Great words from a great man.
Rev. Marlin Lavanhar, Senior Minister at All Souls Unitarian Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma is absolutely my favorite preacher in the world. His words on the situation in Syria are clear, direct, and enlightened. I was just telling my wife today that I need to add a third item to my “restore faith in humanity” checklist.
1. Watching Star Trek
2. Listening to U2
and the new addition:
3. Listening to Marlin Lavanhar preach
As many of you already know, in the years immediately following my graduation from seminary, I worked as a counselor at the Addictions Crisis Center, which is part of the Rescue Mission of Utica. This is a great program. They serve as the “first line of defense” that people come to when they’re beginning their recovery from dependence on drugs or alcohol. They offer food, shelter, medical care, treatment, and counseling to folks in the earliest stages of recovery. Some of them would even show up on our doorstep still under the influence of whatever substance they had been using. As one friend of mine put it, “Basically, [we] meet people on the worst day of their lives.”
One of the most interesting (and often frustrating) things about people in those first few days away from their substance of choice is their adamant (and sometimes violent) resistance to the treatment, which was usually their last, best hope for healing and recovery. They would kick, scream, and test every rule and boundary of our program. Their substance of choice had such a hold on them that they would fight the treatment process, even after they realized they had a problem and voluntarily checked themselves in to our facility.
Working with them for two years gave me a new appreciation for the meaning of the term possessed. My clients’ addictions, their compulsive, uncontrollable desire for drugs or alcohol had taken over their rational faculties so thoroughly that they perceived our attempts to heal them as an attack. The addiction owned them in a manner of speaking and led many of them to do all kinds of destructive things to themselves and others. Most people in our facility had sacrificed money, friends, jobs, houses, and relationships to appease the false gods of their addictions. There are many things worth sacrificing for in this world, but I think we can all agree that recreational substances are not among them.
A lot of people in the general public, people who don’t struggle with addictions, wonder why these folks can’t just stop what they’re doing and make better choices. What most people don’t understand is that it’s not a moral issue. Addiction is not a choice; it is a disease. The electro-chemical processes in the brain have literally been hot-wired and hijacked. And just like an airplane hijacked by terrorists: it’s not going where the pilot (the rational, moral part of the brain) wants it to go. They are not in control. They are possessed and they need help.
This, in a metaphorical sense, is what I see going on in today’s New Testament reading. There is no mention in the text of any addictive, mind-altering substances being used. All we know about the Gerasene man that Jesus encounters is that he “had a demon”.
In pre-modern times, all kinds of things were blamed on the activity of demons (e.g. seizures, mental illness, socially unacceptable behavior, bad luck, other religions, etc.). They didn’t have the kind of knowledge or diagnostic equipment we have today. For example, we now know that a person with schizophrenia doesn’t need an exorcism from demons, she needs anti-psychotic medication in order to make the voices in her head go away. That’s not to say that there isn’t some kind of spiritual element to people’s problems, but I think we have developed a more informed, nuanced, and holistic way of looking at things than our ancestors had.
When people come to me as a pastor, asking for exorcisms (and they do, believe it or not), my first question for them is always, “Have you seen your doctor?” I often end up making referrals, doing short-term pastoral care, praying with, and visiting these people in distress. I find that a combination of medication, counseling, and prayer tends to resolve the vast majority of cases where exorcism was initially requested.
I don’t tend to think of demons as beings or entities in their own right. The image of monsters with horns and bat-wings that take over your mind is the stuff of horror movies. But that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in the reality of the demonic. I believe I encountered a kind of demonic possession every day when I was a substance abuse counselor. The people I worked with were possessed by their compulsive need for a particular substance. The things they did as a result of that compulsion were truly evil, you might even say demonic: They lied, stole, neglected and abused children, some of them had even hurt or killed others. Those who found recovery from their addictions often had to own up to and make amends for the horrible things they had done under the influence.
And the amazing thing is that, in spite of all this harm to self and others, they continue to refuse to let go of their addiction. They cling to their substance of choice as if it were more precious than air. Many of them would refuse treatment and walk out of our program. The average recovering addict has to go through rehab four or five times before they finally get clean and sober for good. Only about one out of every ten clients finds recovery. The rest go back out, pick back up, and continue to use or drink, despite the consequences. That’s what I call possessed.
The Gerasene man in today’s gospel reading was similarly resistant to Jesus’ efforts to heal him. When Jesus commands the demonic spirits to leave the man alone, the man cries, “I beg you, do not torment me”. Torment him? Didn’t this guy realize that Jesus was trying to help him? It was the demons that were tormenting him! But then again, as we’ve already seen today: people sometimes prefer an old, familiar slavery to a new, unknown liberation. Getting over that hump is often half the battle of recovery.
The good news is that this doesn’t seem to present a problem for Jesus. He just keeps at it with this possessed man, this hopeless case, until he has sufficiently separated the person from the problem. That’s a key difference between Jesus and the people of the Gerasene region. They just tried to lock him up and forget about him, but Jesus went out to see and to save the man behind the madness. I think our task, as followers of Jesus in the present-day, is to do the same with those outcasts in our society, those people our culture of achievement has given up on.
Where God is concerned, there is no such thing as a hopeless case.
Now, it would be easy enough to leave things at that: the addict finds recovery, Jesus sweeps in and rescues the man from the demons, and everybody lives happily ever after. But life is more complicated than that.
It would be so easy for us to sit here in our (semi)comfortable pews on Sunday and say prayers for those poor addicts down in Utica, never once taking the time to look hard at our own lives. We tend to take notice of people addicted to drugs and alcohol because (A) those addictions are highly destructive and (B) they’re socially unacceptable. But there are many other kinds of addictions out there as well, many of which don’t involve recreational chemicals of any kind. In recent years, we’ve become more aware of behavioral addictions to things like sex, work, food, exercise, shopping, and gambling. Scientific studies have shown that our brains can’t tell the chemical difference between these behaviors and drugs. Either way, it’s a massive hit from a neurotransmitter chemical called dopamine that our brains get used to having and eventually come to depend on in order to feel normal. The best single book I’ve ever read on this topic is Addiction and Grace by Gerald May. I highly recommend reading it if you want to learn more about addiction from psychological, medical, and spiritual perspectives.
