Matthew 24:36-44
MP3 File
When I was in the fundamentalist period of my life during college there was a famous Christian singer called Larry Norman. He was strange – a combination of a long haired, hippy and a fundamentalist who didn’t look the part. He wrote a popular song called, “I Wish We’d All Been Ready.” I listened to it so many times I could still sing it. I won’t; but I could. He obviously believed in the Rapture which is the name given to the event that some Christians believe will happen in the future when all the true believers will just disappear off the face of the earth up into heaven, whilst the rest of human kind is left on earth to slug it out with the Antichrist.
“Life was filled with guns and war and everyone got trampled on the floor. I wish we'd all been ready. Children died, the days grew cold,“A man and wife asleep in bed, She hears a noise, she turns her head, he's gone! I wish we'd all been ready. Two men walking up a hill,One disappears and one's left standing still. I wish we'd all been ready. There's no time to change your mind, The Son has come and you've been left behind.”
Of course, it’s based on our reading this morning: “Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.” This could be the way the world ends but I somehow doubt it. The contemporary expression of this belief comes in the mega popular books in the Left Behind series. It may seem best to leave Left Behind behind us. But when a book perpetrating a dangerous lie sells 120 million copies, ignoring it may not be such a good idea.
The most serious problem with the Left Behind series of novels is that in this version Jesus is no longer the Lamb slain but a perpetrator of the same violence of the Roman Empire under which the early Christians suffered. According to Left Behind, when Jesus comes again, he will simply wield a vastly superior firepower. Lest you think I’m exaggerating there's an excerpt from a 60 Minutes II interview with the books’ authors aired April 14, 2004, in which Morley Safer comments to the authors: "The Left Behind novels give a graphic version of the New Testament prophecy of the end of the world happening in our time, in which only the righteous are saved. Glorious Appearing tells the story of the return of an avenging Jesus, slaughtering non-believers by the millions. It's an image of Jesus that many evangelicals say is long overdue.
One of the authors, Jerry B. Jenkins, responds: "Unfortunately, we've gone through a time when liberalism has so twisted the real meaning of scripture that they've manufactured a loving, wimpy Jesus that would never do anything in judgment. And that's not the God of the Bible. That's not the way Jesus reads in the Scripture." The other author, Tim LaHaye, adds: "That stuff is straight from the Bible. The idea of him slaying the enemy with the sword that comes from his mouth, which is His Word, and the fact that the enemy's eyes melt in their heads, their tongues disintegrate, their flesh drops off -- I didn't make that up. That's out of the prophecy."
But it seems that he did make it up. There's nothing about the enemy's eyes melting in the Book of Revelation. Instead, twice we see God wiping away the tears from the eyes of God's people (Rev. 7:17; 21:4). There are people gnawing on their tongues in anguish (Rev. 16:10), and birds feeding on the flesh of the dead (Rev. 19:17-21), but not tongues simply disintegrating nor flesh dropping off at the words from Jesus' mouth.
At stake is the God we meet in Jesus Christ. In the New Testament version of Jesus we are shown a stark contrast to the darkness of our human violence wrongly attributed to God. We human beings are the ones who put our faith in superior firepower. For example, in Matthew’s Gospel, the ones who are taken are those who get caught up in a rising tide of violence without even noticing it. Those who are left behind are actually those who resist getting swept away by the violence, and remain faithful to God. They stay awake to recognizing Jesus in the hungry, the stranger, the sick and the imprisoned. But in the Left Behind novels the darkness of that human violence is once again attributed to God, especially through the fictionalized figure of Jesus in the last volume.
Advent is the season in which we focus on preparing for God’s coming. But we prepare for very different ways of being in history depending on whether we follow the Left Behind books or the New Testament. The Left Behind view practically makes the violence of torturing accused terrorists a sign of God’s coming. The biblical view sees caring for the victims of violence as the primary spiritual practice to prepare for God’s coming. It matters greatly which way we prepare.
A group of us have been gathering this past week to listen to different ones of you share about the impact of Clelia and Alberto’s departure from Immanuel’s staff, and about where we go from here. In yesterday’s session, one person spoke passionately about the importance of Immanuel’s ministry in Los Angeles, and challenged us to with the need to wake up to the ministry that God has dropped in our laps. People know that Immanuel stands for justice; and, sadly, they are surprised that a church cares so much about what they care about. But they don’t know enough about our congregation to actually try us out.
We need to be bolder in our witness. Advent is a great time to wake up to that call. As James Alison puts it, “In Advent, God breaks through the clutter of our lives to announce to us that God’s Presence is very near, irrupting into our midst, hauling us out of our half-truths and the ways we have settled for what is religious rather than what is holy, alive and real… Someone wants to speak to us. The oomph behind the ‘isness’ of everything that is wants to invite us into the fullness of a project.” (Christian Century, November 13, 2007, p. 19)
And as Reinhold Niebuhr puts it: "Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love."
So, what does it take to wake up? Jesus indicates that it has something to do with paying attention to the right things. Everyone is looking for something, but we’re not always noticing the right things. We live in an advent season of history that offers clues about what to watch for and how to hold the watching itself. We watch for what really matters and stay with it. We don’t get swept away with the temptation to commit violence in order to defend ourselves, or with pleasures to escape reality. We are left behind as victims of violence, and with all the weight of reality, though accompanied by God’s promises in the midst of it.
In the time of Noah most people were not noticing the right things. Noah, it seems, was different. Noah knew enough to come in out of the rain, and he knew to listen to God. What of the one in the field or grinding meal who is not swept away? What is it they listen to? What makes them ready for the coming of the Son of Man, as Noah was ready for the flood?
Last week I sat with a member of this church as he shared how he has started listening. He calls it “dialoguing with myself.” Sometimes he only spends 5 minutes a day doing it. But already he talks about ways that he is seeing the world and the people in it a little differently.
Peter W. Marty shares a scene from Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town to highlight the need to see things differently. A young woman named Emily dies at the age of 26. She asks the stage manager narrating the play if she can return for a brief visit with her family. He grants her the wish, advising her to choose the least important day in her life -- which "will be important enough," he says. She chooses to return on her 12th birthday, only to find her father obsessed with his business problems and her mother preoccupied with kitchen duties. Emily exclaims, "Oh Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama, 14 years have gone by. I’m dead!" Unable to rouse her parents, Emily breaks down sobbing. "We don’t have time to look at one another. . . . Goodbye, world! , . . Goodbye, Mama and Papa. . . . Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you! Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it -- every, every minute?"
It is this incapacity to attend to the important things in life that brings urgency to Advent. We sleep through God’s signals of alarm and act as if today is like every other day. But if we are casual with today, what chance is there that we will be careful with our lives? What hope is there that we can live less selfishly and more peacefully? In an attempt to rock us out of these complacent ways of living and believing, Jesus presents us with a most dreadful picture -- an intruder stepping into our bedroom while we’re sound asleep. "If the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into," Jesus says. The very fear of that nighttime break-in is the cause for a change in thinking, an adjustment in priorities.
It seems more than coincidental that World AIDS’ Day always falls during or right before the first week of Advent. The scale of the AIDS’ disaster seems overwhelming. In the face of a disaster of this magnitude, it is tempting to stay asleep, to wish we did not know about it, to wish we were still blind, for the need is so great, the changes necessary so enormous, and we feel so small. Last night a number of us attended a showing of a new documentary called “Out in India.” Tom Zehnder wrote the score for it, and Tim and Tom’s song, “Any Day”, was featured. It tells the story of two gay fathers and their two children going to India to mobilize artists to unite in struggling against the AID’s crisis. At one point David Gere said, “During the 80s our country had a president who prohibited anyone from mentioning AIDS in his presence. Imagine how things might be different if that hadn’t been the case.” Pretending to be asleep, pretending to be blind, will not work. With eyes open, we must proclaim our hope that God and good are greater than the deepest despair and the most despicable evil, greater even than the devastation of HIV/Aids. With our eyes wide open, we proclaim our faith in a God who turns the world upside down and calls us to act from mercy, not judgment. We are still free to choose whether or not we will act that way. What will we choose?
December 6, 2007
November 27, 2007
November 25, 2007 - Some Kind of King - Frank Alton
Luke 23:33-43
MP3 File
The other day I was having a discussion with someone about judgment; not final judgment – the kind many Christians seem obsessed with. We were talking about judging each other. This person was arguing that honesty in a relationship requires judgment. If someone does something wrong, she deserves to be judged. If the wrong is serious in my view, it is only natural that he would lose my respect. If she corrected the wrong, then she could earn back the respect of the other. There was clarity in that conversation that focused for me a major difference among people about how we view the world, our existence, and the way things change.
It was a difference apparent in the scene of Jesus hanging on the cross between 2 criminals. Most people in the scene agreed with my partner in dialogue that it was a scene of judgment and lack of respect. Jesus had been judged guilty of something – it was never quite clear what. The punishment was to die on a cross, the capital punishment du jour in the Roman Empire. The criminals hanging with him had obviously done something worthy of death rather than mere imprisonment. This was serious judgment.
The lack of respect was clearly evident as well. The leaders scoffed: “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, God’s chosen one!” Then the soldiers joined in: “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” Finally, one of the criminals in a panic throws insults at him: “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself; oh, and while you’re at it, save us!” The other criminal asked to be remembered, but still didn’t expect anything but judgment.
Only one person present demonstrated an alternative view. Jesus said, “Abba God, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” Even Jesus’ closest followers were thinking in their hearts, “Come on, Jesus; they know damn well what they are doing.” The powerful who heard Jesus offer forgiveness got distracted by theology: who has a right to forgive? They say “only God.” But that totally misses the point. Jesus was offering a new way for human beings to be in the world – a way characterized by love and forgiveness rather than power and judgment. The contrast isn’t about divine and human but about ways of being divine and ways of being human.
The mission of Jesus, crystallized into a single moment in this scene, was to usher in the Reign of God, increasing the number of people who offer forgiveness rather than judgment. In that moment, Jesus revealed in a more dramatic way than he had revealed throughout his entire ministry that God’s core identity is forgiving love.
The church hasn’t done very well over the millennia in getting that message. It actually did fairly well for the first few hundred years as the story of Jesus swept the world over which Caesar held sway because it spoke intimately to those whose throats were under Rome’s heel. The Gospel took root in the soul of powerlessness, which is why it beckons the dispossessed in ways it does no other group.
But then in the fourth century along came a Roman emperor named Constantine, who became a Christian. That sounds like really good news. It would be something akin to Osama Bin Laden becoming a Christian today. The only problem is that the conversion that happened changed Christianity more than it changed Constantine. Constantine transformed the cross from being one Christian symbol among many – a sign of suffering – into the dominant symbol of Christianity – now a sign of power in the world.
Some of the unfortunate consequences of that transformation include the backwards movement on the matter of women’s equality. The early church had made great strides against the patriarchal culture of the Roman Empire. Under Constantine the patriarchal culture was strengthened in the church. It has only been in the past fifty years that the church has begun to restore the mind of Jesus on women’s equality. We still have a long way to go. The symbol of the cross became a lightening rod that fanned the flame of enmity between Christians and Jews. It led to persecution that reached all the way to modern days. The impact on the Muslim world is famously known through the Crusades. In all of these historical stains, the hand of Constantine can be seen.
So, when we come to this Sunday to celebrate the Reign of Christ, we have to make some adjustments. We can’t allow the familiarity of a scene like Jesus on the cross between two criminals to lull us to sleep. It needs to be a wake up call & a call to conversion. What Constantine did to the cross & to Christianity still holds sway both in the church and in the way the world views the church. Jesus has been co-opted by those who understand the Reign of Christ to be not about the supremacy of Love but about obedience to orthodoxy. The king whose throne was a cross and whose dying words were “My God, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing” has been replaced with a judge whose message is “My God will not forgive you unless you are doing it the right way.”
In case that seems like a marginal issue today let me call your attention to recent history. Back in the 1980s when I was beginning to understand the political dimension of my own faith, many US Christians were supporting Central American dictators because they used anti-communist language and created favorable conditions for minority evangelicals to gain influence in the dominant Roman Catholic culture. Today those same Christians and their descendants support the right of our government to torture prisoners because our leaders use anti-terrorist language that gets their vote. They’re even willing to compromise on opposition to some of their key personal morality issues like abortion & hate crime legislation in order to make sure we are safe from terrorists. Jesus on the cross presents a very different picture from those who want to make peace by threatening violence.
It is time for others in the church to find our voices & reclaim the historic faith we’ve inherited: to PRO-claim the Good News of the Gospel of Grace whenever & wherever we can; to challenge those who preach the Jesus of Judgment by our serving instead the King of Love. Every time we try to make Christ reign into a rule of law rather than of love we crucify him again. Every time we choose the institution of the church over the inspiration of the Holy Spirit we grieve the heart of God. Every time we hold our tongues and allow the strident voices of the all-too-certain ideologues of the Religious Right to claim moral values as their sole and private preserve, we fail in our call to shepherd God’s people, to calm their fears, to gather them in. (Susan Russell, Christ the King)
Jesus embodied the best of Jewish values: not causing fear, not causing terror, not causing exclusion; practicing wisdom, practicing justice, & doing what is right. Jesus has had a liberating and healing effect on a wide variety of members of God’s family. Jesus was a king, but no an ordinary one. Jesus was a leader, but not an ordinary one. Jesus was “the king or leader of fishermen, of tax collectors, of Samaritans, of prostitutes, of blind people, of demoniacs, of cripples. Those who followed Jesus were a rag-tag bunch: women who now leaped with joy, a Samaritan leper with a heart full of gratitude, a crippled woman who had been unable to stand straight with dignity for 18 years, and a blind man who had followed Jesus all the way from Jericho” (Culpepper, R. Alan, Luke, The New Interpreters’ Bible, p. 370)
Our ultimate allegiance is to live our lives in such a way that those who otherwise have no hope can be in a new community along with us and that we can be in a new community with them and thus, all of us be healed by hope and love, for hope and love are the only things that can put fear in its place. My friends, this is the most important conversion the Gospel calls us to this day. There are so many hopeless and lonely people in this city. Some are already in this congregation. Do they – do we – experience the healing of hope and love? Or are we so full of judgment or apathy that people can’t find healing here? How do we become a healing community of forgiveness?
One good starting place is to see ourselves loved by this love, because until we do, we can’t love others with the heart of a shepherd that looks at wolves in their sheepliness. The challenge isn’t to recognize people who are wolves dressed as sheep. It is to creatively imagine wolves that are in some hidden part of their lives like sheep, and to love them as such. In order to respond like that we have to learn to be less concerned about our reputation & more concerned about love. Jesus’ love is for the persecutors, the scandalized, the depressives, the traitors, the finger pointers, and for all those they are pointing fingers at. Jesus’ love will not be party to any final settling of accounts. It seeks desperately and insatiably for good and evil to participate in a wedding banquet. (James Alison, Raising Abel, p. 187-8) Once we see ourselves loved, we must come to know what our ultimate allegiances are in the midst of fear: the values of not causing fear or terror or exclusion to keep us from practicing wisdom, justice, and what is right; to embody those values in our personal lives and find ways in our community of faith to embody them the way Jesus embodied them.
Dorothee Soelle was a German theologian who taught for a long time at Union Theological Seminary in New York. She tells a story that paints a contemporary picture of what this looks like. She was walking by a construction site in New York City one day & asked a construction worker, “Sir, excuse me, do you happen to know what time it is?” He said, in a kind of good-humored mockery back, “Am I Jesus, lady?” She said his answer was so strange that at that time she was completely speechless. But she writes that she has not been able to get his question out of her mind. “Am I Jesus, lady?”
For this worker, she reasons, Jesus is from another world. Jesus is a heavenly being who has nothing to do with you & me, who sees, hears, knows and can do everything, but is removed from us. The churchy language which has called him Messiah, Lord, Son of God, and the Christ really has had an effect to remove us from Jesus. “That’s what you get,” she says, “when you make Jesus into an unreachable, completely other superman, indeed, into God – a Sunday outing of the heavenly being who stopped by for a short visit in Bethlehem.”
