What difference does my life make for others around me? What difference does anyone's life make? It's always a question related to parenting. Parents make choices that affect the manner in which their children form their identities. Harry Chapin put it well in his song, Cat's in the Cradle. When he was a young father he was too busy making a living to be bothered by his son. When he was finally old enough to enjoy time with the family, his son had learned to be too busy for him!

Of course, the other side of the story is just as true. Maurice Boyd remembers the impact of one incident that sealed the impact of his father on his life forever. His father worked in a shipyard in Belfast, Ireland. During the Depression, work dried up. Times were tough and for three years his father was out of a job.

Then one of his old bosses at the shipyard approached his father. The important man would find work for Mr. Boyd. He would guarantee it, no matter how much worse things got. All Mr. Boyd would have to do would be to buy a life-insurance policy from the man. It would work to their mutual benefit: the boss' income would increase, and Mr. Boyd's work income would be guaranteed!

It was a great deal except for one thing: it was illegal. Maurice Boyd remembers his father sitting at the kitchen table with the whole family surrounding him. There at the table his father counted the cost. He reviewed their desperate financial situation. He ticked off the outstanding bills, and the money he ought to be making - could be making - if only he'd say yes to his boss.

His father wrote it all down on a sheet of paper: the gains and the losses; what he could make and what he could lose. Then he wrote down a category that Maurice Boyd will never forget: integrity! What did it matter if he gained the cash to pay the rent but lost his ability to teach his children right from wrong? What did it matter if he gained the dignity of a job, but lost it each morning when he looked at himself in the mirror and knew that the only reason he can go to work instead of someone else is because he cheated? Says Maurice Boyd: "He discovered that no one can make you feel inferior without your consent and that one way you can keep your soul is by refusing to sell it. He realized that whatever else he lost, and God knows he lost enough, he didn't have to lose himself."

John the Baptist shouted that message to the crowds from Jerusalem who came to see his odd ministry at the Jordan River. The hardest thing to do in life is to maintain our integrity. Sin has entered the human soul precisely at this point. We are not, most of us, evil people. We're rather nice, aren't we? There's much that we do that's good, fine, noble, kind, and wise, and no one can deny that.

Here's the problem: Whatever else sin might do in our lives, it first and foremost perforates the lines of our hearts and lets us tear off a piece here and a piece there until we find ourselves segmented, fragmented, torn apart in separate snippets of self. It isn't that we become blackened by sin in one large stroke. It isn't that we turn into hideous monsters of greed and cruelty. It isn't that we dissolve the Dr. Jekylls of our personalities into dastardly Mr. Hydes. Instead, we keep most of our goodness intact, but we make small allowances in certain little areas. We cheat on our taxes a little, maybe... Or we turn our eyes from the needs of someone we could help... Or we compromise our communication until we speak from only our mouths instead of our souls.

The fragmentation of our lives makes us less than we should be, less than we could be. It makes us less than the people God made us to be. It is precisely because we and our world have lost our integrity that the great prophet of God must come and set things right.

There is a powerful scene in Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons. The story is that of Sir Thomas More, loyal subject of the English crown. King Henry VIII wants to change things to suit his own devious plans, so he requires all his nobles to swear an oath of allegiance that violates the conscience of Sir Thomas More before his God. Since he will not swear the oath, More is put in jail. His daughter Margaret comes to visit him. "Meg," he calls her, with affection. She's his pride and joy, the one who thinks his thoughts after him.

Meg comes to plead with her father in prison. "Take the oath, Father!"she urges him. "Take it with your mouth, if you can't take it with your heart! Take it and return to us! You can't do us any good in here! And you can't be there for us if the king should execute you!"

She's right in so many ways! Yet her father answers her this way: "Meg, when a man swears an oath, he holds himself in his hands like water, and if he opens his fingers, how can he hope to find himself again?"

You know what he means, don't you? When our lives begin to fragment, it's like holding our lives like water in our hands, and then letting our fingers come apart, just a little bit. The water of our very selves dribbles away. We may look like the same people, but who we are inside has begun to change.

