September 27, 2009 Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 19; James 5:13-20; Mark 9:30-50
You are a young child in Galilee. You are luckier than some because you are not an
orphan, you have parents and a home, but you live in a house where you are constantly
reminded that children are the lowest, last and least in the social order.
Nothing makes you feel lonelier or more left out than when the adults in your house
are excited to be entertaining important guests. So when a traveling teacher comes to town
with his disciples and fills the house to overflowing with an eager crowd, you feel like a
motherless child. You shrink into a corner, wanting to watch but afraid of being cursed
and beaten and sent away. When the teacher turns and beckons you with a stern
expression on his face you are terrified and want to run, but you dare not disobey, and you
walk slowly toward him.
He sees your fear and his face softens. He smiles. He opens his arms. He folds you
into them with the warmest hug, and you hear him say, “Whoever welcomes one such child
welcomes me and welcomes the one who sent me.”
You see the astonished look on the adult faces around you, none more than your
parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles, and you know right then that you will
never be left out or treated badly in that house again. He keeps you near him as he teaches
and eats, and though you do not understand much of what the adults say, your heart is full
of the deepest joy, the deepest feeling of home that you have ever felt.
Today parents often place their children’s needs and desires above their own, but
we are aware there are still too many children who suffer neglect or abuse, or who are
motherless or fatherless or homeless.
And we are aware especially today when we will be discussing health care reform
that there are children who have no health insurance, and that among the 44,000 people
who die for lack of health care every year, a disproportionate number are children.
And we are aware that many adults in this congregation are facing serious illnesses,
hardships and losses right now, with all the separation and loneliness, anxiety and
depression that can exacerbate those struggles.
But we are also aware that a teacher has come into the house who has the power to
change everything, who opens up to us a way out of separation into healing and wholeness
and holiness and the deepest peace and joy our hearts have ever felt. He looks at us and
beckons us. He holds his arms out wide to us.
What will it take for us to enter the healing and joy that come from connection with
the God who is love? What will it take for us to transform our separation and suffering?
The answer is it will take separation and suffering. At least that is part of the
answer Jesus gives in today’s teaching.
He says that to transform our separation from God we need to separate ourselves
from what separates us. For instance, if it is our hand, far better to cut it off than to be
separated from God. Jesus is talking metaphorically, of course. He is talking about letting
go of things we are attached to that keep us from following his way.
Like the disciples in the gospel story, we need to wean ourselves from the proud,
competitive thoughts we have been taught to think. We suffer as much the disciples did to
hear Christ say that the point of life is to give it away to others, to sacrifice and lose it,
rather than to become the greatest, or at least better than some. Jesus says we have to let
that thinking go in order to connect to his way.
It is also part of our training in our society to judge who is in and who is out, and
jealously to guard our privilege, as the disciples did when they caught a stranger healing in
Christ’s name. We judge others, we judge ourselves, we judge God, but judging and
grumbling separate us from the God who is love and from the way of Christ, which is to
humble ourselves and accept and serve as one beneath all others.
As we identify old habits, addictions or patterns of thought that separate us from
living as Christ calls us to live, we need to have the courage to suffer the pain of letting
them go.
Bob Hagen told a story at Prayer of the Heart about Sir Edmund Hillary, the first
person to climb to the summit of Mt. Everest. Apparently he approached a Sherpa in a
village in Nepal and asked what he could give the village to repay them for their
hospitality. The Sherpa began by questioning what western society had to offer. Part of
the Sherpa’s response was, “We do not envy you the restlessness of your spirit.” This is
one of our greatest stumbling blocks: our restlessness, our over-ambitious over-busyness,
our unwillingness to give our spiritual being the quiet time it needs to connect to God. It is
very hard for us to let this way of being go. We try all kinds of strategies to ease the ill
effects it has on our health and well being like drugs, denial or distractions, but when they
wear off, the problem remains. The way to heal our restlessness is to come to rest. The
way to heal our feeling of no time is to take time. The way to transform our separation is
to separate ourselves from what separates us.
And so to suffer. Jesus says that it is better to suffer the pain of cutting off what we
are attached to that separates us from God than to enter the hell of unquenchable fire that
we suffer from separation. But then he says this very strange thing. He says, “Everyone
will be salted with fire.” Salt stands for the essence of God within us—all the good that we
are trying to connect to when we connect to God. Fire stands for suffering in this
passage’s context. To be salted with fire means that be connected to God through
suffering. Jesus is saying that suffering is a path to transformation, and through it to peace
and joy.
Christine Bartholomew is the youth minister at First Baptist Church in Oak Park,
Illinois. She has lupus, an autoimmune disease that can be fatal. She wrote in The
Christian Century magazine this month about sobbing as she was going through an
extremely debilitating treatment, questioning God’s ability to get her through it. She
wrote, “The Lord did not…remove the lupus from my DNA, but the Lord heard my prayer
and rescued me. How does the Lord rescue someone from sickness when the sickness may
still remain? I mean that the Lord changed my faith during my sickness and gave me a new
faith for my time of need. The Lord sent me friends and family who did all they could.
The Lord sent laughter, that uncontrollable spasm of air and noise that heals and cures so
many intangible things.”
