"I Am"

Exodus 2:23-25; 3:1-15; 4:10-17

John 8:58

Psalm 46

World Communion Sunday

 

What are some of the ways that you come to know God?  Scripture, nature, worship, prayer, meditation, fasting, spiritual disciplines such as lectio divina and clearness committee and ....  Do you have one or two ways that speak to you more than others?  That you tend to gravitate towards?  Are there other ways of knowing God that are less comfortable for you?  Or ways that you avoid?

               You know the familiar story about the blind men and the elephant.  I read it to you in January.  But I think it’s a story we should all be remembering on a regular basis, especially as we seek to cross our differences, to be in relationship despite our disagreements, to work to love those who don’t see things the same ways that we do.  So here it is again:

It was six men of Indostan, to learning much inclined,

Who went to see the elephant (though all of them were blind),

That each by observation might satisfy his mind.

The first approached the elephant, and, happening to fall

Against his broad and burly side, at once began to call:

"I see," said he, "the elephant is very like a wall!"

The second, feeling of the tusk, cried, "Ho! What have we here?

So very round and smooth and sharp? To me 'tis mighty clear

This wonder of an elephant is very like a spear!"

The third approached the animal, and, happening to take

The squirming trunk within his hands, thus boldly up and spake,

"I see," said he, "the elephant is very like a snake!"

The fourth reached out his eager hand and felt about the knee:

"What most this wondrous beast is like is mighty plain," said he,

"'Tis clear enough the elephant is very like a tree!"

The fifth, who chanced to touch the ear, said, "E'en the blindest man

Can tell what this resembles most. Deny the fact who can,

This marvel of an elephant is very like a fan!"

The sixth no sooner had begun about the beast to grope,

Than, seizing on the swinging tail that fell within his scope,

"I see," said he, "the elephant is very like a rope!"

And so these men of Indostan disputed loud and long,

Each in his own opinion exceeding stiff and strong,

though each was partly in the right, and all were in the wrong!

So oft in group endeavors, the members of the team

Rail on in utter ignorance of what each other mean,

As if it were an elephant not one of them has seen.

               So, too, I think we are all limited in our knowledge of God by many things.  For example, our circumstances in life limit what we see of God.  The limits of our experiences, the limits of the time that we can give over to our spiritual lives, these limit our understanding of God.  We are limited by our beliefs in seeing the whole picture of God.  The really wise person is the one who recognizes they lack knowledge because that is the person who is open to learning and experiencing more.  Our "knowledge" of God can often limit what we see of God, what we hear of God.  Let me give you a specific example - those who "know" that God is only male miss seeing the feminine or even binary or fluid aspects of God.  Those who "know" that people are made in the image of God may miss seeing aspects of God reflected and alive in nature or in other ways that are beyond human. 

               We see this with scripture too: if we only take scripture as literal and historic, we frankly miss the deeper messages within it.  When we miss those layers and layers of wisdom and meaning, we also miss out on deeper and different ways to see and understand God. 

               We also limit God by what we leave God out of in our lives, or what parts of our lives we keep separate from our faith.  Can you think of areas people hide away from God?  Can you think of areas that YOU keep separate from God?  Or areas of our lives in which it might be a challenge to include God in?   

               Besides all of these things that limit our relationships with God, I would also say that spending time with God only in the ways that are familiar and make us comfortable also limits our understanding of God.  We only see the part of God that we are touching, that we are exploring in those moments.  For example, when we only know God through prayer, we may come to see a God who listens, a God who loves, but we may miss that God also instructs, also guides, also has words to speak to us.  We have heard some people say they don't come to church because they find God better on their own.  Well, I suggest that only finding God in church, and conversely, only finding God outside of church - both of these limit our vision and understanding of God.

               The scriptures we heard today present two ways that people might meet God.  Moses met God in a burning bush.  The Psalmist tells us to meet God in silence.  Both are important.  Both give us information about God.  God appearing in the burning bush tells us that God is amazing, can do anything, can appear in any form, and that God does speak to us, does come to us, does have instruction for us.  It shows us the drama and wonder of God, the ways in which God can be so obvious, so hard to ignore, so beyond our expectations.  God telling us to be still to know God tells us that God is also gentle, and at times is not dramatic, but calls us into a stillness and into a place of listening and being present in the quiet and stillness.  That God is as close to us as our own breathing and heartbeats, if we but quiet down for a moment to experience God.

