You Are What You See

               "You are what you see."  This is a quote that I was told came originally from Thick Nhat Hanh but as I tried to clarify this online, it seems many people have said this, and with good reason.  Psychologists say that what we internalize through life, media or other parts of life can deeply affect who we are, what we believe, and how we function in this life time.  I read an article in Psychology Today that named the deep effects on a person's psyche of watching too much negative news.  Watching negative news can lessen our sense of joy, increase anxiety, and lead to deep depression. Similarly, there are numerous studies that show watching too much violent TV or engaging in violent video games encourages children and adults to act out that violence in their lives.  Considering how much time people spend watching violent TV or playing violent video games, is the increasing rage and violence in our country surprising?

           There is a common misperception that if you are feeling angry, you can dispel those feelings by acting out violence towards non-human targets (punching bags, pillows, shooting images through a video game).  In fact, the opposite has been found to be true.  Once you begin to act out violence towards ANYTHING, the possibility of becoming violent towards the living beings around you increases. That is a consistent finding.  Psychologists knew this 40 years ago (I remember learning it in my psychology classes in college) and studies continue to bear out this finding, yet people still claim they are "getting OUT their anger" through violence when instead their behaviors increase those feelings and violent tendencies. When we see, feel, hear or act out violence, even if it is aimed at inanimate or video objects, we increase the violence of our own beings and our own tendencies to harm others.

            This also manifests in what news we watch.  While we choose our news channels based on our beliefs, at the same time it becomes circular in that the stories we hear and see reinforce and tend to cement us into the beliefs we already had.  They make us who we are as much as we choose them because of who we are.

            Still, today I heard the phrase, "you are what you see" differently.  While I believe that what we see, what we engage with our eyes, our ears and our actions (such as playing violent video games) does change how we interact with the world, I also heard and understood this phrase at a deeper level.  We have choices about how we see the events around us.  We make decisions about how we interpret events.  As I have shared before, I knew someone who regularly said that every action of every person was a play for power.  I don't agree with her that this is true of everyone.  I do see that it is true of her own behaviors.  She projected onto the world her own internal reality.  She chose to see the world through the lens of others' playing for power and as a result, this "sight" of hers effected everything that she did as well and encouraged her choices to continue to be plays for power. 

    I am very close to a few people who have a condition that is a common part of ADHD called Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria.  Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria affects the way in which they see the world in that they experience perceived slights as rejection.  This may sound familiar to some of you who may experience this in your own lives as well.  Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria means that if someone forgot to invite you to something, or didn't look at you while they were speaking, or said something in a way that could have been perceived as a slight, even if that was never the intention, you assume you are being rejected, you assume you aren't liked and aren't valued.  While this is a common part of ADHD, there is still some choice in this.  There are activities that encourage those with this condition to consider other possibilities for the behavior they saw as rejection.  If these activities are practiced with regularity, they can change the way the person sees and interacts with the world.  

       Another example: Once a person starts seeing the world as divided into "good" and "bad" it is easy to see that mirrored in the world.  By "easy," I mean just that.  Considering why a person or group of people behave in a certain way takes effort, it takes work to refrain from casting certain people or groups of people as "bad guys."  It also usually means a person has to be more self-reflective and look at their contributions to the negative behaviors in the world, and that can be very painful.  But that effort, that work is deeply worthwhile as we strive to heal the world, bring peace to the world, create a better world, and become more whole people ourselves.

       What do we choose to engage in with our eyes, our ears, our time?  Do we choose to invite into our beings the violence that is so prevalent on TV or in video games, or even in the news?  Do we try to balance the negative news we hear with positive news, reminding ourselves that there still is good in humanity and in the world?  (Because that is the solution here: ignoring the news is not a good option.  Choosing to balance it out with positive stories is more effective as well as healthier.) But more, how do we choose to see the world?  And can we choose to see with eyes of grace, compassion and love?  If we make that choice, how will our behaviors, and our very souls be impacted and effected?  I believe this choice would change each of us, and in doing so, has the potential to change the world for the better.  

Expectations of Clergy And Other People of Faith

            I've heard several people lately say something to the affect that they left the church at some point in their lives because of the way other people in the church behaved.  They left because of a pastor, or because of the way members of the congregation behaved towards the pastor, or they left simply because members of the congregation were unkind towards other members of the congregation.  And the conclusion of each of these folk was something along the lines of "people in the church shouldn't behave that way."  After all, if we strive to follow God, shouldn't that make us better?

            I've been sitting with this question for years, actually.  It's common that people leave because of the hypocrisy they see in the church: so after a pastor messes up, or after mean people in the church do something unkind, or because of the judgmental stance of some churches or congregations.  Shouldn't we who profess to follow a loving, compassionate, gracious God work harder to do right?  To avoid hurting people?  To build people up and care about those who need our care?  Shouldn't our weekly time remembering what we are called to do and who we are called to be make some difference in our lives?

          My answer has changed over the years, some, but here it is as I think now:  Yes, our time in the church should make us better.  But it should not make us better than other people.  It should just make us better than we ourselves might have been had we not been in that place of remembrance and support for being the best we can be.  None of us will ever be perfect.  And I don't think we can ever compare ourselves to other people.  The best we can do is compare ourselves to ourselves.  Have we grown to be more loving, more forgiving, more gracious than we were before?  Or than we might otherwise have become?    

        I think about what Jesus himself said on this subject, (Luke 5:31-32): "Jesus answered, “Healthy people don’t need a doctor, but sick people do.  I didn’t come to call righteous people but sinners to change their hearts and lives.”  

        People come to church for many reasons.  But for many of us, it is because we are striving to be the people God calls us to be and we know we need the help and support of the community, of the time of worship and joint commitment to serve the poor and oppressed.  We need the time together to both reflect and work together to bring justice and peace to the world.  We can't do it on our own, or certainly we can't do it as well on our own.  For those who can, more power to them.  For the rest of us, our time in community and in church is essential for us to be the best we can be, for us to continue on the journey to be more whole, more caring and more loving.  That's all we can do.  We will never reach that goal, we will never be perfect.  But church allows us to grow towards it, to remember to self-reflect and work harder to be better.

        Some of what angers people is how big the mistakes are that some people within churches make.  I understand that.  But I have two responses to this.  First, I don't think God ranks "mistakes" or "sins" (to use a churchier word) in the same way that we do.  In the ten commandments, for example, murder is not listed as a worse sin than forgetting to take a day of rest.  I want you to think about that for a minute.  Murder is not ranked higher in the ten commandments than forgetting to honor the Sabbath.  There's no "ranking" of sins in scripture.  WE do that.  WE rank things and sometimes we really get those rankings off in some very strange ways.  Some Christians think that loving someone they have decided is inappropriate is worse than murder, for example.  We know this because they will KILL LGBTQ folk and feel justified in doing so.  But God wants wholeness for us and that means working for good in every aspect, working towards love and care, compassion and understanding in every way.  When we fail, we fail.  God forgives and we move on, hopefully having learned from the mistake.  

         The second thing I want to say about that is that again, we cannot be comparing people against other people: only against themselves.  And since we do not know what they would have been like had they NOT been in church, who are we to say that church has made no difference for them?  We can't know this.  

