We were home the other evening, watching a moving on TV. I lost the toss, and we eschewed a movie about Queen Victoria in favor of a movie starring the very nice-looking Viggo Mortensen, a post-apocalyptic Cormac McCarthy tale called “The Road.” An hour and twenty minutes into the sepia-tinted, desperate world of a man and his small son who fought hopelessness, starvation, and bands of violent cannibals while walking across a desolate and lawless land toward the ocean, the father was shot by a cross-bow and died and we looked at each other and said—we should have gone for Queen Victoria, at least she won. It was a movie whose order of the day was mere survival in the face of certain death—a road I would not care to walk again, or ever.

The gospel of Luke, our second reading this morning, tells this story: Jesus went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went with him. As he approached the gate of the town a man who had died was being carried out. He was his mother’s only son, and she was a widow, and with her was a large crowd from the town. When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, “do not weep.” Then he came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, “young man, I say to you, rise!” The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother.

This morning, all around our communities, in every corner of the globe, this is what we see: a young man dies in combat, and the order of the day goes on. A child or two is shot playing on the road in front of their home—a casualty of a drive by meant for someone else, and the order of the day goes on. A pelican, dripping with oil, is lifted from the tide waters, and cradled gently by a weeping volunteer, but still, the order of the day, the order of death, goes on. There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that death is commonplace in our lives, unavoidable, even, in our worlds. . .but this morning’s stories are more deeply about another kind of death: that is, what Walter Brueggemann calls daily seasons of death that beset us; how, in the face of fear, grief, guilt, hate, and self-absorption, we draw more and more into a closed, self-preoccupied world that is killing us. This story is about that kind of dying. . . .and what we can do about it, if we are sick and tired of feeling sick and tired.

In the Elijah story from I Kings, we can see both kinds of dying, the physical and the spiritual, having their way in a diminished world. Elijah has foretold, and begun to survive, a season of desperate drought that has placed his land at the point of death. In a dream or a prayer, he is directed go now to Zarephath, where I have commanded a widow to feed you. There he finds a woman and a child more desperate than he.

She claims impending physical death for herself and her son, and has lived daily seasons of dying as well: an “order of the day” that dismisses women, widows with their children and “aliens” as beneath notice, beyond community.

Warily, defensively, the woman and the prophet make common cause – they survive together because they must. . . and somehow, the risk they take proves to be a God-thing: the jar of meal continues to hold just enough; the oil for cooking does not run dry. But other than merely surviving, nothing changes. And lest we think that such miracles, these “God-things”, are unambiguous, joyous moments that sweep away human limitation, erasing the daily seasons of death forever with a Divine “happily ever after,” the story of the order of the day does go on. The drought continues, the child becomes ill and declines until there is no breath in him. The tenuous truce that binds Elijah and the widow erupts with accusation, guilt, and mutual suspicion, threatening to rupture everything, including their fragile connection with the sacred…

And then, not a moment too soon, the silent complicity with the daily seasons of death is shattered by a word of power. Oh God, oh, God! Let this child’s life come into him again. It is not God’s word that breaks the silence, the cycle of death and desperation: it is a human one.
A voice from a man who, like us, has learned to survive, but finally wants more.

A voice from a soul who has been worn down by the daily seasons of death, by guilt and accusation and suspicion and self-absorption and not caring—but who has finally had enough. A voice from a believer who had long been looking for a sign from God and who at last has looked into the mirror and found the sign he longed for: himself.

He has seen the face of God, his own face, and he throws his body—vulnerable but resolute, over the body of the boy, and life is snatched from the jaws of death—for the child, for Elijah, and for the widow, who gasps—‘atah yada ‘ti—a confession of faith out of fatalism: now I know that the word of God in your mouth is true.

Last week, on Trinity Sunday, I invited us to consider what holy Name, what image of God was the one we needed, each of us, in this moment of time, in whatever season we find ourselves in. After the service, Isabelle came up to me and said—that brown pelican you mentioned? Covered with oil? I saw it—it was Christ, it is being crucified for our sins.

And I was stunned, and all this week, as the oil has crept nearer and onto our own state’s shores, my carefully balanced compromise of prayer, anger, cynicism and hopeful dependence on BP, the MMS, Congress and Barak Obama to step up and fix everything has been crumbling under those ten words, the image of a Brown Pelican, a Christ, being crucified so that we might rise up and have life through him.

When Jesus stopped the funeral cortege in Nain, confronting those silent people in their daily season of death—he spoke only ten words: Do not weep. Young man, I say to you, rise. When the young man sat up, the gospel tells us that he began to speak…

I imagine that he is speaking still, if we would but listen. I imagine that he is telling us that if we are not the ones to stretch our own bodies, like Elijah did, over those who are weary to the point of death, to cover them with our love, and speak a word of life on their behalf to God, then, who will? I imagine him saying that if we are willing to pass by death in silent complicity with friends and fellow citizens who have all but given up on living with meaning, if we refuse to Stand Up, then there really is for him and others like him, no hope. I imagine him saying, with Jesus: things can be different. Do not weep. Stand up. Do something, for my sake, for God’s sake. And when we do, when we do, I know he will be speaking again, in mighty chorus with a long forgotten widow and her son, and every forgotten one since…. ‘atah yada ‘ti: Now I know, now I know, now I know , that the word of God in your mouth. . .is true.

Psalm 133; Revelation 21:1-5

My friend Bruce traveled with a clergy group to Israel a few months ago, and told me this story about his group’s visit to the holy city of Sefad, in the hills near the Galilee. Sefad is a city of mysticism and artistic vision; it became a center of the study of kabbalah after the mystic Rabbi Isaac Luria settled there in the 16th century. It is a beautiful place to explore; high in the hills and cris-crossed by cobbled streets almost inaccessible by car, it makes you feel like you have dropped into medieval Europe. Bruce and his colleagues had been led to one of the famous synagogues in the city
center; it is a small place, filled with paintings and fabrics marked
by mystical symbols and intricate patterns. They were studying a
beautiful fresco and dodging groups of other tourists and seekers
when they heard a heavily accented voice speak behind them. What
brought you here? Assuming
the person was speaking to someone else, they went on chatting and
studying the interior of the synagogue. . .but the voice came again: what brought you here? Nervous silence smothered
the soft conversations among the pastors. A third time, soft and
insistent, the voice asked, what brought you here? The
men turned around to see a small old man (a
rabbi? a docent? another tourist?) gazing at them. What
brought you here? He was
waiting for an answer. What to say? There was awkward silence
for a moment, uncertain glances, then, looking confident, the Baptist
minister stepped forward and said in a clear, slow and confident
voice: THE HYUNDAI
MINI-VAN.

What
brought you here?

The
invitation of a friend? Your parents, or grandparents? Curiosity?
Habit? A hunger for friendship, or a yearning for the divine? A
desire to be part of something bigger than yourself?

What
brought you here?

This
morning our congregation is in the fourth week of a five week series
on spiritual antibodies, that is, practices that can help us build up
our resilience to the dis-eases of ordinary or extraordinary stresses
in life, so that we can be more peaceful, purposeful, and joyful day
to day. Living with these practices —intentionality,
relaxation, self-validation, connection, and self-care—
can help us live authentically while we try to fulfill the mission
statement that is each of ours and all of ours, here at Riviera, that
is, to reflect the path of
Christ. This morning is a
special day for us as we rededicate our sanctuary four years after
the hurricanes that damaged it and two years after beginning our
renovation. And it is also a special day on the liturgical calendar,
World Wide Communion Sunday. But in a way that is, I think, typically
Riviera, special days are carried in the flow of the Ordinary, not
interruptions of it nor distractions from something less worthy or
interesting. In a way that is common to many people of faith, we
trust that what we need will be made visible to us in our ordinary
practice, rather than outside of it. We don’t have to go on
pilgrimage, beseech the heavens, or make sacrifices. . .we just have
to show up; show up and pay attention. And so, mindfully and with a
grateful heart, we continue with our ordinary-time little sermon
series; and turn to this morning’s topic, Connection,
and wait to see how the intersection of our special celebration with
our everyday practice will speak in us and through us.

