ONLY A SPARK
October 7, 2001


TEXT:II Timothy 1:1-14 Luke 17:5-10
In William J. Bennett’s book, The Book of Virtues, is a story of how England’s King Richard III lost his kingdom to the Earl of Richmond at his defeat at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485.

King Richard sent his groom to get a horse ready for battle, but the blacksmith had no more iron after supplying the king’s whole army for the last few days. He looked far and wide and found only a lttle. Still, after nailing on three shoes, he was short.

Bennett writes: “I need one or two more nails,” he said, “and it will take some time to hammer them out.”

“I told you I can’t wait,” the groom said impatiently. “I hear the trumpets now. Can’t you just use what you’ve got?”

“I can put the shoe on, but it won’t be as secure as the other.” “Will it hold?” asked the groom. “It should,” answered the blacksmith, “but I can’t be certain.”

“Well, then, just nail it on,” the groom cried. “And hurry, or King Richard will be angry with us both.”

The battle wore on, one of King Richard’s troop lines was broken, and as the king raced toward the broken line to defend and urge his besieged solders on, one of the horse’s shoes fell off, and the frightened animal fell and then ran away.

The last words of King Richard III, as he waved his sword in the air and begged for one thing in exchange for what he had, were: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” The battle inspired a famous saying as recorded by Bennett:

For want of a nail, a shoe was lost,
For want of a shoe, a horse was lost,
For want of a horse, a battle was lost,
For want of a battle, a kingdom was lost,
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail!


We are led to believe that often it is the smallest and seemingly most insignificant detail that changes the tides of history and alters the course of civilizations. What we forget are all the other insignificant details that precede the one final event that brings about the change. It is like the sports analyst who would reduce an entire season of baseball games to the very last game between two tied contenders, knowing full well that any loss anywhere throughout the 167 game season would result in one of the teams being in second place. Major changes are based on the accumulation of the seemingly insignificant even as the ocean is made of billions and billions of drops of water.

The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!” The Lord replied, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.” How much faith is needed to work a miracle? How much love is needed to overcome hatred? How many voices are needed for peace to come to the world?

What we have seen this past month did not occur in isolation from all that was happening throughout the world. It was evil manifesting itself after a slow accumulation of many months and years, breaking forth on one horror-filled morning. Terror reached its zenith and set off a conflagration that has triggered a chain-reaction among the nations of the earth. The spark that ignited on September 11, 2001 may yet alter the course of human events even more. People of faith know that our God has a way of overcoming evil with good, and turning what may be the most calamitous of circumstances into a final blessing.

There is also accumulating within this world a consciousness of wholeness and peace, of love and compassion. We may call it the awareness of the Kingdom of God in shadow form. It lies hidden in the hearts of men and women until such time as it is evoked by such cataclysmic events. We have seen the heart of darkness, but we have also seen the resurgence of the human spirit in deeds of courage, compassion, and patriotism that have bound us together more tightly as community. We need to affirm that and celebrate that, but we must also recognize that even among ourselves there is the capacity for evil. We, too, have the potential for acting like the terrorists we have deplored.

Jesus told a parable of a field in wheat and weeds grow together. There is good and evil in this world and they know no boundaries whether national, cultural or religious. We should not blame all Arabs or all Moslems for what has happened in New York last month any more than we should blame all crew-cut ex-soldiers for what happened in Oklahoma City in 1995. Let us remember that it was Serbian Christians who massacred thousands of Albanian Moslems. Let us not forget that Adolf Hitler praised Martin Luther and cited Luther’s book, On the Jews and Their Lies, as a pretext for Kristalnacht and the Holocaust that followed. You will find atrocities and crimes against humanity among all the peoples of this earth. We are all guilty of falling short of God’s intentions for us.

Even as we have a common capacity for evil, we also have among the religions of the world a common hope for living together in peace and worshiping the one God who is known by many names. We are not the children of lesser gods, but we are derived from a common source and we are all on the same planet moving toward a common goal. We have differences of language, worship, cultural experience, and ethnicity but God does not love any of his children any more or any less. We need to find ways of asserting our common humanity.

I believe that is happening. There is the building of a consciousness for the peace of the world. It happens as silently as the accumulation of snow falling on a fir tree. You may be familiar with a wonderful modern parable in which the coal-mouse asks the wild dove, “Tell me the weight of a snowflake.” “Nothing more than nothing,” came the answer.

“In that case I must tell you a marvelous story,” the coal-mouse said. “I sat on the branch of a fir, close to its trunk, when it began to snow, not heavily, not in a raging blizzard, no, just like in a dream, without any violence. Since I didn’t have anything better to do, I counted the snowflakes settling on the twigs and needles of my branch. Their number was exactly 3,741,952. When the next snowflake dropped onto the branch—nothing more than nothing, as you say—the branch broke off.”

Having said that, the coal-mouse flew away. The dove, since Noah’s time an authority on the matter, thought about the story for a while and finally said to herself: “Perhaps there is only one person’s voice lacking for peace to come about in the world.”

It only takes a spark to ignite that which has been accumulating since the beginning of time. It may come in the form of food to a starving Afghan child. It may come in the gift of bread broken in this service of communion. It may come in a word spoken without hatred to a former enemy. How much faith is needed? How much love is required? What is the weight of a snowflake?

Twenty years ago, Ken Keyes, Jr. wrote a book called The Hundredth Monkey. He begins by telling the true story of a species of Japanese monkey, the macaca fuscata, that had been observed in the wild for a period of thirty years. In 1952, on the island of Koshima, scientists were providing the monkeys with sweet potatoes dropped in the sand. The monkeys liked the taste of the raw sweet potatoes, but they found the dirt unpleasant.

An eighteen-month-old female found she could solve the problem by washing the potatoes in a nearby stream. She taught this trick to her mother. Her playmates also learned this new way and they taught their mothers too. This cultural innovation was picked up by various monkeys before the eyes of the scientists. Between 1952 and 1958, all the young monkeys learned to wash the sandy sweet potatoes. Only the adults who imitated their children learned this social improvement. Other adults kept eating the dirty sweet potatoes.

Then something startling took place. In the autumn of 1958, a certain number of Koshima monkeys were washing sweet potatoes. The exact number is unknown, but one morning when, let’s say, the hundredth monkey learned to wash potatoes, something amazing happened. By that evening every monkey in the tribe was washing potatoes before eating them. The added energy of the hundredth monkey created an ideological breakthrough.

What is even more amazing, this habit jumped over the sea. Colonies of monkeys on other islands and the mainland troop of monkeys at Takasakiyama began washing their sweet potatoes.

The lesson of this scientific observation is that when a certain critical number is achieved, this new awareness may be communicated from mind to mind.

There is a consciousness building within the universe whose time is coming. God is at work in the hearts and lives of millions of people. Christians know that the experience of Good Friday has given way to the Resurrection, that what seemed to be defeat ended in victory. When night seems darkest, we see the stars more clearly. We need to share this hope and pass it on.

As Paul Said to Timothy, “For this reason I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands; for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self_discipline,” so must we continue to do our part to rekindle the flame of love. It only takes a spark to keep the fire going.

-Harry Serio