Dust We Go

^“Then he came to the disciples and found them sleeping; and he said to Peter, ‘So, could you not stay awake with me one hour? Stay awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial;^* the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.’  Matthew 26: 40-41

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” – Ferris Bueller

 

“Nathan… Dust you came, dust you go.” 

When anything needed tending to in our little church, Johnny Williamson tended to it.  He wore every hat there was to wear at our church, and he was the consummate good sport about it.  He was a giant of a man in my life and in the life of my church and community. 

Several years ago on Ash Wednesday, the preacher was out, and Johnny naturally volunteered to do the service. 

The formal liturgy for imposing ashes was, “Out of dust you came, and to dust you shall return.”  But as Johnny rubbed my forehead with ash, he said in his distinctly easy way, “Nathan… Dust you came, dust you go.”    

My wondering into Lent every year starts with that memory – dust you came, dust you go.  As someone who has struggled to understand the meaning of this season, I trust that’s probably enough for me to know about it. 

This has been a hard Lent for many people I know.  The tragic deaths of a pastor, husband and father in a church close by and the death of an 8 year old child in my own little community weigh heavy.  I think about them, and then I think about a pastor called by parents to the hospital on Ash Wednesday to administer ashes not only to them, but to their newborn, perfectly healthy child, only hours old.  What courage.   

Two thoughts in tension have been with me lately (though I have no idea who said them):  The first is, “The meaning of life is that it ends,” and the second, “The meaning of life is that it goes on.”  When we think about it, both are true.  Each life comes to an earthly end, and yet there are always those left behind to grieve and learn how to go on. 

Somewhere between these two meanings is another that maybe Lent invites us to – the meaning of life is that it is happening now.  As Ferris Bueller reminds us, “Life moves pretty fast.  If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” 

Halfway through Lent is a good time to reflect on this.  If you’ve given up or taken on something for Lent, the newness of the task has worn off and now it’s just hard work grinding to the end (if you haven't abandoned it already).  Of course, it’s not just a Lenten vow most of us are grinding through right now – careers, relationships, commitments, church, spirituality, life.    

But take a look outside.  Spring is springing.  Grass is growing, animals are moving (heck, people are moving), the sun is thawing out the grind of winter.  Life is happening.  Maybe spring is also telling us to “Stay awake…The spirit is indeed willing, but the flesh is weak.”

Thank God that Jesus chose disciples just like us, grinding their way through life and ministry, half awake and missing the point.  Jesus is in agony, wrestling with soon laying down his life, and his friends keep dozing off on him. 

“The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”  This is us to, isn’t it?

“I’ll watch you do a flip son, just let me send this one last email…I should really call her and check on her, I’ll do it first thing tomorrow…I ought to…One day I’m going to…I would love to, but I’ve got a million things to do…I'll take off and spend a few days with them as soon as ...Someday, when I don’t have deadlines and stress, I’m going to…”

Zig Ziglar says motivation is like bathing:  sure it works the first time, but you’ve got to do it again and again to keep its effectiveness.  Births and death, love and loss, these force us to reflect on the wonder and frailty of life.  Yet it’s in the mundane existence of the everyday that the big and holy work of living a life is accomplished.  So here’s one more little reminder for today, and a challenge to keep looking for reminders of it tomorrow and on and on:

Life moves pretty fast. 

Stay awake. 

Miracles and heartache are all around you. 

Attend your own life.  

Enjoy the ride. 

Dust you came, dust you go. 

Remembering

“I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

 “Come ride with me.”  That’s how he’d always put it.  It often meant work, but it mostly meant spending time together.  “Come ride with me.  We need to help somebody move a few things.  It won’t take long.”  It was a Saturday morning, and I was a teenage kid not thinking about much. 

The Sunday before I had surely been paying attention, to see if I could understand what was being whispered, to see if certain people came, to hear if there was any more news from the pulpit.  Our church’s minister had just resigned because of an affair.  The church was in shock, hurt, and fuming over the deep breach of trust.  It was probably my first time to feel scandalized.

