Recent Sermons

“The Pervasive God”
Matthew 13:31 – 33
Preached July 27, 2008
17th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Today, two short, yet pithy parables. They are two in a string of parables Jesus has been telling the people to try to help them understand the nature of the kingdom of God. Jesus’ proclamation is that the kingdom of God has broken into human history and that it has something for everyone. So bend your ear and listen, he says, because this is exciting.
I’ve spoken to the parable of the mustard seed in the past, so today I think I’ll focus on the second parable here, the parable of the Yeast or Leaven. I’ll not even try to restrain my natural enthusiasm for this parable. The nature of yeast speaks deeply to one of my favorite avocations – baking bread. I actually learned in high school in a home economics class, Bachelor Survival. And I’ve been enjoying the pleasure of bread baking ever since. For years I keep a sour dough starter. My kids got really tired of all my sour dough experiments like sour dough cake and sour dough corn bread. I find bread baking very therapeutic and seeing a lump of dough rise to the top of the bowl is quite satisfying. But also I’m enthusiastic about this parable because in one sentence it speaks a profound truth about God’s presence in the world.
Note right up front that the surrogate for God in this parable is a woman. Quite extraordinary in its own right, given the prevailing paternalistic ideas of the day. But this is no ordinary woman just breaking a couple of loaves for her husband’s pleasure. This is a baker! Jesus said she mixed the yeast into three measures of flour. That’s a bushel of flour! That’s 128 cups! That’s 16 five-pound bags! After you’ve added 42 or so cups of water you’ve got a little over 101 pounds of dough on your hands.
Which leads me to this thought: Take the whole lump of dough. When Jesus says the whole is leavened, he’s not kidding. The lump of dough stands for the whole world. And by itself it’s just that, a lump of dough, indigestible in its present form, incapable of going anywhere, let alone to heaven. By itself the dough would just sit there.
But it isn’t by itself. The baker woman mixed in the yeast. And this introduces the mystery of the kingdom. The yeast is hidden in the dough. It can’t be seen once it’s mixed in. But it is there and it is everywhere. The yeast is all pervasive. There is no part of the lump of dough that is not affected by the yeast. Indeed, the pervasiveness of the yeast is the major emphasis of this parable.
The yeast is dissolved in the very liquid that makes the flour become dough. The yeast was there from the very beginning even when it first became dough. I’d like to think that the yeast fomenting in the water is akin to what we will rehearse a bit later when we talk about baptism. From the earliest days of creation scripture says the Spirit was moving over the waters. So you could say that while Jesus is just now proclaiming the presence of the kingdom of God, in a very real sense the kingdom of God as always been in the world. Just as the yeast pervaded the dough right from the very beginning so has God pervaded the world right from the very beginning. Jesus’ announcement of this Good News is just that – Good News. Redemption has already taken place. The world is already in God’s hands.
And just as the yeast, once it is in the dough, is so intimate a part of the lump as to be indistinguishable from it, so is the kingdom in the world. Indeed, the yeast and the dough are so indistinguishable that you can’t say what is the world and what is the kingdom of God. They are so intertwined that you might as well say they are one and the same.
But there is even more! It is all too tempting when talking about the kingdom of God in the world to envision a time when the world was a world without the kingdom in it. But this parable doesn’t give that option. For every second of the time that the dough is dough, the yeast is inseparable from it. Therefore, for every second of time the world has been a world, it has also been the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God has always been in the world. Jesus’ role is merely to proclaim that what once was hidden and mysterious is now made manifest. What this says to me is that the kingdom of God is all pervasive in the world. It might be a mystery but it is very actual and universal.
