Luke 12:49-59
July 18, 2010
‘I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on, five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided:
father against son
and son against father,
mother against daughter
and daughter against mother,
mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law
and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.’
He also said to the crowds, ‘When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, “It is going to rain”; and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, “There will be scorching heat”; and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?
‘And why do you not judge for yourselves what is right? Thus, when you go with your accuser before a magistrate, on the way make an effort to settle the case, or you may be dragged before the judge, and the judge hand you over to the officer, and the officer throw you in prison. I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the very last penny.’
Back in 2003 I had an experience in a local church that raised my hackles. In July of that year I took a short sabbatical to write part of my book, Becoming a Blessed Church. As I often do when I’m on vacation, or not at Calvin Church on a Sunday, I’ll visit another church, just to see what others do. That particular Sunday, the Sunday of the 4th of July weekend, I decided to visit a large, non-denominational evangelical church. The service was quite a production, with red, white, and blue everywhere. In the front of the church, which was set up like an auditorium, had a stage with a band, along with two large PowerPoint screens on the right and left of the stage. The screens had film clips of waving American flags, and every once in a while a picture of a bald eagle would replace the clip.
Everyone was welcomed to the service, and then we stood and started singing “America the Beautiful,” with some modifications. After each verse, the band would stop playing and an actor in period costume would walk to the front of the stage and talk to the audience. The first one was an actor dressed as Thomas Jefferson, then next one dressed as Abigail Adams, and a third one dressed as Ben Franklin. Each one pretty much said the same thing, with minor variations. Basically what they said was this, “When I helped found this country, I founded it in faith. I founded it on the words of the Bible. This is the Word I founded the country in. This is the Word I believe in. And this is the word I stake my life on.”
Listening to each person speak made me squirm. I wanted to shout out to all the people, “Listen, people, you aren’t sheep. What they’re telling you isn’t true! They’re manipulating you!” I was irritated. Does it seem somewhat odd and perhaps heretical that I would want to scream this. What’s wrong with what the actors said? Didn’t Jefferson, Adams (well,… John Adams; I’m not sure what role Abigail had), and Franklin found the country on the Christian faith, and wasn’t the Bible central to their lives? The answers? No, they didn’t,… at least not in the way suggested by these actors, and yes it was.
As the well-known U. S. Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once said, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts.” This church was creating their own facts. Unfortunately, too few Americans today understand the faith of our Founding Fathers enough to know the difference between fact and opinion.
The fact is that the faith of the Founding Fathers was very much like that of the original colonists. They did not all share the same faith. In fact, they did not all share the same belief that they were Christian. Some didn’t really consider themselves Christian at all. Others saw themselves as Christians, but others as less than Christian. What makes it even more complicated is that many Founding Fathers adopted a faith that wasn’t completely Christian in the way we consider a faith to be Christian. And the funny thing today is that Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Ben Franklin, are often considered by modern evangelicals to be Christian, despite the fact that if these three were alive today, they would be considered heretics by those same evangelicals. Why? Because Thomas Jefferson, the Adamses, and Ben Franklin weren’t necessarily Christian. Let me share with you what they believed.
Thomas Jefferson’s Faith:
Jefferson was officially an Anglican, and when he worshiped, he worshiped in an Anglican church, but that doesn’t mean that he accepted Anglican beliefs. In fact, Jefferson’s theology and beliefs were much closer to Deist and Unitarian than to Christian. He did not believe that Jesus was the Son of God, God incarnate, or the Messiah. Instead, he believed that Jesus was a great teacher of moral and philosophical truth. He believed that Jesus was the greatest teacher ever, but he did not believe in any of the miracles the gospels report. So Jefferson would not have believed in the virgin birth, the healings, feeding of the 5000, or the resurrection. The foundation of Jefferson’s belief was in the power of reason. He believed that true religion was one of reason rather than of revelation. That’s different from us. We believe that through Christ, and the writers of the Bible, God’s will and truth have been revealed. Jefferson believed that God’s will could only be reasoned out and that scripture was the work of flawed men who probably messed up God’s truth. As a result of his uncertainty about religion and its impact on reason, he founded the University of Virginia to be a college that was intentionally not affiliated with any church. If Jefferson were among us today, would we consider Jefferson to be a Christian?
Looking at how Jefferson treated the Bible, it’s hard to believe so. Jefferson struggled so much with the gospels, he decided to do something about it. He took several copies of the Bible, and using a razor blade, cut out every miracle story or part that he thought improbable. Then he rearranged them all so that they read in chronological order, creating one super-rational version of the Gospel. To get a sense of what this might of have done to the Bible, he took out whole segments, such as half of Mark 4, 6, 7, 8, as well as all of Mark 5 and 9. Is that the act of a Christian? I’m not pointing this out as a way of denigrating Jefferson. I think that he was one of the greatest men to ever live, and I do believe that in his own way he was a man of faith. I just don’t know that he was Christian, and if he wasn’t, can we say that he founded the nation as a Christian nation?
Benjamin Franklin’s Faith:
Like Jefferson, Franklin’s faith and belief were much closer to Deist and Unitarian than Christian, although he hid it better. Has raised as a Puritan, but later became an Anglican, despite rejecting most of Christian doctrine and belief, other than a belief in God and God’s providence. His theology and beliefs were much closer to Deist than to Christian, believing that God’s truths can be found entirely through nature and reason. He rarely disclosed his own personal beliefs, but when it came to Jesus he mainly saw him as a great moral teacher whose teachings had been corrupted by centuries of interpretation. He attended worship regularly at Christ Church in Philadelphia, but was reluctant to commit to any one religious view. According to John Adams, Franklin, ever the diplomat, was so good at hiding his own beliefs that Presbyterians thought he was one of them, Anglicans one of them, Congregationalists one of them, and Unitarians one of them. If he were with us today, would we consider Franklin to have been a Christian?
John Adams’ Faith:
Adams was raised as a Congregationalist, but later became Unitarian, rejecting most of Christian doctrine and belief, other than a belief in the essential goodness of God’s creation. His theology and beliefs were a combination of Deist and Unitarian. He tended to characterize it as a belief in the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount.
He did not believe that God intervened in life, and he rejected the Trinity, but did believe in life after death. This is very different from what we Christians believe in. We believe that God does intervene in life, which is why we pray for healing and other concerns. And we believe in the Trinity, although I know that many of us struggle with that concept. Again, knowing what we know about Adams, can we say he was a Christian? In his case it’s easy to say that he answer is “no” because he was a Unitarian. Unitarians, while emerging out of the Christian faith, is not Christian faith.
So, getting back to our overall question, if we are going to say we are a Christian nation, are we sure the Founding Fathers were Christian? Certainly many of them were. In fact, a fair number were Presbyterian and Anglican pastors. But looking at the most influential, there’s a real question. Add in George Washington, who refused to take communion in worship, and James Madison (the principle writer of the U.S. constitution) who had strong Deist leanings, can we say that any of the most influential founding fathers were Christian as we define Christianity?
One thing also is clear. If you delve into their beliefs, they were clearly in favor of not making this a Christian nation. Many of the Founding Fathers had a deep, deep suspicion of the State and Church. Why? Because they knew that in Europe pastors were paid by the state when they served in state churches. And each country had a declared state religion. In England it was the Anglican Church. In Scotland the Presbyterian Church. In France, Italy, and Spain the Roman Catholic Church. In Norway and Sweden the Lutheran Church. And in these countries the state paid the salaries of pastors. So the Founding Fathers’ question was whether these pastors served the state or God. Also, they had seen how the establishment of one state religion led to the oppression of others, and they cherished the American colonial experiment of free exercise of religion. They believed in this idea so much that the very first amendment to the U. S. Constitution was a very simple, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” You see what their very first concern was? It was that the government should not establish a religion, or get in the way of people’s freedom of religion.
So, now that I spoke last week about the colonists’ faith and today about the Founding Fathers’ faith, what do I believe? While I am a Christian, and while I believe that life without faith and God becomes increasingly selfish and hollow, I also recognize that a true faith only comes with a choice, not compulsion. To declare our country to be a Christian nation, and to enforce it with some sort of governmental backing, would actually lead away from what we really want. You see, true faith only forms when it is done through free choice. Having the state enforce religion doesn’t lead to free faith chosen by choice. It actually has the effect of pushing people away from religion and faith by pushing them to do what they don’t want to do. For instance, growing up I went to a private elementary school where psalm reading, hymn singing, and prayer were part of our every morning assembly. I hated it. It started the process of turning me off to religion that culminated in my leaving the church at age fifteen. For some reason, going to church as a child didn’t have the same impact. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that I knew that it was the appropriate place for prayer.
My point is that when we talk about things like putting prayer into our schools, be careful what we wish for. We are asking the government to enforce what we are called to do. It doesn’t necessarily lead to free choice of religion. One of the things we do at Calvin Church is to teach prayer, scripture, and the practice of faith, but we do it in a way that we hope leads to a mature, free choice when teens become adults. Sometimes it doesn’t, which is sad. But we recognize that people are free to reject what we offer. For good or for bad, we don’t run after people who reject the church, mainly because we want this to be a place of choice, not a place that has to convince people to be here.
Think of your own faith. What have you believed because it was forced on you? I’m not just talking about religious beliefs. I’m talking about political or any other kinds of beliefs. Do you believe what you believe because someone, especially the government, said that you must do or believe this? Again, this is my problem with both the topics of school prayer and Ten Commandments in courthouses. I believe that if we are asking the government to step in and intervene on our behalf, we’ve become lazy. I am very much like the Founding Fathers. I don’t want the state enforcing my faith. I’m wary of it because I don’t think they’d do a good job of it. I think we’re better at it.
Also, if schools did enforce school prayer, who would be leading it? What kind of Christian prayer would it be? Would it be an evangelical one emphasizing who is saved and who isn’t? A Roman Catholic one, praying for the pope and the area bishops? Would it be a Pentecostal one, asking God to give everyone the gift of tongues? Would it be a Presbyterian one? Would it be a Mormon one? Or would it be a Deist, Unitarian one? Not all Christianity is alike, so which Christian prayer would it be?
Also, when I hear people say that we are a Christian nation I get nervous because I know historically what happens when governments establish and support particular religions. I look at the state of religion in Europe, and it is abysmal. Something like 30% of all Americans go to church on Sunday mornings. Not a great percentage, until you compare it to Europe, where between 3% and 5% go to church on Sunday mornings. That’s the impact of state religions. Back in 1996 Diane and I visited Scotland. While sitting in a pub attached to the inn we were staying in, I had a conversation with a man stopping by for a drink after work. Eventually he asked me what I did for a living. I told him I was a Presbyterian pastor. He pushed back slowly and cocked his head. Then said, “I don’t think I’ve ever met a pastor before. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve met anyone who’s gone to church before.” Surprised, I asked him, “Don’t people go to church here?” He said, “I’m not sure, but I don’t know of anyone. I’ve only seen the insides of churches on television, myself. I’ve never been in one.”
I believe that the U.S. is the most religious nation in the world because of our freedom. But take away that freedom and would we be that religious?
With all this said, I don’t want to leave the impression that I therefore believe that religion and faith should be kept out of politics and government. While I don’t believe that the state should establish religion, I do believe that religious thought should absolutely be part of our political establishment. This is the second half of the First Amendment. I don’t want the state to establish religion, but I do absolutely want the free exercise of religion (including atheism, which is a religion, since it is a practice regarding the place of God and religion in life) in all spheres of American life, including politics. This is very much in keeping with the Founding Fathers’ beliefs. They may not all have been Christian, but they were all religious, and they brought their beliefs, practices, and faith into the public sphere. Jefferson may have been a Deist, but those Deist beliefs shaped the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and his presidency. Who knows what Washington was, but he brought his faith into his command of the American Army. Madison was officially an Anglican, who was trained under the Presbyterian John Witherspoon at Princeton. You may not know this, but part of the model for the U. S. government is based on the Presbyterian system of checks and balances. We always balance laity and clergy in our church, both locally and at higher levels. We have equal levels of clergy and elders at higher levels of government of our church, and in times of dispute all clergy (and elders, when applicable) are guaranteed a fair jury trial. In the U.S. government the president is checked and balanced by Congress and the judiciary in much the same way.
Ultimately, I believe that we are not a Christian nation, but we are a nation of Christians, living in a country that was founded on Christian ideals. This country is richer when our Christian faith is brought into our governing, and poorer when people try to bring government into our faith. I am very much like the Founding Fathers.
Each of us is free to believe that we are a Christian nation, but I think we have to be careful about getting what we wish for; because the Christianity we might get in our nation may not be the Christianity we believe in.
Amen.
Are We Really a Christian Nation? Part 1: The Colonists' Faith
Luke 8:4-15
When a great crowd gathered and people from town after town came to him, he said in a parable: ‘A sower went out to sow his seed; and as he sowed, some fell on the path and was trampled on, and the birds of the air ate it up. Some fell on the rock; and as it grew up, it withered for lack of moisture. Some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew with it and choked it. Some fell into good soil, and when it grew, it produced a hundredfold.’ As he said this, he called out, ‘Let anyone with ears to hear listen!’
Then his disciples asked him what this parable meant. He said, ‘To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God; but to others I speak in parables, so that “looking they may not perceive, and listening they may not understand.”
‘Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God. The ones on the path are those who have heard; then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved. The ones on the rock are those who, when they hear the word, receive it with joy. But these have no root; they believe only for a while and in a time of testing fall away. As for what fell among the thorns, these are the ones who hear; but as they go on their way, they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature. But as for that in the good soil, these are the ones who, when they hear the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patient endurance.
So,… are we a Christian nation or not? Over the past year I’ve had two conversations on the topic with two people with very strong opinions. The first person was an evangelical Christian who attends a large, non-denominational church. He was very adamant that the United States is a Christian nation. He stated emphatically that this country was settled by Christian colonists, practicing a Christian faith, with Christian beliefs guiding their government, and therefore the government should promote the Christian faith since we are a Christian nation. I think it surprised him when I told him that I completely disagreed with him, and that I believed we were not founded as a Christian nation. It surprised him because in his mind (and maybe yours) Christian pastors are supposed to believe and teach that this is a Christian nation.
About a month later I had a similar conversation with an atheist. She said emphatically that we are not a Christian nation, that this country was founded by people who had a problem with Christianity and wanted religion left out of politics. She then said that she believed that there should be freedom of religion, but that all religion should be kept out of the public sphere. She was telling me this because she saw me as an “enlightened” Christian, one whom she believed would agree with her. I said to her that I completely disagreed with her, and that I believed that Christian faith is part-and-parcel of our nations’ make-up. To leave Christianity out of the public sphere would go completely against what the founders believed.
So right now you’re wondering if I’m some sort of strange waffler. Most wafflers agree with whoever is speaking to them. I seem strange because I was disagreeing with both. Why? The answer is that I’ve spent a lot of time studying American Christian history, and I know that both of them were misrepresenting it. Most of us have studied American history, and we’ve learned certain facts, such as that this country was settled by people escaping religious persecution, and that in this country we believe in a wall separating church and state. But these facts only scratch the surface of what really took place. And some of them are wrong.
