"Of Blagojevich and Anthony"

"Of Blagojevich and Anthony"
Proverbs 2:5-12


I’ve been following the news more closely, lately, since we started our Sunday School class based around current events.  I find myself trying to guess which news story is going to be highlighted for discussion for the coming Sunday.

The two stories that caught my interest early in the week had to do with the conviction of Rod Blagojevich selling Barrack Obama’s old senate seat to the highest bidder as well as lying to federal investigators.  And, of course, the whole Caley Anthony story, the two year old allegedly murdered by her mother, Casey Anthony.  Both stories have at their heart huge questions of personal integrity.  There have been so many lies and counter lies, denial, deflections and dysfunction, I’m pretty much sick of it all.

Juxtapose all that with the celebration of our independence as a nation on the 4th of July, and the huge amounts of integrity it took on so many people’s part, to gain and maintain our freedom.  We have moved, at the beginnings of our national history, from a position of personal and national integrity, to a place where personal and national integrity are severely damaged.  From our legal system, to our economic system, to our political system, to our morality, and on and on, we have gone terribly astray.

Our country is infected with systemic problems, for sure.  But all systems are run by people.  I’ve always said, if it wasn’t for people it would be a pretty good world.  So if the systems in our country are going to change, people have to change.  In any kind of large scale, systemic change, there needs to be a number of strong individuals, with a large amount of personal integrity, to make that kind of change happen.

So, this morning, I’m launching us out into a series of sermons based on the book of Proverbs.  The book of Proverbs was a teaching tool.  It is a collection of wisdom that was passed down from father to sons.  Proverbs isn’t about facts and figures about life.  It’s not about statistics.  It’s a book about how to live well.  How to be a person of integrity.  A country can’t be great, unless it’s people are great.  A country can’t be a place of integrity, if it’s people have no integrity.  Change, if it is to happen, must start with personal integrity, passed down from adults to children.  That’s why we’ll spend a good amount of time, the rest of the summer, looking at the book of Proverbs in order to bolster our own, and our children’s, and hopefully our country’s integrity.

The assumption behind these proverbs about personal integrity is that it doesn’t come naturally.  We aren’t born as people of integrity.  We have to live into becoming people with a strong moral fibre.  It takes effort and resolve to live a life of integrity.

Integrity, according to these verses in proverbs read a moment ago, has a lot of facets to it:  common sense, justice, honesty, fairness, sound judgement, protecting yourself from evil ways, refusing to lie.  So, mainly, with all these different facets, integrity has to do with being a certain kind of person.  Being a person of integrity means we know who and what we are.  And that we are willing to continue to work at our personal integrity no matter what the cost may be to us.

Looking at it another way, creating integrity is a way of writing your personal story.  We all live by a personal story.  Dan McAdams has a great book titled, The Stories We Live By.  The subtitle of the book is, Personal Myths and the Making of the Self.

At the start of the book he tells the story of Margaret.  Margaret drove over 2000 miles across the country with her teenaged daughter.  She drove all that way to break into an abandoned chapel at a Catholic Church so she could, in her words,  “rip the place apart.”  The mother and daughter scaled the cyclone fence surrounding the former Catholic boarding school for girls.  Twenty-five years had passed since Margaret left the school.

Margaret marched behind the altar.  She kicked its walls in and punched the pulpit.  She knocked over particular pews.  She flipped off the icon paintings on the wall.  With her car keys she carved, “I hate nuns,” and “They beat children,” in the chapel’s big wooden doors.

Then she stopped.  She calmly turned to her daughter and said, “We can leave now.”  She had accomplished a mission of extraordinary significance.  What may appear to others as an act of petty vandalism was for her a sacred ritual of facing her tragic story that started at that school and church.  One can only imagine what happened to her there.  Her personal theme had been, “my wasted life.”  But now she would not let that theme determine or deter her growing sense of personal integrity.


What is a story?  What does it take to make a story?  There’s a simple formula.  First, you need a character for your story.  Second, you need a setting for your character.  Then, thirdly, when you add a certain amount of dramatic conflict, what you get is the fourth element of the story, the theme or the myth of that story.  The myth of our personal stories has to do with how we put together, and find meaning around life’s ultimate questions.  How your character, imbedded in particular settings, dealing with dramatic conflict, will determine the depth and quality of your integrity.

Margaret had to return to her setting, the old Catholic school and chapel, where she suffered dramatic abuse of some kind.  In an equally dramatic way, she had to purge herself of that setting in order to change the meanings she had allowed to shape her life.  She was ready to find a new integrity of person, in a new setting, which would create new meaning for her life.

There are some parts of this formula we can’t control.  Like setting.  We are all born into a particular setting that included parents, siblings and extended family.  We had no choice in that.  Or the schools we went to, where we went to church (or didn’t go to church), our genetics, etc.  This is all the “raw material” we were given as we came into the world.  We can’t do anything to change all that.

Also, some of the dramatic conflict in our lives was way beyond our control.  For example, if you had an alcoholic, disruptive parent.  Or your parents got divorced.  Or if there was physical, sexual, or emotional abuse.  A life changing accident.  A disease.  All of that, that any of us experienced, and may still experience, was out of our control.