        Churches are human creations.  And as such they will be imperfect just as humans are imperfect.  They are there to build up, to honor God, to create community, to encourage us to be the church in the world, lifting up the oppressed, empowering the poor.  We who are in the church are part of that.  But because we are part of it, church will reflect our gifts, and our weaknesses.  We continually strive to do better, to make church better.  But it will never be perfect just as we as individuals will never be perfect.  

         I say again, church will make no person perfect.  It just won't.  But it can help.  At least it can help some of us.  And that's enough for me.    

Choice

Ephesians 1:1-14

Mark 6:14-29

               Today in the narrative lectionary we begin a look at the book of Ephesians.  And for today what I want to say about this passage is simply that it is in many ways the elevator version of Christianity.  It talks about our being chosen first by God, our adoption, redemption, forgiveness, grace, mystery; the pleasure and plan of God for all to be gathered in, inheritance, the seal of the Holy Spirit.  But to be honest, as I looked over the passages for today, I felt much more called to focus on this very disturbing passage from Mark.  So, we will be discussing that today.  And what I want to look at in particular is this idea that Herod had, this belief that Herod had no choice but to behead John the Baptist. 

We know this story.  He imprisoned John the Baptist, and according to this story in Mark, it was because John had told him that he had acted unlawfully when he had married his son’s wife.  But at the same time as he had imprisoned him, it was also clear that he valued John the Baptist.  Herod was getting something from that relationship, it was freeing for him, it was teaching him, it was touching him.  He respected John.   

Then we come to the second part of the story.  His daughter, Herodius, dances for Herod and his guests.  Herod is so pleased that he says to her “ask me for anything and I will give it to you.”  Herodius asked her mother and her mother asked for John the Baptist’s head.  Now here is the interesting part.  The story says, “although the king was upset, because of his solemn pledge and his guests, he didn’t want to refuse her.  So he ordered a guard to bring John’s head. The guard went to the prison, cut off John’s head, brought his head on a plate, and gave it to the young woman, and she gave it to her mother.”

Herod believed that he had no choice.  He had no choice but to take a man’s life, an innocent life; a life, furthermore, that he greatly valued.  Now we can go into the specifics of why he felt this way.  We can talk about shame culture and the huge consequences he would have faced if he had done anything differently.  We can talk about what it means to have choice in this situation.  But regardless of whether you feel he did the right thing or the wrong thing for his place in that time and in that situation, the fact still remains that he had a choice to make and he made it, despite the things he told himself about lack of choice.

As I read this story, a Joan of Arcadia scene came to mind in which God asks Joan to play chess.  She joins the chess club at school and ends up beating the school chess champion though she really does not understand how to play the game.  Other disasters happen in which she is a part and finally she ends up in a chess game against God.  She still doesn’t really know how to play chess, but she sits down to begin.  She says,

“I don’t really know how to play chess.”

God responds, “Well, that’s fairly obvious.” 

“You know, God, for once I’m very glad to see you…  Because my life is completely unravelling.  I’m up to my eyeballs in the drama of the high school mating ritual and now, thanks to you, I’ve been mistaken as the high school chess champion.  How did this happen to me?”

“Which part?”

“How did I beat that kid at chess?”

“He was using logic.  You weren’t.  it’s impossible to guard against chaos.  It’s rare but it happens. Black’s move.”

“I don’t want to.” But even as she says this, she picks up her pawn and moves it.  “I don’t know how to play this game,” she says again.

“And yet you play the game.”

“Because I’m forced to!”

“Forced to!  Your friends make a suggestion which you follow up on and then you are surprised at the outcome!  It’s a causal universe.” He says as he moves his piece.   “Your move.”

“Wait a minute.  I’m being punished because I made a tiny little effort to fit in?”

“It’s not about punishment.  It’s that actions have consequences.  And to be in denial of that is to be disengaged from the laws of the universe which renders you powerless, and vulnerable to an inordinate amount of pain. Other than that, it’s no big deal. Move. ” Joan picks up a piece then puts it back down and reaches for another.

“Noooo,” God said.   “It’s a rule called touch move.  Once you’ve touched a piece you have to move that piece.”

“I’m not allowed to change my mind?  What kind of universe is that?”

“Oh, you can change your mind, but you still have to play that piece.  So you should think before you move.”

“Wait a minute.  This is a metaphor, right?”  She stares at the board for a few more minutes, mumbling under her breath and finally moves her piece.  “I took the bait so now I’m in the game.  How do I get out?”

“There are many ways to get out.  Surrender is one.  Losing is another.  Winning.  Cheating, which I don’t recommend.  But you have to do something.  You have to have a strategy.  You see, the number one rule of chess is this: whatever you do, don’t play the other person’s game.  Play your own.  Your move.”

-- 

Herod was playing the other person’s game.  Herod allowed the rules of a shame society to tell him that he had no choice but to have John the Baptist beheaded.  He played the other person’s game, and one man lost his life, and Herod lost his grounding.

I’m reminded of the movie “The Devil Wears Prada”.  The movie’s main character, Andi, starts as a person with goals and integrity.  She wants to be a journalist, and she has written about injustices such as poor work conditions.  She is in a committed relationship and values her time with her friends.  She enjoys her life, and has a cause or meaning, a purpose in her future.  Her values do not include shallow things like appearance, being thin, high fashion, owning expensive purses, clothing, things.  She puts work in its proper place as one aspect of who she is.  She is down-to-earth, centered, and knows where she is heading and what she wants.  When she first applies for the job as Assistant to the Director of Runway Magazine, she is appalled by the value system that surrounds her – the emphasis on accessories that make no real difference to one’s well-being, the insistence on being thin, on looking “right,” on dressing “right.”  But when she takes the job, she finds her values and her identity being slowly challenged, slowly and subtly being undermined and eroded.  She finds herself giving up more and more of her time with her friends and significant other in order to work.  She finds herself being pulled into the drama and the appeal of a fast-paced career with models and glamour and eventually into valuing the entire system of clothing and accessories and being thin and owning purses that cost thousands of dollars – all things she didn’t used to care about.  The choices she is faced with – to choose depth, meaning and relationships, or to choose appearance, glamour, fame and achievement are subtle choices, but she finds herself choosing for the latter again and again, and she finds herself saying to those who would challenge those choices, “well, I didn’t have a choice!” She chooses to do what her boss asks her to do, even when it means that she ends up deeply hurting a colleague who was becoming a friend.  And the entire time she is slipping she repeats that phrase, “I didn’t have a choice.”

What made her descent, her decline into a life that the movie, and I imagine many of us, would consider sinful so easy for her was that she didn’t realize she was playing by the rules of the other person.  Like Joan in the Joan of Arcadia episode, she kept saying to everyone, but especially herself, “I didn’t have a choice.” But that lie that she told herself, that she didn’t have a choice meant that she lost her friends, she lost her significant other, she lost her sense of self and her values.  As her boyfriend breaks up with her, she receives a phone call from her boss, and she says, “I’m sorry.  I have to answer this,” STILL not realizing she is making a choice.  As her boyfriend walks away he says to her, “You know, in case you were wondering?  The person whose calls you always take – that’s the relationship you’re in.”  Even after all of those losses she still didn’t realize the choices that she was making or that she had a choice to make, until her boss, Miranda, in the film pointed it out to her by comparing Andi’s choices with her own.  Andi could see that Miranda’s choices were hurtful, were harmful, were devastating.  But until Miranda pointed out that Andi had made the same choices, Andi couldn’t see. She could not see the choice she was making, or even THAT she was making a choice.