I disagreed with both because both were holding onto simplistic understandings of the settling and founding of this country, and I refused to be simplistic. Unfortunately, we modern Americans don’t seem to be able to hold onto any ideas that don’t fit onto a bumper sticker, and it is easier to say we either are or are not a Christian nation than to dig into the truth. The result is that we say that we either are or are not a Christian nation, when the reality is that what we are is more complex than this. So, this morning I want to give you a very Presbyterian sermon on the whole question of whether or not we are a Christian nation.
What does that mean, that it will be Presbyterian? I saw a recent promotion for the Presbyterian Church that said, “I’m proud to be a Presbyterian because we don’t have to check our heads at the door.” I’m not sure that will be a catchy enough phrase to get people to join our churches, but I think it’s true. We Presbyterians believe in thinking our way through faith, and so this morning I want you to think. I’m going to talk about the colonization of this country and its impact on us as a nation, but at the end I’m not going to tell you how to think. I’m simply going to invite you to think. And the question I’m going to ask at the end is this: “Knowing what you know now, are we really a Christian nation?”
To help you think through this I want to take you through the colonization of America and see if you know it as well as many of us think we do. For instance, answer this question: We are a nation founded by people trying to escape religious persecution—true or false? Whichever way you answered, you were only 50% right. If you understand the role of religion in the colonization of America you’ll see why. I want to look at the four great migrations into America, and talk about how they influenced our nation, and especially our thinking about whether or not we are a Christian nation. I’m basing my talk on David Hackett Fischer’s incredible book, Albion’s Seed. I don’t expect you to read it, unless you are really interested in history. He is known at the foremost expert on American colonization. His book is over 1000 pages long, but it is fascinating. He says that there were four main migrations that influenced American thought. There were other migrations, to be sure, but they didn’t have a foundational impact.
To understand the role of religion among the colonists, you have to start with understanding England itself in the 1600s. It was not a very peaceful place. Most Americans know that we had a civil war in the 1860s, but most don’t know that England went through a civil war in the early 1600s. The power kept passing between Anglicans (those who cherished the king and followed the Church of England), Catholics (those who cherished the king but followed the Roman Catholic Church), and Congregationalists (those who had little use for the king nor the Anglican or Catholic churches, and followed a Calvinist form of religion). Whichever group was in power typically oppressed the other two. This is the context that led to the first big migration to America, which was the Puritan migration into the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
The Puritans were from a soil-poor area of England called East Anglia. It was comprised of Norfolk and Suffolk counties, mainly, along with several other counties. It was on the eastern coast of England, and the people who lived there were very independent and communal. They were Calvinists, following the religious reforms of the Swiss Reformation of the 1500s. They were a thorn in the king’s side, as well as the Anglicans and the Catholics. They did manage to secure power in England for a decade or more under Oliver Cromwell, but their rule was austere and violent. Why did the king allow the Puritans to set up a colony in Massachusetts? Because he wanted to get rid of them, and they wanted to escape their religious persecution in England.
The Puritans set up the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which was comprised of what is today Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine, with the hope that it would become a model Christian society. John Winthrop, in delivering a sermon to Puritan colonists in 1630 as they prepared to disembark in Salem bay, said that he hoped Massachusetts would become a “city set upon a hill” (based on Jesus’ words in Matthew 5) that would become a model to the world. Since then, many Americans have declared that our whole country was founded as this city on a hill.
For the Puritans, their faith was everything. They saw no disconnect between faith and the rest of life. We often think of them as being very austere and rigid, although this wasn’t quite true. It is true that they dressed in a very reserved and modest way, wearing simple linen and wool clothing. Women always had their heads covered, and their dresses revealed no wrists, legs, or chest. The men were dark clothing that similarly covered their whole bodies. There was no showiness about their dress. Also, they believed in hard work, but that the produce of their work should be shared. It is also true that to be a Puritan meant to conform. Everyone dressed the same, spoke the same, and shared virtually the same beliefs. There was little tolerance for dispute. Also, to become fully part of the community, whether church or village, a person had to be born-again. It wasn’t enough, though, to say that you had had a born-again experience. You had to have your experience in public in a way that others could witness to.
Still, it’s not as though everything about them was rigid and austere. Community and family was everything for them. They were known as very loving and devoted parents. And they were known for offering a very free and inclusive democratic government. For example, they were the original creators of the town hall meeting, in which everyone in the community could have a voice. Their community emphasis was also demonstrated in the fact that there were very few poor among them. The community always looked out for the poor. If you were poor in a Puritan community, you would be invited to live with a family, for as long as the rest of your life. Widows and widowers were taken in by local families, and children whose parents died were quickly adopted by family or neighbors. The wealthy among them saw it as their duty to share their wealth, and held very little of it for themselves. You can see this tradition still in Massachusetts in its nickname, “Taxachusetts.” The willingness of people to pay higher taxes to care for the community was natural outgrowth of Puritan culture. To sum up the basic sense of Puritan culture, we can say that:
• They were very salvation oriented (who’s saved and who isn’t), with each person expected to live a pure (Puritan), godly life, adhere to Calvinist doctrine, and have a publicly demonstrated conversion experience. They were extremely intolerant of different Christian ideas, and especially denominations. They did not consider Christians of other faiths to be Christian. They were an abomination. In fact, if you were found to be practicing another faith in the colony—being a Quaker, Anglican, or Presbyterian—you were often forced to walk to another colony, while your head and arms were locked in a stock. As you walked from village to village, you would be spat on, garbage would be thrown on you, and children would hit you with sticks. On rare occasions, you would be hanged.
• They were very community and family oriented, with an emphasis on conformity of dress, belief, and behavior.
• They believed in using force and social pressure to enforce religious belief.
• They believed in the equality of all people, and that what distinguishes people is the nature of their work, not their rank in society. There was little social hierarchy, with each person’s voice being considered important.
So,… this gets back to our basic question. If we are we a Christian nation, are we Christian like the Puritans?
The next major migration to American was night-and-day when compared to the Puritans. These were the Anglican Cavaliers who settled into Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. They were not looking to escape religious persecution because, for the most part, they were in the religious majority. The Cavaliers were the second, third, fourth, and fifth sons of wealthy noblemen from the south of England. Their fathers owned large estates, estates that would be willed to the eldest son upon their deaths. The other sons were given money to make their way in the world. Many came to the colonies to create their own estates and plantations to rival their father’s.
The cavaliers dress was very different from Puritan dress. They dressed in fine silks and cottons. Their hear was long, and they wore swords by their sides. They were Anglican in their faith, and while the church was important to most of them, their faith was consigned mostly to Sunday mornings. The rest of the week they lived and did as they pleased. In many ways their religion was the accumulation of wealth. They were not in the colonies seeking religious freedom. They were seeking economic opportunity, with a goal of becoming rich. To summarize Anglican Cavalier life, we can say that:
• They believed that the universe was created with a natural hierarchy, of which we all are a part and have a natural rank. They believed that this ranking was ordained by God. So in the church there would be God, the king, the archbishop, the bishop, the priests, and then the laity. In secular society there was the king, the nobility, middle-class, servants, and then slaves. To them, all people have a duty to conform to their rank, and to not desire to rise above it. Understanding their view of community, and the Puritan one, you can see why slavery thrived in the south, but never took on in Massachusetts. The Puritans saw Africans as equal, but the Anglican Cavaliers saw them as naturally inferior, and put on this earth to be slaves. As a result, it’s easy to understand why people in the South couldn’t understand what the problem with slavery was, and some today still look down on African-Americans.
• They believed in the use of force, especially to enforce their hierarchy. As a result, they were highly intolerant of any other denomination and forced Puritan and Quaker settlements out of the colony. They weren’t as violent in doing so as the Puritans, but the tolerated no other beliefs and denominations.
So,… this gets back to our basic question. If we are we a Christian nation, are we Christian like the Anglican Cavaliers?
The next migration was radically different from the other two. This was the Quaker migration that settled into New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. The Quakers were a religiously persecuted people from central England. Their faith was very different from Puritans and Anglicans. They were very anti-institutional, believing that everyone could go to God directly without the help of pastor or priest. They also believed in peace and unity, equality, and the validity of other faiths (even if they saw their own as being preeminent).
The Quakers in the colonies, led by William Penn, who founded Pennsylvania (which originally included Delaware and parts of what is now New Jersey), wanted to create a land of religious liberty. And so he not only invited Quakers to come to Pennsylvania, but also Anglicans and Presbyterians, Lutherans and German Reformed, Mennonites and Amish, Harmonites (who settled in our town of Harmony), the Scotch-Irish (whom we’ll talk about later), Jews, and even Muslims. Penn believed he was creating a grand Christian experiment, one that was diametrically opposed to the Puritan one. He was creating a colony on a hill, but one that included all who followed the Christian faith or a religion. He might have seen the Quakers as foremost among all Christians, but he saw all Christians as basically equivalent. This was far from how the Puritans and Anglicans saw things. They each saw themselves as true Christians, and all other faiths as false. The Quakers of Pennsylvania wanted to create a colony that would reflect their religious beliefs:
• The equality of everyone;
• Always seeking peace and unity in society;
• Pursuing religious freedom and social pluralism;
• Being community-oriented, but with a strong sense of personal expressions.
In many ways I see myself as a product of Pennsylvania. I believe in these same values, but I know that I live among many Christians who see only themselves as true Christians, and all others as false. Knowing all this about Penn, the Quakers, and the founding of Pennsylvania, it’s no accident that the signing of the Declaration of Independence took place in Philadelphia. That document would have a hard time finding the same kind of communal support in either the New England or Southern colonies. It’s also no accident that Pennsylvania had the most signers of the Declaration of Independence than any other colony.
So,… this gets back to our basic question. If we are we a Christian nation, are we Christian like the Quakers?
The final major migration to shape American thought was the Scotch-Irish settlement first into Pennsylvania (the only colony that would invite and have them), and then down the spine of the Appalachians. It’s a bit of a misnomer to call them Scotch-Irish because many of them really weren’t Scottish. They really should have been called borderlanders. They came from the borderlands between Scotland and England. These were people who owed allegiance neither to Scotland and England. For centuries they were caught in a vice. When England would attack Scotland, they would demand allegiance from these people, but if they lost the battle, the Scottish would come onto their lands and kill the people there for supporting the English. If the Scottish attacked the English, they would demand the support of the borderlanders. If they lost, the English would then come and kill them. They were caught in a perpetual vice, so they created their own clan system of familial connection and support. When either the Scottish or the English would demand allegiance, these families would gather together and tell each army that not only would they not align with them, but whenever the army passed they would attack them from the rear. These were a fiercely independent and violent people who learned to be self-reliant and to take care of self and family first.
Many of these borderland folk were sent to Northern Ireland when Scotland and England joined to create Great Britain. Despite the peace between Scotland and Ireland, these folks remained violent and disruptive, so it made sense to exile them. From there they moved to the colonies in America. These people were unlike any other to come to America. They were built for the frontier, not the cities. They were uncultivated, and had their own ways that were extremely different from the educated Anglicans, Puritans, and Quakers. They cursed, they got drunk, they spat, and they fought. The women’s dresses revealed ankles and wrists, and sometimes even cleavage. Even the tolerant Quakers were uncomfortable with them, and encouraged them to move to frontier to places like,… Western Pennsylvania.
The legacy of the Scotch-Irish is still with us. These people were not seeking religious freedom. They already felt they had it. In the independence of the borderlands they had formed their own Christian churches. It is said that they often went into the frontier armed with a Bible and an axe. They felt no allegiance to any church, and if they disagreed among their own churches, they were quick to split. I’m convinced that what’s at the root of all our arguing in the Presbyterian Church is our Scotch-Irish roots. We’ve been arguing and splitting for centuries. In each new era we find new things to fight and split about, but it’s in our DNA, it seems, to fight. If you really want to understand the Scotch-Irish temperament, look to the Hatfield-McCoy feud of the 19th century. Do you know what they were fighting about? Neither do I, nor does anyone else. They were feuding because they were Scotch-Irish.
So how did these folk influence the faith of our country? They were the first libertarians. They believed in their own independence, their own freedom, and their right to do what they wanted. They didn’t want to pay taxes, and they didn’t want the government interfering in their lives. From a political perspective, these are the forebears of the NRA, the Libertarians, and even the Tea Party. Their influence on American faith is that they were the first to be spiritual but not religious. They may have gone to church, but often not together. Each individual person or family saw themselves as the real Christians, and all others as pale imitations. And they justified whatever they did on those grounds. They could find biblical justification for anything. Does that sound familiar today?
So,… this gets back to our basic question. If we are we a Christian nation, are we Christian like the Scotch-Irish?
The problem with calling ourselves a Christian nation is that if we look at our roots, there was no consistent Christianity to say what was universally Christian. If we are a Christian nation, which version are we? We can’t be all because they aren’t all compatible with each other. The independence of the Scotch-Irish conflicts with the communal focus of the Puritans. The intolerance of the Puritans and Anglicans conflicts with the tolerance of the Quakers. So which Christianity are we as a nation?
Next week I want to look at the faith of the founding fathers, because it was just as complex and varied as that of the colonists. Until then I want you to reflect on this question: knowing what you know now, would you say that we are a Christian nation?
Amen.
When a great crowd gathered and people from town after town came to him, he said in a parable: ‘A sower went out to sow his seed; and as he sowed, some fell on the path and was trampled on, and the birds of the air ate it up. Some fell on the rock; and as it grew up, it withered for lack of moisture. Some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew with it and choked it. Some fell into good soil, and when it grew, it produced a hundredfold.’ As he said this, he called out, ‘Let anyone with ears to hear listen!’
Then his disciples asked him what this parable meant. He said, ‘To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God; but to others I speak in parables, so that “looking they may not perceive, and listening they may not understand.”
‘Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God. The ones on the path are those who have heard; then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved. The ones on the rock are those who, when they hear the word, receive it with joy. But these have no root; they believe only for a while and in a time of testing fall away. As for what fell among the thorns, these are the ones who hear; but as they go on their way, they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature. But as for that in the good soil, these are the ones who, when they hear the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patient endurance.
So,… are we a Christian nation or not? Over the past year I’ve had two conversations on the topic with two people with very strong opinions. The first person was an evangelical Christian who attends a large, non-denominational church. He was very adamant that the United States is a Christian nation. He stated emphatically that this country was settled by Christian colonists, practicing a Christian faith, with Christian beliefs guiding their government, and therefore the government should promote the Christian faith since we are a Christian nation. I think it surprised him when I told him that I completely disagreed with him, and that I believed we were not founded as a Christian nation. It surprised him because in his mind (and maybe yours) Christian pastors are supposed to believe and teach that this is a Christian nation.
About a month later I had a similar conversation with an atheist. She said emphatically that we are not a Christian nation, that this country was founded by people who had a problem with Christianity and wanted religion left out of politics. She then said that she believed that there should be freedom of religion, but that all religion should be kept out of the public sphere. She was telling me this because she saw me as an “enlightened” Christian, one whom she believed would agree with her. I said to her that I completely disagreed with her, and that I believed that Christian faith is part-and-parcel of our nations’ make-up. To leave Christianity out of the public sphere would go completely against what the founders believed.
So right now you’re wondering if I’m some sort of strange waffler. Most wafflers agree with whoever is speaking to them. I seem strange because I was disagreeing with both. Why? The answer is that I’ve spent a lot of time studying American Christian history, and I know that both of them were misrepresenting it. Most of us have studied American history, and we’ve learned certain facts, such as that this country was settled by people escaping religious persecution, and that in this country we believe in a wall separating church and state. But these facts only scratch the surface of what really took place. And some of them are wrong.