In addition to the aforementioned behaviors, I would go on to say that anything can be an addiction, depending on the place it holds in our lives. Even good and healthy things like family, relationships, church, religion, country, and school can be addictive. Whenever we let just one thing take over our whole field of consciousness for extended periods of time, we are in danger of becoming addicted or possessed in the way we’re using that language today. Spiritually speaking, we are committing the sin of idolatry: worshiping false gods, serving a part of reality at the expense of the whole, or even treating a part as if it were the whole. We can even be addicted to (possessed by) a certain way of thinking or way of doing things. This last one especially applies to groups of people as much as individuals.
I find it interesting that, in today’s gospel reading, the demons themselves ask Jesus to let them stay in the area. They ask to be sent into a herd of pigs that immediately goes berserk and destroys itself. After that, the people of the Gerasene community approach Jesus and ask him to leave. Why? Because, according to the text of Luke’s gospel, “they were seized with a great fear.”
Isn’t that interesting? When Jesus first tried to help the possessed man, the man cried out in terror, “I beg you, do not torment me”. He was afraid of the very person who had come to help him. Now, at the end of the story, that man is “clothed and in his right mind” while the rest of the so-called “normal” people in his community are suddenly terrified of Jesus the healer.
This is another aspect of this story that bears a striking and frankly eerie resemblance to my experience of working with people who have addictions. More often than not, so often in fact that it became a predictable pattern, my clients would return home after completing treatment to discover that their families no longer know how to relate to them. In the years while my clients were active in their addictions, their families adapted in order to learn how to function in a dysfunctional environment. They were used to operating under the assumption that one member of the family would always be drunk, high, or absent. This is what experts mean by the term co-dependency: one person in the family unit is chemically or behaviorally dependent while all the others are “dependent with” that person or “co-dependent”. When the dependent person comes home clean and sober, ready to rejoin the family system, the family suddenly has to rethink their old patterns for relating to each other and learn new ones. This process is difficult and scary because they think they have to maintain the old balance and fulfill their old roles in the dysfunctional family system in order to survive. It’s not at all uncommon for families to go through stress or even break up when someone is in the early stages of recovery.
The solution is for family members to participate actively in their own recovery process alongside their loved one who is getting clean and sober. Addiction is a family problem that requires a family solution. That’s why support groups like Al-Anon exist: to help the co-dependents of alcoholic people with their own recovery
And the same goes for the rest of us in the broader community. Participating in the work of building God’s kingdom on earth is not just about helping those poor, unfortunate souls who struggle with addiction. It’s about facing our own addictions and co-dependencies (even the socially acceptable ones) so that Jesus can liberate us from our own demons and bring healing and wholeness to the entire community.
If we are open to that process taking place in us, if we can trust that Christ is here to help us and not to harm us (even when his healing presence feels scary and unfamiliar), then we can say that we are walking the path of faith toward the promised land of God’s kingdom of heaven on earth.
When she walked into the party, they were sizing her up like a piece of meat. She was that girl: the one with a reputation.
They had all kinds of ideas about her. Who knows if any of the rumors were actually true? It didn’t matter. Somebody had to occupy the bottom rung of the social ladder and it might as well be her.
Those religious folks, the upstanding citizens, made a good show of cutting her down in public. They said people like her were the problem with society these days: no morals and values, no respect for the law.
They said this world would be a better place without people like her. But secretly, she knew: they needed people like her to exist. Without the scumbags and lowlifes, who would they have to look down upon? Their self-righteousness was built on appearances and comparisons. They only seemed high and holy next to people like her because they did a better job of hiding their faults. They put on a fancier show, that was all.
The problem was that everyone else in town accepted the reality of their show. Heck, she almost accepted it herself. That’s the problem with labels: when you hear them enough, you eventually start to believe them yourself.
Maybe I am worthless, she thought. Maybe no one will ever love me. Maybe this world would be better off without me in it.
That’s a pretty thick mental fog to get lost in. It can lead to some pretty severe and irreversible rash decisions. For all we know, she might have been on the verge of one such decision herself.
But then she met Jesus.
No, I don’t mean to say that she found religion, saw the light, or got born again. That’s too easy. Too cut and dry. Besides, those folks in the “upright citizens’ brigade” love that stuff. They eat it up like candy: the wayward sinner reforms her ways and comes back home where she belongs. Classic redemption story. Good propaganda. It reinforces their assumptions about the world and makes them look like loving and gracious heroes to welcome someone so despicable as her.
But this Jesus guy was different.
They didn’t seem to like him very much either. At first, he seemed like one of them: he was a religious teacher, people called him Rabbi, and he had a lot to say about God. He knew the Bible pretty well too. He was always quoting from it, but every time he did, all the religious folks in the crowd would get real red in the face and start clenching their jaws, like he had just said something to annoy them. Didn’t they love that stuff? Wasn’t the Bible kind of their “thing” after all? Then why would they get so mad when Jesus recited parts of it in their presence? I guess they didn’t like what he had to say about it.
Maybe he was making them uncomfortable. After all, he was a rabbi, but he didn’t act like other rabbis. For one thing, he hardly ever went to synagogue. Most of the time, he was hanging out in the streets with folks who wouldn’t be caught dead in a synagogue on the Sabbath… people like her.
Nobody knows how it happened. They just seemed to come from everywhere. Jesus said it was God drawing them, but that didn’t even make any sense. What would God have to do with people like them? Still, something inside of her made her stick around on that first day. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was. That same feeling kept her coming back around for as long as he was in town.
The things he had to say made sense to her. He certainly knew the Bible but he didn’t throw it in her face. He knew all about the Temple and its elaborate rituals, but he didn’t seem to care much about it. He kept saying the day would come when “not one stone would be left on top of another” in that place. He seemed pretty irreligious for a religious teacher.
He said, “The place where God lives is within you and around you.” He spoke from the heart and didn’t bother with all of that fancy philosophy and theology that the other rabbis used. When people asked Jesus about God, he usually pointed to whatever happened to be in his line of sight at the time:
“Do you see that woman baking bread? That’s what God is like. Do you see those crops growing in that field over there? God is like that. Do you see that farmer sowing seed, that woman sweeping out her house, or those merchants in the market? God is like all of those.”
