If I Lined up all the Teachers…

My dad used to play this game with me right before bed.  He’d tuck me in and then say “If I lined up all the little boys in all the world and could pick just one to be my son, who would I pick?” And I would go through all the people I knew.  We’d whittle it down by putting qualifiers on it like “does he have blond hair etc.” And of course eventually we’d get to where he was picking me.  We both knew it was going to be me.  But the longer I could guess, the later I could stay up.  My son Isaac and I would play that same game when he was little. He wasn’t that great at it.  He would always pick himself first guess...

But if I could line up all the teachers in the world and pick one, just one that would be the most influential teacher and mentor I would ever have.  Mr. Ferree, at first glance would not have been the teacher I would have picked.  Because at first glance and maybe even at a second and third glance, Mr. Ferree may have been one of the strangest people I’ve ever met in my entire life.  I’m sure throughout our time together, you’ll get to meet some of my friends and you’ll realize that if I’m saying someone is one of the strangest people I’ve ever met, that’s saying a lot. Mr. Ferree was a WEIRDO.

Ok.  Let’s erase the obvious here.  Let’s take away the thank you for not projectile vomiting t-shirt, and the near obsession with 19th century whaling songs, you would still have one of the strangest men I’ve ever met.  First of all, he looked just like Ben Franklin and KNEW everything about Ben Franklin.  And on the first day of my American literature class, after we had all settled down, he pulled out a burnt-out computer hard drive and told us that this was our brain on drugs.  If he ever got “mad” about something he’d go into these “tirades” where he would swing around a computer mouse and slam it into his podium.  That is, until one day he decided that all animals should be freed and threw the mouse out a window.

With a lot of students at my boarding school being from Cleveland, there were a lot of Browns fans there.  And so it made sense that a few of the kids were bummed when the Browns moved to Baltimore.  Mr. Ferree, tired of these complaints looked at us one days and asked, “How do you think I feel??” and rolled up his sleeve revealing a big Cleveland Browns tattoo.  It was pretty shocking.  It was also a fake tattoo.  But it took awhile for order to be restored.  And these were just ordinary, every day occurrences in Mr. Ferree’s Class

I don’t know why by Mr. Ferree took a deep interest in me.  I really don’t.  But I never had a teacher encourage me before, who made me feel like I was worth something.  One day I came into class and he excitedly pulled me aside and told me to see him immediately after school.  So, after school I went to his room.  He brought me in, and as though he was revealing the arc of the covenant or something, he gingerly pulled out an old 45 record from his desk.  “Do you know what this is, Quincy?”   “A record Mr. Ferree.”  “This Mr. Worthington, is our afternoon.”  It was a record of all the sound effects and music for the looney tunes cartoons.  He took me over to his house, made popcorn, turned on Yo MTv Raps and muted it.  Then he put the looney tunes record on.  And it was hysterical.

My first inside joke was with the man.  We were reading the play the Odd Couple and there’s a line where Oscar is yelling a Felix that it took him weeks to figure out that the note We’re out of Cornflakes, F.U. meant Felix Unger.  So, when one of us would take a jab at the other we’d say “We’re out of cornflakes.”  Like when I told him that time flies and he looked at me, opened the window, walked over to the clock on the wall, threw it like a frisbee out the opened window and said, “Not very well, Mr. Worthington, not very well.”  I responded, “We’re out of cornflakes, Mr. Ferree.”

One day he made me come over for what has become one of the most exciting moments of my life.  Apparently, Mr. Ferree had Kurt Vonnegut’s home phone number and had been calling a very disgruntled Kurt Vonnegut on his birthday for about 25 years or so.  I’ve now been cussed out by Kurt Vonnegut on his birthday 2 years in a row.  And he’s my favorite author of all time.

And that’s just it. Through all his antics and pranks and the oddest sense of humor I’ve ever seen, Mr. Ferree taught me that learning and reading is an amazing journey.  And that it isn’t something that you should do because you have to, but because you WANT to, because it ads something inexplicably wonderful to your life. It would have been enough had Mr. Ferree just been interested in me.  It would have been enough just to have faith in me, no one really did up until that point, but Mr. Ferree opened up worlds to me I never knew existed.  I told him I like plays, and he taught me to write them.   I told him I didn’t fit in, and he taught me to be myself. I told him I wanted to be somebody, and he taught me how to become that.