I disagreed with both because both were holding onto simplistic understandings of the settling and founding of this country, and I refused to be simplistic. Unfortunately, we modern Americans don’t seem to be able to hold onto any ideas that don’t fit onto a bumper sticker, and it is easier to say we either are or are not a Christian nation than to dig into the truth. The result is that we say that we either are or are not a Christian nation, when the reality is that what we are is more complex than this. So, this morning I want to give you a very Presbyterian sermon on the whole question of whether or not we are a Christian nation.
What does that mean, that it will be Presbyterian? I saw a recent promotion for the Presbyterian Church that said, “I’m proud to be a Presbyterian because we don’t have to check our heads at the door.” I’m not sure that will be a catchy enough phrase to get people to join our churches, but I think it’s true. We Presbyterians believe in thinking our way through faith, and so this morning I want you to think. I’m going to talk about the colonization of this country and its impact on us as a nation, but at the end I’m not going to tell you how to think. I’m simply going to invite you to think. And the question I’m going to ask at the end is this: “Knowing what you know now, are we really a Christian nation?”
To help you think through this I want to take you through the colonization of America and see if you know it as well as many of us think we do. For instance, answer this question: We are a nation founded by people trying to escape religious persecution—true or false? Whichever way you answered, you were only 50% right. If you understand the role of religion in the colonization of America you’ll see why. I want to look at the four great migrations into America, and talk about how they influenced our nation, and especially our thinking about whether or not we are a Christian nation. I’m basing my talk on David Hackett Fischer’s incredible book, Albion’s Seed. I don’t expect you to read it, unless you are really interested in history. He is known at the foremost expert on American colonization. His book is over 1000 pages long, but it is fascinating. He says that there were four main migrations that influenced American thought. There were other migrations, to be sure, but they didn’t have a foundational impact.
To understand the role of religion among the colonists, you have to start with understanding England itself in the 1600s. It was not a very peaceful place. Most Americans know that we had a civil war in the 1860s, but most don’t know that England went through a civil war in the early 1600s. The power kept passing between Anglicans (those who cherished the king and followed the Church of England), Catholics (those who cherished the king but followed the Roman Catholic Church), and Congregationalists (those who had little use for the king nor the Anglican or Catholic churches, and followed a Calvinist form of religion). Whichever group was in power typically oppressed the other two. This is the context that led to the first big migration to America, which was the Puritan migration into the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
The Puritans were from a soil-poor area of England called East Anglia. It was comprised of Norfolk and Suffolk counties, mainly, along with several other counties. It was on the eastern coast of England, and the people who lived there were very independent and communal. They were Calvinists, following the religious reforms of the Swiss Reformation of the 1500s. They were a thorn in the king’s side, as well as the Anglicans and the Catholics. They did manage to secure power in England for a decade or more under Oliver Cromwell, but their rule was austere and violent. Why did the king allow the Puritans to set up a colony in Massachusetts? Because he wanted to get rid of them, and they wanted to escape their religious persecution in England.
The Puritans set up the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which was comprised of what is today Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine, with the hope that it would become a model Christian society. John Winthrop, in delivering a sermon to Puritan colonists in 1630 as they prepared to disembark in Salem bay, said that he hoped Massachusetts would become a “city set upon a hill” (based on Jesus’ words in Matthew 5) that would become a model to the world. Since then, many Americans have declared that our whole country was founded as this city on a hill.
For the Puritans, their faith was everything. They saw no disconnect between faith and the rest of life. We often think of them as being very austere and rigid, although this wasn’t quite true. It is true that they dressed in a very reserved and modest way, wearing simple linen and wool clothing. Women always had their heads covered, and their dresses revealed no wrists, legs, or chest. The men were dark clothing that similarly covered their whole bodies. There was no showiness about their dress. Also, they believed in hard work, but that the produce of their work should be shared. It is also true that to be a Puritan meant to conform. Everyone dressed the same, spoke the same, and shared virtually the same beliefs. There was little tolerance for dispute. Also, to become fully part of the community, whether church or village, a person had to be born-again. It wasn’t enough, though, to say that you had had a born-again experience. You had to have your experience in public in a way that others could witness to.
Still, it’s not as though everything about them was rigid and austere. Community and family was everything for them. They were known as very loving and devoted parents. And they were known for offering a very free and inclusive democratic government. For example, they were the original creators of the town hall meeting, in which everyone in the community could have a voice. Their community emphasis was also demonstrated in the fact that there were very few poor among them. The community always looked out for the poor. If you were poor in a Puritan community, you would be invited to live with a family, for as long as the rest of your life. Widows and widowers were taken in by local families, and children whose parents died were quickly adopted by family or neighbors. The wealthy among them saw it as their duty to share their wealth, and held very little of it for themselves. You can see this tradition still in Massachusetts in its nickname, “Taxachusetts.” The willingness of people to pay higher taxes to care for the community was natural outgrowth of Puritan culture. To sum up the basic sense of Puritan culture, we can say that:
• They were very salvation oriented (who’s saved and who isn’t), with each person expected to live a pure (Puritan), godly life, adhere to Calvinist doctrine, and have a publicly demonstrated conversion experience. They were extremely intolerant of different Christian ideas, and especially denominations. They did not consider Christians of other faiths to be Christian. They were an abomination. In fact, if you were found to be practicing another faith in the colony—being a Quaker, Anglican, or Presbyterian—you were often forced to walk to another colony, while your head and arms were locked in a stock. As you walked from village to village, you would be spat on, garbage would be thrown on you, and children would hit you with sticks. On rare occasions, you would be hanged.
• They were very community and family oriented, with an emphasis on conformity of dress, belief, and behavior.
• They believed in using force and social pressure to enforce religious belief.
• They believed in the equality of all people, and that what distinguishes people is the nature of their work, not their rank in society. There was little social hierarchy, with each person’s voice being considered important.
So,… this gets back to our basic question. If we are we a Christian nation, are we Christian like the Puritans?
The next major migration to American was night-and-day when compared to the Puritans. These were the Anglican Cavaliers who settled into Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. They were not looking to escape religious persecution because, for the most part, they were in the religious majority. The Cavaliers were the second, third, fourth, and fifth sons of wealthy noblemen from the south of England. Their fathers owned large estates, estates that would be willed to the eldest son upon their deaths. The other sons were given money to make their way in the world. Many came to the colonies to create their own estates and plantations to rival their father’s.
The cavaliers dress was very different from Puritan dress. They dressed in fine silks and cottons. Their hear was long, and they wore swords by their sides. They were Anglican in their faith, and while the church was important to most of them, their faith was consigned mostly to Sunday mornings. The rest of the week they lived and did as they pleased. In many ways their religion was the accumulation of wealth. They were not in the colonies seeking religious freedom. They were seeking economic opportunity, with a goal of becoming rich. To summarize Anglican Cavalier life, we can say that:
• They believed that the universe was created with a natural hierarchy, of which we all are a part and have a natural rank. They believed that this ranking was ordained by God. So in the church there would be God, the king, the archbishop, the bishop, the priests, and then the laity. In secular society there was the king, the nobility, middle-class, servants, and then slaves. To them, all people have a duty to conform to their rank, and to not desire to rise above it. Understanding their view of community, and the Puritan one, you can see why slavery thrived in the south, but never took on in Massachusetts. The Puritans saw Africans as equal, but the Anglican Cavaliers saw them as naturally inferior, and put on this earth to be slaves. As a result, it’s easy to understand why people in the South couldn’t understand what the problem with slavery was, and some today still look down on African-Americans.
• They believed in the use of force, especially to enforce their hierarchy. As a result, they were highly intolerant of any other denomination and forced Puritan and Quaker settlements out of the colony. They weren’t as violent in doing so as the Puritans, but the tolerated no other beliefs and denominations.
So,… this gets back to our basic question. If we are we a Christian nation, are we Christian like the Anglican Cavaliers?
The next migration was radically different from the other two. This was the Quaker migration that settled into New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. The Quakers were a religiously persecuted people from central England. Their faith was very different from Puritans and Anglicans. They were very anti-institutional, believing that everyone could go to God directly without the help of pastor or priest. They also believed in peace and unity, equality, and the validity of other faiths (even if they saw their own as being preeminent).
The Quakers in the colonies, led by William Penn, who founded Pennsylvania (which originally included Delaware and parts of what is now New Jersey), wanted to create a land of religious liberty. And so he not only invited Quakers to come to Pennsylvania, but also Anglicans and Presbyterians, Lutherans and German Reformed, Mennonites and Amish, Harmonites (who settled in our town of Harmony), the Scotch-Irish (whom we’ll talk about later), Jews, and even Muslims. Penn believed he was creating a grand Christian experiment, one that was diametrically opposed to the Puritan one. He was creating a colony on a hill, but one that included all who followed the Christian faith or a religion. He might have seen the Quakers as foremost among all Christians, but he saw all Christians as basically equivalent. This was far from how the Puritans and Anglicans saw things. They each saw themselves as true Christians, and all other faiths as false. The Quakers of Pennsylvania wanted to create a colony that would reflect their religious beliefs:
• The equality of everyone;
• Always seeking peace and unity in society;
• Pursuing religious freedom and social pluralism;
• Being community-oriented, but with a strong sense of personal expressions.
In many ways I see myself as a product of Pennsylvania. I believe in these same values, but I know that I live among many Christians who see only themselves as true Christians, and all others as false. Knowing all this about Penn, the Quakers, and the founding of Pennsylvania, it’s no accident that the signing of the Declaration of Independence took place in Philadelphia. That document would have a hard time finding the same kind of communal support in either the New England or Southern colonies. It’s also no accident that Pennsylvania had the most signers of the Declaration of Independence than any other colony.
So,… this gets back to our basic question. If we are we a Christian nation, are we Christian like the Quakers?
The final major migration to shape American thought was the Scotch-Irish settlement first into Pennsylvania (the only colony that would invite and have them), and then down the spine of the Appalachians. It’s a bit of a misnomer to call them Scotch-Irish because many of them really weren’t Scottish. They really should have been called borderlanders. They came from the borderlands between Scotland and England. These were people who owed allegiance neither to Scotland and England. For centuries they were caught in a vice. When England would attack Scotland, they would demand allegiance from these people, but if they lost the battle, the Scottish would come onto their lands and kill the people there for supporting the English. If the Scottish attacked the English, they would demand the support of the borderlanders. If they lost, the English would then come and kill them. They were caught in a perpetual vice, so they created their own clan system of familial connection and support. When either the Scottish or the English would demand allegiance, these families would gather together and tell each army that not only would they not align with them, but whenever the army passed they would attack them from the rear. These were a fiercely independent and violent people who learned to be self-reliant and to take care of self and family first.
Many of these borderland folk were sent to Northern Ireland when Scotland and England joined to create Great Britain. Despite the peace between Scotland and Ireland, these folks remained violent and disruptive, so it made sense to exile them. From there they moved to the colonies in America. These people were unlike any other to come to America. They were built for the frontier, not the cities. They were uncultivated, and had their own ways that were extremely different from the educated Anglicans, Puritans, and Quakers. They cursed, they got drunk, they spat, and they fought. The women’s dresses revealed ankles and wrists, and sometimes even cleavage. Even the tolerant Quakers were uncomfortable with them, and encouraged them to move to frontier to places like,… Western Pennsylvania.
The legacy of the Scotch-Irish is still with us. These people were not seeking religious freedom. They already felt they had it. In the independence of the borderlands they had formed their own Christian churches. It is said that they often went into the frontier armed with a Bible and an axe. They felt no allegiance to any church, and if they disagreed among their own churches, they were quick to split. I’m convinced that what’s at the root of all our arguing in the Presbyterian Church is our Scotch-Irish roots. We’ve been arguing and splitting for centuries. In each new era we find new things to fight and split about, but it’s in our DNA, it seems, to fight. If you really want to understand the Scotch-Irish temperament, look to the Hatfield-McCoy feud of the 19th century. Do you know what they were fighting about? Neither do I, nor does anyone else. They were feuding because they were Scotch-Irish.
So how did these folk influence the faith of our country? They were the first libertarians. They believed in their own independence, their own freedom, and their right to do what they wanted. They didn’t want to pay taxes, and they didn’t want the government interfering in their lives. From a political perspective, these are the forebears of the NRA, the Libertarians, and even the Tea Party. Their influence on American faith is that they were the first to be spiritual but not religious. They may have gone to church, but often not together. Each individual person or family saw themselves as the real Christians, and all others as pale imitations. And they justified whatever they did on those grounds. They could find biblical justification for anything. Does that sound familiar today?
So,… this gets back to our basic question. If we are we a Christian nation, are we Christian like the Scotch-Irish?
The problem with calling ourselves a Christian nation is that if we look at our roots, there was no consistent Christianity to say what was universally Christian. If we are a Christian nation, which version are we? We can’t be all because they aren’t all compatible with each other. The independence of the Scotch-Irish conflicts with the communal focus of the Puritans. The intolerance of the Puritans and Anglicans conflicts with the tolerance of the Quakers. So which Christianity are we as a nation?
Next week I want to look at the faith of the founding fathers, because it was just as complex and varied as that of the colonists. Until then I want you to reflect on this question: knowing what you know now, would you say that we are a Christian nation?
Amen.
Overcoming Darkness: Cultivating Fruits
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.
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.
Overcoming Darkness: Dealing with Our Demons
Luke 8:26-39
June 20, 2010
Then they arrived at the country of the Gerasenes, which is opposite Galilee. As he stepped out on land, a man of the city who had demons met him. For a long time he had worn no clothes, and he did not live in a house but in the tombs. When he saw Jesus, he fell down before him and shouted at the top of his voice, ‘What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me’— for Jesus had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. (For many times it had seized him; he was kept under guard and bound with chains and shackles, but he would break the bonds and be driven by the demon into the wilds.) Jesus then asked him, ‘What is your name?’ He said, ‘Legion’; for many demons had entered him. They begged him not to order them to go back into the abyss.
Now there on the hillside a large herd of swine was feeding; and the demons begged Jesus to let them enter these. So he gave them permission. Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned.
When the swineherds saw what had happened, they ran off and told it in the city and in the country. Then people came out to see what had happened, and when they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid. Those who had seen it told them how the one who had been possessed by demons had been healed. Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them; for they were seized with great fear. So he got into the boat and returned. The man from whom the demons had gone begged that he might be with him; but Jesus sent him away, saying, ‘Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.’ So he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him.
Over the years I’ve noticed an interesting conundrum when it comes to church, and especially church attendance. This isn’t a conundrum that many of you are caught in, but it is one that a significant number are. Here’s the conundrum. The church is meant to be a place for people who are struggling in personal darkness, but often when people go through struggles, they don’t want to go to church. So the very place that is set up to help them is the place they avoid. They avoid it because they don’t want people to see them cry, or they don’t want people to know they are going through difficulty, or they don’t want to have to explain what is going on in their lives. The problem is that these people end up pushing away a possible beacon of light for them. The fact is that the church is made for hurting people, but when people are hurting they often don’t want to be seen in church.