He even saw signs of God’s presence in the lilies of the field and the sparrows of the air. That didn’t sound like any rabbi she had ever heard before. What’s even weirder is that he didn’t seem to be bothered by all the freaks and misfits who kept gravitating toward him. In fact, whenever zealous devotees came up to pledge their allegiance to him, Jesus kept turning them back to those very same freaks and misfits. “These people are my family,” he would say, “Whatever you do for them, you do for me.”
Family? Did he mean her? Nobody had ever talked to her like that before. People called her a lot of things, but never “family.” She hadn’t even spoken to her own family in years…
Why would anyone want her of all people in his family?
All the same, she kept coming back, drawn by that inexplicable something. Who knows? Maybe Jesus was right and it really was God that was drawing her?
She loved listening to him. She loved the way he stuck it to those religious hypocrites, using their own Bibles against them. She loved his stories and the way he looked at the world: finding God everywhere in it. But most of all, she loved the way he looked at her.
Men often looked at her, but not like that. They usually looked at her with some perverted combination of disgust and desire. Regardless of whether or not the rumors about her were true (some were and some weren’t), they believed them all and treated her accordingly. But Jesus called her family. He saw what she was capable of, not just what she was (or what she represented to everyone else). When he taught, his eyes would sometimes momentarily lock with hers, as if he was speaking directly to her. She would swell with pride and sit up a little straighter, imagining that he really was talking to her.
He wasn’t of course. She was just a woman, and a bad one at that. Women weren’t allowed to study under rabbis in that day. Even socially respectable women would only be allowed to sit in and listen to his lectures. But then why did he keep looking at her? Why did his words make so much sense? She was getting it! Could it be possible that maybe (just maybe) he really was speaking to her? I don’t know… but she kept coming back.
And something was happening inside of her. She was looking at the world in a whole new way. It was as if she had been blind all along and was really starting to see things clearly for the first time ever. It was almost as if she had been some lame beggar by the roadside and Jesus was taking her hand, lifting her up onto her own two feet, and teaching her how to walk her own path. For the first time in a long time, she felt like a person again, a real human being. It felt like those cold, numb, dead spaces inside of her were coming alive again when she was around Jesus. Who knew that was even possible?
Earlier that afternoon, she was hanging around town as usual and she heard some folks talking. They said Jesus would be moving on tomorrow, headed to another town. She felt her stomach jump with fright. Leaving? He was leaving? To where? Would he be back? Was this the last chance she would ever have to see him and feel that amazing feeling?
She had lost track of time those last few days. They seemed like an eternity to her. She was so caught up in everything he was saying, everything that was going on, it didn’t occur to her that Jesus wouldn’t be staying there forever. What was she supposed to do?
Something inside her heart told her she should do something, but she didn’t know what. Shouldn’t there be some kind of religious ritual for thanking or blessing a rabbi who was leaving? It seemed like there should be. After all, those religious folks had prayers, and blessings, and rituals for just about every other occasion, why not this one? But what would it be? She wished there was someone she could ask, but certainly no other rabbi would ever give her the time of day, much less let her ask a question. Besides, most of those blessings and rituals could only be performed by men. She would only get to sit out and watch, if she was lucky.
But that didn’t sit right with her. That didn’t do justice to the kind of person Jesus was. She might not know the correct thing to do, but she had to do something. It was getting late. The sun was almost down. There wasn’t time to plan anything elaborate. Besides, she heard that Jesus already had plans. He was invited to dinner at some big shot Pharisee’s house. They would have all kinds of fancy food and entertainment there. Nothing she could do would measure up to that. They would never even let her in the door, anyway. It was a hopeless cause… unless…
Nah, that’s too crazy… it would never work… but then again…
She had this jar. It had been with her a long time. Nobody knows how she got it. It was the only thing she had that was worth anything. It was filled with a very rare and expensive perfume, worth about as much as a full year’s salary for a working man. Once upon a time, that jar of perfume was worth more than her life, but not anymore. Jesus had showed her that she was worth so much more than that. The dignity she had discovered through him made that jar seem cheap and worthless by comparison.
It was right then that she knew what she had to do. Maybe she didn’t know the proper ritual for blessing a rabbi, but she would make one up to demonstrate to Jesus and everyone else what it was that he meant to her.
She went home, grabbed that jar, and made a bee-line for the house where Jesus was having dinner. Her heart was pounding and her adrenaline was pumping as she got closer. Right up to the front door she walked. And right through. The bouncer happened to look the other way for a second and so he didn’t notice her until she was already inside. He shouted and tried to grab her, but it was too late. She had already made it to the place where Jesus was sitting: reclining actually, with his feet stretched out behind him.
She looked down at those feet. Just like everyone else’s, they were disgusting. Without paved roads or organized sanitation, city streets in the ancient world were cesspools of filth. A person’s feet would get caked with mud and excrement just from walking around. Nobody liked to touch feet or wash them. It was the worst job, even for a slave. Feet were gross.
The woman looked down at Jesus’ feet. Then she looked back at the jar in her hand. After pausing for a second, she broke the jar open and dumped its precious contents onto Jesus’ feet. The pungent smell of lavender filled the room. She had never opened the jar before. She always wondered what its contents might smell like. Now she knew. It was beautiful. It reminded her of the way that Jesus made her feel inside. Through him, she had come to be aware of her own inner beauty for the first time ever. She was like that jar of perfume: broken open, poured out, precious, and beautiful.
As the weight of this truth hit home for her, she began to cry for joy. Her tears dripped down off her cheeks, chin, and nose and onto Jesus’ feet. Looking down, she realized the tears mixed with the jar’s contents were washing away the layer of filth left from the long, hard road. She could see his beautiful, soft, brown skin showing through. Bending down even further, she took each foot in her hands, undid her long, dark hair, and used it like a towel to wipe away those last remnants of slime, continuing to weep as she did it. This felt right. It was all she had: the only thing she could think of to do.
