Do you have a personal hero or heroine? Whose personal qualities or accomplishments inspire you? Who do you see as someone who is doing God’s work in the world? Maybe your role model is a spouse, a parent, or a friend. Perhaps it’s a character in a book, or a saint on our church’s calendar. For many Marian Wright Edelman is a model of someone who is dedicated to Christ and to doing God’s work in the world. Born in segregated Bennettsville, SC in 1939, Marian was the fifth and youngest child of a Baptist minister. Although her father died when she was fourteen, Marian never forgot his reminders that being a Christian means serving the world. She tells us, “Daddy used to say that God ran a full-employment economy. Just follow the needs.” After graduating from Spelman College, she entered Yale Law School and became the first African American woman to be admitted to the Mississippi bar. In addition to working for the NAACP, in 1968 she moved to Washington, DC, where she advised Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign. In Washington she also became interested in children’s development and poverty. In 1973, she founded the Children's Defense Fund to speak for poor, minority and disabled children and to research the needs and concerns of children. As the leader of the CDF, Wright Edelman persuaded Congress to overhaul foster care, support adoption, improve child care, and protect children who are disabled, homeless, abused, or neglected. She has written over a dozen books and received many awards for her work, including a MacArthur fellowship and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. What’s more important, as a person of faith she reminds us that, “When Jesus Christ asked little children to come to him, he didn't say only rich children, or white children, or children with two-parent families, or children who didn't have a mental or physical handicap. He said, ‘Let all children come unto me.’” For many of us, in her passionate advocacy for children and her dedication to “the least of these,” Marian Wright Edelman provides a moving example of a faithful disciple of Christ, someone who in her own life models Christ for us.
Who are your heroes or heroines? Who are your heroes or heroines, Paul asks the Christian community at Phillipi. Who do you want to imitate? Paul himself had had an overwhelming conversion experience on the road to Damascus. As he began to preach Christ crucified and risen, he realized that to complete the transformation he had experienced he would have to imitate Christ, conform himself to Christ, every day of his life. In our reading from his letter to the new Christians at Philippi Paul urges them to press forward in singleheartedly modeling themselves after Christ. Although Paul called this community his “joy and crown,” the Philippians needed this reminder. Philippi was located on the Via Egnatia, the highway that linked Rome with Asia Minor. A cosmopolitan city, Philippi contained people of many different philosophical persuasions and spiritual practices. The few Jews in the city thought that those Jews who believed that Jesus was the Messiah were making a mockery of their ancient faith. On the other hand, some of the Jewish Christians were Judaizers, extremists who believed that all followers of Jesus, including Gentiles, should be circumcised and should follow all the Jewish dietary laws. Some others perhaps were Gnostics who regularly took part in sexual orgies. Some others took advantage of their special status as Roman citizens. Although this Christian community was likely mostly Gentile in origin, it would have been easy for its members to get sidetracked from their devotion to Christ. There were so many differences among them that might cause disharmony, dissension, and strife. The Philippian Christians all needed a role model whom they could follow, a hero or heroine who could inspire them as they grew into Christian maturity.
Paul suggests that they look to him, the founder of their community, as a role model of faith. He makes this suggestion, not because he is proud or arrogant, but because he really wants the Philippians to join with him in imitating Christ and to model themselves after those who are true followers of Christ. While the Cross may have its enemies, he tells them, true followers of Christ look to those who exemplify a life dedicated to Christ. These are the people who must be their role models, not the Judaizers, nor the hedonists, nor those who flaunt their Roman citizenship. As baptized Christians, as people who have had the cross marked on their foreheads, as people who have left behind the values of this world, they are called to live out their commitment to servant leadership, in imitation of Paul himself, and ultimately, in imitation of Christ. For some, as it did for Paul, that commitment may even mean imitating Christ in his martyrdom.
Who are your heroes or heroines? Who are your role models of faith? Who are the role models of faith and Christ-like living for this parish? Whom do we model our lives after? Last month, in one of our readings from Paul’s letter to the fractious Corinthian Christians, we discovered that love is a verb, and that those who come together in Christian community, who want to grow together as mature Christians, learn to treat each other in ways that reflect their commitment to living as Jesus’ followers. Are there any such communities that can be models of faithful life for us? For many throughout the centuries, monastic communities have been models of Christian community. Even today, the sisters of the Community of the Holy Spirit in New York or the Community of the Transfiguration in Cincinnati, the brothers of the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Boston or at Three Rivers Abbey in Michigan, the monks of the Trappist monastery in Kentucky, all exemplify communities who are dedicated to living in conformity with Christ and that reflect back to the world their commitment to Christ. But what of non-monastic communities, communities of ordinary lay folks? Are there any such communities who can be role models of the Christian life for us? Within the last decade, a “New Monasticism” movement has taken shape. Born out of a desire for what its founders call “a grassroots ecumenism and a prophetic witness within the North American church,” member communities of this movement share certain characteristics. These marks of community include location in what are called “the abandoned places of Empire,” hospitality to strangers, active pursuit of racial reconciliation, “intentional formation in the way of Christ and the rule of the community,” caring in common for a plot of land, and commitment to a disciplined prayer life. Right here in Ohio, a group calling themselves Common Friars has begun to live as an intentional community at the Good Earth Mission Farm in Athens. In Cincinnati the Walnut Hills Fellowship is a group of inner-city neighbors “
