The Lutheran Hour
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"Pulling for Others"
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Text: Romans 8:31-39
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Wes was talking on the phone with his mother. She’d never been to South Africa and was excited to hear about it. His mother had always been pulling for him, but Wes had only just begun to appreciate this. Their relationship had come to a turning point recently. It hadn’t been more than a few years ago when they were arguing in the kitchen and he stood over her, and it occurred to her that her son might actually hit her. Physically he could harm her, but she wasn’t afraid of him. She saw what was really going on, saw him drifting along in a current towards self-destruction. She saw that he needed help, more help than she could give on her own. So she made the decision to send him to a military boarding school. Wes resented her for it at first, but it proved to be the experience that kept him from drowning in his conflicted teenage rebellion.
In the military, Wes was blessed with more people pulling for him. Pulling for him, not because he deserved it, but because that’s what they did, that’s what they do, and they showed him how to pull for others. And with so many pulling for him, he graduated from that military school, was accepted into Johns Hopkins University, got an internship with the mayor of Baltimore, became a Rhodes Scholar, a decorated combat veteran, a White House fellow, a business leader with a bright future in front of him. Looking back, Wes says it was all the people pulling for him that made the difference. And it was because of them that he got this opportunity to study abroad in South Africa, the place Wes was now telling his mom about over the phone. Just before he hung up, his mom changed the subject. “I have something crazy to tell you”, she said. “Do you know that they’re looking for some guy with your name, another guy named Wes Moore, for killing a cop?”
See this first Wes was surrounded by people pulling for him, but this other Wes would be surrounded by the police and then by steel bars in a prison cell. They didn’t know it at the time, but both Weses had grown up in the same crime-ridden neighborhood in Baltimore. Both grew up fatherless, both had made bad choices that put them at odds with local law enforcement, but their paths diverged. The other Wes, now serving a life sentence in prison, maintained his innocence. He said that he wasn’t even there that day when his brother and some accomplices robbed a jewelry store. He said he wasn’t there when his brother pulled the trigger and killed a cop. He said he wasn’t there. But the DNA test on a necklace found at the crime scene said that he was. His lawyer said that his brother must have borrowed the necklace and dropped it during the robbery, but the jury didn’t buy it.
So the other Wes was sentenced to life in prison, and that’s where the first Wes met him. He remembered what his mother had told him on the phone when he was still in South Africa. He was intrigued at first simply because they were joined by the same first and last name, Wes Moore. So when the first Wes returned to the states, he followed the case and wrote a letter to the other Wes in prison. They shared the same name after all and other similarities as well, lack of resources, delinquency, fatherlessness. But here was the first Wes with new opportunities opening before him at every turn and then there was the other Wes, locked in a six-by-eight-foot cell where he would most likely die.
Why are their stories so different? When we ask that question, we are asking not only for them, we’re asking for us, for our children and grandchildren, hoping they will find opportunities flowering before them. Hoping they’ll stay out of prison and not just the institutional kind with physical locks and bars. When we ask why the two Weses are so different, we’re asking for us, for our friendships, for our marriages and partnerships, hoping that they grow deeper and flourish even though we see so many withering and decaying. We ask about the Weses because we hope our lives point to something more than just pointless futility. The first Wes asked this question in a book he wrote in 2010 titled, The Other Wes Moore. He asks the question but doesn’t give a simplistic answer. Instead, he puts their two stories, their two childhoods side by side and lets you the reader, answer what made the difference.
Reading it, you can see that it’s not as simple as saying that one made good choices and the other made bad choices. They both made bad choices and they both had second chances. The first Wes, the author, wrote the book not to congratulate himself, but to confess his gratitude toward others, toward the people who were pulling for him. Four years later, Wes wrote a follow-up book titled, The Work. In this book reflecting back on his childhood he wrote, “I owe everything in my own life to other people.” Being a Rhodes Scholar, a combat veteran, a White House fellow, he says, “I owe it all to other people.” To his family, his fellow soldiers, his mentors, to all the people who were pulling for him. And the other Wes? It’s not as simple as saying he made bad choices. He did make bad choices, but he was also affected by the bad choices of others.
