Keep Your Eyes on the Prize
Yesterday, about 75 miles south of us at the Monterey Jazz Festival, Pete Seeger played, sang, spoke and wowed the crowd. Pete Seeger is 90 years old and has been performing on banjo and 12-string guitar for 70 years. Our country is 233 years old. Pete Seeger’s voice has reflected and guided our history for almost 1/3 of this nation’s existence. If you’ve never heard of him, I’m sorry for you: you’re missing a giant of our on-going civil rights story, of our music, and of commitment to non-violence and stewardship that has outlasted the people who said all these are Anti-American.
For over 70 years, he has not lost sight of what matters. He has kept his eyes on the prize: justice, freedom, non-violence, reconciliation, and the full body of the United States hand in hand, as one. When I first lived in New York City, the Hudson River had no signs of life – not even microscopic life – as far as Poughkeepsie, 83 miles to the north. Imagine: not a single living freshwater creature for 83 miles. It was Seeger’s early vision of Clearwater that became an ecological stewardship movement, a power, an educational center, housed on a sloop that floated in filth 35 years ago and in waters full of fish, swimming children, and other freshwater life today. Seeger keeps his eyes on the prize.
Seeger is never happier than when his once crystal-clear tenor voice, now raspy, is drowned out by a crowd making a chorus so huge and loud that he simply moves away from the mike. He is a messenger. He carries a gospel, and there is nothing, nothing, that surpasses a crowd carrying that message and picking up the necessary work themselves. Seeger humbly supports us all as we keep our eyes on the prize. It’s not about him, it’s about the prize.
Keep Your Eyes on the Prize, by the way, is one of the many folk songs Seeger has shared to move us forward as a society. It was an anthem of the Civil Rights struggle of the 50s and 60s, sung with the same heart as We Shall Overcome. It’s about people jailed for their beliefs, beaten for their rights, people who did not retaliate, but kept their eyes on the prize of freedom and equality and on living the peace they espoused.
We enjoy readings today that help us keep our eyes on the prize with the humility of Pete Seeger. Proverbs describes a wonder woman, James shares both example and non-example of the prize, and Mark … well, Mark shows us once again how the chosen, inside counsel of 12 on whom Jesus is counting disappoint. Perhaps if Pete Seeger had been among them….
Proverbs opens with “A capable wife who can find? She is far more precious than jewels….” This woman is a phenomenon. She can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and she can also create beauty, run a business, spot and buy real estate opportunities, make Boy Scouts look as if they’ve never been prepared for anything, protect and love her family. She garbs herself not in expensive or flashy clothing to attract attention, but in strength and dignity that earn it. She keeps her eye on the prize – not fame or wealth or self-seeking or social mobility, but on her Lord. This unnamed woman embraces the freedom and strength of humility. She keeps her eyes on that prize, and she lives in happiness every day.
I’ve slowly been reading a book titled The Spirituality of Imperfection, and I’ve been loving it. We have a long history in the sphere of religion that would have us believe that only perfection yields spiritual worth. In fact, if the woman we read about in Proverbs took herself seriously, she would be another example of a perfection I’ll never have and that would make me consider slitting my wrists … well, at least doing some shopping. But authors Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham tell us ancient Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Greek stories showing the deep spiritual rewards of imperfection. We need only get out of our own ways and keep our eyes on the prize of our gospel.
James has a similar approach to Kurtz and Ketcham, which is probably why I always enjoy reading James. James urges, don’t deny that you have bitter envy and selfish ambition, just don’t confuse that with truth. Sure, once you’ve eaten two Oreos you feel there is no choice but to finish the box, but maybe you’ve just lost the big picture. You are who you are and you are imperfect, and you have a choice: you can wallow in the disorder and chaos and despair your imperfections yield, or you can accept that part of yourself, refocus, and get on with it. Return your eyes to the prize. As James says, if your best thinking got you where you are, then check your sources, and go seek wisdom from a better, more reliable source. “Draw near to God and God will draw near to you.”
We have a fascinating juxtaposition in our reading from Mark. You think there have to be verses missing between Jesus’ shocking revelation of his impending death and humiliation and the disciples’ blind focus on their anticipated rewards. Do they hear what Jesus is saying? No. Jesus’ words never register with them. The disciples’ imperfection isn’t that they’re stupid; it’s a complete failure of perception. They’re not buffoons, they don’t process what Jesus is saying because they don’t want to know. They are afraid to ask because asking might yield an answer that ruins everything. Hey, I’ve worked out of my own assumptions and hopes and haven’t let reality influence them, no matter how clear it is, have you? I’ve held onto my expectations for months and years despite all information to the contrary, have you? I’ve feared that reality would ruin my dreams, and rejected it. Like the disciples, I’ve had a serious failure of perception.
The disciples are protecting a reality that does not exist by rejecting everything Jesus brings. Their eyes are on a prize, a prize that makes them salivate and imagine themselves with power, prestige, and wealth. It’s not the prize. It’s not the prize that satisfies, that the woman of Proverbs holds, that James revisions, or that people of our own civil rights struggle understand. It’s not a prize of comeuppance, but a prize of fullness in God. Like Pete Seeger, let us relinquishing the mike and take up the song.