I think that the root cause of this conundrum is an American affliction. All of us Americans have a basic problem, which is that we suffer from a denial of darkness. It afflicts all of us. Americans hate pain and suffering, and we run from it constantly. We take drugs, whether prescription or illegal, to push away our pain. We drink too much alcohol to help us repress the pain. We’ve created a glittering entertainment culture to mask darkness and suffering. And we worship and celebrate the wealthy because they seem to have overcome darkness with glitzy and glamorous homes, cars, possessions, and lives. We do a lot to gloss over the darkness of life.
I really wasn’t aware of how pervasive our denial of darkness was until I had a conversation with five fellow students over lunch one day while I was in graduate school. I was studying for my Ph.D. at Duquesne University, and I was lunching with two white Protestant pastors (one Methodist and the other Episcopalian), and three African men (one a priest from Kenya, one a priest from Uganda, and another an Augustinian friar from Ghana). The three of us Protestants were complaining that on Easter Sunday our churches are packed to the rafters, but we can’t convince people to come on Good Friday. The Africans looked at each other, and then at us with puzzled faces. When we asked why they looked like that, they said, “That’s really odd because in Africa our churches are overflowing on Good Friday, and we can’t get anyone to come on Easter.” We talked about this, and the Africans were the ones that pointed out that in Africa suffering is a constant reality and so they relate to the suffering Christ on the cross. But their experience in the U. S. was that we were a people who can’t deal with suffering, and so we hide from it with our possessions. They pointed out our American affliction, which is a denial of darkness.
This denial is sad because Christianity is mean to be a faith for people struggling with difficulty, darkness, and demons. If you look at the Bible, all of its stories are of people struggling through and overcoming darkness. Abraham was lead by God from the city into the desert, where he struggled. Joseph was sold by his brothers into slavery, and then was thrown into prison. Moses, after killing an Egyptian soldier, had to leave his life of pleasure as part of the royal family to live in the desert for forty years, and then came back to lead the Israelites into the desert for forty years. David, despite being anointed as king of Israel, and being celebrated as the slayer of Goliath, had to live as an outlaw in the desert for forty years. The prophets spoke in times of darkness, whether under threat from an invading army or in Babylonian exile. And Jesus, despite teaching people how to find light in their lives, was criticized and attacked for his teachings, and eventually arrested, flogged, and killed for it. Darkness is all through the Bible.
It’s for this reason that I say that Christianity is a faith for people in darkness. In fact, it is the only faith with a religious symbol that’s a symbol of suffering. Think about the symbols of other religions, whether it is the yin-yang symbol of Taoism, the statue of Buddha, the crescent moon and morning star of Islam, or the star of David in Judaism, none are suffering symbols. Our symbol is one that transforms suffering. The cross is a symbol of suffering and execution. The modern-day equivalent would be if we used a hangman’s noose or an electric chair as our religious symbol. Christianity is a faith that embraces the reality of darkness, but also the reality of God’s light transforming that darkness into something else.
The reality of life is that there is a fair amount of darkness, which seems to be part of the way God created the world. But there’s also great beauty and pleasure, which is also how God created it. And I believe that the task of life is to make a choice between whether we’ll let darkness rule our lives, or light.
Hilbert Caesar has lived through tremendous darkness, and through it discovered light. Five years ago Caesar was a master sergeant overseeing a squad in Iraq. He was in charge of a 155 mm mobile howitzer, which is something like a long tank with a huge artillery gun attached. The squad had been mobilized, and while en route, was ambushed as an IED exploded under the howitzer, flipping it over. When Caesar came to, he looked down at his leg, and it was a mangled mess. He knew that his leg would have to be amputated. He spent months in rehab, which were months of darkness, a darkness made worse when he learned that of the ten people in his squad, eight had been killed. He felt responsible, even though he knew that there was nothing different he could have done. He wondered if his life was over. He wondered what woman would ever be interested in a man with only one leg.
Caesar was at a critical junction. It would take very little for his life to plunge into never ending darkness. The fact is that about ¼ of all vets coming back from combat suffer symptoms of PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder, and he was moving in that direction. What is less known, though, is that despite these odds, another ¼ seem to come through trauma like Caesar did, and experience PTGS, which is post-traumatic growth syndrome. About ¼ of all people who undergo traumatic experiences actually sense their lives becoming better because of it. They find that their trauma helps them reprioritize their lives. They become better than they were. Often they grow spiritually, and experience God more intimately in their lives. This is what happened to Caesar.
Despite his darkness, he started talking with other vets who had gone through similar experiences. Together they looked for the positive, rather than dwelling on the negative. He began to pray. He says that he became wiser, richer, more compassionate, and more appreciative of life. He noticed other people more, and said, “I’m the same person, but I’m a different person now.” Caesar left the military, but now works for the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs at a job focusing on helping others like him. He went through darkness, and in the midst of it found the light (adapted from an article, “Moving On,” from The Washington Post, December 5, 2005).
It’s hard for many people to make the choice for light over dark. There are lots of reasons, but one I believe in is that there is actually a force for darkness in the world, a force that is incredibly subtle. I believe that there is a demonic darkness that stalks us. Now, I realize that as a good, rational Presbyterian, I’m not supposed to believe in the demonic. And the truth is that for many, many years I didn’t. And that disbelief was supported by my seminary training. The fact is that we never once talked about the demonic in all my years there. In checking with other Presbyterian pastors, it’s hard to find any who were taught anything about the demonic. We just don’t believe in it.
My belief in this power grew while working on my Ph.D., which is odd, since you would think that working on that degree would make me more sophisticated and less likely to believe in stuff such as the demonic. Adrian van Kaam, a professor and Catholic priest, in one of his classes, talked about the demonic. God bless the Catholics. There may be many things we believe that we do or believe better than them, but there are also many things that they believe and do better than us. I believe that the Catholic Church, in many ways, has a much better, and more balanced, understanding of the demonic than we do. Van Kaam taught that the demonic is a force of darkness with one goal in mind: to pull us away from God and divide us against each other and God. But he also taught that this darkness is essentially powerless, except for the power we give it. He said that those kinds of vomit-spewing, body-levitating possessions are extremely, extremely rare. Instead, what the demonic does is to take our negative feelings and fan them to grow them stronger. So, if we are angry about something small, the demonic fans that anger so that it grows and causes us to act on it in destructive ways. The demonic does the same thing with passion, lust, cynicism, skepticism, ambition, and other self-focused emotions. There is nothing wrong with feeling these things, but the demonic fans them so that they take over our lives. And you’ve experienced something like this in others.
Have you ever been with an extremely negative person who starts going off on how bad the government is, kids today are, teachers unions are, big business is, and the like? They start going off, and you feel trapped. Their anger or outrage grows hotter and hotter. Meanwhile, they suck the energy and life right out of you. And you can’t get away. That’s the kind of fanning of the flame the demonic does, and it does it with an eye toward dividing us against each other and God. There’s an energy to negativity, but instead of giving life it sucks life.
Here’s the thing, though, about both darkness and the demonic. Both only have the power we give them. If we let the demonic and darkness fan us, then we will be consumed by both. But we do have a choice in the matter. If we choose to refuse to let darkness grow, and if we choose to seek what’s good rather than what’s dark, we can overcome darkness. While Christianity is a faith that recognizes the reality of darkness, it also recognizes that darkness is a choice, and we can choose to seek God’s light.
The secret to overcoming any darkness is to decide what kind of power we are going to give it. Are we going to let it grow? I’ve learned over the years that what contributes to darkness is a problem that researchers are finding in many people who suffer from depression. They are noticing that many people with depression suffer from chronic rumination. What do I mean by that? Rumination is something that cows do. They have four stomachs, and so have to keep regurgitating what they’ve eaten to chew on it again, and then send it to the next stomach. They chew and swallow; regurgitate, chew and swallow; regurgitate, chew, and swallow; and regurgitate, chew and swallow. Many people in darkness do the mental equivalent of this. They start to go into darkness, and then they start thinking negative thoughts associated with it. They might think about mistakes they’ve made, or about actions they didn’t take. Where we might think those thoughts for several hours or a day, they think about them for weeks and months at a time. The thoughts never change. They may berate themselves for decisions in the past, or for their situation in the present. They chronically ruminate, and they can’t break the cycle long enough to see other possibilities.
It’s not just people suffering with depression who do this. Most of us, when in darkness, do this. Rumination, whether depression related or not, creates the opening for darkness to reign. Whatever our situation is, rumination on how bad it is can immerse us and keep us in darkness. But God does offer a light, if we’re willing to take it.
Personally, I’ve had to struggle through chronic rumination for much of my life simply because I’m a pastor. The fact is that pastors get criticized on occasion. We can be criticized for something we say or do, or for something we didn’t say or do. Most of the time people are caring enough to either keep their concerns about this to themselves, or if they do share them, they do so in gentle and caring ways. But occasionally people aren’t very nice about it, and their comments can be devastating. I was devastated by a number of these kinds of comments early in my ministry and it traumatized me so much that for a period of time I wouldn’t answer my phone at the church unless I knew who was calling and why. In my first year in ministry I had received one too many critical phone calls, and I became phone-shy.
There was one particular incident when a woman yelled at me publically in front of fifteen junior high kids on a retreat, and then she met with me in my office the following week and yelled at me again. And she was yelling at me for something I was powerless to prevent. It’s hard to distill this down to a short story, but basically I was overseeing the youth program on a retreat for junior and senior high schoolers, and I was supposed to go up a trail to a campfire to tell stories to the junior highers. The problem was that I was at another campfire with the older teens, and two of them wanted me to leave so they could sneak off into the woods and do things young men and women like to do. I was stuck because all the other adult volunteers had disappeared. I was worried about leaving, but I had no way of telling the junior high adult volunteers I was stuck. When the other adult volunteers finally showed up, I ran up the trail to join the junior highers, but the woman with them had already brought them down the trail, and proceeded to berate me in front of all of them.
I was devastated, and I became somewhat of a recluse for a time, worrying about doing something else I’d be yelled at for. But after a lot of prayer I finally realized that I couldn’t spend my career this way. So I developed a rule. The day that someone berates me or criticizes me, I’m allowed to obsess about it, as long as I’m also praying about it. The second day I’m allowed to pray about it a lot, but only think about it a little. By the third day I have to give it over to God and move on. In other words, I can spend a little time in darkness, but in due time I have to move toward the light.
We do have a choice over whether we will live in darkness or light. There is darkness in the world, and it can be very powerful, but we can make a choice for light. And if you are interested in learning further how, come back next week and I’ll talk about how to make that choice.
Amen
June 20, 2010
Then they arrived at the country of the Gerasenes, which is opposite Galilee. As he stepped out on land, a man of the city who had demons met him. For a long time he had worn no clothes, and he did not live in a house but in the tombs. When he saw Jesus, he fell down before him and shouted at the top of his voice, ‘What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me’— for Jesus had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. (For many times it had seized him; he was kept under guard and bound with chains and shackles, but he would break the bonds and be driven by the demon into the wilds.) Jesus then asked him, ‘What is your name?’ He said, ‘Legion’; for many demons had entered him. They begged him not to order them to go back into the abyss.
Now there on the hillside a large herd of swine was feeding; and the demons begged Jesus to let them enter these. So he gave them permission. Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned.
When the swineherds saw what had happened, they ran off and told it in the city and in the country. Then people came out to see what had happened, and when they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid. Those who had seen it told them how the one who had been possessed by demons had been healed. Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them; for they were seized with great fear. So he got into the boat and returned. The man from whom the demons had gone begged that he might be with him; but Jesus sent him away, saying, ‘Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.’ So he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him.
Over the years I’ve noticed an interesting conundrum when it comes to church, and especially church attendance. This isn’t a conundrum that many of you are caught in, but it is one that a significant number are. Here’s the conundrum. The church is meant to be a place for people who are struggling in personal darkness, but often when people go through struggles, they don’t want to go to church. So the very place that is set up to help them is the place they avoid. They avoid it because they don’t want people to see them cry, or they don’t want people to know they are going through difficulty, or they don’t want to have to explain what is going on in their lives. The problem is that these people end up pushing away a possible beacon of light for them. The fact is that the church is made for hurting people, but when people are hurting they often don’t want to be seen in church.
I think that the root cause of this conundrum is an American affliction. All of us Americans have a basic problem, which is that we suffer from a denial of darkness. It afflicts all of us. Americans hate pain and suffering, and we run from it constantly. We take drugs, whether prescription or illegal, to push away our pain. We drink too much alcohol to help us repress the pain. We’ve created a glittering entertainment culture to mask darkness and suffering. And we worship and celebrate the wealthy because they seem to have overcome darkness with glitzy and glamorous homes, cars, possessions, and lives. We do a lot to gloss over the darkness of life.
I really wasn’t aware of how pervasive our denial of darkness was until I had a conversation with five fellow students over lunch one day while I was in graduate school. I was studying for my Ph.D. at Duquesne University, and I was lunching with two white Protestant pastors (one Methodist and the other Episcopalian), and three African men (one a priest from Kenya, one a priest from Uganda, and another an Augustinian friar from Ghana). The three of us Protestants were complaining that on Easter Sunday our churches are packed to the rafters, but we can’t convince people to come on Good Friday. The Africans looked at each other, and then at us with puzzled faces. When we asked why they looked like that, they said, “That’s really odd because in Africa our churches are overflowing on Good Friday, and we can’t get anyone to come on Easter.” We talked about this, and the Africans were the ones that pointed out that in Africa suffering is a constant reality and so they relate to the suffering Christ on the cross. But their experience in the U. S. was that we were a people who can’t deal with suffering, and so we hide from it with our possessions. They pointed out our American affliction, which is a denial of darkness.
This denial is sad because Christianity is mean to be a faith for people struggling with difficulty, darkness, and demons. If you look at the Bible, all of its stories are of people struggling through and overcoming darkness. Abraham was lead by God from the city into the desert, where he struggled. Joseph was sold by his brothers into slavery, and then was thrown into prison. Moses, after killing an Egyptian soldier, had to leave his life of pleasure as part of the royal family to live in the desert for forty years, and then came back to lead the Israelites into the desert for forty years. David, despite being anointed as king of Israel, and being celebrated as the slayer of Goliath, had to live as an outlaw in the desert for forty years. The prophets spoke in times of darkness, whether under threat from an invading army or in Babylonian exile. And Jesus, despite teaching people how to find light in their lives, was criticized and attacked for his teachings, and eventually arrested, flogged, and killed for it. Darkness is all through the Bible.
It’s for this reason that I say that Christianity is a faith for people in darkness. In fact, it is the only faith with a religious symbol that’s a symbol of suffering. Think about the symbols of other religions, whether it is the yin-yang symbol of Taoism, the statue of Buddha, the crescent moon and morning star of Islam, or the star of David in Judaism, none are suffering symbols. Our symbol is one that transforms suffering. The cross is a symbol of suffering and execution. The modern-day equivalent would be if we used a hangman’s noose or an electric chair as our religious symbol. Christianity is a faith that embraces the reality of darkness, but also the reality of God’s light transforming that darkness into something else.
The reality of life is that there is a fair amount of darkness, which seems to be part of the way God created the world. But there’s also great beauty and pleasure, which is also how God created it. And I believe that the task of life is to make a choice between whether we’ll let darkness rule our lives, or light.