She continues, “When I was a young teacher of religion, I once asked the schoolchildren whether they thought the baby Jesus also had wet diapers.” She says, “Most children rejected that decisively.” Jesus, already as the Christ child, must be different and higher & purer. “But that,” she continues to reflect, “draws Jesus away from this world and above all, it tells us that we cannot live as Jesus lived. We shouldn’t even try because it is impossible anyway. I mean, after all, how would we ever manage to feed the hungry? We don’t have more than five loaves and two fishes. How would we ever manage not to serve the industry of death? How would we manage to heal the sick?” “Are we Jesus, lady?”
Then she concludes, “Today I would answer the worker at the construction site a little more openly and I would take the initiative. I would say, ‘Yes, you are Jesus, man – what else would you want to make of your life?’ Being yourself, alone, isn’t sufficient; you know that already. You, too, are born and have come into the world to witness to the truth. So don’t make yourself smaller than you really are. Just imagine, you are Jesus and I am Jesus and your mother-in-law is Jesus and your boss is Jesus. We, together, are Jesus. And if we are Jesus, what would change? There is something in every one of us of God.” Then she closes with a poem, quoting a poem:
MP3 File
The other day I was having a discussion with someone about judgment; not final judgment – the kind many Christians seem obsessed with. We were talking about judging each other. This person was arguing that honesty in a relationship requires judgment. If someone does something wrong, she deserves to be judged. If the wrong is serious in my view, it is only natural that he would lose my respect. If she corrected the wrong, then she could earn back the respect of the other. There was clarity in that conversation that focused for me a major difference among people about how we view the world, our existence, and the way things change.
It was a difference apparent in the scene of Jesus hanging on the cross between 2 criminals. Most people in the scene agreed with my partner in dialogue that it was a scene of judgment and lack of respect. Jesus had been judged guilty of something – it was never quite clear what. The punishment was to die on a cross, the capital punishment du jour in the Roman Empire. The criminals hanging with him had obviously done something worthy of death rather than mere imprisonment. This was serious judgment.
The lack of respect was clearly evident as well. The leaders scoffed: “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, God’s chosen one!” Then the soldiers joined in: “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” Finally, one of the criminals in a panic throws insults at him: “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself; oh, and while you’re at it, save us!” The other criminal asked to be remembered, but still didn’t expect anything but judgment.
Only one person present demonstrated an alternative view. Jesus said, “Abba God, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” Even Jesus’ closest followers were thinking in their hearts, “Come on, Jesus; they know damn well what they are doing.” The powerful who heard Jesus offer forgiveness got distracted by theology: who has a right to forgive? They say “only God.” But that totally misses the point. Jesus was offering a new way for human beings to be in the world – a way characterized by love and forgiveness rather than power and judgment. The contrast isn’t about divine and human but about ways of being divine and ways of being human.
The mission of Jesus, crystallized into a single moment in this scene, was to usher in the Reign of God, increasing the number of people who offer forgiveness rather than judgment. In that moment, Jesus revealed in a more dramatic way than he had revealed throughout his entire ministry that God’s core identity is forgiving love.
The church hasn’t done very well over the millennia in getting that message. It actually did fairly well for the first few hundred years as the story of Jesus swept the world over which Caesar held sway because it spoke intimately to those whose throats were under Rome’s heel. The Gospel took root in the soul of powerlessness, which is why it beckons the dispossessed in ways it does no other group.
But then in the fourth century along came a Roman emperor named Constantine, who became a Christian. That sounds like really good news. It would be something akin to Osama Bin Laden becoming a Christian today. The only problem is that the conversion that happened changed Christianity more than it changed Constantine. Constantine transformed the cross from being one Christian symbol among many – a sign of suffering – into the dominant symbol of Christianity – now a sign of power in the world.
Some of the unfortunate consequences of that transformation include the backwards movement on the matter of women’s equality. The early church had made great strides against the patriarchal culture of the Roman Empire. Under Constantine the patriarchal culture was strengthened in the church. It has only been in the past fifty years that the church has begun to restore the mind of Jesus on women’s equality. We still have a long way to go. The symbol of the cross became a lightening rod that fanned the flame of enmity between Christians and Jews. It led to persecution that reached all the way to modern days. The impact on the Muslim world is famously known through the Crusades. In all of these historical stains, the hand of Constantine can be seen.
So, when we come to this Sunday to celebrate the Reign of Christ, we have to make some adjustments. We can’t allow the familiarity of a scene like Jesus on the cross between two criminals to lull us to sleep. It needs to be a wake up call & a call to conversion. What Constantine did to the cross & to Christianity still holds sway both in the church and in the way the world views the church. Jesus has been co-opted by those who understand the Reign of Christ to be not about the supremacy of Love but about obedience to orthodoxy. The king whose throne was a cross and whose dying words were “My God, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing” has been replaced with a judge whose message is “My God will not forgive you unless you are doing it the right way.”
In case that seems like a marginal issue today let me call your attention to recent history. Back in the 1980s when I was beginning to understand the political dimension of my own faith, many US Christians were supporting Central American dictators because they used anti-communist language and created favorable conditions for minority evangelicals to gain influence in the dominant Roman Catholic culture. Today those same Christians and their descendants support the right of our government to torture prisoners because our leaders use anti-terrorist language that gets their vote. They’re even willing to compromise on opposition to some of their key personal morality issues like abortion & hate crime legislation in order to make sure we are safe from terrorists. Jesus on the cross presents a very different picture from those who want to make peace by threatening violence.
It is time for others in the church to find our voices & reclaim the historic faith we’ve inherited: to PRO-claim the Good News of the Gospel of Grace whenever & wherever we can; to challenge those who preach the Jesus of Judgment by our serving instead the King of Love. Every time we try to make Christ reign into a rule of law rather than of love we crucify him again. Every time we choose the institution of the church over the inspiration of the Holy Spirit we grieve the heart of God. Every time we hold our tongues and allow the strident voices of the all-too-certain ideologues of the Religious Right to claim moral values as their sole and private preserve, we fail in our call to shepherd God’s people, to calm their fears, to gather them in. (Susan Russell, Christ the King)
Jesus embodied the best of Jewish values: not causing fear, not causing terror, not causing exclusion; practicing wisdom, practicing justice, & doing what is right. Jesus has had a liberating and healing effect on a wide variety of members of God’s family. Jesus was a king, but no an ordinary one. Jesus was a leader, but not an ordinary one. Jesus was “the king or leader of fishermen, of tax collectors, of Samaritans, of prostitutes, of blind people, of demoniacs, of cripples. Those who followed Jesus were a rag-tag bunch: women who now leaped with joy, a Samaritan leper with a heart full of gratitude, a crippled woman who had been unable to stand straight with dignity for 18 years, and a blind man who had followed Jesus all the way from Jericho” (Culpepper, R. Alan, Luke, The New Interpreters’ Bible, p. 370)
Our ultimate allegiance is to live our lives in such a way that those who otherwise have no hope can be in a new community along with us and that we can be in a new community with them and thus, all of us be healed by hope and love, for hope and love are the only things that can put fear in its place. My friends, this is the most important conversion the Gospel calls us to this day. There are so many hopeless and lonely people in this city. Some are already in this congregation. Do they – do we – experience the healing of hope and love? Or are we so full of judgment or apathy that people can’t find healing here? How do we become a healing community of forgiveness?
One good starting place is to see ourselves loved by this love, because until we do, we can’t love others with the heart of a shepherd that looks at wolves in their sheepliness. The challenge isn’t to recognize people who are wolves dressed as sheep. It is to creatively imagine wolves that are in some hidden part of their lives like sheep, and to love them as such. In order to respond like that we have to learn to be less concerned about our reputation & more concerned about love. Jesus’ love is for the persecutors, the scandalized, the depressives, the traitors, the finger pointers, and for all those they are pointing fingers at. Jesus’ love will not be party to any final settling of accounts. It seeks desperately and insatiably for good and evil to participate in a wedding banquet. (James Alison, Raising Abel, p. 187-8) Once we see ourselves loved, we must come to know what our ultimate allegiances are in the midst of fear: the values of not causing fear or terror or exclusion to keep us from practicing wisdom, justice, and what is right; to embody those values in our personal lives and find ways in our community of faith to embody them the way Jesus embodied them.
Dorothee Soelle was a German theologian who taught for a long time at Union Theological Seminary in New York. She tells a story that paints a contemporary picture of what this looks like. She was walking by a construction site in New York City one day & asked a construction worker, “Sir, excuse me, do you happen to know what time it is?” He said, in a kind of good-humored mockery back, “Am I Jesus, lady?” She said his answer was so strange that at that time she was completely speechless. But she writes that she has not been able to get his question out of her mind. “Am I Jesus, lady?”
For this worker, she reasons, Jesus is from another world. Jesus is a heavenly being who has nothing to do with you & me, who sees, hears, knows and can do everything, but is removed from us. The churchy language which has called him Messiah, Lord, Son of God, and the Christ really has had an effect to remove us from Jesus. “That’s what you get,” she says, “when you make Jesus into an unreachable, completely other superman, indeed, into God – a Sunday outing of the heavenly being who stopped by for a short visit in Bethlehem.”
She continues, “When I was a young teacher of religion, I once asked the schoolchildren whether they thought the baby Jesus also had wet diapers.” She says, “Most children rejected that decisively.” Jesus, already as the Christ child, must be different and higher & purer. “But that,” she continues to reflect, “draws Jesus away from this world and above all, it tells us that we cannot live as Jesus lived. We shouldn’t even try because it is impossible anyway. I mean, after all, how would we ever manage to feed the hungry? We don’t have more than five loaves and two fishes. How would we ever manage not to serve the industry of death? How would we manage to heal the sick?” “Are we Jesus, lady?”
Then she concludes, “Today I would answer the worker at the construction site a little more openly and I would take the initiative. I would say, ‘Yes, you are Jesus, man – what else would you want to make of your life?’ Being yourself, alone, isn’t sufficient; you know that already. You, too, are born and have come into the world to witness to the truth. So don’t make yourself smaller than you really are. Just imagine, you are Jesus and I am Jesus and your mother-in-law is Jesus and your boss is Jesus. We, together, are Jesus. And if we are Jesus, what would change? There is something in every one of us of God.” Then she closes with a poem, quoting a poem:
If Christ is born a thousand timesSo to the question, “Am I Jesus, lady?” The answer can only be “Yes, shouldn’t I be?” (Dorothee Soelle, Theology For Skeptics: Reflections on God, p. 88)
In Bethlehem and not in you,
You remain still eternally lost.
November 26, 2007
18 de noviembre de 2007 - Una espiritualidad para tiempos de crisis - Alberto Moke
MP3 File
Mi primera reacción cuando Frank me confirmo que quería que predicara hoy, fue de temor. Temor a que mis emociones le ganaran a mi cerebro y quedarme atascado sin poder decir nada. Pero después sentí que tenía que hacerlo, sacar fuerzas para compartir lo mucho que ha significado para nosotros el haber servido en Immanuel. Recuerdo que lo que motivo a quedarme en Immanuel hace cinco anos, era servir a una comunidad hispana que buscaba sobrevivir en la búsqueda de una mejor vida, mas llena de esperanza. Clelia y yo hemos conversado varias veces que en más de 30 anos de ministerio, nunca habíamos conocido una comunidad tan genuina y real y por esa razón tan bella. Creo que no hace falta decirles que ustedes han marcado profundamente nuestros corazones y nos van a hacer mucha falta. Les amamos con todo nuestro corazón.
Mi otro temor era escoger un tema que fuera relevante. Escogí este pasaje porque es uno en el que he reflexionado en más de una ocasión y me ha servido para reafirmar mi convicción de que en nuestra jornada de fe Dios ha estado siempre presente, saliéndonos al encuentro, bloqueándonos y haciéndonos cambiar de rumbo, y desafiándonos a caminar en senderos nuevos que solo El conoce. También porque ante la necesidad de buscar nuevos modelos de liderazgo nos ayuda a reconocer criterios para la selección de un liderazgo centrado en la voluntad de Dios.
La historia nos suena conocida. Una comunidad multicultural luchando, como Immanuel, por atender los problemas propios de una comunidad diversa, que necesitaba crecer y descubrir nuevas fronteras en su jornada de fe.
Es la historia que leímos. En una de las sinagogas compuesta por judíos que hablaban griego, había la queja de que a sus viudas les daban menos atención que a las viudas que hablaban hebreo y arameo del grupo dominante al que pertenecían los apóstoles. Tal vez no era la intención, pero el impacto del grupo es que estaban siendo discriminados.
Los apóstoles no se pusieron a la defensiva cuestionando las motivaciones de los que expresaron sus quejas sino que buscaron una solución administrativa que daba prioridad a la inmediatez de la necesidad humana sin caer en separaciones innecesarias entre lo material y lo espiritual. Todo lo contrario la historia nos da luces para un modelo de espiritualidad integral que toma en cuenta la totalidad de la vida.
Cuando vemos la historia de manera más completa nos damos cuenta que este incidente, tal vez insignificante para algunos estaba enmarcado en una realidad mucho más amplia y era la necesidad de que el alcance de la gracia de Dios se extendiera a una familia mucho más grande que el pueblo judío.
No hay dudas de que Dios estaba en medio de su pueblo, como lo esta también hoy con nosotros. ¿Cuantos dicen amén? Dígale a su hermana o amigo que esta a su lado: Dios esta con nosotros! Dios estaba con los apóstoles, estaba con los judíos que estaban en el poder y también con los que se sentían marginados. Estaba presente y reinaba en medio de las situaciones mas tensas. Hoy nosotros somos parte de ese pueblo tan especial al que pertenecemos por la gracia de Dios, pero ese privilegio tan grande no ocurrió sin que se tuvieran que vencer obstáculos, derribar muros y sin que un grupo de lideres comprometidos estuvieran dispuestos a morir por causa de Cristo y el nuevo reino de paz que el estaba inaugurando.
Es fácil hacer teología mirando para atrás para discernir donde ha estado Dios. Hoy damos gracias porque nosotros, quienes antes estábamos al margen ahora nos podemos sentar a la mesa, antes no éramos nadie. Ahora somos linaje escogido, ahora somos hijos. Ahora somos reyes y sacerdotes. Pero tenemos que admitir que el camino ancho por el que hoy caminamos fue antes un camino angosto en el que se dieron luchas, que hubo gente que se comprometió a vivir las demandas del nuevo reino hasta las últimas consecuencias.
Menos fácil es hacer teología en el camino, como tenemos que hacerlo nosotros hoy porque no existe la referencia de la historia y el único recurso que tenemos es la guía del Espíritu Santo, que nos corrige, y nos ayuda a enderezar nuestras sendas.
Es por eso que en momentos de crisis y dificultades necesitamos de una espiritualidad que nos coloque en el centro de la voluntad de Dios, que nos ayude a examinar nuestras motivaciones mas profundas y nos aleje de la tentación del poder, la arrogancia y el triunfalismo. Es necesaria una espiritualidad de reconozca y valore la sabiduría de la comunidad. Nos dice Lucas en el verso 2: “Los doce apóstoles reunieron a todos los creyentes y les dijeron: no esta bien que nosotros dejemos de anunciar el evangelio de Dios para dedicarnos a la administración. Por eso, busquen entre ustedes siete hombres y mujeres de confianza, entendidos y llenos del Espíritu Santo, para que les encarguemos estos trabajos.”.
Necesitamos una espiritualidad que nos invite a la acción. Es hora de actuar, mi querido hermano y hermana. Es urgente atender a las viudas, a los huérfanos, a los inmigrantes indocumentados, a los que están al margen por su condición social, a los que son menospreciado por su situación económica, por su situación mental o emocional, a los que han vivido al margen de la ley, los marginados por su orientación sexual, los mas vulnerables a ser abusados, los niños, los discapacitados, las personas de la tercera edad, los que por largos anos han vivido esclavos del vicio y de todo tipo de adicción. Dios nos llama a actuar, sirviendo las mesas, atendiéndolos, dándoles nuestro tiempo y nuestra amistad, proveyéndoles cuidado pastoral. No, esa no es solamente tarea de los pastores ordenados, es tarea tuya como miembro de la comunidad que ya fuiste llamado y ordenado en el momento en que fuiste bautizado.
EN VEZ DE REACCIONAR LOS APOSTOLES DECIDIERON ACTUAR: “AYUDEN A ESCOGER LIDERES QUE ESTEN DISPUESTOS A SERVIR DIRIGIDOS POR EL ESPIRITU SANTO”
Hay una sociedad que necesita de una comunidad sanadora, una comunidad que proclame las buenas noticias de Dios esta vivo y esta en medio de los sufrimientos de su pueblo y quiere que nosotros seamos las luces que los guíen en medio de las tinieblas.
