November 22, 1981 

Amos 7:10-15; Romans 12:1-2,9-17,21

New Orleans is the setting for John Kennedy Toole's novel A Confederacy of Dunces. The main character is a fat slob by the name of Ignatius J. Reilly. Picture him if you can. Waddling fat. Always wears a green hunting cap with ear flaps pulled down on his head. He wears ballooning speckledy tweed pants and a plaid flannel shirt. Big cheeks and a little mustache surround his mouth into which he is usually pushing food and out of which he is usually spouting insults to others and complaints about his chronic indigestion. Get the picture? 

Ignatius is a 30-year old self-claimed superior intellect with a degree in Medieval Literature yet who has never worked a day in his life. Finally, his widowed mother kicks him out of the house and forces him to get a job. The story is the hilarious account of Ignatius' misadventures. He lands a job in the office of a pants factory as a filing clerk. He loses his job when it is discovered that he simply puts the piles of daily filing into the garbage can and incites a riot among the workers in the factory part of the business. His next job is selling hot dogs by pushing a weiner shaped cart through the French Quarter. For this he dresses with a pirate's hat pulled over his hunting cap and with a plastic sword pinned on nis gigantic waist. Near disaster strikes when he causes such a scene outside a cheap nightclub that several people are arrested. 

It is not until the end of the book that something begins to dawn on the reader. Because Ignatius is a total nonconformist misfit – a rough square peg in a world that wants people to be smooth round pegs – things happen that would have never occurred if he had simply gone along. His laziness forces his mother to assert herself, throw him out, and find herself a new husband. Because he made such a mess at the pants factory, the owner who had been depressed and bored with the business had to get interested again to straighten things out. Feeling better about himself, the owner proceeded to stand up to his henpecking wife. Even the brawl outside the French Quarter lounge had the result of the police discovering by fluke that the owner of the dive was operating a high school pornography ring.

Ignatius was no saint. He was a self-centered and obnoxious misfit. Yet John Kennedy Toole, who died at 32 and is not around to confirm this, seems with his story to say that this world needs the square peg people to push us out of our deadening and deadly ruts. 

The Bible is full of square peg people: people who refused to go along with the crowd, people who had the guts to make waves. In Paul's words, they dared to transform the world into the brother and sister feed each other place God means for it to be instead of conforming to the dog eat dog place it is. They bowed their backs with words and actions and shouted: "Hey world, stop treating each other the way you are! Get off of each other's back!" Usually for their courage of speaking up, they were rejected, hurt, ridiculed, even killed. But because they had the guts and inspiration to show us another way, we still have a chance of being a little better.

Take Amos the prophet for example. Amos was active around 750 years before Jesus. He tended sheep and pruned trees for a living. One day, he got the weird notion that God wanted him to travel up to the northern kingdom of Israel to tell the people and King Jeraboam there a thing or two. So he went. He pointed out to them in no uncertain terms how the wealthy ate and drank to excess on ivory carved beds while ignoring the hungry and needy in the land. He chastised them for trying to gain security by building so many chariots and swords. He told them that God was sick of their religiosity and ritual and wanted right living instead from them: honesty in business, justice in the courts, and compassion for the poor. Amos, in God's name said: "I hate your feasts, your solemn assemblies...but let justice roll down like the waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.”

Jeraboam was not impressed. His personal priest Amaziah went to have a heart to heart talk with Amos. In short, Amaziah told Amos to hit the trail, to go back from where he came. Amos probably felt like a failure. But because he was willing to be a rough-edged square peg, his words are still around to remind us that stuffing ourselves, ignoring others, and trusting weapons for a security only right living under God can bring will get us all killed.

Jesus found out what a world that wants everyone to be round pegs who fit in and go along does to those who defy the system. He wouldn't go along with the Sadducees in the temple who sold out to the Romans in order to maintain power and financial control over the people. He wouldn't go along with the revolutionary Zealots who wanted to have a bloody war to overthrow the hated Romans. He talked about all that love-your-enemy business. He wouldn't go along with the nit-picking Pharisees who wanted to be God's in-crowd and turn their backs on the poor and hungry. He was always out there mixing it up with those sick and hungry people. He wouldn't go along with those who just cut out of society in order to stay pure and uninvolved, those like the monastic community of Essenes of his day we have learned about through the Dead Sea Scrolls. He insisted on staying up to his heart and arm pits in the world begging, demanding, and cajoling people to let God's love into them and out of them. In the end that turned out not to be the end but a resurrecting beginning, they built him a cross-shaped peg and nailed him to it. Yet where would we be if he had just kept his mouth shut and gone along. 