She went on, “Sometimes [the Lord] uses our weaknesses as a way of refining us
and making us able to walk a little closer with him…. Through the fire of pain and
suffering we gain our depth, our flavor, our salt. Through my suffering I received the gift
of God’s undeniable presence. His Spirit walked into rooms, sat beside my bedside and
held my hand.” (The Christian Century, 9/22/09 p20)
We do not have to have the exact faith of Christine Bartholomew to find suffering
to be a path to transformation. We may not believe in a God who “uses our weaknesses as
a way of refining us” or uses pain to give us depth, and yet we may still find that we can be
refined and gain depth through suffering. This fall many of us who come to Prayer of the
Heart will be reading the book The Mindful Way through Depression that is related to the
Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy courses Nancy Kilgore offers. It teaches us to
approach our suffering rather than avoid it, to greet it with compassion and
lovingkindness. This requires that we separate ourselves from strategies of trying
immediately to end our suffering through drugs, denial or distractions and instead open
ourselves to experience the truth, at least long enough to know it fully.
Sometimes the truth is that our suffering is more than we can bear, and we need
drugs, denial or distractions in order to survive it. There is nothing wrong with that. They
have their place as essential tools along side all therapies that help us endure suffering that
could break or even kill us. There are forms of suffering, like chronic severe depression,
that may not lead to any perceptible positive spiritual transformation until we have had all
the help of all the therapies available, and even then no one should ever judge another for
how they emerge from that suffering. We should try not to judge ourselves or God, either,
if we feel stuck and untransformed, or if we have been transformed by suffering into
bitterness and despair. Judging is not going to help. Our hope is in remaining open to
possible future positive transformation. (This is what makes depression a particularly
destructive and intractable form of suffering. It specializes in taking that hope away.)
Everyone’s suffering is unique, and there is no way to judge or compare. Other
people going through what strengthened Christine Bartholomew’s faith could descend into
spiritual darkness for years and it would not make them wrong or unworthy of honor and
respect. The point is not to achieve a spiritual goal. The point is to consider a spiritual
path through suffering that has led many others along a journey, sometimes long and
sometimes short, to transformation. This is the path that Psalm 19 says revives the soul,
makes wise the simple, rejoices the heart, enlightens the vision, endures forever, and is
more to be desired than gold and sweeter than honey.
The path as laid out in The Mindful Way through Depression is to approach our
suffering with the courage to feel it and face its truth, and then to bring to it all the
compassion and kindness we would offer a hurt child. Sometimes that approach will
inform us that we are in danger and need to seek treatment, but often we find that the part
of us that is suffering is actually fairly contained, and that all around it is a spaciousness
inhabited by grace. When we stop bracing ourselves and screwing our eyes tight shut
against it, sometimes—not always, but sometimes—we can see how the suffering is
connecting us to God, to our truest, deepest self, and to our community—we can see
positive transformation taking place even as we suffer.
As many of you know, the Barkers have been suffering the consequences of an
injury Matt sustained that required an operation and now a very long period where he will
have to be out of work or working much less than they need. Those of you who read our
weekly BIG NEWS(letter) email know that Terry often ends it writing about the view out
her window. Here is what she wrote in the latest edition:
“The view from my window this week is of a loving and supportive community of
people who are giving so much to my family and myself right now. I cannot begin to tell
you how much all the love and caring and support in so many forms means to us. We are
all deeply touched and warmed by all of you. Thank you from the very depth of my heart.
Peace and love to you all, Terry.”
To be able to see that view from the window of our suffering takes the courage to
face the truth and the grace to find God within it. This is where the spiritual path is
designed to lead us.
The letter of James says that prayer is powerful and effective and can heal us.
Prayer has that power because it connects us to God. As Christine Bartholomew found,
that connection can rescue us from sickness even when the sickness remains. It can
transform suffering into meaning and wisdom, into peace and joy, even as the suffering
continues. This may not be our experience immediately, we may remain in a dark night of
the soul even for years, but once it comes, to be thus transformed is in a real sense to be
healed, to realize that we are whole and holy.
The connection to God that comes through separation and suffering throws off
sparks like a jumper cable, and if we channel it, we can use its power to the same creative,
life-giving ends that we see in the life of Christ and in all the saints. We have seen this at
work here in our own congregation coming through people who have suffered much. This
power can help us create a society that is the opposite of the judgmental, competitive
world where people try to stop others from stealing their privilege. It can help us create a
society that does not begrudge others the health care they need, but is willing to make any
sacrifice to give others the same opportunity for healing and joy.
This church has much important work to do, helping one another heal, working for
health care reform and other Christ-like causes. Our effectiveness depends on the journey
to connection we are each courageous enough to take through our own conditions of
separation and suffering.
The 20th century British playwright George Bernard Shaw envisioned life as a
splendid torch that he wanted to make burn as brightly as possible while he had a hold of
it, and by that light to serve others. The 12th century Christian mystic and poet Hildegard
of Bingen used the image of being a living offering burning on God’s altar. Even our
suffering can give off a light like a candle that connects others to the source of our light, if
we find the way through our suffering to connection and healing. Shaw called this the
greatest joy, to know that our life is serving such a cause. It is the joy of an usher on
Christmas Eve who passes the flame of her candle from pew to pew and watches the
darkness fill with a golden light.
Let us pray in silence…
Sermon 09/27/2009