El viernes en la noche un grupo de hermanos y hermanas de Immanuel fuimos a consolar a un grupo de personas que realizaban una vigilia por un joven que fue abaleado por las pandillas. Como comento el pastor Howard Dotson, de la iglesia First Congregational, tanto la víctima como los miembros de la pandilla es muy probable que hubieran sido bautizados en una iglesia cristiana. Para muchos de ellos el barrio y la pandilla eran su iglesia. En muchos sentidos esto es cierto porque Dios y por ende la iglesia está presente donde está la pobreza y el sufrimiento humano. ¿No será que es esta uno de las grupos que desatendemos como solemos desatender a las viudas, niños y discapacitados que no se pueden valer por si mismos?
Hay muchas otras mesas que necesitan ser atendidas por líderes llenos del Espíritu Santo que estén dispuestos a ser agentes transformadores de una sociedad que ya no quiere escucharnos reflexionar sino ver modelos de vidas comprometidas, guiadas por el Espíritu Santo, marcadas por el amor incondicional que emana de sus poros, por los dones de hospitalidad, por la sabiduría que sale de sus labios y por la disposición de vivir la fe hasta las ultimas consecuencias, aun participando de los sufrimientos por causa del reino.
Ojalá que nuestros pastores continúen enfocándose, como los apóstoles, en el ministerio espiritual, la proclamación, la ensenadaza y en el infinito poder de la oración. Y ojala que las diferentes comunidades y culturas que son parte de Immanuel acepten el desafió de ser una iglesia movida por lideres de base cuya única motivación es ser agentes transformadores de una sociedad que quiere conocer a Dios en vidas ejemplares.
Por lo demás hermanos y hermanos corramos la carrera convencidos de que “ni la muerte ni la vida, ni los ángeles ni los demonios, ni lo presente ni lo por venir, ni los poderes, ni lo alto ni lo profundo, ni cosa alguna en toda la creación, podrá apartarnos del amor que Dios nos ha manifestado en Cristo Jesús nuestro Señor (Romanos 8:37-39)
November 20, 2007
November 16, 2007
11 de noviembre de 2007 - Los riesgos de la fe - Abel Lopez
Hebreos 11:1-10; 39-40; San Juan 20:1, 11-18
MP3 File
Hace dos semanas atrás, el líder espiritual de ustedes, Frank Alton, me tomo por sorpresa cuando me pidió que viniera a predicar esta mañana. Yo pensé, Frank, ¿No te basta que ya te preste a Jonathan, uno de mis mejores músicos y ahora quiere llevarme a mi también? Frank se echo a reír, parece que me leyó el pensamiento. Yo le dije, esta bien, pero con una condición. Yo tengo que traer conmigo a Dan Cole, mi Director de Música. Excelente! Me dijo Frank, Ahora son dos los que me llevo! Yo no tenia ni la menor idea de que los músicos de Emmanuel y de Todos los Santos iban a guiarnos en nuestro servicio de adoración con una música tan maravillosa. Por favor, démosle un aplauso por sus talentos y su dedicación al ministerio.
Frank y yo somos amigos desde hace ya varios años. Cuando a mí me fueron a ordenar como Sacerdote Episcopal, mi Obispo estaba buscando una Iglesia bien grande para que cupiéramos todos y Frank no dudó un segundo en ofrecer esta Iglesia. Es aquí donde yo fui ordenado y es un gozo muy profundo y conmovedor el poder predicar en este lugar donde un buen día mi vida fue transformada para siempre.
Hace algunos años atrás yo fui parte de un grupo de trabajo que nos pusimos a explorar el uso de un lenguaje e imágenes de Dios más inclusive. Este grupo de trabajo se puso a buscar entre las pocas mujeres en el Nuevo Testamento, hasta que encontramos a Maria Magdalena, una líder y discípula fiel que apoyo el ministerio de Jesús y quien permaneció en la cruz después que otros huyeron. Ella también fue la primera en encontrarse con el Cristo resucitado. Y su historia tiene mucho que enseñarnos sobre la fe, y especialmente cuando como pueblo de Dios, atravesamos momentos de incertidumbre y desconfianza.
La historia de la resurrección según San Juan comienza con estas palabras: “Temprano en el primer día de la semana, mientras aún estaba oscuro, Maria Magdalena vino a la tumba.” (repetir)
Maria Magdalena era una persona poco común. La Biblia nos dice que tenia siete demonios, pero Maria conoció a alguien llamado, Jesús. Ellos fueron compañeros en el ministerio, pero algo sucedió en la vida de Maria. Algo de lo que ella nunca pudo olvidarse. Algo maravilloso y transformador, algo que la cambió por completo. Algo que la elevó y la llevó a convertirse en lo que Dios siempre había deseado para ella. Y entonces ella se acercó a ese Jesús y se quedo junto a él y le fue fiel a ese Jesús y a su mensaje y a sus enseñanzas y a su espíritu, AUN, cuando otros lo abandonaron y huyeron en otra dirección. Yo quiero hablar de Maria porque cuando otros abandonaron a Jesús, Maria Magdalena fue la única que le siguió con su fe.
Temprano en el primer día de la semana, mientras aún estaba oscuro, Maria Magdalena fue a la tumba. Maria parecía estar siempre en desacuerdo, y no al mismo paso que los otros discípulos de Jesús. Ellos iban en una dirección y ella se iba en otra dirección.
Eso me hace recordar las palabras de Henry David cuando dice: Si alguien no mantiene el mismo compás que sus compañeros, es porque quizás esa persona esta escuchando un ritmo diferente. Yo quiero sugerir que Maria estaba escuchando un ritmo diferente. Maria no marcaba los mismos pasos que los otros discípulos, pero si marcaba los mismos pasos del maestro de los discípulos. Maria es alguien que marchaba al toque de un tambor diferente.
Maria era alguien que respondió a un llamado más profundo y que respondió al llamado de Jesús de amar a sus enemigos; bendecir a quienes los maldigan, orar por los que les persiguen. Maria sabia como mantener su fe en medio de las dificultades!
Cuando examinamos cuidadosamente el texto nos damos cuenta que Juan esta tratando de decirnos algo aquí. Escuchen las palabras del texto nuevamente, Juan dice: “Temprano en el primer día de la semana, mientras aún estaba oscuro.”
Si tomamos Juan 20 y lo ponemos al lado de Mateo, Marcos y Lucas y miramos como cada uno de ellos describe lo que sucedió en la mañana de la Resurrección nos resultará muy interesante.
Marcos dice: “Muy temprano en el primer cuando había amanecido.”
Mateo dice: “ En el primer día de la semana cuando amanecía.”
Lucas dice: “ Muy temprano al amanecer.”
Pero Juan dice: Temprano en el primer día de la semana, mientras aún estaba oscuro.”
Okay, O Juan estaba medio dormido o es sonámbulo o simplemente no sabe la diferencia entre el amanecer y el oscurecer o acaso Juan está tratando de decirnos otra cosa aquí?
En el Evangelio de Juan, la luz y la oscuridad, el día y la noche son formas que Juan utiliza para hablar de las potestades de mal. La oscuridad es una palabra que usa para hablar de un tiempo de confusiones, es una forma de referirse a las adversidades y a los tiempos difíciles. Es por eso que cuando Juan describe la misión de Dios en el mundo, Juan dice: “La luz resplandece en las tinieblas y las tinieblas no pueden dominarla.” Es en el evangelio de Juan que Jesús dice: “Yo soy la luz del mundo; quien me sigue no andará en tinieblas, sino que tendrá la luz de la vida.”Oh! ya entiendo, ya entiendo!
Temprano en el primer día de la semana, cuando aún estaba oscuro, Maria vino a la tumba. En medio de la confusión y la desolación, Maria Magdalena tiene un mensaje ¡Cristo vive! Mis hermanos y mis hermanas, mantengan la fe!
Tener fe significa que cuando enfrentemos las tinieblas y las incertidumbres del futuro creamos que el amor y el poder de Dios nos acompaña hasta cruzar al otro lado de las dificultades. Cuando nos encontremos cerca de nuestra propia tumba- como todos hemos de encontrarnos algún día; cuando nos sentimos inseguros y desalentados y todo en la vida nos parece salir mal, cuando nuestra comunidad enfrenta dificultades y dudas, Maria Magdalena tiene un mensaje para ustedes: ¡Mantengan la fe! Porque ¡Jesús vive!
Mis hermanos y hermanas Maria Magdalena nos ofrece un modelo de liderazgo en medio de las dificultades. Existen dos tipos de personas en el mundo. Un tipo dice: Yo creeré cuando lo vea.” Pero el otro grupo dice: Yo lo creo porque ya lo veo.”
Yo creo que nada sucede en este mundo y en esta Iglesia sin que haya alguien que de un paso al frente y diga: Yo tengo una visión diferente a como son las cosas hoy en día, en el mundo y en mi iglesia. Yo voy a dar mi vida, mis recursos, mis energías para hacer esa visión una realidad. Yo no voy a esperar a verlo para creerlo, yo voy a crearlo porque ya lo veo. Esa es la característica distintiva que hace a un líder tener una visión. Proverbios 29:18 nos dice: “ Donde no hay una visión, la gente perece.”
Hay una historia de un trapecista que iba cruzar la cuerda floja a través de Las Cataratas del Niágara. El avisó a todos que iba a cruzar las cataratas y gente de todos lugares vino a verlo. El tomó su barra de equilibrio y mientras se preparaba para cruzar le grito a la multitud: ¿Ustedes creen que yo puedo cruzar las cataratas? ¿De veras que lo creen?
Ellos respondieron: ¡Si creemos, si creemos!
El trapecista toma la barra en sus manos y cruza las cataratas y regresa. Y ellos respondieron : Bravo, bravo, bravo!
Entonces les dijo: ¿Ustedes creen que yo pueda cruzar las cataratas empujando una carretilla?
¡Claro que si, claro que si, si creemos!
Entonces el trapecista tomó la carretilla, cruza las cataratas y regresa nuevamente.
Y ellos respondieron: Bravo, bravo, bravo!
Una ves más el trapecista les dice: ¿ Ustedes creen que yo puedo cruzar las cataratas, empujando una carretilla pero esta ves con los ojos cubiertos?
Ellos dijeron: ¡Claro que si creemos, ándele pues!
El trapecista se cubre los ojos, empuja la carretilla y cruza las cataratas y regresa nuevamente. Y ellos estaban asombrados: Bravo, bravo, bravo!
Entonces el trapecista les dice: Ahora pues, ¿Ustedes creen que yo puedo empujar la carretilla con los ojos cubiertos y con alguien sentado en la carretilla?
¡Claro que si, por supuesto que lo creemos. ¿De veras creen que yo puedo hacerlo?
¡Claro que si, claro que lo creemos ¿De veras que lo creen?
Si, si lo creemos
Entonces les dijo: ¿Quién se ofrece como voluntario?
¡Mis hermanos y mis hermanas nosotros estamos reunidos aquí hoy porque nos atrevimos a seguir a Maria Magdalena en la carretilla! Maria Magdalena fue esa voluntaria que por su tremenda fe regresó con el mensaje de que Jesús vive aun cuando otros huyeron. Y es por ella y por gente como ella de profunda fe aquí en esta congregación y que no se dan por vencidos antes las dificultades, que nosotros todos podemos gritar hoy, bravo, bravo, el Señor ha resucitado! ¡Aleluya! Mis hermanos y mis hermanas, mantengan la fe! mantengan la fe! Jesús vive! Y esta congregación vivirá! Amen.
MP3 File
Hace dos semanas atrás, el líder espiritual de ustedes, Frank Alton, me tomo por sorpresa cuando me pidió que viniera a predicar esta mañana. Yo pensé, Frank, ¿No te basta que ya te preste a Jonathan, uno de mis mejores músicos y ahora quiere llevarme a mi también? Frank se echo a reír, parece que me leyó el pensamiento. Yo le dije, esta bien, pero con una condición. Yo tengo que traer conmigo a Dan Cole, mi Director de Música. Excelente! Me dijo Frank, Ahora son dos los que me llevo! Yo no tenia ni la menor idea de que los músicos de Emmanuel y de Todos los Santos iban a guiarnos en nuestro servicio de adoración con una música tan maravillosa. Por favor, démosle un aplauso por sus talentos y su dedicación al ministerio.
Frank y yo somos amigos desde hace ya varios años. Cuando a mí me fueron a ordenar como Sacerdote Episcopal, mi Obispo estaba buscando una Iglesia bien grande para que cupiéramos todos y Frank no dudó un segundo en ofrecer esta Iglesia. Es aquí donde yo fui ordenado y es un gozo muy profundo y conmovedor el poder predicar en este lugar donde un buen día mi vida fue transformada para siempre.
Hace algunos años atrás yo fui parte de un grupo de trabajo que nos pusimos a explorar el uso de un lenguaje e imágenes de Dios más inclusive. Este grupo de trabajo se puso a buscar entre las pocas mujeres en el Nuevo Testamento, hasta que encontramos a Maria Magdalena, una líder y discípula fiel que apoyo el ministerio de Jesús y quien permaneció en la cruz después que otros huyeron. Ella también fue la primera en encontrarse con el Cristo resucitado. Y su historia tiene mucho que enseñarnos sobre la fe, y especialmente cuando como pueblo de Dios, atravesamos momentos de incertidumbre y desconfianza.
La historia de la resurrección según San Juan comienza con estas palabras: “Temprano en el primer día de la semana, mientras aún estaba oscuro, Maria Magdalena vino a la tumba.” (repetir)
Maria Magdalena era una persona poco común. La Biblia nos dice que tenia siete demonios, pero Maria conoció a alguien llamado, Jesús. Ellos fueron compañeros en el ministerio, pero algo sucedió en la vida de Maria. Algo de lo que ella nunca pudo olvidarse. Algo maravilloso y transformador, algo que la cambió por completo. Algo que la elevó y la llevó a convertirse en lo que Dios siempre había deseado para ella. Y entonces ella se acercó a ese Jesús y se quedo junto a él y le fue fiel a ese Jesús y a su mensaje y a sus enseñanzas y a su espíritu, AUN, cuando otros lo abandonaron y huyeron en otra dirección. Yo quiero hablar de Maria porque cuando otros abandonaron a Jesús, Maria Magdalena fue la única que le siguió con su fe.
Temprano en el primer día de la semana, mientras aún estaba oscuro, Maria Magdalena fue a la tumba. Maria parecía estar siempre en desacuerdo, y no al mismo paso que los otros discípulos de Jesús. Ellos iban en una dirección y ella se iba en otra dirección.
Eso me hace recordar las palabras de Henry David cuando dice: Si alguien no mantiene el mismo compás que sus compañeros, es porque quizás esa persona esta escuchando un ritmo diferente. Yo quiero sugerir que Maria estaba escuchando un ritmo diferente. Maria no marcaba los mismos pasos que los otros discípulos, pero si marcaba los mismos pasos del maestro de los discípulos. Maria es alguien que marchaba al toque de un tambor diferente.
Maria era alguien que respondió a un llamado más profundo y que respondió al llamado de Jesús de amar a sus enemigos; bendecir a quienes los maldigan, orar por los que les persiguen. Maria sabia como mantener su fe en medio de las dificultades!
Cuando examinamos cuidadosamente el texto nos damos cuenta que Juan esta tratando de decirnos algo aquí. Escuchen las palabras del texto nuevamente, Juan dice: “Temprano en el primer día de la semana, mientras aún estaba oscuro.”
Si tomamos Juan 20 y lo ponemos al lado de Mateo, Marcos y Lucas y miramos como cada uno de ellos describe lo que sucedió en la mañana de la Resurrección nos resultará muy interesante.
Marcos dice: “Muy temprano en el primer cuando había amanecido.”
Mateo dice: “ En el primer día de la semana cuando amanecía.”
Lucas dice: “ Muy temprano al amanecer.”
Pero Juan dice: Temprano en el primer día de la semana, mientras aún estaba oscuro.”
