“Ideals are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them with your hands. But like the seafaring person on the desert of the waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them you will reach your destiny.” (Carl Schurz)
German native Carl Schurz was a person with many leadership roles. A general in the Union army during the Civil War, the first German born US Senator, Secretary of the Interior, editor of Harper’s Weekly, leader of the Progressive Republicans following the Civil War, he held many lesser noticed roles of leadership. There is a monument to Carl Schurz in Morningside Park on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. There is also a Carl Schurz Park in Manhattan’s Upper East Side in the area of Hell’s Gate. Many monuments abound for Schurz throughout his native Germany.
I have admired the above quote. Yet notice it does not say what ideals and what destiny to which they may lead. For Schurz it was a mixed bag. While having some positive views on race, many other views were racist and repressive. Yet his point concerning ideals is right on target.
Notice Schurz does not give an indication from where our ideals might originate. We can be left with the impression that according to Schurz they come from us. But we as Christians are those who follow. We are those who follow Jesus Christ. It is Jesus who is both source and leader of any values called Christian.
We don’t need a sextant, compass, octant, or other instrument for Christian navigation. A telescope might be fine if we use it to focus on Jesus. We follow Jesus even when, and, perhaps, especially when, Jesus seems to grate against popular opinion or the accepted wisdom of the world. We follow Jesus even when Jesus seems to lead us away from something in the Bible. Jesus is the hermeneutic, the tool for interpretation, the lense through which we view the Bible. While the Bible is “rule and norm” for faith in our Lutheran understanding, Jesus is how we understand this rule and norm.
Jesus gives us what we might call “ideals”. Love is more powerful than hate, forgiveness stronger than punishment. The way to winning over enemies is to love them. Sacrificing and even suffering for such ideals can be both necessary and effective. Any and all are our neighbors. I could go on, but we get the idea.
Where do you want to go in life? How do you want to end up? When others look back at your life, what do you hope they will see? What do you hope they might say? The way to a satisfying answer to these can be found in the ideals we adopt. I should say, the ideal, Jesus Christ. Jesus who is more than an ideal, but a Savior who both gives to those who follow and a Savior who leads and puts back on the following track those who stray from their ideals.
We cannot touch the stars. Nor can we reach out and touch Jesus or hold in our hands the ideals of Jesus. We can, however, follow Jesus. We can follow to the cross, follow into new life, follow into and through this life and be made constantly new even now in this life. In the end we may discover it was not we who chose our ideals, but the ideals that chose us.
Throughout life, far too often we learn how powerless we are. Throughout our life of following often we learn of one powerful enough to pull us along and grant us power to make it through even many times to becoming a new person. Shoot for the stars. Hold fast to the one who chose us and leads our following.