                In the movie, “You’ve Got Mail”  the main character’s book store has lost all kinds of business when a huge Barnes and Noble type store moves in across the street.  She tries everything to get her store to succeed, but it cannot compete against a Costco-like enterprise.  Finally she meets with her employees and says, “I’ve decided to close the store.”  Her dearest and longest employee responds, “closing the store is the brave thing to do!”  Meg Ryan’s character says, “What bull!”  To which Bertie responds, “It is!  You are envisioning a new future.  One you never expected and stepping into it boldly.”

               She did not have a choice about responding or not to the competition from across the street.  But she did have a choice about how she would respond.  And she made a choice that was her own game, her own step forward.  As sad as it made her, it also was a choice of hope.   

               As Dumbledore said in the Harry Potter series, “It is our choices that show who we are.  Not our abilities.”

I think about the stories I heard from a prisoner of seeing other prisoners saving food from their lunches and then calling the skunks. “Here, kitty, kitty!” they’d say and leave food for the skunks and other wildlife in the area.  They are in a situation over which they have very limited control, and certainly very few choices.  But this is a choice they can make: eat their food, or save it to share with the creatures around the prison.

Finally, I want to share with you one more movie story.  In the movie, Keeping the Faith, there is a wonderful conversation between a young priest and an older priest.  The young priest doubts his call into the priesthood after falling in love with a woman who is his friend.  Nothing happened between the two, but he found that the very fact of falling in love made him doubt a call that included celibacy.  He said to his older priest mentor, “If she had kissed me back, I would have given it all up.  She didn’t, but I keep thinking about what you said in the seminary that the life of a priest is hard and if you can see yourself doing anything else you should do that.”

The older priest responded, “Well that’s my recruitment speech which is good when you are starting out because it makes you feel like a marine!  But the truth is you can never tell yourself there is only one that you could be.  If you’re a priest or if you marry a woman, it is the same challenge.  You cannot make a real commitment unless you accept that it is a choice that you make again and again and again.  I’ve been a priest over 40 years, and I fall in love at least once every decade.”

The thing is, in every situation there are choices to be made. EVERY situation.  We choose how we see things, we choose how we act.  Sometimes we are making decisions between two terrible things.  Sometimes we are deciding between two wonderful things.  Sometimes it feels we don’t have a choice, but we still choose how we understand a situation, where we put our focus, whether we find gratitude or pain.  We choose whether we grow and learn, or whether we become bitter. And we choose whether we see God, whether we see the grace that is offered in every moment.  We choose whether or not to take the grace that is offered in each moment.  No matter how terrible a moment is, we still can choose to see the gift in having each breath we have to breathe.  In every single moment grace is offered.  But it is a choice we make whether we see it or not.  As Rick Warren said it, “I used to think that life was hills and valleys - you go through a dark time, then you go to the mountaintop, back and forth. I don't believe that anymore.   Rather than life being hills and valleys, I believe that it's kind of like two rails on a railroad track, and at all times you have something good and something bad in your life.   No matter how good things are in your life, there is always something bad that needs to be worked on. And no matter how bad things are in your life, there is always something good you can thank God for. You can focus on your purposes, or you can focus on your problems:   If you focus on your problems, you're going into self-centeredness, which is my problem, my issues, my pain.' But one of the easiest ways to get rid of pain is to get your focus off yourself and onto God and others.”

Grace is offered to everyone in every moment.  But that doesn’t mean it is always easy to accept.  It also doesn’t mean that grace is always happy or even painless.  Sometimes the very breath we breathe is painful.  That grace, ruach, spirit, wind, breath that we are offered in each and every moment does not always come wrapped in a pretty package.  And sometimes that very breath itself is painful.   We know that sometimes wind becomes so strong it destroys things.  We know that sometimes the Spirit’s words to us are hard to take.  I think about at the end of Harry Potter, when the evil Voldemort was given a choice.  He could choose remorse, have his soul healed and live, or he could continue along his path of destruction that would lead to his ultimate destruction too.  He chose the latter because the pain of remorse was too much.  He chose to turn away from the Grace that was offered.  But that did not change the fact that it was being offered in that very moment.

In the story of Herod, we see that Herod’s inability to see his choices, to think beyond what he felt he had to do ended badly for John, and ultimately for Herod, too, who became obsessed with worrying that John’s ghost was haunting him.  He thought Jesus himself was John.  “But when Herod heard these rumors, he said, “John, whom I beheaded, has been raised to life.””.  But his inability to see did not mean that he did not have choice.  He could have pointed out to the girl that this request she made was really what her mother wanted and not what she, herself wanted.  He could have reasoned with her, talked to her.  After all, she was HIS daughter too.  But instead he felt bound by a blind, spur of the moment commitment he made.  And that feeling of being bound left him feeling impotent and blind to his choices.  He played her game, did not choose the grace of other options that were before him, and everyone suffered.

We have those same choices.  And my prayer is for us to see God’s grace, to choose God’s grace and to play the game the way God calls us to play it, for ourselves and for the world.  Amen.

Transfiguration: of US

Mark 8:27-9:8

Who are you?  Who are you REALLY?  If you describe yourself to someone else, who would you say you were?  Would it change depending on the person you were speaking to?  How do you describe yourself to yourself? 

Now a deeper question, perhaps - How would GOD describe you?

Are you always the same person?  Yes and no, right?  At our core, probably.  But on the edges, in our behavior, we have good days and bad days; days of light and days of dark; days that we could have/should have/would have done better and days when we were able to live out and act out our lives beyond our own expectations, when we rose beyond others expectations as well.

Sometimes we think we know people, we have relationships with other people and we believe we know and understand them, but then they do something that catches us off-guard.  They surprise us, for good or for bad, and we have to look at them again, and re-evaluate who we thought they were.  We have to reevaluate our relationships with them, we have to reevaluate our understanding of them, we have to reassess who they are in our minds and hearts.  We all know stories like this, right?  Some of us have lived through stories like this, where a person we thought we knew intimately shows us that they are someone else altogether, that they have parts of themselves we never knew about, or whole areas of their lives that we knew nothing about, or activities that completely blind-sided us.  Other times we hear about heroic behaviors from people we just saw as regular folk, people, just like us, just living each day as it comes.  We can be surprised by people.  

Sometimes we surprise ourselves as well.  We are put in situations that call from us more than we thought we had, more than we thought we could be, and we rise to the occasion. … or we don’t, and maybe that surprises us too.  And the thing is that it’s not usually that people suddenly become something they are not.  It’s more true that people are complex, multi-faceted, and we didn’t see parts of ourselves or parts of other people.  We didn’t and don’t, ever, I would say, know someone else, or even ourselves, completely.  Other people are always more than we believe them to be.  We, ourselves, are always more – more complex, more multifaceted, than we think we are.  We don’t always know what we would do in a specific situation until we find ourselves in that situation.  For example, will we have the courage to stand up against wrong, even if that means losing our friends?  Will we have the courage to stand up against wrong even if it means losing our jobs?  Will we have the courage to stand up against wrong even if it means losing our lives?  We don’t always know, we don’t really know, until we are in that situation.  It is easy, for example, for people to say they would not have been part of the crowd asking for Jesus’ crucifixion.  But some of those same people found themselves in Nazi Germany supporting the Nazis not because they believed them to be right, but because they did not have the courage to stand up to them.  We have the same situations again and again.  And we don’t know how we will respond until we are put in a situation in which we have the opportunity to stand up to what is wrong and we see what we will do.