That Saturday morning my dad drove us to an apartment building I didn’t recognize.  Standing on the balcony of an upstairs apartment was the last person I would have ever thought I’d see: our former minister.  It was so surprising but happened so matter-of-factly that all I could do was follow along.  And pay attention. We got out and shook his hand.  It’s amazing how instantly you can move from scandal to compassion when you’ve got the right teacher.  And then our truck and us in it carried furniture from a storage unit to that apartment for the rest of the morning. 

And then we went home.  We didn’t talk about it, or if we did, I don’t remember.  “That’s just what we do,” was the message either way.  “Come ride with me,” was how a lot of my practical theology lessons started.

My dad would be 66 years old this week, and he is never far from my mind.  When I think about him, I often think about “eternal life.”  And I try to think about all the things that phrase is, its surplus of meaning. 

I think of a beautiful soul that has died back into the God he so faithfully loved.  I think of the life he lived, a life lived so much in the eternal truths of the faith he practiced.  Here was a man of such tender spirit who did what he could while he could to brighten the lives of so many people.  And I think of how living that way, a life eternal, still matters, how that spirit still permeates the space and people around where he lived.  It’s sappy cliché, but it’s true: the measure and reach of a life goes on long after we are gone.  Each life has changed the world for eternity, for better or worse.

I’ve heard life on earth described as a social gathering (a party of sorts), one that started before we got to it.  And the conversations are well underway by the time we arrive.  But we come, and we mingle, meet, and begin to pick up on the conversation.  We gradually start to engage and become fully involved in it for a  good long time, and then it comes our time to retire for the evening, and as we leave, we look back to see the gathering and the conversation still going on. 

Like anyone invited to such a gathering, I have hopes for the evening. 

I hope my conversation partners are gracious listeners.  I often open my mouth before I should; it’s an insecurity response that’s not hard to see. 

I hope I can be quiet and listen.  I get the feeling I’ve happened upon some wise, wonderful and funny people. 

I hope I can ask the right questions to the wallflowers and the overbearing ones.  I sense that a few just need somebody to show some genuine interest.

I hope I can find a circle where I can really be me.  I hope I can find at least one person I can be totally honest with about the hard parts of my life.  It’s going to be entirely too stuffy of an evening if I can’t find a few people to relax around and who really seem to like my weirdness.

I hope I can talk with some people very different from me.  It’ll be a much more relaxed time if I just smile and meet the people who look and think differently rather than occupy my mind with thoughts of “those people over there…”

I hope I remember to thank the host for a wonderful evening every time I see him.  I’m not entirely sure I’ll get a chance to when it’s time to say goodbye. 

I hope I can remember often the people I met when I got there who were so welcoming to me and taught me so much.  I hope I can show the later arrivers the same hospitality. 

I hope that at the end of the night, when I’m in bed asleep and the party is still going, that there’s a story or two to tell about me like the one I get to tell about love and a teenage kid and his dad on a Saturday morning.  Or maybe the people I was talking to will raise a glass and say to each other that their time at the party was a little brighter because I was there.    

I hope I can live into that eternal life.  And I hope each of us can stop, remember, and raise a glass for someone we knew who lived an eternal life around us. 

 

“Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either.”

Changing Lenses

”The eye is the lamp of the body.  So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness.”  Matthew 6:22-23

“How you see is what you see.”  Richard Rohr

A few days ago, I found a pair of old glasses in a drawer while looking for a place to put a new flashlight I got for Christmas.  They are still my favorite glasses, the ones without any frames, but my optometrist wouldn’t change the prescription on them, so I had to get new ones.  Feeling nostalgic, I put them on.  It’s amazing the difference a couple of clicks on the prescription wheel can make.  I got dizzy, everything was distorted and blurry, but only for a few minutes.  After that, my eyes adjusted, and I ended up wearing them the rest of the day. 

A new year is as good a time as any to think about the lenses we see the world through. 

We’ve all heard someone described as seeing the world through “rose-colored glasses,” meaning that person is seeing the situation as better than it actually is.  But those Pollyannas, as strange as they are to us, force us to realize that our experience is never objective and that we always have a choice in how we interpret what happens in our lives.  The problem, I think, is that we too often let that choice be made for us.   