The
fourth antibody is connection. Or put another way, community. This
spiritual antibody is different from the other four, which are
possible to practice alone. You can have, and follow your mission,
by yourself. You can regulate your body and practice relaxation
alone—in fact, it is probably easier for most of us to do so! Same
goes for self-validation! If you don’t have other people around to
rely on for your sense of self-worth, you can find it within, with
God. The last vaccine, self-care we will find is also, almost
completely, a game you play alone. But connection is different. It
requires me both to give of myself, and to give myself up, to others.
It is not private practice, it is that most anachronistic of habits
in an individualistic, factionalized and nuclear-family oriented
culture: the practice of life in community. When we teach these
antibodies in Compassion Fatigue and Resiliency workshops we talk
about connection as having four components. It’s not just enough
to show up, or go through the motions of being with other people. We
all know churches, and professional associations, clubs or cliques
that do that: the people show up, and appear to be having a wonderful
time together, but there is something missing, something wrong. To
practice genuine connection, four qualities must be present.

Real
community is marked by narrative.
It is present when persons listen to, and share their stories.
That’s one of the reasons our worship takes so much time for
sharing the peace, and pays so much attention to the expression of
the prayers of the people, and people from the church occasionally
replace pastors and preachers in the pulpit.

Real
community is characterized by trust, and by an ability to confront one another in
love.

Real
community allows us to tell on ourselves, to, as a friend of mine
once put it when she advised me to trust my church with the stories
of my own failures and brokenness, tell
the truth about yourself so that others know church is the place
where they can tell the truth, and be accepted.

Real
community makes us accountable. For what we
say we will do for ourselves, and for what we promise to do for
others. The apostle Paul said it another way—when one part of us
is weak, all of us are weak; and if one of us is strong, all of us
benefit. When we are in relationship in the family of God, what we
do to ourselves matters, and what we say we are doing for the life of
the community counts, as well. We are not a staff-run church, a
spiritual spa where you can pay to show up and have someone else help
you feel better. We are a working community, a work in progress, and
everyone’s participation matters, and matters deeply.

When
we tell and hear our sacred stories, trust each other to confront us
when we need it, tell on ourselves with trust and transparency, and
are accountable for our own actions and for the life of the
community, God shows up, and we are Christ, manifesting as community.

No
matter how well one is vaccinated with the other four antibodies, no
one can be healthy, resilient or spiritually whole without
connection, outside of intentional community. I absolutely believe
that with my whole heart….even though it is REALLY HARD some days,
and I wish that the Hyundai bus had brought me, so I could
leave again, rather than the vehicle of Christ’s body, our common
table and our common life, from which I can never escape.

Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, the German Confessing Church pastor who was executed by
the Nazis for his part in a plot to assassinate Hitler, said that the
Church was Christ, existing
as community. That’s what
I believe in, that’s what I was drawn to, when I first chose to be
a church person instead of merely a Jesus person. I attended this
little church, a farm house in the country rapidly being overrun by
suburbia, whose people—not too many, usually, stepped up and
volunteered and had fun and asked hard questions and generously
yielded to each other in love. If it was one family’s week to
vacuum and set up the chairs, usually, through the overflowing of
friendship, there were two, or three, and a picnic , or maybe wine
and cheese after….If the denomination fought and argued about
homosexuality or theology, we talked about it in church, rather than
avoiding the conflict, and we learned how to disagree, and stay
together. I had loved Jesus since early adolescence, but at Hope I
fell in love with the Church.

And
I love this church—which today marks a moment in a history…..a
big moment for us, but more because of what it represents than what
it is. We remade this sanctuary, after years and moments and laughter
and arguments, in the image of God, as we see God here…that is, in
the overflowing of friendship that is Christ manifest as community.

We
opened up our dark, stained glass lower windows to the world, because
we believe we should always see it, and know its movements, even when
we are in sanctuary. We got rid of our high chancel and imposing
pulpit because we believe that God comes to us in the immanent and
neighborly, more than in the authoritative and transcendent. We
built a “mother ship” that moves our worship orientation around,
because we believe we must always see ourselves and God from a
variety of perspectives, in order to be engaged and real in the
world. We built our stunning stained glass celtic cross and sheltered
it under a tent of hospitality, because we want to remind ourselves
and show others that the practice of hospitality is the heart of the
gospel, the center of our worship, and the face of God. I borrowed
the title for this morning’s sermon from our friend, Richard
Godbeer who just two weeks ago was ordained into leadership as an
elder of the church. His book, The
Overflowing of Friendship, describes the practice of intentional friendship between men during
the colonial and revolutionary period of our nation’s history. He
makes the case that such friendships—nurtured with intentionality,
practiced across boundaries of ideology and social condition, created
in the men who sought them a particular character of emotional and
spiritual transparency, a character that enabled them, and their
brothers and sisters, to make a new nation. Initially, I thought I
was merely hi-jacking his fabulous title . . .but now, though the
contexts out of which we speak are vastly different, I’m not sure
the principle isn’t the same. For I am advocating a practice of
connection and community that will not merely make you, or me, more
joyful, resilient and spiritually whole; I believe that when we
practice community together we develop our capacity to transform, and
heal the world. This is what the vision in Revelation is about: a
world salted by believers, who, having endured the divisions and
disintegrations and false promises of civil society, have found their
way to the true society, the kin-dom of God, by practicing deep
connection across boundaries of language, nation, and race. We
are salt for the earth, O people….bring forth the kindom of God.

(vimeo ID: 6924883)

Self-Validation: Spiritual Antibody #3

For how many of you in this room is your best always good enough?

Think about that’¦and listen:

It is the final hour of a pastors’ retreat. We have
reached a conclusion of baptismal name-calling. Pastors one-by-one
are invited to sit in the center and declare the “name” they had claimed from the bible, from which they
had been given the “authority” to teach and preach. The exercise is going
swimmingly until a young pastor walks to the center and sits down. We
wait. Silence. We wait. More silence. Protestant impatience with
silence begins to express itself: creaking chairs, clearing throats,
watching watches, and a visual counting of the bodies that are left
to be named. He finally shifts his gaze from his hands to a place
over our heads. “I’ve looked for my name for three days.
It isn’t there.” That cracks the silence. What does he mean,
“It isn’t there?”
Everything necessary for our salvation is expected to be there.

“It’s not that I didn’t want one of those
names. But they aren’t strong enough. Strong enough to undo
the one I have. My father gave it to me. Over and over again. My name
is…” His gaze sinks down to his fingers. “My
name is….’Not good enough.” There is silence, deep enough to drown in. Tears
rise. We watch and listen, helpless on the shores of this grief, this
dangerous confession of inadequacy. He has voluntarily stripped naked
and plunged in over our heads.¹

This morning we have read part of the story of Jacob, whose name
means’”supplanter. After a lifetime of living down to
the name his parents gave him it is at last time to face his past,
and begin to live his own life, instead of the one he stole from his
brother Esau. He has been given a new name, but he alone can decide
whether he is worthy to live into it. What will he do? And what will
we do? Because we know the flaw, the danger in both these stories,
the pastor’s and the patriarch’s: if we are not good
enough, in the end, it is no one’s fault but our own. No
matter what legacy of inadequacy we have inherited, what name we have
been given, it is up to us, and no one else, to claim our place as
God’s beloved child, and to live as if we believe it.