One day shortly after I became a minister, I got to preach at the church I grew up in. And Mr. Ferree came to see me. I caught up with him afterwards as he was trying to escape out the door and thanked him for everything. I told him there was no way I could have become anything close to who I am today without him.  Then we both started crying like babies and he hugged me.  I didn’t know his cancer returned. I didn’t know in a few months he’d be gone. I didn’t know it was the last time I’d ever see him. Just before he walked out of the church, he turned to me, smiled and said that he only had three students he ever thought would be ministers and the other two were in jail. I told him we’re out of cornflakes.

If I lined up all the teachers in the world and could pick just one, just one... I’d pick Joel Ferree.  And if I lined up all the things that a person can be to another person in this life and pick one to be, I’d want to be a Mr. Ferree to somebody.  We don’t pick the great ones.  And I don’t know if they pick us.  But sometimes in life, whether through happenstance or divine intervention, someone we don’t expect walks into our lives and shakes it to the very foundation. And lest you think that I’m just rambling about my teacher, this is exactly what happened to the Eunuch in Acts this morning.  Along walks Philip and rocks this guys world to the very foundations.

See, We as human beings, have no way of knowing how what we do can affect the lives of others.  And we, as Christians, are called to bring light into the darkness of the world.  That for us is a very serious calling. Philip here gives us insight into how we do it and what it looks like.  The first thing is to be open to the Holy Spirit, to listen to where it is calling us to go.  And notice here that the Holy Spirit doesn’t tell Philip how or why.  It just says go down this wilderness road.  Notice that it doesn’t call Philip to someone he’d expect.  It’s an Ethiopian Eunuch...  How many of those do you think are hanging out in Israel back then?  We don’t know what Philip’s reaction is, but if he’s at all like me he might be a little afraid of the unknown and strange people.  But he just goes.  And then the holy Spirit doesn’t really tell him what to do, but just to see what’s going on and Philip does.  And Philip changes this man’s life by bringing Jesus Christ into it.  Though it seems like a big and profound story, it is one that speaks to the heart of what it means to be a Christian in the trenches of ordinary living. And what it tells us is that we need to Live like Christians.

When we walk out these doors, we still need to be Christians.  And that works in the simplest and most profound ways.  We never know how and why and to what effect God is going to use us.  And if we look at Philip’s example, God might not even tell us.  But we should be open to where the Holy Spirit is moving us to be helpful and useful in someone’s life.  Maybe it’s because I spend so much time there having a bunch of kids who eat constantly, but the Supermarket always comes to mind as the simplest and most honest example of how what we do and how we act can affect others.  I’ve seen rude person after rude person go through a line and just destroy a cashier’s day.  And I’ve seen those people with the uncanny ability to just look at someone and cheer them up, turn the whole day around for the cashier.

And Lord knows what some of the people who work at the grocery store have going on in their personal life.  Or our waiters at restaurants. Or the person behind the counter at the gas station.  Or the hundreds of people who pass through our lives that we never give a second thought to and yet they seemed to get dumped on all the same by ourselves and others.  Be Christians to them.  If they look grumpy or mad ask them how their day is and mean it.  They can’t be as intimidating as a Ethiopian Eunuch in charge of a Queen’s fortune.  And we never know how our attitude toward them and how we treat them will affect and change their lives.

It isn’t hopeless optimism to think that we can change our community and make it better.  We have amazing power that I believe comes through the Holy Spirit to do that.  It just means being open to it, going where we feel compelled to go, and acting Christian.  It isn’t that every event and every encounter will be big life changing moments.  It’s just that we don’t know which encounter will be.  We never know when or if or how we’ll be a Mr. Ferree or a Philip to someone. But if we listen to the Holy Spirit, live up to being Christians, and go bringing light into the darkness, I guarantee you we’ll begin to make this world better by doing the work of Jesus Christ one person at a time.  And If we lined up all the things to do in this life and could pick just one, just one thing to do... Shouldn’t that be it?