Like those old glasses I put on, it doesn’t take long for emotions like aggravation and victimization to move from a heightened emotional state that dizzies me with anger to something I internalize.  They are the lens I adjust to and start seeing my whole life through (and certainly, the lens I start seeing certain people through). 

William James summed up much of much of psychology when he said, “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”  Everything else in the room you are in right now other than what you are choosing to focus on do not become part of your experience.  They exist, but just not to your experience.  This insight has become the focus of volumes of study on “mindfulness.”  The results are proving that, to a large extent, we can consciously decide what we want to focus on, and choose a more meaningful experience in doing so. 

Jesus is telling us some similar, isn't he?  “If your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light.”  As Rohr says, how we see ends up determining what we see.  And Jesus tells us this matters deeply for our spiritual health.  

We’ve all witnessed it, haven’t we:  two poor women – one bitter and one with joy in her heart; two rich men – one with quiet humility and one an entitled jerk; the dying man – who, if he’s been awake even a part of his life, has “thank you” in his heart even when his prognosis is bleak.  Life is going to come; it’s up to us to mind our lamps, as Jesus would say, and put on the right lenses to make sure we see the joy and meaning in it.   

So here’s to picking up those old, cracked, gratitude-and-grace-filled lenses and looking out on life and the people in it this new year.  And here's to our faith that in doing so, we'll all be filled with light.

God the Child

“To you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.”  Luke 2:11-12

“Making the decision to have a child - it is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. ” – Elizabeth Stone

“And then something really beautiful happened, Daddy...” This morning my three year old decided he’d take a turn reading a story to me.  He pulled out a book about a rabbit we hadn’t read in a while, and he started.  This one had great pictures, and he has a wild imagination.  When he gets on a roll and gets excited, he gets hard to understand.  I was doing my best to follow along as the rabbit dodged one “spooky creature” after another, but his thought process and speech were about to lose me.  And then a deep breath, and clear as a bell: “And then something really beautiful happened, Daddy...”  Out of nowhere, he changed things for our rabbit, and out of nowhere the joy of being with this kid overwhelmed me. 

This time of year, we look at two stories in the bible – Matthew’s tale of great threat and peril, and Luke’s, of annunciation and joy.  Both stories setup the themes of who Jesus was and what his life was about.  And in Jesus we see a culmination of our revelations of God – from creator to deliverer, redeemer, and on to crucified and resurrected lord.    

But Christmas gives us a season to ponder God as something else too – a child. 

So here's an invitation to do just that – think about God as a child.  Think about God as your child.

We always call God “father” and ourselves “children,” and that is wonderful and deeply true in its way.  But take this Christmas invitation to turn things upside down for a minute. 

Think of the love you have as a parent for your child.  I am incapable of imagining greater love than that. What joy they bring us, what meaning and purpose.  What salvation.  Life is indeed never the same.  

And what utter amazement.  Every parent knows the tingling feeling of sitting in the dark, just watching your child sleep.  You know the joy of watching a kid open a present, ride a bike for the first time, and, well, you fill in the blank.

And what vulnerability.  The more you think about it, the more you see the genius of God in this parenting thing. Deep, true love, is born in vulnerability, and what is more vulnerable and loveable than a child? 

How immensely lovable our God is when we see this total vulnerability.  Stay with it – this is not the God of power and might; this is God the child, our child, completely powerless.  And yet we’d move heaven and earth out of love for our child.

This is our God, isn’t it?  The one that turns everything upside down.  The one who puts the last first, who turns the other cheek, who dies to give life.  And this is the God who comes to us as a child.  Our child. 

Christmas has many invitations; seeing God the child is mine to you.  Because this feeble soul, try as it might, can think of no love more powerful than love for a child.      

And then, maybe think out a little, a year, five, ten, twenty years from now.  Oh, the care we’ll take with this child.  And we’ll mess up loving him, but not too bad.  But we know this in our bones: we’ll try harder at this than at anything we’ll ever do because of this love, this animating love for this child.   