I grew up in Birmingham in the turbulent 1960s. I remember how people cursed Martin Luther King, Jr. because he wouldn't be a "good nigger" and shuffle along and not cause trouble. Me and others took their lives in their hands because they really believed the business in the Bible and Constitution about humans being equal. At the time, he was called a communist. People jumped with gusto on his mistakes. For all his trouble, he got it in the head. And only now will some admit the guy had a point. O God, forgive us for what we do to square pegs. But where would we be without them?

In the remaining time, I would like to point to some areas in life where we need to pay attention to the square-peg people who may save our lives in more ways than one. 

FIRST, SQUARE PEG PEOPLE IN OUR PERSONAL LIVES CAN GET US BACK TO THE REAL POINT OF LIFE. You may have seen Erma Bombeck's account of sitting in church several rows behind a little girl who was 5 or 6. The little girl was on her knees facing backwards as people came down the aisle. Each time she caught the glance of someone, she would smile, wave, and even say "hi". Every time this happened, her mother would whisper in her ear and tug on her arm to turn around. But the friendly little girl, enjoying where she was and enjoying the people's response to her, just kept on. Finally, Erma Bombeck relates, the mother had enough. With clenched teeth she whispered in her daughter's ear and apparently gave her a good pinch. The little girl's eyes filled with tears, she turned around and sat down with a hurt look on her face. The mother was heard to say at that point, "That's better. You’re in church!" 

The little girl – non-conformist she was – knew more about what worship means than many of us adults. Worship is celebration that despite evidence to the contrary God is real and Loves us, that although we are scarred and wounded we are alive, and, therefore, stomachache expressions aren't quite as appropriate as smiles and waves. At home those little square pegs will not and should not ever be as round as we try to make them. Their irreverence for made-up beds, freshly vacuumed floors, and neat couch cushions remind us that houses are homes for living and loving not museums for tiptoeing through.

There are other sorts of square-peg people in our personal relationships who can get us back to the point of living with meaning and caring. Believe it or not, every once in a while, ministers run into some cranky, hard-to-get-along-with people in our visits and pastoral duties. It is so much more pleasant to deal with people who are sweet and complimentary. I couldn't make it without them. Yet it is funny how the tough customers always teach me things about myself that I probably wouldn't know otherwise. Those who don't seem helped by my help force me to evaluate my motives. Do I really care about others or am I just looking for compliments and strokes to make me feel better about me? They make me remember that some people live with such problems that sweet smiles and superficial conversation are just not possible. The people who differ with me and let me know it and even let me have it push me to look at matters differently. They force me to learn that loving and caring do not always mean agreeing. Don't underrate your critics or enemies for what they alone can teach you about you, them, and life. 

SECOND, DESPITE A LOT OF BAD PRESS WE NEED THAT INTERNAL SQUARE PEG CALLED CONSCIENCE IN US TO KEEP US REMEMBERING THAT PEOPLE ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN THINGS AND CARING IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN COMFORT. Conscience can be a real bummer when we won't permit ourselves to relax and when our guilt makes us act a lot more rotten than whatever we did rotten that made us feel guilty in the first place. Still, we need that little part of us which will feel not go along when we try to take shortcuts with values and people. It's that part of you that won't let you off the hook when you know you need to check on someone, give them a call or visit, because they are having a problem. We try to rationalize: "I'm so busy; I'll do it tomorrow; I don't know what to say; etc. The square peg conscience in you tells you: “You just don't want to deal with the hurt.” Yet until you risk showing up and cast that uncomfortable situation with someone who needs you, then the peace will not come. 