The host of the party was, predictably, indignant. He pulled out all those nasty names and labels that people called her. But somehow, those names didn’t phase her as she ran her fingers over Jesus’ smooth, clean, sweet-smelling feet. In that moment, she was prepared to let him talk and say whatever he wanted, but Jesus wasn’t. Jesus interrupted the Pharisee’s tirade with a single word: Simon. That was his name, the Pharisee that is. Jesus called him by name, not by his status or position. “Simon,” he said, “I have something to say to you.”
You better believe that shut him up quick. Jesus then told another story about debts being forgiven. “Do you see this woman?” Obviously, Simon didn’t. All Simon saw was another sinner, another woman who didn’t know her place, another scumbag lowlife. Simon didn’t really see her but Jesus saw her, so he asked Simon, “Do you see this woman? I tell you, her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love.” Did she just hear him right? Did he just say forgiven?
Seeing the shock and confusion on her face, he said it again just to drive the point home. He spoke her name… she didn’t even realize that he knew her name, but he called her by it. She looked up and their eyes met again. He repeated, “Your sins are forgiven.”
Forgiven. She never thought she would hear that word spoken to her, but somehow she knew he was right. That was what she had been feeling all along. Forgiven. Restored. The shame and stigma washed away.
And Jesus wasn’t just making it happen for the first time either. He was announcing a reality that had already come true. She was already loved, forgiven, and clean. Jesus’ words were only sealing the deal and making it real to her. She was a person with a name and dignity, no matter how hard society might try to take that away from her.
Almost as soon as Jesus had said this, the room erupted into theological debate over who has the authority to announce such forgiveness. The religious machinery was hard at work, already pumping out Bible verses and quoting rabbinical commentaries on the matter.
Jesus just rolled his eyes, shook his head, and looked back at her smiling. And then, leaning down to whisper in her ear while the debate raged on around them, Jesus spoke her name again and said, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”
This woman, whose name has been lost to history but was known to Jesus, was not the only one who experienced such wholeness at the feet of Jesus. There were other women among his disciples as well. We read about some of them this morning: Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Susanna. They were an integral part of his ministry, contributing a vital part. There were men too, of course.
And the amazing thing is that all of them together… all of us… from first century Palestine to twenty-first century New York, are still hearing in our hearts and proclaiming with our lives that same message of forgiveness that continues to resound through the halls of history:
“I love you, God loves you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Be blessed and be a blessing!
This past week, it was my honor to offer the blessing at the Utica Observer-Dispatch’s Teen All-Stars Breakfast. Distinguished high school seniors from our area were awarded for their good deeds, accomplishments, and acts of service to the community. I was invited to participate in this event by Dave Dudajek, who I know through his daughter, Jaime Burgdoff (one of our congregants here in Boonville).
It was amazing to hear about these local teenagers and everything they’ve managed to do in high school. My memories of high school mostly involve staying up late, watching B movies, and driving around town with friends when we had nothing better to do. But these folks are already making an impact on their world in the name of what they believe is right.
At this event, Donna Donovan (president and publisher of the OD) gave an address where she talked about these students’ upcoming freshman year at college. They would be challenged and inspired to grow in new directions and their horizons would be expanded far beyond what they could possibly imagine at this point. She also told them that this would only be first of several “freshman years” they would experience throughout the rest of their lives. Each new experience, journey, accomplishment, and challenge will lead them into yet another experience of being a wide-eyed and wet-behind-the-ears “freshman” who is just now figuring out who they are and what life is all about.
In Zen Buddhism, this is called “Beginner’s Mind”. A person has Beginner’s Mind when she or he is absolutely open to each new moment, each new experience in life. All of life, the whole universe even, becomes a teacher to a person who has Beginner’s Mind. Each and every moment is the moment when Enlightenment might happen.
I think this is what Jesus meant when he used the word “repent”. We associate that term with guilt and sorrow for one’s sins, but in the original Greek the word “repent” is metanoia (“change the way you think”). When he says “Repent”, Jesus is inviting us to think differently and look at the world through a different set of eyes, open to what the Spirit of God might be saying and doing in any particular moment. The kind of awareness and openness that metanoia entails corresponds quite closely with the Zen concept of Beginner’s Mind.
In today’s reading from the gospel of Luke, we can see Jesus issuing just such a call to repentance (metanoia, Beginner’s Mind) even though he never actually uses that particular term.
The story opens with a rare and unlikely character: a Roman Centurion. He was a soldier in a hostile, occupying army. Imagine that, instead of first century Judea, this story was taking place in Paris, France in 1941. In that setting, this Roman Centurion would have been a Nazi Commander talking to a local priest. The hostilities between nations would have created a barrier between these people that was almost impossible to overcome. After that, there are also the barriers of race and religion. These invading European pagans would have been offensive in the extreme to Jewish inhabitants of Judea. The people of Judea, in turn, would have seemed backward and barbaric to the Roman Centurion, who was trained to think of himself as a great hero of the Empire: making the world safe for Roman order and peace. There is no reason on earth why this Roman Centurion and these religious Jews should have any amicable contact whatsoever.
However, something seems to have already happened before Jesus ever set foot on the scene. We learn that there is a private relationship between this Centurion and the Jews. Seemingly insurmountable obstacles and prejudices had already been conquered. The Centurion had become a benefactor of the Jewish people, even laying down the money to sponsor the building of their synagogue. The Jewish leaders, in turn, had come to respect this one Centurion in spite of his being a Roman soldier.
The Jewish leaders probably thought of themselves as quite liberal and progressive for having made such a stretch in their worldview to include him. When Jesus was passing through and the Centurion sent a request to him through the leaders, they took advantage of the opportunity to highlight what a good relationship had developed. As Jesus was hearing the request, the leaders interjected, “He is worthy of having you do this for him, for he loves our people, and it is he who built our synagogue for us.”
What a lovely moment of intercultural understanding and the power of respect to overcome differences in even the most hostile circumstances! Too bad Jesus came along and felt the need to ruin it.
Jesus, you see, has this strange knack for cutting to the heart of a matter, turning things around, and getting you to see the world from an upside-down, inside-out perspective. In this case, he does just that by answering the religious leaders’ inclusive magnanimity with a snide remark: “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.”