Words Without Knowledge

Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind:  ‘Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? – Job 38:1-2

“God is not an answer man can give, God says. God himself does not give answers. He gives himself, and into the midst of the whirlwind of his absence gives himself.”  Frederick Buechner


“You are going to have to speak up sir, not everyone can hear you,” the bishop said to the young man in front of an audience of about 600 fellow Methodist strangers.  “OK, sorry,” his voice cracked as he tried his best to move closer to the microphone.  “OK. So, someone much wiser than me once said, ‘You don’t have to attend every argument you’re invited to…’” 

It was the young man’s second day at his first annual conference, a gathering of ministers and lay people every year in the Methodist church to fellowship and take up church business.  He was looking forward to the fellowship, and being the grandson of a Methodist preacher, he was looking forward to learning about the business of the church.  Little did he know, he was walking into a culture war mine field, and little did he know that he’d soon feel compelled to speak in front of a room of complete strangers.

Apparently every four years it get likes this.  The year before the bigger general conference of Methodists from all over the world, people at the local level submit petitions to be voted on that get submitted to the bigger gathering.  Every hot-button issue of our culture was well-represented on the list – abortion, homosexuality, evolution, you name it.  And not just once; they voted again and again on these topics.  They had discussion time before each vote with time for people to speak both for and against each petition, which was a more gracious version of a cable news point-counterpoint, though the arguments were the same. Could it have been any different? 

Someone should’ve warned him, but they didn’t.  He kept thinking back to the story of a vagabond who came in dirty and smelly to a prim and proper church who was asked by the preacher after the service to “Go home and pray, and ask God what he thinks you should wear when you come into this church.”  When he showed up the next week dirty and smelly again, he was reminded, “I thought I asked you to pray and ask God about what you should wear when you come to this church,” to which the vagabond replied, “I did, and God said he didn’t have any idea, said he’d never set foot in this church.”

So on the third separate resolution about banning homosexuals from some part of church participation, he asked to be recognized and spoke – not about homosexuality, but about Christianity - the good news of god’s presence, grace, love and mercy - and how any message we send to anyone should at its heart be about that, and how a “no” vote wasn’t a “yes” for anything but a “no” against clothing ourselves in our faith and speaking of anything other than the gospel. 

Maybe it was just his imagination, but he thought the vote after he spoke was at least 575-25 in favor of the resolution he'd opposed, compared to the 580-20 in favor of the other two.

Reading Frederick Buechner talking about Job this week reminded me of that story.  Job can only hang his head when God in the whirlwind asks: “Who darkens counsel by words without knowledge?”  And so should we hang our heads too.  We sow this wind and reap this whirlwind with him.  We all trade in “words without knowledge,” don’t we, when we talk for God, when we quote scripture for a moral code or try to speak to someone’s darkness that we’ve never encountered. 

“Words without knowledge” is a simple concept, but it is enormous; it’s everywhere, and it’s in so many of our beliefs.  “Words without knowledge,” is anything - scripture, creed, doctrine, opinion, argument - anything not grounded in experience.  Albert Einstein puts its much better than me, “Information is not knowledge. The only source of knowledge is experience.”  The only part of me that resists that universal truth is not my faith, it’s my ego. 

“Words without knowledge” are a cheap and dangerous substitute for experience.  They soothe our egos, “Hey, you are right!”  They keep us away from people we are called to love, they keep us away from feelings we need to feel, and they keep us bound up in ignorance and away from living life in the world with ourselves and others exactly as God made it all: very good.

Paul tells us this as well.  He opens the famous “love is patient” chapter of 1 Corinthians with, “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”  Love is the language of God.  And love, no matter how much we read and study about it, can only be known by experience. 

No one can tell you with any conviction what they don’t know by experience.  And so let us tell of our faith only what we know. 

I know a God who has carried me through some very dark times.  May I be there for others and help them experience it when the time comes. 

I know there is always hope.  May I speak that kind word to others when they are in need of it. 

I have known the pain of deep regret and failure.  May I share that experience with those I see walking a similar destructive path. 

I know there is always redemption.  May I encourage those who are outcast by their own shortcomings.

I have known the freeing power of forgiveness and mercy I’ve never deserved.  May I grant them both before they are asked for. 