Hilbert Caesar has lived through tremendous darkness, and through it discovered light. Five years ago Caesar was a master sergeant overseeing a squad in Iraq. He was in charge of a 155 mm mobile howitzer, which is something like a long tank with a huge artillery gun attached. The squad had been mobilized, and while en route, was ambushed as an IED exploded under the howitzer, flipping it over. When Caesar came to, he looked down at his leg, and it was a mangled mess. He knew that his leg would have to be amputated. He spent months in rehab, which were months of darkness, a darkness made worse when he learned that of the ten people in his squad, eight had been killed. He felt responsible, even though he knew that there was nothing different he could have done. He wondered if his life was over. He wondered what woman would ever be interested in a man with only one leg.
Caesar was at a critical junction. It would take very little for his life to plunge into never ending darkness. The fact is that about ¼ of all vets coming back from combat suffer symptoms of PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder, and he was moving in that direction. What is less known, though, is that despite these odds, another ¼ seem to come through trauma like Caesar did, and experience PTGS, which is post-traumatic growth syndrome. About ¼ of all people who undergo traumatic experiences actually sense their lives becoming better because of it. They find that their trauma helps them reprioritize their lives. They become better than they were. Often they grow spiritually, and experience God more intimately in their lives. This is what happened to Caesar.
Despite his darkness, he started talking with other vets who had gone through similar experiences. Together they looked for the positive, rather than dwelling on the negative. He began to pray. He says that he became wiser, richer, more compassionate, and more appreciative of life. He noticed other people more, and said, “I’m the same person, but I’m a different person now.” Caesar left the military, but now works for the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs at a job focusing on helping others like him. He went through darkness, and in the midst of it found the light (adapted from an article, “Moving On,” from The Washington Post, December 5, 2005).
It’s hard for many people to make the choice for light over dark. There are lots of reasons, but one I believe in is that there is actually a force for darkness in the world, a force that is incredibly subtle. I believe that there is a demonic darkness that stalks us. Now, I realize that as a good, rational Presbyterian, I’m not supposed to believe in the demonic. And the truth is that for many, many years I didn’t. And that disbelief was supported by my seminary training. The fact is that we never once talked about the demonic in all my years there. In checking with other Presbyterian pastors, it’s hard to find any who were taught anything about the demonic. We just don’t believe in it.
My belief in this power grew while working on my Ph.D., which is odd, since you would think that working on that degree would make me more sophisticated and less likely to believe in stuff such as the demonic. Adrian van Kaam, a professor and Catholic priest, in one of his classes, talked about the demonic. God bless the Catholics. There may be many things we believe that we do or believe better than them, but there are also many things that they believe and do better than us. I believe that the Catholic Church, in many ways, has a much better, and more balanced, understanding of the demonic than we do. Van Kaam taught that the demonic is a force of darkness with one goal in mind: to pull us away from God and divide us against each other and God. But he also taught that this darkness is essentially powerless, except for the power we give it. He said that those kinds of vomit-spewing, body-levitating possessions are extremely, extremely rare. Instead, what the demonic does is to take our negative feelings and fan them to grow them stronger. So, if we are angry about something small, the demonic fans that anger so that it grows and causes us to act on it in destructive ways. The demonic does the same thing with passion, lust, cynicism, skepticism, ambition, and other self-focused emotions. There is nothing wrong with feeling these things, but the demonic fans them so that they take over our lives. And you’ve experienced something like this in others.
Have you ever been with an extremely negative person who starts going off on how bad the government is, kids today are, teachers unions are, big business is, and the like? They start going off, and you feel trapped. Their anger or outrage grows hotter and hotter. Meanwhile, they suck the energy and life right out of you. And you can’t get away. That’s the kind of fanning of the flame the demonic does, and it does it with an eye toward dividing us against each other and God. There’s an energy to negativity, but instead of giving life it sucks life.
Here’s the thing, though, about both darkness and the demonic. Both only have the power we give them. If we let the demonic and darkness fan us, then we will be consumed by both. But we do have a choice in the matter. If we choose to refuse to let darkness grow, and if we choose to seek what’s good rather than what’s dark, we can overcome darkness. While Christianity is a faith that recognizes the reality of darkness, it also recognizes that darkness is a choice, and we can choose to seek God’s light.
The secret to overcoming any darkness is to decide what kind of power we are going to give it. Are we going to let it grow? I’ve learned over the years that what contributes to darkness is a problem that researchers are finding in many people who suffer from depression. They are noticing that many people with depression suffer from chronic rumination. What do I mean by that? Rumination is something that cows do. They have four stomachs, and so have to keep regurgitating what they’ve eaten to chew on it again, and then send it to the next stomach. They chew and swallow; regurgitate, chew and swallow; regurgitate, chew, and swallow; and regurgitate, chew and swallow. Many people in darkness do the mental equivalent of this. They start to go into darkness, and then they start thinking negative thoughts associated with it. They might think about mistakes they’ve made, or about actions they didn’t take. Where we might think those thoughts for several hours or a day, they think about them for weeks and months at a time. The thoughts never change. They may berate themselves for decisions in the past, or for their situation in the present. They chronically ruminate, and they can’t break the cycle long enough to see other possibilities.
It’s not just people suffering with depression who do this. Most of us, when in darkness, do this. Rumination, whether depression related or not, creates the opening for darkness to reign. Whatever our situation is, rumination on how bad it is can immerse us and keep us in darkness. But God does offer a light, if we’re willing to take it.
Personally, I’ve had to struggle through chronic rumination for much of my life simply because I’m a pastor. The fact is that pastors get criticized on occasion. We can be criticized for something we say or do, or for something we didn’t say or do. Most of the time people are caring enough to either keep their concerns about this to themselves, or if they do share them, they do so in gentle and caring ways. But occasionally people aren’t very nice about it, and their comments can be devastating. I was devastated by a number of these kinds of comments early in my ministry and it traumatized me so much that for a period of time I wouldn’t answer my phone at the church unless I knew who was calling and why. In my first year in ministry I had received one too many critical phone calls, and I became phone-shy.
There was one particular incident when a woman yelled at me publically in front of fifteen junior high kids on a retreat, and then she met with me in my office the following week and yelled at me again. And she was yelling at me for something I was powerless to prevent. It’s hard to distill this down to a short story, but basically I was overseeing the youth program on a retreat for junior and senior high schoolers, and I was supposed to go up a trail to a campfire to tell stories to the junior highers. The problem was that I was at another campfire with the older teens, and two of them wanted me to leave so they could sneak off into the woods and do things young men and women like to do. I was stuck because all the other adult volunteers had disappeared. I was worried about leaving, but I had no way of telling the junior high adult volunteers I was stuck. When the other adult volunteers finally showed up, I ran up the trail to join the junior highers, but the woman with them had already brought them down the trail, and proceeded to berate me in front of all of them.
I was devastated, and I became somewhat of a recluse for a time, worrying about doing something else I’d be yelled at for. But after a lot of prayer I finally realized that I couldn’t spend my career this way. So I developed a rule. The day that someone berates me or criticizes me, I’m allowed to obsess about it, as long as I’m also praying about it. The second day I’m allowed to pray about it a lot, but only think about it a little. By the third day I have to give it over to God and move on. In other words, I can spend a little time in darkness, but in due time I have to move toward the light.
We do have a choice over whether we will live in darkness or light. There is darkness in the world, and it can be very powerful, but we can make a choice for light. And if you are interested in learning further how, come back next week and I’ll talk about how to make that choice.
Amen
The Holy Spirit and You: Acting with the Spirit
Acts 13:1-12
June 6, 2010
Now in the church at Antioch there were prophets and teachers: Barnabas, Simeon who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen a member of the court of Herod the ruler, and Saul. While they were worshipping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, ‘Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.’ Then after fasting and praying they laid their hands on them and sent them off.
So, being sent out by the Holy Spirit, they went down to Seleucia; and from there they sailed to Cyprus. When they arrived at Salamis, they proclaimed the word of God in the synagogues of the Jews. And they had John also to assist them. When they had gone through the whole island as far as Paphos, they met a certain magician, a Jewish false prophet, named Bar-Jesus. He was with the proconsul, Sergius Paulus, an intelligent man, who summoned Barnabas and Saul and wanted to hear the word of God. But the magician Elymas (for that is the translation of his name) opposed them and tried to turn the proconsul away from the faith. But Saul, also known as Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, looked intently at him and said, ‘You son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, full of all deceit and villainy, will you not stop making crooked the straight paths of the Lord? And now listen—the hand of the Lord is against you, and you will be blind for a while, unable to see the sun.’ Immediately mist and darkness came over him, and he went about groping for someone to lead him by the hand. When the proconsul saw what had happened, he believed, for he was astonished at the teaching about the Lord.
I had a really interesting and wonderful conversation this past Friday afternoon. I was on the phone with a classmate from high school, Kelly, who I probably hadn’t seen in over twenty years. We were talking because of an experience my cousin told me that Kelly had had four years ago. It was a story that I found inspiring, and I wanted to find out a little bit more, so I had contacted Kelly to see if she would be willing to talk with me about it. Kelly agreed, and we have a very long conversation on Friday afternoon. She gave me permission to share it with all of you, which I feel very privileged to do.
Kelly had an experience of the Spirit during one of the most tragic experiences imaginable. You see, four years ago Kelly’s son, Michael, died after a car accident, and as you can imagine it turned both her and her husband Jeff’s life around in an instant. Yet even in the midst of this tragedy, Kelly discovered one of the ways God’s Spirit can act in our lives.
When Kelly and Jeff got to the hospital in Savannah, Georgia, the doctor told them that Mike’s injuries were severe, and that there really wasn’t anything they could do for him. He asked them if it was okay to let him go. After Kelly and Jeff said that it was okay, the doctor said, “Please give us a few minutes and then we’ll come back and get you.”
You can imagine the kind of pain Kelly and Jeff were in, and Kelly found that in that moment all the words of the Bible and of traditional faith just weren’t enough. She needed something more concrete. She was thinking to herself that she wasn’t going to make it if she didn’t get some tangible sign that it would be okay, that Mike would be okay. Even though Mike had died, she was still his mother and she still needed to know that Mike was safe and that they’d be together again. As she walked into the room where Mike was laying, she experienced the Spirit.
Walking into the room behind Jeff, she was looking down, wanting so much to get a sense that everything would be okay. Suddenly, she felt as though someone had pushed her head back with the palm of a hand, even though there was no one there. Her head snapped back, and as it did she reflexively closed her eyes. The darkness of shut eyelids quickly yielded to the most brilliant turquoise she had ever seen. The color may have been turquoise, but it wasn’t a turquoise found on earth. It was the color of joy or grace or the Spirit—something beyond this world. Then she heard the sound of rushing wind in her ears, like the rushing wind when you put your head out a car window. In the wind she heard a voice, several times, saying, “Class ring!”
This all lasted about five seconds. She wondered what it meant, and then she knew. One of Mike’s proudest possessions was his class ring. He had been a really good student, and he was especially proud of graduating from high school. Kelly responded to the voice, thinking to herself, “I got it Mike.”
Kelly said to the nurse, “Can I have his graduation ring?” The nurse said that there was no jewelry on Mike when he came in. Laying on the bed, Mike had nothing on, no personal effects, yet for some reason both his hands were wrapped in plastic wrap. Kelly pointed to his hands and said to the nurse, “Get the ring!” The nurse unwrapped the hands, and was shocked to find that the graduation ring was on his finger. Taking the ring, Kelly said to Mike in her mind, “That’s it, Mike? No ‘I love you?’” But she knew that Mike was there with her. It took her a day to understand all of this, and she realized later that if she hadn’t asked for the ring, it would have disappeared when his body was cremated. Kelly experienced not only as her son’s presence in that place, but also as the Spirit’s presence.
Since that time Kelly has had over a dozen experiences that have comforted her and revealed to her that Mike is still alive with God, and that everything really is okay for him. There are still times when she is overcome with missing him, and almost always she sees a hawk—either a live one, or a picture of one—which tells her that Mike is okay. Why a hawk? It was the mascot for his school, and since Mike so identified with his school, it makes sense that it would comfort Kelly to see one.
It hasn’t just been Kelly who’s had these experiences. Her husband Jeff also has had one really significant experience. Some time after Mike had died, Jeff took his truck to a dealership for an oil change. Normally he would have stayed and waited for the thirty minutes it took, but this time he decided to leave it and come back later. When he returned, and as he went to get his car, a tractor-trailer with new cars backed right in front of him blocking his way. His eyes immediately went to one of the cars on the back, a black Z06 corvette with specialized trim and decals. He was stunned. This was the exact car that his son, Mike, had a poster of in his room. Mike had always said that one of his dreams was to get a black Z06 corvette with specialized trim. There it was in front of Jeff.
Then the truck driver released a lever and the car rolled down off the racks and rested literally right in front of Jeff’s feet. One of the managers of the dealership was standing there, and so Jeff asked him who the car was for. The manager told him that it was a very specific, special order that had taken some time to put together, but that the man ordering it had called the dealership two days ago to cancel it. Then the manager said to Jeff, “I don’t know what we are going to do with it. It’s such a specialized car that we’ll have a lot of trouble selling it.” Jeff said, “No you won’t. it’s mine. I’ll buy it.” It has become Jeff’s special connection with his son, Mike. Whenever he is really feeling the loss of his son, he gets in the car and drives. He says that he can feel Mike’s presence next to him as he drives.
As I mentioned before, Kelly says that since her initial experience with Mike’s ring she has had literally dozens of experiences of Mike and God’s Spirit. One significant experience she had was a dream in which she was with God and was able to ask questions not only about Mike, but about life, our purpose, and why things are the way they are. In this dream God revealed everything to her. She had been given all the answers to every question. When she awoke she could remember only a few answers. She knew that even though God had revealed everything, it was not God’s will that she remember everything. There are things that meant to remain mysteries to us while we are alive. What’s interesting about Kelly’s dream is that after I gave this sermon in the first service, I had several people in the congregation who had lost spouses or children (including Connie Frierson, our program director), tell me that they had had that same dream. Apparently Kelly is not alone.
Kelly’s experience is a testimony not only to the fact that there is life beyond this life, but also that God’s Spirit can act in our lives in incredibly amazing and loving ways. The fact is that the Holy Spirit wants to be in our lives and act in our lives. Our passage is testimony to that. It’s a passage about the Spirit acting in the lives and ministry of the early Christians.
Kelly’s experience of hearing wind acts as a great reminder of just how the Spirit act sin our lives. I believe that one of the best metaphors for how the Spirit acts is like the wind moving sailing ships across the ocean. The wind is always there. It is always blowing across the surface. We are like sailing ships moving across the ocean, and the question is whether or not we are willing to put our sails up to catch the wind and let it move us, or if we are like rowers, determined to move by our own powers. The wind can move us, but are we willing to let it? Are we putting up our sails, and if we are, are we putting it up in the right direction to be moved by the wind? Just because a ship puts up a sail doesn’t mean that it will catch the wind. If we open our sails with an edge to the wind, the wind just blows around the sail, doing nothing. But if a sail is put up flat to the wind, it can be blown to new and wonderful shores.
Just as a wind moves a ship, the Spirit can move us, but only if we are receptive in the right way. If we are willing to work with the Spirit, it can move us. But if we are closed to the Spirit, or are only receptive in cautious and tentative ways, the Spirit can’t do anything with us.