Did you get that? Jesus said, “not even in Israel”. Who are the Israelites? They are! Jesus is saying that this pagan foreigner actually has more faith than the religious leaders of his own people! What would that be like in today’s terms? Imagine if the President of the United States pinned the Congressional Medal of Honor on an Al Qaeda terrorist, saying that this soldier represented the very best in America. People would be outraged! They would take to the streets in protest! They would call for the President to be impeached and tried for treason! Well, that’s the same level of outrage that the Jewish elders would have felt when Jesus said that a Roman Centurion had more faith than any of them. How dare he?! Just who does this Jesus guy think he is, anyway?!
Well, here’s what Jesus is doing in this situation: he’s creating an opportunity for his compatriots to adopt a Beginner’s Mind. He’s dropping a truth bomb on them so huge that it will hopefully shock them out of their preconceived notions about reality. If they can stay with him in this moment and be open to what he is saying, they’ll find themselves looking at the world in a whole new way.
Up until now, they’ve had a very ego-centric view of themselves and their role as “God’s chosen people.” To them, being “chosen” meant that they were endowed with a certain kind of special status that made them inherently superior to every other race, culture, and religion on the planet. So, from their perspective, they really were being quite kind and generous in their endorsement of this Centurion as “worthy” to receive the benefits of Jesus’ healing ministry.
But Jesus saw right through their generosity and exposed it for what it really was: Arrogance. Implicit in their charitable endorsement of the Centurion was the presumption that they themselves occupied the center stage in God’s unfolding drama in the world. Sure, they were presenting a kinder, gentler form of religion in that moment, but it was still a very self-centered vision (no matter how open or welcoming it might appear to be).
In reality, it’s not up to them to decide who is worthy or unworthy. In reality, being “God’s chosen people” has less to do with status and more to do with being part of what God is doing in the world. In reality, God’s work in the world extends far beyond the borders of any one nation, religion, race, or culture.
By highlighting the superior faith of the Roman Centurion, Jesus is drawing our attention to that reality. Jesus is inviting us to repent in that metanoia sense of the term, to think outside the box, to cultivate a Beginner’s Mind, an open heart, and an expanded consciousness. Like Donna Donovan said to the youth at the Teen All Stars Breakfast, it’s about engaging in a lifelong series of “freshman years” that challenge us and invite us to an ever greater sense of openness to life’s opportunities.
Here in the church, even when we’re being quite open, accepting, and progressive, it’s still quite easy to fall back into that ego-centric sense of superiority about being “God’s chosen people”. It’s easy to think that it’s all about us and our church. What Jesus wants to remind us of today is that it isn’t. We are part of what God is doing in the world. God’s mission includes us, but it’s also bigger than us, and it’s certainly not about us.
In order to participate in God’s larger mission, we have to move beyond the seductive idea of being a welcoming or even a growing church. We have to look for a faith that’s greater than our own and ask ourselves, “What is God doing in the world at large and how can we be a part of it?” And then our next task is to commit all of our resources to pursuing those ends, even if it costs us our very lives.
Where do you see God at work in the world at large? Who are the “Roman Centurions” in your life, outsiders whose faith and participation in God’s mission might go unrecognized by established religious authorities? How is God calling you to partner with these religious outsiders and participate in God’s larger mission?
These are the questions we need to be asking ourselves as a church and as individual Christians. This is the mentality, the Beginner’s Mind, that we need to cultivate day by day so that we can be more open to what God is doing and more faithful followers of Jesus, whose great big love honors and embraces the faith of all people: Israelites, Centurions, and even Presbyterians.
I hear a lot of folks talking lately about how the world isn’t what it used to be. They’re worried about the decline of human society, the decay of public morals and values, and the emptying of mainline Protestant churches. For many of these folks, these three series of events are related. They say, “People just aren’t coming to church anymore, so society is going to pieces.”
A lot of people wonder why this is the case. There are a lot of theories. Some say it’s because of the cultural changes that happened during the 60s. Some say that our country’s tolerance of religious diversity has left people in a state of moral and spiritual confusion. Others say that our society’s addiction to busy-ness and constant entertainment has distracted people to the point where they just don’t even have time to think about church anymore.
Personally, I think some of these theories have valid points. And I think the whole truth about the matter is probably bigger and more complex than any single theory can fully explain. But there’s one theory that stands out to me more than the rest, if only because it’s the one I hear most often from people who don’t come to church. And here it is (the number one reason most people give for not coming to church): “It’s hypocrisy of Christians who claim to believe that God is love but do not extend that love to other people.”
Isn’t that interesting? When you actually go and ask people why they don’t come to church, they tell you: it’s not because of diversity, and it’s not because they’re too busy, and it’s not because of the 60s. It’s because of Christians. The author Brennan Manning once said, “The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, and then walk out the door and deny him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.”
As Christians, it seems that we don’t take our theology seriously enough. We think we can love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength without loving our neighbors as ourselves, but Jesus calls FOUL on that play. He says you can’t have one without the other. If you try to separate them, you end up with something other than the God revealed in Jesus.
Central to our Christian faith is the belief that God is love. Did you get that? God is love. Most people breeze right by it without thinking and end up with the wrong idea about who God is and how God works in the world. What they tend to hear is “God is loving” (i.e. “God is basically a nice person”). In other words, they think that the Old Man in the Sky (who made the world and controls everything that happens) is a nice guy. But that’s not what the text says. The text is taken from 1 John 4:16 and it says, “God is love.”
There’s a big difference between being loving and being love. God is love itself. God can be found in the dynamic interchange of energy between people who care about each other: family, friends, lovers, even enemies. Wherever there is love, there is God. In fact the full text of 1 John 4:16 reads, “God is love and those who abide in love, abide in God, and God abides in them.” The Creator of the universe is not separate from it. God is not “out there,” floating on a cloud or in some alternate dimension. No, God is right here. As the apostle Paul says in Acts 17, “In [God] we live, and move, and have our being.” God is within us and all around us, wherever love is found. God is love. God is a relationship.
Our ancestors in the early Christian church came up with an interesting way of expressing this truth. They left us with a kind of puzzle that could never be solved. And they called it the Trinity. According to the doctrine of the Trinity, we Christians believe in only one God who eternally exists as three persons: traditionally called Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God is both three and one, one and three. Each person in the God-head is co-equal and co-eternal with the others. There is no hierarchy or pecking order among them.