This morning marks our third exploration of five spiritual
antibodies against compassion fatigue; five spiritual practices we
are seeking to learn to incorporate into our lives so that we may be
peaceful, purposeful, and joy-filled, no matter what the
circumstances of stress or threat around us, in our professional and
personal worlds. We have in the past weeks considered how no one of
us’”not even Jesus!’” is immune to the effects of stress
in our lives. We have explored intentionality and considered
what our personal mission and values are. We looked at relaxation, a prayer-like state of bodily self-regulation that helps us to
remain unclenched in the presence of real or perceived threats, so
that we can be in touch with our higher self, and not be a slave to
the alligator brain that tells us to fight or flee in the presence of
danger. Today we consider self-validation, the third spiritual
antibody. In order to be spiritually healthy within, no matter what
the outside circumstances, we must become capable of loving. When the
rich young ruler asked Jesus how to live divinely, Jesus asked
him’”what is the greatest commandment? And the man responded
correctly, We must love the Lord our God with all our hearts and
all our minds and all our strength, and our neighbor as ourselves. For many of us, this golden rule has called our attention to two
things: loving God, and loving our neighbor. What is often
neglected’¦as yourself. . .is key to the first two
actions.

For if we do not love and trust ourselves, we cannot hope to know
how to love a neighbor, a friend, a partner, a child, an enemy. And
if we cannot love our neighbor whom we can see, we cannot love God,
whom we can’t see. The spiritual practice of self-validation
is neither vanity nor self-aggrandizement, it is believing that we
are God’s worthy child, so that we can in all circumstances
act that way. Why does it matter? Because when we don’t
believe we are good enough, that our best is good enough, we become
dangerously addicted to the praise of others. And if we cannot get it
freely, we will, like Jacob, be forced to take it from others. We all
know people like this; who feel better by running you down; who take
credit for what someone else has done, who need adoration so
desperately to fill up the empty inside that they will take from
anyone and everyone whatever they can, and be enraged that it is
never enough. To love God and to love others we must love ourselves,
and be in charge of our own sense of worth. it is believing that we
are doing our best; and that our best (which is all anyone can do!)
is always good enough.

This morning’s reading is about two boys who never believed
their best was good enough, two children who , hating each other,
never learned to love themselves. And now after long years of
struggle and competition, they must face each other; now they must
face themselves.

Jacob is first’”as always!’”to see his brother Esau
approaching. Now, suddenly, he is no longer the new man Israel, the godwrestler, whose name and power were won at such great cost
in the dark struggles of the night. Now that he sees his brother, he
is again the supplanter, a brother-wrestler, the child who fought
with his own blood and fled his home in fear of his life. Last night,
he strove with angels and prevailed. This morning, he is only Jacob:
and he carries with him to meet his brother all the history of what
he was and what he has tried to become, and the guilt that long years
have never been able to erase. He cannot love his brother because he
has not learned to love himself.

And then there is Esau: always oldest, always second best. Have
you only one blessing? he cried in anguish upon discovering his
brother’s treachery, when his life and his hope and his power
were stolen at Isaac’s deathbed. Bless me, me also, father! But Isaac, feeble and broken, outmaneuvered on every side, had
very little left to give his son except regret. Indeed, the blessing
of Esau was a blessing of regret and deprivation and poverty: a
blessing of bitterness and Dis-ease—

Away from the fatness of the earth shall your home be. Away
from the dew of heaven on high’”
You shall serve your
brother, and when you break loose, you shall break his yoke from your
neck.

Neither brother can avoid this meeting, for God knows that, until
the brothers face each other, neither brother will ever be whole.
Esau is coming, with four hundred men and the yoke of his brother,
the yoke of righteous indignation and of bitterness. Jacob has
prepared well for this confrontation, as well he might, but he is
still afraid. Messengers had gone before him, and spies had
ascertained his brother’s strength. His wives and his children
have been separated for safety’s sake, and drilled in the
proper courtesies. Gifts, lavish gifts, have been prepared.
Jacob has choreographed and calculated this meeting with all the
conniving skill at his command, and he is as ready as he will ever
be.

Seven times he bows himself to the earth, the story tells us,
grovelllng before the power and the justice of his brother, who now,
as was foretold, will at last break his yoke. Fearfully, he falls at
Esau’s feet, his new name and his hard-won identity all but
forgotten in his fear. He is ready for anything’”but in truth,
nothing has prepared him for what is about to take place.

But Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his
neck and kissed him, and they wept.

Coming up from those waters of grace, Esau looks around and
gestures: brother, what is all this…stuff? What are you trying
to say? Coming up from the waters of grace, Jacob looks up, and
sees before him the embarrassment of riches, the obsequious excesses
his shame has manufactured, and his heart sinks. Standing in his
brother’s embrace, he sees himself for what he is, still the
same old Jacob, trying to bamboozle and overwhelm…but then,
anointed with his brother’s tears, he grasps for the
“Israel” within, and answers Esau plainly: it is….to find
favor with my lord.

And Esau roars with laughter, and shouts out his freedom from
Jacob’s yoke: I don’t want it! I have enough! Keep
what you have. With four hundred men he rode out to take back by
force what his brother had stolen from him: but when he saw Jacob, he
discovered that he was free. He does not want what his brother has,
he is his own man: and the yoke of Jacob has been broken not on the
killing field, but by Love. Come home, he bids his brother,
and waits.

And Jacob-Israel, weeping, looks upon the face of the brother whom
he has supplanted and hated and feared, and sees, to his surprise,
not the face of an enemy, but the face of the angel, the face of the
man with whom he had wrestled by night, his own face, the face of
God. It is himself he has hated, all along, and finding in his
brother’s face only love and acceptance where he expected to
find judgment, he turns at last to the one he has forgiven least in
his life, sees himself as he truly is, and begins to love.

Back in the room where the young pastor sat in silence, having
confessed his true name:

In a room, full of lifeguards, a pastor is drowning. Then comes
a stirring sound as a handful of women and men rise and circle the
drowning man. An ancient tradition, the laying on of hands, takes
place. One voice rises, then turns into two voices, then unison, male
and female. "You are my beloved son. With you I am well
pleased.” We are deeply immersed in a renewal of baptism.
What we witness is a rebirth.

What does it take for us to know we are God’s beloved son?
God’s daughter? To believe it?

The first time I participated in a Compassion Fatigue workshop, we
were asked to practice self validation by writing ourselves a letter,
a letter of praise and love, with no criticism in it, a letter from
the beloved. To my surprise and dismay. I couldn’t do it. Any
letter of love from God to me must include a description of my
shortcomings, a strongly worded suggestion to shape up and try
harder, a hint of disappointment that I had not measured up to
God’s, that is, my own harsh standards. I tore up several
attempts, looked at my Blackberry, and decided I needed to go return
some emails. When I came back to the room later and listened to my
friends reading their letters aloud, I realized I was standing on
holy ground, and I felt sorry I had refused the opportunity to write
my own blessing. This morning, I invite you to stand on holy ground.
. .to take the paper that has been provided in your bulletin, and to
inoculate yourself with the love of God, by loving yourself. And let
us pray, in these fine old words of Hildegarde of Bingen

Good people, most royal greening verdancy, rooted in the sun, you shine with radiant light. In this circle of earthly
existence, you shine so finely, it surpasses
understanding. God hugs you.
You are encircled by the arms of the
mystery of God.

An Unclenched Moment: Relaxation and Self-Regulation
Gentle me, Holy One,
Into an unclenched moment,
a deep breath, a letting go
of heavy experiences, of shriveling anxieties,
of dead certainties,
that, softened by the silence, surrounded by the light
and open to the mystery,
I may be found by wholeness,
upheld by the unfathomable,
entranced by the simple,
and filled with the joy
That is You 1 .

The
thing is, none of us know when that moment will come: that moment
when we need to be unclenched—not just for our own well-being, but
maybe for the wellbeing, the peace, or even the safety of another.

That
moment came for one of our members this past Tuesday morning when
Coral Gables High School, where she teaches, went on lockdown when a
child stabbed another child to death. When I called her cel phone,
the first words she said were I’m
okay. And
then she went on to describe how she and forty-five frightened
students were shut in the school’s theater, wondering and waiting.
Her voice, while calm, sounded tight, clenched, and while I watched
the helicopters circling over the Gables I felt deeply sad and sorry
she was there, alone . . .and then, suddenly, I was grateful.
Grateful that one of the ones who was there with those frightened
students was a practicing person of faith. . .by which I mean, she,
like each one of us in this sanctuary this morning, is a person
practicing with the intent to be, in whatever given moment, God’s
person, a bearer of light. And I thought she should know that, and
so I said, You
are the person God has placed in this circumstance. Relax your body,
breathe, and know that you are exactly where and what and who you
need to be, for yourself and for these kids. Whatever you choose to
do will be right action, and your students are blessed to have you
there.

