Sermon by Peter Roberts
She used the word “eclectic”

This is going to be a somewhat interactive sermon. I’m going to ask you to
vote by raising your hand and later on, at the end, I’m going to ask that we
all say the same word, three times together….I’ll let you guess what that
word is….First, some talk about currency and value

This is a shinny penny. It was Kathy who introduced me to the saying…Shinny
penny bring me luck cause I’m the one who picked you up. And we do. We’ve a
jug at home for pennies, shinny or well worn, and another jug for what used
to be silver coins. We take the jug change to the bank a few days before
every October 27 and spend it on a meal or something. We were married on
October 27, 1990 and while we don’t have a lot of money, ever, at least once
a year we blow our pennies to the wind, thankful for our love and marriage.

But if you have five pennies you can trade them in for one of these, …a
nickel. Can I see a show of hands of people who pick up a penny or better
yet, a nickel on the sidewalk?

Thanks…

I thought we would get a good number who embrace the fine, New England
values of thrift and what goes for the Protestant ethic and the spirit of
capitalism…People like us pick up pennies and nickels. We know that each has
only a minor value by itself-what can you buy for a nickel now-a-days?-but
if you add more pennies and nickels soon you’ll have one of these, a dollar.
Now we’re talking real money. Let's see the hands of people who will pick up
a dollar bill on the sidewalk!
A buck will still buy a cup of coffee, a few postage stamps and not one but
two newspapers, if you buy them at a machine where they don’t collect the
sales tax. A dollar has a certain mystique to it. The greenback is used to
denote strength and stability. “Solid as a dollar” means exactly what we’d
expect it to.

Now this is a soda can. This is not a product endorsement by the way.

It is not currency or legal tender like a nickel or a penny but as we all
know, it has a value. Take it up the street to California Fruit, pop it
into the redemption machine and they’ll give you a nickel. This can is worth
five cents if you are willing to redeem it. But as we all know, or soon may
find out, redemption is work. You’ve got to do something before you get the
cash. Unlike finding the nickel on the sidewalk, you have to work a little
to get paid but the principle is the same. If you have enough cans and
bottles sooner or later you’ll have enough to get a dollar. Now, can I see
hands of people who pick up cans or bottles on the sidewalk and bring them
home.
Thank you.
I think is it safe to say that most of us, seeing a bottle or can on the
sidewalk, will either deposit it in a trash can or simply leave it where it
is.

People like us don’t pick up cans and bottles for the deposit money and we
certainly don’t go “dumpster diving” for the throw-a-ways from others. Of
course there are exceptions, but these are “colorful eccentrics” who
otherwise are entirely normal and people just like us.

While a penny saved is a penny earned a sack full of cans or bottles,
despite their value, is for most people like us, something we'd rather not
deal with.

Now for a story…

It was an early spring Saturday morning in 1997 and it was a humdinger. A
beautiful day with the sky colored in glorious blue. I was outside the house
doing periodic work on our pickup truck. (it’s an old truck, needing
constant attention but as we’re fond of noting, it is paid for.) I had the
hood up, the windows were down and I was sitting in driver’s seat. The radio
was on and I was listening to the Metropolitan Opera while I was doing
something with the fuzz box underneath the steering wheel. A young woman
stuck her head on the passenger side, looking in at me and said
“Opera and a pickup truck…what an eclectic guy.”

I was a little startled but not terribly. I knew the woman only by sight and
the assumptions that we all make about people. She was around forty, an
attractive if somewhat weathered brunet and she was a prostitute. Like the
other hookers, pimps and drug dealers in downtown, she knew that Kathy and I
were not interested in the goods and services they provided. We maintained a
kind of peaceful coexistence. They didn’t bother us. We left them pretty
much alone.

But what startled me was her use of the word “eclectic”. Here was this
street hooker who probably was also involved in the drug trade, making small
talk and using a grand English word that Kathy and I often employ to
describe our furniture, books and tastes in music. So I said to her with some
astonishment,
“Yea, that’s me…eclectic. Now where did you learn that word?”

She looked away momentarily, perhaps wistfully and said…“I know a lot of
words.” Then she asked for a smoke. I laughed, gave her a cigarette and she
went on her way.

I recounted the incident to Kathy later that morning and my wonder on where
this woman-who was obviously not a person like us-learned the word eclectic.
It was my wonderful wife who reminded me that what we see of people on the
surface is just that, only on the surface.
I learned the woman’s name only later from the newspaper. Her name was Renee
Pellegrino and she had a number of brushes with the law for drug use,
prostitution and the like. She had a mug shot. There was nothing entirely
unusual about her. She was like many, all too many, men and women in America
who reside or subsist below that bell weather mark that separates People
like us-who pick up shinny pennies-from people who pick up cans and bottles.

But the reason she knew the word eclectic, and as she said to me, many
others, was because she learned them, formally.

In 1982 she was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Connecticut College where she
must have run across the word eclectic more than once.

Then she went on to UCONN Law School where she earned her law degree and
knew enough of the subject to pass two state bar exams.

I discovered by reading the paper that Renee Pellegrino’s past and academic
record more than qualified her as a person like us. I know for a fact that
she had at least one more degree than me and by all rights, she should be
today driving a huge SUV, holding down a cushy partner’s position at some
prestigious law firm and living with her, perhaps second husband and 2.4
kids in a Mac mansion in Greenwich.