The doctrine of the Trinity has always been controversial. In ancient times, Jews and Muslims accused Christians of being polytheists. In more recent years, people have identified the sexism inherent in using exclusively male terms to describe the Father and the Son. In any age, the Trinity comes across as confusing. Many have tried to solve the puzzle, but all have failed. So, this morning, I won’t even try to offer an answer to its question. We’re going to let the mystery stand and focus instead on the implications of that mystery for our lives as Christians.
And just what are those implications? Well, according to the mystery of the Trinity, our one God exists in a state of relationship between three persons. In other words, God is a relationship. God exists, not as an individual entity, but as the dynamic exchange of perfect love between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Because of this, it suddenly makes sense to say that “God is love.” God is love because God is a relationship. Wherever love and compassion are established on earth, God is present. “God is love and those who abide in love, abide in God, and God abides in them.” That is the practical application of the theological doctrine of the Trinity. That is where we begin to live what we believe and show ourselves to be either followers of Jesus or just another group of hypocrites.
The only way to faithfully testify to the presence of the Triune God in the world is through acts of love, not supposedly infallible announcements of dogma. If God is a relationship, then we usher and invite people into greater spiritual awareness by being in relationship with them, regardless of whether or not they ever darken the door of our church. Moreover, if God is a relationship, then we come close to God, not through dogma and rituals, but by intentionally engaging in relationships with the people and planet around us.
Jesus spoke about this very clearly in Matthew 25 when he said, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” Offering food to the hungry, clothes to the naked, shelter to the homeless, friendship to the lonely, and justice to the oppressed are not simply good deeds that improve the reputation of the church in the community, they are our best way to participate in relationship with the Triune God. God is a relationship, so relationships are the places where God is most fully known and experienced.
There is no one I can think of in the last one hundred years who lived this Trinitarian theology more fully than Dorothy Day, a Catholic activist who opened homeless shelters and soup kitchens for the unemployed workers of New York City during the Great Depression. So remarkable was this woman, she was not content to simply found and fund a charitable agency for the poor, she moved into the shelter and ate the donated food with her clients, who she simply regarded as friends. In them, Dorothy Day was seeking and serving the Triune God.
She wrote in 1937:
Every morning about four hundred men come to Mott Street to be fed. The radio is cheerful, the smell of coffee is a good smell, the air of the morning is fresh and not too cold, but my heart bleeds as I pass the lines of men in front of the store which is our headquarters. The place is packed–not another man can get in–so they have to form in line. Always we have hated lines and now the breakfast which we serve, of cottage cheese and rye bread and coffee has brought about a line…
The [Pope] says that the masses are lost to the Church. We must reach them, we must speak to them and bring them to the love of God. The disciples didn’t know our Lord on that weary walk to Emmaus until He sat down and ate with them. ‘They knew Him in the breaking of bread.’ And how many loaves of bread are we breaking with our hungry fellows these days–‘ 3,500 or so this last month. Help us to do this work, help us to know each other in the breaking of bread! In knowing each other, in knowing the least of His children, we are knowing Him.
This morning, I want to urge you toward similar action in your own life. I invite you to participate in the life of the Trinity, to get caught up in the infinite whirlwind of perfect love that flows between the persons. In that Great Love, incarnated in the myriad little loves that surround us every day, may you find God: not the monolithic “Old Man in the Sky” but the dynamic energy of love that pulses through all creation. And, through you, may others come to believe in the God who is love. May they find that God here in our church as they enter into relationship with a community of Christians who really do live as if they believed that “God is love, and all who abide in love, abide in God, and God abides in them.” May it be so.
Click here to listen to this sermon at fpcboonville.org
They say growing up is hard to do. And I think they’re right. Because growing up involves change and kids generally like to have a regular, predictable routine. I remember one time when life interrupted my routine and I had to adjust to a new way of doing things. It happened at the beginning of fifth grade. I was having a hard time adjusting to my new classroom, my new teacher, and more challenging homework assignments.
When I finally had all I thought I could handle, I made an appointment to see the school guidance counselor, Mr. Arnold. I walked into his office with my mind made up. I had a plan. I thought I already knew the solution to my problem, so I told him: “Mr. Arnold, this fifth grade stuff is too hard. I don’t like my teacher, I can’t keep up with the material, and I’m just not happy here. I’m obviously not ready for this. I think I just need to back to fourth grade.”
Well, you can imagine what Mr. Arnold’s response was. When he finally stopped laughing, he told me in no uncertain terms that returning to the fourth grade was not an option. Then he introduced me to a new word, one that I’ve carried with me ever since. To be honest, I think he made it up, but it describes so well what I was doing by asking to go back to fourth grade. Mr. Arnold’s word was awfulizing. He said, “You’re awfulizing this situation, and no, you can’t go back to the fourth grade.” And then he explained what he meant by that: my ten-year-old self was choosing to see only the negative parts of fifth grade and blowing them out of all rational proportion until I convinced myself that the only solution was to go backwards and stay in my old comfort zone. By awfulizing the situation, I was basically just giving in to despair and giving up on life. I was refusing to trust that life had given me enough resilience and adaptability to rise up and meet this new challenge.
Despair can be a powerful sedative. Awfulizing, while cathartic, is an addictive anesthetic that keeps us from feeling our growing pains. The upside is that it numbs our pain, but the downside is that it stunts our growth. Evolution only happens through struggle. Life has to be pushed past its previously known limits in order to adapt to new environments.
This is never easy. When it happens in the biosphere, there is always struggle and the imminent risk of failure and death. When it happens in the struggle for social justice, people stand up against powerful and entrenched institutions, like oppressive regimes, unjust laws, multinational corporations, and long-held beliefs, prejudices, and assumptions. Change only happens slowly and with great effort. Activist movements often struggle for generations before they reap a harvest from their labors. They endure persecution, ostracism, imprisonment, and death. Many lose hope and give up the fight along the way, but those who persevere become the catalysts for our social and spiritual evolution. For example, who could have guessed on the night of the Stonewall riots that, within a generation, several countries, the president of the United States, multiple states, and even a few religious institutions would recognize the right to marriage equality?
