A prophet in his own home

Mark 6:1-6

               A woman who ran a soda fountain was disturbed one day to notice a group of older boys making fun of a younger boy.  “He’s so stupid!” she could hear one of the older boys saying, “Watch this!”  The older boy proceeded to take out of his pocket a dime and a nickel which he then held, one in each open palm in front of the younger boy.  “Which one is more?  Which one do you want?” he mockingly asked the young boy.  The young boy looked very carefully for a moment at each coin, finally picking up the larger nickel and putting it in his pocket.  The older boys laughed and mocked and moved on.  The woman watching this, upset by what she saw, approached the young boy.  “I know the nickel is a bigger coin, but son, don’t you know that the dime is worth more than the nickel?”

               “Of course!” replied the boy.  “But if I don’t pick up the nickel every time, they will stop doing the ‘trick’ and so far I’ve managed to get over a dollar of their money.”

               Just like the boy in this story, Jesus, in his home town, was much more than his community would, or could see.  The people in his community could not see Jesus for the man of God that he was.  They could not allow for him to be a worker of miracles, a speaker of truth, the son of God.  As a result he could not do miracles in his home town.  They could not see who he was and so, with his own home community, he had no status, no respect, and ultimately no power. 

               Do you know people who are so charismatic, were so charming even as children that they had no trouble becoming prom queen or king, class president, “most likely to succeed,” etc.?  Individuals at every high school win these titles every year.  And I think that these are the kind of people who would have had no trouble being prophets in their own homes.  These are people everyone likes and everyone wants to be with.  They make their way, their successful way in the world because of and based on their charisma.  Everyone who meets them wants to be part of their fan club, their inner circle, their friends.  Many of our politicians fit into these categories.  Leaders of many of our cults also fit into this category: David Koresh, Jim Jones, etc.  For many of our most famous actors and actresses they too have found success by knowing the right people and by being the ‘right’ people also:  people that you cannot help but want to support, love and be around.  Most of these people not only have charisma or social status because of their personalities, but also have class standing; they are from a class of people whom we tend to respect: they have money, tend to be white collar workers, they come from respected family backgrounds.

               What is interesting for me about today’s scripture is that it tells us Jesus was not one of those typically charismatic people.  The people in his home town did not run to support his ministry, but instead made comments like, “huh.  I know his little sister!” and “He’s just the carpenter’s son!”  In our day the equivalent might be “what’s so special about him?  Who does he think he is, trying to change the world, preaching at us, claiming to do miracles.  We know his family for heaven’s sake!  His father worked as a janitor.  Wasn’t his sister, Suzy, the one who had such trouble in school?  And his brother, George, wasn’t he caught smoking behind the church?  Who does this Jesus think he is?  He’s not so special.”  Because they could not or would not see Jesus, everyone was diminished.  The people did not benefit from his gifts, he was unable to fulfill his purpose among them.

               This understanding of Jesus, as one not successful in his home town, one not seen, one not powerful, is, like everything else about Jesus, scandalous.  God did not come to us among the powerful, among the professionally and monetarily successful, among the popular, or the charismatic or famous.  He came and is coming among those we tend not to see or think of very highly.  He is coming among people you and I would and do have a hard time respecting.

               But while this understanding of Jesus is scandalous, I have to admit, I like this about Jesus.  Since I too am not charismatic or famous or rich by American standards, this surprising part of Jesus appeals to me.  He isn’t so far away, so untouchable that I can’t relate to him.  More importantly, he isn’t such an “idol” that he can’t relate to me.  This story about Jesus makes him once again, more human, more like us, more one of us.  His experiences in this life were very much what many of us have experienced and known.  He underwent again and again what it was like to not be seen in his fullness, valued in his being honored as who he really was, and respected.  He experienced powerless-ness.  He experienced rejection.  He, too, was not seen in his fulness by people he knew, loved and cared for.

               The words of one children’s song are, “There’s more to me than you see.  Won’t you reach out and touch me?”  We understand that feeling.  We are more than the person in the red car sees as he gives us an obscene sign because we made some error in our driving or weren’t going fast enough in his opinion.  We are more than the people in line at the grocery store see, annoyed at us because one of our items is missing the price tag and we have to wait for the bagger to get the correct price.  We are more than the professor sees who writes on our paper, “I’m disappointed in you.”  We are more than our teenagers and the teenagers in our community see who believe we can’t possibly understand or relate to them because they don’t know that in fact we are every age we ever were and so there is still that teenage part in ourselves, searching for who we are, struggling against trying to please those in our communities.  We are even more than those who love us will ever know.  We are more than we ourselves recognize: we are more every day, we are more of our potential, in our possibilities, in our being than just our past, our class, our money, our fame, our talents and our actions show.  We are God’s children.  God made each of us amazingly complex, unique, beautiful and GOOD.  Each of us is immensely valuable.  Each of us is worthy of infinite love.  You are an incredible creation.  You are worthy of being seen, of being loved, of being known.  God made you and loves you just because you are.  Just because God made you in love and for love.