Okay, O Juan estaba medio dormido o es sonámbulo o simplemente no sabe la diferencia entre el amanecer y el oscurecer o acaso Juan está tratando de decirnos otra cosa aquí?
En el Evangelio de Juan, la luz y la oscuridad, el día y la noche son formas que Juan utiliza para hablar de las potestades de mal. La oscuridad es una palabra que usa para hablar de un tiempo de confusiones, es una forma de referirse a las adversidades y a los tiempos difíciles. Es por eso que cuando Juan describe la misión de Dios en el mundo, Juan dice: “La luz resplandece en las tinieblas y las tinieblas no pueden dominarla.” Es en el evangelio de Juan que Jesús dice: “Yo soy la luz del mundo; quien me sigue no andará en tinieblas, sino que tendrá la luz de la vida.”Oh! ya entiendo, ya entiendo!
Temprano en el primer día de la semana, cuando aún estaba oscuro, Maria vino a la tumba. En medio de la confusión y la desolación, Maria Magdalena tiene un mensaje ¡Cristo vive! Mis hermanos y mis hermanas, mantengan la fe!
Tener fe significa que cuando enfrentemos las tinieblas y las incertidumbres del futuro creamos que el amor y el poder de Dios nos acompaña hasta cruzar al otro lado de las dificultades. Cuando nos encontremos cerca de nuestra propia tumba- como todos hemos de encontrarnos algún día; cuando nos sentimos inseguros y desalentados y todo en la vida nos parece salir mal, cuando nuestra comunidad enfrenta dificultades y dudas, Maria Magdalena tiene un mensaje para ustedes: ¡Mantengan la fe! Porque ¡Jesús vive!
Mis hermanos y hermanas Maria Magdalena nos ofrece un modelo de liderazgo en medio de las dificultades. Existen dos tipos de personas en el mundo. Un tipo dice: Yo creeré cuando lo vea.” Pero el otro grupo dice: Yo lo creo porque ya lo veo.”
Yo creo que nada sucede en este mundo y en esta Iglesia sin que haya alguien que de un paso al frente y diga: Yo tengo una visión diferente a como son las cosas hoy en día, en el mundo y en mi iglesia. Yo voy a dar mi vida, mis recursos, mis energías para hacer esa visión una realidad. Yo no voy a esperar a verlo para creerlo, yo voy a crearlo porque ya lo veo. Esa es la característica distintiva que hace a un líder tener una visión. Proverbios 29:18 nos dice: “ Donde no hay una visión, la gente perece.”
Hay una historia de un trapecista que iba cruzar la cuerda floja a través de Las Cataratas del Niágara. El avisó a todos que iba a cruzar las cataratas y gente de todos lugares vino a verlo. El tomó su barra de equilibrio y mientras se preparaba para cruzar le grito a la multitud: ¿Ustedes creen que yo puedo cruzar las cataratas? ¿De veras que lo creen?
Ellos respondieron: ¡Si creemos, si creemos!
El trapecista toma la barra en sus manos y cruza las cataratas y regresa. Y ellos respondieron : Bravo, bravo, bravo!
Entonces les dijo: ¿Ustedes creen que yo pueda cruzar las cataratas empujando una carretilla?
¡Claro que si, claro que si, si creemos!
Entonces el trapecista tomó la carretilla, cruza las cataratas y regresa nuevamente.
Y ellos respondieron: Bravo, bravo, bravo!
Una ves más el trapecista les dice: ¿ Ustedes creen que yo puedo cruzar las cataratas, empujando una carretilla pero esta ves con los ojos cubiertos?
Ellos dijeron: ¡Claro que si creemos, ándele pues!
El trapecista se cubre los ojos, empuja la carretilla y cruza las cataratas y regresa nuevamente. Y ellos estaban asombrados: Bravo, bravo, bravo!
Entonces el trapecista les dice: Ahora pues, ¿Ustedes creen que yo puedo empujar la carretilla con los ojos cubiertos y con alguien sentado en la carretilla?
¡Claro que si, por supuesto que lo creemos. ¿De veras creen que yo puedo hacerlo?
¡Claro que si, claro que lo creemos ¿De veras que lo creen?
Si, si lo creemos
Entonces les dijo: ¿Quién se ofrece como voluntario?
¡Mis hermanos y mis hermanas nosotros estamos reunidos aquí hoy porque nos atrevimos a seguir a Maria Magdalena en la carretilla! Maria Magdalena fue esa voluntaria que por su tremenda fe regresó con el mensaje de que Jesús vive aun cuando otros huyeron. Y es por ella y por gente como ella de profunda fe aquí en esta congregación y que no se dan por vencidos antes las dificultades, que nosotros todos podemos gritar hoy, bravo, bravo, el Señor ha resucitado! ¡Aleluya! Mis hermanos y mis hermanas, mantengan la fe! mantengan la fe! Jesús vive! Y esta congregación vivirá! Amen.
November 11, 2007 - Elizabeth Gibbs Zehnder
Luke 20:27-38
MP3 File
Airport watching
My favorite thing about traveling is the airport experience. I love watching the people - Sitting waiting at the gate, observing the stories that unfold around me. Things that when they happen to me in my life totally hook me, are just interesting when they happen at the gate – screaming kid, kicking on the floor – I give a compassionate smile to the mother, husband who didn’t pack the travel snacks, go figure. Passenger going for it with the airline representative at the counter, raising his voice, belittling the employee – its an interesting study in power dynamics. This passage is a little bit like the airport for me. Its like walking in on someone else’s argument. Sadducees, one bride, seven brothers, resurrection day….We need to know more of the back story before we can feel the impact of the Jesus’ exchange.
One bride for seven brothers. Its just a wacky idea. Even in its 1st century context it was an exaggeration, but not as strange as it sounds to us. The Levirate marriage was a way of ensuring the family line continued. It provided protection for women. We need to understand, we are talking about a male-dominated society and marriage was a crucial element in maintaining continuity. The family was the center of relational, economic and social stability. The women’s role was to bear the children to perpetuate her husband’s family. If she was widowed, without kids, the Levirate plan “B” was for her to marry her dead husband’s brother. This created the possibility that her husband’s family line would continue and that she would have economic and social shelter. So, to the ears of the crowd gathered in the temple courts that day, the concept of a widow marrying her brother-in-law was pretty neutral, and playing out that she would marry all seven brothers was mocking of Jesus.
Jesus is a hick
So Luke tells us Jesus is out teaching and preaching in the temple courts. This was the market place of theological thought. Remember his accent, his clothes, his hair all give away the fact that he’s from the backwater town of Nazareth – this a detail not lost on the sophisticated urban crowd in Jerusalem. He is interacting with the various religious leaders and groups of the day.
Pharisees – pro-resurrection
The Pharisees were one of the key forces. They believed that it was good to interpret and extrapolate meaning from the Torah. In keeping with that they believed in the resurrection of the dead.
Sadducees – urban sophisticates
The Sadducees were in reaction with the Pharisees. The Sadducees seem to have been one of the more culturally sophisticated movements of their time[1]. Their followers were often the leading priestly families and the aristocracy. The Sadducees were more conservative than the Pharisees. They argued for literal interpretations of the scripture and rejected what they saw as Pharisaic speculation on the unknowable. (Let me share a little seminary secret – you can keep them straight because they were “sad you see” because they didn’t believe in an afterlife Sadducees).
Sadducees meet Jesus – resurrection signature issue
So today’s text finds the Sadducees approaching Jesus where he is teaching in the Temple courts. Strutting their intellectual stuff and this is their signature issue. We’ve all been in on these kinds of conversations. Some one with formal education and razor sharp intellect constructs a water tight argument, then they seal the deal with a question that you’d be a fool to answer in any way other than the way they want you to – you don’t think that we should leave a child behind do you? It seems as though the Sadducees are out for sport, some theological ping pong. Certainly more eager to prove their point and underscore their influence than anything else.
Jesus’ response is interesting – at the onset it is surprisingly flat. We can imagine the crowd wondering what he would do, doesn’t he understand what is at stake? would he fold or put up a fight? Who will this woman belong to in the resurrection? – what kind of a question is that! Jesus is thinking – There is no right answer to a wrong question!
Karl Barth (a reformed theologian from Switzerland) said “the Bible gives to every person and to every era such answers to their questions as they deserve. We shall always find in it as much as we seek and no more”[2] Anytime that we “use” God or the church or a point of view to determine winners and losers or to prove that we are better than others, we become participants in deadly game, life without God. We’re just batting around a ping pong ball, keeping our own score.
Some questions belong to the people who are truly famished for an answer. The question of what lies on the other side of death is one of them. It’s the people who admit to knowing crushing defeat, whose dignity and certainty have been deconstructed – these are the people who can begin to know the landscape of a dark world which only makes sense if Christ is raised.[3]
Paul Duke shares some great insights on this question. He points out that other people we read about in the Bible get a very different answer from Jesus to the resurrection question. Jesus tells Martha in her hour of grasping for hope at her brother’s grave – I am the resurrection.
To Mary Magdalene, blinded by tears outside another grave, Jesus gave the ultimate answer of her own name spoken from the other side of death.
When we ask the question with earnest tears in the shadow of death, we may hear our name for the answer. When we inquire about resurrection as though we are counting on the response to establish us as the most insightful and progressive Christians in the room, the answer we get may fall flat on our ears and we may wonder about whether the question was heard.
Jesus, in his compassion, does give the Sadducees a response. He turns their fool-proof argument inside out and lays out how they have missed the boat.
Jesus responds that there is an age that follows this one. And in the age to come we enter into God’s presence in a profound way. He invokes Moses encountering the burning bush. After he peers over the sand dune, Moses realizes that the moment has shifted from everyday to extraordinary and he pulls off his shoes because its all that he can think to do to respond to the fact that that the ground which he is standing on is holy. His face is flushed from the heat as the bush burns brightly and refuses to be consumed.
As Michael Pasquarello points out in his blog, Moses isn’t given answers to his questions or solutions to his problems. Instead, he finds himself standing in the presence of the God of Sarah and Abraham, the God of Rebecca and Isaac, the God of Leah and Rachel and Jacob – the God of the living.
In the age to come, Jesus explains, things work out differently in terms of relationship. Its no longer about having children to added to your credit, but being God’s children. Its no longer about establishing and preserving a position or a network of security and power, but being in God’s presence.
So maybe we don’t personally run into many Sadducees when we go to the Temple courts. After reading this text, I feel prepared to put them in their place if I run in to any.
Chances are, God will catch us just like Moses, unaware, going about our business. One minute 4 year old Eva’s telling me all about the pizza they had for lunch at school and then she’s asking “Where is Fuzzy Grandpa? Nana misses him…Where did he go when he died?
So I take a breath, pushing away the distraction of trying to preserve my position of power, I kneel down on the holy ground that has opened up next to her and gently lay out my hope for the life to come. She nods her assent and requests cheese sticks for a snack. The flames recede, the bush is just a bush again.
In terms of now, this afternoon, the week that lies before us I find that God is inviting us into deeper relationship.
God is inviting us to lay down our ping pong paddles, to set aside our needs to prove our points and protect our position.
God invites us to be vulnerable and earnest in our seeking.
Because as much as we are earnest, as much as we are vulnerable in our desire to know more of God, so too will God respond with the fullest of measures.
God promises to meet us in the shadows of our grief, the valleys of our doubt, the darkness of our night.
God meets us there with the Good News of resurrection and new life.
In the age to come, for sure and now.
Amen.
MP3 File
Airport watching
My favorite thing about traveling is the airport experience. I love watching the people - Sitting waiting at the gate, observing the stories that unfold around me. Things that when they happen to me in my life totally hook me, are just interesting when they happen at the gate – screaming kid, kicking on the floor – I give a compassionate smile to the mother, husband who didn’t pack the travel snacks, go figure. Passenger going for it with the airline representative at the counter, raising his voice, belittling the employee – its an interesting study in power dynamics. This passage is a little bit like the airport for me. Its like walking in on someone else’s argument. Sadducees, one bride, seven brothers, resurrection day….We need to know more of the back story before we can feel the impact of the Jesus’ exchange.
One bride for seven brothers. Its just a wacky idea. Even in its 1st century context it was an exaggeration, but not as strange as it sounds to us. The Levirate marriage was a way of ensuring the family line continued. It provided protection for women. We need to understand, we are talking about a male-dominated society and marriage was a crucial element in maintaining continuity. The family was the center of relational, economic and social stability. The women’s role was to bear the children to perpetuate her husband’s family. If she was widowed, without kids, the Levirate plan “B” was for her to marry her dead husband’s brother. This created the possibility that her husband’s family line would continue and that she would have economic and social shelter. So, to the ears of the crowd gathered in the temple courts that day, the concept of a widow marrying her brother-in-law was pretty neutral, and playing out that she would marry all seven brothers was mocking of Jesus.
Jesus is a hick
So Luke tells us Jesus is out teaching and preaching in the temple courts. This was the market place of theological thought. Remember his accent, his clothes, his hair all give away the fact that he’s from the backwater town of Nazareth – this a detail not lost on the sophisticated urban crowd in Jerusalem. He is interacting with the various religious leaders and groups of the day.
Pharisees – pro-resurrection
The Pharisees were one of the key forces. They believed that it was good to interpret and extrapolate meaning from the Torah. In keeping with that they believed in the resurrection of the dead.
Sadducees – urban sophisticates
The Sadducees were in reaction with the Pharisees. The Sadducees seem to have been one of the more culturally sophisticated movements of their time[1]. Their followers were often the leading priestly families and the aristocracy. The Sadducees were more conservative than the Pharisees. They argued for literal interpretations of the scripture and rejected what they saw as Pharisaic speculation on the unknowable. (Let me share a little seminary secret – you can keep them straight because they were “sad you see” because they didn’t believe in an afterlife Sadducees).
Sadducees meet Jesus – resurrection signature issue
So today’s text finds the Sadducees approaching Jesus where he is teaching in the Temple courts. Strutting their intellectual stuff and this is their signature issue. We’ve all been in on these kinds of conversations. Some one with formal education and razor sharp intellect constructs a water tight argument, then they seal the deal with a question that you’d be a fool to answer in any way other than the way they want you to – you don’t think that we should leave a child behind do you? It seems as though the Sadducees are out for sport, some theological ping pong. Certainly more eager to prove their point and underscore their influence than anything else.
Jesus’ response is interesting – at the onset it is surprisingly flat. We can imagine the crowd wondering what he would do, doesn’t he understand what is at stake? would he fold or put up a fight? Who will this woman belong to in the resurrection? – what kind of a question is that! Jesus is thinking – There is no right answer to a wrong question!
Karl Barth (a reformed theologian from Switzerland) said “the Bible gives to every person and to every era such answers to their questions as they deserve. We shall always find in it as much as we seek and no more”[2] Anytime that we “use” God or the church or a point of view to determine winners and losers or to prove that we are better than others, we become participants in deadly game, life without God. We’re just batting around a ping pong ball, keeping our own score.
Some questions belong to the people who are truly famished for an answer. The question of what lies on the other side of death is one of them. It’s the people who admit to knowing crushing defeat, whose dignity and certainty have been deconstructed – these are the people who can begin to know the landscape of a dark world which only makes sense if Christ is raised.[3]
Paul Duke shares some great insights on this question. He points out that other people we read about in the Bible get a very different answer from Jesus to the resurrection question. Jesus tells Martha in her hour of grasping for hope at her brother’s grave – I am the resurrection.
To Mary Magdalene, blinded by tears outside another grave, Jesus gave the ultimate answer of her own name spoken from the other side of death.
When we ask the question with earnest tears in the shadow of death, we may hear our name for the answer. When we inquire about resurrection as though we are counting on the response to establish us as the most insightful and progressive Christians in the room, the answer we get may fall flat on our ears and we may wonder about whether the question was heard.
Jesus, in his compassion, does give the Sadducees a response. He turns their fool-proof argument inside out and lays out how they have missed the boat.
Jesus responds that there is an age that follows this one. And in the age to come we enter into God’s presence in a profound way. He invokes Moses encountering the burning bush. After he peers over the sand dune, Moses realizes that the moment has shifted from everyday to extraordinary and he pulls off his shoes because its all that he can think to do to respond to the fact that that the ground which he is standing on is holy. His face is flushed from the heat as the bush burns brightly and refuses to be consumed.
