When the summer begins, it stretches out like a smooth, green lawn upon which one might plant an Adirondack chair and settle in, ready to savor some restful days. Like the liturgical season in which it resides, we think of summer as ordinary time, when the days are long but hopefully fairly uneventful. And yet life is always happening. Things are always happening – presidential campaigns, raging wildfires, heat waves and never-ending wars. Ordinary time is consequential time; for each day we are given holds its choices. How will I act? How kind will I be? How much goodness will I unleash into the world?
Today we conclude our month-long sermon series, “All the Good You Can Do.” For four weeks we have delved into ethical decision-making , asking how our actions intersect with our Christian faith. Our launching point has been the TV show, The Good Place, and with the aid of characters on their own ethical journeys we have pondered Aristotle’s virtues next to Jesus’s command to go and sell one’s possessions. We have asked “What do we owe each other?”, weighing the difference between obligations everyone might agree upon and the hard task of forgiveness. We have sought Jesus’s rest amid the exhaustion of moral decision-making, for the demands come at us relentlessly and often our “good” choice has unintended negative effects. Today’s final sermon aims to encourage you. Borrowing the show’s message: there is much good you can do. Keep at it. You may not be perfect, but you can learn to bring greater goodness into the world.
Key characters in the Good Place embody this improvement lesson as they grow over the course of the show’s four seasons. At the beginning, Eleanor is selfish, abrasive in her responses to others’ and consequently, alone. She knows she wants more than a job that asks her to lie, friends that aren’t really friends, and nights spent drinking, but she’s unable to imagine a different path. Over time, as others hold up a mirror to her actions and encourage different behaviors, she is schooled in the art of friendship. She starts caring about others and putting their needs in front of her own. She becomes a leader and a sacrificial one at that.
Chidi is introduced as a professor of philosophy, a learned man who is so overwhelmed by the multitude of choices before him that he can’t make any decision. Instead he wallows in anxiety, infuriating those around him with his constant deliberations. Caught up in his head, he is cut off from his heart. But teaching ethics to Eleanor and becoming immersed in the larger challenges of their neighborhood, Chidi also changes. By the show’s end he is confident, calm. He knows himself and he lets himself love. What was once mere knowledge becomes wisdom.
Tahani and Jason live next door to Chidi and Eleanor. They, too, are stunted characters at the show’s beginning. Tahani was a wealthy philanthropist on earth; but underneath the charity is an obsessive self-absorption intent upon proving to others how special she is. As one TV critic puts it, she is deeply insecure and uses external things to hide the emptiness she feels. She, too, is draw into friendship and then world’s larger needs. Again, friends are honest, helping her see how her false magnanimity is a poor substituted for healing childhood wounds. They help her gain a sense of worth and she embraces a more purposeful existence. Jason appears the most simplistic character; a Floridian who loves hot wings, break-dancing, and the Jacksonville Jaguars. Jason lives on the surface, not thinking too deeply and, like most of us, his thoughtlessness can be hurtful to others. He, too, changes, through friendship, struggle, and connecting with a larger purpose. By the show’s end, he isn’t telling wild, meandering off-topic stories but contributing to the group’s problem solving. His impulsivity is channeled into enthusiasm, his simplicity into trust.
A common theme sparks these characters’ changes: relationships. Eleanor, Chidi, Jason, and Tahani grow by virtue of being drawn into relationship with each other. Their interconnectedness forces them to be vulnerable, to learn to listen, accept criticism, and trust. Each character improves, profoundly, because they value something other than their own needs. In essence, they start to love. They are changed by love.
What does the first letter of John tell us? Love is from God. God is love. Whenever we love, we are of God, with God, and sharing God with others. Love happens in relationship. Love arises in the encounter; in the meeting – us and God, us and others, God in us all. God, whose essence is love, is wholly, always relational. Our text begins with a greeting, Beloved. Before anything else, you claimed in a relationship with God, who is love, reaching out to you.
Do you see yourself in any of these characters? Have you experienced the negative, self-inflicted isolation of Eleanor? Or the unintentional thoughtlessness of Jason? The self-serving charity of Tahani? The all-options but no actions of Chidi? Have you experienced love change you? For these four characters the changes are not easy, quick or pain-free. It is slow and uneven, altered by one truth at a time, or one piece of self-awareness prompting a different reaction and bit by bit, showing them a different life. They try and then fail and have to try again. The work of moral living, says the show’s creator, is this cycle of trying and failing and trying again. Or, to quote Samuel Beckett, it is to try, and fail and try again and fail better. I suspect you can review your life and see the process at work.
Now the premise of The Good Place is that people can improve. Looking at these characters we see persons who over time become kinder, wiser, and more authentically generous. Such encouragement to keep trying to vital in our complicated, fractured world. We need to try, fail, and try again and fail better as we navigate climate change, or racial injustice, or strive to end wars, exploitation of all sorts. Whether we frame our decision-making process as a quest for virtues such as courage, honesty, or community, or as a weighing of the consequences – pain or pleasure, life or death – for those affected by our actions – or as adhering to time-honored principals as respect, dignity or equality – a commitment to thoughtfully approaching our ethical choices is a good, noble, and needed pursuit. It tells us to slow down, to be more conscious of how our actions affect others, to recognize the good we can pour into the world. In our warring, distrustful, and too often isolating world, this is vital work we do together.
But from a different vantage point – the lens of faith – the focus on improvement is lacking something. Because the Christian faith is not grounded in self- improvement but in the power of Christ transforming us. As Paul says, I proclaiming nothing but Christ crucified and resurrected. On these two acts the world is transformed, made new, and so are we. That sacred cycle of standing in grace, being able to struggle with others, to suffer for the pursuit of righteousness, to persevere and discover you hope all the more happens because God’s Spirit is always at work in us, empowering us to live in ways only possible by God’s initiative.
Thomas Reynolds discovered this distinction between self-improvement and transformation through the parenting his son Chris, who by age fourteen had been diagnosed with chronic disabilities.1 “Chris’s temperament, needs, and difficulties have challenged our family to the core,” wrote Reynolds, “overturning conventional expectations about what home life might be . . . . . He continues, “loving Chris has meant confronting my own limitations, relinquishing my hold on a planned and predictable world.” Reynolds shares how being Chris’s parent highlighted his shortcomings, his poverty of spirit and brokenness as a human being, while at the same time “astonishing him with the precious, vulnerable, and beautiful gift of affirming Chris for who he is.” I was cracked open, says Reynolds and “in the new openness created, my son and I found a mutual, deep love. I have discovered what strength in weakness means. I have been met with a sustaining grace. In fact, I’ve seen the surplus of grace that is the basic unit of the universe, created by God.”
Then he spoke of the days when his son struggled; the days that ended in anguish. He found on those days he would hold his son gently and say, “It will be alright.” It will be alright. On one hand such assurance sounded simple unrealistic. But at deeper level, it speaks of the transformation Christ brings, when despite the enormous challenges, personal failures and unchangeable circumstances, hope emerges. Loving each other is another way of loving God, whose grace overflows the world. It will be alright.
We are invited to think deeply about the lives we lead, the choices we make, the ways our actions affect others. AND we are beckoned by God to let Christ’s Spirit transform us in ways we did not imagine. To show us how life is a gift, loving another is loving God, how the world is infused with grace, and all will be alright because God is. Amen.