In the story of the Transfiguration, Jesus was seen in a new light.  He was seen in a way that he had not been seen before.  It’s not that he changed.  Jesus was always Jesus.  But, while he was clearly a leader and a strong man of integrity, faith, power, at the same time he looked like a normal, every day person, which was ALSO who he was.  Christian theology says that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine.  That doesn’t mean he was part human and part Divine.  Fully both.  The disciples for the most part tended to see, I believe, the humanity of Jesus.  But in this moment of the transfiguration, they saw the Divinity of Jesus as he stood with Moses and Elijah with face shining and a voice declaring who he is.  They saw him for a moment in this other aspect, and it terrified them.  My guess is that it would terrify us, too.  We like to see people the way we like to see them.  And no matter how much we want someone to be better, bigger, more wonderful, more able to save us than we think they are, when it comes down to it, seeing Jesus appear in such a way before us would probably terrify us.  

And yet, stories such as this one call us to see.  We are called to see the transfiguration – to see more than we saw before – to go deeper than we knew with each person.  Yes, with Jesus, but also with one another, and to see God in those around us.  We are also called to allow ourselves, too, to be transfigured and transformed, to see God within ourselves as well, and to invite God to live in and through us, to shine in us and to live in us.  

In the story of Don Quixote (in the musical, Man of La Mancha), we hear about his love for the barmaid Aldonza.  She is not a lady, she is poor, she is unrefined.  But Don Quixote sees in her the lovely lady Dulcinea.  At first she argues with him about that designation, saying that she is not who Don Quixote sees.  She declares herself to be a simple barmaid and says to him, “take the cloud from your eyes and see me as I really am!” But when Don Quixote is on his deathbed, Aldonza realizes that because of Don Quixote’s love and vision into who she is, she has, indeed, become the Lady Dulcinea.  Her vision and understanding of herself was altered because of what Don Quixote saw.  And then who she was itself changed because one man’s insight into who she was in her heart, in the depth of her being.  

There is a Hans Christian Andersen story about a teapot that I would like to share with you:  https://fairytalez.com/the-teapot/

Again, the vision and understanding of those around the teapot greatly influenced not only what the teapot saw of itself, but the very essence of who the teapot really was.  

Kintsukuroi is a Japanese practice in which broken pots are glued and mended together with gold to form new amazing works of art.  It is said they are much more beautiful for having been broken.  But I think it is also the case that the artist sees in their brokenness possibility: the artist sees what has not yet been made manifest and creates something even more beautiful.

An elderly Chinese woman had two large pots, each hung on the ends of a pole which she carried across her neck.  One of the pots had a crack in it while the other pot was perfect and always delivered a full portion of water. At the end of the long walks from the stream to the house, the cracked pot arrived only half full.  For a full two years this went on daily, with the woman bringing home only one and a half pots of water.  Of course, the perfect pot was proud of its accomplishments. But the poor cracked pot was ashamed of its own imperfection, and miserable that it could only do half of what it had been made to do. After two years of what it perceived to be bitter failure, it spoke to the woman one day by the stream. 'I am ashamed of myself, because this crack in my side causes water to leak out all the way back to your house.' 

The old woman smiled, 'Did you notice that there are flowers on your side of the path, but not on the other pot's side?  That's because I have always known about your flaw, so I planted flower seeds on your side of the path, and every day while we walk back, you water them. For two years I have been able to pick these beautiful flowers to decorate the table. Without you being just the way you are, there would not be this beauty to grace the house.”

What helps us to be the best we can be?  Often times it is as simple as other people’s love and care.  Other people’s reflection back to us that they see something beautiful in us.  Sometimes that love and care includes gentle correction.  Not comfortable, right?  And sometimes that can help us to be the best we can be.  But I think that just as positive reinforcement is much better with our pets and our children than any kind of punishment in terms of changing behavior, the love we receive and the reflection of good that others show us help us to be the best versions of ourselves that we can be.

There is a scene in the movie Two Weeks Notice in which Sandra Bullocks character is being asked to fight for and stand up for people who have no voice.  She says she isn’t going to the planned event where this is supposed to take place.  Her father says to her, “Hey, we didn’t raise you to sit on the side lines! Ever since you were a little girl, you fought for what you believed in!” 

She responds, “What’s the point?  They aren’t going to listen to me!” 

 “Then you change your tactic, you change your argument.  You don’t give up.  We didn’t give up on civil rights, or equality for women, or fair housing.  As long as people can change, the world can change.”

“Well what if people can’t change?”

Her father, who is struggling with high cholesterol and who has been told not to eat whole milk or cream sweets anymore, takes a bite of his Tofutti- cheesecake and says, “Well, let me put it this way.  I’m sitting here eating a piece of cheesecake made entirely of soy.  And I hate it.  But I’m eating it.”

One of the greatest gifts of God in our lives is that God sees us for all of who we are, and that includes who we can be at our very best, our most whole selves, our full-potential.  God can and does envision the God-spark in you oxygenated to become the bright flame that you are meant to be.  We all have moments when that God spark hides, and we all have moments when it shines brighter.  It is not easy to live into the vision of who we can be, but we are called to try.  As many of you know, I strive to meet evil with goodness, cruelty with kindness, rage with patience and compassion.  But I can’t always do this.  Just this week I had to deal with a service center about my Fast Trak and the person on the phone was rude, snippy, crabby.  And rather than responding with compassion and kindness, I became snippy in return.  That is not who or what I choose to be.  But I know that this is a growing edge: one worth every ounce of energy I can summon.

So then, In all of this I think we are called to two things – first, to strive to see the best in the other.  This does two things – it helps others reach their potential and be the best they can be, simply by seeing in one another the person that they could be: the best that they could be.  The other thing it is is a gift to us.  We get to see God in those around us and that is an amazing gift to us: to see God working, moving, loving in and through others.  Peter, James and John were given that gift – a moment of sight in which they were able to see Jesus more fully, see more deeply into who Jesus was.  That vision, beyond their understanding and beyond their experience, scared them, but it was a gift, too.  We can have those gifts as well, of really being able to see other people, and ourselves.  We just have to keep our eyes open.  

The other thing we are called to do is to try to see that God-spark in ourselves and to strive to live into God’s vision of the best of ourselves that we can be.  I know this is not always easy.  

We are given the vision of the transfiguration: an image of Jesus seen for the best and most whole version of himself.  That image calls us to see those possibilities in ourselves and in others: of being the best and most whole we can be and are.  It’s all that easy, and all that hard.  Amen.

Being Ready for What God Brings Us

Micah 5:1-5

Luke 1:26-55

This morning we celebrate the fourth Sunday of Advent.  And today’s scriptures show us a study of contrasts.  In the Micah passage, we hear about Bethlehem.  The word “Bethlehem” means “house of food or bread.”  Interestingly, Ephrathah, the same place as Bethlehem, means “fruitlessness”.  So we have the contrast in Micah – the place where the ruler is to come, the place where Jesus is to be born, is both the place of food and the place missing food.  To put it in the context of our focus on Advent, it is the place where the bread of life is born, but it is the place that perhaps needs that bread of life most because of its lack or emptiness.  Which do the residents see?  Which do the people of Bethlehem of Ephrathah experience?  Do they see the fruitlessness, the struggles, the pain?  Or do they wait for and anticipate the Messiah who is to come? - the one who is born who is himself the bread of life, the one to feed us, and to free us from hunger of all kinds with his very being?