THIRD, ALTHOUGH THEY USUALLY MAKE US MAD AT FIRST, WE NEED THE SQUARE PEG PEOPLE IN SOCIETY. On September 9, 1980, around daybreak, eight people, including some priests and nuns, broke into a General Electric plant near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This plant is part of a million-dollar-a-day project to build deadly type 12a nuclear missiles. Inside the plant before they were arrested, these people smeared their own blood on some blueprints and dented the nose cones of two missiles with hammers. Long controversial priest Daniel Berrigan was one of the people. They were symbolically acting out the passages from Micah and Isaiah which call for God's people to beat their swords into plowshares, to hammer their instruments of death into instruments of food production and life. In Amos', Micah's, and Isaiah's day, like now, there was the controversy about whether priority should be for war preparation or human services.

What Berrigan did was an illegal act. In many ways a crazy act. It was, to be sure, a way to make waves, not go along, act. Many of us would call him naive at best and subversive at worst. He did something I can't imagine myself ever doing. Yet, what he did has continued to eat on me and remind me that God's will is to feed, not bomb, that Jesus himself said those who depend on the sword for security will die by it. Berrigan called attention to an entirely new situation in all of the history of this planet. For the first time ever, this planet has the power to either feed everybody or kill everybody. This planet produces almost four pounds of grain a day per person, all four billion of them. It is not a shortage but a distribution problem, some who eat too much and others who eat not at all. Yet we who can destroy the world already dozens of times over spend more and more for war and less and less for life's down and outs. 

Berrigan was tried, convicted, and given a stiff sentence. Here is something he said at his trial. Apparently it was a response to those who told him he ought to stick to more priest type activities: "At other times one could talk about family life and divorce and birth control and abortion and many other questions. But this Mark 12A is here....It is terrible for me to live in a time where I have nothing to say to human beings except: ‘Stop killing'. There are other beautiful things that I would love to be saying to people. There are other projects I could be helpful at. And I can't do them.... Because everything is endangered...up for grabs. Ours is a kind of primitive situation, even though we would call ourselves sophisticated. Our plight is very primitive from a Christian point of view. We are back where we started. Thou shalt not kill; we are not allowed to kill. Everything today comes down to that...everything."

I certainly do not think that we can unilaterally throw down our weapons at this point in history. And although I have a hunch the Russian people are not that different from most American people, just wanting to stay alive and love and be loved, I am under no illusions about the tough customers in the Soviet government. Yet right now we are closer to war than we have been in the last 20 years. Conservatives shot down SALT 2 treaty talks. because the proposed treaty didn't give us enough weapons. Liberals shot the treaty down because it gave us too many weapons. And so liberals and conservatives together destroyed the only vehicle we had to keep talking with the Soviets. In the wake of the demise of treaty and disarmament talks scary things have happened. Gone is the talk of Detente and becoming more cooperative. Gone is the talk about a sensible defense. We have started talking about winning a nuclear war, fighting a limited nuclear war. And when a half million Europeans take to the streets in Germany, France, and England, we call them naive and ungrateful for the Marshall Plan. All they are saying is: "We don't want to be the site for a 'limited' nuclear war or a demonstration bomb.

I don't know the motivations behind his act, but last week Mr. Reagan seemed to open the door to do some talking again with the Soviets after all the saber rattling he, we, and they have been doing. I pray a letter per person sitting here today will be sent to Washington tomorrow saying "Please keep talking with those folks. Because for God's sake, if you keep talking to your enemy, maybe you and he won't kill each other. 

A first grade little girl in our church was watching the evening TV news with her father recently. The report was about the new Trident submarine of our country. The Trident carries 24 missiles, each capable of delivering 24 multiple nuclear warheads – 576 in all – to 576 pinpointed targets in the world, literally killing millions of people. The commentator closed his report by saying the Trident sub is the most deadly machine humans have ever built. The little girl turned to her father and said: "Daddy, what kind of people would build something like that?"

Our lives are made complicated by square peg people who just will not fit into the round holes of our look-out-for-number-one and get-the-other-guy-before-he-gets-you conformity. They are obnoxious Ignatiuses, wiggly kids, little girls with exasperating questions we can't answer, cranky people we have to deal with, renegade priests, little voices inside us, and even the ragged figure of Jesus running around in our hearts and history. They irritate us, but, God, please keep sending the square pegs. Blessed are the square pegs, because they are our only hope for keeping human, maybe even keeping alive. Amen.