One more interesting little thing about the nature of yeast, if I may push the limits of this metaphor beyond what Jesus probably intended. How does yeast lighten dough and make it expand? By filling it with thousands of tiny pockets of carbon dioxide. And how do those pockets of gas cause bread to rise? By expanding when heated. So, behold, the imagery of yeast opens up another image – breath! The whole kingdom of God – the pervasive, actual mystery that is irremovably mixed into creation – operates by warm breath. What is the word for the Spirit of God? Breath! I don’t know. It just seems like Jesus is pulling out all the stops in declaring the universal effectiveness, the intertwining pervasiveness, the it-doesn’t-matter-how-you-respond-it-still-works work of God in the world and in our lives. Jesus’ declaration calls for us to enjoy the presence of God already present in us. We have been accepted in the Beloved. The only real thing left for us to experience is the final accolade to be spoken over us by the Divine Baker Women: “Now that’s what I call a real loaf of bread!”

“Bad Farming”
Matthew 13: 24–30
Preached July 20, 2008
16th Sunday in Ordinary Time

I’ve watched Dick and Jean Lym work. Most every week Dick and Jean show up here at the church and devote an afternoon to our garden of flowers and shrubs in the courtyard and out in front of Munger Hall. They water and prune and, most pertinent to my story, weed. Meticulously Dick and Jean scour the flowerbeds for any weeds that have popped up since last the attended to them and pull those suckers out! And I would guess the principle is that weeds are not good for the crop you really want to have in your garden, be it flowers or vegetables or fruit or wheat. So diligent attention to weeding is part and parcel to being a gardener.
So, being the diligent gardeners they are, I would not be surprised if Dick and Jean raised an eyebrow or two at Jesus’ method of gardening. On the surface Jesus’ parable of the Weeds is a straight story about farming. But what kind of farming is this? The practice of not pulling out weeds until harvest time is no way to run a farm. What could only be considered a neglectful way of farming only insures two very undesirable results. First, it contributes to the choking out of good plants that Jesus already deplored in the parable we considered last week. Second, it guarantees a bumper crop of unwanted weed seeds to plague next season’s planting. Yet Jesus tells the story, flouting every known principle of agronomy.
Of course, we know it is not just a story about farming methods. We know that Jesus, despite his ignorance of farming, has a theological point to make. But, on the surface, his theological point seems to be just as bad as his bad farming method. As a result, the church has struggled to understand this story for two thousand years.
How does the church live in the world? Or, more to the point how are we as Christians supposed to deal with all the evil all around us? At least, that is how the dilemma is often expressed – So much evil, so many evil people – how is a righteous, pure Christian or church supposed to deal with it. And, of course, the church has tried many different ways. One way is isolation – do everything possible to distance ourselves from any possible worldly influences. Be as completely separate as possible. The Amish are one admirable example, and yet…is that what Jesus calls for? Another way is personal isolation – the individual Christian is called to be separate from the world, refraining from all possible “worldly” activities. But more often then not the list of worldly activities is quite arbitrary – drinking, dancing, chewing…going with girls that do – and other “worldly” activities, such as participating in unjust economic practices or bigotry are not even questioned. The list of possible “worldly” activities from which the separated Christian is to abstain is potentially endless. So, yet another method is to Christianize the world and remove all the evil practices – and those who practice them. Christian moralists from all over the theological spectrum have tried this method. And whereas one can point to specific accomplishments, such as prohibition or the banning of slavery, it has not resulted in eliminating the problem – evil and evil people continue to prevail. And, somehow, we are still left to deal with it and them. What is a good Christian to do?
It is in light of all these attempts by the church that Jesus’ solution seems most inadequate. Basically Jesus says, “Live with it.” Don’t even try to separate the good seed from the bad seed. That will all be taken care of in God’s own timing. In the meantime, just deal with it! True, there is the vindication thing at the end of the story. The weeds are gathered up to be bound in bundles and burned in an eschatological fire at the end of time. And for many Christians over the centuries that is just what they’ve been waiting to hear. The good are vindicated and the evil get what’s coming. Whew! But consider for a moment the proportions of this parable. The words of judgment and vindication constitute only two thirds of the final verse. The rest of the parable (six and a third verses) is entirely about living with evil. Indeed, not just dealing with evil, but “forgiving” evil. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s look at what Jesus is saying in this outrageous example of bad farming.