It’s not only important to put up our sails, but also to avoid the Doldrums. Do you know what the Doldrums are? It’s where we get the term, “feeling like we are in the doldrums” from. The Doldrums are a region of the ocean both immediately above and below the equator. It’s a humid, hot area that often gets little or no wind for days, weeks, and even months. Sailor traveling between the northern and southern hemispheres can get caught in the Doldrums, sweltering while they agonizingly wait for any wind to pick them up and move them north or south. We can get caught in spiritual doldrums, places where the Spirit cannot blow, when we live in ways that the Spirit just won’t follow. When we live cynical, skeptical, or critical lives, the Spirit won’t blow in our lives. When we engage in activities or lifestyles bereft of God’s purpose, the Spirit will not follow.
Still, if we are willing to put our sails up in the right direction, and avoid living in the doldrums, the Spirit does act in our lives. The question is, though, just how does the Spirit act in our lives? I want to share with you three basic ways. The Spirit acts in our lives through guidance, providence, and presence.
Let’s look first at Guidance. Whether we truly believe it or not, God can guide us if we choose to listen. The basic problem is that not everyone is willing to listen. In fact, I believe that few, even among Christians, are truly committed to listening for God’s voice. Why? For a simple reason: we don’t think to listen because we don’t live in a culture that encourages us to listen. We are so used to not listening that listening seems odd and even impossible. Yet just because we don’t hear doesn’t mean that God isn’t speaking. In my experience, our failure to hear God says more about how we listen than about how God’s speaks.
In fact, it’s this belief that God speaks that underlies our whole approach to ministry at Calvin Church. We’ve been very intentional about saying that we want to listen for God’s voice. For example, we do something here in the leadership of Calvin Church that is very rare in the Presbyterian Church (USA). We make decisions based on prayerful listening. And you can see it in how we vote on issues. Think about how most churches make decisions. When dealing with an issue, most church boards discuss the issue, then prepare the vote. The moderator of the board or session says, “All in favor say aye; all opposed say no.” When churches vote like that, who’s voice are they listening for? Their own. They are voting about what to do in a church and basing the decision on what they want, not what God wants. This is what I mean when I say we don’t even put up our sails, or we put them up parallel to how the wind is blowing. Here at Calvin Church, we use a different process. When making a decision we pray, and then vote using the question—whether in session, a committee, or the congregation—“All who sense this may be God’s will say aye; All who don’t say no.” This is a radical difference because we are being intentional about putting up our sails so that the Spirit can move us.
This ability to listen for God’s voice isn’t just apparent in church decisions. It can be apparent in your own life, if you are willing to listen. You won’t get a loud, booming voice from God in response. The way God often speaks is through a slight nudge or feeling of rightness or wrongness. The Spirit often speaks through subtle promptings. This is why it’s so hard to listen. The world shouts at us. God softly nudges us. But God does give us guidance, if we are open to it.
The Spirit also acts in our lives through Providence. Providence is a fancy word for grace and God’s blessings. Providence is God acting tangibly, and often amazingly, in life. Providence is simply God’s blessings that can lead to coincidences, healings, gifts of grace, and so much more. One reason we have such a strong emphasis on healing prayer at Calvin Church is that we believe in God’s providence. We believe that God can act in these miraculous ways.
You heard providence in Kelly’s story, but I found it even more in the fact that I heard the story first from my cousin Althea, who had visited Kelly two months ago. A little over a month ago I was gone for a weekend celebrating a family reunion around my father’s 80th birthday. It was at the party on Saturday night that Althea told me about Kelly’s story. And here’s even more providence: it took Kelly and me till this past Friday to connect, and that was the perfect timing for me to share it with you this morning. If she had shared it with me one or two weeks before, I would probably have forced it into my previous sermons, where it wouldn’t have quite fit. If we had waited till next week, I don’t know when I would have shared it with you. There was both providence and God’s coincidence in the timing of Kelly’s and my speaking.
Finally, God’s Spirit works in our lives through being a Presence. Sometimes God doesn’t speak to us, nor act tangibly. Sometimes God just lets us know that the Spirit is with us. That’s what you really saw in Kelly’s and Jeff’s experiences. They were blessed with a gift of the Spirit’s presence that helped them sense Mike’s presence. And they aren’t alone. I know of so many people who have ways that they can tell when God is with them.
For example, often God speaks to us through personal symbols to say, “I’m here, and I love you.” I’ve experienced this over and over with the numbers 3 and 7. It all started for me many years ago before I came to Calvin Church. I had been exercising on a machine, and struggling with questions about my future. I was praying to God and asking how long it would be before God acted. I stopped as I prayed and looked down at the odometer. It said 3.33. Since then I’ve seen that number, and other similar numbers, a lot: 733, 337, and 777. I’ll wake up in the middle of the night stressing about something, and I’ll roll over and see that it is 3:33 a.m. I’ll be driving along and praying, and see that the number on the license plate in front of me is 337. Or I’ll be watching television and look at the clock and it will be 7:33. This doesn’t happen merely every once in a while. It happens many times every week. Each time it amazes me.
I’m not alone. David Sloat, one of our members, has a similar experience with the number 444. He said that this past week his son’s bus broke down and the replacement bus was #444. He also said that for his past three jobs he’s noticed that the exchange number on the telephone number has always been 444. The area code is always different, but the exchange has always been the same.
Kelly told me that when she struggles she sees the number 11:11, or 1111. Her whole family sees it. Kelly’s older sister, Kim, attends Calvin Church and has told me that she sees it, and her daughter, Katie, now is seeing it quite often. And since I’ve preached this sermon I’ve received several e-mails from members telling me about their numbers, including one member who told me that he was having a medical procedure this week, and he looked down at the heart monitoring device and the serial number was 07003703. He said he could sense God saying, “I’m with you and it will be okay.”
The Spirit really can act in your life, but there are major questions we have to ask ourselves: Am I in a place where the Spirit can act? Am I in a state of mind and heart where the Spirit can act? Are my sails up and set for the Spirit to act?
Amen.
P.S. (I’ve looked down at the word count on my computer and the total number of words is 3333).
June 6, 2010
Now in the church at Antioch there were prophets and teachers: Barnabas, Simeon who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen a member of the court of Herod the ruler, and Saul. While they were worshipping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, ‘Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.’ Then after fasting and praying they laid their hands on them and sent them off.
So, being sent out by the Holy Spirit, they went down to Seleucia; and from there they sailed to Cyprus. When they arrived at Salamis, they proclaimed the word of God in the synagogues of the Jews. And they had John also to assist them. When they had gone through the whole island as far as Paphos, they met a certain magician, a Jewish false prophet, named Bar-Jesus. He was with the proconsul, Sergius Paulus, an intelligent man, who summoned Barnabas and Saul and wanted to hear the word of God. But the magician Elymas (for that is the translation of his name) opposed them and tried to turn the proconsul away from the faith. But Saul, also known as Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, looked intently at him and said, ‘You son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, full of all deceit and villainy, will you not stop making crooked the straight paths of the Lord? And now listen—the hand of the Lord is against you, and you will be blind for a while, unable to see the sun.’ Immediately mist and darkness came over him, and he went about groping for someone to lead him by the hand. When the proconsul saw what had happened, he believed, for he was astonished at the teaching about the Lord.
I had a really interesting and wonderful conversation this past Friday afternoon. I was on the phone with a classmate from high school, Kelly, who I probably hadn’t seen in over twenty years. We were talking because of an experience my cousin told me that Kelly had had four years ago. It was a story that I found inspiring, and I wanted to find out a little bit more, so I had contacted Kelly to see if she would be willing to talk with me about it. Kelly agreed, and we have a very long conversation on Friday afternoon. She gave me permission to share it with all of you, which I feel very privileged to do.
Kelly had an experience of the Spirit during one of the most tragic experiences imaginable. You see, four years ago Kelly’s son, Michael, died after a car accident, and as you can imagine it turned both her and her husband Jeff’s life around in an instant. Yet even in the midst of this tragedy, Kelly discovered one of the ways God’s Spirit can act in our lives.
When Kelly and Jeff got to the hospital in Savannah, Georgia, the doctor told them that Mike’s injuries were severe, and that there really wasn’t anything they could do for him. He asked them if it was okay to let him go. After Kelly and Jeff said that it was okay, the doctor said, “Please give us a few minutes and then we’ll come back and get you.”
You can imagine the kind of pain Kelly and Jeff were in, and Kelly found that in that moment all the words of the Bible and of traditional faith just weren’t enough. She needed something more concrete. She was thinking to herself that she wasn’t going to make it if she didn’t get some tangible sign that it would be okay, that Mike would be okay. Even though Mike had died, she was still his mother and she still needed to know that Mike was safe and that they’d be together again. As she walked into the room where Mike was laying, she experienced the Spirit.
Walking into the room behind Jeff, she was looking down, wanting so much to get a sense that everything would be okay. Suddenly, she felt as though someone had pushed her head back with the palm of a hand, even though there was no one there. Her head snapped back, and as it did she reflexively closed her eyes. The darkness of shut eyelids quickly yielded to the most brilliant turquoise she had ever seen. The color may have been turquoise, but it wasn’t a turquoise found on earth. It was the color of joy or grace or the Spirit—something beyond this world. Then she heard the sound of rushing wind in her ears, like the rushing wind when you put your head out a car window. In the wind she heard a voice, several times, saying, “Class ring!”
This all lasted about five seconds. She wondered what it meant, and then she knew. One of Mike’s proudest possessions was his class ring. He had been a really good student, and he was especially proud of graduating from high school. Kelly responded to the voice, thinking to herself, “I got it Mike.”
Kelly said to the nurse, “Can I have his graduation ring?” The nurse said that there was no jewelry on Mike when he came in. Laying on the bed, Mike had nothing on, no personal effects, yet for some reason both his hands were wrapped in plastic wrap. Kelly pointed to his hands and said to the nurse, “Get the ring!” The nurse unwrapped the hands, and was shocked to find that the graduation ring was on his finger. Taking the ring, Kelly said to Mike in her mind, “That’s it, Mike? No ‘I love you?’” But she knew that Mike was there with her. It took her a day to understand all of this, and she realized later that if she hadn’t asked for the ring, it would have disappeared when his body was cremated. Kelly experienced not only as her son’s presence in that place, but also as the Spirit’s presence.
Since that time Kelly has had over a dozen experiences that have comforted her and revealed to her that Mike is still alive with God, and that everything really is okay for him. There are still times when she is overcome with missing him, and almost always she sees a hawk—either a live one, or a picture of one—which tells her that Mike is okay. Why a hawk? It was the mascot for his school, and since Mike so identified with his school, it makes sense that it would comfort Kelly to see one.
It hasn’t just been Kelly who’s had these experiences. Her husband Jeff also has had one really significant experience. Some time after Mike had died, Jeff took his truck to a dealership for an oil change. Normally he would have stayed and waited for the thirty minutes it took, but this time he decided to leave it and come back later. When he returned, and as he went to get his car, a tractor-trailer with new cars backed right in front of him blocking his way. His eyes immediately went to one of the cars on the back, a black Z06 corvette with specialized trim and decals. He was stunned. This was the exact car that his son, Mike, had a poster of in his room. Mike had always said that one of his dreams was to get a black Z06 corvette with specialized trim. There it was in front of Jeff.
Then the truck driver released a lever and the car rolled down off the racks and rested literally right in front of Jeff’s feet. One of the managers of the dealership was standing there, and so Jeff asked him who the car was for. The manager told him that it was a very specific, special order that had taken some time to put together, but that the man ordering it had called the dealership two days ago to cancel it. Then the manager said to Jeff, “I don’t know what we are going to do with it. It’s such a specialized car that we’ll have a lot of trouble selling it.” Jeff said, “No you won’t. it’s mine. I’ll buy it.” It has become Jeff’s special connection with his son, Mike. Whenever he is really feeling the loss of his son, he gets in the car and drives. He says that he can feel Mike’s presence next to him as he drives.
As I mentioned before, Kelly says that since her initial experience with Mike’s ring she has had literally dozens of experiences of Mike and God’s Spirit. One significant experience she had was a dream in which she was with God and was able to ask questions not only about Mike, but about life, our purpose, and why things are the way they are. In this dream God revealed everything to her. She had been given all the answers to every question. When she awoke she could remember only a few answers. She knew that even though God had revealed everything, it was not God’s will that she remember everything. There are things that meant to remain mysteries to us while we are alive. What’s interesting about Kelly’s dream is that after I gave this sermon in the first service, I had several people in the congregation who had lost spouses or children (including Connie Frierson, our program director), tell me that they had had that same dream. Apparently Kelly is not alone.
Kelly’s experience is a testimony not only to the fact that there is life beyond this life, but also that God’s Spirit can act in our lives in incredibly amazing and loving ways. The fact is that the Holy Spirit wants to be in our lives and act in our lives. Our passage is testimony to that. It’s a passage about the Spirit acting in the lives and ministry of the early Christians.
Kelly’s experience of hearing wind acts as a great reminder of just how the Spirit act sin our lives. I believe that one of the best metaphors for how the Spirit acts is like the wind moving sailing ships across the ocean. The wind is always there. It is always blowing across the surface. We are like sailing ships moving across the ocean, and the question is whether or not we are willing to put our sails up to catch the wind and let it move us, or if we are like rowers, determined to move by our own powers. The wind can move us, but are we willing to let it? Are we putting up our sails, and if we are, are we putting it up in the right direction to be moved by the wind? Just because a ship puts up a sail doesn’t mean that it will catch the wind. If we open our sails with an edge to the wind, the wind just blows around the sail, doing nothing. But if a sail is put up flat to the wind, it can be blown to new and wonderful shores.
Just as a wind moves a ship, the Spirit can move us, but only if we are receptive in the right way. If we are willing to work with the Spirit, it can move us. But if we are closed to the Spirit, or are only receptive in cautious and tentative ways, the Spirit can’t do anything with us.
It’s not only important to put up our sails, but also to avoid the Doldrums. Do you know what the Doldrums are? It’s where we get the term, “feeling like we are in the doldrums” from. The Doldrums are a region of the ocean both immediately above and below the equator. It’s a humid, hot area that often gets little or no wind for days, weeks, and even months. Sailor traveling between the northern and southern hemispheres can get caught in the Doldrums, sweltering while they agonizingly wait for any wind to pick them up and move them north or south. We can get caught in spiritual doldrums, places where the Spirit cannot blow, when we live in ways that the Spirit just won’t follow. When we live cynical, skeptical, or critical lives, the Spirit won’t blow in our lives. When we engage in activities or lifestyles bereft of God’s purpose, the Spirit will not follow.
Still, if we are willing to put our sails up in the right direction, and avoid living in the doldrums, the Spirit does act in our lives. The question is, though, just how does the Spirit act in our lives? I want to share with you three basic ways. The Spirit acts in our lives through guidance, providence, and presence.
Let’s look first at Guidance. Whether we truly believe it or not, God can guide us if we choose to listen. The basic problem is that not everyone is willing to listen. In fact, I believe that few, even among Christians, are truly committed to listening for God’s voice. Why? For a simple reason: we don’t think to listen because we don’t live in a culture that encourages us to listen. We are so used to not listening that listening seems odd and even impossible. Yet just because we don’t hear doesn’t mean that God isn’t speaking. In my experience, our failure to hear God says more about how we listen than about how God’s speaks.