               In the book Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert takes a year "sabbatical" or pilgrimage to explore her spirituality.  This was not always a comfortable experience for her.  She found herself confronting difficult parts of herself within her spiritual journey.  And some of the things she tried - extended periods of meditation for example, were downright frustrating and uncomfortable at first.  But she continued to try them, to work with them, to give them a chance.  It took time, it took commitment, it took a real desire to see God, to know God in a different way, in a fuller way, in a more complete way.  When we strive to know God in a different way, she discovered, we cannot just try something new for a minute or an hour, a day, or even a week.  It took months, but she was blessed with a deeper, broader, new look at God.  And she found that not only did she encounter God in new ways, but through her encounter with the Divine, she came to understand herself better, to heal some deep brokenness within and to find the courage to heal some brokenness outside of herself, in relationships, as well. 

               This is not surprising.  When we come to know God in a new way, we also come to understand ourselves more deeply, because we are made in God's image.  Similarly, we can come to understand those around us more deeply as well.  We can grow in our capacity to love and to care as we encounter Love itself, as we strive to know God better and in different ways.

               On this, World Communion Sunday, we remember that other Christians around the world, Christians who experience and celebrate God in different ways than we do, are also part of our faith family, part of the family of God.  In their different ways of worshiping and celebrating their faith, they have things to teach us about who God is and where God can be found.  In hearing and learning and experiencing the ways others do worship differently, and understand God differently, we come to see more aspects of God, more nuances to the face of God, more parts of who God is.  I would say this also expands beyond Christianity.  When we encounter and talk and interact with people from different faith traditions, even atheism and agnosticism, we can also learn from them.  Even those who say there is no God or that they don’t know if there is or they don’t care if there is, there are still things we can learn about God even from them!  As I worked on my doctoral dissertation, I interviewed a number of atheists and learned that those I interviewed had a very specific vision of God as a white bearded man sitting in the clouds, literally making the world in 7 of our human days, that they couldn’t accept.  Well, I can understand that.   I tend to agree with them on that.   

These beautiful passages in which God says God’s name is “I am” or “I will be who I will be” or “I am becoming who I am becoming” tell us that God is so very much bigger than we can imagine.  God IS, and in that BEING we find God.  It is not just God’s name.  It is who and what God is.  God IS being.  God IS.  We find that God in the burning bush and in the stillness and in so many ways.  Jesus, too identifies as “I am” repeatedly, “I AM the bread of life,” “I AM the way, the truth and the life,” etc.  Jesus also says this BEING existed from the beginning.  But we humans, we have a hard time with just “being”.  We want to define things more tightly.  We want to assign qualities and attributes.  And those qualities and attributes limit who God really is for us.  If you are happy, you are not sad.  If you are a democrat, you are not a republican.  If you are an athlete, you are not a coach potato.  Whatever it is: our attributes, even of God, limit in our minds not just who we are, and who other people are, but who God really is.  But God IS.  God IS.  And so, we expand our understanding by taking the time to intentionally see other sides of God that may not be as comfortable or easy. We expand beyond the boxes and the attributes and into the BEING of God.

               And so, my challenge for all of us is that we take the risk, and take the time, to try to know God in a way we haven't encountered God before.  I encourage us to try something that we may not have tried before.  We can try a classic spiritual discipline such as daily meditation for a month, or we can try a 24 hour fast.  You can invite someone to be your prayer partner, especially someone you don’t know very well, or someone you’ve had issues with.  This doesn’t necessarily have to be someone you pray with, but someone you can check in with about your prayer life and that can help hold you accountable to daily personal prayer.  You might try a Taize service, or attending one Sunday a service that is completely different.  You could help serve a meal with Winter Nights, or volunteer to help with our laundry program.  You can commit to reading a part of the Bible with which you are unfamiliar, to study it, to discuss it with a small group.  I would be happy to help you form that group.  You might take a journey or pilgrimage to Israel/Palestine.  You might talk to someone that you don't think you like.  Or simply make a commitment to take the time to be still, even amidst the crazy business of our lives.  But the challenge is not to just try this new thing one time, but to really give time to whatever you are trying that is new.  Give it time, give it space, give God time to talk to you through your new experience and to reveal God-self to you in a new way.  Whatever it is, I invite you to seek to feel more of the elephant...or rather, to seek to see more of God and who God is in your life, and in the world.   God is waiting to be known more fully by you, and God promises that in return you will know more of yourself as well.  Amen. 

Limiting God with Our Rules

 

Luke 2:29-32

Acts 15:1-18

               Today we continue our study of Acts with another very interesting story about the continuing conflicts in the early church.  And this one has to do with circumcision and following the other laws of Moses.  It is important to put this in context and remind you all that at this point Christianity was not a separate thing.  There were Jews who were followers of Jesus and there were Jews who did not see Jesus in the same way.  But at this point in time, there still was no such thing as “Christianity” per se.  It was not a new faith, a separate faith.  But things were changing, and fast.  For one thing, Judaism had been cultural as well as religious. And now, followers of Jesus were joining the throngs who were not steeped in Judaism, were not raised Jewish.  Gentiles were joining the movement.  And this was causing huge debates.  Should these people, as they join in this new following within Judaism, should they have to obey all the rules of Judaism, too?  Do they have to be circumcised as the Jews who had been raised in the faith had been?  And is that really fair to adult men to force on them something that the long-standing Jews went through as infants?

