Text:Acts 10: 43 – All the prophets testify about him that everyone who
believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.
There has been a lot going on this
past week to cause me to think about ‘what a life is worth?,’ and the very different
answers at which one arrives depending on one’s angle-of-view.
Of
course, there is Terri Schiavo, the Florida
woman living with severe brain damage.Her husband recently won a court decision
to have the feeding tube removed which has kept her alive for the last fifteen years.He is passionate about her right to die with dignity, based on conver-sations they shared
prior to the heart attack which precipitated her condition.Her parents are equally
passionate about her being kept alive, however minimal her quality of life might appear to be.They have mounted a heroic assault on state and federal courts, and politicians, to have the feeding tube re-established.
Everybody else in the country seems
to have an opinion on their predicament.In a Time Magazine opinion poll taken
last week:75% of all Americans say it was wrong for Congress to try and intervene,
with 68% of Republicans saying so; and 70% say they think it was wrong for President Bush to have gotten involved.So it would seem that taking a stand with either Terry’s husband or her parents is a delicate political
issue.
Then there were the Red Lake, Minnesota
Indian Reservation shootings last week.Sixteen-year-old Jeff Weiss, a high school
student there, perpetrated acts of violent power at the end of his life, after apparently living with an increasing sense
of powerlessness.He shot his grandfather and his grandfather’s girl friend,
a security guard and several classmates at his school, and then turned the gun on himself, leaving a community and a nation
numbed with teenage violence yet again.
And there is Pope John
Paul II, recently released from the hospital and returned to his Vatican residence
to recuperate.He has missed out on his traditional and highly-visible participation
in Holy Week services, and Rome’s LA REPUBBLICA newspaper has declared that ‘the throne of Saint
Peter is deserted with the Pope serving only as a symbol of his office in a speech-less body.’‘Vatican sources’ have responded by saying that the octogenarian pontiff is
lucid and still making day-to-day decisions that affect the life of the Church.
Taken together, these three on-going
news stories have once again raised the question:
What is a life
worth?
What is a life worth when a wife is
brain dead except for autonomic functions (which keep respiration going)?
What is a life worth when a beloved
daughter is brain dead but seems to offer non-verbal response to family presence?
What is a life worth when a grandfather
and his girlfriend a killed?
What is a life worth when a school
security guard and a number of classmates are shot?
What is a life worth when the troubled
16-year-old also takes his own life?
What is a life worth when an
historically significant international Church leader can no longer talk or appear in public beyond waving a blessing from
his window?
In each case, someone is saying, those
lives ‘are not worth a plugged nickel!’
And while I instinctively knew that
the phrase applied to these circumstances from my hearing it used throughout my life, I didn’t know exactly what it
meant.Do you?
I looked up ‘plugged nickel’
in a couple of dictionaries to no avail.I typed ‘plugged nickel definition’
into the GOOGLE search engine, but only came up with tens of thousands of restaurants, bars and electronics outlets.I vented my frustration out loud, and John Lawser responded that I wasn’t asking
‘the right question.’So I let HIM do it, and here is the result:
US slang dating back to 1888:When coins actually contained valuable
metal, a counterfeiting practice removed the silver or other precious metal from the center of the coin and replaced it with
a plug of lead or other base metal:hence, ‘plugged nickel.’
If I apply this ‘plugged nickel’
phrase as a metaphor for the value of a life, I get some interesting implications.For
example, if one doesn’t SEE the value to a person’s life, they have cut the center (or more to the point, the
heart) out of that person.They are no longer worth anything.
Put another way, that’s what
we do whenever we fail to find value in a person – we cut the heart out of them, and then we don’t feel obligated
to help them in whatever trouble or need their circumstances might occasion.For
instance, we need not feel required to make donations to help the teenager that ASLAN Youth Ministries ministers to in Red
Bank, Long Branch or Haiti, if we assume that the circumstances of their poverty and broken home might imply that they are
nothing more than losers who are never going to take responsibility for themselves.We need not feel a reason to help local chapters of the INTERFAITH HOSPITALITY NETWORK or HABITAT FOR HUMANITY provide
safe/temporary shelter, self-help programs or their own home to families who haven’t succeeded in providing such things
for themselves.After all, nobody after our parents ever gave us free room and
board.
And what about the people who pump
our gas and sell us milk who don’t ‘bother’ to learn English well enough for them to understand us when
we talk to them.What is their value to us?Or the Palestinians who are so frustrated that they bomb and kill Israelis, or the Israelis who are so frustrated that
they bomb and kill Palestinians, or Iraqis, Afganis, Asians in one-of-the-…stans-we-never-heard-of-before,
who chased their president out of the capital, marched all night, and burned and looted?What are they worth to us?
It costs to care.
It costs us time, money and angst
(to name a few) to care for the needs and circumstances of others.After all,
most of us ‘have a full plate’ just trying to care for our own families.There is only so much a person can do, and doesn’t ‘charity begin at home?’
Our model for caring, our formula
for calculating what is at the center (or heart) of another, is to be found in the One who made us.
2,000-plus years ago, God chose to
send his Son into our world and into our lives, because of the value (the heart) he put in each of us.After all, he took ‘the dust of the earth’ and ‘breathed into it the breath of life.’Therefore, into the core of every human being (into our center) he placed his Spirit.Then, he made a further investment in that he called upon his Son to stand in for
us as preparation for our day of judgment.He substituted Jesus in the place
of punishment for our sins, because as a just God, a price for disobedience must be paid.
So Jesus, ‘obedient unto death,’
blinked his eyes to clear his vision from the blood that ran from the prongs of his crown of thornes,
winced as he took every stroke of the scourge which ripped the flesh off his back, and strained himself upright after every
stumble under the weight of the immense beam he was forced to carry up the path to Golgotha.You SAW Mel Gibson’s PASSION OF THE CHRIST, you KNOW what he went through for you.
He didn’t cut the heart out
of us to leave only the less-than-worthless dust of which we (carbon-based units) were made.He cut out the selfishness at the very center of our being and replaced it with the blood (or the heart) of Jesus.
God in Christ
makes us worth more, not less.
It goes back to
one’s ‘angle of view,’ doesn’t it.God looks at us and sees the blood of his Son changing everything about us.And
those who ‘see’ with ‘the eyes of God’ see the value in everyone:because everyone is worth more, worth getting involved for, worth paying a price for.
We WERE insignificant nickels (it
takes five, just to get a dial-tone so you can dial a number and wait to find out how much more it will cost you to actually
talk to someone).And then Jesus gave us the potential for a new center, a new
heart.To God, we are now worth un-told millions of dollars, after what God ‘payed’ for us.
What, then, is a person to do with
such knowledge, which is the point of Easter?One COULD be a ‘good Presbyterian,’
and live out the mandate of the Westminster Confession’s most famous question and answer:“What is (our) chief end?(Our) chief end is to glorify
God and to enjoy (God) forever.”
What that might look like for us includes:
SEEK GOD if he’s not really important
to you right now,
INVITE GOD INTO YOUR HEART if you’re
ready to try and take God seriously,
WALK WITH CONFIDENCE because you walk with
the knowledge that you are worth more to God than anything else in all creation.
Because of the Empty
Tomb, you (yes, YOU) give new meaning to the phrase:a plugged nickel, because
you are now plugged with the blood of Jesus
__________________________________
A
sermon, prepared and preached for Easter Sunday, March 27, 2005at
Lincroft Presbyterian Church,Lincroft
New Jersey,by the Rev. Mr. Alan R. Schaefer, Interim Pastor