In fact, it’s this belief that God speaks that underlies our whole approach to ministry at Calvin Church. We’ve been very intentional about saying that we want to listen for God’s voice. For example, we do something here in the leadership of Calvin Church that is very rare in the Presbyterian Church (USA). We make decisions based on prayerful listening. And you can see it in how we vote on issues. Think about how most churches make decisions. When dealing with an issue, most church boards discuss the issue, then prepare the vote. The moderator of the board or session says, “All in favor say aye; all opposed say no.” When churches vote like that, who’s voice are they listening for? Their own. They are voting about what to do in a church and basing the decision on what they want, not what God wants. This is what I mean when I say we don’t even put up our sails, or we put them up parallel to how the wind is blowing. Here at Calvin Church, we use a different process. When making a decision we pray, and then vote using the question—whether in session, a committee, or the congregation—“All who sense this may be God’s will say aye; All who don’t say no.” This is a radical difference because we are being intentional about putting up our sails so that the Spirit can move us.
This ability to listen for God’s voice isn’t just apparent in church decisions. It can be apparent in your own life, if you are willing to listen. You won’t get a loud, booming voice from God in response. The way God often speaks is through a slight nudge or feeling of rightness or wrongness. The Spirit often speaks through subtle promptings. This is why it’s so hard to listen. The world shouts at us. God softly nudges us. But God does give us guidance, if we are open to it.
The Spirit also acts in our lives through Providence. Providence is a fancy word for grace and God’s blessings. Providence is God acting tangibly, and often amazingly, in life. Providence is simply God’s blessings that can lead to coincidences, healings, gifts of grace, and so much more. One reason we have such a strong emphasis on healing prayer at Calvin Church is that we believe in God’s providence. We believe that God can act in these miraculous ways.
You heard providence in Kelly’s story, but I found it even more in the fact that I heard the story first from my cousin Althea, who had visited Kelly two months ago. A little over a month ago I was gone for a weekend celebrating a family reunion around my father’s 80th birthday. It was at the party on Saturday night that Althea told me about Kelly’s story. And here’s even more providence: it took Kelly and me till this past Friday to connect, and that was the perfect timing for me to share it with you this morning. If she had shared it with me one or two weeks before, I would probably have forced it into my previous sermons, where it wouldn’t have quite fit. If we had waited till next week, I don’t know when I would have shared it with you. There was both providence and God’s coincidence in the timing of Kelly’s and my speaking.
Finally, God’s Spirit works in our lives through being a Presence. Sometimes God doesn’t speak to us, nor act tangibly. Sometimes God just lets us know that the Spirit is with us. That’s what you really saw in Kelly’s and Jeff’s experiences. They were blessed with a gift of the Spirit’s presence that helped them sense Mike’s presence. And they aren’t alone. I know of so many people who have ways that they can tell when God is with them.
For example, often God speaks to us through personal symbols to say, “I’m here, and I love you.” I’ve experienced this over and over with the numbers 3 and 7. It all started for me many years ago before I came to Calvin Church. I had been exercising on a machine, and struggling with questions about my future. I was praying to God and asking how long it would be before God acted. I stopped as I prayed and looked down at the odometer. It said 3.33. Since then I’ve seen that number, and other similar numbers, a lot: 733, 337, and 777. I’ll wake up in the middle of the night stressing about something, and I’ll roll over and see that it is 3:33 a.m. I’ll be driving along and praying, and see that the number on the license plate in front of me is 337. Or I’ll be watching television and look at the clock and it will be 7:33. This doesn’t happen merely every once in a while. It happens many times every week. Each time it amazes me.
I’m not alone. David Sloat, one of our members, has a similar experience with the number 444. He said that this past week his son’s bus broke down and the replacement bus was #444. He also said that for his past three jobs he’s noticed that the exchange number on the telephone number has always been 444. The area code is always different, but the exchange has always been the same.
Kelly told me that when she struggles she sees the number 11:11, or 1111. Her whole family sees it. Kelly’s older sister, Kim, attends Calvin Church and has told me that she sees it, and her daughter, Katie, now is seeing it quite often. And since I’ve preached this sermon I’ve received several e-mails from members telling me about their numbers, including one member who told me that he was having a medical procedure this week, and he looked down at the heart monitoring device and the serial number was 07003703. He said he could sense God saying, “I’m with you and it will be okay.”
The Spirit really can act in your life, but there are major questions we have to ask ourselves: Am I in a place where the Spirit can act? Am I in a state of mind and heart where the Spirit can act? Are my sails up and set for the Spirit to act?
Amen.
P.S. (I’ve looked down at the word count on my computer and the total number of words is 3333).
John 20:19-23
May 30, 2010
When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’
Archbishop Oscar Romero stood at a crossroads. He was paralyzed with indecision. It seemed impossible to go back, but what was the right path forward? Should he take the path of capitulation, choosing to work with a corrupt government that was sponsoring terrorist attacks against its own people? Should he stand up and speak out against the Salvadoran government, thus assuring his own assassination? The people, and especially the poor, were looking for him to do something, anything, to bring an end to the violence.1
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, El Salvador was torn by civil unrest. In many ways El Salvador was the mirror image of Nicaragua at the same time. Nicaragua had been taken over by communists, and had been a country that violently suppressed anyone who supported capitalism and democracy, especially the wealthy and moderately wealthy. In El Salvador, it was the poor who were violently suppressed, especially when they spoke up for more rights and a desire to be lifted out of poverty. Right-wing death squads were torturing and killing hundreds and thousands of innocents if they showed any sort of sympathy for leftists. Meanwhile, left-wing communist guerillas were convincing the poor to join them in their struggle to overthrow the government, and sometimes torturing and killing them when they weren’t willing to join them. The question was, how should Archbishop Oscar Romero respond, since he was the Catholic Church’s voice in El Salvador, a Catholic country? Romero never expected to be in this position.
He had been chosen archbishop of El Salvador precisely because he was an orthodox, bookish, studious bishop whom the other bishops believed would not make waves. He was expected to keep his nose out of these kinds of issues. Romero wanted the same thing. He had no interest in fomenting trouble in the country. He wanted to lead the people of El Salvador back to an orthodox Roman Catholic faith. But when he was confronted with the reality of the violence against innocents, he knew he had to do something. He knew he was called to lead the people back to God’s way, a way of love, compassion, forgiveness, and grace. But to do so might put his life in danger.
His dynamic transformation from a traditionalist, introverted, intellectual priest to a humble, activist archbishop approach came about after he toured El Salvador. He visited the sites where bodies of those executed by the death squads had been dumped. He visited men and women who had been beaten and tortured. He talked with officials from the government and with Marxist guerillas. He became fully aware that God was calling him to take a stand after an incident that revealed to him the evil afflicting El Salvador. He had negotiated the release of guerilla-held hostages after receiving promises from the Salvadoran army that they would not be mistreated. Despite these promises the guerillas (including a priest who had been supporting the guerillas), were immediately arrested. Romero also was arrested when he protested their treatment. In prison he heard the torture of the priest, and when he was released he was given the priest’s dead body.
Romero was torn. He supported neither the Marxist guerilla rebellion nor the government-sponsored violence. He felt called to lead the people to a way of peace, but how could he do it? He knew that the way of violence pursued by both sides would lead to the spiritual and material destruction of the whole country. How could he lead the people to God’s way—a way of love, justice, compassion, and unity?
Visiting the graves of victims of violence, Romero was stricken with grief. He stumbled forward along a road and then fell to his knees. He offered perhaps as profound a prayer as has ever been said: “I can’t… You must… I’m yours… Show me the way.” He was brought to the depths of humiliation by his experiences, but in those depths he found the power of humility.
Walking down the road into a poverty-stricken village nearby, he came across soldiers. They mocked him, stripped him of his clothing (sound familiar?). The poor rushed up to him and hugged his waist, embarrassed to see the partially naked archbishop being derided by the soldiers. Romero tried to quiet the people, telling them that everything was all right, and a woman replied, “But you are our voice. You speak for us.”
Romero hesitated for a moment, not knowing how to respond, and then in humility he responded in the way that Christ called him to respond: “Let us begin a celebration of the mass now. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. The grace of our Lord, Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Lord, you have created us for freedom [and the people responded “Lord, have mercy”]. Christ, you made us to live in dignity [“Christ, have mercy”]. Lord, you strengthen us in the struggle for justice [“Lord, have mercy].” Romero rooted his response in sacramental prayer.
From that moment on, Romero spoke out against the government and the guerillas. He offered the country a new way, the way of Christ, the way of peace. He refused to be silent, even though his life was threatened. He spoke out in radio addresses to the country. He preached about unity in the country and caring for everyone through his sermons. He was repeatedly warned to keep quiet, but he continued to speak. On March 23rd, 1980, he addressed the country, challenging the military to quit killing the poor and to bring justice to the country. The next day he was shot by a sniper while celebrating mass. Like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. before him, he opened himself up to God at a radical level, and he received the Holy Spirit in a way that not only transformed him, but eventually the country of El Salvador. [To learn more about Oscar Romero, I encourage you to rent to film, Romero. It is a truly amazing film, and one of my favorites]
Now, I don’t want to imply that if you open up to the Holy Spirit, you’ll be shot. This is the extreme situation. What I do want to say clearly, though, is that Oscar Romero is a perfect example of how opening up to the Holy Spirit can transform our lives, and life all around us. The Spirit works in the Spirit’s ways, and the Holy Spirit of God can do amazing things, if we are willing to receive the Spirit. And Oscar Romero prayed the perfect prayer for receiving the Holy Spirit in our lives, saying, “I can’t,… you must,… I’m yours,… show me the way.”
This is it,… this is all it takes to get the Holy Spirit to come alive in our lives. But as simple as this idea is, it is incredibly hard to do because we don’t usually want to give ourselves this much to God. As I mentioned last week, our problem is that we often say we want God in our lives, but what are we willing to give up to let God in at this level? If we are willing to work up the courage to let God in at this level, though, Oscar Romero gives us the model with these four phrases: “I can’t,… you must,… I’m yours,… show me the way.” I want to spend the rest of this time just going over these four phrases to help you understand how to use them to bring the Spirit in more powerfully in your life.
I can’t:
Coming to God and saying, “I can’t,” is one of the most powerful ways to radically open up to God. It’s the first step because it’s the step of humility that goes against our whole nature, which is to say, “I can, and I’ll do it by myself.” Whether you know it or not, saying “I can’t” is also the 1st step of Alcoholics Anonymous, and every other addiction program. It’s the step that says, “My life is unmanageable, and I can’t do it by myself anymore.” What most people don’t know is that this first step of AA actually has Christian roots. Bill W., who founded AA, had learned the Christian belief about “metanoia,” which literally means conversion. The first step of metanoia is to realize that we cannot manage life by ourselves. The other two steps are recognizing that God seeks a better way for us, and then surrendering ourselves to God. Bill W. transferred this idea of metanoia to AA, yet it is very much a Christian idea, and one that Oscar Romero uttered as he kneeled and said, “I can’t.”
This first step of receiving the Holy Spirit is the hardest step because all of us spend our lives trying to be in control of our lives. It’s human and American nature. Why do we strive for control? Because of our egos, which lead us to say to God far too often, “I can do it myself.” Adrian van Kaam had a great way of pointing this out. He used to say that the word “ego” is an acronym meaning, “eking God out.” He’s right. This is also the step that distinguishes between people of faith and atheists. Atheists can’t say to God, “I can’t,” because they’ve eked God out. Many religious people also eke God out, but those of true faith know that the first step to receiving the Spirit was “I can’t.”
You must
Saying “You must,” is the next step of metanoia. It simply requires that we recognize that God can do what we can’t. We recognize that God not only has the power to do things we can’t, but that in God’s love God wants to do what we can’t. God wants to make our lives better and more whole.
There is a problem when people think of this step. Often people make the mistake of thinking that saying to God “You must” means doing nothing—just sitting back and sipping piña coladas while God does everything else. That’s not what “You must” means. “You must” means that we do our part, and God does God’s part. We still do what we need to do, but we give the results to God. We do our work, and we let God’s Spirit come in and complete what we do. We do our part and give up control of the rest.
I’m yours
Basically, “I’m yours” means surrendering to God. This is the most important step of receiving the Spirit. When we surrender, we are saying to God that in good and bad, happiness and despair, we are your’s. Most people don’t want to give themselves this completely to God, and it’s this reluctance that also keeps the Spirit out of their lives. If you look back at my sermons from the past two weeks, you’ll see how crucial surrender is. In the one story I told of an artist who recovered his passion for painting by surrendering himself to the guidance of the Spirit. Last week I told a story of a man in despair who gave himself over to the voice of God, and afterwards it led him to discover God’s voice speaking to him moment-by-moment. Surrender opens our souls to God.
Show me the way
I want to share with you an experience I had back as young teen. As a child, I used to go to a camp in New Hampshire every summer for eight weeks. During those summers we did a lot of camping and hiking up mountains. When I was thirteen, we hiked along a trail through the Pemigewassett Wilderness for a four-day, three-night trip. The first night we climbed up and over a mountain named Mt. Carrigan, and then into a river valley to camp for the night. The next morning we set out to climb Mt. Bond. Now what you need to know is that the Pemigewassett Wilderness is a vast, 45,000 acre tract of land in the White mountains of New Hampshire with few people and lots of forest and wildlife. Also, that area has some of the most unpredictable weather in the country. It is not uncommon for major storms to blow in suddenly out of nowhere.
As we started our ascent of Mt. Bond, it was a beautiful day. Not a cloud in the sky. Climbing higher, there were a few puffy clouds, but otherwise it was clear and warm. Approaching the summit, a fog suddenly surrounded us. It was the thickest fog I have ever seen. And it was dangerous. We could see no further than tree-feet in front of us. We were above the tree line, so there was nothing there but bare rock. There were also few trail markers—only cairns (piled rocks) set about fifty yards apart. To get to our next campsite, we had to cross the rocky summit and go down the other side. We could not go back the way we had come, because if we did, we would not make it to our pick-up point two days later. We had no choice but to go forward.
The problem was that the fog was so thick that we could barely see a person standing ten feet away. How do you take 12 boys and two counselors, across a bare summit, following markers fifty yards apart, to a campsite that no one could see, especially when we could barely see each other? The counselors called us together and told us that we were facing a very dangerous time. If we got separated from the group, we could be lost in the wilderness. So they pulled out the map and compass, and marked where we were. They then lined us up in a line and told us not to get further than an arm’s length away from the person in front of us. We would move as a group from one cairn to another. At each cairn, the counselors would stop us, set their mark, and set the direction using the map. Then we would move forward. If any of us strayed, we could be lost for good.
We were literally walking blind across the summit, trusting a counselor with a map and a compass, but little else to get our bearings. It was a nerve-wracking hike that took over two hours to walk a path that normally would have taken just forty-five minutes. As campers, we had no choice but to let others discern the way as we followed.
To me, this is very much like the way it is when we ask God to “Show me the way.” So often life is like a fog. We don’t always know what the right and wrong ways are. We don’t always know what God’s will is, but if we are willing to really pay attention in the fog, God will lead us. I believe this because I’ve experienced this. I’ve discovered that whenever I really let God guide me, amazing things happen.
Let me give you an example. I don’t know whether you were here on Easter morning, but I told a story about a gangster who went from being a collector and enforcer for the mob to becoming a pastor working with kids on the streets of Pittsburgh. I know that some people loved the story, and others wondered why I told it on Easter. Let me tell you how I came to choose the story.