I have witnessed personal destruction wrought by hate and injustice, and I have played a part in perpetuating both.  May I stand with those who are persecuted and pray for those who persecute.

I have had the rough edges of my perspective smoothed time and again by simple conversation with good friends, complete strangers, and my three year old kid.  May I carry the candle of peace in my heart to quietly share with others as well.

I’ve known immense joy and happiness.  May I look for ways to pay that joy forward in this life, and may a deep sense of gratitude be the lens through which I see the world.

I have known the unyielding grace of God in Jesus in ways unspeakable and dumbfounding.  May I live a life in communion with the rest of creation that in ways ever so small but ever so significant spreads the good news that I have come to know through experiencing this life.

Buechner is right.  God gives no answers, only himself – on the cross and in our lives again and again and again. 

What can we proclaim more honestly than that?

Fully Human

“Then he said to them, ‘The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath; so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.’” – Mark 2:27

We call Jesus many things – the Christ, the Son of God, Lord and Savior. But in Mark, the oldest of the gospels, these aren’t the titles Jesus wants us to hear. Over and again, he refers to himself as the Son of Man. Thrown in with those other titles, we take the enigmatic “Son of Man” to be a high title. But “Son of Man” is not a title like the others. A “son of man” as opposed to a “son of god” is another way of saying “a person,” or “a human one” or even “the human being,” as people have translated it.

To hear Jesus refer to himself as “the human being” for an entire gospel is refreshing to me. So much of the message of salvation I hear preached has a singular focus: your fate in the afterlife. And please don’t misunderstand, I am not saying the message of salvation Jesus preached has nothing to do with eternity; but I am saying it has at least as much to do with life on this side of the grave. Jesus did not simply come to sell us fire insurance for when we die; he came to teach us what it means to be alive. In Jesus, our concepts of human and divine merge into one. He is both human and divine. And I think he would say the same thing applies to all of us, each a son of man, and each a child of God.

Jesus took living seriously. He ate and drank, he healed, he tore down social barriers, he told stories, he forgave, he taught, he loved, he subverted, he prayed, he did grand gestures, he gave thanks, he spent serious time with friends, he suffered, he gave life. And he tells us how we live matters. In his story of separating those to be rewarded and those who are cast out, those who have missed out ask, “When did we see you and do nothing?” and he tells them, “Whatever you did to the least of these, so you did to me.” This is a serious call for us to tend to those hurting in the world, but it is also a serious wakeup call to us to pay attention and start living.

Paula D'Arcy puts it wonderfully, “God comes to you disguised as your life.” My own experience has taught me this as well. In the times that I am alive, really alive and not on auto-pilot, God is there. If you are there with a friend in need, surely you have sensed it to. When you are laughing with friends, fully present, you see life brighter. If you have ever fallen in love or had a child, the joy there is nothing if not holy. If you have ever suffered or been fully present to someone who has, those dark times can be sacred space if you have the courage to walk through them. When you stop, really stop, and give thanks, you see it – a life and world shot-through with the glory of God and the suffering of God both just waiting to be attended to by you.

So we have choices every day. The first is to decide that God does come disguised as our lives, and the second is to live and live with that in mind. And by living, I think I mean something positive and negative. Positively, I think I mean loving on people & loving life as fully and as often as we can. Maybe that means - sincerely paying attention to people around us, whether it’s a spouse, a customer, the girl bagging groceries, or an elderly relative or person from church; setting aside time to pray, whether that’s with your bible and a verbal prayer or whether that’s on a bike ride with a thankful state of mind; being deliberate about having a positive attitude about this amazing God-disguised life no matter what is being thrown at us; reaching out to people who are hurting (this is serious living) and asking how they are doing and letting them know you are praying for them (it’s that easy & that hard); making quality time much more often for the important people in our lives; planning and crossing some things off the bucket list and doing generally things that make us happy; finding places in our communities to pay forward all the wonderful time and influence people invested in us along the way; and expressing gratitude to God and others often for everything they do for us.
 