See, the first Wes had people pulling for him. Even his father who died of a rare medical condition when Wes was four, his father was pulling for him. And in four short years, he gave his son a lifetime supply of loving memories that sustained him. As for the other Wes, his father was still alive, but he chose not to be around. The first Wes had a mother with a deep network of family support, including her parents who chose to make many sacrifices for Wes’ future. The other Wes had a mother who depended on government programs which were funded and defunded by politicians with no personal knowledge of her situation. The first Wes had a family who chose to pull him out of a failing neighborhood. The other Wes had an older brother who chose to become a captive in an inner city drug ring and pulled the other Wes down with him.
Wes, the convict, made bad choices, but so did the first Wes. So did I. But where we found loving discipline, healthy expectations, and responsible role models, the other Wes, and many others like him, found abandonment, punishment, and isolation. Now, if I were a politician, I’d present you with a platform at this point in the talk. If I were a progressive politician, I might talk about how privilege and power are shared unfairly and how we need smarter programs and more equitable policies to fight favoritism and spread opportunities more evenly. If I were a conservative politician, I might talk about how bureaucratic fixes are wasteful and invite entitlement and how we need to support the traditional family to raise our children with a greater sense of gratitude and accountability to others.
And if I were a moderate, I’d say we somehow need to do both and to be skeptical of both. But I am not called to the vocation of politician. I do believe that the vocation of politician is vital; it’s important, and I pray for politicians, whether they’re progressive, conservative, or moderate. I pray that God gives them the wisdom to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly under God. We need good politicians. But we also need to remember that the problems they tackle and the solutions they offer are short term.
It’s like people after a shipwreck organizing the survivors. After a shipwreck, there’s much important short term work to do. We need to get people into life rafts. We need to account for resources and ration supplies and there are better and worse ways to do this. And it ought to bother us if one Wes ends up safe in a raft surrounded by sufficient resources and people pulling for him while the other is slowly sinking in the ocean. That ought to bother us, and we should try to do something short term to help all the other Weses out there. And we need smart people to organize these political efforts. But my calling, my responsibility, is to remind you that we are still in a shipwreck and to tell of a greater rescue that is coming.
I think you all know that we are in a shipwreck. Even if you are surrounded by people who love you, even if you’re blessed with abundant resources, safe in your little life raft. I think you know that we’re in a shipwreck because you see how quickly circumstances can change. A cancer diagnosed, a marriage sunk, a business capsized, the whole country goes under overnight. And even if you’re insulated from all that in this moment, you can sense our human shipwreck in the groupish attitude of people who care only about those in their little raft. You can sense it in the self-righteousness of people who say that they want to save everyone, but are really just serving themselves. You can sense the shipwreck in yourself, in your own self serving and so can I. We sense it in our bodies failing, and our days dwindling in a world that is groaning.
Some say that this shipwreck is all there is. They say that there is no external rescue coming for us and all around us it’s just ocean, endless, meaningless, fatherless. And so the real rescue, according to this perspective, is simply to embrace life as it is, to make the best use of this time in these tiny rafts. Others will tell you that there is hope for some greater rescue, but it’s on a distant shore. It’s up to us to paddle ourselves there. So we all know that we are in something like a shipwreck. We’re all tending to the business of survival. We’re all political in that sense, and some of us are called to be politicians, to organize the survival efforts on some larger scale. I have not been elected into politics in that sense, but I am called to speak of this shipwreck and to tell about the rescue.
Now, the Rescuer that we speak of every week on this program is Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah. When I was growing up, I got the impression that the rescue that Jesus promises was just another version of that disembodied existence after death. I thought of Jesus as a free ticket to a happy, floaty afterlife, and I didn’t think he had any interest in this world, this physical, political world. But then someone showed me a passage in the Bible that changed the way I saw things. The words were from one of the first preachers of Jesus, a man named Paul, a Jewish man who wrote to followers of Jesus living in ancient Rome roughly 50 years after the birth of Jesus. The words were from the middle of the letter, chapter 8. There Paul says that when the crucified and risen Jesus comes to the rescue, the whole physical world will be set free from its bondage to decay. The whole creation will be brought into new life that will come when Jesus returns to raise the dead and restore all things.
In the letter, Paul retells the story of the Bible, a story that leads to Jesus. It’s the account of how the eternal God created the physical world, good but incomplete. Incomplete because it needed proper caring for and cultivating. So God created human beings, a special creature with physical and spiritual dimensions created to be God’s partners, to cultivate and to tend to God’s garden creation. But humankind chose not this first way, but the other way. They chose a life separated from God, a life that proved to be a living death, a shipwreck. But God did not leave His creation fatherless because He is a loving Father by nature.