In today’s passage from Luke, we are also shown two women in great contrast with each other.  Elizabeth is old and, up to this point, considered barren, desperately wanting a son to legitimize her (because in that day, the only way for a woman to be “legitimate” was to birth a son).  Mary is very young, single and therefore would not be choosing to be pregnant.  We come to see and learn about both women in times that could be seen as either extremely difficult or extremely blessed.  Elizabeth, scorned by barrenness remained secluded for five months.  Mary, after the shame of unexpected and illegitimate pregnancy, stood to lose her legal and social rights as Joseph considered ending his betrothal to her. She could have been stoned to death, or simply left bereft, abandoned and without means. It is in the midst of this that they, too, have choices about what to see, and how to experience their lives. Do they focus on the scorn, on the scandals and rejections of their lives, on their fear because of their difficult situations?  Or do they wait and look and anticipate with celebration the uniqueness of their situations and God’s promised coming to each of them through the births of their sons?

This contrast, as we hear repeatedly throughout Advent, is much greater even than this.  God, we are told repeatedly, is a God who reverses the social order completely.  This, too, then becomes a great study in how God works through these contrasts.  The lowly are brought high, the high are brought low.  In the choice of both Mary and Elizabeth we see this as well.  To the religious faithful in that time, to the Pharisees, to those ensconced in the church life, it would have seemed absolutely scandalous that two women – one old and one very young; poor peasant women – would be God’s prophets in bringing in the Messiah.  This is again the radical, outrageous message of Christianity, of Christ, of Jesus, of the God that we come to know through Jesus.  Jesus shows us the God who raises up the oppressed and outcast into positions of leadership, into being God’s most highly honored and exalted people.  God chooses to work powerfully in and through the people who appear most powerless.

               When God shows up, everything that we know is challenged.  Everything that we held in priority is shaken up and different priorities arise.  When God shows up, it is God’s plans that take precedence, not ours.  And we find that the vulnerable are the ones who are made strong, the rejected are the ones whom God chooses, and the outcasts are central to the story.  As Mary herself says, “God has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”  Mary prophesies, along with all the prophets to proceed her, the reversal of all we believe to be true about the world, about the ordering of society, about whom God most values, most cares for, most honors.  Mary sees herself in this as well.  Again in her own words we hear, “My soul magnifies the Lord,  and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for God has looked with favor on the lowliness of this servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me.” 

               And in this study of contrasts, Mary, too, had a choice about how to see her pregnancy.  She could have been devastated and felt imposed upon, recognizing and experiencing the hardship and risk to her already lowly position because of her vulnerable place.  But she didn’t.  Instead, she focused on the grace of God, on the gift of God’s amazing choice of her as mother of Jesus.  Her choice, in choosing to magnify the Lord, to celebrate with joy and singing and gratitude the amazing and unexpected gifts of God is not insignificant.  It gave strength to Jesus to be who he was, to become who he was becoming, to be the “I am” of God. 

How both Mary and Elizabeth chose to see their situations, how they chose to focus on God’s coming, celebrating the amazing gifts of their sons and what God was doing through their lives, these are not unimportant choices that Mary and Elizabeth make.  To quote Jann Cather Weaver, “(These two women) sought to live radically faithful lives in response to the call from their God.  Not unexpectedly, these women lived lives like those of their soon-to-be-born sons.  Do we think John and Jesus just “knew” how to live radically faithful lives?  How to be preachers?  How to be as eloquent as the Magnificat?  How to be healers?  John and Jesus knew how to live radically faithful lives because they were sons of two women who had faithfully faced a terrifying yet expectant reality.”  As they waited for their sons to be born, as they waited for their redemption, Mary and Elizabeth chose to be faithful despite society’s pressures.  They chose to celebrate the living and real presence of God in their lives.  They chose to wait with open eyes to see what God was doing next, which they knew would be amazing, wonderful and beyond anything they could expect.

               I talked a few weeks ago about my experience of waiting on mission trips. Each time that we have gone we spend more time than we could anticipate waiting.  We wait for the host church or host site to tell us what we need to do and where.  We wait for the “experts” to show up and tell us how we are supposed to accomplish whatever it is that we are doing.  We wait to get the materials we need to do the job.  We wait some more for new materials, or for the materials that didn’t work to be replaced by ones that do.  We wait for the time, the situation, the opportunity, the tools…all of these things - we spend an incredible amount of time waiting.  This is hard and frustrating for all of us.  We are there to work.  We have a job to do and we want to see it done.  It can be easy in those moments to focus again on the challenges and struggles.  We struggle not only to figure out how we can get the jobs done in the short time we have when we are encumbered by delays and waits and other challenges.  We also struggle at times to understand why we are there when we know things are so hard for the people we are struggling to help that it is hard to see how our little jobs can really make a substantial difference in their lives.  And we ask the harder questions: Why do we bother fixing the floor when the roof is leaking?  Why do we paint the walls when the building should frankly be torn down and replaced?  But as I mentioned before, the waiting was also an opportunity to talk to the people we were helping, whose homes we were fixing, and to talk to each other.  Through listening, through working together, through being together, we were given glimpses of God’s deep grace.  We heard each others’ stories and saw God at work in the lives of those who struggle so deeply.  We heard our own stories anew as we shared them with strangers.  We waited for God’s coming in different ways – sometimes through our own hands as we built and listened and created relationships.  And like Mary, we, each of us, experienced moments when we were touched by the awe of God having chosen us to be in that place at that time, helping God usher in and create something new as we were given the gift of being bearers of a bit of God’s grace to those individuals we met and served.  That choice on our part, too, was not unimportant.  When we chose to serve in joy, rather than focusing on the frustrations of the waiting, of the stumbling, of the jobs that just aren’t done 100% perfectly; our choice to see God’s hand and to look with eyes of gratitude and grace inspired others to do the same.  It inspired those we helped, too, to look more deeply at their lives and to see God’s hands at work.  It inspired them also to give back, to pass forward the gifts of God.  And our choice to look for God’s hands and feet kept us going through the times of waiting until we did have the things we need to build, to work, to be part of bringing in God’s realm in that little corner for that little bit of time.

One day a young man named Tim who had wild hair, wore a t-shirt with holes in it, and no shoes made his way into a very conservative, well-dressed church. He walked into the church with his messy appearance, a little late. Since the service had already started Tim walked down the aisle looking for a seat. It was Christmas time, so the church was completely packed and he couldn’t find a seat. By now, people were really looking a bit uncomfortable, but no one said anything. Tim got closer and closer and closer to the pulpit, and when he realized there were no seats, he just squatted down right on the carpet. By now the people were really uptight, and the tension in the air was thick. About this time, the minister realized that from way at the back of the church, a deacon was slowly making her way toward Tim. The deacon was in her eighties, had silver-gray hair, and a beautiful suit. A godly woman, very elegant, very dignified, very courtly. She walked with a cane and, as she started walking toward this boy, everyone was saying to themselves that you couldn't blame her for what she was going to do. How could you expect a woman of her age and of her background to understand some dirty young man, a kid really, sitting on the floor? It took a long time for the woman to reach the boy. The church was utterly silent except for the clicking of the woman's cane. All eyes were focused on her. You couldn’t even hear anyone breathing. The minister couldn’t preach the sermon until the deacon did what she had to do. And then they saw this elderly woman drop her cane on the floor.. With great difficulty, she lowered herself and sat down next to Tim in order to worship with him so he wouldn’t be alone. Everyone choked up with emotion... When the minister gained control, he finally said, 'What I'm about to preach, you will never remember. What you have just seen, you will never forget.'