But the character, who we are, that person in the story, we do have control over.  The building of our own personal integrity, either because of or in spite of the unchangeable factors, we do have a say in, and can influence.

Our personal integrity, the meanings and myths of our personal stories are determined NOT by the setting of our stories.  NOT by the conflict in our stories.  Our personal integrity is determined by who we choose to be within those settings, and during our times when we must face conflict.

We may need to forgive those settings and conflicts we can’t understand or accept.  Especially in the parts of the story that we couldn’t control.  That’s part of our choice for integrity.  Forgiving our past for what it was, especially when it was beyond our control.

But some of the dramatic conflict in our stories has to do with our own selves.  Because we are all a mix as human beings, our selves contain inner ogres which we must face, and with which we must deal.  We can’t become people of integrity, or a nation of integrity, unless we deal with these parts of ourselves we may not like very much.

Our inner ogres might answer to names like mean, cheap, hypocritical, self-righteous, lustful, prudish, vulgar, stingy, two-faced, insensitive, self-centered, passive aggressive.  And so on.

As I said, we are a mix as human beings.  The good news is our ogres are not the sum total of who we are.  We have a lot of good traits in us that help bolster our sense of personal integrity.

But the warning is that our inner ogres are our potential selves.  Potentially, the inner ogres can detract from our good traits and ultimately destroy our integrity.  If we allow them enough growing room.

They are our unexpressed selves.  Remember in Mad Magazine (if you are bold enough to profess that you once read that magazine, as I am now) there was that one cartoon titled, “Shadow vs. Shadow.”  It showed a character in all white doing something.  But the character’s dark shadow on the wall was doing what the white character really wanted to be doing.  That’s the inner potential, the unexpressed ogre in us.  It only has as much power as we give it expression.  Not giving the inner ogres their expression is a large part of building our integrity as persons.

When you look at the list of qualities that define integrity in this part of the second chapter of Proverbs, they mostly have to do with ogre control:  common sense, honesty, fairness, sound judgement, keeping yourself from lies and scheming.  That’s all ogre control.


What happens if your ogre control, described for us here in Proverbs 2, breaks down?  What happens if we end up with a bad chapter in the story of our lives?  You may be fortunate that, in your life story, you only have a bad sentence or paragraph here or there.  Some minor mishap--hardly a blip in the telling of your story, and the maintenance of your personal integrity.

Others may have a bad chapter.  A major piece that isn’t pretty.  A time we wish could be edited out.  But no.  It’s there.  How that bad chapter fits into your story, and more importantly, how you flow out of it, will build or destroy your integrity.  How we deal with our bad chapters has a lot to do with building and rebuilding personal integrity.

Let’s look at a couple of examples from literature.  First, from Shakespeare:  Oedipus.  Oedipus, the son of a king and queen, was taken from his home soon after he was born.  When he was a young man, he went on a journey.  He met up with a stranger, they got into a conflict; they drew swords, and Oedipus killed the stranger.  Oedipus didn’t know at the time, that the person he killed was his real father.

Oedipus came, in his journey, to Thebes.  He ended up helping the city get through a crisis.  The grateful people hailed him as king.  He married the queen, not knowing it was his own mother, the widow of the king he had killed earlier in his journey.

Later, Oedipus finds out the truth of the tragic wrongs he had done, even though they were done out of ignorance.  On discovering the truth, he cried out:
Darkness!
Horror of darkness, enfolding
memory of evil deeds I have done!
Why should I see?
Oedipus went into his chambers and tore out his eyeballs with his own fingers.  He spent the rest of his life wandering in blind and overpowering guilt.  He took responsibility for his actions but could never forgive himself, dying in misery.  His bad chapter became his last chapter.

The other example is the character Raskolnikov, in the book Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.  In this book, Raskolnikov murders a wretch of a woman in cold blood, simply because he could.  There was no ignorance in his murderous act, as there was with Oedipus.  Raskolnikov simply did it without guilt.

But later in the book he falls in love with Sonia.  Out of his love for her he confesses his crime to the police, but still tried to make excuses for his behavior.  He blamed it on fate.  But once in prison he came face to face with his inner ogres.  When Sonia came to visit him, at one point in the story, he fell at her feet, and found the courage to admit his darkness.  He found the only remedy for such a dark, bad chapter:  forgiveness from others and himself.  Only then was Raskolnikov able to move on with his life as a person of integrity, and begin a new chapter.

These two characters, Oedipus and Raskolnikov are examples of what we can do with the bad chapters in our lives.  We can let the guilt of them overwhelm us and destroy us.  And so can dishonest denial.  Only honesty answered by God’s grace can free us, and restore our integrity.  Then we can start writing a new chapter.

Personal integrity is an ongoing challenge.  A daily challenge.  Reading through the book of Proverbs will be a guide for the ethical and moral situations we face that challenge our integrity.  And people throughout church history have given us guidance about how to maintain our integrity before God.  One of those is Ignatius of Loyola.

(The Examen)