Sermon - Am I Special?
Written for the live service on 14/10/12
“You’re a wizard, Harry.”
“I’m a...what?”
(Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – JK Rowling)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg6otKMr88c
I doubt that there is a single person who has read or heard that exchange in either the book or film and not attempted to put themselves in Harry’s place. There are numerous internet groups, some with hundreds of thousands of members, based on such premises as ‘I think my parents hid my Hogwarts letter’.
If you are not familiar with Harry Potter, think of the moment in The Phantom Menace when Qui-Gon tells Anakin he is to become a Jedi – do you not find yourself wishing that someone would come and tell you that your life is to take on a new higher purpose?
This is not to say that all these people actually believe that they are witches and wizards, but that we yearn to seek out reasons to see ourselves as extraordinary, special, and unique. It is a trait that seems to be inherent in human nature. Whilst some of you will be members of the site because you feel with certainty that the Force exists, others of you will have joined because you were hoping to discover the Force, or some other higher meaning to life and thereby your own existence.
What we do in and with our lives has meaning and worth to us personally – it is then hard to feel that, in fact, in the grand scheme of things, our importance might stretch no further than ourselves and those others we are close to.
So is this the case?
The Force has guided each of you here, in one way or another. YOU have been chosen to follow this path – to study the Force and to become a real Jedi – and it is up to you whether to heed that call. Every living being has the capacity to connect with the Force to some degree, and as such we are all special. No-one is more special than anyone else, we are simply different from each other. Perhaps there are people here who are unsure of whether being a Jedi is their true calling and are contemplating taking what they have learnt and applying it to their lives in some other way. This is just as much a ‘good’ and ‘worthy’ path as that that of a Jedi Master.
Life would not be what it is without each and every individual element that makes up its basic fabric – and that includes YOU. Think of it like all those sci-fi films and TV programmes where someone goes back into the past, changes one tiny insignificant-seeming thing, and when they return to the future everything is different.
So essentially, we have all received a metaphorical Hogwarts letter. Alerting us to our individual potential to be a part of a much wider realm of possibility. Perhaps the sense of wonder that is conveyed by the line “You’re a wizard, Harry” can now be felt by each of you if I tell you “You really can learn to live in harmony with the Force”. So now that we have established that you really are special, the question is, what will you do with what you learn and in what way will you choose to manifest your gifts?
