Loading...Ambassador Richard Holbrooke died this week at the young age of 69. He occupied a dazzling array of diplomatic posts: Ambassador to Germany, negotiator of the Dayton Peace Accords, and at his death, the President’s representative in Afghanistan. Direct, bold, and analytical, Holbrooke represented the best virtues of the foreign policy establishment.
His greatest triumph was bringing peace to the Balkans. The Clinton administration was floundering. To be specific,
Warren Christopher had not negotiated a peace. America stood by impotently as the marauding Serbs slaughtered the Bosnians. Holbrooke cracked heads. He got a deal. Not a perfect one. But absent his efforts, there would likely have been none and the killing would have continued unchecked. For that accomplishment alone, he deserves to go down in the history books.
Jacob Heilbrunn, a senior editor at National Interest, wrote:“Richard Holbrooke may well have been America's greatest diplomat of the past several decades.”
This week I lost one of my boyhood heroes. Bob Feller, Hall of Fame pitcher for the Cleveland Indians, died at the age of 91. I was introduced to Mr. Feller by my grandfather, who told me that Bob Feller was a fellow Iowan, his hometown being Van Meter. Bob Feller, in the days long before radar guns told us how fast a fast ball was, once threw a baseball past a motorcycle whose speedometer was at 100 mph. That fastball was named for Feller’s home town, “The Van Meter Heater.” Sportswriters have been unanimous in their tributes, calling Bob Feller one of the greatest pitchers ever.
What makes one eligible to be called great? Occasionally it is reaching the top, or having the most, or being the best, how ever any of those things are measured and defined. But mostly, greatness has less to do with what one does, and more to do with who one is, and more importantly, who one is becoming.
In Twelfth Night Shakespeare wrote: "Be not afraid of greatness; some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them."
And in the sitcom “Mash,” Hawkeye Pearce adds: “And some of us got it all three ways!”
Today, by the grace of God, greatness is thrust upon Meghan. And as we witness and support her call, all of us are reminded of what is the measure of our work as the people of God.
Bishop Bob Johnson in a sermon at the ordination of a deacon told this story. There was a rector of a vibrant parish in a major city who noticed that just a few miles away another parish had closed due to a changing neighborhood. Its property had been sold for development. Shortly thereafter, he heard that the beautiful old Victorian brick church was going to be destroyed. He made it a point to go down to the old church on demolition day and rescued an old brick, which he took back to his healthy parish and placed it on the pulpit where all could see.
Finally, after several weeks of services with the brick on the pulpit, someone asked, “Why is that old brick there?” And he told the story I just told. He went on to say, the message of that brick to me, to this parish and to the church is engage or perish. Engage in mission to people in need or perish in refusing to get caught up in changes all about. (//www.episcopalpgh.org/2009-convention-eucharist-sermon-bishop-johnson/)
The deacon has a special role to encourage, exhort, and provoke the Church to be about our greatest calling: being servants, engaging in mission to our neighborhoods and communities, because Jesus calls us in this Gospel to be those who serve.
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