Sermon of the Week:
That Was Close!
An online sermon preached with The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on August 2, 2020.
Week one of a nine part sermon series:
I Feel Seen: Ancient Stories and Modern Wisdom
Keywords: Jacob Wrestles, Less than Perfect, Anxiety, Abraham and Isaac, Betrayal, God Can Handle It, Names. #pcusa
Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
Matthew 14:13-21
and Genesis 32:22-31
Permission to podcast / stream the music in this service obtained from ONE LICENSE with license #A-733469. All rights reserved.
I don’t know about you,
but if I had my way, I’d require every problem to have a simple solution.
Give me a black-and-white description of a problem,
with a clear and robust way to resolve it.
My car won’t start.
Ok. What’s wrong? Well, the problem is a bad battery
(caused by a forgetful driver who didn’t close the door)
and so the solution is a jump start,
or a new battery,
or, worst case, maybe replace the alternator. Voila. Simple. Take care of it, and it’s done.
Or, what about that strange noise we heard in the garage?
Well, thankfully it stopped when the mousetrap went off the other day.
No more noise. That must be the end of it, right?
I hope so.
Hungry? Go get some food.
Tired? Get some sleep.
Restless? Well, maybe stop watching the Royals and that might go away.
Who doesn’t prefer things to be simple, clear and unambiguous?
Cut and dry.
But so little in our life works that way.
It is almost always more complicated…
Maybe you’re hungry, and you have no money to buy food.
Maybe you’re tired, but your kids need you
and the dishes aren’t done
and the dog knocked over the plant so there’s dirt and leaves everywhere
and that noise is back in the garage
and you’re not thinking very clearly…because you’re tired….
Or, to take another example,
you’ve had some blood work done,
and the results weren’t….conclusive
and there are more tests needed
but any way you slice it, it isn’t very good
and your plans for the next 6 months aren’t viable any longer
because the treatment options all have side effects.
Which one should we try?
Or maybe you’ve found yourself
in a situation where your close friends are fighting.
I mean, really angry at each other,
and we can see both sides of what they’re going through
and we don’t know how to help or how to be honest
without hurting one or the other, or both!
But they’re looking for some help, and saying nothing will hurt too.
Ugh.
These are hard questions.
So much in life is complicated, complex, multi-faceted.
So little is black and white and simple.
And, honestly, it is exhausting.
Very little these days is clear cut.
Sometime we can have all the information we need to know
but the options don’t have an obvious “right answer.”
And then there are other times where we just can’t know everything we need to know
but we still have to make our best decision based on the best information available,
and live with the consequences.
Who wants to do that?
Give me the cut and dry any day, right?
We prefer the simple to the complex, even though life is more often than not complex.
///
Maybe this can help explain
why so many people lean toward the unrealistically simple solution
to life’s difficult problems.
If you just read THESE books, you’ll find the secret solution to parenting, or dieting, or dealing with your partner, or whatever…
If you just PRAY this way, this many times a day, facing this direction and using THESE words
you’ll hear God. Oh, for sure.
And, by implication, the other people who don’t do that don’t stand a chance.
If you just watch THIS news and not THAT news, you’ll get a sense of what is really going on.
If you take THIS anti-malaria drug, it will protect you from COVID,
Don’t worry that we don’t have any good science on that yet.
If you BURY those emotions deep enough,
you’ll be able to ignore them and maybe they can go away on their own….
You can begin to understand why Self-help books are a hot commodity these days,
as are unquestioning forms of faith and religion…
The kind of faith that encourages you to check your head or your heart at the door.
Honestly: I used to stay up at night
wondering why in the world anyone would be attracted by fundamentalism…
and there are a lot of different kinds of fundamentalism…
but just a quick recap of the news,
or a brief assessment of the stresses that human beings face in this modern age,
in our day to day lives,
and you can perhaps
understand the appeal.
Life is really, really hard sometimes.
And there is something alluring
about just shutting down our critical faculties
and refusing to participate any more.
///
One of the things we talk about from time to time in these sermons
is what makes for a healthy religious journey,
and why the particular form of Christianity that we follow
seeks a different sort of path.
Unfortunately, there are many different religious traditions,
including some forms of Christianity,
including some forms of protestant Christianity,
that proffer overly simplistic answers to these deep human predicaments.
I’m guessing you know what I’m talking about.