As Michael Pasquarello points out in his blog, Moses isn’t given answers to his questions or solutions to his problems. Instead, he finds himself standing in the presence of the God of Sarah and Abraham, the God of Rebecca and Isaac, the God of Leah and Rachel and Jacob – the God of the living.
In the age to come, Jesus explains, things work out differently in terms of relationship. Its no longer about having children to added to your credit, but being God’s children. Its no longer about establishing and preserving a position or a network of security and power, but being in God’s presence.
So maybe we don’t personally run into many Sadducees when we go to the Temple courts. After reading this text, I feel prepared to put them in their place if I run in to any.
Chances are, God will catch us just like Moses, unaware, going about our business. One minute 4 year old Eva’s telling me all about the pizza they had for lunch at school and then she’s asking “Where is Fuzzy Grandpa? Nana misses him…Where did he go when he died?
So I take a breath, pushing away the distraction of trying to preserve my position of power, I kneel down on the holy ground that has opened up next to her and gently lay out my hope for the life to come. She nods her assent and requests cheese sticks for a snack. The flames recede, the bush is just a bush again.
In terms of now, this afternoon, the week that lies before us I find that God is inviting us into deeper relationship.
God is inviting us to lay down our ping pong paddles, to set aside our needs to prove our points and protect our position.
God invites us to be vulnerable and earnest in our seeking.
Because as much as we are earnest, as much as we are vulnerable in our desire to know more of God, so too will God respond with the fullest of measures.
God promises to meet us in the shadows of our grief, the valleys of our doubt, the darkness of our night.
God meets us there with the Good News of resurrection and new life.
In the age to come, for sure and now.
Amen.
[1] First thoughts on Year C Gospel Passages from the Lectionary, Pentecost 24 – www.staff.murdoch.edu.au/-loader/lkpentecost24.htm
[2] Paul D. Duke, Transfigured relations – Live by the Word – Christian Century, October 25, 1995
[3] Carlyle Marney quoted by William Willimon, Paul Duke, Transfigured Relations
November 10, 2007
November 4, 2007 - Healing relationships with the deceased - Frank Alton
MP3 File
John 11:1, 7, 11, 14-15, 17, 20-22, 28-44
We come to the final sermon in this series on healing. I have wanted to create a frame for the center for healing we will be opening next year. Friday night a group of us met in Judy’s and my home to update each other on how the center is progressing. It was very encouraging. I want to keep the center before you as we prepare to open next spring.
This morning as we celebrate All Saints Sunday I want to speak to a dimension of healing we don’t often consider – healing our relationships with those who have died. In my experience, this kind of healing incorporates all the dimensions of healing we have addressed this past month – body, soul and spirit.
This area of life doesn’t come naturally to me, both because of my personality and because of my Protestant upbringing. Protestants stopped celebrating All Saints Day because it was associated with an understanding of the doctrine of the communion of Saints that included granting a special role to certain saints and asking their intercession for us. At the end of the Apostle’s Creed we say, “I believe in the communion of saints.” The meaning of that belief has varied greatly over the centuries, but it experienced a major transformation in the Protestant Reformation. Protestants rejected the idea that believers needed an intercessor between them and God besides Christ. In order to clarify that rejection, the reformers downplayed the role of saints who had passed on. It has only been in recent decades that the Presbyterian Church even includes a liturgy for All Saints Day in its Directory of Worship.
The first time I even thought about the doctrine of the communion of Saints was about 25 years ago when I was walking with one of my spiritual mentors in Lima, Peru. Father Henri Nouwen and I were through a Cathedral in downtown Lima when I asked him why Catholics prayed to the saints. He explained it with a logic that made sense to me. Christians ask each other to pray for them, and actually do that when they gather to pray. Christian belief also claims that those who die in Christ are actually alive in the spiritual realm, and that they are worshipping God. If that is true, it makes sense to ask Christians who have died to pray for us as well. While I never actually asked one of my ancestors to pray for me, I no longer saw the practice as silly.
It was not until both my parents had died and I started a phase of my healing journey that opened me to some new approaches to healing that I actually began to converse with those who had died. A significant moment in my healing journey came when I forgave my father – 24 years after he had died. The healing work happened at the levels of body, soul and spirit. Certain forms of body work were unblocking the spiritual energies that needed to flow through me. That happened in ways that I didn’t understand at all, but took on faith. In the midst of that I wrote a twelve page letter to my father, which I put in a wine bottle and tossed off the Venice pier. Finally, I carried on some dialogues with both my father and his father, whom I had never met. It was during one of those dialogues that I started weeping uncontrollably and realized that I finally understood my father, could accept his humanness, and forgive him for not being the perfect father. It helped that I had become a very imperfect father in the meantime.
That experience opened me to see all kinds of ways that unprocessed feelings with those who have died impact every aspect of our lives, from our physical and emotional wellbeing, to our ability to carry out our life work. To hold grudges against those who have died keeps us stuck in many ways. It blocks both emotional and physical healing. When we’ve been hurt by someone who is already dead it’s challenging to find healing from the wounds inflicted. I had an emotional healing through forgiving my father.
Dennis, Matthew and Sheila Linn tell a story about someone who experienced physical healing through a form of prayer that led to forgiving one who had died. They teach what they call the “Shoe Prayer” which is based on the Sioux prayer, “Great Spirit, grant that I may never criticize my neighbor until I have walked a mile in his moccasin.” At one retreat a man named Gereon participated in a shoe prayer. It turns out that in 1944 Adolph Hitler’s soldiers killed Gereon’s entire family. Gereon was so eager to take revenge that he became involved in three different plots to kill Hitler. 35 years later, Gereon still had not been able to forgive Hitler. During the shoe prayer he traded his right shoe with his neighbor and was astonished to receive a military boot just like Adolph Hitler’s.
As he tried to walk in Hitler’s shoe, he felt the tightness of that military boot. He tried to enter more deeply into Hitler, sitting like a soldier with his back as stiff as a rod and his feet stubbornly dug into the ground. As he became aware of the terrible constriction and rigidity of Hitler’s world, he was surprised to start feeling compassion. He realized that he was able to forgive Hitler for everything except his hardness of heart. But then he broke into tears as he realized that Hitler’s hard heart felt just like his own that for 35 years had been unable to forgive. By the end of the prayer Gereon had taken in enough of God’s healing love for his own hard-ness of heart that he could offer it even to Hitler. But it was only as he bent down to remove the military boot and return it to his neighbor that he realized that for the first time in 35 years he could bend over without the ever present sharp pain in his back. He had literally taken Hitler off his back & received a physical healing.
Forgiveness isn’t the only kind of healing available to us. Last Wednesday evening we had a service in which we engaged in a series of rituals that addressed this healing work. Some wrote letters to people who have died. Others prayed and were anointed with oil. Still others simply sang meditative songs together, or sat alone looking at the candles. All kinds of healing related issues came up for people.
This healing doesn’t only happen through rituals either. I had an experience 5-6 years ago that happened in the midst of my work. I was having my weekly supervision session with one of the interns at Immanuel who was doing her Clinical Pastoral Education at a hospital. She was telling me about baptizing the dead fetus of a baby who died in the mother’s womb and had to be removed by Caesarian, and how weird that was for her as a Protestant. As she spoke I began to weep. I was remembering another fetus – the son that my first wife and I lost when she was diagnosed with cancer. At the time I was so absorbed with the impact of my wife’s cancer that I had never really grieved the death of my son. I had never even thought of him as a real person. But as the intern shared her story, I realized that my son would have been 21 years old at the time. That made him real enough to me to begin my grief work of facing some unhealed and unprocessed feelings that were coming to the surface.
Sometimes the healing affects us powerfully in our jobs. How we react to things often shows which story line we are following. Whenever we react strongly to something, it usually indicates that we are reacting out of the place of our hurt and unhealed child. The place we usually get stuck is in old scripts for our lives that are no longer working for us.
Recently, I was in a conversation with a woman who is starting a non profit agency that works for children. She is doing everything in her power to make sure that children are safe in the agency, since so many children get hurt in programs that are otherwise designed for their well being. We were exploring whether she had done enough or if she needed to take more precautions. It became obvious that there could never be enough precautions. She said that people who don’t protect children from harm are scum. Even if you have done everything possible to protect them and one gets hurt, you are still scum. We explored where that “script” came from, and learned that she had been hurt as a child, and felt that her parents had not done enough to protect her. She was not able to break through that stuck place that day, but she knew where her work needed to be.
The biblical story of Lazarus has become one of my favorites around All Saints Day and funerals. It gives permission to so many different expressions of grief, and invites both internal and relational healing around death. I was pleased to find a beautiful book entitled Simple Ways to Pray for Healing that uses the Lazarus story to help us do our healing work with those who have died. I want to invite you to visualize the story of Lazarus with me as a way to begin the process of healing a relationship in your life. I believe that doing this in the context of worship facilitates a prayerful connection for healing. Of course, you may choose to opt out of doing the visualization. Feel free to sit and do whatever meditation might be helpful. But I am going to lead the rest of us in a visualization.
Sit comfortably, close your eyes and begin to focus on your breath. Breathe deeply and slowly, breathing in the love of God that surrounds you. Continue breathing deeply and with each breathy fill yourself with Jesus’ compassion for the deceased.
With your right hand make a fist. Let it become as hard and as immovable as the stone that covered Lazarus’ tomb. Now, take a moment to visualize a deceased person in your life who is behind that stone, someone with whom you would like to dialogue.
Before you move the stone, share with God how you feel about this person’s death. Like Martha and Mary who complained to Jesus, “If you had been here, my brother would not have died,” you may wish to express your disappointment. On the other hand, perhaps you feel relief. Take a moment to express whatever feelings come up, and then listen to what Jesus most wants to say back to you. When you feel ready, push back the stone with Jesus and imagine that the deceased person is, like Lazarus, bound from head to foot. Unbind the person, beginning with the forehead. When you have uncovered the eyes, look into those eyes and share what you most want to say. When you have said everything, continue unbinding the person until you get to the heart. As you unbind the heart, look inside it and see what it is that the person most wants to say to you.
Continue to say and do with that person whatever will most fill both of you with life. Perhaps you want to travel in your imagination to a favorite spot, or introduce new members of your family, or have this person fill in some hurt place in your life. If you are praying for a miscarried, aborted or stillborn baby, perhaps you wish to name the child and baptize it with Jesus.
Finally, if it seems right, make a space for this person in your heart. Perhaps imagine putting a rocking chair or a candle there; invite her or him and Jesus to make their home in your heart. Take a moment to feel the warmth of their light filling your heart. Take deep breaths; breathe in all that they want to give you. Slowly return to this room and open your eyes.
The communion of saints takes on many forms. Whether or not that visualization worked for you, I invite you to keep working on those relationships that still need healing in your life. You might want to go home and write about this experience. You might want to talk to a trusted friend about it. However you do it, notice what gets unstuck for you – what shifts for you. If you’ve been sweeping under the rug all the unresolved issues with people who have died, let the saints come marching back into your life so that you might experience healing that can affect your whole life.
October 29, 2007
October 28, 2007 - Healing through the Spirit: Unblocking the Flow - Frank Alton
Joel 2:23-29; Luke 3:21-22; 4:1-2a; 16-19
This morning our healing journey moves from soul to spirit. There is an important shift here, and it involves a change in direction. Thomas Moore summarizes it: “In our soulfulness, we endure the most pleasurable and the most exhausting of human experiences and emotions; in our spirituality, we reach for consciousness, awareness, and the highest values.” (Thomas Moore, 231) In other words, soulfulness makes sure we are grounded in the earth, while spirituality makes sure we are connected to heaven. Both are essential in order to be whole people.
Much of the world views this through a series of energy centers in our bodies – places where spirit either flows or gets blocked. The heart is considered the central center if you will. The energy centers below the heart involve self esteem, money, sex, power, and connection to family and tribe. All of that seeks to be rooted in the earth. The energy centers above the heart involve love, forgiveness, self expression, intuition and wisdom, all of which seek connection with the divine. Today we are going to focus on this latter group as we focus on healing through the spirit.
Why is healing through the spirit so badly needed in our culture? Where do we see that need most clearly? Some of it seems so obvious that it hardly bears saying. We must begin by unblocking the spirit energy that has been trapped and blocked in our own lives so that life can flow again. The traumas and stresses life brings our way cause spirit energy to get stuck in our energy centers. The stuckness takes different forms in our lives but always manifests itself concretely. Think of the ways you see it in yourself and in others. Most of us know some kind of stuckness resulting from a fear or phobia. We’ve all been laid low at some point by an illness. If we’ve lived long enough we usually acknowledge that illness is often the result of our refusal to stop from winding ourselves up into frenzy. Our bodies simply force us to stop so we don’t kill ourselves. We have also seen in ourselves and/or in others the way chronic anger and frustration, as well as irritating passive aggressive behavior, can stymie our best efforts to get on with life.
We also see the need for spirit healing in the way people desperately seek the spirit because it has been driven out of modern life. Life has become technical, mechanical and routine. More and more people live in cities, and cities only function well with a certain degree of mechanization. Even people who live in rural areas are spirit starved because their lives are also mechanized to a great degree.
The desperation is manifest through the ways people seek spirit. People try out mind-altering drugs because they sense a need to connect to something more than the life they live. Traditional cultures used to help people make those connections. Now we have to figure it out for ourselves. Others seek healing precisely by reconnecting to traditional and alternative spiritual practices like rituals and initiation rites from ancient cultures. Still others are rediscovering ancient approaches to medicine that have been forgotten in the west. Music has always been a window to spirit. It used to be channeled through the church. Now it is a constant companion through Ipod-connected ear phones or speakers that pipe it into every place people gather.
People are less and less willing to engage religion that only speaks to the area north of the neck and doesn’t really connect their spirits to deeper meanings. So Pentecostal, charismatic and African American worship styles are on the rise. The ancient practice of spiritual direction is being rediscovered as people act on their longing for guidance in spiritual matters, not just instruction in religious matters. The church is even taking another look at religion and politics, realizing that the answer isn’t removing politics from the church but infusing it with spirit.
A third arena that reveals the need for healing through the spirit is creation. Sacred texts of all major religions speak of creation as a spirit infused reality. When creation is sick it is a spiritual problem. The Hebrew text we read from Joel speaks in these terms. The Christian version of this is most clearly stated by Paul in Romans: “Creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God, who have the first fruits of the Spirit. Creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” (8:19-23) The current condition of creation as viewed in the destruction of the environment is a matter of spirit sickness; healing will only come when that connection is realized. Indigenous people have a lot to offer us here, as they see matter as the skin of spirit, a permeable boundary between the dimensions of spirit and matter. Something of that is evident in Romans.
One final symptom of our need for spirit healing is the way our society has rejected its youth and forgotten its elders. The prophet Joel describes a spirit-infused society: “Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old ones shall dream dreams, and your young ones shall see visions.” The flip side of this has been well described by Michael Meade: “The fabric of a culture tends to unravel where its young people are rejected and its old people are forgotten. When a culture rejects the dreams of its youth and forgets the visions of its elders it becomes destructive to life regardless of its heralded ideals. A culture that rejects the spirit of its youth will come to lack spirit and imagination when faced with life’s almost impossible challenges. A culture that forgets the necessity of converting “olders” into genuine elders will have leaders who can’t learn from the past and, therefore, can’t imagine a meaningful future.” He gets very specific about our own country: “Either the United States will learn from the lived knowledge of its elders and the nascent dreams of its youth, or it will stay the course and blindly follow the predictable path of hubris and tragedy into the desert of time.” He expresses some hope that “perhaps the United States, with such a large population of potential elders, is trying to wake up.” (Water of Life, iv-v) Let’s hope so.
So what does it mean to wake up to spirit healing? How does spirit energy get released? Clearly the healing must address the deep needs we have just described. Many are rediscovering the power of initiations as a way to awaken spirit healing. One way to consider the struggles of youth, the troubles of the aged, and the changes and dangers sweeping through both culture and creation is through the lens of initiation. The awareness of the need for some kind of initiation intensifies whenever and wherever radical changes disrupt the flow of life.
That was the situation into which Jesus arrived to be baptized. Jesus received the Spirit in his baptism. The Gospel of John says we receive the Spirit by being born again, which is a symbol of baptism. Remember that Nicodemus took Jesus too literally – he thought birth is something that only happens once. We still take Jesus too literally if we think it only happens twice. The message in that is that the initiation symbolized by baptism doesn’t only happen once. It has to keep happening throughout life.