So God began a rescue operation, a rescue that looks surprisingly progressive and conservative at the same time. Conservative because God chose to work within the family as He Himself designed it: one man, one woman bound to each other for life in a marriage partnership biologically designed to bring forth more life, to bring forth children. From all the families of the world, God chose one man and his wife, Abraham and Sarah, who although they did not have a model marriage, God chose them to begin His rescue. It’s a conservative plan but at the same time progressive. Because from the beginning, Abraham and Sarah’s family was to be a family with a mission, not simply to look out for their own, but always to be sharing what they had been given, to be a family for all people, not just the ones in their raft. Abraham’s family was to be the first, the first family that truly pulls for others and their model for this wasn’t the short-term politics of this shipwrecked life. Their model is God Himself.
God is the model because Abraham’s family also suffered a shipwreck. They were supposed to be the first, but they became like the others, like us, and rejected God’s way and chose the other. So God Himself made a way to them. God’s eternal Son, Jesus came to their rescue to be their Messiah. But when He came, he looked too progressive for the conservatives, too conservative for the progressives, and too zealous for the moderates, so they crucified Him. And that’s when God did His most surprising work yet. In the sacrificial death of Jesus, God satisfied His insistence on justice and fulfilled His love for kindness. Then God raised Jesus from the dead to restore that first way, the way of humble faith—not only as God’s partners, but as His beloved children.
Many in Abraham’s family believed this message. And when the news about this rescue in Messiah, Jesus came out, there was no more room in the raft for self-congratulation, no more room for pleading innocence, but only room for gratitude. God was still pulling for them, not because they deserved it, but so that they could pull for others.
Paul was among the first to start pulling for non-Jews, to spread the news of the rescue in Jesus beyond the biological family of Abraham. That’s why he wrote this letter, to encourage a mixed group of Jews and non-Jews following Jesus together in Rome. Listen to this excerpt from that letter, the end of chapter 8. He says, “If God is for us, who can be against us? God did not spare His own Son, but freely gave Him up for us all. How will he not also with Him, freely give us all things? Who is going to bring any charge against God’s chosen ones? God is the One who justifies them. Who is going to condemn? Messiah Jesus, who died, more than that, who is raised to life, He is at God’s right hand and He is pulling for us, interceding for us. Who will separate us from the love of the Messiah? Shall trouble or hardship, persecution or famine, nakedness, danger or sword? No. In all these things we are more than conquerors. We are completely victorious through Him who loved us. You see, I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor rulers, neither present nor future, nor any powers, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Messiah Jesus our Lord.”
Wes Moore, the author of that book, The Other Wes Moore, as of January 2023 at the age of 44, became the first black governor of the state of Maryland. Governor Wes Moore has important work to do in his state. Work that we all share in our states, in our cities, and our neighborhoods. Work that none of us can do on our own. There are people adrift who need someone pulling for them. And even though pulling people into life rafts is not the same as rescuing them, it’s a step better than drowning. But I pray for politicians and I’m learning to participate in my local politics as a follower of Messiah Jesus. And I am a small part of a global family of Jesus followers, connected by His blood, joined by the same name, learning to pull for others because He is pulling for us.
If this message has come to you adrift in the shipwreck of this mortal life, I have a promise for you that no political platform can deliver: the promise that Jesus Messiah, the Son of God, is pulling for you and trusting Him, nothing can separate you from His love. And if this word has come to you and you find yourself safe in a raft surrounded by people who love you, I offer that same promise. And if you trust Him, Jesus will do something in you, and you’ll find that you have less room in your raft for self-congratulation and more for gratitude and more to share with other survivors. You don’t have to be afraid of sharing because God Himself is pulling for you. Nothing can hurt you. No one can harm you. You have nothing to lose. You are loved. The rescue is coming, so reach out and pull for someone else. In the Name of Jesus. Amen.
No Reflections for July 23, 2023
Music Selections for this program:
“A Mighty Fortress” arranged by Chris Bergmann. Used by permission.
“If You Will Trust the Lord to Guide You” by Kenneth Kosche. From Triumphant Lamb by the choirs of Concordia University-Wisconsin (© MorningStar Music Publishers) Used by permission.
“In Holy Conversation” From The Concordia Organist (© 2009 Concordia Publishing House) Used by permission.