               They aren’t decided.  They aren’t settled.  They are fighting about something that deeply matters to the people, on both sides of the issue.  Do these new converts have to follow all the rules and rituals and practices and even beliefs that those raised in Judaism had followed?  This was the debate.  And the outcome?  Well, we heard it today.  Peter states that God does not distinguish and differentiate between peoples in this way and we therefore can’t do it either.  The Gentile converts therefore do not have to follow the same rules because they, like those steeped in Judaism, are saved by grace and grace alone.

               Peter’s speech about this, his conviction about this is VERY interesting.  First and foremost it is interesting because of the reasons he gives for his insistence that the Gentiles no longer have to follow all of the Mosaic laws.  He does not say, “We should not insist on circumcision because it isn’t very welcoming of us to do so.”  Neither does he say that the practices and rituals of the faith are unimportant.  But what he does say is that this is not just about the people.  This is about our very understanding of God.  “Why then are you now challenging God by placing a burden on the shoulders of these disciples that neither we nor our ancestors could bear?”

               He is pointing out that we LIMIT GOD by insisting on these rules, these practices, for all people.  We are limiting God when we expect people to follow a set of rules that are too hard for them to follow.  He isn’t just saying that people can’t do this easily.  He is not just saying that we will limit our welcome, limit our congregation size, limit the numbers of those who come to church by these rules and regulations, rituals and hoops that we insist upon.  It limits GOD, God-self when we block doors, and set up barriers between God and God’s people.  And then he continues by saying, “On the contrary, we believe that we and they are saved in the same way, by the grace of the Lord Jesus.”  God has created the door, God has created the opening into faith and into relationship with God.  And that door is one thing only: that door is grace.

               There is nothing that we can do, and there is nothing that we can fail to do, that determines salvation for us.  Salvation, relationship with God, the life we experience through our faith, these things come through grace.  They come through grace offered to all people.  No one gets there without it.  No one finds God, finds relationship to God without it.  And no one fails to receive the grace that God offers when they open their hearts to accept it.

               I found myself remembering a time at my last church when a woman came in wanting a tour of the church.  I showed her around, told her about the many, many ways we were doing service in the community, told her about the amazing music program, etc., when she stopped me and said, “Bottom line: do you make sure that everyone here believes that Jesus is the only way to salvation?”  Something about the way she phrased it caught me off guard.  So I pushed a little, “I’m sorry.  Are you saying that people have to believe that Jesus is the only way in order to be saved?”  “Yes.”  She said.  I was confused by this.  I know there are many Christians who believe that faith in Jesus is the only way they can be saved.  But that is faith in Jesus as Lord.  That is faith in Jesus as the WAY.  It is not faith THAT Jesus is the only way.  So I pushed a little further.  “So, it’s not faith IN Jesus that saves, but faith THAT Jesus is the only way that saves?”  “Yes” she said again.  “Are there other specifics about belief that are also required in order to be saved?”  I asked, just curious.  “Oh, well, yes!”  She said and began to list a whole bunch of things.  I finally stopped her and asked, “And where does grace fit into this?” 

               “Well,” she said, “Grace is what picked you to have these beliefs in the first place.”

               “Ah.  So, God determined who would be saved and who wouldn’t, and God made those people believe certain things and thereby only extended grace to those few God had picked?”

               “Yes.”

               “And the signal that they are saved is that they all have ‘right beliefs’.”

               “Yes”.

               I was reminded of an Ann Lamott quote: “You know you’ve made God in your image when God hates all the same people you hate.”  Or in this case, you know you’ve made God in your image when there is only one right set of beliefs and that happens to coincide with your own. 

               That is dangerous. 

               And, as Peter said, this doesn’t just limit who is included and who isn’t.  It also limits God immensely.  It says God is incapable of being present with people who believe differently than I do.  It says God is incapable of “saving” those who have their own unique relationship with God.  It says God cannot go beyond the boundaries that we have decided are necessary, perfect, specific. 

               But the conflicts, the fights, the arguments over what one must believe or even what one must do to be a part of the church continue even beyond this.  Putting aside the conversation I had with that woman who visited my last church, there are arguments within our denomination about things that are more practical, rituals, the proper path of faith, like whether a person must be baptized before they take communion.  You know where I stand on this.  I know people who have come to faith through taking communion, through the taking of this bread and this cup and experiencing life and community through those actions.  So, to me, the idea that a person’s faith must follow a prescribed path of baptism first and then communion seems absurd and again limits that faith path, that path to God and the possibilities within those decisions.  We baptize children, but other faith traditions don’t, feeling the person must follow a specific path before they are baptized.  The Presbyterian church requires that baptism be done in community, and that any parent who wants a child baptized must be a member of the church.  We believe that the baptism of an infant is a promise by a community to raise the child in that faith.  And if the parents aren’t members, we can’t very well make that promise to them.  But again, some would argue that if baptism is a symbol of new life, why is this only offered in community?  Some would suggest that we should trust that the parents are making a commitment to raise the kids in the faith, whether we are there to help or not.