               There was a monastery high in some beautiful mountains that was going to be closed down.  There were only a few monks who lived there – no new monks had joined for many years and visitors were scarce.  In an act of desperation, the monks decided to consult a local guru who was known for his wisdom in all matters.  When brother Michael consulted with this guru, the wise man said that he could not help them to keep the monastery open but that he was so glad the brother had come because he had a message for him.  Michael was surprised and asked what the message was.  The guru told him that the Christ was living disguised in the monastery.  Michael took this message back to the monastery, and told the other monks that while the guru had not been able to help them, that he had this amazing news to share with them.  After hearing the message, the monks began to look at one another differently.  Surely the Christ wasn’t brother Jason, they thought, he snores and brags and is anything but Christ-like!  But then again, the guru had told them that Christ was in disguise…    Could it be brother Simon?  He eats a little too much, but is generally very gentle and loving.  Maybe it is him…  Because none were sure who was the Christ in disguise, they began to treat each other person in the monastery as if they could be the Christ, just in case they were.  Visitors to the monastery began to notice that something was different here.  Each of the monks seemed to treat everyone with such reverence, such care, such respect and such holiness.  And as they noticed this difference, they wanted to be around it more.  They invited their friends to come back with them, and some chose to join the monastery.  The monastery began to grow again and eventually became a thriving, vital, active Christian community.

               When Jesus was not seen and not understood, not respected and loved by his own community, everyone in the community was poorer.  The same is true among us.  When we do not see each other, work to know each other, love each other in our fulness, we are all poorer for it.  And there is good reason for us to try.  Because just as in the story of the monastery, Christ is among us.  And she/he is indeed in disguise: the disguise is each of us.  The disguise is you.  What would happen here if were each treated with the care and respect of these monks?  What would happen to you if people looked at you like they really saw you, respected you, VALUED you, all the time, as the amazing, lovable, child of God person that you are?  What would happen to our world if we began to treat each other across cultures and across all barriers of ethnicity, gender, ability, age, country of origin, sexual orientation, religion, with the care and respect of the monks?

               Where is the Christ?  Where does Christ come again among us?  Not where expected – not in the powerful, the rich, the famous, the noticeable, the “beautiful people”.  Jesus did not come to us as the all loved, “most likely to succeed”, rich bachelor TV personality.  And Christ does not return as a person we would recognize as being of consequence: not rich, not popular, not special by American standards.  Jesus had regular, normal brothers and sisters, his dad had a blue collar job, he grew up in a poor community and, as much as he was divine, he was also fully human, just like us.  The challenge in this for all of us is that we are called to treat everyone around us as the Christ.  The comfort in this is that you, too, are deserving of such love, such care, such deliberate intentional knowing of the wonderful, beautiful, child of God that you are.  Christ returns every day anew.  In and among us.  In and among YOU.

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.
     

Yesterday's Sermon - Who Are We?

2 Timothy 4:6-18
Luke 18:9-14

In the passage we heard today from Timothy, we hear the struggles and pain of a person abandoned by friends, by peers, by everyone.  We hear the suffering of a person who is alone, trying desperately to connect and get what he needs in the midst of the pain he is feeling.  He is alone, at the mercy of those who would and did attack him and imprison him.  He is also human.  And as a human, he feels the sting, the hurt, the deep pain of their betrayal and abandonment.  But even in the midst of that, even in the midst of that, he returns again and again to a deeper understanding of who he is.  And that deeper understanding is that he is a child of God, a God who loves him, who will stand by him, who will justify him, who will not abandon or betray him.  That is what he returns to each time.  Who is he?  A child of God.  Who are we?  Children of God.

