Galatians 5:13-25
June 27, 2010
For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.
Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law. Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.
By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.
Nan Durny has a story to tell, and I feel very, very privileged to share her story with you this morning. If you don’t know Nan, she’s Calvin Church’s clerk of session. Her husband, Peter, is an elder and the co-chair of our Personnel and Finance Committee.
I want to take you back to the spring and summer of 1996, which was when the lights went out in Nan’s life. Prior to February of 1996, Nan had been married to the love of her life, David Emerick. Nan had met David when they were both teens. She was from Evans City, he was from Ambridge, and they met at the Dairy Queen in Cranberry when their two group of friends started talking. When Nan’s friends left the Dairy Queen, Dave and his friends followed, and from there their romance blossomed. It wasn’t too long before they were married, and then had kids—first Nick, who is now attending Penn State, and then Kayla, who is at West Chester University.
As Nan has said, they were living the American dream. They had two beautiful kids, and they had both designed and built their own house. David was 34, Nan was 33, and life seemed great. During the summer of 1995, though, David started feeling ill. He was having stomach pains. At first they diagnosed it as ulcers, and put him on medication, but that didn’t seem to help. Then they suspected that he might have some sort of intestinal autoimmune disease such as Crohn’s Disease. So they put him on prednisone, and that did the trick. He felt better than he had in a year. Once again, life seemed great, until right around Thanksgiving. Dave came downstairs to talk to Nan and said that he felt terrible. He was all white and was physically shaking. They went to the doctor and took a CAT scan of his abdomen, where the doctors discovered that his liver looked like Swiss cheese. There was cancer everywhere. They also detected a walnut sized tumor on his colon, which was the original site of the cancer. The doctors were grim. They told Nan and Dave to get their affairs in order and to spend as much time as possible with their children because Dave only had about two months to live.
In front of their children they tried their best to act as though everything was normal. Dave immersed himself in spending time with Kayla, Nick, and Nan. There was very little hope. Despite all their efforts to hold on, Dave died in February, 1996, little more than two months after his diagnosis.
There was one point right before Dave died in which Nan felt truly hopeless. She had been working so hard to hold it all together in front of others, to be strong and cheerful in the face of it all, but it was getting harder. She was in the shower one morning and began sobbing. She was overwhelmed by everything that was going on—not only Dave’s impending death, but also with how she would pay the bills, how she would raise children alone, and how she would cope. In the midst of her sobbing she heard a voice. It was a genderless voice that seemed to be both inside and outside of her at the same time. It had an amazing clarity, and she could feel LOVE in that voice that let her know that she was loved more than she could ever know. The voice said, “I am here with you. I cannot heal David. That’s not what’s meant to be, but I will be with you and him. Pray for strength and know that I will be with you no matter what.” Nan felt a deep, deep warmth and peace that filled her body and soul. She knew that she could make it.
After Dave died, Nan tried to hold onto a sense of normalcy, but it was hard. What was hardest was going to worship on Easter after Dave died. Looking around at all the couples with young families was hard. Nan felt alone. It became harder each week to go to church because of the pain she felt, and because of her increasing sense of isolation. So she stopped going to church. And she began to question whether God even existed. Now, you might be tempted to think to yourself, “But didn’t she hear God’s voice? Shouldn’t that sustain her?” A lot of people who hear God’s voice have a hard time holding onto it when they are in deep grief and pain. It’s not that they forget. It’s that the grief is so much louder than the memory of God’s voice.
The Rev. Dr. Steve Polley, who is now our parish associate for pastoral care, had that same position in the church in Cranberry at the time. He noticed that she hadn’t been to church in a while, so he visited her that summer. The exchanged some small talk for a while, and Steve asked her how she was. She said that she was okay. He paused and said, “No, how are you really?” Nan paused for a bit, and said, “I’m angry! I’m angry at my situation, I’m angry that Dave died, and I’m angry at God for letting this happen!” Steve, in his infinite wisdom, said, “That’s okay, Nan. God knows you’re angry, and it’s okay to be angry at God. God knows that you have a lot to be angry about, but God’s still going to love you and be with you. That’s what church is for. It’s supposed to be a place where you can work out your anger with God.”