               We struggle, just as the early church struggled.  And a lot of that struggle goes beyond beliefs and into the fact that our practices, our rituals, our rites, are meaningful to us.  And they should be meaningful to us.  There is purpose in them, there is history in them.  Just like for the Jews who for thousands of years had practiced the rites of the church, including circumcision, our practices connect us to a long and important history.  I am certain it must have felt that their practices were being discounted, that the meanings were being diminished.  If it was no longer an essential part of their faith that their males be circumcised, what had it meant that they had done this for thousands of years?  What had these practices and rules and structures and rituals been for, if they could so quickly and so completely be discounted in this way?

               For us, too, these conversations carry the same concerns.  In Bible study we had a conversation, for example, about the wording of the Lord’s Prayer.  It is important to many people to use the words that they have always used when saying the Lord’s Prayer.  It connects to a history, a tradition, a ritual that is important.  For me, as you know, it is much more important that the meaning in the prayer be accessible.  So, I choose to use the words of the Ecumenical version of the Lord’s prayer.  These are words that are used in our common language (unlike “art”, “hallowed” and “thy”).  They are words that feel more inclusive of children and the unchurched in our communities.  So, the struggle, the divide remains between the tradition and the deep importance of those rites, and the accessibility and inclusivity of our practices. 

               What is challenging for all of us, and I include myself in this, is to see the next generation do things so differently than we have done them.  And our call is to recognize the deep value in our rites and traditions without making them into idols of their own.  And this is hard.  The call is for us to be able to say, “This has been meaningful and continues to be meaningful for me, but that does not mean that I need to insist on it for those who are coming after me.”  The call is to feel that another person’s choice to do something differently is not necessarily a judgment, a condemnation or even a dismissal of the way that we have done things before.  And that is not easy.  It is not easy for any of us.

               I think about the conversations I’ve had with my own kids, for example, about things like marriage.  Younger people are not getting married as often.  It’s even acceptable now in our culture for a couple to have children together and continue to be in relationship without ever getting married.  Does that mean my marriage is not meaningful?  What about going to church at all?  I know that it has been painful for many that their children don’t go to church.  But the fact that they have a different path or relationship to God is not a dismissal of your path and your relationship to God. 

               The musical Fiddler on the Roof is a musical about this very struggle.  As Reb Tevye said, “Our traditions have kept us balanced for many, many years….Without our traditions we would be as shaky as a fiddler on the roof.”  And throughout the musical he continues to hold on to many of his rituals and traditions, even as he must let go of others.  He is faced with the challenge of choosing between his traditions and his relationships with his daughters.  For his first daughter, Tzeitel, he finally allows her to break the tradition of having the Matchmaker choose her husband for her.  She wants to marry the tailor who has been her friend, and finally Tevye allows it, though it hurts him to break tradition.  His second daughter then asks for his blessing on her marriage, and breaks the tradition of even asking the father for his permission to marry.  Tevye struggles with this as well, but eventually accepts that times are changing, that traditions change.  For two of these conflicts, then, he chooses his daughters, letting go, though it is ever so painful for him, of his traditions.  But this his third daughter wants to marry a Christian.  And this breaks too many of his traditions, of his beliefs, of his practices.  He cannot accept it.  The challenge to his traditions pushes him too far.  And in the face of his choice between tradition and even his daughter, he chooses his tradition.  For us, too, we may come to a point where we feel pushed too far.  But we are called to choose love again and again.  And that love means looking for balance, determining what is most important to us, being willing at times to let go, and at other times to rejoice and find comfort in what we know, what is familiar and meaningful to us.  We are called to choose love.  We are called to allow God to bring change within us, both as the church and as individuals.  We are called to sing a new song to the same God.  And sometimes that will mean keeping things the same.  And other times that will mean letting go and allowing change.  Both will be challenges. 

               These are hard conversations.  These are hard conflicts with which we struggle.  But it goes back again to passages such as this, and the invitation we have been given to be open, to let God do the work that God does in ways that may astonish, may challenge, may confront us as well.

               I’ve found myself, as I have struggled with changes my own children have made that have called me to see differently, to be differently, recollecting on the Kahlil Gibran essay on Children (The Prophet. New York: Alfred A Knopf. 1995, p 17)

    "Your children are not your children.

    They are the sons and daughter’s of Life’s longing for itself.

