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"Bitter or Better"
The Rev. Dr. D. Scott Stoner
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Yesterday, I had the honor to attend a ceremony here at St. Christopher’s. I had never been to a ceremony like this before. I even had the chance to have a small part in it, the ceremony lasted almost an hour and a half and yet, it was so powerful, every moment was so moving that you lost track of the time. It was a very special ceremony and I’m wondering if any of you have ever been to one of these? This ceremony was to recognize and bestow the award of Eagle Scout to one of our own members. Anybody here ever been to an Eagle Scout ceremony? Not counting the people that were here yesterday. Do we have any Eagle Scouts in our midst? I have one I will introduce you to in just a second. We had one at the early service, Dirk Hausman, I found out is an Eagle Scout. But the Eagle Scout that we honored yesterday is none other than our own Jim Ansley, who is sitting right here. Stand up Jim, come here. (applause). Congratulations Jim.
Jim in your own way you probably helped Jim more than you know because you will probably recognize Jim as the guy that sells popcorn at the lectern for his Boy Scout Troop. One of the, let me give you a microphone here so that you can, you didn’t know that you were going to be part of the sermon today. What I am going to preach about today is character and character is one of things you spoke about yesterday because there is such a correlation between what Boy Scouts teach and what the church teaches, could you do the Boy Scout oath for us? (laughter) He already has his Eagle Scout now; we can’t take it away from him.
On my honor, I will do my best, to do my duty,
To God and my country, to help other people at all times
To obey the Scout law. To keep my body physically strong,
mentally awake and morally straight.
Awesome! Wonderful! And then what do they call the 12 points of the Scout law. Really this isn’t a quiz but this is --- You know, why don’t you do the sermon today and I’ll sit down.
(Jim Ansley) A Scout is trustworthy and loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.
(Rev. Stoner) Wow! All right, good job. And when I came here 6 ½ years ago I think Jim and his family had only been here about a year and so you probably were 11 ½ then. And it has just been wonderful to watch Jim grow up in this community and to know that this is one of the communities that has helped form him into the person he is and the character that he has. I also want to recognize his parents who are here today, Mary Beth and Harry Ansley. You want to stand up? And thank them. (applause) Harry is actually the Scoutmaster of Troop 391.
One of the things that was so moving to me yesterday was not just to see Jim get an honor but to see all the dads and all the other men who were volunteering their time to help form these young men. And it’s not a coincidence that MaryBeth and Harry are also the coordinators for St. Christopher’s at the Gathering, our food service program and they have kind of brought their two worlds together with people from the church and people from the scout world serving down at the Gathering over the years.
Anything you want to say or enlighten us with? That you’ve learned along the way about character? This was not staged! I didn’t know Jim was going to be in church this morning. He didn’t know he was going to be standing up here either! (laughter) What have you learned about character through the Boy Scouts and how did you learn it? I am always interested in how is character learned?
(Jim) It just sort of happened. I used to not and I do now. (laughter) I’m not really awake. (laughter)
(Scott) That’s not one of the Boy Scout laws being awake is it?
(Jim) Popcorn sales and the outings because at the outings you learn all of the practical skills of building a fire and surviving out in the wilderness. And the popcorn sales taught me how to interact with people and taught me that even though everyone was laughing a few of them bought popcorn. So shame on you!
(Scott) Oh is that right? I was giving them credit for being part of – is it too late for them to buy popcorn? Tell them about your project, what an Eagle Scout has to do.
(Jim) An Eagle Scout has to a project, usually around 100 hours in length including the planning time. My actual, physical work hours were 250 or something and forty-seven minutes. And we lay down around a half a mile of wood chips, built eight benches and dug a fire pit and collected a lot of wood. Out at Mary’s Margin, which is that way, far that way. It’s about forty miles from here, so we went out for three or four weekends, in the rain and the mud.
(Scott) Mary’s Margin is run by a couple of Episcopal nuns, Anglican sisters. It’s a retreat center about forty-five miles from here. And I want to say a couple of other things about character because as I was watching yesterday, when Jim was getting his award at one point the Scout master brought up two of the youngest cub scouts that were about this tall standing on either side of Jim and he was teaching them how to do certain things and you could see already how they were looking up at this guy as an Eagle Scout. And it seems to me that that is one of the ways character is learned by watching not just the adult mentors but you were a scout once looking up at the older guys in the troop.
(Jim) Yah, and they were tall. (laughter)
(Scott) Yes, and you learned from them. Again, we want to congratulate Jim and know that we are right beside you. Congratulations. Thanks. (applause).