And
on the other end of the line I heard a deep breath, and then a calm,
centered voice saying: Okay.
I can do that. And
she did, that day, and then the next.

In
this morning’s story from the gospel of Mark, that moment came for
the disciples twice in short order. First, when the left-over
disciples (the ones who weren’t invited up on the mountain with
Jesus for the Transfiguration) tried to prove that they, too, were
good enough to be Jesus’ best and brightest. A man with a child
described as “possessed of a demon,” probably, an epileptic,
begged the nine disciples to heal his son.

The
disciples had healed before: why not now? And why not, especially,
when they no doubt felt stung and overlooked by their secondary
position in the Jesus circle? I imagine them trying, one after the
other, to pray and find within themselves the power of God to heal,
while the others stood by, confused and clenched up inside, secretly
hoping that they, and not one of the others, would be successful,
would save the day.

It
was a circle of competition that ended in consternation.

By
the time Jesus and the three got back down the mountain, all they
could do, in the face of the child’s suffering and the father’s
pain was whimper why?
Why couldn’t we fix it? And
Jesus, laying hands on the child, said to the father—all
things are possible to those who believe;

and
to his disciples—this
kind only comes out by prayer.

The
second time that moment came—or, perhaps, more accurately, the
second time we are told that that moment came—was later, after the
disciples had once again heard that Jesus was on the way to his
death, and on their way to the next village they addressed their fear
and impotence and sense of impending loss by engaging in a robust
discussion about….which
one of them was the greatest. The
greatest? The greatest what,
we would ask with scorn, except for the fact that we know why people
like the disciples, people like us, get caught up in such pitifully
self-serving conversations: because deep down, we fear that we are
not the greatest at all, but rather, the least and the lost. When
Jesus asked later, what
were you talking about along the way? they
were clenched with shame and misery because they knew Jesus had found
them out.

That
moment comes for each one of us. And it won’t surprise you if I say
that such moments come again and again, throughout our days as we
face the thousand insults and perceived threats to our well-being,
our comfort, our safety, our self-image, our balance. Sometimes our
moments are dire ones, important ones, like at Coral Gables Senior
High earlier this week; other times, small and private, threatening
harm only to ourselves as we clench or rage or fret over an idiot on
the highway, a bill in the mail, a call from a supervisor, a report
from the doctor, a phone call late in the night.

We
are in many ways the safest generation that has ever lived, but we
maintain ourselves in an almost continual state of alert, as if at
any moment the world, our world, might come to an end. So when Ted
Loder prays, gentle
me, holy one, into an unclenched moment, we know it is exactly what we each need, every moment of the day: to
be found by the wholeness and filled with the joy that is God.

It
is why we are here, in this sanctuary, practicing our faith.

This
morning, we are well into a series of sermons presenting five
spiritual antibodies—five spiritual practices we can use in our
lives so that we might not grow
weary in well doing, as the apostle Paul put it, but live our lives with joy, peace, and
purpose, whatever
the outside circumstances. We first considered intentionality—that
is, an awareness of why we are here on this planet and what
principles and values we have chosen to practice along our path—and
how knowing our mission can help us stay centered and focused when
distractions or destructions threaten. Today, we are looking at relaxation,
or put another way, self-regulation.
What can we do to remain unclenched, peaceful, and more importantly,
an agent of healing and transformation for others when in the
presence of perceived or actual threats? What is right action when
we are threatened or afraid?

In
the two texts we have read this morning, there are images that show
us the way we want to become. In First Samuel 16, in the text about
the choosing of the boy David by the prophet Samuel to be king, the
real circumstance is one of danger for everyone. The prophet, who
works for King Saul, knows that his life is forfeit if Saul discovers
he has anointed his replacement. The people of Bethlehem, knowing
the king’s paranoia and rage, are fearful and trembling when Samuel
brings danger to their door. Though Samuel hopes to find the new
king, anoint him, and slip back out of town without being noticed,
everything goes wrong, as young man after young man parades before
him and he knows they are not the right one. Finally he asks if there
is no other child of Jesse to be seen, and when he is told well,
just the eighth, the littlest, he
knows both the risk they are all taking, and the necessity of this
moment of choosing. What is right action when in the presence of a
threat? Samuel says, we
will all stand here and wait until he comes. Right
action in the presence of a perceived threat is to relax. And
whether it took two hours or two days for the child David to be found
in the fields and to be brought forward, when you know what the right
thing is, it is possible to stand and wait, with peace.

Jesus
put it this way: this
kind comes out only by prayer….but
what does that mean? Surely they must have prayed….laid hands on
the foaming child, sought God’s power. But they failed, and I
suspect the text tells us why. There are times when “prayer” is
just words—words that fill up a room, or a mouth, or a
conversation—but go nowhere genuine, or real. When our fists are
clenched, we can’t receive anything. That is, when we pray in fear
or in competition, or with our mind already made up, we are full
already, even if it is only full of ourselves. The kind of prayer
Jesus is describing is not a filling up, but rather, an emptying, an
unclenching, a relinquishing. And if we can release ourselves into
this kind of unclenched moment, right action will present itself, and
we can experience wholeness and healing, whatever the circumstance.
The father of the boy did it when he prayed from his heart: Lord,
I believe, help my unbelief. I think that is the best prayer in the bible.

To
be gentled into an unclenched moment can happen in a variety of ways.
When I work with my colleagues in Presbyterian Disaster Assistance to
help leaders of communities struck by disaster to maintain their
resilience and their purpose down the long road to recovery, we teach
a very quick and easy method of relaxation and self-regulation that
any one can use, all day and every day, to live in the unclenched
moment. Many of us in this room already know this technique, and try
to practice it. And if any of you want, we can teach it to you in
five minutes. And there are other ways to this prayerful, childlike
place, as well. Some follow the Buddhist practice of mindfulness, that is a moment-by-moment being and awareness, accepting self in
relationship with the world and the divine. Many, Christians among
others, practice meditation, in the form of stillness or labyrinth
walking or chanting, or prayers on the breath. Any of these practices
can help us learn to be still and know God…and stay that way.
Knowing and practicing relaxation as a spiritual discipline builds
our immunity in the midst of danger or threat. It causes us, as
Jesus tried to show his disciples after all their sad and
disappointing failures to be like him, to
become like a child.

When
one of our members, Rose Maree Curtis, was in nursing care and
terrified that she was dying, she learned a version of the ancient
Jesus prayer, asked me to write it and tape it to the wall next to
her bed, so that when she felt terror taking her, she breathed her
way with that prayer into stillness and peace. Let us pray it now: Lord
Jesus Christ….you are the light of the world….fill my heart with
your love….and my mind with your peace.

1 Ted Loder, quoted in Life Prayers.

Mark 8:22-38

We had been warned, but we did it anyway: we rented a car in England. I’m a good driver, and I thought I had what I needed. A decent enough map. A clear destination. A companion on the journey—map reader and spotter. After the first two miles of driving on the left, I began to feel a little bit comfortable and was ready to get to business. I took the exit the guy at Enterprise had indicated, and that was when we rolled into the first roundabout, circled it, and
found ourselves inexplicably pointed BACK into the center of London.
We were leaving London, on our way south to Winchester Cathedral. I
checked the destinations indicated on the sign. Twickenham. M2267
CM3206. Honey, check the map, okay? I need
which of these little things connects with the M25. Honey? Which one
goes to Winchester? The next roundabout, she
suggested I just keep driving around it until we could figure it
out……irritably, we snapped back at each other. I was wondering
why at each roundabout an arm pointing in a different direction was
still mysteriously going toward Twickenham. Take
that one, Gili suggested. But
I don’t WANT to go to Twickenham!!! I said
between gritted teeth. Where is the M25? Or
the M3? Or any M thing at all with less than four numbers???