    They come through you but not from you,

    And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

    You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

    For they have their own thoughts.

    You may house their bodies but not their souls,

    For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

    You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

    For life goes not backward nor tarries from yesterday.

    You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

    The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.

    Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;

    For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable."

               The next generation of church, the next generation of believers, the next generation of children will not be like us.  We are called to expand our vision, and to see the ways we actually limit God by trying to keep things the same.  At the same time, I invite you to be gentle with the struggle.  The struggle has always been there.  It has always been real.  It started early on and it continues even now.  The changes do not lessen your value for the ways we have always done things.  The challenges are not judgments on what has been meaningful to you in connecting you with God, with your community and with one another. 

               Tradition and history, meaning and acceptance.  They are all valuable.  We just need to make sure that we are not limiting God in our valuing of either.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Can we change those early messages of rejection?

       A while ago I posted a quote on Facebook and asked for thoughts/comments.  The quote was "By the age of five you've either learned that the world is good and everything and everyone in it stretches out toward you with love.  Or you know that you're a reject.  No one ever unlearns that first lesson."
       The responses to the quote varied though there was universal questioning of the absoluteness of the sentence. "No one" is a phrase that is almost always problematic.  A few people were distracted by the author of the quote, making comments about who she was and whether or not her opinion was important or to be valued. (Notice I'm not naming her here... it is, again, distracting.  It was the idea I was interested in, not who said it. And while who a person is does affect what an idea means or the place of orientation that dictates the idea, sometimes an idea is worth considering for its own merit or lack of merit, distinct from the person who said it.)  The people whose first lessons taught them that the world was good tended to respond by saying the idea was patently false. I understand that. Their early experiences were positive.  They want that positive world view for everyone else.  They are hopeful that it is something all of us can obtain.  They learned the world was good, so the idea that it might always remain a bad, scary, or rejecting place for some folk is not an idea easily accepted.  But it is the responses and thoughts of those who learned otherwise, who were taught that they were "rejects" on whom I would like to focus this blog post.
        People whose early training inclined them towards feeling unsafe in the world were not all in agreement.  Some stated that with a great deal of work they were able to work through those early training sessions and to come out on the other end.  Others said they agreed with the sentiment on the whole, and that, despite the work they'd put into it, their initial reaction to most situations tended to be one of defensiveness, mistrust.  These folk, all very thoughtful, insightful, self-reflective and deep people, said that they choose to act in the world as if it were a safe place, a place of grace and compassion. They choose that way of behaving, despite the fact that the internal alarms yell something different to them.
       Children are very resilient.  We know this.  We also know that early events impact us more than anything else can.  They become part of our DNA in a sense, part of our make-up.  As brain studies show, path ways in our brain thinking and chemistry get emphasized, cemented even, early on in our life times.  Once a path way is formed, especially one that is a response to trauma of any kind, training our thinking to go a different way, to respond in a different way, to follow a new path way can be very, very difficult.  Depending on how deeply those early path ways were carved, re-training those thoughts to not automatically follow the deep gullies dug through out thinking can sometimes be near impossible. We all receive many messages as children, from different sources and in different ways. We know the value of a good care giver and role model for children who are living a hellish home life or who have survived a trauma of great proportion: it can make all the difference in the world, turn a life around, change the way a child moves into adulthood when there is something positive, someone affirming, when an adult takes the time to offer a different possibility, a different world view.  We know of stories of kids who have lived through hell but turned out okay because of someone who took them under their care and reflected back to them a different image of who they are than the one they had originally been given.  But we also know of kids who never have that alternative reflection, who don't ever have someone to tell them that things could be different, that they could be different, that there is good and love out there.
      When the early messages of rejection are strong, many kids' reaction to that message is so negative in itself that they begin to create and recreate the unsafe world around them. They become the bullies that first victimized them.  They act out the violence or abuse that they have experienced. Then it becomes even harder to change that initial message. They end up in gangs, and later in prisons, in a cycle of abuse and abusers, of violence and rejection.  This is the reality for too many of our kids, though truly, even one kid living through a hellish childhood is one kid too many.
      The bottom line is that trauma and early rejection are hard to overcome.  For some it is harder than for others.  And for some it is nearly impossible.  I'm reminded of a story in the book Leaving Northhaven by Michael Lindvall in which a pastor is reflecting on the life of a young man who was adopted early on but who was born with fetal alcohol syndrome.  Jason had lagged behind his peers, had been completely impervious to direction, was not changed or impressed by any kind of discipline or correction because he could not live beyond the moment.  He had no internal moral compass, but coveted approval from anyone, which eventually led him into a bad gang of kids and finally led him to a lifetime jail sentence.  The parents who had adopted him loved him but could not overcome the condition he was born with.  The story continues, “Ardis, Jason’s adopted mother, had told me that some shocking percentage of FAS (fetal alcohol syndrome) kids end up in prison, that they still loved their boy, but had come to accept the hard truth that they could never have heard when they were young, namely, that their love – unbounded and powerful as it might be – could not conquer all….The boy was an incarnation of all the things that cannot be fixed.  Perhaps his parents love had somewhat deflected his heedless course, but it was never enough.  Jason was Jason.  He was the emblem of that which we may fear the most; not evil, not even death, but the terrible truth that love cannot conquer all.  Like Jimmy and Ardis, Jason’s parents, I once struggled to believe that this was not so, namely, that love – faithful enough, deep enough, tireless enough, bottomless love – could not but win.  Now I sat in an eight-by-eight room in a prison across the table from what looked for all the world to be a loss….Some broken things just cannot be fixed.  There are broken people who cannot be healed in this world, neither by our love nor our cleverness….Some wounded souls heal; but some go to their graves pulled into the earth by darkness no mortal love can ever lighten.”