Jesus introduces his parable with yet another reference to the Kingdom: “The kingdom of heaven can be compared to…” And he goes on to say that “good seed” is sowed in the field. The good seed germinates and starts growing. But then something happens, something bad. Jesus says the “enemy” comes and sows weeds. The word Jesus uses for weeds actually refers to a specific kind of weed, darnel, which, interestingly, looks just like a stock of wheat. What does that say about the relationship between Jesus’ kingdom and the kingdom of the world? Well, it seems to me that efforts to get rid of evil by force are doomed to do exactly what the farmer suggests they will do. Since the troops available to fight the battle (meaning “us”) are either too confused or too busy, all they will accomplish by their frantic pulling out of the weeds is the tearing up of the good wheat right along with them. Worse yet, since good and evil in this world commonly inhabit not only the same field but even the same individual human beings – since there are no unqualified good guys any more than there are any unqualified bad guys – the only result of a truly dedicated campaign to get rid of evil will be the abolition of literally everybody.
So the enemy has strewn his bad seed amongst the good seed while everybody was sleeping and then he went away. “So when the plants came up and bore grain,” continues Jesus, “then the weeds appeared as well.” The mystery of goodness grows quite of its own accord but the mystery of iniquity seems unfortunately to be doing just as well. The weeds may not be real wheat, but they look just like it. The enemy doesn’t even have to stay around. If the servants can only be enticed to take up arms against the weeds, then the enemy will have succeeded because a real disaster will have taken place. And it almost happens. Coming to the farmer, the servants are totally consumed with dealing with the evil. “Do you want us,” they ask the farmer, “to go out and pull up the weeds?”
“No!” the farmer says to them. “Pull up evil, and you’ll pull up goodness right along with it.” But then comes the most remarkable word in the whole parable: “Let.” “Let both of them grow together.” We can’t just pause here to consider this word. We have to put on the brakes completely. The word in Greek is aphete and whereas translating it into “let” or “leave” is perfectly acceptable, a very common New Testament rendering is “to forgive.” Indeed, this very word is found in the prayer we pray every Sunday: “Forgive our debts as we forgive our debtors.”
So consider, the malice, the evil, the badness that is manifest in the real world and in the lives of real people is not to be dealt with by attacking or abolishing them; rather, it is to be dealt with only by an aphete, by a letting be, by forgiveness, by a permission, if you will. I know what you’re thinking because it’s what I’m thinking: “How can we let or forgive evil to just exist and wreak havoc on the world?” Won’t that just result in more weeds which results in overwhelming all the goodness the kingdom seeks to promote and which results in God’s work getting squashed? Doesn’t that make it real hard for those of us who strive to live by kingdom values, to be the good seed…doesn’t that make it really hard to do God’s work of justice? Well, I guess the answer is “yes.” But that’s the way God has chosen to work, at least according to this parable.
I suppose that’s why we can finally heave a sigh of relief when Jesus comes to the “but-they’ll-get-what’s-coming-to-them-in-the-end” part of the parable. But when you think about it, what good does that do us, here and now? To be sure, Jesus does indeed end on the note of the ultimate triumph of justice. God is in charge, after all, and God will eventually deal with such stuff. But the great bulk of the parable is about living with the mess, in the mess. In the present circumstances of the world (which I should say are the only circumstances in which we find ourselves), the mystery of the kingdom is quite in charge doing its thing in the world.
Granted, this is a hard parable to come to grips with. So unsatisfactory! So messy! And it’s that messiness that I think makes us want to skip right to the very end for the judgment part. We like vindication. We like messes cleaned up. We like justice to prevail and evil defeated. We like the bad people to get what’s coming to them and we good people get our reward. But this, this living with, this letting be, this forgiving bad people – that’s too hard.