But that was not to be. Something happened to her between receiving the
golden Phi Beta Kappa key in 1982 and June 25, 1997. On that morning, a few
weeks after she and I had our brief chat, her body was found somewhere in
Waterford. She had been murdered and the case is still unsolved. You can
see her picture at the Waterford police web site and there is still a fifty
thousand dollar reward for information on the killing.

Of course her life and its end was a tragedy but just as important is the
lesson I learned and the remorse I feel today.

You see on that beautiful Saturday morning Renee Pellegrino, street walker
and drug user, stopped to speak with me. She made pleasant small talk about
me, my pickup truck and opera on the radio.

I don’t think she saw me as a threatening type but perhaps and as someone
with whom she might have a brief conversation that did not revolve around
sex, or drugs or the police or where she was going to get her next meal. She
reached out to me. She heard the music and saw the pick up truck and made
the intellectual conclusion that I was an eclectic guy who might also know
the word eclectic.


She favored me by making the comment hoping perhaps, that I would enjoy
it-which I did. She may have also hoped we could have talked about the
glorious day or classical music or the paid for pickup truck. However
briefly, she tried to break down the wall that separated the hooker from the
guy in the pickup.

But I didn’t respond as she may have wanted. Yes, I acknowledged her thoughts
but I also belittled her with my amazement of her use of the work eclectic.
She could have just asked for the smoke and been done with it, but no, she
opened her life up, just slightly, to me by suggesting that there was more
to her than what I and the rest of the world saw.
I did not see the door open. I only saw the hooker.

It is unlikely that I could have made much of a difference in her life. We
traveled in much different circles. But I didn’t try.

I could have invited her and perhaps her friends to a barbeque in the back.
I could have asked her if she needed help or food but I didn’t. I accepted
her outward appearance as the reality. I didn’t ask about her life or what
she dreamed of doing someday or the baseball team she was for.

Those kind of questions are reserved for others. For people who are more
like us.
And because I didn’t know in my unexamined ignorance, I wrote her off as an
interesting aberration. I was too busy, too preoccupied with my own life to
truly care to make the effort to learn about hers.

And now for some thoughts on Jesus…There’s a line made popular by one group
or another about what would Jesus do, or say, or drive or wear. Of course
most of these groups ask the question with the idea that they’ve got at
least one of the answers. They have an certainty, misplaced or not, that I
can only envy.

Among the many things that I am not, is a biblical scholar, making me ill
suited to say with any exactitude what Jesus would say or do on any number
of questions.
But I will stick my neck out and suggest that had Jesus been sitting in his
pickup truck on Tilley Street on that beautiful Spring day, and been greeted
by Renee Pellegrino, that his words would have been much different than
mine. He might have asked what troubled her. He might have sought to
assure her. He might have praised her gifts or forgiven her, as he does for
all of us.


I also think it is safe to say that would have nothing to do with those of
us who view the world, intentionally or not, into groups of People like us,
and the rest.


Jesus gave up a reasonably comfortable, middle class, blue collar life to
cohort with tax collectors, prostitutes, criminals, the sick and the
multitudes of the poor. And unlike most of us, he looked beyond the garb of
life-that which we find so important-and accepted all.

He didn’t care if a man or woman collected cans or owned the company that
made the cans. Jesus looked past what was seen and asks, no demands, that we
do likewise.
His demands, and I don’t think there is anything else to call them but
demands, tests us-to the very core of our being-everyday and with everyone.

Someone said once that the problem with Christianity is not that it was
tried and found wanting but that is was found difficult and left untried.

This Christianity business is up close and personal. There is no time off
for weekends and one does not build up a credit to be used for later. And if
we are even remotely interested in staying on his good side, we’d better
forget all grand social compacts that separates us from can collectors.

I am never more proud of this church and this community than when I see the
preparations that are made for our community meals. We invite all to join us
here, no strings attached, and each guest is treated with warmth and
dignity. During these times we begin to understand that we are all God’s
children. We begin to see that all people are people like us.

Its said that teacher never knows where their influence will end. The
lessons they teach are repeated with each generation and their gifts are
passed on to unknowing recipients.


Aside from the police department’s web page and a few old newspaper stories,
most of the world has forgotten about Renee Pellegrino. There used to be a
few posters asking for information about her death on vacant store fronts,
but they are long gone. Many of her friends, the people we’d see her with,
have also left, as downtown is now less hospitable to their particular
trades.

But I haven’t forgotten her. She taught me, unknowingly by her death and
that one day of eclectic small talk, that what we see is not what matters.
It took that one sentence from a hooker in downtown New London to drive home
what Jesus had said to each one of us 2000 years ago. Thanks to her, now I’m
beginning to get it.

So what do I want you to do? Well, that’s up to you. But if you need a
reminder for reflection, then maybe I can help.

In the back of the sanctuary is a small plate with pennies in it. They are
all face up showing old honest Abe. But the back side of each penny is
painted sky blue, reminding me and hopefully you, of sky on that glorious,
early Spring day when an eclectic guy learned that we are all people like
us.

Take a penny home and remember the words of Jesus…"Blessed are you who are
poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

Let’s all say Amen together, three times…Amen…Amen and Amen.