Who Is Your Audience?
Matthew 6:1-9
February 3, 1980
Keith Miller is a layman in the Church whose words are increasingly seen as prophetic. I went to school with Keith, and so I have always been partial to his writings. I am particularly grateful to him for his ability to take a simple incident and draw out some profound learnings.
One such incident happened at the time of the publication of a book of his. Critical reviews began to come in from all sides. Keith said none of this particularly bothered him until one day he read a critique that devastated him. He was thinking after that of stopping writing. This person’s evaluation mattered enormously, and his criticism cut to the quick.
Miller concluded from all this that each of us has a select audience before whom we play the drama of our lives. It may be only one person, or it may be a large group of people. But whoever they are, Keith points out, we allow them to exert an enormous influence over our actions. In fact, we entrust almost God-like powers to those we select as our audience of significance. And Keith concludes his thoughts by asking us all to identify our critical audiences. Once we determine that, he says, we can better understand our actions and begin to correct some of our crippling behaviors.
This is the fourth in our series on workaholism. I won’t be talking strictly to workaholics today, but let it suffice to say that workaholics, as well as the rest of us common garden variety type of neurotics, can take a clue from Keith Miller. The beginning of a recovery for a workaholic is found in identifying who is your audience of significance.
Right after I concluded my first sermon on workaholics, a woman came up to me and said: “Your sermon was helpful, but the one question you didn’t raise, and the real clue to workaholics, was: For whom is a workaholic working?” In other words, who gives a workaholic his applause, his strokes, his critiques, his reviews? I think that woman was right, and so, to expand on it, I would start by asking all of You: Who is your audience of significance? Whose reviews mean something to you?
It is interesting to note that this was the issue that Jesus addressed in our lesson. Let me start by giving a little background. In the first-century Jewish church, the three great religious acts were alms-giving, prayer, and fasting. These religious acts were to be done in relation to God and God alone. But Jesus observed that this was not the way these things were actually done. With almost X-ray vision, Jesus detected a different agenda. As he watched the religious workaholics, the Pharisees of his day, he concluded that they had a significant audience other than God. As the Bible put it, “they wanted to be seen of men.”
Take, for example, the business of almsgiving. As Jesus observed the Pharisees, their actions were calculated to win the approval of their peers more than of God. The situation was that into the brass coffers, shaped like trumpets, outside the temple, people placed contributions for the poor. As Jesus watched, he saw the Pharisees busily breaking down theIr offering into the smallest eotna9e possible and then, at the busiest time of day, dumping all the coins. into the container. Imagine the noise it would make, the attention it would attract, the murmurs of approval that might arise! All this meant, as Jesus put it, that the real, significant audience, consciously or unconsciously, was the peer group, the other Pharisees, and not God.
To be perfectly honest, as I observed what Jesus was saying, I became increasIngly uneasy. What he uncovered in the life of the Pharisees is a dynamic that I find present in my life. The older I get, the more I become aware that I have been influenced, controlled, driven, and shaped by the significant audiences in my life. And many times these audiences have hurt, embarrassed, and stopped me from doing things , or caused me to do other things, that were not helpful.
I can recall my first Christmas as a priest. I had been ordained for 20 days and had been an assistant for six months. I was serving in a large, prestigious parish in New Jersey. The custom in that parish on Christmas was for the Rector to take the Christmas Eve service and the assistant to take the next morning service.
The midnight service was beautiful. The Rector. who had a tremendous voice, intoned or sang the service. The choir was magnificent, and it truly was an outstanding worship experience. After the service, I went to the Rector and said, ”I have a problem about tomorrow morning. I can’t sing. They tried to teach me in the Seminary, but I can’t hold a tune. I really cannot do the service the way you did tonight. ”Nonsense,” the Rector said, assuring that, since he had a lovely voice, everybody could sing. ” Just do your best and it will be fine. Remember that God is the audience, and all our gifts and talents are acceptable to Him.”
Needless to say, I didn’t sleep a wink. I started warming up at 5 o’clock. About a half hour before church, the Rector and the choir director took me aside and we had a quick rehearsal. At the end of our rehearsal, I once again protested: ”I really can’t sing, and. I’ll feel foolish.” “Don’t worry,” the Rector said. “God is your real audience, and He will accept your voice. ”
Five minutes later, we lined up in the procession. As we were filing past the organ bench, the choir director handed me a note. I read it as we were walking down the aisle. He had written: “God may be your audience, and your singing may be acceptable to Him, but it’s not to me. Let’s say the service this morning. Merry Christmas — Arthur.” And of course I said the service. I was devastated, but I learned something also, friendship was invaluable. There were some significant audiences in my life other than God.
The question I would raise with you right now is: Why do we allow these significant audiences so much power? Why do we hand over 51% of our voting stock to them? Why do we allow our actions to be shaped by this audience? And we turn to our Lord’s words for clarification. He reminds us that our audiences give us our justification through the imagery of rewards. He shows us not only the way life is but the way it could be. He points out the temporary rewards that we receive from most of our audiences, and the more lasting reward from our Father in heaven.
What Jesus means is this: if we make any person or group other than God our “audience of significance,” all we will receive from that group is their limitations. Most of the time, our reward consists of a temporary label, a moment of acceptance, a fleeting second of respect;.
But these rewards pass, and then we are left with the emptiness and hollowness of actions without learning, of life without love. On the other hand, if we make Almighty God our audience, all the experience of a loving Father will be ours.
This is difficult for us to understand, and sometimes a story makes the point in more graphic ways. Keith. Miller provides us with such a story.
In a small sharing group in which he participated, there was an attractive, outgoing 40-year-old woman. In the course of a discussion about the important people in one’s life, the woman said God was most important, and then she shared her life story. Her own words are so poignant that I want to quote them verbatim:
When I was a tiny little girl, my parents died and I was put in an orphanage. I was not pretty at all, and no one seemed to want me, but I longed to be adopted and loved by a family. As far back as I can remember. I thought about it day and night, but everything I did seemed to go wrong. I must have tried too hard to please the people who came to look at me….The result was that I seemed to drive people away.
Then one day the head of the orphanage told me that a family were coming to take me home with them. I was so excited that I jumped up and down and cried. The matron reminded me that I was on trial, and that this might not be a permanent arrangement, but I just knew that it would be, So I went with the family and started school in their town I was the happiest little girl you can imagIne, But then one day a few months later I skipped home from school and ran into the house. No one was at home, but there in the middle of the front hall was my battered old suitcase with my coat thrown across it. As I stood there and looked at the suitcase, it slowly dawned on me what it meant: This family didn’t want me anymore
At this point, Keith reported, the woman stopped speaking, and there was hardly a dry eye in the circle as everyone tried to imagine what it must have been like. But then the woman cleared her throat and said almost matter-of-factly:
This happened to me seven times before I was 13 years old. But wait, don’t; cry it was experiences like this that ultimately brought me to God. When I was having so much trouble finding acceptance from other people and from myself, I found God. Here was a parent, a father, a lover, whom no amount of rejection could remove, no amount of criticism could change, And suddenly I found myself blessed far beyond any rewards that I could think of.
I come back, then, to the original question. The question is the ultimate one: Who is your audience? I am indebted to Keith Miller for the form of the question, but to Jesus Christ for the piercing analysis of the concept. We all have an audience to whom we play our lives. John Donne was right: No man is an island to himself. Every one of us, somewhere, someplace, has an audience to whom he or she plays. Workaholics or not, all of us are shaped, evaluated, and criticized by these significant audiences.
Who, then, will it be? Who, then, will give us our rewards? The way we answer that will determine the pattern of our lives.
Amen