Change happens slowly, but it does indeed happen. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said, “The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Not many know this, but Dr. King was actually adapting the words of the famous 19th century Unitarian minister Theodore Parker. Parker said, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways… But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”
These words have been a source of comfort and hope to many in the struggle for justice. But the question arises, How do we know? How can one be so sure that this universe is arranged in such a way that we can be sure that right will win out in the end? Well, the short answer is that we don’t. Philosophers are quick to point out the naturalistic fallacy, a rule (if you will) of critical thinking which states that one cannot derive an Ought from an Is. In other words, you cannot logically draw a definitive conclusion about the way things should be based on the way things are. Take, for example, the following popular label on food and drug products: Contains All Natural Ingredients. We consumers are supposed to look at that and think that, because the ingredients are all natural, they must therefore be good for you. But we know that’s not true. You want to know what else is natural? Arsenic, Plutonium, and Hydrochloric Acid. These things contain all natural ingredients as well, but I wouldn’t want to put any of them inside my body! Just because something is natural doesn’t necessarily make it good.
So, how then can Rev. Parker and Dr. King say that the arc of the universe “bends toward justice”?
Well, I think we can start by looking at the facts. There are certain things we know about the universe that we would almost certainly label as good. How about the fact that we are here? We exist. Most would accept that fact as both true and good. How then did this favorable state of affairs come about?
Let me tell you a story: it takes place on a planet where a race of life forms has learned how to extract a vital resource from its environment. The downside is that the extraction process gives off a toxic gas that poisons the atmosphere. These life forms, with wanton disregard for anything other than their own immediate needs, willingly pollute the atmosphere of their planet for generation after generation until the air is saturated with poison. Yet, even then they continued their pollution. They kept going until the vast majority of life on their planet had been eradicated.
This sounds like a sad beginning to a dystopian science fiction story, doesn’t it? But it’s not. There’s a lot more science than fiction in this story because it happened right here on our planet about 2.4 billion years ago in what scientists call the Great Oxygenation Event (GOE). In the GOE, anaerobic cyanobacteria figured out how to extract hydrogen from water molecules. The poisonous air pollution that resulted from this process was a toxic gas known as oxygen. We don’t think of oxygen as pollution nowadays because we need it to live and breathe, but there was a time when it caused our planet’s first pollution crisis. The fact that we are here now, breathing oxygen, is a testament to life’s amazing capacity to endure and adapt.
They say, “One person’s trash is another person’s treasure.” You could say that’s certainly true in our case, where we now depend on oxygen for our very survival. We could say that one era’s pollution is another era’s air!
Life is amazing, isn’t it? The universe has taken almost 14 billion years to produce the people sitting in this room right now. You and I are sitting here as the end-result of billions of years of evolutionary success. Of course, we can’t say that it was all good, but I think most of us would agree that something must have gone right along the way! We’ve gone from single-celled organisms to fish, to dinosaurs, to mammals, to primates, to humans. We are the heirs of a vast evolutionary inheritance passed down from generations of ancestors leading all the way back to the stars themselves, in whose furnaces the atoms of our bodies were forged.
We’ve come so far, across eons and light years, to sit together in this room today. That’s quite a pilgrimage! We’ve overcome so much strain and adversity. The odds were (exponentially) against us ever getting here in the first place, but we beat the odds. We are here. We have overcome. In the words of Dr. King, we have hewn “out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope,” a precious jewel set into the ring of our being. Our very existence on this planet is a testimony to hope.
Other ancestors have testified to this hope as well. I’m thinking primarily of our predecessors in the liberal religious tradition: the Universalists. They were the great prophets of hope. They were the first to jettison doctrines of hellfire and damnation from their religion. They refused to give up on anyone because they believed there is hope for all. They taught that there is a place for everyone in this world and that all things will eventually come together for good. Rev. John Murray, one of the founders of Universalism in America, once said, “You may possess only a small light, but uncover it, let it shine, use it in order to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of men [and women]. Give them not Hell, but hope and courage.”
Liberal Universalist faith was founded on hope. We are gathered here this morning as heirs of both the evolutionary and the Universalist legacies of hope. We have more reason than most to draw strength and courage from this faith.
Sure, we can’t guarantee that any particular struggle for liberty or justice will immediately end in our favor. No one can promise that. But it seems, based on our scientific and religious history, that life itself can be trusted. Life endures. Life adapts. Life overcomes. This tendency seems to be woven into the fabric of the evolutionary process itself. To put it in human terms, using symbolic language:
When we stand on the side of love, the universe stands with us.
“The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
This assertion, far from being a justification for fatalism and inaction, has the capacity to fill us with hope, strength, and courage. When Desmond Tutu’s church in South Africa was once invaded and surrounded by a SWAT team during Sunday services, he stopped his sermon, calmly looked around, smiled, and said, “Since you have already lost, I would like to invite you to come and join the winning side.” At this, the congregation erupted with joy and began dancing… right out into the street where more soldiers were waiting, weapons at the ready. Not knowing what else to do, they stepped aside and let the dancers pass by unharmed.
Desmond Tutu’s faith that equality and justice would win out over evil in the end was the source of his amazing strength to keep going when the cause itself seemed hopeless. His faith proved stronger and more enduring than the powers of Apartheid. The strength of life itself flowed up and out through his heart, mind, and body as he committed his whole self to the evolution of the human spirit and society.
My hope this morning is that you and I might choose to trust life and embrace the faith of Desmond Tutu, Martin Luther King, and Theodore Parker. May we come to know and feel the long, gentle arc of the universe, bending inexorably toward justice. May we draw strength from this hope and rise again to meet the challenges of injustice, trusting that, no matter what happens, life will overcome.
May it be so.
Be blessed and be a blessing.
Last week, Bruce Reyes-Chow, Moderator of my denomination’s 218th General Assembly, announced that his friend, Landon Whitsitt, would be publishing a free eBook of compiled prayers and sermons based on the recent school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.
I’m honored to be able to say that my sermon from last Sunday, The Dark Side of Joy, was submitted and accepted.