      We all carry scars from our early years.  Some are easily worked through.  Others are more serious.  Serious ones can prevent us from living the lives we would choose to live, whether that scar be a lack of self-worth, a message that we can't do better, a belief that the world is against us no matter what, a vision of the world as evil and violent, a message that we are rejects, not acceptable, not okay, that we can't do what we want or whatever that message may be. There are sometimes (often based on economic and national privilege) opportunities to fight these early messages, to work through traumas and to strive to live a life not controlled by our early experiences. But not everyone has those chances.  And some people's genetic make up mixed with those early traumas make a true recovery extremely difficult if not impossible.  I understand that we don't want to believe that there is anyone beyond healing. But the stories of our world show us otherwise.
       Personally, I imagine I will continue to work my entire life against early negative messages.  And while I would hope for something different, I have come to accept that I will watch my children spend their entire lives fighting their early experiences of trauma as well. We do the best we can do. And we hope to learn how to avoid imparting these messages to other children.  Faith helps.  But it doesn't fix everything.  Love helps.  But it too, has limits, at least in this world.  The early years of our children are so important.  Spending time working to make those early years the healthiest possible for each child will go a long way, not only towards healing individuals but in healing communities, nations and the world.  We have a long way to go.  But looking towards the children is an important start.
     

Sunday's Sermon - Codependency

Matthew 18: 15-18, 21-22
(The Giving Tree)

I would like to start by asking you a series of questions that I would like you to think about for a few minutes.

Do you feel responsible for other people--their feelings, thoughts, actions, choices, wants, needs, well-being and destiny?
Do you feel compelled to help people solve their problems or to try to take care of their feelings?
Do you find it easier to feel and express anger about injustices done to others than about injustices done to you?
Do you feel safest and most comfortable when you are giving to others?
Do you feel insecure and guilty when someone gives to you?
Do you feel empty, bored and worthless if you don't have someone else to take care of, a problem to solve, or a crisis to deal with?
Are you often unable to stop talking, thinking and worrying about other people and their problems?
Do you stay in relationships that don't work and tolerate abuse in order to keep people loving you?

These are a few of the classic questions of a group called CODA, a 12 step group that tries to identify and look at behaviors knows as co-dependency. While I don’t see a lot of what I would call classic co-dependent behavior in this congregation, I wanted to give you that list of questions to think about for a few minutes. We’ll return to this later.

In the mean time, I want to tell you the story of a friend of mine from a long time ago, who gave me permission to tell her story and whom, for the purposes of this sermon I will call Katy. Katy was one of the most loving, giving people that you would ever meet. She gave to any who would ask her, anything that they asked. If George needed a ride to church, Katy would give it. If the congregation needed food for a potluck or if anyone in the church was sick, she was sure to be there with a hot dish. When Dana needed someone to listen to her troubles, Katy was always around with an open ear. She sewed the costumes for the Christmas pageants, she held the women’s annual tea at her house and would not allow anyone else to bring anything to help. She ran the annual food drive, taught Sunday school, and was pretty much a fixture at the church. Whenever anyone needed anything, they knew they could count on Katy. It wasn’t just at church that she was so giving and caring, either. Although Katy had a fairly demanding job, she still found it possible to volunteer at the local soup kitchen, and serve on the PTA. And in these areas too, people knew that if they needed anything, they could count on Katy. At home, she was always in command with her caring. Her children lacked for nothing: their financial and emotional needs were always completely met, their rooms were always spotlessly maintained... by Katy, no household chore was ever left undone, because, as Katy stated, she wanted the children to be free to focus on their school work and on being children. Her husband, too was always cared for to the best of her ability. When he came home from work, he was free to put his feet up, to relax, because even though Katy also worked, she would tend to his every need, most of the time anticipating those needs before he even asked.  Everything seemed so perfect, so well maintained. And that was how Katy understood her Christian calling. She took the Shel Silverstein book, “The Giving Tree” as her model for how Christians should be, and she gave everything she had, everything she was, to the care of others.