All right, I almost don’t have any time left for my sermon now. But I was reflecting on this whole idea of character because it seems that character is the essence of so many of our different value systems. Church is obviously about instilling and forming character, Scouting is, I think most sporting activities are trying to do that as well. Certainly schools are doing that and all the extra curriculars and certainly family too is all about trying to form character. And it is one of those things that you know when a person has character. It is easy to know it and recognize it but sometimes it is hard to define. As I was thinking of character it is not something you can use to describe a young child. A baby or a toddler does not have a wonderful character, they may have a temperament or they might have a spirit about them or a personality. Character it seems to me is more defined as we get older by the choices that we make. It is the accumulation of the day-to-day choices that we make.
There is a funny story that is told of a Catholic grade school where the kids were lining up for lunch and there is this big bowl of beautiful red apples, freshly picked, deliciously ripe and there was a sign written by one of the nuns and it said, “ Please only take one.” And you could see the kids getting up there and they all wanted to take more than one but saw the sign and so an exercise in good character they all only took one. But then when they got to the end of the line there was a big mound of cookies and there was no sign by the cookies except one that had been written by another kid and it said, “Take as many as you want, God’s watching the apples.”
But somebody once said that character is what you do when nobody is looking. Character is what you do when nobody is watching. Character is what you do when there is nothing you can gain from your actions. Somebody else said character is how you treat other people who could be of no benefit to you, no effect on your life. So again it is one of those things that we can think about it, we can recognize it but it is hard to think about it. How do we form it? I think that it is something that is caught more than it is taught. I think that is the value of something like Scouting, any community that is ongoing in someone’s life for a number of years. You catch it, it’s not like, “today we are going to teach character.” You are going to get it today. It is not like learning how to build a fire. You can learn that. Character is something that is modeled.
The word character comes from a Greek word that means to engrave or to imprint. That’s why another meaning of the word character is like a letter from the alphabet, like characters on the printed page. The engraver would set up the characters and print the pages. It’s helpful for me to think about that. Character is, for those of us who are adults who are involved in formng character in children, we are trying to engrave something, it’s something permanent that we’re trying to engrave on their hearts and on their souls. And of course, as people of faith we believe that the master engraver is God. We have in the person of Jesus a model of what character looks like. It’s no longer just words on the page, it’s a life lived in the way that Jesus did and all the values that he stood for. And so we are constantly trying to engrave those values on our own hearts and souls. And I said to Jim yesterday at the Eagle Scout ceremony, as we have given thanks for all the people that have engraved traits on him but as we come to adulthood we are our own engravers in many ways. We choose what will engrave on our hearts and on our souls we choose it in our habits, we choose it in those disciplines that we practice.
We are what we do and we also see character most clearly when we are in times of adversity. When we are in times of stress. It has been said that adversity or stress doesn’t just create character but it reveals it. We find out who we are when we are in the midst of stress. Character is something you can’t fake; it’s not something you can put on for a day or two. It is revealed in times of stress, in fact there’s a story that is used sometimes to teach this to kids, to young people. The story is about, imagine if you took three pots of water, put them on a stove and brought them to a boil and then you put out a carrot, an egg and some coffee beans and you dropped them each in a different pot, let it boil 20 minutes and then you come back. The hot water is like adversity, stress, it is like challenge that is in our lives and you can look and you can see the how the three different items fare. The carrot obviously became very soft. It was broken down by the hot water and changed and became kind of soft and limp. The egg which had been very fragile and vulnerable inside had become hardened which can happen to any of us sometimes if we are going through a loss or a hard time, if we get stuck in that we can become hardened. And then the lesson from the coffee beans is, the coffee beans were changed but only the coffee beans changed the water and made coffee. And people who have the highest character not only come through adversity intact but they actually change those that are around them. They actually change and make an impact on those that are around them. Any of us who have known someone who has faced a difficult diagnosis with incredible courage, that is like that coffee. We have been changed by their presence in the way that they have engaged that. That’s what character seems like it is to me. It is also said that in these kinds of opportunities of stress we can become better or we can become bitter. Today in honor of Jim and the Scouting organizations I give thanks for all the ways in which in our culture people are committing their time to help form character. It seems to me it is something that is needed more than ever in our world today to form character in our young people and I’ll close with this line that I said yesterday. When I met Jim when he was 11 ½ as you can see just a little bit today what a great sense of humor he has, and I thought to myself back then and after yesterday I thought of it in a whole new way than I thought back then, Actually I would like this to be true of all of us. What I said to Jim yesterday is “What a character!”
Amen.