What does initiation accomplish? What we notice through Luke’s story of Jesus is that the Spirit tends to drive people into the fray of life. Jesus was first driven by the spirit into the wilderness. That is where we reconnect with the invisible spiritual realities that infuse life with transcendent qualities by facing our naked selves, unprotected from all the props that come from outside ourselves. At the end of forty days Jesus was sent into a different part of the fray – his hometown. From there the Spirit sent him to the poor and oppressed, which in turn got him in trouble the rest of his life.
The healing of the Spirit is not a gentle healing. It involves scary change. Jesus said, “Blessed are the Peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.” Peacemaking involves entering the fray to work for peace where there is no peace. Almost everyone wants peace. But often we seek cheap peace. We want it at no cost. We want it by ignoring or denying or escaping conflicts of which we are a part. That is not Spirit-infused peace.
Thomas Moore makes this connection clear: “The Jordan is the archetype of our willingness to live fully, to have our own work and mission, and therefore to be blessed, as the Gospel story tells, by a higher parent and a protecting spirit. The Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca painted this scene at the Jordan, showing Jesus standing straight in his full dignity, while in the background another man is about to be baptized – any of us taking our turn – has his garment almost off, lifted over his head in a posture of exquisite ordinariness. It’s an inspiring image of the willingness to step courageously into the river of existence, instead of finding ways to remain safe, dry and unaffected.” (The Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore p. 243)
There are terrible consequences to remaining safe, dry and unaffected. The prophet Joel speaks of selling people to others: “You have sold the people of Judah and Jerusalem to the Greeks, removing them far from their own border.” What could that mean in our context? Could it include things like destroying the reputations of individuals and communities by creating rumors about them? The message of Joel is that the only way to stop the cycle of violence and destruction is to enter the stream of the spirit where nothing is gained by exercising vengeance. History itself brings judgment so people don’t have to. Judgment is never the last word with God – just as gossip and destruction are not the last word. In a biblical view of history, healing the land, the animals, broken relationships and broken spirits is the promised future. When we believe that, we don’t have to resist the Spirit that drives us into the midst of a broken world.
When we allow the Spirit to do her work, she leads people into all kinds of activities they never thought they would do, and that are not their actual jobs. I think of Richard Prince, who works as a handy man and has qualifications for all kinds of things. Richard can’t stop himself from taking people to Tijuana to build houses, and to investing in the lives of youth. Those aren’t the ways he earns his money but they are ways he manifests the Spirit. Most of us go about looking for a job by gathering qualifications & credentials and submitting them to people looking for someone to do a particular job. But many of us have experienced the kind of leading Richard demonstrates, which is also the kind Jesus had in the wilderness and in Nazareth, and the kind his mother experienced when the Spirit came upon her to conceive Jesus.
The final piece of spirit healing involves reconnecting the pieces of creation to each other & to their true purpose so that healing & reconciliation can come to the whole cosmos, because God has created us all to work together in harmony. Joel describes how first the soil is infused with spirit and released from its fear and healed; then the same thing happens for the animals; then the environment is restored to its original intention of sustaining the life of creation; and finally the generations of human ones will be unblocked so the spirit can flow again, and society can be ordered properly, such that the young have bold visions and the elders dream dreams. Luke reveals the same truth thru the story of Jesus in the synagogue in Nazareth where a young man announces his spirit-led dream quest of reconnecting to full inclusion in society those who have been thrust to the margins - the poor, the captives, the blind and the oppressed. Indeed, when the Spirit is present, for each child that’s born, a morning star rises and sings to the universe who we are and we become makers of peace and healers of spirit.
This morning our healing journey moves from soul to spirit. There is an important shift here, and it involves a change in direction. Thomas Moore summarizes it: “In our soulfulness, we endure the most pleasurable and the most exhausting of human experiences and emotions; in our spirituality, we reach for consciousness, awareness, and the highest values.” (Thomas Moore, 231) In other words, soulfulness makes sure we are grounded in the earth, while spirituality makes sure we are connected to heaven. Both are essential in order to be whole people.
Much of the world views this through a series of energy centers in our bodies – places where spirit either flows or gets blocked. The heart is considered the central center if you will. The energy centers below the heart involve self esteem, money, sex, power, and connection to family and tribe. All of that seeks to be rooted in the earth. The energy centers above the heart involve love, forgiveness, self expression, intuition and wisdom, all of which seek connection with the divine. Today we are going to focus on this latter group as we focus on healing through the spirit.
Why is healing through the spirit so badly needed in our culture? Where do we see that need most clearly? Some of it seems so obvious that it hardly bears saying. We must begin by unblocking the spirit energy that has been trapped and blocked in our own lives so that life can flow again. The traumas and stresses life brings our way cause spirit energy to get stuck in our energy centers. The stuckness takes different forms in our lives but always manifests itself concretely. Think of the ways you see it in yourself and in others. Most of us know some kind of stuckness resulting from a fear or phobia. We’ve all been laid low at some point by an illness. If we’ve lived long enough we usually acknowledge that illness is often the result of our refusal to stop from winding ourselves up into frenzy. Our bodies simply force us to stop so we don’t kill ourselves. We have also seen in ourselves and/or in others the way chronic anger and frustration, as well as irritating passive aggressive behavior, can stymie our best efforts to get on with life.
We also see the need for spirit healing in the way people desperately seek the spirit because it has been driven out of modern life. Life has become technical, mechanical and routine. More and more people live in cities, and cities only function well with a certain degree of mechanization. Even people who live in rural areas are spirit starved because their lives are also mechanized to a great degree.
The desperation is manifest through the ways people seek spirit. People try out mind-altering drugs because they sense a need to connect to something more than the life they live. Traditional cultures used to help people make those connections. Now we have to figure it out for ourselves. Others seek healing precisely by reconnecting to traditional and alternative spiritual practices like rituals and initiation rites from ancient cultures. Still others are rediscovering ancient approaches to medicine that have been forgotten in the west. Music has always been a window to spirit. It used to be channeled through the church. Now it is a constant companion through Ipod-connected ear phones or speakers that pipe it into every place people gather.
People are less and less willing to engage religion that only speaks to the area north of the neck and doesn’t really connect their spirits to deeper meanings. So Pentecostal, charismatic and African American worship styles are on the rise. The ancient practice of spiritual direction is being rediscovered as people act on their longing for guidance in spiritual matters, not just instruction in religious matters. The church is even taking another look at religion and politics, realizing that the answer isn’t removing politics from the church but infusing it with spirit.
A third arena that reveals the need for healing through the spirit is creation. Sacred texts of all major religions speak of creation as a spirit infused reality. When creation is sick it is a spiritual problem. The Hebrew text we read from Joel speaks in these terms. The Christian version of this is most clearly stated by Paul in Romans: “Creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God, who have the first fruits of the Spirit. Creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” (8:19-23) The current condition of creation as viewed in the destruction of the environment is a matter of spirit sickness; healing will only come when that connection is realized. Indigenous people have a lot to offer us here, as they see matter as the skin of spirit, a permeable boundary between the dimensions of spirit and matter. Something of that is evident in Romans.
One final symptom of our need for spirit healing is the way our society has rejected its youth and forgotten its elders. The prophet Joel describes a spirit-infused society: “Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old ones shall dream dreams, and your young ones shall see visions.” The flip side of this has been well described by Michael Meade: “The fabric of a culture tends to unravel where its young people are rejected and its old people are forgotten. When a culture rejects the dreams of its youth and forgets the visions of its elders it becomes destructive to life regardless of its heralded ideals. A culture that rejects the spirit of its youth will come to lack spirit and imagination when faced with life’s almost impossible challenges. A culture that forgets the necessity of converting “olders” into genuine elders will have leaders who can’t learn from the past and, therefore, can’t imagine a meaningful future.” He gets very specific about our own country: “Either the United States will learn from the lived knowledge of its elders and the nascent dreams of its youth, or it will stay the course and blindly follow the predictable path of hubris and tragedy into the desert of time.” He expresses some hope that “perhaps the United States, with such a large population of potential elders, is trying to wake up.” (Water of Life, iv-v) Let’s hope so.
So what does it mean to wake up to spirit healing? How does spirit energy get released? Clearly the healing must address the deep needs we have just described. Many are rediscovering the power of initiations as a way to awaken spirit healing. One way to consider the struggles of youth, the troubles of the aged, and the changes and dangers sweeping through both culture and creation is through the lens of initiation. The awareness of the need for some kind of initiation intensifies whenever and wherever radical changes disrupt the flow of life.
That was the situation into which Jesus arrived to be baptized. Jesus received the Spirit in his baptism. The Gospel of John says we receive the Spirit by being born again, which is a symbol of baptism. Remember that Nicodemus took Jesus too literally – he thought birth is something that only happens once. We still take Jesus too literally if we think it only happens twice. The message in that is that the initiation symbolized by baptism doesn’t only happen once. It has to keep happening throughout life.
What does initiation accomplish? What we notice through Luke’s story of Jesus is that the Spirit tends to drive people into the fray of life. Jesus was first driven by the spirit into the wilderness. That is where we reconnect with the invisible spiritual realities that infuse life with transcendent qualities by facing our naked selves, unprotected from all the props that come from outside ourselves. At the end of forty days Jesus was sent into a different part of the fray – his hometown. From there the Spirit sent him to the poor and oppressed, which in turn got him in trouble the rest of his life.
The healing of the Spirit is not a gentle healing. It involves scary change. Jesus said, “Blessed are the Peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.” Peacemaking involves entering the fray to work for peace where there is no peace. Almost everyone wants peace. But often we seek cheap peace. We want it at no cost. We want it by ignoring or denying or escaping conflicts of which we are a part. That is not Spirit-infused peace.
Thomas Moore makes this connection clear: “The Jordan is the archetype of our willingness to live fully, to have our own work and mission, and therefore to be blessed, as the Gospel story tells, by a higher parent and a protecting spirit. The Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca painted this scene at the Jordan, showing Jesus standing straight in his full dignity, while in the background another man is about to be baptized – any of us taking our turn – has his garment almost off, lifted over his head in a posture of exquisite ordinariness. It’s an inspiring image of the willingness to step courageously into the river of existence, instead of finding ways to remain safe, dry and unaffected.” (The Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore p. 243)
There are terrible consequences to remaining safe, dry and unaffected. The prophet Joel speaks of selling people to others: “You have sold the people of Judah and Jerusalem to the Greeks, removing them far from their own border.” What could that mean in our context? Could it include things like destroying the reputations of individuals and communities by creating rumors about them? The message of Joel is that the only way to stop the cycle of violence and destruction is to enter the stream of the spirit where nothing is gained by exercising vengeance. History itself brings judgment so people don’t have to. Judgment is never the last word with God – just as gossip and destruction are not the last word. In a biblical view of history, healing the land, the animals, broken relationships and broken spirits is the promised future. When we believe that, we don’t have to resist the Spirit that drives us into the midst of a broken world.
When we allow the Spirit to do her work, she leads people into all kinds of activities they never thought they would do, and that are not their actual jobs. I think of Richard Prince, who works as a handy man and has qualifications for all kinds of things. Richard can’t stop himself from taking people to Tijuana to build houses, and to investing in the lives of youth. Those aren’t the ways he earns his money but they are ways he manifests the Spirit. Most of us go about looking for a job by gathering qualifications & credentials and submitting them to people looking for someone to do a particular job. But many of us have experienced the kind of leading Richard demonstrates, which is also the kind Jesus had in the wilderness and in Nazareth, and the kind his mother experienced when the Spirit came upon her to conceive Jesus.
The final piece of spirit healing involves reconnecting the pieces of creation to each other & to their true purpose so that healing & reconciliation can come to the whole cosmos, because God has created us all to work together in harmony. Joel describes how first the soil is infused with spirit and released from its fear and healed; then the same thing happens for the animals; then the environment is restored to its original intention of sustaining the life of creation; and finally the generations of human ones will be unblocked so the spirit can flow again, and society can be ordered properly, such that the young have bold visions and the elders dream dreams. Luke reveals the same truth thru the story of Jesus in the synagogue in Nazareth where a young man announces his spirit-led dream quest of reconnecting to full inclusion in society those who have been thrust to the margins - the poor, the captives, the blind and the oppressed. Indeed, when the Spirit is present, for each child that’s born, a morning star rises and sings to the universe who we are and we become makers of peace and healers of spirit.
October 21, 2007 - Healing through the Soul: Discovering our own Story - Frank Alton
Jeremiah 31:27-34
As we make our journey through different elements of healing our whole selves, today we come to the matter of healing our souls. I want to ask two questions this morning: what do our souls need healing from? And, what are some ways to find healing for our souls? The well known Greek word for soul is the word from which we get our word “psychology.” In the modern world psychology has been the primary way we deal with our souls. But that is a very recent development. What Thomas Moore calls the “Care of the Soul” is something that has usually been the purview of religion – priests and shamans have been the primary “psychologists” for most of human history.
But there is a problem with religion being the realm for caring for the soul. Religion is often perceived as primarily a moral enterprise. Religion imbues society with moral values and then guards those values. At the same time, moralism is one of the most effective shields against the soul because it protects us from its intricacy. A great deal of soul is hidden behind moralistic attitudes. This means that many people who are drawn to religion fear the soul and are afraid to reflect on their moral principles because they might change. At the same time, people who are drawn to the soul often resent religion because it tries to impose its morality on them. I have always loved today’s passage from Jeremiah because I believe it offers a path for religion that doesn’t get trapped in moralism and offers true life and healing for the soul. What does our soul need healing from?
Our souls need healing from the dishonoring they received in childhood. I have been repeating every week that each of us is born with a gift that only we can give to the world. If we are able to respond to that gift our souls thrive. If we fail to give it the world won’t receive it. And if we fail to discover and appreciate it our souls will shrivel up.
Most cultures believe that our souls are given a companion that guides us in discovering, giving form to, protecting and exercising our gift. The Romans called this companion “genius.” The Greeks called it the “daimon.” Christians call it the “guardian angel.” Some views of parenting call for breaking the spirit of the child in order to help the child function effectively in society. Unfortunately, if & when the person wakes up & discovers that what was broken was his or her true self, there is a need for deep healing.
Sometimes the genius is so strong it refuses to be broken. Yehudi Menuhim, the great violinist, used to go with his parents before he was even four years old to hear violin concerts. The concertmaster Louis Persinger would break into a solo passage as little Yehudi sat with his parents up in the gallery of the Curran Theatre. Later in his life he wrote how, “During one such performance I asked my parents if I might have a violin for my fourth birthday and Louis Persinger to teach me to play it.” It was a very grandiose request for a four year old. His hands weren’t even big enough to hold a violin. But his genius knew what it wanted and needed. His family responded to his request, but with a gift that they considered appropriate for his age and size. On his fourth birthday a family friend gave him a toy violin made of metal with metal strings. He writes, “I burst into sobs, threw it on the ground and would have nothing more to do with it.” (Unfinished Journey, Yehudi Menuhin, NY: Knopf, 1976, p. 22-23)
James Hillman (The Soul’s Code) points out that the soul isn’t age appropriate. Yehudi’s arms could not extend and his fingers could not articulate enough for a full-sized violin; but the vision was full-sized to match the music in his mind. He had to have what he wanted because “I did know, instinctively, that to play was to be.” Sometimes this takes the form of literally crushing the gift. Parents get so impatient with the mismatch between the soul and the fingers that they break the fingers. At other times the soul is wounded when society & family teach children to adopt a common story as they grow up. When the common story is taught before or instead of the soul’s story, everyone loses. Jeremiah admits that under the old covenant or the old agreement this was the case. People started out in life with common laws and a common story. This is a living from the outside in. The new agreement Jeremiah anticipates encourages people to discover their story rather than learn it from someone outside who teaches them. Then we can develop our own relationship to the common story.