There was only one flaw in this perfect scene of hers. Katy’s best friend at church and work, Samantha, occasionally drank a little too much. As Samantha explained it, her job was hard, her life was stressful and she just needed to unwind sometimes. Katy could understand that.  So she did her best to “help” Samantha by covering for her when she was hung-over some mornings and couldn’t get to work, by hiding the alcohol when she felt Samantha had had enough, by getting Sam’s kids out of the house when things started to get ugly. But what started as an occasional drinking binge began to be more and more frequent. Eventually Samantha lost her job and then her husband left her and took the kids. But Katy was there to the rescue even then. She took Samantha in to her own house, she tried to bolster Samantha’s self-esteem thinking that if she only felt better about herself, maybe she could get out and find a job; she took on more and more in her fight for her friend, in her efforts to continue to be ‘giving’ and supportive.

Samantha’s life was falling apart. Finally she began to realize it and decided she had to stop drinking. Samantha tried to stop, but in those first few days and the end of that first week she became so ugly to Katy, her kids and Katy’s family, that eventually Katy went out and bought her a bottle of wine herself just to “get her to normal up” as she said it.

At that point Katy’s husband Dan stepped in.  “Katy, Sam’s life is falling apart.  She has to stop drinking.”
“Yes, but she was acting horribly!”  Katy retorted.
“So, you’d rather have your friend’s life be a mess than to support her through this terrible time?” Dan asked incredulously
“But it’s not just for me,” Katy said. “I’m protecting you and the kids too.  She’s horrible to you, too, when she’s not drinking!”
“So let’s go away for a week or two. You know it will get better once the physical addiction is broken,” Dan said. “She is your friend!  She has to stop drinking!”

But Katy was so caught up in all of this that she could not see it. All she could see was that she had to support her friend. And at that moment “support” looked like providing the alcohol that seemed to calm and stabilize her. Katy’s life was also now spinning out of control.  And the life of her family was very closely following.

At church she found herself beginning to talk about Sam, even though Sam was also a member there. Of course Katy did. Katy needed someplace to process all of this. Who better to process with than those who also knew and were trying to support Sam. Katy talked about how Sam was “making her” take care of her in this terrible way that was destroying her own family. She talked about how Sam should just suffer the consequences of her own behavior. Katy talked and talked. But she did not change her own behavior towards Sam. She could not stop enabling Sam’s addiction. Katy could not say no. She could not set limits. She was sinking with Sam.  To use the book that Katy herself was so fond of, she was reduced to the stump of the Giving Tree, but was still trying to give.
What does this story about my friend have to do with today’s scripture lessons?

I want to start at the end of my story with Katy and work backward. While her behavior at church here may be the least of the problems, we have to start there, I believe, to get at the root of the issues. So let’s go back to Jesus words in Matthew. Jesus words here give us one of the few if not the only time that Jesus actually tells us how to treat each other within the walls of the church. Most of his words have to do with how we are to treat people who are not necessarily in the church: love your neighbor, especially the stranger, feed the hungry, visit those in prison, etc.  But here we have Jesus telling us how to treat each other within the fold, within the family. What did he say?
He says that if someone hurts us, or “sins against us,” we are to talk to that person DIRECTLY. Not to anyone else, but directly. If that doesn’t work, then what are we supposed to do? Bring a witness or two and talk to the friend DIRECTLY!!! If that doesn’t work, what are we supposed to do? Involve the church and talk to the friend, how?  DIRECTLY!!!

Are we supposed to process the situation with the witnesses before we go to talk to the friend? No. Are we supposed to let the church know what is going on before we go to talk to the friend? No. Here’s a harder question. Is there room here for processing with another church member? Of course, but in the company of the friend! There really might be times when we need to process more than this. Jesus doesn’t offer this, but I would suggest that a co-dependents anonymous group is a wonderful place to do this kind of processing. Processing with a counselor is also a good idea. Is it hard to talk to a person who has upset us directly? Very, very hard. I think most of us struggle with this at some point. It is so easy, so tempting, especially when we want to support each other by listening to each other, to talk to other people about someone in the church or something that has upset us. It is really hard to talk to a person directly about upsetting behavior. It is especially hard to talk to them directly without processing the information with others first. Can you imagine saying directly to a person who has really hurt you, or even just really bugged you, the things that when we are angry or hurt are so easy to say to someone else? Can you imagine having to process the hurt and pain directly with a person who has hurt you before you even talk through it? Sometimes we don’t talk to a person directly because we think we are making a mountain out of a mole hill. But if we find ourselves talking to someone else about it, then clearly some talking needs to be done and that talking should always be done with the person it involves. I think for the large majority of us, this is really hard.