Negatively, I think I mean turn off whatever is distracting us from doing the positive things: turning off the cell phone (don’t let it buzz or beep while you are trying to live or let it lure you into idly reading it instead of smiling and talking to the person next to you); turning off the computer and television as well when you’ve got somebody you could be talking too; turning off negative influences and negative people who darken your view of this God-disguised life; not letting fear of failure, awkwardness, or not knowing what to do or say stop you from trying something or saying something to someone or generally living your God-disguised life; and not waiting until tomorrow to do what there is time to do today.
 
Here is our one promised shot. And the Human One wants us to experience being human as much as he did. In so doing, both our faith & our experience teach us that we’ll meet God again and again and again disguised in our lives. And the more we practice being fully human, the more we’ll pick up on the disguise.
 
“The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” - Saint Irenaeus

Owning Our Wounds

[I was honored to preach something close to this at the Laity Sunday service last week at a wonderful little country church - Summerville UMC in Phenix City, AL.]

Therefore, to keep me from being too elated, a thorn was given to me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated.  Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.’ So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. - 2 Corinthians 12:7-9

I asked Judd what I might speak about, and he said it's laity Sunday, so you if don't have anything else prepared, you can speak about laity in action.  And I told him I'd try but that I was going to take the advice given to someone else asked to be a guest speaker in church, “Come tell us about what's saving your life right now.” I think that what I've prepared can at least compliment this wonderful service that has been led by the laity so far.  What I've heard today is about our mission, to minister to the world.  And what I'll talk about is what gets in our way of doing that, and a possible path toward being able to fulfill that mission.  And that path, as Paul tells us, is weakness, or as the title of this message describes, "owning own wounds." 

This is hard for us in 2012 in the United States because weakness is despised by our culture.  "Weak" really is a four letter word.  If you had the unfortunate experience of watching all of the post-debate analysis, it wasn't about substance.  No, it was about who looked weak and who looked strong, weakness was dismissed and strength was “presidential.”  And it's not just in politics, it's everywhere.  Weakness needs to be rooted out, things that are broken need fixing or replacing.  And it's only natural.  We don't want to be weak and limited in what we can do.  No one wants pain and suffering.  Because it hurts.

So here is the great apostle Paul.  And he was weak, broken in some big way.  It’s so bad he calls it a messenger of satan sent to torment him.  So he cried out to the lord three times to take it away from him.  Honestly, I can’t always relate to Paul, he confuses me.  But here, can't we all relate to him?  He's hurting.  We don't know what it is, and maybe he does that so we can all find ourselves in this passage.  He's going through hardship, which we've all been through. 

And his prayers were heard, but God did not grant his wish.  God is not in the wish granting business.  God is in the salvation business.  So what Paul hears is not, “I will remove this hurt from you.”  God's answer was, “Paul, my grace is sufficient for you.  Paul, my power is made perfect in weakness.  Paul, you are a boastful man, so go boast of this: you are broken and weak, and once you finally accepted that, the power and grace of God met you, and it was enough for you.”

That is the good news for us if we are willing to hear it – not that God will take away our struggles, but that when we move toward what hurts, we move through it, and there we will be embraced by the overwhelming grace of God.  And it will be enough for us too.

It's not just Paul; this is at the heart of the gospel.  Jesus tell us that “I did not come for the healthy, but for those who need a doctor.”  He’s telling us that he’s going to have a hard time reaching and transforming us if we aren't willing to embrace what hurts us.  One of the great travesties of living in a culture of strength is this “I'm fine,” response to everything that happens.  Divorce?  Don’t need to talk about it; I'm fine.  Chest pain?  I'm fine, it's probably just indigestion. Overworked?  Dealing with a sick or elderly loved one?  It’s OK; I'm fine. 

What a lie.  When Jesus says the sick, not the healthy need a doctor, he's telling us don’t be too proud to come looking for healing or you won’t find it.  He's telling us, "hey be honest with yourself.  Where are you hurting?  Where are you weak and broken?  Find that place in yourself," Jesus says, "and I promise I'll meet you there." 

We serve a crucified savior.  The way of the cross is the path through pain and death, and ONLY then onto resurrection.  The resurrected Jesus is not in shining white robes that we see in our Sunday school room walls.  Jesus still had his wounds. “Here Thomas,” says Jesus, “don't believe it's me, look right here, touch my wounds.”  Those wounds don't go away and neither do ours, but part of our salvation is that they can be transformed into something very sacred.   