A second soul wound that needs to be healed is literalism. Walter Breuggemann speaks of the prophetic imagination. Nothing kills imagination like literalism. Many Christians have tried to turn the prophetic word into literal predictions of things to come. In so doing they miss the energy and the healing power of the prophetic tradition. One of the teachers I met this summer said, “The real problem is a loss of faith in the dream of life and the immediacy of the spirit that animates the world…We are in a struggle for the presence of genuine imagination in the face of the hardening of ideas and the narrowing of hearts that ensues when people make god one-sided and consider their own beliefs to be literally true and universal.” (Water of life, iii)
One powerful example of how taking things too literally destroys imagination is the city of Jerusalem. Jeremiah spoke of the city being rebuilt. But was he talking literally or was he engaging the imagination? Michael Meade speaks about how over the millennia, taking Jerusalem literally has created tremendous conflict. Christianity, Judaism and Islam all see it literally as a place of origin. It is the place that all three religions began according to their stories. It is a place of three feuding brothers. When the world was thought to be flat, Jerusalem was considered the center of the world because on the summer solstice the sun shines exactly vertically on the site of the temple. Maps from that time show Jerusalem as the center from which everything else in the world flowed.
When this view continues to be held literally it leads to terribly destructive strategies. The current administration in this country operates from a literalistic Christian perspective in attempting to get a foothold in Iraq that will eventually lead to Jerusalem so that we can bring freedom to the entire Middle East. That view bumps up against the equally literalistic view of Jewish and Muslim administrations in other nations. Doesn’t that miss the point of the prophetic imagination? Isn’t the prophetic imagination fueled by a mythic vision of Jerusalem as the city of God descending from above? To literalize that vision is to make people spill endless blood on that hill, to fight over other people’s ideas of what happened on that temple mount. In order to heal our souls we need to rediscover the world as a place where the sacred is seen as present and announcing itself all the time. When we disconnect from the sacred, we tend to make the wrong sacrifices over and over again. When we wake up we wonder again about the sacred, and ask if we want to send our children into a sacrifice that we no longer see as having any value. That is happening today as we wonder what is happening to our souls as we keep sending our young to die in Iraq.
So what are the things that heal our souls? This section of the Book of Jeremiah is called the Book of Consolation. In the midst of Jeremiah’s long complaint, he reminds people that judgment is never God’s last word. Restoration and renewal always await us.
Jeremiah offers a number of elements that lead to healing. The whole chapter leading up to the verses we read is full of singing and water, mostly in the form of weeping. “Sing aloud with gladness for Jacob.” “With weeping they shall come, and with consolations I will lead them back. I will let them walk by brooks of water.” “They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion.” “Their life shall become like a watered garden.”
Singing and weeping opens the heart to both the sorrow and the joy of the world. Shedding the tears shaped within each heart moves the soul and softens the boundaries between people. Most cultures that are still in touch with their roots know the healing power of singing and weeping. I’ve experienced it mostly among African Americans and Latin Americans. In the presence of anger that is about to get out of hand or sadness that is about to overwhelm, someone breaks into a song and everyone gradually joins in. The singing is often accompanied by weeping as if the waves of sound were washing ancient wounds in a river made fresh with tears.
Tears can also transform anger. But it happens mostly by releasing untold stories that shift the ground on which people are fighting. Storytelling helps us see the larger themes that circle our lives. There was a tense moment one night at the retreat when we got to talking about divorce and marriage. A number of men were telling how they had either anguished over a decision to divorce in the past, or were currently considering divorce in order to save their souls. Their stories were intense, and evoked empathy from many of us. But some of the men and youth were arguing that marriage must be saved no matter what – that it was wrong to talk about saving the soul through something like divorce. Their responses felt like a form of judgment that felt inappropriate and alienating.
Then their stories started coming out. Several young men talked about growing up without a father. They literally pleaded with the men in the room not to abandon their children by getting a divorce. One man was especially harsh and persistent in his judgment. Several men who hadn’t said anything stood up and literally screamed at that man saying how inappropriate his comments were, and how he was alienated from the spirit of the group. This went on for a long time until that man’s story started spilling out: “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be so harsh. But my wife died 18 years ago and I would give anything to have her back, and I just can’t believe that anyone would voluntarily give up something like I long for every day.” Then he started weeping – waves of lament that went on for 10 minutes while the whole room just listened and cried whatever tears his tears evoked in us. It shifted the whole mood. It didn’t eliminate the anger over the judgmentalism, but it built bridges where bridges had been blown up in the previous hour. Tears and songs and stories are powerful elements for healing the soul.
Jeremiah ends this passage offering forgiveness. Stories of forgiveness signal our longing for forgiveness. Ernest Hemingway tells the story of the Spanish father who wanted to be reconciled with his son who ran away from home to the city of Madrid. The father misses the son and puts an advertisement in the local newspaper El Liberal. The advertisement read, "Paco, meet me at the Hotel Montana at noon on Tuesday. All is forgiven! Love, Papa." Paco is such a common name in Spain that when the father went to the Hotel Montana the next day at noon there were 800 young men named Paco waiting for their fathers! Hemingway's story reminds us how desperate all of us are for forgiveness.
Another story is told about a six year old girl named Ruby Bridges taught the world an unforgettable lesson about forgiveness. In 1960, Ruby walked into the William France elementary school in New Orleans, Louisiana the first day after a federal judge mandated the desegregation of the New Orleans school district. Ruby was the only African American student in the entire school. Every day she walked through a gauntlet of angry adults who insulted her with racial slurs and foul language. Robert Coles, the Harvard psychologist, interviewed Ruby Bridges in the midst of this pressure packed situation. Coles had seen the little girl walking through the crowd with her lips moving. He asked, what she was saying? Was she talking back to them?
Discovering our own story, and connecting our stories to the stories of others is core work in the healing of our souls. As I shared three weeks ago, Immanuel is entering a year in which we need to engage each other around our stories in order to heal the soul of this church, and to find healing for our own souls. A week from Saturday we will be gathering to share some of the stories that have been emerging this month. I encourage you to join the circle of healing.
As we make our journey through different elements of healing our whole selves, today we come to the matter of healing our souls. I want to ask two questions this morning: what do our souls need healing from? And, what are some ways to find healing for our souls? The well known Greek word for soul is the word from which we get our word “psychology.” In the modern world psychology has been the primary way we deal with our souls. But that is a very recent development. What Thomas Moore calls the “Care of the Soul” is something that has usually been the purview of religion – priests and shamans have been the primary “psychologists” for most of human history.
But there is a problem with religion being the realm for caring for the soul. Religion is often perceived as primarily a moral enterprise. Religion imbues society with moral values and then guards those values. At the same time, moralism is one of the most effective shields against the soul because it protects us from its intricacy. A great deal of soul is hidden behind moralistic attitudes. This means that many people who are drawn to religion fear the soul and are afraid to reflect on their moral principles because they might change. At the same time, people who are drawn to the soul often resent religion because it tries to impose its morality on them. I have always loved today’s passage from Jeremiah because I believe it offers a path for religion that doesn’t get trapped in moralism and offers true life and healing for the soul. What does our soul need healing from?
Our souls need healing from the dishonoring they received in childhood. I have been repeating every week that each of us is born with a gift that only we can give to the world. If we are able to respond to that gift our souls thrive. If we fail to give it the world won’t receive it. And if we fail to discover and appreciate it our souls will shrivel up.
Most cultures believe that our souls are given a companion that guides us in discovering, giving form to, protecting and exercising our gift. The Romans called this companion “genius.” The Greeks called it the “daimon.” Christians call it the “guardian angel.” Some views of parenting call for breaking the spirit of the child in order to help the child function effectively in society. Unfortunately, if & when the person wakes up & discovers that what was broken was his or her true self, there is a need for deep healing.
Sometimes the genius is so strong it refuses to be broken. Yehudi Menuhim, the great violinist, used to go with his parents before he was even four years old to hear violin concerts. The concertmaster Louis Persinger would break into a solo passage as little Yehudi sat with his parents up in the gallery of the Curran Theatre. Later in his life he wrote how, “During one such performance I asked my parents if I might have a violin for my fourth birthday and Louis Persinger to teach me to play it.” It was a very grandiose request for a four year old. His hands weren’t even big enough to hold a violin. But his genius knew what it wanted and needed. His family responded to his request, but with a gift that they considered appropriate for his age and size. On his fourth birthday a family friend gave him a toy violin made of metal with metal strings. He writes, “I burst into sobs, threw it on the ground and would have nothing more to do with it.” (Unfinished Journey, Yehudi Menuhin, NY: Knopf, 1976, p. 22-23)
James Hillman (The Soul’s Code) points out that the soul isn’t age appropriate. Yehudi’s arms could not extend and his fingers could not articulate enough for a full-sized violin; but the vision was full-sized to match the music in his mind. He had to have what he wanted because “I did know, instinctively, that to play was to be.” Sometimes this takes the form of literally crushing the gift. Parents get so impatient with the mismatch between the soul and the fingers that they break the fingers. At other times the soul is wounded when society & family teach children to adopt a common story as they grow up. When the common story is taught before or instead of the soul’s story, everyone loses. Jeremiah admits that under the old covenant or the old agreement this was the case. People started out in life with common laws and a common story. This is a living from the outside in. The new agreement Jeremiah anticipates encourages people to discover their story rather than learn it from someone outside who teaches them. Then we can develop our own relationship to the common story.
A second soul wound that needs to be healed is literalism. Walter Breuggemann speaks of the prophetic imagination. Nothing kills imagination like literalism. Many Christians have tried to turn the prophetic word into literal predictions of things to come. In so doing they miss the energy and the healing power of the prophetic tradition. One of the teachers I met this summer said, “The real problem is a loss of faith in the dream of life and the immediacy of the spirit that animates the world…We are in a struggle for the presence of genuine imagination in the face of the hardening of ideas and the narrowing of hearts that ensues when people make god one-sided and consider their own beliefs to be literally true and universal.” (Water of life, iii)
One powerful example of how taking things too literally destroys imagination is the city of Jerusalem. Jeremiah spoke of the city being rebuilt. But was he talking literally or was he engaging the imagination? Michael Meade speaks about how over the millennia, taking Jerusalem literally has created tremendous conflict. Christianity, Judaism and Islam all see it literally as a place of origin. It is the place that all three religions began according to their stories. It is a place of three feuding brothers. When the world was thought to be flat, Jerusalem was considered the center of the world because on the summer solstice the sun shines exactly vertically on the site of the temple. Maps from that time show Jerusalem as the center from which everything else in the world flowed.
When this view continues to be held literally it leads to terribly destructive strategies. The current administration in this country operates from a literalistic Christian perspective in attempting to get a foothold in Iraq that will eventually lead to Jerusalem so that we can bring freedom to the entire Middle East. That view bumps up against the equally literalistic view of Jewish and Muslim administrations in other nations. Doesn’t that miss the point of the prophetic imagination? Isn’t the prophetic imagination fueled by a mythic vision of Jerusalem as the city of God descending from above? To literalize that vision is to make people spill endless blood on that hill, to fight over other people’s ideas of what happened on that temple mount. In order to heal our souls we need to rediscover the world as a place where the sacred is seen as present and announcing itself all the time. When we disconnect from the sacred, we tend to make the wrong sacrifices over and over again. When we wake up we wonder again about the sacred, and ask if we want to send our children into a sacrifice that we no longer see as having any value. That is happening today as we wonder what is happening to our souls as we keep sending our young to die in Iraq.
So what are the things that heal our souls? This section of the Book of Jeremiah is called the Book of Consolation. In the midst of Jeremiah’s long complaint, he reminds people that judgment is never God’s last word. Restoration and renewal always await us.
Jeremiah offers a number of elements that lead to healing. The whole chapter leading up to the verses we read is full of singing and water, mostly in the form of weeping. “Sing aloud with gladness for Jacob.” “With weeping they shall come, and with consolations I will lead them back. I will let them walk by brooks of water.” “They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion.” “Their life shall become like a watered garden.”
Singing and weeping opens the heart to both the sorrow and the joy of the world. Shedding the tears shaped within each heart moves the soul and softens the boundaries between people. Most cultures that are still in touch with their roots know the healing power of singing and weeping. I’ve experienced it mostly among African Americans and Latin Americans. In the presence of anger that is about to get out of hand or sadness that is about to overwhelm, someone breaks into a song and everyone gradually joins in. The singing is often accompanied by weeping as if the waves of sound were washing ancient wounds in a river made fresh with tears.
Tears can also transform anger. But it happens mostly by releasing untold stories that shift the ground on which people are fighting. Storytelling helps us see the larger themes that circle our lives. There was a tense moment one night at the retreat when we got to talking about divorce and marriage. A number of men were telling how they had either anguished over a decision to divorce in the past, or were currently considering divorce in order to save their souls. Their stories were intense, and evoked empathy from many of us. But some of the men and youth were arguing that marriage must be saved no matter what – that it was wrong to talk about saving the soul through something like divorce. Their responses felt like a form of judgment that felt inappropriate and alienating.
Then their stories started coming out. Several young men talked about growing up without a father. They literally pleaded with the men in the room not to abandon their children by getting a divorce. One man was especially harsh and persistent in his judgment. Several men who hadn’t said anything stood up and literally screamed at that man saying how inappropriate his comments were, and how he was alienated from the spirit of the group. This went on for a long time until that man’s story started spilling out: “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be so harsh. But my wife died 18 years ago and I would give anything to have her back, and I just can’t believe that anyone would voluntarily give up something like I long for every day.” Then he started weeping – waves of lament that went on for 10 minutes while the whole room just listened and cried whatever tears his tears evoked in us. It shifted the whole mood. It didn’t eliminate the anger over the judgmentalism, but it built bridges where bridges had been blown up in the previous hour. Tears and songs and stories are powerful elements for healing the soul.
Jeremiah ends this passage offering forgiveness. Stories of forgiveness signal our longing for forgiveness. Ernest Hemingway tells the story of the Spanish father who wanted to be reconciled with his son who ran away from home to the city of Madrid. The father misses the son and puts an advertisement in the local newspaper El Liberal. The advertisement read, "Paco, meet me at the Hotel Montana at noon on Tuesday. All is forgiven! Love, Papa." Paco is such a common name in Spain that when the father went to the Hotel Montana the next day at noon there were 800 young men named Paco waiting for their fathers! Hemingway's story reminds us how desperate all of us are for forgiveness.
Another story is told about a six year old girl named Ruby Bridges taught the world an unforgettable lesson about forgiveness. In 1960, Ruby walked into the William France elementary school in New Orleans, Louisiana the first day after a federal judge mandated the desegregation of the New Orleans school district. Ruby was the only African American student in the entire school. Every day she walked through a gauntlet of angry adults who insulted her with racial slurs and foul language. Robert Coles, the Harvard psychologist, interviewed Ruby Bridges in the midst of this pressure packed situation. Coles had seen the little girl walking through the crowd with her lips moving. He asked, what she was saying? Was she talking back to them?
"No!" she replied.Dr. Coles said that Ruby Bridges' gracious act of forgiveness transformed his own life.
"Then what were you saying?" Coles asked.
"I was praying!"
"Praying?" Robert Coles said in a surprised voice. "Why were you praying?"
Ruby said, "I usually pray before I go to school but this particular morning I forgot so I prayed as I walked into the school."
"What did you pray?" Robert Coles asked.
I prayed, "God forgive them. That's what Jesus did on the cross."
Discovering our own story, and connecting our stories to the stories of others is core work in the healing of our souls. As I shared three weeks ago, Immanuel is entering a year in which we need to engage each other around our stories in order to heal the soul of this church, and to find healing for our own souls. A week from Saturday we will be gathering to share some of the stories that have been emerging this month. I encourage you to join the circle of healing.
October 14, 2007 - Healing through the body: The fountain of youth - Frank Alton
2 Kings 5:1-19
I want to begin this morning by sharing with you why healing is so important to me. I don’t do this to legitimate the theme, because it’s central enough to the Gospel to justify being a major focus. I do it to show how I personally connect to this central theme of the Gospel. Those of you who know me well have heard me speak repeatedly of the healing journey. At some level I have been on a healing journey my entire life, though I have only realized that recently. Until recently I traced my healing journey back to the time when my first wife contracted cancer. I believed there was something in her illness for both of us. So I started psychotherapy as a way to make myself more available both to her and to my own healing during her illness.
But as I became more and more engaged in alternative healing in recent years I remembered that my father brought many forms of alternative healing into our lives at a very early age. We all saw a chiropractor when that was definitely considered a marginal profession by society. He took us to eye doctors who gave us exercises to strengthen our eyes rather than glasses to compensate for their weakness. We drank a variety of beverages mixed with protein powder to keep us healthy. None of my friends’ families did any of these things.