We finally
made it out of London, and on the right road, by grace and by golly.
But it was a full day later before we learned that, in roundabouts in
England, it wasn’t enough to know that you wanted, ultimately, to
go to Salisbury, say, or Bath. Because each roundabout sign only
showed the next two towns on each little radial arm’s route, it was
necessary not only to know your ultimate destination, but also the
markers along the way…or else, you would most certainly become
terribly lost.

This
morning’s sermon is first in a series exploring five spiritual
practices we call Spiritual Antibodies in our work with distressed communities and people recovering from
disaster. The “disease” these antibodies are intended to
inoculate against is Compassion Fatigue; that is, what happens to us
when the chronic stresses and circumstances of our life and work wear
us down and out to the point where we begin to act out in ways that
are harmful to ourselves and others. Last week, we considered the
story in the gospel of Mark in which Jesus, worn down by challenge
and opposition, exhausted from his work of healing and teaching, and
struggling with friends and followers who didn’t understand his
mission, acted out by calling a Gentile woman who came to him for
help a “dog.” Jesus was experiencing compassion fatigue, and he
was at less than his best.

It is
commonly believed that the way to treat stress, burn out or
compassion fatigue, is to change the circumstances that caused it.
If work is causing you stress, go on vacation. If your marriage is
in a hard place, get a divorce. If you aren’t happy, move
somewhere else, or get a new job. But as a friend once marvelously
and honestly told me, the problem with
changing your partner when you’re unhappy is that you still are
stuck with yourself. And unless I change, nothing changes.

The
Centers for Disease Control, the CDC in Atlanta, would applaud that
observation. When an outbreak of disease is diagnosed somewhere in
the world, it is impossible to physically remove every creature from
harm’s way. You can’t get rid of the virus, the germs, the agents
that cause outbreaks. It’s just not possible to treat disease that
way. Rather, you fight disease by building immunity and resilience
in the exposed population.

When we
say that we eradicated smallpox in this country, we did not mean that
we killed all the smallpox in the world, rather, we practiced a
program of universal inoculation, building antibodies and immunity to
smallpox across our population, until the disease could not gain a
foothold. The CDC defines disease not as the absence of toxicity, but
as a lack of effective antibodies. We don’t get sick because of the toxicity of our environment, but
because of the inability or weakness of our immune system.
Spiritually and emotionally speaking, it is the same. We are never
going to live in a world that is stress free, or danger-free. The
circumstances of life will always present challenges and insults to
us, sometimes more, sometimes less. We can’t change that, so we have to change ourselves. We have to
build up our spiritual immune system.

So it
follows that the first key is to know what a healthy system looks and
feels like, so that we can be aware when our spiritual health is at
risk. Jesus knew that; he knew what a Christly self looked like, and
so he was quick to correct his course when challenged. In last
week’s story, the challenge of the Syrophoenician woman helped him
realize he was symptomatic: a healthy Jesus would not have insulted
a person in need; and so, he corrected course, recovered himself, and
got back on track. How do we know what a healthy spiritual and emotional self looks like?

This is
the first spiritual antibody: intentionality. In order to be
spiritually and emotionally well, we need to know why we are here and
what are the principles that guide us through our life. When I was
driving aimlessly around in circles in London, growing ever more
frustrated, angry and stressed, I knew where I wanted to go
ultimately, but I had no clue how to get there. If I had known the
villages along the way, and how the system worked, I would have
understood not only the big picture, that I was going to Winchester.
. .but also, the way to get there without harming myself or others.
To be spiritually healthy, we need to know not just where we are
going, that is, our mission in life; but also, what values we choose
to practice that will get us there. So I am going to ask you to take
a few minutes now, while Laura plays and sings softly, and use the
piece of paper in your bulletin to think about and write what you
understand your life’s mission to be. It should be short, to the
point, easy to remember. And then, what are the core values or
principles that keep your life on track. Why
are you on this planet? What principles and values are important to
keep you on your life’s path?

The story
we read earlier this morning from the gospel of Mark speaks
eloquently about the importance of intentionality in our lives.
Jesus is nearing the end of his public ministry of teaching and
healing. All of his life’s work of bringing people into communion
with God and wholeness in their lives is driving him inexorably
toward a final confrontation with the powers in his world that could
not tolerate such health and freedom. In the deepest places of his
spirit, he knew that if he stayed on mission, he would be killed. But
no one in the prime of life and the fullness of service wants to die.
In this text, Jesus is preparing his disciples and himself to stay
centered in their purpose, in his life mission, no matter what. He
knows that this will be especially difficult for his followers, who
don’t fully understand what he has come to do; but also, hard for
him. He knows he must be carefully attentive to his purpose and the
temptation to stray from it, if he is to fulfill his mission.

The first
story, the story of the two-part healing of the blind man, helps us
understand this. When Jesus first touches the blind man he asks, can
you see anything? The man responds that I
can see people, but they look like trees, walking. The
man knows what he sees, and he knows that it is not quite right. His
desire is for full health and healing, and he knows that he is only
partway there. In response to this, Jesus touches him again, and his
sight is fully restored, he is whole.

Just after
this little story, Jesus asks his disciples, in effect, can
you see anything? And they respond, some
say you are Elijah, some, the prophet, some, John the Baptist. And
you? What do you say? Peter makes the connection, you are the
Christ, son of the living God. He gets it,
what Jesus’ mission is, what they have been doing, and why. Just
for that moment, they know the way—and so Jesus reveals to them the
hardest part of the path he has chosen: that it will lead to his
crucifixion and death. This is the first time in the gospel of Mark
where Jesus dares to say that aloud, that in order for him to fulfill
his mission, it is necessary for him to die.

But we
have been talking not just about our mission and our integrity in
that mission, but also about the ways the stresses and strains and
insults of life tempt us to breach that mission. We all have what we
might call “ditch behaviors,” things we do when our immunity is
low and we begin to get spiritually “sick.” We get irritable
with those we love. We feel put upon and martyred. We drink too much,
or eat or shop too much. We withdraw from friends and family. Jesus
did it in the story we studied last week. In this week’s story,
it is Peter who can’t maintain his mission when the fear of losing
Jesus overwhelms him. When Jesus says, I’m
going to die, Peter rebukes him and tells
him, no way. Whatever you have to do to avoid
this death, do it. He invites Jesus to
breach his integrity, to ditch his mission, so that he can avoid pain
and death and loss.

That is
why Jesus is so sharp and pointed in his response to Peter, or
rather, in his response to himself. Get
behind me, satan, for you are focusing on human things, not divine. Through the years, Peter has taken a bad rap for this little
incident, dismissed as evil because he is tempting Jesus away from
his chosen path. But the fact is, Peter is doing Jesus a favor here.
In the most ancient traditions of the Jewish people, Satan is not a devil with horns, the personification of evil. Rather, he
is the Adversary, a devil’s advocate who points out an alternative
path. Well, I know you believe the right way
is to maintain your commitment to love and serve even if they kill
you for it, but wouldn’t you rather live? Isn’t there another
way? The devil doesn’t make us do it; he
points up the alternatives, so that we can make choices that are less
than our highest and best. But the choice and the responsibility, all
along, are entirely our own.

Peter,
acting as the Adversary, only suggests to Jesus what Jesus himself is
tempted to do.

Of course
he would rather live than die. But he knows that to live, he would
have to betray his principles and his mission. And so he teaches his
disciples (and himself) whoever would save
himself must be willing to lose his life. And those who would keep
their life at any cost will lose their soul.

From this
point on, Jesus is able to maintain his mission, and bring his
disciples along with him into a hard and dangerous time, because he
knows what his ultimate goal is, and what temptations he is
vulnerable to that might lead him down an alternative path, missing
the mark. He knows what it is to see clearly, and what it looks like
to see less than clearly (that is, in the metaphor of his healing
story, to see people who look like trees). We can do the same, and
practice intentionality as we move through the challenges and joys of
life. If we know why we are here, and we know what principles are
core values to us, we will be able to recognize those circumstances
and symptoms that mean we are off the path . . . or beginning to lose
our way.

