“Fundamentals”
Genesis 1: 26 – 2: 3   Psalm 8
A Sermon by the Reverend Odette Lockwood-Stewart

For seventeen years I served as a campus minister (at UCLA, SDSU, and at Cal,) and one of my favorite programs was called the “Last Lecture Series.”  We would invite a professor to give a public lecture as if it were the last one of his or her life.  The values, thoughts, poetry, questions, stories, and visions that flowed from these lectures given by scientists, artists, engineers, historians, and many others, were wildly diverse, often surprising and consistently challenging.

Last Spring, Randy Pausch, a popular computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, agreed to give such a lecture.  But between the time he agreed to do it and the date of the lecture, Dr. Pausch, 47 years old, married, with three very young children, was diagnosed with metastatic pancreatic cancer and was told that he might have 3-6 months of health remaining.  

Eventually, for his family and for himself, he decided that even though he had resigned from the university to be with his family in the time he had left, and even though he had moved to Virginia to be closer to extended family, he would still return to the University to give his real “Last Lecture.” He did so in September 2007.

The title of his lecture was “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.”  (You can view the whole 76-minute lecture on the web.)  In it he talks about his specific childhood dreams and how achieving some of them (like zero gravity) and not achieving some of them (like playing for the NFL) taught him a lot – about joy, honesty, integrity, gratitude, love, about life. In a tiny book called, The Last Lecture he tells a series of stories that reveal his fundamental values for what he calls “living like I’m dying and living like I’m living.”        Pausch is a Christian, but he wanted to be understood by everyone and therefore did not use religious language in his stories... However, at the beginning of his lecture, he did say that he had had a deathbed conversion:  he had finally bought a Macintosh!

It is easy to forget the fundamentals. Pausch’s high school football coach, Jim Graham, was a seriously old school coach.  Coach Graham believed in fundamentals.  Coach Graham was so old school that he thought the forward pass was a trick play!  On the first day of football practice the students were surprised that Coach didn’t bring any footballs.  He even said they didn’t need a football!  When asked about it, he asked them how many players are on the field in a football game. “Twenty-two.”  Then he asked how many players touch the football at any given time. “One.”   “Right!” he said, “So we’re going to work on what those other 21 guys are doing.”        (p. 36)

For Randy Pausch daily fundamentals include:  show gratitude; tell the truth; never give up; and while you can’t choose what happens to you, you can choose how to respond, and what fundamentals guide our choices.

Pausch’s invites us as teachers, students, co-workers, parents, friends, neighbors, communities of faith to be less like judges and more like coaches, less like lecturers and more like personal trainers, – practicing fundamentals and form together, giving access to space, community, and equipment, and then being demanding – so that each person will know how to judge for themselves how they are coming along.

We practice our faith, not to be perfect, not to be spiritually buff, but to be transformed by the Spirit of God for the transformation of the world.  

John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement nearly 300 years ago set forth three fundamentals for living as followers of Jesus Christ.  Three general rules.  I think they are a perfect place to begin ... and a great place to end up.  The three simple rules are ... are you ready?  1.  Do no harm.   2.  Do Good.  3.  Stay in Love with God.

United Methodist Bishop Rueben P. Job wrote of them last year in this tiny book Three Simple Rules:A Wesleyan Way of Living. (*Book...*Bookmark*) The first rule is “do no harm.”... Our children talked about this moments ago.  “Do no harm” changes the first question I ask myself when I act or react.  It’s no longer about what has happened to me, rather,  it’s whether what I plan to do will do harm.  As Bishop Job says, “To do no harm means that I will be on guard so that all my actions and even my silence will not add injury to another of God’s children or to any part of God’s creation.” (p. 31) To do no harm, we must engage in careful and continuous assessment of self and world.  We fail, we fall, NONE of us is perfect – but are we listening, are we learning, are we practicing?

The second simple rule is a corollary of the first ... that takes it one step further.  First, “do no harm”, then, “do good.”  “Doing good, like doing no harm, is a proactive way of living ... Doing good is directed at everyone, even those who do not fit my category of ‘worthy.’ ... This command is universal in that no one is exempt from it.” (p. 37)

I was moved not only by the decision of the California Supreme Court this week, but by the quality of the language they used.  Chief Justice Ronald George, who was first appointed a judge in 1972 by Governor Ronald Reagan and appointed to the State Supreme Court by Governor Pete Wilson in 1991, wrote the majority opinion. He said, in part,

We conclude that, ... the constitutionally based right to marry properly must be understood to encompass the core set of basic substantive legal rights and attributes ...  These core substantive rights include, most fundamentally, the opportunity of an individual to establish — with the person with whom the individual has chosen to share his or her life — an officially recognized and protected family possessing mutual rights and responsibilities and entitled to the same respect and dignity accorded a union traditionally designated as marriage....the substantive right— constitutes a vitally important attribute of the fundamental interest in liberty and personal autonomy that the California Constitution secures to all persons for the benefit of both the individual and society.

The fundamental interest in liberty and autonomy for all citizens insures that the good is the common good.
In the Book of Genesis we read that each one of us, every one of us, is a child of God, all humanity is made in God’s image, blessed, loved, and entrusted to claim the inheritance of children of God.  We are more than fellow citizens.  We are brothers and sisters, beloved of God.

Do no harm.  Do good.  And the third rule really is the foundation on which the first two depend ... “Stay in love with God.”  One way Bishop Job expressed this is “... to live our lives in harmony with something larger than ourselves and larger than that which the world values as ultimate.”
John Wesley wrote in his journal in 1738 “the life of God in the soul, is the image of God fresh stamped on the heart.” Staying in love with God requires something of us.  When we are deeply in love, we are changed.....we are transformed by that relationship.
Do no harm ... Do good ... stay in love with God.

As we live our lives aware that any day could be our last day, any word could be our last word;  As we live in love with that higher power, deeper source, all-encompassing spirit that sustains us ... As we choose to take on disciplines of thought and action in community that will help us to do no harm and to do good ... We will be formed ... and re-formed ... sustained and transformed by a power and love that never will let us go.  Amen.