               God does work in mysterious, wondrous ways.  As today we being the celebration of Christ’s coming to us, as a beautiful baby, but weak, innocent, helpless and poor, we don’t only celebrate but we also anticipate Christ’s coming anew, I pray that all of us might have Mary’s eyes to look with trust, and joy; with hope and celebration, with gratitude and faith for the amazing thing that God is doing next.  Thanks be to God!  

Sermon - Sight

Isaiah 9:2

Luke 24:13-25

We read today’s story as part of Easter-tide, but I found myself coming back to it again.  Because it is an odd story that calls us to look deeper. The disciples were walking with Jesus.  But they did not recognize him.  How could they not recognize Jesus?  Why did they not see? Just as on Pentecost I talked about how sometimes it is really hard to hear and understand one another, sometimes it is also very hard to see. So I ask you to take a moment and reflect on these questions: What do we fail to see because we don’t expect what is actually there? What do we fail to see because we don’t want to see it? What do we fail to see because we don’t believe it? What do we fail to see because something isn’t where we expect it to be?

There once was a little boy named Sam who was very excited about Halloween.  But his parents kept putting off getting his costume until finally the day of Halloween his mother came home with a costume that Sam hated. It was of some comic book character who had been big once but who now was seen by all the kids to be ridiculous and only for the littlest of children.  Sam was devastated. How could he ever wear this?  He couldn’t possibly go out on Halloween in this costume!  He was so upset, he ran down the street to where an older couple who had become surrogate grandparents to Sam lived.  He ran into their house and cried and cried about the terrible costume his mother had picked out for him. Well, Norm, the older man thought for a few minutes and then he said to his wife, “Don’t we have some old costumes up in the attic from when our kids were children?”

“Why, I believe we do!” she replied. Up they all went into the attic and down they came with an old ghost costume. Really, it was just a sheet with holes cut in it for the eyes. But Sam was so thrilled with the costume, he just couldn’t wait to put it on. With a look of awe in his eyes, he pulled the sheet down over his head and before anyone could stop him, he went running out the door to go trick or treating and ran straight through the yard and bam into a tree!  Norm saw this and he dashed out after him, picked up the little boy, but before he could stop him, there Sam took off again, running as fast as he could until bam he ran smack into another tree!  This time the force pushed him flat onto his back where he lay still until Norm came running up.  Norm wondered what on earth was going on until he looked into Sam’s face and realized that Sam had not lined up the eye holes to match his eyes. He had been virtually blind, running around the yard, completely unable to see where he was going. Norm gently but firmly took hold of the sheet, pulled it around until Sam was able to see through the eye holes, tied a rope around his waist to hold the costume in place and sent Sam off on a much more successful and enjoyable Halloween evening of trick-or-treating!

One day a boy was walking down a road when a frog called to him, “Boy, if you kiss me, I will turn into a beautiful princess.” The boy picked up the frog, smiled at it, then placed the frog into his pocket. A few minutes later, the frog said, “Boy, if you kiss me and turn me back into a beautiful princess, and I will stay with you for a week.” The boy took the frog from his pocket, smiled at it, then put it back into his pocket. A few minutes later, the frog said, “Boy, if you kiss me and turn me back into a beautiful princess, I will do anything you want!” The boy took the frog from his pocket, smiled, and put it back. Finally, the frog cried, “Boy, what is the matter, I have told you that I am a beautiful princess, and if you kiss me, I will stay with you and do anything you want!” The boy took the frog from his pocket and said, “Look, I am an engineering student, I have no time for a girlfriend, but a talking frog is cool!”

The boy saw a different reality from the frog.  The boy saw farther, or at least he saw differently. 

About twelve years ago, on my birthday, Eldest brought me a present wrapped up.  Eldest was the ripe age of four and a half.  She was little and she was a typical young child who couldn’t really see beyond herself in so many ways.  I knew it was a store-bought present, as opposed to something made for me.  And I had been told by all of the adults who knew what the gift was that I should not to expect much in this gift because Eldest had insisted on buying this particular present despite being strongly encouraged to pick something else.  It was given to me with looks of apology and even discomfort from the adults who knew what the gift was.  So I opened it without much hope or expectation.  This is the gift (show them the miniature).  What do you see in this? 

I’ll tell you what I see.  I see Eldest herself.  Especially at that age…a little dancing fairy girl.  She found a replica of herself at that age, what I saw most profoundly, most deeply within herself at that age. And that is what she gave to me: a memory of Eldest at the age of almost 5.  And I felt that in her insistence on this particular gift, she actually had a deeper insight into what I loved most than anyone else around her at the time.  She had sight into who I was, into what I saw, and into what I valued, that the adults around did not see.

A wise woman who was traveling in the mountains found a precious stone in a stream. The next day she met another traveler who was hungry, and the wise woman opened her bag to share her food. The hungry traveler saw the precious stone and asked the woman to give it to him. She did so without hesitation. The traveler left, rejoicing in his good fortune. He knew the stone was worth enough to give him security for a lifetime. But a few days later he came back to return the stone to the wise woman. “I’ve been thinking,” he said, “I know how valuable the stone is, but I give it back in the hope that you can give me something even more precious. Give me what you have within you that enabled you to give me something so very precious -  Give me what you have within you that enabled you to give me the stone.”

Sometimes the darkness or the challenges in life themselves carries a gift for us.  I am reminded of a MASH episode in which Hawkeye had a stove explode in his face which caused eye damage in both eyes.  He lost his vision and he didn’t know if that loss was permanent or temporary.  The day before he was to see the doctor to have the bandages removed – the day before he was to discover if the eye damage was permanent or temporary – he seemed in a frantic mode of insisting on walking around and moving around. BJ confronts his frantic walking around and going out saying, “Hawkeye, I know what you’re trying to do. And I know how you feel…You don’t want to think about what might happen, so you keep running.”  But Hawkeye insists that that’s not the case.  He says, “Look, when Dr. Oberman comes in here tomorrow, and unwraps my eyes, I hope to God I’ll have my sight back. But… something fascinating has been happening to me…One part of the world has closed down to me but another part has opened up.  Sure, I keep picturing myself sitting on a corner with a tin cup selling thermometers, but I’m going through something here that I didn’t expect. I spent two incredible hours this morning listening to that rain storm.  And I didn’t just hear it, I was part of it. I bet you have no idea that rain hitting the ground makes the same sound as steaks when they’re barbequing. Or that thunder seems to echo forever.  And you wouldn’t believe how funny it is to hear somebody slip and fall in the mud…  This is full of trap doors, but I think there has to be some advantage to this.  I’ve never spent a more conscious day in my life.”