The Luke passage is, in a way, a set up for all of us.  Do we find ourselves feeling like the tax collector or like the Pharisee?  If we are the Pharisee, we are condemned by Jesus for judging the tax collectors and others.  If we see ourselves like the tax collector and others, then we have put ourselves once again in the position of the judge – this time condemning the Pharisee.  No, the only way to understand this parable is to see ourselves once again by different definitions.  We cannot be defined by human definitions.  Perhaps in some ways we are both tax collector and Pharisee, and several commentaries I read emphasized this – that we must recognize that we are both people who strive to be good, and people who fail to be completely good at all times.  We are both people who at times recognize our failure and at other times people who are grateful that we haven’t fallen as far as others – and in that gratitude become people who judge and do the opposite of what Jesus calls us to do.  But, again, I think the greater truth, the truth of both of these passages is slightly different.  We are not “tax collector.”  We are not “Pharisee”.  We are not judge and judged.  Who we are, at our deepest level is, once again, that which is sometimes hardest to feel and find.  We are children of God.

I know and understand that all of us have had times of feeling hurt, devastated even, by betrayal or the rejection of others.  That’s part of the human condition, all of us experience disloyalty, treachery, and dismissal from people we love, we all experience these kinds of losses in our lives.  We all have, we all do.  But if we can separate our identity from what other people think, or say, or do to us…if we can live instead in the hope and joy of being God’s children, then we can face anything.  We can stand strong in the face of pain and loss, we can rest secure knowing we are loved and held no matter what.   That doesn’t mean we won’t feel the pain.  Does it still hurt to feel alone?  To feel inadequate?  To feel judged and/or to judge others?  All these things still hurt.  As we saw, the Pauline author of Timothy felt the pain, too.  We know of his deep and abiding faith.  And yet he still hurts and struggles.  That is human.  But he SURVIVES and has meaning and joy and life and love because of who he is at the deepest level – he is one who belongs to God.  For us, too, in those times of loss and pain, rejection and betrayal, we don’t have to lose our sense of self, our sense of value, the joy and meaning we find in life – because we belong to God.  And being God’s children gives us joy, gives us meaning, gives us love even when we are not getting it from other humans.
 
In the book The Life of Pi, Pi says, “Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love – but sometimes it was so hard to love.  Sometimes my heart was sinking so fast with anger, desolation and weariness, I was afraid it would sink to the very bottom of the Pacific and I would not be able to lift it back up….Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out.  It was a hell beyond expression.  I thank God it always passed…The blackness would stir and eventually go away, and God would remain, a shining point of light in my heart.  I would go on loving.” (p209)
God offers us that.  God offers that constantly and faithfully – connection, love, light, meaning, joy.  But the challenge for us is to take the personal time to connect with it, even when it is hard, even when there are pressures not to, even when we feel despair.

Mitch Albom described it this way, “The (Rabbi) puttered from room to room in quiet contemplation.  Having survived the Great Depression and two world wars, he was no longer thrown by headline events.  He kept the outside world at bay by keeping the inside world at hand.  He prayed.  He chatted with God.  He watched the snow out the window.  And he cherished the simple rituals of his day: the prayers, the oatmeal with cereal, the grandkids, the car trips with (his wife), the phone call to old congregants."(p 223)

I'm reminded of the joke about the man who complained that he wasn't able to reach his pastor by phone one day; when the clergy replied that it was his/her day off, the man snarled:  well, the Devil never takes a day off.  To which the wise pastor smiled and said:  true enough and if I don't take a day off I would be just like him.

And why would he be like him?  I think the slope into evil starts with a feeling that we lack love.  If we feel unloved, we stop caring enough to love in return, despite the rejection.  My kids and I have been watching Star Trek the Next Generation episodes.  And we saw an episode yesterday in which the crew encountered something that defined itself as a “skin of evil”.  It quickly became clear that this “skin of evil” defined itself this way and fed off of others’ pain because of its own hurt and feeling of being abandoned.  It self-defined as something that got joy out of others’ suffering because of its rage at having been left, rejected, abandoned.  Humans need love to live.  They need love to survive.  We know this from studies.   And when they don’t have enough of it, or when they are damaged by rejection and abandonment, that is when they can turn to evil.  But the truth is that no one is ever without it, not really.  Because God offers it constantly.  And if we can remember that we are loved, if we can turn to that love even when human love fails us (and it will because none of us is perfect – we all make mistakes and we all suffer from them and from the mistakes of others), then we do not have to sink, we do not have to give up, we do not have to become bitter or jaded or revengeful or torn apart by rage.

Paul’s faith continued with him to the end and so even at the end, his life had meaning and grace.  When we recognize, in reading stories like the one we heard about the Pharisees and tax collectors, that none of what we do or feel – for good or for bad defines us, we, too, can hold on to that meaning.  Who are we?  We are God’s children.  That is your identity.  That is what gives you value, worth, and the blessings of this day.  That is what defines who you are.  You are God's and ultimately, nothing else matters.  Amen.