Which is why I believe many Christians get into what I described last Sunday as a preoccupation with who’s ‘in’ and who’s ‘out’. They like certainty and this parable describes anything but certainty. I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon over the past years and I’ve come upon an idea. It seems that maybe there is a psychological or maybe deeply ingrained need for some people to require certainty. These people need clearly drawn lines. In order to function they need to know precisely what is right and what is wrong and who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’. Knowing the answers if very important. Nail things down. For these folk this parable is really hard.
But there are other people who are able to live with uncertainty. These are people who, if you will, are more comfortable with ambiguity. They don’t have to have everything figured out in black and white. They can live in suspension. It doesn’t mean they are wishy-washy. It just means that they can know who they are in the midst of uncertainty and, yes, confusion. And, maybe, they are people who can live in the midst of people who aren’t exactly like them and be OK. They can live in the world, with all its weeds, and still be people of the kingdom. For these people this parable is not discouraging, but maybe even hopeful.
I guess I’m encouraging you to be people who can embrace uncertainty and ambiguity even while you assert your membership in the kingdom of God. Yes, we live in a messy world. There are weeds all around. But when we think about it, it is those very weeds we would like to invite to be a part of our community. We are called to relate to, communicate with, welcome in, those who don’t know yet about the presence of the kingdom of God. I guess at this point we shouldn’t refer to them as weeds. Indeed, the whole we/they, we’re the good wheat/they’re the bad weeds thing doesn’t work anymore. We the church aren’t that much different than those outside the church. The only real difference is that we’ve gotten the word that there is grace to be had in Christ and that maybe they’d like to partake of that grace as well. Instead of wheat and weeds maybe we can refer back to that old gospel saying: The Good News is just about one beggar telling another beggar where to find food.
When it comes down to it we all, wheat and weeds alike, have to contend with an evil world. And Jesus calls us to be fully engaged in that world. So, let’s continue to be bad farmers just like Jesus.

“That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It, Except…”
Matthew 13:1 – 9
Preached July 13, 2008
15th Sunday in Ordinary Time

The Bible is full of stories, stories written in antiquity. These stories weren’t written to us or for us. They were written to and for the original readers of those stories. In the case of the story of Jacob and Esau maybe 3000 years ago. In the case of Jesus’ story of “The Sower” about 2000 years ago. But these stories have been preserved for us these many hundreds of years later. And in our Christian tradition each Sunday we retell these stories because we believe they have something to tell us even as they did for those original readers so many years ago. In some way we try to let these stories inform us about what it means to worship God, about what it means to be Christian.
Take Jacob and Esau. A story of treachery and deceit. A story of enmity between brothers, indeed, a tragedy. And a story that reaches out from the past and still haunts us today. For it is that Jacob is the father of the Jewish race and Esau is the father of the Arabic race. And things have been difficult ever since. And so it is that all three the monotheistic world religions trace their roots to this story. Jews, Muslims and Christians all look to Abraham and Isaac as their common source. But it all fell apart with Jacob and Esau.
Now for the original readers of this story and the longer story that makes up the entire book of Genesis the lesson was simple: God brought the nation of Israel into existence to be God’s people, so don’t give up – continue to be faithful. But what about for us? What lesson is there for us in this ancient story? Maybe all we can say is that God works in the messiness that is the human race. That God work’s God’s purposes despite our own treachery and our own self-interests and, yes, even our own tragedies. So, the lesson may be, be faithful because God is indeed at work in this world despite what we see and experience in this world. And, yes, even despite our own mess ups.
Then we come to this little story told by Jesus. It’s a parable, a made-up story, to teach a lesson. It comes at a pivotal point in the story of Jesus as told by Matthew. Prior to this Jesus has been more confrontational with his teaching and his behavior. People are getting upset; people are voicing opposition; people are rejecting his message of the Kingdom of God. But despite that rejection he is such a compelling figure that the people crowd around to hear him, so much so that he has to create some distance from the crowd by setting out in a boat away from shore. Maybe he should have rented a football stadium to give his speech, you know, plan big. But then Jesus is not Barak Obama (and neither, should I say, is Barak Jesus). But here is Jesus on the boat telling his stories.
