I would like to begin the sermon with a tongue in cheek remark by Soren Kierkegaard on whom I will later rely for a particular insight about Abraham. He says: “ What huge heads everyone must have in order to have such huge thoughts.” I want to talk about the problem of heroes and my lifetime thinking about them. I was raised on the heroes of the Bible: Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, et al. One of my first secular heroes was Jackie Robinson, the baseball player. My first recollection of being excited about baseball, which as most of you know has become a life time preoccupation, was Dizzy Dean announcing a Brooklyn Dodger game on national TV and Jackie Robinson stealing home in that game. As a pony and colt league baseball player myself I, of course, used the Jackie Robinson model Louisville Slugger bat, a point I will come back to later. I should also probably mention, although it is impossible for me to think you wouldn’t know, that Robinson was also the man who in 1947 broke the so-called color line in major league baseball.

      When I was about 14, another man who also captured my imagination was a “missionary” who periodically visited our Linda Vista congregation. His name was Juan Chavez and he had a way of walking out into an audience and speaking with such immediacy that it was exciting to hear him preach the gospel without such decorum that ordinarily keynoted the gospel speaking that I had otherwise heard. Chavez was marvelous in his ability to vivify his work in Tijuana and to challenge the audience to help.

      When I was 16 and trying to decide where to go to college, I visited Occidental College and attended a lecture by a philosopher, Donald Loftsgordon. Dr. Loftsgordon was enthralling. And he didn’t stand still in front of his audience either. Instead, as he spoke he paced from one end of the classroom to the other. I had been taught in my high school speech class to stand perfectly still when speaking, that any movement (or wandering) was distracting, but Loftsgordon was mesmerizing and living proof that my speech teacher was wrong about at least some speakers. My freshman year his courses were full by the time freshmen registered. My sophomore year he was on sabbatical. By my junior year he had committed suicide. It was my first disillusioning awareness of the problems of fallible heroes. Relevatory journalism was not common in my youth so there had not been so many and frequent exposees of famous people. I was shocked and I wondered did his act of suicide diminish the regard that he deserved as a “professor”? Our equivalent to SGA did not think so. They decided to establish a perpetual teaching award in his name. I was an officer on SGA. I felt that it was not so easy to distinguish the quality of teaching from the overall quality of the life. I shared the other students’ concern and perhaps pity, but I did not agree that the perpetual teaching trophy should be named after someone who had done something I thought was so clearly wrong - commit suicide. I have no recollections of feeling self righteous about my vote. I still feel in touch with the sadness I felt. But, I thought the gesture of establishing the award for teaching was wrong. As a voting member I called for a roll call vote so that I could record my vote against establishing this teaching award, which, by the way, is an award that is still given each year to the professor the students vote teacher of the year. That I was so much younger then, and that it was so long ago, I think I can say fairly that for me my single negative vote was what Paul Tillich calls an act of courage - an act in which I was both part of the group, yet apart from the group. But was I right? How much can you expect of heroes?

      For me it was also in college where I first learned that honest Abe Lincoln suffered severely from depression, then called melancholia, and that he had also been a miserable failure in most of his undertakings. It was even worse news about George Washington. Not only did the father of the country have wooden teeth, but he hadn’t chopped down a cherry tree, thrown a silver dollar across the Potomac, or even stood up in the front of his boat crossing the Delaware (and good thing or we would have surely lost our first president into the winter river).

      Perhaps it was because of such human foibles that led the professors at the college and university I attended (other than Pepperdine) never to spend time on the biographies of the authors of the books we read. “Biography,” if it belonged anywhere at all (after junior high school), belonged solely to the historians, and the lives of the authors we read were not presumed germane to their works. It didn’t really matter if Galileo recanted, and Francis Bacon embezzled, and Napoleon was ruthless. It was their work we studied. With Carlyle academicians had seemingly decided to measure eminence, not character, as the measure of heroism. And I became comfortable with that notion.

      I don’t remember thinking much about “heroes” for a long time after that. It was just after I had returned to Pepperdine to teach that I remember thinking about the issue again. Some of you may remember. At another school a college basketball player had been found guilty of a sex related crime. There had been a cover up. Then it was exposed. There was a trial and guilt established. This person “paid his legal debt to society” and went on to have a lucrative professional career. But as I had had a long, if dubious, career of lionizing athletes and thinking it appropriate that they should be role models as well as athletes, I was reluctant to pay admission to see someone I did not want to “identify” with. But was that fair on my part? I wondered. The person had paid the seemingly small penalty that society demanded of him. Surely there were other professional athletes who had done wrong things that I just didn’t know about. So, if the person played a great game, why not just admire his game? Do you really care whether your mechanic is a nice person? The telephone operator is an escaped-convict? Your gas station attendant cheated on income tax? Should individuals with clearly public roles be held to higher standards of behavior? Are hypocrites who “play the role” any better than documented sinners? I’ve not found such questions easy to answer. But they seem important to me. Soren Kierkegaard argues that heroes we choose suggest our better natures.

      Last spring I went to visit one of my academic heroes, Basil Bernstein (pronounced Burn-stine). Funny, since I had only known of his name in print I had thought his name was pronounced Bernsteen. Anyway, in one of his unpublished papers, that he shared with me, he had written that in the middle ages the validity of knowledge was verified by the character of the academician’s life. I rather liked that thought. And I began to think about why I had been willing to separate the issue of the creation of knowledge from the character of the creator of that knowledge. Bernstein explained it in terms of power. If you can market knowledge separately from the character of the creator of the knowledge, you change who can make the profit. It is not necessarily in the best interests of those with the best character to experience this dichotomy. But it may explain a lot about what is happening in higher, particularly higher public education. I wondered further about the implications of this separation of work and character for Christians.