            When we are given the opportunity to see things, hear things, understand things from a different perspective, it is an incredible gift.  It helps us to see, to really see, beyond what our eyes tell us. And sometimes our eyes get in the way.  I have a friend who did some work helping people fix up their houses.  She was painting rooms in a house one time and told me that the old paint in one room had had to be scraped off before they put on the new paint because the wall had been textured.  However, the previous paint had been sponge painted on.  That meant that the wall looked textured even where the texturing had already been scraped off.  She told me she had to scrape the walls with her eyes closed because her eyes did not tell her the truth about what she was seeing, about whether the wall was still textured or just looked that way because of the sponge paint. 

As you know, World War I was a very bloody and aggressive war, a time of great death and tragedy and loss.  At the Western Front it was bloody and violent like everywhere else.  But on Christmas Eve, 1915, things changed for a moment.  Soldiers heard across the lines, across the divisions in politics and beliefs, other soldiers singing Christmas carols.  In listening to one another, the German soldiers from Saxony were inspired to make a brave choice.  Bringing food across the front, and singing Christmas Carols, they came to the British soldiers they were fighting in a Christmas spirit.  The British soldiers, shocked at first, were also moved and found themselves responding by joining in the singing and offering up what they had to share in the festivities as well.  After a time of singing and faith celebration, pictures were shared, personal stories began to be told, sometimes only through hand signs, between people of many different nationalities.  In one version of this story, officers had to break up the comradery as they realized fighting would soon become impossible between these two groups if they continued to get to know, share and celebrate with one another.  In another version of the story, the bonds made that night were so great that those soldiers could not be compelled to continue fighting those they had come to see as human brothers and sisters.  These soldiers, then, on both sides, would no longer kill each other and had to be moved off the front.  In the midst of tragedy, in the midst of war, in the midst of violence and death and anger, new sight was gained, new vision given, through sharing, through seeing one another as the human beings that we all are.

A mother told this story: We were the only family with children in the restaurant. I sat Erik in a high chair and noticed everyone was quietly sitting and talking. Suddenly, Erik squealed with glee and said, 'Hi.' He pounded his fat baby hands on the high chair tray. His eyes were crinkled in laughter and his mouth was bared in a toothless grin, as he wriggled and giggled with merriment.  I looked around and saw the source of his merriment. It was a man whose pants were baggy with a zipper at half-mast and his toes poked out of would-be shoes. His shirt was dirty and his hair was uncombed and unwashed. His whiskers were too short to be called a beard and his nose was so varicose it looked like a road map.  We were too far from him to smell, but I was sure he smelled.. His hands waved and flapped on loose wrists. 'Hi there, baby; hi there, big boy.. I see ya, buster,' the man said to Erik. My husband and I exchanged looks, 'What do we do?' Erik continued to laugh and answer, 'Hi.' Everyone in the restaurant noticed and looked at us and then at the man. The old geezer was creating a nuisance with my beautiful baby. Our meal came and the man began shouting from across the room, 'Do ya patty cake? Do you know peek-a-boo? Hey, look, he knows peek- a-boo.' Nobody thought the old man was cute. He was obviously drunk. My husband and I were embarrassed. We ate in silence; all except for Erik, who was running through his repertoire for the admiring skid-row bum, who in turn, reciprocated with his cute comments. We finally got through the meal and headed for the door. My husband went to pay the check and told me to meet him in the parking lot. The old man sat poised between me and the door. 'Lord, just let me out of here before he speaks to me or Erik,' I prayed. As I drew closer to the man, I turned my back trying to sidestep him and avoid any air he might be breathing. As I did, Erik leaned over my arm, reaching with both arms in a baby's 'pick-me-up' position. Before I could stop him, Erik had propelled himself from my arms to the man. Suddenly a very old smelly man and a very young baby united in love and kinship. Erik in an act of total trust, love, and submission laid his tiny head upon the man's ragged shoulder. The man's eyes closed, and I saw tears hover beneath his lashes. His aged hands full of grime, pain, and hard labor, cradled my baby and stroked his back. No two beings have ever loved so deeply for so short a time.  I stood awestruck. The old man rocked and cradled Erik in his arms and his eyes opened and set squarely on mine. He said in a firm commanding voice, 'You take care of this baby.' Somehow I managed, 'I will,' from a throat that contained a stone. He pried Erik from his chest, lovingly and longingly, as though he were in pain. I received my baby, and the man said, 'God bless you, ma'am, you've given me my Christmas gift.' I said nothing more than a muttered thanks. With Erik in my arms, I ran for the car. My husband was wondering why I was crying and holding Erik so tightly, and why I was saying, 'My God, my God, forgive me.' I had just witnessed Christ's love shown through the innocence of a tiny child who saw no sin, who made no judgment; a child who saw a soul, and a mother who saw a suit of clothes. I was a Christian who was blind, holding a child who was not. I felt it was God asking, 'Are you willing to share your son for a moment?' when God had shared God’s son for all eternity. How did God feel when God put Jesus in our arms 2000 years ago. The ragged old man, unwittingly, had reminded me, 'To enter the Kingdom of God , we must become as little children.' Sometimes, it takes a child to remind us of what is really important. We must always remember who we are, where we came from and, most importantly, how we feel about others. The clothes on your back or the car that you drive or the house that you live in does not define you at all; it is how you treat other people that identifies who you are.

            A blind person asked God once, is there anything worse than losing your sight?  To which God responded, “yes, losing your vision.”

            When we try to see with our eyes, we often fail to do so. That blindness, that inability to see without help is a common problem for humans.  We walk around in the dark, not because it is dark, but because our vision is covered, obscured in some way. It can be obscured by our politics, obscured by our beliefs, obscured by what we expect to see or what we fear seeing.  It can be obscured by our pride, or even by our shame. Oftentimes this blindness causes us to err, to sin, to take a wrong path so that somebody gets hurt, ourselves or someone else. We all have blind spots, we all need God’s help to see.   

Today’s story on the road to Emmaus is a human story.  A human story of failing to see God, to see Divinity, to see Christ, in the one who is with us, in the one walking along by our side.  The disciples didn’t recognize Jesus.  And we often don’t recognize the God in the person we are with.  But it is our call to try, to crane to see a little deeper, a little more where, what and who God really is.  It is our call to see God in the ones we are with, no matter what road we walk.  My prayer for all of us is sight, is vision.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

And their eyes were opened

Genesis 3:1-7

   Luke 24:13-35

               In the Genesis passage for today we read that the serpent said to the woman, “God knows that when you eat of the fruit, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” And they ate and their eyes were opened.

               What this tells us is that before they ate, their eyes were closed.  That means God created them without sight, without understanding.  And it would seem as we read this story that God wanted for their eyes to remain closed.  God did not want them to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, did not want them to see, to understand, to know.

               At first glance this can be hard for us to understand.  As humanity continues to strive to understand the world we live in through science, through astronomy, through medical research, as we become more connected to information through the world-wide web, this idea that somehow God didn’t want us to know seems absurd.  But in today’s gospel lesson as well, when Jesus is risen, walking with the disciples on the way to Emmaus, Luke tells us that their eyes “were kept from perceiving him.”  They were kept from the knowledge of who he was.  How do we understand this omniscient God who creates us with closed eyes and who “keeps us from perceiving”?