This story of the Sower is just the first of several parables Jesus tells to try to help the people understand what the Kingdom of God is really like. The problem is that the parables are not all that clear. Oh, the elements of the story are pretty simple to understand. A sower goes out and spreads seed in the typical fashion of farming at that time. Peasant farmers couldn’t afford plows and didn’t always have access to irrigation. So they threw the seed on the ground hoping for the best. Not all of the seeds make it. Some are eaten by birds, some landed on rocky ground and thus didn’t thrive, and some landed in the thorns and were choked off. But some landed in good soil and grew abundantly, resulting in a harvest up to a hundred fold. And that’s the story.
So, what does it mean? Well let me tell you a story. It’s my story. Or, at least, it’s my story about this parable, the parable of The Sower. I was raised in a Christian faith tradition that said that this parable is all about who is “in” and who is “out.” Those of us who were “in,” the saved ones, those who had responded to the word of God sown in our hearts, were the fortunate ones. We were small in number. Most people, we were taught, rejected the word and were doomed for judgment. But we, those who believed like us, were the fortunate few. And we were going to heaven and everyone else was going to hell. Those going to hell included the Catholics and the Presbyterians, and all non-Christians. Indeed, not even all Baptists were included. One had to pray the prayer of salvation with the right theological understanding in order to be included in the “in” crowd. So when we read this parable we took great comfort in knowing that we, the true believers, represented the soil that produced. For those who didn’t believe rightly this was a parable of judgment. The key was that to be saved one had to believe, to respond in the right way to the seed sown in our hearts. The offer of salvation, we were taught, had no effect unless one met the conditions.
So for many years I and my cohorts sought to “win” people to Christ. We were soul winners. Indeed, we became the Sower spreading the good seed, seeking to persuade folk to accept the seed in their hearts. So we talked about breaking up the hard soil of people’s hearts so they could receive the good seed. We preached the judgment of God hoping they would eschew the cares of this world and accept Jesus. At least that was what I was taught to do.
But over time Linda and I came to have severe difficulties with this reading of Jesus’ parable. As we worked in the inner-cities of Denver and Los Angeles, we found that this judgmental, fundamentalist view of Christianity did not serve the people we worked with well at all. And we found it wasn’t working for us either. Oh, our work with the people in our church was very rewarding and compelling. But the city challenged the relevance of my Fundamentalist faith. And over the course of several years I came to realize that this judgmental view of my faith was quite bankrupt. It really had no hope for the people we worked with. I had been a Baptist minister for ten years, slugging it out in the inner-city. But I had to walk away from it. I resigned from ministry. This was a fatal blow to my identification with my Fundamentalist heritage and a shattering blow to my faith. For months I had severe doubts about God’s love and concern for me. I had discarded the faith of my youth and had nothing to replace it with. I spent several months in depression, mourning the loss of my youthful dreams, totally disillusioned.
I struggled because all I had known was a certain way of being Christian and I had walked away from that. I had discarded my old beliefs and traditions but had not replaced them with anything positive. After about two years of wandering around in the faith wilderness Linda and I came upon a church: Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church in Denver. We went there primarily because of the music but soon discovered something quite wonderful. We discovered anew the grace of God. Here I found a positive affirmation of faith based on the grace of God. While there I was also affirmed in my ministerial skills and abilities by the pastoral staff and members of the congregation. They even allowed this former Baptist to preach on a couple of occasions. Today I find my faith to be overwhelmed with the realization of God’s grace in my life and in the world.
It’s almost like I discovered a whole new version of Christianity. My previous faith was based on the obsession with who’s “in” and who’s “out” and judgment upon all those who are “out.” But now my new faith is based on the obsession that all are included, everyone is “in.” Now I realize I am talking about two different versions of the same faith tradition that is Christianity. Yet the differences are quite profound. Let’s go back to Jesus’ story of The Sower to see those differences.