This is why John comes pointing the way to another kingdom. Here there will be no separation between the impulse of the heart, the thought of the mind, the word of the mouth, and the action of the hands. Somehow, everything about the coming kingdom is integrated. That's the meaning of the word "integrity," isn't it? Pure in heart!

When the one of integrity arrives, this world must change. This is why we celebrate Advent over and over, until the coming again of God's anointed one. When Bill Moyers interviewed Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, she told him how it was for her. Dr. Remen has founded several institutes for the care of cancer patients. She said that sometimes she has a much greater sense of integrity during those times when she isn't feeling all that well physically. Bill asked her what she meant by "integrity" and she replied, "That I am what I am..." She said that even with her wounds and her weaknesses, "there's an essence and a uniqueness and a beauty" about her life that is whole and complete. Integrity. Pure in heart. The peaceable kingdom.

Jesus raises the banner of heaven's royal claims over Gentile and Jewish territory, and thus is the source of political allegiances that supersede temporal boundaries. This is very good news during Advent, when the nations of the earth conspire against one another, and only the Christian church can effect a transnational celebration of the politics of grace. The peaceable kingdom.

Robert Coles is a child psychiatrist and professor at Harvard University who likes to figure out why we do the things we do. In his book The Call of Service he wonders about people who try to make a difference in life. People who seek to reform themselves, even with the tenacity of sin that clings down deep. People who attempt to better society, in spite of the fact that it stubbornly refuses the challenge.

Why do they do it? Coles asks. The stories are all so different that it is hard to figure out a way to summarize them neatly in some framework. In fact, the people themselves often have a hard time de?ning what it is that makes them tick. One young teacher in an urban school is challenged all the time. Street-smart students, weary of self-righteous "do-gooders" put the question to him. "What's in it for you?" they demand. And he really can't say.

But this he and all the rest of them can say: Sometime earlier in their lives, each of them ran into a crisis situation, a situation that tested their identity and their willingness to do something about it, and in that crisis situation, each of them encountered someone who put his life on the line. Someone who taught them the meaning of service. Someone who gave of herself in a way that bucks the trend of selfishness and self-preservation. And the influence of that someone else made it possible to be greater than each of them had previously considered. Enter the peaceable kingdom, where things change because we have brushed against the holiness of God, and Jesus becomes our Savior and mentor.

Years ago, when radio station WXYZ in Detroit was the big news in broadcasting, people spent hours each night listening to the latest episodes of "The Green Hornet" and "Sergeant Preston of the Yukon." Nearly every year the station brought out a new dramatic hero.

Station manager George Trendle often suggested the main ideas for these characters. In fact, he was the inspiration behind one of the most famous figures they ever created: The Lone Ranger. Trendle said this about the man he had in mind: "He's a sober-minded man with a righteous purpose to make kids look up to him."

But that's easily lost on us. When Thomas Naylor was teaching business management at Duke University, he asked his students to draft a personal strategic plan. He reports that "with few exceptions, what they wanted fell into three categories: money, power, and things...very big things."

In fact, said Naylor, this was their request of the business faculty at Duke University: "Teach me to be a money-making machine!" A money-making machine! A machine with no heart! That's the fragmentation of our lives taken to the extreme.

So here we are, in a sense, on the brink of another year, the liturgical year, the year of expectation of God's doing something good once again, the year of the coming of the kingdom announced by John. As they say, "Today is the first day of the rest of your life!" Let's imagine that there are 365 new days thrown back onto the credits side of the ledger. What do we do with them? Each day in the year ahead 9,077 babies will be born; 2,740 young people will run away from home; 63,288 traffic accidents will occur, in which 129 people will die; 5,962 couples will get married and 1,986 will divorce; 500 million cups of coffee will be drank; and the snack bars at O'Hare Airport in Chicago will sell 5,479 hot dogs.

And each of us will be challenged in one of the three great crises of life:

The Identity Crisis: Who am I?
The Influence Crisis: What does my life mean to those around me?
The Integrity Crisis: How deep is my soul?

Do we know the hope of the coming kingdom and the one who has the capacity to restore our integrity because of his own? Amen.