I’d like
to bring this home with a word from Viktor Frankl, the philosopher
and theologian who wrote Man’s Search for
Meaning. He lost his entire family in the
holocaust and barely survived the death camps, enduring dehumanizing
torture. His statement, That which is to give
light must endure burning, is one of my own
core principles. He said this: We who lived
in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the
huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They
may have been few in number, but the offer sufficient proof that
everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the
human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of
circumstances, to choose one’s own way. When we are no longer able
to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.

in the ordinary-day life practice of spiritual values that Riviera members have come to call “reflecting the path of Christ” I am often awed and always grateful for the generosity of our community of faith. This is not a Sunday-only kind of faith community for most of you: in addition to going to work, maintaining a household and nurturing your relationships at home, so many of you give significant time and energy to the practice of your faith week by week. You visit friends and church members in hospital or at home, you run errands for friends and neighbors, you read and respond to prayer concerns that move through the community by phone or cyberspace, you bring the concerns of others, known to you, into our circle of care. You attend choir, volunteer in the office, the hospital, the bay clean up, the walks and runs to eradicate various diseases, you care.

Not a week passes that I don’t hear a story from one of you about how you are attempting to meaningfully relate your faith practice, a sermon or part of worship or education with which you connected, with the challenges and changes you face day by day in the world outside the sanctuary. When you leave after the benediction on Sunday morning, you are not leaving church—you are taking church to work, reflecting the path of Christ in the everyday world. Put another way, (borrowing the words of Jesus!) you are the light of the world.

Viktor Frankl, the philosopher and concentration camp survivor, whose “Man’s Search for Meaning” is a 20th century classic and an awe-inspiring demonstration of how one man with faith made a life of purpose, meaning and even joy in the midst of the most profound and dehumanizing experience of suffering, said this:

“That which is to give light, must endure burning.”

I described you as light – givers, and so you are.

If Frankl is right, and in my experience both as a pastor and as a disaster responder, I think he is correct; if the first part of the statement is true, so is the second.

That is, light-givers experience burning, and need to know how to sustain their “fuel” for a long and joyful life of purposeful shining into the dark places of life.

Care-giving, light-giving, expends fuel. It costs you something to choose to engage in the lives of neighbors, friends, and strangers. It spends something of your spiritual and physical energy to choose after work not to just go home and sack out with reruns of your favorite show, but to cook a meal and take it to a person bound to home, to stop by the hospital for a visit, to write a card, make a phone call, go to church for a meeting or a practice session, show up for your volunteer shift…. it is your joyful choice, and the way you reflect Christ in the world, and it also costs you something. And when stresses and costs begin to pile up to the point where your fuel reserves get low, and when, like now, times are hard and the workplace itself is harder, you may begin to experience what trauma specialists have come to describe as “Compassion Fatigue.” Your life and work of caring for others wears you out, instead of energizing you. You stop burning fuel to keep your light shining, and you start burning yourself….and that’s not the way it should be!

My friend, Compassion Fatigue specialist Dr. Eric Gentry, has developed a wonderful program for treating and preventing compassion fatigue. For the past year, my colleagues from the National Response Team of Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, Jim Kirk and Bruce Wismer and I have worked with Dr. Gentry to adapt his transformational material for the faith community. In late August, we premiered this model at Riviera in a Compassion Fatigue mini-retreat with 26 members and friends of RPC. We are planning to offer this material again in the future. In the meantime, beginning on Rally Day, September 13, I will preach a five part sermon on the Spiritual Antibodies that people of faith can put into practice–a vaccine, if you will, to help you become more resilient to the effects of compassion fatigue, if you are experiencing it, or, for the rest of us, to help us stay spiritually resilient and healthy in our everyday work as we seek in our lives to always be light givers.

Put simply, your vocation as a child of God is to shine as light in the world. ..wherever you are. And this “spiritual vaccine” can help you keep healthy, joyful, and intentional in that vocation…whatever you do.

Here are the themes and the texts we will be considering through this series:

September 13: Rally Day!

• Spiritual Vaccine #1: Intentionality.
• Text: Do You Want to Be Made Well?
• John 5:2-9 The Man by the Pool of Bethzatha

September 20: Ordination Sunday

• Spiritual Vaccine #2: Relaxation (Self-Regulation)
• Text: Sanctuary
• I Samuel 16 Samuel and David

September 27: Spiritual Vaccine #3: Self-Validated Caregiving

• Text: Take My Blessing–Please!
• Genesis 32-33 Esau and Jacob

October 4: CHURCH REDEDICATION SUNDAY!!!!

• Spiritual Vaccine #4: Connection and Community
• Text: The Overflowing of Friendship
• (with thanks to RG)
• Psalm 133 How good it is….

October 11

• Spiritual Vaccine #5: Refueling and Self-Care
• Text: The Return of the Prodigal
• Luke 15 The story of the Prodigal Son… and Brother…. and Father

Mark 7:24-37

We are the generation that stands between the fires:. . . It is our task to make from fire not an all-consuming blaze but the light in which we see each other fully. All of us different, all of us bearing One Spark. We light these fires to see more clearly that the Earth and all who live as part of it are not for burning. We light these fires to see more clearly the rainbow in our many-colored faces. Blessed is the One within the many; blessed are the Many who make one. (Arthur Waskow)

There are two Christs in this story from the gospel of Mark: one, the Christ who knows who she is and why she has been placed on this planet. She will bring healing to those closest to her heart… and to those who are far off. She sees the image of God in the face of every human soul, and is not afraid to bring that image forth; whether from the spirit of her sick child or from the grasp of a demon, or a man.

The other Christ? A man who, having for a season lost his own purpose and his chosen way, is challenged and changed. Repenting, he recovers his soul, and rises above human failing and human flaw to become a better man. Forgiven, he remembers who he is, a son of God—healed, he returns to his life’s work, a light shining in darkness , that darkness can never extinguish.

There are two essential questions that each one of us, a person made in the image of God, ought to be able to answer. The answer to the first is the spark of divinity within us; the answer to the second, the Christ light that guides us along our daily path. Here they are:

Why are you on this planet?

What values and principles do you choose to practice as you fulfill this purpose?

Of the two Christs in this story of Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman, it can be said that one shines with the clear light of faith and purpose while the other, shadowed by stress and sorrow, has, for a season, forgotten.

There is good reason for Jesus to have been experiencing compassion fatigue. If Mark intends in any way for us to read the Jesus story chronologically, Jesus had learned of the death of his friend, John, fled to a far place only to feed the five thousand, taught both disciples and the crowds, faced down the challenges of the scribes and Pharisees and healed the sick (when he was supposed to be resting). He is sick and tired, burnt out and bound up. All the giving and the healing, the challenges and the opposition—the very work he loved and came to do, have used up his reserves and left him running on empty.

We all know how he feels… we all have felt that way before. And we can understand that when the story tells us Jesus arose and went away from there to the region of Tyre and Sidon, and entered a house and would have no one know it, what Mark is trying to say is that Jesus had booked a vacation villa in a foreign country and he was done.

But Jesus is not the only Christ in this story—God has sent another One to Jesus to care and to confront, to hound and to heal. The unlikely Christ in this story of upsetting surprises is a foreigner, a woman, and a mother with a demon possessed daughter –she is once, twice, three times not a lady, but deeply, disturbingly Unclean. Oh, and one more thing: she is the only one in the room who remembers why she’s on this planet, and what values light her way toward fulfilling her life’s purpose.

But immediately a woman, a Gentile, Syrophoenician by birth, whose little daughter was possessed by an unclean spirit, came to Jesus and fell at his feet, begging him to cast the demon out of her daughter.