I did not want to tell that story at all. In fact, my whole sermon was moving in another direction. But the Monday before Easter I had finished a book I was reading, and I went to my stack of books to pick the next one to read. As I grabbed it, the pile of books fell to the floor, and one book, Left for Dead, about the mobster, rested on my foot. It had been autographed and given to me by Joe Bellante, the mob guy who had become a pastor. He had given it to me four years ago, but I had never read it. I didn’t want to read it then, either, so I put it on another pile. Later in the day, I was sitting in my chair, and reached for my drink, and knocked the book into my lap. I chuckled to myself and wondered if God was trying to tell me something. I still didn’t feel like reading it, so I put it on another pile. Thirty minutes later I again knocked the book by accident into my lap. At this point I realized that this was God showing me the way. God wanted me to tell that story. I prayed over it and sensed that this was God’s calling.
I have to tell you that I didn’t really want to use the story because I figured it would become a lightning rod for criticism, but I’m much more committed to seeking and doing God’s will than I am in protecting myself, so I started to read. You’ve just been given an insight into how I try to do my sermons. I always submit my sermons to prayer as I’m preparing them, and I ask God what God is saying to me, what God wants me to say to you, and how God wants me to say it. And I’m amazed week-by-week how often I find stories and thoughts by sheer coincidence. It happens because I try to ask God to “Show me the way” in my sermons and in so much else in my life.
Do you want God to show you the way? If so, I have three things you need to learn: Slow down—open up—grab hold. We need to slow our lives down if we’re to let God show us the way. Do you know what the biggest problem of modern life is? We are all moving too fast. And the speed at which we live life keeps God out of our lives. We have to slow down and make time for God. We also have to open up to God through our surrender and saying that we can’t, you must. And once we sense we are hearing God’s voice, we have to be willing to grab it and follow with courage. This sounds so simple, but it is hard.
The point of all this is that God’s Spirit can act in amazing ways in our lives, but we have to be willing to do what’s necessary to let it work. We have to be willing to say, “I can’t,… you must,… I’m yours,… show me the way.”
If you come next week and are willing to say, “I can’t,… you must,… I’m yours,… show me the way,” I’ll share with you how the Spirit can act in our lives.
Amen.
May 30, 2010
When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’
Archbishop Oscar Romero stood at a crossroads. He was paralyzed with indecision. It seemed impossible to go back, but what was the right path forward? Should he take the path of capitulation, choosing to work with a corrupt government that was sponsoring terrorist attacks against its own people? Should he stand up and speak out against the Salvadoran government, thus assuring his own assassination? The people, and especially the poor, were looking for him to do something, anything, to bring an end to the violence.1
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, El Salvador was torn by civil unrest. In many ways El Salvador was the mirror image of Nicaragua at the same time. Nicaragua had been taken over by communists, and had been a country that violently suppressed anyone who supported capitalism and democracy, especially the wealthy and moderately wealthy. In El Salvador, it was the poor who were violently suppressed, especially when they spoke up for more rights and a desire to be lifted out of poverty. Right-wing death squads were torturing and killing hundreds and thousands of innocents if they showed any sort of sympathy for leftists. Meanwhile, left-wing communist guerillas were convincing the poor to join them in their struggle to overthrow the government, and sometimes torturing and killing them when they weren’t willing to join them. The question was, how should Archbishop Oscar Romero respond, since he was the Catholic Church’s voice in El Salvador, a Catholic country? Romero never expected to be in this position.
He had been chosen archbishop of El Salvador precisely because he was an orthodox, bookish, studious bishop whom the other bishops believed would not make waves. He was expected to keep his nose out of these kinds of issues. Romero wanted the same thing. He had no interest in fomenting trouble in the country. He wanted to lead the people of El Salvador back to an orthodox Roman Catholic faith. But when he was confronted with the reality of the violence against innocents, he knew he had to do something. He knew he was called to lead the people back to God’s way, a way of love, compassion, forgiveness, and grace. But to do so might put his life in danger.
His dynamic transformation from a traditionalist, introverted, intellectual priest to a humble, activist archbishop approach came about after he toured El Salvador. He visited the sites where bodies of those executed by the death squads had been dumped. He visited men and women who had been beaten and tortured. He talked with officials from the government and with Marxist guerillas. He became fully aware that God was calling him to take a stand after an incident that revealed to him the evil afflicting El Salvador. He had negotiated the release of guerilla-held hostages after receiving promises from the Salvadoran army that they would not be mistreated. Despite these promises the guerillas (including a priest who had been supporting the guerillas), were immediately arrested. Romero also was arrested when he protested their treatment. In prison he heard the torture of the priest, and when he was released he was given the priest’s dead body.
Romero was torn. He supported neither the Marxist guerilla rebellion nor the government-sponsored violence. He felt called to lead the people to a way of peace, but how could he do it? He knew that the way of violence pursued by both sides would lead to the spiritual and material destruction of the whole country. How could he lead the people to God’s way—a way of love, justice, compassion, and unity?
Visiting the graves of victims of violence, Romero was stricken with grief. He stumbled forward along a road and then fell to his knees. He offered perhaps as profound a prayer as has ever been said: “I can’t… You must… I’m yours… Show me the way.” He was brought to the depths of humiliation by his experiences, but in those depths he found the power of humility.
Walking down the road into a poverty-stricken village nearby, he came across soldiers. They mocked him, stripped him of his clothing (sound familiar?). The poor rushed up to him and hugged his waist, embarrassed to see the partially naked archbishop being derided by the soldiers. Romero tried to quiet the people, telling them that everything was all right, and a woman replied, “But you are our voice. You speak for us.”
Romero hesitated for a moment, not knowing how to respond, and then in humility he responded in the way that Christ called him to respond: “Let us begin a celebration of the mass now. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. The grace of our Lord, Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Lord, you have created us for freedom [and the people responded “Lord, have mercy”]. Christ, you made us to live in dignity [“Christ, have mercy”]. Lord, you strengthen us in the struggle for justice [“Lord, have mercy].” Romero rooted his response in sacramental prayer.
From that moment on, Romero spoke out against the government and the guerillas. He offered the country a new way, the way of Christ, the way of peace. He refused to be silent, even though his life was threatened. He spoke out in radio addresses to the country. He preached about unity in the country and caring for everyone through his sermons. He was repeatedly warned to keep quiet, but he continued to speak. On March 23rd, 1980, he addressed the country, challenging the military to quit killing the poor and to bring justice to the country. The next day he was shot by a sniper while celebrating mass. Like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. before him, he opened himself up to God at a radical level, and he received the Holy Spirit in a way that not only transformed him, but eventually the country of El Salvador. [To learn more about Oscar Romero, I encourage you to rent to film, Romero. It is a truly amazing film, and one of my favorites]
Now, I don’t want to imply that if you open up to the Holy Spirit, you’ll be shot. This is the extreme situation. What I do want to say clearly, though, is that Oscar Romero is a perfect example of how opening up to the Holy Spirit can transform our lives, and life all around us. The Spirit works in the Spirit’s ways, and the Holy Spirit of God can do amazing things, if we are willing to receive the Spirit. And Oscar Romero prayed the perfect prayer for receiving the Holy Spirit in our lives, saying, “I can’t,… you must,… I’m yours,… show me the way.”
This is it,… this is all it takes to get the Holy Spirit to come alive in our lives. But as simple as this idea is, it is incredibly hard to do because we don’t usually want to give ourselves this much to God. As I mentioned last week, our problem is that we often say we want God in our lives, but what are we willing to give up to let God in at this level? If we are willing to work up the courage to let God in at this level, though, Oscar Romero gives us the model with these four phrases: “I can’t,… you must,… I’m yours,… show me the way.” I want to spend the rest of this time just going over these four phrases to help you understand how to use them to bring the Spirit in more powerfully in your life.
I can’t:
Coming to God and saying, “I can’t,” is one of the most powerful ways to radically open up to God. It’s the first step because it’s the step of humility that goes against our whole nature, which is to say, “I can, and I’ll do it by myself.” Whether you know it or not, saying “I can’t” is also the 1st step of Alcoholics Anonymous, and every other addiction program. It’s the step that says, “My life is unmanageable, and I can’t do it by myself anymore.” What most people don’t know is that this first step of AA actually has Christian roots. Bill W., who founded AA, had learned the Christian belief about “metanoia,” which literally means conversion. The first step of metanoia is to realize that we cannot manage life by ourselves. The other two steps are recognizing that God seeks a better way for us, and then surrendering ourselves to God. Bill W. transferred this idea of metanoia to AA, yet it is very much a Christian idea, and one that Oscar Romero uttered as he kneeled and said, “I can’t.”
This first step of receiving the Holy Spirit is the hardest step because all of us spend our lives trying to be in control of our lives. It’s human and American nature. Why do we strive for control? Because of our egos, which lead us to say to God far too often, “I can do it myself.” Adrian van Kaam had a great way of pointing this out. He used to say that the word “ego” is an acronym meaning, “eking God out.” He’s right. This is also the step that distinguishes between people of faith and atheists. Atheists can’t say to God, “I can’t,” because they’ve eked God out. Many religious people also eke God out, but those of true faith know that the first step to receiving the Spirit was “I can’t.”
You must
Saying “You must,” is the next step of metanoia. It simply requires that we recognize that God can do what we can’t. We recognize that God not only has the power to do things we can’t, but that in God’s love God wants to do what we can’t. God wants to make our lives better and more whole.
There is a problem when people think of this step. Often people make the mistake of thinking that saying to God “You must” means doing nothing—just sitting back and sipping piña coladas while God does everything else. That’s not what “You must” means. “You must” means that we do our part, and God does God’s part. We still do what we need to do, but we give the results to God. We do our work, and we let God’s Spirit come in and complete what we do. We do our part and give up control of the rest.
I’m yours
Basically, “I’m yours” means surrendering to God. This is the most important step of receiving the Spirit. When we surrender, we are saying to God that in good and bad, happiness and despair, we are your’s. Most people don’t want to give themselves this completely to God, and it’s this reluctance that also keeps the Spirit out of their lives. If you look back at my sermons from the past two weeks, you’ll see how crucial surrender is. In the one story I told of an artist who recovered his passion for painting by surrendering himself to the guidance of the Spirit. Last week I told a story of a man in despair who gave himself over to the voice of God, and afterwards it led him to discover God’s voice speaking to him moment-by-moment. Surrender opens our souls to God.
Show me the way
I want to share with you an experience I had back as young teen. As a child, I used to go to a camp in New Hampshire every summer for eight weeks. During those summers we did a lot of camping and hiking up mountains. When I was thirteen, we hiked along a trail through the Pemigewassett Wilderness for a four-day, three-night trip. The first night we climbed up and over a mountain named Mt. Carrigan, and then into a river valley to camp for the night. The next morning we set out to climb Mt. Bond. Now what you need to know is that the Pemigewassett Wilderness is a vast, 45,000 acre tract of land in the White mountains of New Hampshire with few people and lots of forest and wildlife. Also, that area has some of the most unpredictable weather in the country. It is not uncommon for major storms to blow in suddenly out of nowhere.
As we started our ascent of Mt. Bond, it was a beautiful day. Not a cloud in the sky. Climbing higher, there were a few puffy clouds, but otherwise it was clear and warm. Approaching the summit, a fog suddenly surrounded us. It was the thickest fog I have ever seen. And it was dangerous. We could see no further than tree-feet in front of us. We were above the tree line, so there was nothing there but bare rock. There were also few trail markers—only cairns (piled rocks) set about fifty yards apart. To get to our next campsite, we had to cross the rocky summit and go down the other side. We could not go back the way we had come, because if we did, we would not make it to our pick-up point two days later. We had no choice but to go forward.
The problem was that the fog was so thick that we could barely see a person standing ten feet away. How do you take 12 boys and two counselors, across a bare summit, following markers fifty yards apart, to a campsite that no one could see, especially when we could barely see each other? The counselors called us together and told us that we were facing a very dangerous time. If we got separated from the group, we could be lost in the wilderness. So they pulled out the map and compass, and marked where we were. They then lined us up in a line and told us not to get further than an arm’s length away from the person in front of us. We would move as a group from one cairn to another. At each cairn, the counselors would stop us, set their mark, and set the direction using the map. Then we would move forward. If any of us strayed, we could be lost for good.
We were literally walking blind across the summit, trusting a counselor with a map and a compass, but little else to get our bearings. It was a nerve-wracking hike that took over two hours to walk a path that normally would have taken just forty-five minutes. As campers, we had no choice but to let others discern the way as we followed.
To me, this is very much like the way it is when we ask God to “Show me the way.” So often life is like a fog. We don’t always know what the right and wrong ways are. We don’t always know what God’s will is, but if we are willing to really pay attention in the fog, God will lead us. I believe this because I’ve experienced this. I’ve discovered that whenever I really let God guide me, amazing things happen.
Let me give you an example. I don’t know whether you were here on Easter morning, but I told a story about a gangster who went from being a collector and enforcer for the mob to becoming a pastor working with kids on the streets of Pittsburgh. I know that some people loved the story, and others wondered why I told it on Easter. Let me tell you how I came to choose the story.
I did not want to tell that story at all. In fact, my whole sermon was moving in another direction. But the Monday before Easter I had finished a book I was reading, and I went to my stack of books to pick the next one to read. As I grabbed it, the pile of books fell to the floor, and one book, Left for Dead, about the mobster, rested on my foot. It had been autographed and given to me by Joe Bellante, the mob guy who had become a pastor. He had given it to me four years ago, but I had never read it. I didn’t want to read it then, either, so I put it on another pile. Later in the day, I was sitting in my chair, and reached for my drink, and knocked the book into my lap. I chuckled to myself and wondered if God was trying to tell me something. I still didn’t feel like reading it, so I put it on another pile. Thirty minutes later I again knocked the book by accident into my lap. At this point I realized that this was God showing me the way. God wanted me to tell that story. I prayed over it and sensed that this was God’s calling.
I have to tell you that I didn’t really want to use the story because I figured it would become a lightning rod for criticism, but I’m much more committed to seeking and doing God’s will than I am in protecting myself, so I started to read. You’ve just been given an insight into how I try to do my sermons. I always submit my sermons to prayer as I’m preparing them, and I ask God what God is saying to me, what God wants me to say to you, and how God wants me to say it. And I’m amazed week-by-week how often I find stories and thoughts by sheer coincidence. It happens because I try to ask God to “Show me the way” in my sermons and in so much else in my life.
Do you want God to show you the way? If so, I have three things you need to learn: Slow down—open up—grab hold. We need to slow our lives down if we’re to let God show us the way. Do you know what the biggest problem of modern life is? We are all moving too fast. And the speed at which we live life keeps God out of our lives. We have to slow down and make time for God. We also have to open up to God through our surrender and saying that we can’t, you must. And once we sense we are hearing God’s voice, we have to be willing to grab it and follow with courage. This sounds so simple, but it is hard.
The point of all this is that God’s Spirit can act in amazing ways in our lives, but we have to be willing to do what’s necessary to let it work. We have to be willing to say, “I can’t,… you must,… I’m yours,… show me the way.”
If you come next week and are willing to say, “I can’t,… you must,… I’m yours,… show me the way,” I’ll share with you how the Spirit can act in our lives.
Amen.
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