cannot be inhabited.  “They shall not sit high in the judge’s seat nor understand the sentence of judgment, but they will maintain the world.”  They do!  At this point we ordinary people have rarely received our just due.  It is by our efforts that roads have been made, buildings built, crops planted and harvested, factories operated, goods produced, and schools, hospitals, and stores maintained.

It was by ordinary people that this nation was founded.  Common law was built out of the experience of our lives.  Common worship brought a leavening influence into the most remote and undisciplined areas.  With dignity and integrity ordinary people like us handed on our political and religious inheritance to succeeding generations.  This is all for our encouragement and satisfaction -- the power of ordinary people to provide the strong foundations for living and substantial underpinnings for the super structure. 

Ordinary people nourish, sustain, and give substance to the basic virtues -- honesty, truth, faithfulness, integrity, frugality, character, and goodness -- without which any group life is impossible.  Time-after-time leaders can turn to them and receive some work of common sense or earthly criticism which sets in its proper perspective many a bit of specious thinking.  Ordinary people are to be honored for the part they play in holding the world together by faithful deeds and honest living.  Vital individuals count.  “Men and women of integrity and rectitude are the strong nails that hold the world together,” said Dr. Frederick Meek.

The importance and power of the ordinary person lies at the heart of life; it lies at the very heart of our understanding the Christian faith.  The Christian faith has always insisted that the most important thing in the world is the single individual person, as that person is known, loved, and cared for in the affection and the great mind of Almighty God.

Let us never lose sight of the fact that Christianity is the truth about God and persons -– not about multitudes, but about each single individual person.  Jesus entrusted the great truths and insights of God to common people.  He expected prosaic people like you and me to find our strength and power in them.  He committed the future of all the purposes and hopes that filled his heart and which came from the heart of the Creator God to a few ordinary people, fisher folk, petty officials, and a handful of women.

All this makes it understandable that God clearly showed God’s essence in the life of one born into the modest inheritance of an ordinary home.  We have made too little of that fact.  It is not that Jesus was an ordinary man, but it was into the home of ordinary people that there came this personality who has shown God most clearly to the human race.  And in loving family relationships, his life was molded.  Joseph and Mary (two very usual persons) were entrusted with an extraordinary responsibility which they fulfilled as they nurtured this child -- who they accepted as a gift of God.  They had their part in touching the world through the common obligations of parenthood which they understood as a sacred trust.  There was no Ph.D. thesis on raising children.  They simply did the tasks at hand with grace and dignity -- living the essence of greatness in the humble home routine. 

It was living within the framework of the life of ordinary people -- in his education, in his cultural life, in his daily labor -- that the Christ, the Savior of humankind lived among us.  Christ lived not as a king in a palace, but as a man of calloused hands. Christ lived as a laborer -- a carpenter.  He knew about slivers and sawdust; he knew about sweat and soiled work clothes.  In the circumstances which surround the most ordinary life, God revealed God’s self essence most clearly.  In that fact we should glory even while it humbles us.  God is part of holiness but he is equally a part of our dailyness -- spirituality and practicality as an essential mix.

It was natural that Christ left his most profound influence on ordinary people.  To them he entrusted the on-going influence of what was yet to come.  In the first chapter of the book of Acts we read of one of the resurrection appearances to his disciples where he told them that the Holy Spirit would come upon them and they would be his “witness in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth”.  (Acts 1: 8b)  The Christian Church was born on Pentecost -- 50 days after Easter.

It’s first members were ordinary people who were filled with the power of the Holy Spirit and a new force was unleashed on the world.  Ordinary men and women united in Christ produced a unique kind of wisdom and witness.  “Those who have turned the world upside down have come hither also”, was one way of describing them.  They were people who made a difference by the lives they lived.  Seven million converts were added to the Christian Church within 300 years.  Dynamic common people went out and slowly, but surely, effected changes in the social order.  Just a little handful or ordinary people -- forgiven, faithful, and committed Christian disciples -- willing to move against the stream, led by the Spirit of God, living in the light of the cross, expressing their faith, and lovingly upgrading the level of society as a redeeming force.  Slowly standards changed, not so much because they deliberately set out to bring them about, but as the inevitable by-product of a living faith in Christ.

The uniqueness of the church has been the fact that ordinary people through the centuries have profoundly affected life on the face of this earth and still do.  They maintain the world.  The church and the home are still powerful forces for good and God in a troubled and traumatic world.  And their values continue as a strong leavening influence.

You may think we have forgotten about our Old Testament lesson.  Not so.  We have been attempting to interpret it throughout this entire sermon.  The children of Israel as slaves of the Egyptians were being afflicted.  Those were harsh and horrible days.  God spoke to Moses in a dramatic spiritual encounter, assigning him to talk to Pharaoh the King and to lead the children of Israel out of Egypt.

Such a demand was more than Moses thought he could handle.  Thinking and speaking of himself as an ordinary person he asked, “Who am I that I should go unto the King of Egypt?”  The voice of the Lord came back and said, “I will be with you.”  I will be with you.  It is not so much who you are as an individual person, as who is walking with you, who is watching over you, and who is guiding you.  A person takes on something of the grandeur, the nobility, and the stature of the cause for which one stands.  The power of the ordinary person aligned with the power of God is far greater than the power of the genius indifferent to or arrayed against the power and purpose of God.

Christian character and a Christian purpose in the lives of ordinary people are powerful forces and that quality of life is within the reach of us all.  An ordinary person and one’s God, together, are a powerful pair -- influential and important beyond measure -- a strength to be reckoned with.  We live in times that need redeeming.  We can either be part of the problem or part of the solution.  Once a gatekeeper was bribed because he had no moral values, no spiritual strength, no overarching loyalty, and a great civilization was affected.  Despite the fact that it took outward precautions, it was betrayed from within.

Out of the heritage of those who are Dutch comes the story (apocryphal perhaps but not beyond credibility) of a little lad walking past one of the dykes that protected the precious hard gained ground of the Netherlands.  There was a tiny leak in the dyke.  The water was coming through.  Knowing that what was now a trickle would soon become a torrent, the lad put his finger in the hole and stopped the infiltration of the common enemy.

According to my version of the story, he was there for a long time; almost longer than a young lad could stand with his own resources.  And it is my understanding that he prayed for the strength and the resources to fulfill the task thrust upon him.  A common little lad, an ordinary individual, held back a destroying torrent.

One was bribed and did the unthinkable.  The other prayed and took his place among the unsung saints who maintain the world.  The power of the ordinary become extraordinary when linked with God.  The words God spoke to Moses are words God still speaks to us, “I will be with you.”  God keeps God’s promises.  Ordinary individuals, homes, and churches become co-partners with Almighty God in maintaining the world.  So we take heart even in the worst of times.

Amen.