               This story tells us that Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit, taking charge of their own best interests.  They chose not to depend on God to know or do what was best for them.  And in making that decision they set up a wall of mistrust between themselves and God.  In eating they saw, but in receiving knowledge in this way, they became filled with shame.  They became aware of their nakedness, or rather their vulnerability and weakness.  Their eyes became open to the dangers of the world and to their own lack of power to face it.  They saw that they were not gods with the power to discern what is best for themselves.  And in their fear and shame they tried to cover themselves with fig leaves.  Because the leaves were inadequate to cover them, they simply heightened their sense of shame.  Only God can cover that nakedness, that shame, that vulnerability but they had separated themselves from God.  So they were unable to cover themselves and they hid.  The serpent had spoken the truth – their eyes were opened.  But God, too, had spoken the truth – in that one action, the innocence of humanity had died.

               This story in Genesis is not a past tense event.  It is a story about growing up.  It is a story about what all of us go through as our eyes are opened, as our naivete is destroyed. A while ago on a TV program about kids and their thoughts and feelings, a well-known host asked a nine-year-old girl what she wanted to be when she grew up. The little girl in a very childlike confident and assured way informed the host that she wanted to be president of the United States.  The host responded by asking the little girl why she thought no women had been president in this country before.  Still with a face of innocence and confidence, the nine-year-old girl told the host and the audience that it was because 2/3^rd of all men did not believe in the gifts of women, and would not support a woman becoming president.  The host was astounded.  But he decided to prove her wrong.  So he polled the audience.  He asked the men by a show of hands to indicate how many would support a qualified woman becoming president if that woman represented the values that they supported.  He then asked how many would vote against her simply because she was female.  The child was right, and before her nine year old eyes and on national television, 2/3^rd of the men in that room said they would never vote for a woman president.   The pain and confusion on the face of the little girl was hard to watch as her head knowledge became the more experiential learning of seeing their vote right before all of our eyes. 

Kids’ faith in adults and in the world is broken at younger ages.  We hear too many stories of young children whose innocence has been ended by prejudice, drugs, abuse, kidnapping, rape or murder.  Our children’s eyes are opened and they come to distrust their world, to be cynical and fearful.  More frightening still, we see in their knowledge of good and evil the power and ability to choose – good or evil.  The numbers of young people engaged in violence, and even murder in this country rises each year.  School shoot outs are one example of the naivete broken in our kids’ lives.  The numbers of children abused appears to be rising.  And it is hard to blame these children who have experienced so much personal violence for turning to violence themselves.

Perhaps the most painful thing to see is our own part in the world’s evil.  We see the accelerating destruction of our environment and we know our consumerism and waste is destroying our world. We see species on the verge of extinction and know it is because our buying supports this kind of abuse of nature.  Closer to home we experience people acting outrageously in their cars.  We see cynicism in increasingly younger people.  We see the cross and wonder where we would have stood in the crucifixion. 

I’ve shared with you before about the movie, “The Color of Fear”.  A group of men from different ethnicities, backgrounds, races gathered together for a weekend to talk about racism.  One white man who was present dominated most of the weekend fighting hard against the idea that racism was even real.  He kept saying to the men of color in the room, “Why do you see yourselves as different?  We’re all the same.  Why can’t you be just like me?  You’re imagining your oppression.  No one really treats you differently because of your appearance.”  No matter what the other men in the room shared with him, he could not hear their experiences of racism, of abuse, of oppression.  Finally one of the men said to him, “What would it mean to you if what we are telling you about our experience were true?”  The man looked startled for a moment.  Finally he answered, “It would mean the world isn’t as safe or beautiful as I had thought…And it would mean that I was part of the problem,” and with those words he began to cry.  It hurts to see.  And from this vantage point we can wish desperately that the end of our innocence had never begun.  But innocence has been broken, and we die constantly in our “enlightenment.”

I took Eldest to see Beauty and Beast last weekend. One of the lines that Beauty sings is, ““I was innocent and certain. Now I'm wiser but unsure. I can't go back into my childhood, That my father made secure.”  And again, that is the story of humanity.  It is the story of growing up.  It is our story.

               So where is the Good News in this?

               I do not believe that God is AGAINST humans obtaining knowledge.  I believe deeply that God does wish for us wisdom and growth.  But God does not want our insight into good and evil to come through disobedience, through breaking the trust between God and humanity.  When it does, our first glimpse, our first understanding of good and evil comes through seeing our own inadequacy, misjudgment and our first response is always both shame and fear, often with some denial thrown in for good measure.  But the good news in this is that we don’t reap what we sow.  God is the God of life, who, even now, even after we turn from God and mortally wound ourselves, God continues to love us.  God maintains relationship with humanity, and clothes our vulnerability with grace.  Then, God leads us out of the garden so that our immortality will not be lived out in the dangerous, shameful world we have envisioned for ourselves.  In other words, God calls us to see past the crucifixion, past death.  God calls us to keep looking, keep our eyes open, past the pain.

               On CNN a while ago there was a story that traced the old legal practice of sterilization.  It turns out that in our country in the 40s there were places that regularly sterilized people with mental disabilities and other disabilities.  IN addition, some hospitals at the time were considering using euthanasia on those same people with the justification that they had no quality of life.  But this ended abruptly during WWII with people’s awareness of where such atrocities could lead.  These little insights, these small changes which come from seeing, happen all around.  Many who were abused as children work on educating the communities and on healing the survivors so abuse doesn’t continued.  Mothers Against Drunk Driving began as a result of the loss of a child from a drunk driving accident.  Mothers against Gangs which educates and works to find after-school alternatives for kids began, again, with a mother who lost her child through gang activity.  That is not to say that there is good in evil situations.  Nor am I trying to say, “just look on the bright side”.  There is no excuse for evil.  But even out of the most awful things, even out of the deaths we die each day, if we keep our eyes open, God can help us find ways to bring new life, bring grace, bring good.

               The two disciples on their way to Emmaus had seen only enough to know that Jesus had been crucified.  They were in deep sorrow.  They had seen only enough to believe that their hopes had been shattered.  Their friend, leader and lord had been killed in a most horrible way.  The one they’d hoped would rescue them from Roman tyranny and oppression was dead.  And after three days it seemed, on top of everything, that his body had been taken from the tomb.  But God would not leave them there.  God did not leave them there.  God brought about the most amazing miracle in all the world.  Jesus was alive.  Death had been overcome.  Christ was arisen!  He came and walked among them.  Still they did not see.  He interpreted for them all scripture and the prophets, the foretelling signs of his resurrection.  But still they could not believe in the risen Christ.  Finally he broke bread with them.  He ate with them.  He was present in a most intimate way with them, and they saw him.  Just for a moment they saw – long enough for them to believe and know that he was risen!

               Still, the question might be asked, why did God “keep them” from recognizing Christ at first?  For most of time and for most people in the world, we have been unable to see first-hand Jesus resurrected.  And so God began then what God calls forth from us now: that we might learn to see with our hearts and our faith as clearly as they saw with their eyes.  God knows we are imperfect.  And for this reason God does give us signs, God does help us to see, through Bible stories, through our experiences, through one another.  We are called to keep our eyes and our hearts open.  Because while it is true that some things we have to see to believe; the things that are most important, those things with the most value and meaning and promise, those things we have to believe in order to see.