As I said before, I used to read this story as one about only a few receiving and most rejecting, about being “in” or “out,” and about the “outs” being judged severely. Now I don’t see it that way at all. This parable, and all the ones that follow, are parables of the Kingdom. They describe what the Kingdom of God is all about. This is central to Jesus’ teaching: The Kingdom of God has broken into this world and a new thing is happening. He describes it somewhat as a mystery, yet to be discovered. But what I have come to realize is that the mystery is Jesus himself. He is the Kingdom of God breaking into the world, in his very person. Jesus is the message.
So in this parable the Sower isn’t Jesus, it is God the Father. What Jesus turns out to be is the seed sown. But note what that does to the sense of the story. It means that Jesus has already, and quite literally, been sown everywhere in the world. Now we don’t tend to think that way. We’ve acted instead as if the Word, Jesus, wasn’t anywhere until we got there with him. The Christian church has conducted far too many missions on the assumption that we were “bringing Jesus” to the heathen. Instead, all we had to bring was the Good News of what the Word – who was already there – had done for them.
The seed in the story is sown on four different kinds of ground. It is meant to cover all human conditions. The seed, the Word, has been sown everywhere. It included everybody. In other words, the Kingdom of God is everywhere already. Or to put it yet another way, God’s love and grace permeate our world and our lives. God is already there doing the work of grace. We are recipients of God’s grace quite independent of any thing we do on our own. We can’t do anything to earn this acceptance by God. We belong to God based solely on God’s intent and not on the quality or correctness of our response.
But what about the birds and the hard ground and the thorny bushes, you say? Don’t they depict a rejection of God’s grace and therefore a rejection of God? Don’t the non-receptive spurn God and therefore deserve judgment? Let me repeat something I said yesterday in my sermon for Otto Sommerauer’s Memorial Service. God loved Otto. God loves all of us. God accepted Otto for who he was completely and without any preconditions. God accepts us for who we are completely and without any preconditions. God’s acceptance of us never goes away, never waivers, never lessens depending on how we respond. But God does call us, urges us, to respond. Otto felt God’s love. Otto knew God’s love in a deep and abiding way. And Otto responded to that love with his life. The devout life that was Otto was a personal response to the Word sown in his heart, in his life. And the bounty was a hundred fold.
You see, the trick to understanding these parables is that God so much wants us to experience the Word of grace give to us. But we can thwart that work of grace in our lives. We can let the cares of this world and the lure of wealth, as Jesus explains later, choke off that grace. We can let shallowness of soil result in shallow roots that get easily pulled out when tough times come. But we need let that happen. We can grow deep into the rich soil of God’s grace. That’s what Otto did and many people over the course of his ninety years were blessed because he did. Live in the grace that is already yours, that is already present in you, and you too will be a blessing. May that be the prayer of all of us. Amen.

“Who Is This Guy?”
Matthew 11:16 – 19, 25 – 30
Preached July 6, 2008
14th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Who is Jesus? We might think we know, but do we really. It seems people everywhere are fighting over who he really is. Last week at the General Assembly in San Jose I heard lots of arguments about who Jesus is. It seems all sides claim Jesus as their own. So, we turn to scripture to tell us who Jesus is. But even here, maybe even especially here, who Jesus is may not be easy to determine.
John the Baptist’s disciples came asking, “Who is this guy?” Is this Jesus really the messiah? Evidently, John wasn’t too sure. You see Jesus seemed to be going about all this quite differently then did John. They had different styles for sure. Jesus highlights these differences: John came neither eating nor drinking; Jesus came eating and drinking, with tax collectors and 'sinners'. But Jesus reassures John’s disciples he is the one by pointing to the works he has done.