What Would Jesus Do? We think we know the answer, because after all, Jesus is God. Jesus may be a little tired, but we know he will dig down, reach out, love, touch and heal… because that is his mission, it is what he came to do. Jesus Saves!

But Jesus is not himself—indeed, when the woman enters the room he cannot even find enough of himself to be the Christ he knows he should be. And in this brave and shocking story of a Lord gone lousy with pain, Jesus snaps, breaching his integrity in a shameful, demeaning way . . .And Jesus said to her, ‘let the children first be fed, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.’

What did he just say? In its way, it was like the N-word, a racial slur used by men like him of people like her, insulting and vicious. It was, in the setting, as unwelcome and upsetting as the form sent out by the Broward County Schools this week which asked families to label themselves and their children as caucasians, hispanics, negroes. What?

Biblical scholars down the years have strained and struggled over the meaning behind Jesus’ uncharacteristic and unconscionable insult. They suggest he might have been testing the woman’s faith, or teasing her. And though Jews of Jesus’ day didn’t keep dogs as pets because they considered them unclean, commentaries would ask us to believe he called this woman ‘s dying child a puppy, as if Jesus were some metrosexual with a Prada bag, toting his teacup Pomeranian around the countryside, unable to tell the difference between a woman suffering with fear for the life of her child and a house pet.

The commentaries want us to swallow this story because they believe that responsibility for sustaining the mythic perfection of Jesus of Nazareth lies squarely on the shoulders of the church established in his name. But we know better. We know we are not responsible for the words or actions of Jesus, but only for our own words and actions.

We know that good people, Christ-ly people, even, can reach the breaking point of spiritual pain or long-suffering and make serious mistakes, wounding themelves and others. We know it could have happened to the man Jesus, because it happens to us.

And I think we need to know that even Jesus himself could break down and breach his own mission, his own values… and still remain the Christ of God; with a capacity to repent and be healed, forgiven, and restored to his life of peace, purpose and joy.

Because if he could, so can we.

Called out by the integrity and love of the Syrophoenician woman, Jesus responded, and the Christ within showed up. Restored to himself, Jesus found not just enough healing power to save the woman’s daughter… but more than enough to save himself, and to begin to heal the harsh divide between the woman’s people, and his own.

Jesus no longer needed a vacation, he did not even need to return home to his old work and his own people! Instead, filled with compassion and joy, he went farther and deeper than he imagined he could, broadening his ministry to include the Greek cities and the people in them, feeding four thousand Gentiles with the same generous magic that once before had fed five thousand of his own people. . . and rejoicing to learn that there was still enough left over to feed a thousand more.

After all, the story’s ending is the oldest and best of all: they lived happily ever after. The woman went home, and found her child in bed, and the demon gone. All of the demons, gone as simply as that: gone from the child, gone from the fears of the mother, gone from the sting of bitter words exchanged between enemies, gone from the tired soul of Jesus the Christ.

In the crucible of compassion fatigue, accepting his weakness, embracing pain as a pathway to peace, Jesus found his holy self, his Christ, and became wholly what God intended him to be—what God intends all of us to be: Christs without borders, light-bearers whose flame, always burning brightly, need never go out.

God, grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference; taking, as Jesus did, this poor world as it is, not as we would have it; accepting pain as a pathway to peace, so that we may be reasonably happy in this world and supremely happy in the next.

This is a hard saying, who can stomach it?

An Episcopal priest whose writing I enjoy wrote a story once about a class of first graders making their first communion. She described the beautiful white dresses and gloves, the boys in their blue blazers, the parents, proud and tearful as they guided their children to the altar. One by one, the celebrant went down the line of worshippers, placing bread in their cupped hands, tipping the chalice toward upturned, shining faces, murmuring, the body of Christ, broken for you. The blood of Christ… it was a hushed and holy moment, up until the point where one little girl, really listening, saw the cup of blood moving toward her lips and pushed it away in horror, saying Yuck! You keep it, I don’t want any blood!

And that’s what happens in this long, familiar, and mostly lovely discourse on Jesus as the Bread of Life in the sixth chapter of the gospel of John. The words about Jesus as the Bread of life are considered so central to the Christian faith that the lectionary invests four long weeks on these stories of the feeding of the 5000, Jesus walking on the water, and the nourishing metaphor of Jesus I am the bread of life– the eager followers drinking in each word.

But in the next instant, like a badly edited movie, the plot twists abruptly: the eager followers are baffled, offended: who does Jesus think he is? Is this not Jesus the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? The charismatic leader becomes obscure and difficult: no one can come to me unless drawn by the Father– not that anyone has seen the Father, except the One who is from God. And then, even the comforting metaphor of life-nourishing bread takes a horrifying, cannibalistic turn: those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me. Whoever eats me will live because of me. Now maybe it’s metaphor, and maybe it’s not; but whatever Jesus meant by it, surely he went too far. This is a hard saying, the disciples observe, plainly, flatly revolted—who can stomach it? And just like that, a story everyone thought everyone understood becomes something else altogether, and no one knows what to do. . . except, maybe, to quietly slip away.

We don’t know what to do with the unexpected and unwelcome graces of God. The affront of God’s justice. The unpredictability of God’s presence. We are those followers who now, out of poverty, have learned to live with more than enough. Who have, out of our need to understand and to know, have made everything the same. We are too long at the fair, too familiar with our faith, too dependent upon security, sufficiency, and the comfort of sameness… not only have we ceased to be surprised, we have ceased wanting to be surprised; indeed, we are bored.

It’s like those commercials and news snippets I keep seeing as we dance through a national health care or insurance reform debate. Blah, blah, blah-blah-blah… .insurance reform, universal health care…. WAIT FOR IT! Woman yelling from the back of the room, “YOU’RE TRYING TO RUIN OUR COUNTRY WITH SOCIALIZED MEDICINE! I WANT THINGS THE WAY THEY’VE ALWAYS BEEN! I WANT MY AMERICA BACK!” Cut to the news analysts… spontaneous or staged, blah-blah-blah…. Wait a minute, what were we talking about? What do we want? What do we really need?

If we are honest, we might admit that we would rather have the security of a god who is predictable than a god who is real. Having tasted the wonder bread of Jesus, we would like the disciples prefer to have this bread always rather than the flesh and blood Jesus, the living, dynamic, unpredictable presence of the divine. The ancestor stories that the disciples, the crowds and the Jews reference when they are asking Jesus to give them more, and more of the same, is the old and best story of the Hebrew slaves’ exodus from Egypt. It was a story that formed a people’s identity; indeed, it forms it still. It was a story about the generosity and the unpredictability of God. . . it is a story about the self-centeredness and predictability of God’s people. When the people were hungry, manna from heaven. Thirsty? Water from a rock. Tired of that same-old-same-old manna? (how soon we go from desperately grateful to tiresomely expectant) Quails fly by, meals on wings. We call, God delivers.

The community of the gospel of John was no different, and that is one of the things that is off about this story—trying to wake us up, it models the very flatness of a story told so often that no one is listening any more.

The characters in this story are flat, uni-dimensional. Where is Peter, Salome, Aquila, Thomas, blind Bartimaeus, individuals with problems, potential, and stories of their own? Here, we have stock characters, arrayed in a Greek chorus: The Disciples. The Jews. The Crowd. Everyone plays their dreary part, asking far too much, listening far too little, so that the living Jesus must resort to graphic and theologically radical language in order to awaken them to the fact that they are not telling the same bedtime story for the seventy-fifth time, they are newly, and dangerously, in the presence of the living, unpredictable, wild God.

Jesus is not a vending machine. God is not a 911 call, hello, what is the nature of your emergency? And you? You are not Simon Peter, King David, Sarah or Abraham or everyChristian. You are a unique soul, formed in the image of God, bearing the living and particular Christ presence in your own body, tailored to your own particular and beloved shape. What God needs to do for you is not what God did for your neighbor, or your ancestor. So faithfulness is not about believing God will do the same thing for you in any given situation that God did for you, your father, or our ancestors in faith a thousand times before, but rather, opening our minds, our hearts, and our hopes to a living relationship that will walk alongside us as we work and pray our way through whatever circumstance confronts us.