And that's the hard and beautiful gospel for our hard and beautiful lives.  We can't leave the hard parts out.  We deny the transforming grace of God when we don't deal with what hurts us.  And it has real life consequences.  A favorite author of mine, Richard Rohr, says “the pain we don't transform, we transmit to others.”  I can tell you without reservation that the most embarrassing moments of my life, when I am hurtful to those I love, they come out of some unresolved pain that I'm just not dealing with.  I've either been hurt or slighted by someone else, or I'm insecure & not sure I'm up to the task, but I don't admit that & I so I just bluster my way through when things get hard. 

Please don't ask my wife for any specifics, but she knows better than anyone else.  When I'm being especially difficult to live with, and I’ve got some darkness that I haven't dealt with, but, “Hey, I’m fine,” get ready for trouble if you point out where I’m coming up short.  My ego gets upset and I lash out. 

Rather than owning where I'm wounded, I let my wound own me.  I AM THE VICTIM, I have been treated unfairly, and I can't relent from it.  And that cuts off the path to healing and forgiveness.   I end up missing out on so much of the beauty of life right in front of me because I'm just too proud to admit I am broken need to deal with it.

This is what we all do when we refuse to get in touch with what's wrong with us.  Stress from work, sickness or death of a family member, strained relationships, financial harship, broken trust.  These things wound us. If you live long enough, life is going to wound you deeply.  There is just no getting around it.  And if we don't transform the pain, we will transmit it to others.  We look for ways to patch it up: food, alcohol, television, internet, smart phones, work work work.  Anything to keep from checking in with ourselves and deal with how we’re broken.  “Lord, just make me numb!“ We don't say it, but isn't this what we are asking when we don't deal with what hurts?  

But numb is not where god's grace is found.  It is found on the other side of pain.  And we only get there by dealing with what hurts, dealing with where we fall short, dealing with the suffering that life has placed in our path.  And please hear me, I don't not for a second think that God causes us to suffer for some reason.  Death and depression and disease and divorce are not instruments of God, they are not put there for a purpose.  But the genius of God is knowing that in the fullness of life, we are going to suffer, we are going to hurt and cause others to hurt, and God says that's where he's going to go to work.  He's not going to leave us there unchanged.  Like Jesus, our wounds won't go away, but we will start to see them more fully.  Not just as a place of death, but as the path to resurrection life.

There's a song I love that has this line in it: “There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.”  I love that line because it names what Paul says, the light, the sufficient grace of God, is there with us when life is cracked and broken.  And that grace comes when we go down toward the darkness, and not up and away from it.  We've got this cultural image of climbing.  Climbing up the ladder of success, climbing up and away from what's weak and dirty in us through achievement, climbing higher and higher up toward a God that we imagine is sitting in a kingdom on high.  Climbing away from our pain and weakness.  And there’s a whole Christian tradition that tells us what we find when we climb up looking for God, looking for the high life free of difficulty.  It tells us when we get to the top, there's nothing there.    It's only when we fall do we realize that we fall into the grace of God.  600 years ago a woman named Julian of Norwich said “First there is the fall and then the recovery from the fall.  Both are the mercy of god.” 

And what do we find when let ourselves fall and be broken?  We find ourselves on a path downward.  But it’s a path we walk along always, always with God.  If we are promised anything, it is that God is with us in our suffering.  And that path he takes us on leads to a very sacred place, to a place in each of us that we see cannot be wounded, because it is the very image of god that is in each of us.  It's something that we all have, and it is undefileable and unbreakable, it is our deepest truest self that is always in communion with God and is waiting for us to rediscover it. 

There is a story that I love about a little boy, 4 or 5 years old, whose parents bring home his newborn baby sister.  And the boy tells his parents to give him some time alone with his new sister.  They knew the issues with bringing home a new sibling, but they have the baby monitor setup, so they tell him to go ahead into her room, and they sneak into the other room to listen to the monitor.  And they hear him close the door and hear his little feet patter over to her bed, and they hear him get real close to her and whisper: “Hey! Tell me all about God, because I've almost forgotten.” 