      Is it in our best interest as Christians to separate knowledge from the source? Certainly not always; but, then, when? It was still in the general context of this kind of thinking that I read Soren Kierkegaard’s book, Fear and Trembling, which is about Abraham and about faith. I admit that it had always seemed a bit strange to me that Abraham would be asked to take Isaac up on a hill and “off him.” I had heard the explanations that it proved his obedience and hence proved his faith. But it also smacked to me, although I didn’t want to think about it, of the kind of stuff Nazi Germans must have said about obeying. (By the way, we often say speak where the Bible speaks and be silent where it is silent. I am certainly not going to try to persuade you about an understanding of that particular scripture about Abraham, but I do admit to being impressed with Kierkegaard’s “huge thoughts” on this huge issue about Abraham.)

      Anyway, at the risk of oversimplifying Kierkegaard there are a couple of points I would like to borrow from him. First, I was relieved that Kierkegaard suggested that if we figured it all out rationally we still wouldn’t have faith. That, in and of itself, makes some kind of rational sense. Second, I was amused that Kierkegaard realized that Abraham was “no thinker, he felt no need to go further than faith.” If Abraham didn’t have to figure it out completely, then I probably wouldn’t have to do so either. Third, Kierkegaard made it possible for me to understand how completely Abraham had to love Isaac, and Isaac specifically, for this story of faith to work. In my mind I think I must have thought that it was a lot like the situation with Job’s children - they were replaceable. God could give Abraham another son. I could imagine Abraham willing to obey, but I saw the dilemma as one about whether he could commit a murder, not a matter of how much he loved Isaac. But that is not the way it was. As Kierkegaard says, “if (Abraham) had not so loved Isaac, then he could not understand that it could be forgiven; for what sin was more terrible?” As a father I can better understand that now. Abraham loved Isaac as much as I love my daughter, Creedance, and yet he was still up there on the mountain, and, absurd as it might seem, Abraham, and I quote Kierkegaard again, Abraham “could not comprehend that it was a sin to have been willing to sacrifice to God the best he owned.” Abraham could not fully know that God would not require it until he was prepared to take his son’s life, and it was at that precise moment of pending death that Abraham went over the top, and in so doing, charted previously uncharted territory. Somehow I think Abraham must have been amused when at the very moment of sacrifice he also realized, of course, that God wouldn’t require it. I think he must have laughed as he fully realized the character of God.

      So for Kierkegaard, Abraham is the great hero of faith. But that truism, unfortunately, does not really resolve my questions about the roles and limits of heroes. Kierkegaard, himself, goes on to say that he could not, and would not want to be such a hero of faith. It was quite okay with Kierkegaard for god to require much less of him than that. He says, “God created man and woman, so too he shaped the hero,” yet Kierkegaard himself said that he didn’t really want to be an Abraham. So now where are we other than with huge minds and small thoughts? It is for now that I have waited to tell you, as I promised I would, about my Jackie Robinson story and my Jackie Robinson bat. His bat model is noteworthy because it is very heavy and has a thick handle. But it is the Jackie Robinson model and Jackie Robinson was my hero. Among the many characteristics I don’t share with Robinson is strength. It seems silly now, but in my youth I persisted in using a bat I was not strong enough to swing. I am sure that the first thing Mr. Robinson would have told me about hitting was that I couldn’t generate enough bat speed with the bat I was using to hit a baseball. I am not so naïve as to think that such an obstinacy on my part kept me from advancing to a distinguished hitting career (After all I had intended to be a major league pitcher, not batter.) But I would have been a better hitter and it was a real life example of how “heroes” are not inherently beneficial. As another ‘hero’ of mind, Ralph Waldo Emerson, said, “imitation is suicide.” But that ‘imitation is suicide’ does not mean that I am willing to say that you should be your own hero. But, then, neither am I willing to say that Jesus should be your hero which you may have been expecting. Fortunately, we need only one Messiah and Jesus filled the bill. Messianic complexes on our part are not only not called for, but are completely inappropriate. I think most of us will agree that it is already too late for us to be perfect.

      So, where does that leave us, hoping you have been thinking along with me about your own heroes? Well, I am finally fast approaching my “tentative” conclusion. But not before talking about yet one more baseball player, Pete Rose, who is currently in a lot of trouble, not only with his lifetime ban from baseball, but apparently with the IRS as well. Despite all his problems, Rose still argues that he is a suitable “role model” for children on the field, “between the foul lines.” I don’t doubt that Rose consistently put his best performance on the field and that that part of his life can be admired. I also realize, however, that my heroes are more likely to be taken from those who do not require such a close circumspection of the areas of their heroism. I am sure that professors here at Pepperdine have done quality research, but it is the quality of their lives that has drawn me to Pepperdine. I won’t embarrass anyone by naming names, but in my ten years as a college student the best professor I ever had is in this room. It’s not just because he is brilliant. And I can look around this audience and name name after name of people who inspire me to be, like the Army ad, all that I can be. Not because they are perfect like Jesus; not only because of the quality of their work. But because they serve others and love God. So here, finally is what I think is the crux of the matter.

      As Kierkegaard says, “no one shall be forgotten who was great in this world; but everyone was great in his own way, and everyone in proportion to the greatness of what he loved. For he who loved himself became great in himself, and he who loved others became great through his devotion, but he who loved God became greater than all.” Within these rubrics Pete Rose was a great hitter; Jackie Robinson a great crusader; Abraham a great lover of God. I suspect the story of Abraham does confirm that we will be great in proportion to what we love. Praise God.