In away, it is about insurance, about growing up, losing the coverage we had and becoming self-insured. . .

This is not easy. I know this, not just because of my own life, but because I am privileged to walk alongside some of yours, and I listen as you feel your way through a change in circumstance, an illness, a divorce, a strike, a career change. God doesn’t always respond as we hoped or expected. . .the way God shows up to answer our urgent prayers can even be missed, if we are relying too much on an old way, or an older story.

You all know the story about the man whose boat was sinking and who prayed to God to deliver him… .

2 Samuel 11:1-15

Hearing this morning’s scripture, you might think you were reading a transcript of some reality tv show, a telenovela, perhaps, rather than listening for the word of God. There’s just nothing uplifting, holy, or, well, biblical about this tale of the sordid fall of Israel’s golden boy, King David, who used his power to serve his lust, who took what he wanted without pity, and who, in serving his own transitory need, shattered the lives of an innocent woman and her soldier husband, setting his own family’s fortunes on a downward spiral toward destruction.

Church folk read the bible to be inspired, not disgusted—we want to raise up our lives. We come to church for better, not for worse—and if any of our own personal histories bear the burden of some similar story of shame—well, that is not for church, but instead is a secret best kept hidden, even from ourselves.

I had a professor of pastoral counseling in seminary who made this fact abundantly clear while teaching us how to minister to parishioners in crisis. Before she brought into class some “real” people whose personal and familial problems were to be addressed by us in counseling, she would introduce their issues—adultery, alcoholism, financial misfeasance, abuse—and with a grimace of distaste on her face and a shake of her head would conclude this situation is as ugly as homemade sin. From which I learned that, at church and in the family of God, some folks’ troubles were just too nasty to talk about; too ugly to be redeemed.

But this morning, just for a few minutes, the bible—the bible—would ask us to believe that even homemade sin is not too ugly to be unveiled, too awful to examine, too far beyond redemption to be offered up to God and to God’s people. This morning, the bible offers us a rare opportunity to listen to one such story—a story as ugly as homemade sin—and to find in it, a word from God.

This is a story that, as scholar Walter Brueggemann puts it, reveals more than we want to know about David and more than we can bear to understand about ourselves. It is a story that cuts deep into the strange web of foolishness, fear, and fidelity that comprises the human map.1

This is a story about David—or maybe about any one of us, a story about what happens when a person experiences a failure of vocation, a loss of meaning, a breakdown of identity, a surge of ruthlessness or recklessness that, once indulged, changes the landscape of family, faith, and life forever. It is a story about a ball player who struggles with addiction, about the priest who fell in love, the neighbor whom desperation led to “borrow” money from his company’s coffers but who was caught before he could repay it. It is a story about a husband, a wife, a stranger whom you would never have suspected… it is a story about you, or about me.

In the spring of the year, when kings go forth to battle, David stayed home. His place was with his soldiers in the field, but his heart, lulled by security, had turned in boredom to matters of power, and of lust. How strange, that stories of human tragedy can be told so pitilessly, with such brevity and baldness. It happened. He saw a woman. He sent. He lay with her. She conceived. She sent and told him: “I am pregnant.” Told so coldly, what are we to believe? How are we to feel? Where are the explanations, the details, the mitigating circumstances? Where is the personal charm that will permit us to understand, to excuse, to embrace David and what he has done with compassion and grace? How are we to feel, when nothing and no one is spared in the telling of this old and ugly story?

Like David, our first reaction is to deny, to cover up, to hide. We aren’t that kind of person. He would never do anything like that. Maybe she’ll never find out. There must be some reasonable explanation. Maybe if I get busy, have a drink, get a lawyer, start over again somewhere else, strike a bargain, pretend a lot and lie a little, this mistake can be erased as if it never existed, and I can have my life back again, the way it was before.

We listen to David, and we watch him, trying to repair the shattered fragments of his life and Bathsheba’s, and sadness fills us. Calling the man he has betrayed in from the field of battle, David seeks for peace, yearns for it like a man dying of thirst in a desert of his own creation. Is it well with Joab? With the war? With you? With the people? Is everything okay? Uriah doesn’t know, but David does, that nothing is okay—not now, and perhaps not ever again—and no assurance of peace, offered in ignorance of the truth, can touch this pain David carries. For David alone knows what he is: he bears the pain of his fall from grace in secrecy and shame. He believe that the love of God cannot reach him there: and so believing, he despairs and compounds the wreckage he has made of his life by committing murder. The secret must be kept for David to survive; and so, Uriah must die—and with him, the last of the shining innocence of the shepherd boy who became king, and the last of that man’s hope and trust in the saving power of Love.

In short order, the story rushes to its unhappy conclusion. Uriah returns. Joab obeys. The soldier dies, and a messenger is sent with the news to David, who now must pay the additional cost of the hardening of his soul against his comrades, his people, his friends. People die, he shrugs, swallowing against the grief. It is the way of battle. Do not be troubled, he tells the messenger to tell Joab, and it is evident that it is himself he is trying to convince. And the story tells us: the thing was not evil in David’s eyes. And how could it be? For deadening the conscience to the soul’s cry of pain is the only way David can now survive in the script he is penning for his life.

Or is it?

Could it be… that there is something bigger at work in David and in Israel than power, and cynicism and fear? Something that will not abide a cover up that deadens the soul of a man and cripples the future of a family, a people, and a land. Something that will not let sleeping dogs lie; something that is standing for the possibility of truth when silence might have been enough to get by.

The narrator of this story knows what that Something is, and he names it: Now the thing was evil in the eyes of the Lord. “The thing” was good enough for the broken David; but it was not good enough for David’s God. And so God’s people found the courage to tell this story, and to tell it straight: as ugly and impossible as it was.

Where before in David’s life there were circumstances, explanations, justifications—just like in our own lives—where before, there were reasons to explain away the truth, to distance the knowing of self, to silence the voice of God; now, there is inexplicably a new Power at work.

A people willing to open their eyes and face the truth about the golden boy of Israel. A family willing to share the cost of David’s mistakes. A genuine possibility that a man might be loved, not despite, but in the midst of, his brokenness and his flaws. An astounding, ground-breaking, reckless new trust in truth—and in truth’s God—that calls the people to tell it like it is, let the chips fall where they may, and listen for a saving, a judging, a healing word from God.

Long ago at seminary, I learned how good God’s people are supposed to be, and how ugly it is when people of faith upon whom we rely and trust, fall prey to human flaws and fail us, and themselves. What I did not learn, in that polarizing professional training ground, was how much power is at work in the church that holds with equal strength both the reality of sin and brokenness and the reality of mercy and redemption. A few years into my work as a pastor, I saw the wonderful Robert Duvall film Tender Mercies, about the drunk and disgraced country singer who found redemption and a new beginning in the household of a struggling single mother, and I thought, that’s what church is supposed to be, a place of tender mercies where you can tell the truth about yourself, and hope and be helped to a new life.

This story of David’s, of ours, has guts. It asks us: does faith mean perfection, or does it mean trust, even in the midst of brokenness? It asks us: is fidelity about the appearance of goodness? Or about a willingness to persist and to begin again to live for the Good, even in the midst of shattering, ego-breaking failure and sin? Are there tender mercies at work in the lives of God’s children, even when they are broken, mercies that are shaped by the kindness of a friend, a neighbor; by the willingness to confess and forgive, even one’s own self? This story says, yes.

It tells us something very important about the nature of God and about the possibilities of a life sustained by God’s grace: that God works for good even in, or perhaps especially in, the deeply flawed and terrible circumstances of lives broken by sin and hidden in the Lie. The old hymn says it as well as anything else:

There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea

There’s a kindness in God’s justice which is more than liberty.

There is no place where earth’s sorrows are more felt than up in heaven.

There is no place where earth’s failings have such kindly judgment given.

1 Brueggemann, Walter, Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching; 1 and 2 Samuel, p. 272.