We grow up, get wounded and forget, don't we, about our union with God.  It's like layer upon layer upon layer of paint and wallpaper from life gets plastered over that original beauty and oneness that has always been in all of us.  And when we embrace our brokenness, we get to see through that crack in everything where the light gets in, we get to remember our oneness with God.  We get to experience his grace that is sufficient for everything we face in this life. 

And when it happens, we cannot help but share it, to try to see the weakness and brokenness of others and wrap our arms around it, and try to bring God’s grace to it.  As the scripture says, we go looking for Jesus in others, in the hungry, the sick, the naked, the imprisoned.  And I think we end up being more gracious and patient with people in general.  Feeling the embrace of God in our own insecurity, we have more patience with it in others, don't we? 

To claim our brokenness is to help bring the power and grace of God into our world.  And don’t just believe me.  Think about the most gracious people you know, who show up when times are hard,  who can speak words of comfort in grief, who tend to the sick and the poor, whose egos don’t ever seem to get in the way of anything God is trying to do; they are almost always people who have endured great pain or struggle and moved through it.  I've heard it called “the terrible gift,” and that is very fitting.  Life has handed them something terrible, but out of it they have received the gift of the grace and strength of God to get through it, so they share it with others. 

And to use some good Methodist language: it shows up in our mission and in our nurture.  A couple of examples: our church hosts a community-wide Christmas dinner every Christmas day.  Full Christmas dinner with turkey, dressing, sweet potatoes, you name it is served for about 300 people, and most of them probably wouldn’t get Christmas dinner otherwise.  Inevitably, every year this mission is led by those who have lost someone they love, a spouse, parent or child.  These are people who know what it's like to have a hard Christmas. 

In my own life, I lost my father last year to a brain tumor.  He lived with it for 20 precious and hard months.  It was and continues to be a very big wound in my life. But let me tell you, the grace we received in that time could fill the time of 20 more sermons.  Amazing acts of love and kindness were with us every step of the way.  God's hands were so often the hands of friendship, cooking meals, cutting the grass, holding our hands while we laughed and cried and prayed.  I can testify without reservation to the power of God made perfect in weakness, and to a God that showed me in the middle of deep pain that there is still a place in me that is whole and unbroken even in the face of tremendous loss. 

And out of that has come a couple of missions at our church.  My wife started a caregiver support group seeing the struggle of my mom caring for my dad and knowing of others dealing with that in our community.  I was eating lunch after my dad's funeral with the pastor of his church who told me of a mission he was excited about – Stop Hunger Now, where your church partners with this group to buy bulk food supplies and packages them into individual meals that are shipped to school feeding programs in the poorest and hungriest places in the world.  So I felt led to help start that in Union Springs.  Over the last year and a half, we've raised money and packaged 30,000 meals in this program that have fed kids in Uganda.  It is a wonderful mission. 

And one of the greatest honors of my life came several months after my father passed.  I was asked to speak at the funeral of a fellow church member who had died of pancreatic cancer.  Though I would have thought about it, “Hey, we need to go take them some food,” I probably wouldn’t have done so if I had not experienced those same acts of grace by others in my own family's hard time. And so we did go visit and take them a few meals.  And out of that came a wonderful friendship and some very holy time accompanying them on that journey.

And owning our wounds is a journey.  It’s healing work that is never really finished.  But we can learn so much from it.  It teaches us how to live, how to live faithfully.  And ultimately it teaches us how to die faithfully, unafraid because we already know that god will meet us there too. 

The work of the laity, I think, is to first own our wounds, to be broken and accept the power of God that we find in weakness, to experience that love in that deep and holy place in each of us.  And then be there to cry with others who are broken, and to share with them the grace we've experienced. 

When our stance toward life is a stance of weakness and brokenness, it is all that we can do to go out looking to comfort the weakness and brokenness in others and share the good news with them.  And that good news is this: “Hey, I am here with you, and so is the grace and power of God, and it is sufficient for you.”  

My prayer for us today is that we have the faith to believe this, and the courage to go to those hard places where God promises us he'll meet us and transform us.  Amen.