Then Jesus says an interesting thing: "To what can I compare this generation?" They are like children playing games in the marketplaces, he says. We played the flute; we sang dirges. They didn't dance; they didn't mourn. What is interesting is that Jesus is not quoting any known source; this isn't some prophetic statement from the Old Testament. It is just a simile that he made up. Now it’s obvious that 'they' are the people of Israel. But who are the 'we'? Well, it’s John and Jesus. John, who didn't eat or drink and Jesus who did. John, who came preaching repentance, sang the dirge. He sang the dirge of repentance but the people did not mourn. Jesus, who came preaching the good news of the kingdom, played the flute. He played the songs of grace, truth, and true freedom but the people did not dance to his music.
Jesus plays the flute and invites us to dance. What a wonderful image. It fits right in with his invitation to come to him. Come to him all you who are weary and burdened and he will give you rest. Take his yoke upon you and learn from him and you will find rest for your souls. Lay down your burden so you can dance – the dance of freedom and grace.
What are these burdens we bear? Well, for Jesus’ audience their burden was most likely political and spiritual oppression. Jesus is speaking to the political reality of the day, Rome and its puppet local government King Herod, made life unbearably heavy for the people of Israel. And for Jesus, the leaders at the temple only made things worse. We know Jesus was talking about political oppression in his use of the word ‘yoke’. The simple device used to keep oxen under control so they would plow a straight line, was often a metaphor for oppressive governments. When Jesus says his yoke is easy, he is really saying the government of his kingdom, the Kingdom of God, will not be oppressive. Indeed, his government is liberating. So to the people in his hearing, Jesus spoke to political realities on the ground.
Ah, but that isn’t quite our reality. Oh, we deal with political realities, but I’d dare say, not as oppressive burdens. No, I think our burdens are more existential, more personal. Our burdens may be internal. Maybe these are the burdens Paul is describing in chapter seven of Romans. “I do not understand my own actions,” Paul says. “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate…I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” How incredibly confusing! It’s as if Paul is saying there are two people inside of him at war with each other—and the bad guy is winning the war. Of course, Paul’s appeal is that we don’t have to let the bad self win the war. Because of Christ’s death and resurrection we can be restored, we can be re-created, we can become whole. So what are these burdens we bear inside us?
Guilt from sin can be a heavy burden. Our arrogance and pride lead to wrongs committed against others. We hurt others. The guilt we bear from such actions weighs heavy on us. Jesus says, lay down your burden; accept my forgiveness and you will find rest. There is an incredibly poignant scene of forgiveness in the movie The Mission, set in eighteenth century South America. The notorious slave trader, Rodrigo, has come to the end of himself in remorse and guilt for his terrible deeds against the natives. He decides the only answer is to pay penance: He carries on his back the implements of his slave trade, weapons and armor, up the steep cliffs. He toils under his massive burden, wearily stumbling on the slippery rocks. As he reaches the top he is met by the very natives he used to kill and enslave. One of them comes toward him with a knife. Rodrigo believes he is going to be killed and his guilt would welcome it. But instead the knife is used to cut the rope, releasing the slave trader of his burden, sending it tumbling down the waterfall. All Rodrigo can do is breakdown in tears as the native tries to comfort him. Jesus says lay down your burden of guilt. Learn of me; accept my forgiveness and find rest.
But there is a more insidious, less obvious, burden we all bear. Often, it is so subtle and deeply ingrained that we do not even know it is there. But it is a heavy burden, indeed. This is the burden we impose on ourselves by our own free will. Oh, the burden might not seem self-imposed. It might seem like something that has been done to us. The burden might be the deep psychological scars of a troubled childhood. The burden might be serious wrongs done to us by others. The burden might be an addiction that has overtaken our life. The burden might be a sickness that saps our strength and joy. And as we carry these burdens we might very well consider ourselves victims – things done to us. These are not burdens of the guilt of pride and arrogance. Certainly I’m not the perpetrator of my plight. And we might be justified in asserting that. But even so, in some significant way these burdens we bear are of our own choosing. These burdens have become such an integral part of our lives that we can't imagine living without them. As heavy as they are we have become comfortable with these burdens. So we choose to bear them. We will not let them go.