That wasn’t the response Nan was expecting. It made her feel better, and she felt more hopeful after he left. In fact, he helped her to remember the voice she had heard in the shower months before. Going back to church on a regular basis she slowly started feeling better, even if the grief never really left her. She also started attending a young widows group and a grief support group, which is where she eventually met Peter Durny, whose own wife, Mary Ann, had died from cancer almost a year earlier after a five-year struggle. They started dating, but it wasn’t easy. Both felt guilty about dating. Were they dishonoring Dave and Mary Ann by dating, let alone falling in love? Is this what their spouses would want? Both struggled
Then one night Nan had a dream. It was the kind of dream I mentioned several weeks ago when I told you the story of one of my classmates from high school whose son had died. That woman, Kelley, had had a dream in which she was with God and was given the answer to all the questions she had about the universe, life, death, and beyond. Nan had that same dream, and just like Kelley, she woke up not remembering the answers, but knowing that God was with her. She told Peter about her dream, and amazingly he said to her, “I know,… I had the exact same dream last night.” They were married that same year and came to Calvin Church after moving to Zelienople.
Nan had definitely experienced both darkness and God’s presence. The fact is that for a long time Nan teetered on the edge of a cliff that many of us teeter on in life. It’s a cliff that overlooks the abyss of darkness. When we stand there we sometimes have the ability to gain perspective on what really matters in life, and adjust our lives accordingly; but just as often people slip and fall into the abyss, and struggle to get out.
What makes the abyss of darkness so hard in is that it is a place of despair in which people lose hope. So often, when people go through traumatic difficulties—the death of someone close, a divorce, an illness, loss of a job—they become despairing. Many people only have compassion for those who have had a loved one die, but going through a divorce can lead us just as deeply into despair because there still is a death—the death of a relationship. I have great compassion, rather than judgment, for people of divorce, both spouses and children, because often the judgment of others deepens their despair. We also can feel despair when we lose a job, especially in our work environment of today. People can become hopeless, wondering if they’ll ever get another job.
This despair can lead us into what Paul calls, “the works of the flesh,” which are “fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these.” These acts are all symptoms of the problem, not the problem. They are symptoms of people feeling like they are trapped in darkness, and who engage in these works of the flesh trying to get relief from their pain. They get drunk, or enter serial relationships, or get into fights as a way of trying to relieve the darkness of despair, not realizing that their actions actually lead them deeper into despair. Their pursuit of the relief of pain actually causes more pain.
There is a way out of all this, and Paul talks about it in our passage. The way out is by being led by the Spirit, but to be led by the Spirit we have to be open to the Spirit, which is hard to do from the bottom of the abyss. When we are at the bottom, we often feel too hopeless to become open to God. But Nan became open to God. She became open to being led by the Spirit, and it made all the difference. It took a while, and some prompting from God’s hands and feet—Steve Polley—but she did it.
The secret of overcoming darkness is to actively seek the light that the Spirit offers—to trust in what’s possible, not what’s in the past. This is hard stuff, because, as I said last week, negativity and despair have their own energy and allure, and it’s easy to give ourselves over to the energies of anger, cynicism, skepticism, and despair. And the more we give ourselves over to that power, the more it isolates us from God by building a moat around our lives.
I do realize that in talking about Nan hearing God’s voice this morning, and often in other stories I’ve told, it can cause frustration in us because most of us don’t hear God’s voice at all. What I’ve noticed is that the people who hear God’s voice tend to have certain attributes that open them to God. Either they are in despair and God responds to them through the gift of speaking to them, or they live lives in which they intentionally cultivate a listening heart and mind. In other words, they are dedicated to daily practices that open them to God—they pray every day, read scripture or spiritual books on a regular basis, and actively listen for God’s voice in their minds, in what they are reading, in what other people say, and the like. They are intentional, and it opens them to sensing and hearing the Spirit.
If we are willing to open up to the Spirit, and to be intentional in trusting that God has something better in store, we plant seeds of fruit that get us out of the bottom. Paul talks about these seeds. He says that they are “ love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” When we become intentionally open to God’s Spirit, these seeds grow in our lives and transform our lives. They move us from darkness to light.
There is a way out of darkness, but it requires looking up, not down. It requires looking for what’s good, not what’s bad. It requires looking for what’s possible, not what’s in the past.
Amen.