The book, A Good Word, edited by Landon Whitsitt, is now available for free download at Landon’s website: landonwhitsitt.com
I heard this amazing sermon yesterday on the monthly Quest podcast from Church of the Larger Fellowship. It was originally preached on December 12, 2009 at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Arlington, VA. The preacher is Rev. Archene Turner, a Unitarian Universalist minister. Many thanks to Rev. Turner, who has granted me permission to reprint her words here.
A friend suggested that I read Invisible Cities, a short novel by Italo Calvino that consists of dialogues between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan because she found the stories meaningful. I certainly found Polo’s thoughts about inferno provocative:
“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
I think we are living in an inferno. People acknowledge we are living in an economic crisis but family, we are in a moral crisis too.
A recent survey found that one in four families had been hit by a job loss during the past year and nearly half had suffered a reduction in wages or hours worked. For the working poor, already struggling, the current recession is knocking them down another notch – from low wage employment and inadequate housing toward erratic employment and no housing at all. Barbara Ehrenreich recently went back and interviewed some of the people in her 2001 best seller, Nickeled and Dimed, about the working poor, the quarter of the population that struggle even in the best of times. She called her article “Too Poor to Make the News”, because the media is looking for what has been called “recession porn” – stories about the incremental descent of the well off from excess to frugality, from ease to austerity.
A Typical story reads “Sarah and Tyrone Mangold … she was selling health insurance, and he was working on a heating and air conditioning crew. She got laid off in the spring, and he a few months later. Now, they had one unemployment check and a blended family of three children.
They ate at his mother’s house twice a week. They pawned jewelry. She scoured the food pantry. He scrounged for side jobs. Their frustration peaked one night over a can of pinto beans. Each blamed the other when that was all they had to eat. “People get irritable when they’re hungry,” Ms. Mangold said.
Mr. Mangold, no longer objects to using food stamps. “I always thought people on public assistance were lazy,” he said, “but it helps me know I can feed my kids. “
Stories like this often includes phrases like “Those we serve are now our neighbors, our former colleagues and hard working individuals struggling to make ends meet.
I wanted to SCREAM. Were not the people they served before our neighbors, our former colleagues and hard working individuals struggling to make ends meet? And “we’re hearing from more and more middle class people who have never in their life gone to a food pantry..they are very, very frustrated and angry.”
Who goes to food pantries for kicks ?
I thought about the hundreds of people I had seen at some of the ALIVE’s programs. On Halloween Day, that pretty unseasonably warm, Saturday morning, UUCA members Diana Day and Ann Marie Hay took the time to show me ALIVE’s child development center, food distribution and shelter as others prepared for monsters, ghouls & goblins.
The people I saw in the food distribution center did not appear angry. They were unusually quiet and respectful. Many of them looked like members on my own family tree – white, Native, Asian and Pacific Islander, African, Arab and Latino/a descent.
Perhaps the frustration and anger had passed out of them. Maybe there is a difference in people’s minds of climbing up a ladder than going down one. To me a rung on a ladder is a rung.
I thought of Polo’s two ways to escape suffering the inferno. The first is to accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it.
Many people do not know about the people ALIVE serves in Northern Virginia. We think need, struggle and hunger are in a distant land. Africa, New Orleans, the District of Columbia – but oh no, not here, not in our neighborhoods or in our religious communities or at UUCA.
We can live our lives so we no longer see what is happening in our world. We pretend that things are not happening all around us and we become a part of the inferno.
Most people when they think of an inferno think of Dante.
UU minister John Nichols noted that when Dante wrote:
“The Inferno” he was actually at the mid-point of his own life, struggling with disillusionment. He imagines that he was chased down into a vast h*** by wild beasts that threatened to tear him limb from limb. He passes beyond a sign reading, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” and then he knows that he has reached the outer suburbs of Hell.
Descending into the Hellish pit he finds the trail winds downward like a canyon in the shape of a corkscrew. The farther one descends, the greater the sins of those one passes.
The fiery temperature in Dante’s Hell drops dramatically where it houses people with a diminished capacity for caring. At the lowest level are those who have killed in themselves all love for others. Their souls are encased in ice.”
Okay confession time – I’ve never read Dante’s Inferno. I was raised on another story about Hell, about a rich man going to Hell and a poor man to Heaven. The rich man is surprised to see the poor man in heaven by the side of Abraham. In his suffering, the rich man pleads to Abraham to send the poor man to give him water to quench his thirst. Abraham says that the chasm is too wide to be crossed.
Martin Luther King Jr and other preachers have interpreted this story to mean that the rich man did not go to hell because he was rich;, but because he allowed the poor man to become invisible to him. He passed this poor man every day and failed to help. The rich man was blind to the need of others. Even in Hell, he held on to his notion that he was better than the poor man and could ask that he serve him. It is interesting that the rich man wanted the people in heaven to care and help him, but he had failed to do this in his own life on earth for others.
Perhaps our souls are encased in ice or destined to hell because we are blind to the needs of others. We might be that way because we ourselves are barely holding on. In “The Working Poor: Invisible in America, David Shipler writes that ‘in the house of the poor the walls are thin and fragile and troubles seep into one another’. Perhaps those troubles seep into our own lives, too, because our lives are just as fragile.
That is why I say we are living in an inferno and even Hell some days. Each of us walks that tight rope of hanging on to make sense of our own world . Something in us says “just do for you and yours.” I want to tell you to resist this urge. The act of doing the exact opposite – reaching out to help others– is the balm that heals us and is the very essence of who we are as religious people and what will lead us into a moral recovery.
Polo says the other way to escape the suffering in the inferno is to “seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
Polo does not say do things to make YOU endure and give YOU space – he says THEM. The act of caring for someone else is the message I would like to share with you this holiday season and do it to have faith in life like the old man in the reading.
Let us move from our past into our future building a better tomorrow for everyone.
Let us work together to create a world where we value people instead of things and we give the gift of ourselves to our one human family.
The song we just learned says “all of us are all united, we are family united and the other song asks what can I give..the answer is simple…give your heart.
So in this December season, make a list and check it twice of let’s say, three acts of kindness that you would not typically do for others. It can be our Unitarian Universalist holy trinity.. Do these acts with no expectation of a thank you or a need for acknowledgement from the other person or people because these are things you are giving YOURSELF to pull you out of the inferno of the living.
So may it be.
Ashe.
Hopping Hadrian's Wall 