I would like to tell you the story of a young lady who has struggled her entire life with such a burden. Her's is a story that might be more severe than most. But she tells it with such clarity of insight that I think we can all learn from her struggle. Marya Hornbacher, in her poignant, yet troubling book Wasted, tells the story of her eating disorder, how she struggled with bulimia and anorexia. How it almost killed her. How, in the depths of despair, she found grace that enables her to slowly heal. And, curiously, how she chose her fate out of her own free will.
Marya has been consumed with the issue of food and hunger as long as she can remember. She has always been aware of how her body takes up space. In many ways her eating disorder was the definition of her life. A life of deadly contradictions, as she puts it: "A wish to prove that you need nothing, that you have no human hunger, which turns on itself and becomes a searing need for the hunger itself."
There is plenty of blame to throw around. She decries a society that makes "thinness a strange state of grace." The cultural environment is a culprit in the sheer popularity of eating disorders. And she is very aware that her family played a significant role in "creating an environment in which an eating disorder may grow like a hothouse flower." She describes her parents like this: "My father, voracious, tried to gobble up my mother. My mother, haughty and stiff-backed, left my father untouched on her plate."
There are many methods of self-destruction available, she says, but "I chose an eating disorder." She describes her choice this way:
I look back on my life the way one watches a badly scripted action flick, sitting at the edge of the seat, bursting out, "No, no, don't open that door! The bad guy is in there and he'll grab you and put his hand over your mouth and tie you up and then you'll miss the train and everything will fall apart!" Except there is no bad guy in this tale. The person who jumped through the door and grabbed me and tied me up was, unfortunately, me.
We can be inclined to tie ourselves up. Or, as Marya puts it, "I was carefully constructing my own private hell." She describes endless afternoons after school at home alone, eating and eating and eating. "Filling the mouth, the hole in my heart, the endless hours with the numb stupor of food." But she did not like what she saw in the mirror.
And so it came to pass that one day, stuffed full of Fritos, I took a little trip downstairs to the bathroom. No one gave me the idea. It just seemed obvious that if you put it in, you could take it out. When I returned, everything was different. Everything was calm, and I felt very clean. Everything was in order. Everything was as it should be.
And, so her choices took over her life. "Bulimia took over my life," she says. Or, as St. Augustine would have put it, her freewill turned into the bondage of her will.
Over the years she managed to manipulate herself through many interventions, hospitalizations, and treatment centers. But she always kept in control, or her addiction never let her go. Until one day--one day of many spent in treatment centers-- she encountered grace in the form of Duane. As she puts it, "Duane, not much more than four feet tall, ruined everything." Duane, an eleven-year-old car thief, truant, and abandoned child, would not let her hide inside her disorder. "Marya," he said one day, "will you be my sister while you're here?" She smiled and said, "Yeah," "He looked up at me and gave me the goofiest, most wonderful grin. I felt like I'd been offered the Nobel Prize for Normalcy." Then Duane said, "I know you don't usually give hugs but I was wondering maybe if I could give you a hug, you don't have to hug back or anything, but I thought maybe since you've been here awhile and you haven't had any hugs at all in like weeks maybe you need a hug." She leaned down and stiffly hugged him. He held on to her neck to tightly, the contact was so startling, and his small self so warm, that she took a sharp breath inward and started to cry. "Hugs are very good for you," he said. And she just held on for dear life. From such seemingly small encounters Marya came slowly and haltingly to the belief that she was worth living. And out of that leap of faith she started down the road to healing. She began to lay down her burden and come to the rest.
Who is this guy, Jesus? "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” Oh, if we would only truly hear those words. Jesus invites us to find rest from our weary burdens. If we would let go of the burdens we cling to and claim our true selves, we just might feel like dancing, even if we don't know how. Jesus is playing his flute inviting us to dance with him in freedom and grace. Who is this guy? Why, he is the Lord of the Dance. He is the life that will never, never die. He will live in us if we live in him. So…
Dance, then, wherever you may be,
I am the Lord of the Dance, said He.
And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be,
And I'll lead you all in the dance, said He.