Often they are heavy on authority figures,
encourage a shallow reading of the sacred text,
or argue that their way is the only way, and everyone else doesn’t actually love God or love Jesus.
And sometimes, many of these unhealthy forms of piety
discourages us from expressing our true feelings,
or asking our deepest question and doubts…
because our feelings are messy and complicated
and if you only believed more truly,
prayed more fervently, loved God more,
you wouldn’t doubt, you wouldn’t question, you would just believe…
or so the story goes.
And the result is, more often than not,
a crisis of faith when the going gets rough…and it does for all of us at one time or another.
///
I was thinking this week
about when I was training for ministry at The University of Chicago Divinity School.
I spent a semester as a student chaplain at Rush University Medical Center,
and it was such a profound learning experience.
I wasn’t prepared for often patients and families
tended to bury their true emotions about what was happening to them,
because they didn’t think they were feeling the “right” sorts of feels
or because they were so used to not dealing with their emotions
that they were afraid that they would bubble over if they let them out…
My assignment at Rush University Medical Center was to work with the multiple acute-injury patients
often patients recovering from back surgeries, heart attacks, multiple traumas
some of the hardest experiences that human beings can face.
My job was to be present with them,
a caring, interested listener who wasn’t a doctor or nurse,
someone willing to talk about their faith if they wanted to,
and I could be there
to lift up their concerns to God in prayer.
Some of the time I felt useful,
and here or there I would have an honest encounter
where the patient would have the fortitude to share what he was truly feeling
or how she could admit how she was struggling to work out what was going on.
But most of the time,
patients and their families would see me
and the chaplain’s insignia on my jacket
and they’d just smile and tell me how their faith was sure, and strong, and unbroken.
Thanks for checking. Nothing to see here.
Again, sometimes that was actually true. When it was, I was amazed.
I sat with them and marveled at the way
they found God piecing it all back together
or how God was there with them as they were searching for answers, you know,
giving them encouragement and love along the way.
But more often it was really not all that true,
and, if they permitted a few minutes of conversation,
they might reveal a deep pain and sometimes a mountain of fear
and, more than that, guilt, oh so much guilt,
that these feelings they were feeling…pain and fear and maybe anger
were NOT WHAT GOD WANTED.
They were convinced that God couldn’t fathom them wavering, or struggling.
It was not Okay, they might confide in me.
That always broke my heart, the spiritual anxiety on top of their physical woe.
I particularly remember one evening, when I was on call,
when I had a page to go to the delivery room
and I met there a young woman, in her teens,
who had delivered a stillborn child, about 22 weeks along.
And she was traumatized.
I stayed there, and I wept, and I prayed with her and the nurses.
I didn’t have anything really to say. What do you say?
The young woman’s mother was in the corner, not able to look over
acting as if everything was fine, nothing to see here.
Deep, painful denial.
And after about 15 minutes, the young woman’s father came in the room
a mechanic, you see, and he wasn’t able to get off work,
wasn’t able to be there for his daughter
he wasn’t there to fix it.
and took one look at my jacket, and he got angry, so angry.
He spat in my face.
He was crushed, hurting, broken.
We all were, in that moment.
And my heart broke as they wrestled with their pain
and I wished that they knew “they had permission” to do that….
///
We would prefer things to be simple.
In the end, we don’t want to have a mess of feelings,
we’d prefer not to deal with them, thank you very much.
Here’s the thing:
when you look at scripture, there’s nowhere you’ll find
God shaming you for your struggles
as you wade through the deep-water moments of life.
Instead, you find lessons like we find in the Psalms, for instance,
poems that lift up every sort of feeling that human beings have ever felt–
yearning, heartache, abandonment, jealousy, vengeance, unrequited love,
deep concern for loved ones—
it is all there, in the Psalms,
healthy emotions and harmful feelings alike,
an example for us, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear,
that God can understand ALL of these things we feel,
that God is big enough to withstand it,
that God can empathize with us, and loves us through thick and through thin.
We could lift up other scriptural examples, of course,
most notably we could talk about what it means
for God to become human, God’s incarnation in the life of Jesus of Nazareth,
or how God must have felt at Jesus’ betrayal and death,
or the amazing affirmation of life in the resurrection… all examples of God getting it…
but for today I want us to focus on this really fascinating moment in the life of Jacob.
We should offer a little bit of context about Jacob:
Jacob is one of two sons born to Isaac,
twins, actually, him and his brother Esau. [Read more…]