I reconnected to that early journey about 7 ½ years ago, though I didn’t know at the time that I was reconnecting. I had some lower back pain & went to some one offering Chinese healing. I didn’t know at the time what led me to seek that out then. But a few months’ later two things happened that I didn’t connect until over a year later. First, my mom died; and secondly, I decided to work more intensely with the Chinese healer. That healing work opened me to what I thought was a whole new realm of healing. In fact, I was reconnecting to a path I had met as a child.
The focus of my healing has not been as much physical healing as it has been emotional healing, though it is important to remember that back pain was the symptom that led to the most recent part of my healing journey. During my sabbatical a few years ago a friend gave me a book entitled, The Mindbody Prescription, by Dr. John Sarno. It helped me make sense of the connection between physical healing & emotional healing.
Dr. John Sarno teaches that many painful conditions – including most neck and back pain, migraine, repetitive stress injuries, whiplash and tendonitises – are rooted in repressed emotions. “The purpose of symptoms is to prevent repressed feelings from becoming conscious by diverting attention from the realm of the emotions to that of the physical. It is a strategy of avoidance.” He quotes Stanley Coen, a Columbia psychoanalyst, who suggests that the purpose of physical pain is to distract attention from frightening, threatening emotions & to prevent their expression. Symptoms … are players in a strategy designed to keep our attention focused on the body so as to prevent dangerous feelings from escaping into consciousness or to avoid confrontation with feelings that are unbearable.” What they are saying is that our bodies instinctively choose to suffer physical pain rather than threatening emotions because it is less scary.
Dr. Sarno tells the story of a patient he calls Helen whom he treated successfully for low back pain. When she was 47 she remembered having been sexually abused by her father as a child and teenager. After she had been treated by Dr. Sarno she joined a support group for women survivors of incest. Her back began to hurt one day but she reassured herself that she knew the psychological reason for the pain. She described the experience: “I went to the meeting, trying to keep kind of under control and not be totally emotional & miserable with people I had barely met. I wanted to see if this kind of group was really right for me. I found myself, in spite of trying to keep some distance, very much over-whelmed – by the amount of pain & havoc wrought in these women’s lives, as well as my own, by the abuse.”
Over the next 48 hours the pain gradually increased until she was paralyzed with it. She wondered out loud with her husband why the therapeutic concept wasn’t working. He replied, “You’re talking about 40 years of repressed anger.” “Then, in an instant, I started to cry. Not little tears, not sad, quiet oh-my-back-hurts-so-much tears, but the deepest, hardest tears I’ve ever cried. And I heard myself saying things like, Please take care of me, I don’t ever want to have to come out from under the covers, I’m so afraid, please take care of me, don’t hurt me. I couldn’t stop and my husband just held me. As I cried and voiced these feelings, it was as if there was a pipeline from my back and out through my eyes. I FELT the pain almost pour out as I cried. I knew that what I was feeling at that moment was what I felt as a child, when no one would or could take care of me, the sacredness, the grief, the loneliness, the shame, the horror. The feelings were there and they poured over me and out of me.” (The Mindbody Prescription, p. 12-13)
The story of Naaman reveals a similar process. We learn several things about Naaman right from the start. He was commander of the army of the king of Aram. He was a great man and a mighty warrior. At the moment of the story he was in high favor with the king because he had won a military victory. The impression we have from all that is of a man who might be a little arrogant, & who might resist receiving help from people he considered beneath him. We are also told that at some point he had contracted leprosy. So we are surprised but not shocked to learn that he took advice from someone who was a child, a girl, a foreigner, a prisoner of war and a servant. She said there was a prophet in Israel who could cure his leprosy. Of course he didn’t relate to her directly – only through his wife. But he did act on her advice. As a commander he figured it was best to deal with kings to set things in motion.
That didn’t go so well. The king of Israel thought he was trying to start a war. Fortunately, Elisha the prophet heard about it and got him to go see him. So Naaman gets in his chariot-cade complete with secret service and heads out to the barrio to meet Elisha, ready to offer him his ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold and ten sets of garments, along with the letter of recommendation he had from his king. Elisha doesn’t even dignify his visit with a personal appearance. He sends a messenger to tell Naaman to go wash seven times in the Jordan River.
Naaman was enraged. “Who the hell does he think he is? He is supposed to come out, stand and call on the name of his God, and wave his hand over my spot of leprosy to cure it. You think I’m going to bathe in your muddy river? If a river is going to heal me, my country has rivers that are 100 times better than this one.” But he really wanted to be healed. So once again he listens to servants – this time his secret service agents. He decides to go ahead and wash in the Jordan. We are told that “his flesh was restored like the flesh of a young boy, and he was clean.”
What would Dr. Sarno say about Naaman’s story? Like Elisha, Dr. Sarno would have seen beneath Naaman’s leprosy to what really needed healing in him. Even without laying eyes on Naaman, Elisha knew what Naaman really needed. The rage that emerged in response to Elisha’s prescription, along with the leprosy itself, were the symptoms of what really needed to be healed at an emotional level.
At what point was Naaman healed? When he went into the water or when he came out of it? It was when Naaman literally stepped off his high horse and decided to step in the water that he found healing. At that moment he embraced his child. That decision awakened childlike parts of him that led both to physical healing and to making him more human in all his relationships – with self, others, God. For Naaman, the dirty Jordan River became the fountain of youth in which he was able to get in touch with his child and become lighter and more playful in his spirit. At a physical level it also had to do with making new cells that restored his flesh to that of a child. That was more than a cure – it was a healing of his whole being.
Healing is different from curing. To cure a disease is to get over the physical symptoms. Most of us want that pretty badly when we are sick. So to distinguish that from healing is tricky. To tell someone that physical healing may not be the point, and that healing is a journey we are on for our whole lives, is often not received as good news. When we’re sick it’s not easy to accept that the healing process usually lasts our whole lives. In the Bible healing is another word for salvation. When I’m not sick I like the word in part because it resonates with what I know of Jesus, whose view of salvation involves less rejecting judgment than other parts of Scripture.
Carolyn Myss (Why we don’t heal, p. x) has authored many books about healing, and has been on her own very intense healing journey. She dares to tell people with physical symptoms that healing is bigger than a cure. Many people get to that understanding eventually, but they may reject it initially. She suggests that “illness can emerge as the answer to a prayer. It can physically guide us onto a path of insight and learning upon which we would otherwise never have set foot. It may be a catalyst for expanding personal consciousness as well as for understanding the greater meaning of life.”
She speaks of three kinds of power. Tribal power is rooted in the belief systems of our families and societies. Individual power begins to take effect when we pursue questions like, “What about me? How do I fit my needs into the obligations I have? What are my needs?” This is where illness can be an answer to prayer because through it we may discover our most valuable abilities and contribute the most to others. We have to exercise our power to choose. Finally, symbolic power reaches down to the level of archetypes to allow us to see beyond the physical meaning of events to view them as divine opportunities to evolve our consciousness. Each is more powerful than the previous, and we must overcome it without wiping it out.
All of this relates to the view we are taking in the Center for Healing. We want to focus on helping people deal with stress, trauma and meaning. Physical illness may be the presenting symptom. But we hope that becomes more an excuse that gets people to focus on their health in holistic and preventative ways. We believe that those in turn will us more physically healthy. Western medicine is often criticized as seeing everything in medical terms. But that is actually a fairly new perspective. As recently as 70 years ago most doctors were family doctors who knew about everything going on in the community. If a factory closed down & laid off workers doc knew the layoff had something to do with symptoms he was seeing. Now we call it alternative medicine. Maybe it’s not alternative; maybe we’re just recovering what is traditional. In fact, it may go back even farther than the prophet Elisha who was already practicing it in the time of Naaman.
I want to begin this morning by sharing with you why healing is so important to me. I don’t do this to legitimate the theme, because it’s central enough to the Gospel to justify being a major focus. I do it to show how I personally connect to this central theme of the Gospel. Those of you who know me well have heard me speak repeatedly of the healing journey. At some level I have been on a healing journey my entire life, though I have only realized that recently. Until recently I traced my healing journey back to the time when my first wife contracted cancer. I believed there was something in her illness for both of us. So I started psychotherapy as a way to make myself more available both to her and to my own healing during her illness.
But as I became more and more engaged in alternative healing in recent years I remembered that my father brought many forms of alternative healing into our lives at a very early age. We all saw a chiropractor when that was definitely considered a marginal profession by society. He took us to eye doctors who gave us exercises to strengthen our eyes rather than glasses to compensate for their weakness. We drank a variety of beverages mixed with protein powder to keep us healthy. None of my friends’ families did any of these things.
I reconnected to that early journey about 7 ½ years ago, though I didn’t know at the time that I was reconnecting. I had some lower back pain & went to some one offering Chinese healing. I didn’t know at the time what led me to seek that out then. But a few months’ later two things happened that I didn’t connect until over a year later. First, my mom died; and secondly, I decided to work more intensely with the Chinese healer. That healing work opened me to what I thought was a whole new realm of healing. In fact, I was reconnecting to a path I had met as a child.
The focus of my healing has not been as much physical healing as it has been emotional healing, though it is important to remember that back pain was the symptom that led to the most recent part of my healing journey. During my sabbatical a few years ago a friend gave me a book entitled, The Mindbody Prescription, by Dr. John Sarno. It helped me make sense of the connection between physical healing & emotional healing.
Dr. John Sarno teaches that many painful conditions – including most neck and back pain, migraine, repetitive stress injuries, whiplash and tendonitises – are rooted in repressed emotions. “The purpose of symptoms is to prevent repressed feelings from becoming conscious by diverting attention from the realm of the emotions to that of the physical. It is a strategy of avoidance.” He quotes Stanley Coen, a Columbia psychoanalyst, who suggests that the purpose of physical pain is to distract attention from frightening, threatening emotions & to prevent their expression. Symptoms … are players in a strategy designed to keep our attention focused on the body so as to prevent dangerous feelings from escaping into consciousness or to avoid confrontation with feelings that are unbearable.” What they are saying is that our bodies instinctively choose to suffer physical pain rather than threatening emotions because it is less scary.
Dr. Sarno tells the story of a patient he calls Helen whom he treated successfully for low back pain. When she was 47 she remembered having been sexually abused by her father as a child and teenager. After she had been treated by Dr. Sarno she joined a support group for women survivors of incest. Her back began to hurt one day but she reassured herself that she knew the psychological reason for the pain. She described the experience: “I went to the meeting, trying to keep kind of under control and not be totally emotional & miserable with people I had barely met. I wanted to see if this kind of group was really right for me. I found myself, in spite of trying to keep some distance, very much over-whelmed – by the amount of pain & havoc wrought in these women’s lives, as well as my own, by the abuse.”
Over the next 48 hours the pain gradually increased until she was paralyzed with it. She wondered out loud with her husband why the therapeutic concept wasn’t working. He replied, “You’re talking about 40 years of repressed anger.” “Then, in an instant, I started to cry. Not little tears, not sad, quiet oh-my-back-hurts-so-much tears, but the deepest, hardest tears I’ve ever cried. And I heard myself saying things like, Please take care of me, I don’t ever want to have to come out from under the covers, I’m so afraid, please take care of me, don’t hurt me. I couldn’t stop and my husband just held me. As I cried and voiced these feelings, it was as if there was a pipeline from my back and out through my eyes. I FELT the pain almost pour out as I cried. I knew that what I was feeling at that moment was what I felt as a child, when no one would or could take care of me, the sacredness, the grief, the loneliness, the shame, the horror. The feelings were there and they poured over me and out of me.” (The Mindbody Prescription, p. 12-13)
The story of Naaman reveals a similar process. We learn several things about Naaman right from the start. He was commander of the army of the king of Aram. He was a great man and a mighty warrior. At the moment of the story he was in high favor with the king because he had won a military victory. The impression we have from all that is of a man who might be a little arrogant, & who might resist receiving help from people he considered beneath him. We are also told that at some point he had contracted leprosy. So we are surprised but not shocked to learn that he took advice from someone who was a child, a girl, a foreigner, a prisoner of war and a servant. She said there was a prophet in Israel who could cure his leprosy. Of course he didn’t relate to her directly – only through his wife. But he did act on her advice. As a commander he figured it was best to deal with kings to set things in motion.
That didn’t go so well. The king of Israel thought he was trying to start a war. Fortunately, Elisha the prophet heard about it and got him to go see him. So Naaman gets in his chariot-cade complete with secret service and heads out to the barrio to meet Elisha, ready to offer him his ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold and ten sets of garments, along with the letter of recommendation he had from his king. Elisha doesn’t even dignify his visit with a personal appearance. He sends a messenger to tell Naaman to go wash seven times in the Jordan River.
Naaman was enraged. “Who the hell does he think he is? He is supposed to come out, stand and call on the name of his God, and wave his hand over my spot of leprosy to cure it. You think I’m going to bathe in your muddy river? If a river is going to heal me, my country has rivers that are 100 times better than this one.” But he really wanted to be healed. So once again he listens to servants – this time his secret service agents. He decides to go ahead and wash in the Jordan. We are told that “his flesh was restored like the flesh of a young boy, and he was clean.”
What would Dr. Sarno say about Naaman’s story? Like Elisha, Dr. Sarno would have seen beneath Naaman’s leprosy to what really needed healing in him. Even without laying eyes on Naaman, Elisha knew what Naaman really needed. The rage that emerged in response to Elisha’s prescription, along with the leprosy itself, were the symptoms of what really needed to be healed at an emotional level.
At what point was Naaman healed? When he went into the water or when he came out of it? It was when Naaman literally stepped off his high horse and decided to step in the water that he found healing. At that moment he embraced his child. That decision awakened childlike parts of him that led both to physical healing and to making him more human in all his relationships – with self, others, God. For Naaman, the dirty Jordan River became the fountain of youth in which he was able to get in touch with his child and become lighter and more playful in his spirit. At a physical level it also had to do with making new cells that restored his flesh to that of a child. That was more than a cure – it was a healing of his whole being.
Healing is different from curing. To cure a disease is to get over the physical symptoms. Most of us want that pretty badly when we are sick. So to distinguish that from healing is tricky. To tell someone that physical healing may not be the point, and that healing is a journey we are on for our whole lives, is often not received as good news. When we’re sick it’s not easy to accept that the healing process usually lasts our whole lives. In the Bible healing is another word for salvation. When I’m not sick I like the word in part because it resonates with what I know of Jesus, whose view of salvation involves less rejecting judgment than other parts of Scripture.
Carolyn Myss (Why we don’t heal, p. x) has authored many books about healing, and has been on her own very intense healing journey. She dares to tell people with physical symptoms that healing is bigger than a cure. Many people get to that understanding eventually, but they may reject it initially. She suggests that “illness can emerge as the answer to a prayer. It can physically guide us onto a path of insight and learning upon which we would otherwise never have set foot. It may be a catalyst for expanding personal consciousness as well as for understanding the greater meaning of life.”
She speaks of three kinds of power. Tribal power is rooted in the belief systems of our families and societies. Individual power begins to take effect when we pursue questions like, “What about me? How do I fit my needs into the obligations I have? What are my needs?” This is where illness can be an answer to prayer because through it we may discover our most valuable abilities and contribute the most to others. We have to exercise our power to choose. Finally, symbolic power reaches down to the level of archetypes to allow us to see beyond the physical meaning of events to view them as divine opportunities to evolve our consciousness. Each is more powerful than the previous, and we must overcome it without wiping it out.
All of this relates to the view we are taking in the Center for Healing. We want to focus on helping people deal with stress, trauma and meaning. Physical illness may be the presenting symptom. But we hope that becomes more an excuse that gets people to focus on their health in holistic and preventative ways. We believe that those in turn will us more physically healthy. Western medicine is often criticized as seeing everything in medical terms. But that is actually a fairly new perspective. As recently as 70 years ago most doctors were family doctors who knew about everything going on in the community. If a factory closed down & laid off workers doc knew the layoff had something to do with symptoms he was seeing. Now we call it alternative medicine. Maybe it’s not alternative; maybe we’re just recovering what is traditional. In fact, it may go back even farther than the prophet Elisha who was already practicing it in the time of Naaman.
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