The listeners at church also have a responsibility here. When someone approaches us to complain about another member of the church, should we allow them to process it through with us? I don’t really think there’s space for that in light of this passage from Luke. What we might perhaps do instead is to suggest that while we would love to listen to them, it would be better to have this conversation if the person being discussed were present. This is perhaps even harder to do than confronting in other situations.  It is very, very hard. But it is something we are called to strive for in our relationships with our church-mates.

I believe the main reason Jesus asks us to do this is very simply that talking to a person directly about something that has hurt or upset us is respectful of the person, our brother and sister, who has hurt us. If Jesus was about anything it was about giving dignity and respect to every individual no matter what they have done or failed to do. When we talk behind someone’s back, when we “process” a person and their issues, we are putting ourselves in the position of judge, in a position of power in which that individual, who doesn’t know we are talking about them, or isn’t there to hear directly what is said, has no way to defend themself. That’s one reason Jesus asks us to do this.

Another reason is what we discussed last week, that the church is supposed to be about the spiritual welfare of each individual. If we don’t confront people by telling them when they have hurt us, or, to use Biblical language, when they have sinned against us, we are missing an opportunity to be about supporting each other in our spiritual journeys. Spiritual growth, growth of any kind, requires change and sometimes we need each other to help point the way that we need to go. We confront each other lovingly to let go of our anger. We confront to grow and walk together in our spiritual journeys. We confront as a sign that we think that brother or sister is important enough to deserve direct, caring, loving communication, and even correction at times. We also confront directly as a way to make sure we are accountable for our own behavior. When we talk directly to a person it becomes much harder to hide our own choices that often contribute to a situation behind blame.

Jesus calls us to love our neighbor as ourselves. The key words for Katy and for us here today are “AS YOURSELF.” When we start loving others to the point that we are giving up ourselves; when, like the tree in the Giving Tree, we have given our fruit, our branches, our trunk, everything that can give life, when we give it all to another person, there is nothing left of us to give. God does not want you to give to the point where you are spent and can give no more.  Giving, loving - these are life time jobs. We are not asked to burn ourselves out to the point of destruction.

Sometimes in loving, like Jesus, like Martin Luther King Jr., like many saints and good people in history, sometimes in loving completely, we do lose our life. But our job is not to seek out death. Our job here is not to become martyrs. Our job is to love God, neighbor AND SELF to the best of our ability. Loving self starts with knowing our limits.

I’m not saying that we should not strive to give more to others. We should strive to give more.  Most of us tend to err on the side of not giving enough, materially as well as in our care for others. But when we get to the point of burnout, when we get to the point where we feel we need to process by talking behind someone’s back, we are not loving ourselves as our neighbor, or loving our neighbor as ourselves since we are forgetting Jesus’ directive to talk directly to those who hurt us.

Fortunately for my friend Katy, she finally did get help. She finally went to a group called Al-anon, which is a twelve step group for people with loved ones who are alcoholics, and later she joined a group called “CODA” or co-dependent’s anonymous- another twelve step group. While Al-anon and Coda are not affiliated with any particular religion, she told me later that the main lesson she learned in these twelve step groups was the lesson we read today in the Luke passage. In Katy’s case, she learned to love herself as her neighbor. Katy discovered that she had been trying to hold on to Samantha’s love at any cost, even the cost of Samantha’s broken life, and that was why she could not really help Samantha give up her drinking. Katy learned the hard lesson that all of her “care,” not just for Sam, but also for her children and many of the other people in her life, actually prevented those she loved from growing. While she thought she was caring for them, in fact she was enabling them to stay dependent, in the case of her children to fail to learn care for themselves, in the case of her husband, to fail to learn to carry his weight, and in the case of Samantha to stay addicted. She learned that this was not love.  Love was helping them to grow. Sometimes that meant saying “no” and letting the other suffer the consequences of their actions. Sometimes it meant saying “no” and forcing the other to learn to do things on their own. Sometimes it meant saying “no” just because she had to care for herself too. This was not easy. Sometimes the other became angry, even threatened to take away their love. But she also learned that love so easily lost was not love that she really had in the first place. As the CODA saying goes, “People don’t love or respect people they can use. They use people they can use.”

Katy has not stopped being a giving, loving person. If anything, she is more giving in that her care comes from a place of gratitude and genuine care, rather than trying to earn love or approval. She has stopped giving in such a way that it keeps those around her from growing, that it enables her family and friends to be stuck in addictions and lazy behavior, that she herself is in constant burn-out. She is learning, slowly but surely, her own limits. As a result, she is no longer resentful to those around her for using her. And she has found not only real love between friends and family members, but respect as well.  May we all continue to strive for respect, love and genuine caring for God, neighbor and self.  Amen.