Allowed

You are allowed to take a break. You are a human, not a robot, and you require food and sleep and friends and the chance for your imagination to dance. Do not begrudge yourself these things. 

You are allowed to break down. You are a human, not Atlas, or gravity. The Earth will not spin off its course if you stop doing everything you're doing when your body and mind force their priority on you. The roaring river of life will continue its journey to the sea regardless of whether it carries you along with it. It is better to lay gasping on the shore than to drown. 

Please don't drown.

You are allowed to get people to help you. You are allowed to let people help you. You are a human, not some fictive perpetual motion machine. No, listen to me, dearheart. You do not have to do this by yourself. You cannot do this by yourself. You have spent all these years regretting every kindness given to you because each shows anew the lie of your self-sufficiency, but let me tell you, with the abundance of love that I have in my heart, that lie is killing you. Yes, I know that everyone will one day leave. Yes, I know that everyone will at some point let you down. Yes, I know, you have to be responsible for yourself. All of these things are true, but hear me: your life cannot be lived alone. It is too much to bear. It is too much to bear and you are surrounded by others who are willing and able to help you bear it. They are gifts. They are grace. Let them help you. Let them love you. 

You are allowed to love. 

You are allowed to love. 

You are allowed to love. 

It is not some mistaken emotion produced by an unbridled limbic system. It is not an unconcerned and unprincipled appeal to sentimentality. It is not some basic evolutionary or tribal urge that should be understood and transcended. It is none of the things that you worry it is. It is not weakness, it is not distractibility, it is not misplaced longing, it is not a waste. Love is how people care for each other, and we bear a great burden of care for one another. Love is how people watch after one another, and we are called to be each other's keepers. Love is how we carry each other along. Love is how we share with one another. Love is how we survive. No, more than that, more than survival. Love is life abundant. Love is what we are promised, what we are made for. 

Please, dearheart, remember always that you are allowed to love. You are allowed to love and be loved. Every good thing grows out of this. Give yourself permission to love. 

You Are a Liar/I Hope You're Eaten Alive

This is a reflection on two episodes of Conversations With People Who Hate Me that deal with the topic of rape and sexual assault. As Dylan says, if that's not something you should be reading about right now, that's totally fine. Go out and do something good for you. But if you've got the energy, this might help you see something new in the world you haven't seen before. 

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I want to be strong. I want to be kind. I want to help. Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ on my left, Christ on my right, Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me. I want to be good.

Mostly, though, I want to be strong and I kinda want people to know that I'm strong. I want to be capable and I kinda want to hear people tell me that I'm capable. St. Patrick's Breastplate fails me in the face of my stubborn adherence to this picture of who I am, who I want to be. I want to be useful. I want to do something. Not only do I want these things, but I think that my value, my worth depends on my ability to be useful.

And because I'm usually strong and because I'm usually capable and because my value system depends on it, I find myself particularly torn down when I find that I'm not strong enough or not capable enough. It's supremely frightening when I don't really understand why my strength has abandoned me or where my ability has gone.

That's what happened after I listened to episode 17 of Dylan Marron's Conversations With People Who Hate Me, You Are a Liar. Typically in my past, when difficult topics had come up for discussion, like rape and sexual assault, or any of the other million ways that hurt people hurt people, or careless people hurt people, the walls go up and the analytical mind comes on and I sit with the facts of the matter. No need to get emotional with it. No need to play on someone's heartstrings. Just give me the information I need to understand the situation. Thanks.

But that conversation was so... raw for me. I began listening with such hope that the person who had called a rape survivor a liar would, through hearing her story from her in her own words, come to understand the complexity of the matter and retract not only his comment but repent of the damaging ideas that had led to it. But as the episode went on, it became clear that he was entrenched in his way of thinking and that nothing was going to change his mind and I once again remembered why so many survivors of sexual violence and abuse don't report. People don't believe us anyway, don't hear us. And that's not going to change.

Inside me, my strength was telling me, "Oh, get over it. These are three people on the internet having a conversation that is in no way connected to you. The guy didn't mean anything by it. He didn't harbor any ill will. He just had a difference of opinion. Move on. Get over it. Get over it. Get over it. Shut it down. We have other shit to do."

I couldn't.

I laid there for God knows how long, then got up and found something to distract me. I didn't do any of the things that needed doing. I wasn't capable. I wasn't strong. I couldn't get over even this small thing. For the rest of my life, these small things will knock me off my feet and I will take days to recover and everything good about me, everything helpful will be gone. It's hopeless. I am useless. I am worthless.

This, my friends, is not what good is.

It's easier now, with some distance and some life-changes, to be gentle with my past self and with my mind. I had thought that strength was being able to play through the pain and I understand why I thought that. Sometimes strength is that. But strength is also seeing your hurt and allowing yourself time to heal. Strength is seeing that you are worthy of healing, that you are important enough, valuable enough just because you're here, to receive care for your wounds. Strength is allowing other people close enough to help. They probably want to help too. And usefulness and capability are all well and good, but they are not the pillars upon which your value stands. You, just as you are, are loved and capable of loving, and that is more than enough to build upon.

Once upon a time, during a moment of caring for me while I was deep in the throes of intense self-doubt, a friend asked me, "Well, you believe that Jesus loves you, right?" And I could not for the life of me fathom why he would bring up such a trite idea at such an important time. Sure. Jesus loves me. The Bible tells me so. I have accepted this and graduated from Sunday School. Can we move on to something more substantial now?

But I think he was actually aiming at something deeply important. My faith tradition gives me an anchor, a storehouse of hope and love that is never closed to me, though I may not think that I deserve to run to it. The truth that I do believe, phrased in a way that I will hear it, is that the Love that made the Cosmos also cares for me, regardless of what I've done or left undone, regardless of what I can do or will do, regardless of the state of my heart. Christ died for us while we were yet sinners and that proves God's love for us. My brain, my mind, my lived experience might cause me to doubt my worth, but keeping the faith, for me, as hard as it is, means remembering that I am loved by an everlasting, inexhaustible Love, and that I am able to give love because part of that Love lives in me. That, for me, is as substantial as it gets. This is the touchstone. This is home.

Now, this is my journey and not yours. I will be the first to admit that the faith tradition that anchors me is also the one that deeply scarred me, making me think that I was worth less because of my abuse. I have had to wrestle with Christianity and the Church and who I understand Christ to be in order to land in a place of sureness in my faith, and that is not the journey for everyone. Another belief system or another way of seeing the world might speak to you. You might anchor your hope in the good that we can do for each other, and find that goodness and hope and love in your friendships and other relationships, and that might provide the renewal you need to face the world. But let me leave you with two little sparks of hope anyway:

After years of thinking that I wasn't taken seriously or wasn't cared for when I reported, I found out that the truth of the matter is that I wasn't understood. Finding this out didn't heal every wound, but it did open the door for more love and more understanding in my life than I'd had before. Sometimes life surprises you.

And that guy, who wouldn't believe a rape survivor without empirical evidence? Well, Dylan had another conversation with him and I think you'll find encouragement from listening to this one. If you've got the energy, give episode 25, I Hope You're Eaten Alive, a listen. Sometimes people surprise you, if you're able to give them the chance.

Brought Together

The texts for this sermon were Genesis 2:18-24, Mark 10:2-16, and Hebrews 1:1-4 and 2:5-12. They are not easy texts. For good and gracious contextualizing thoughts on the gospel, which talks about divorce, I would direct you to this reflection on the gospel text, which directed much of my thinking for this sermon. The sermon as preached was framed differently in the beginning, with an emphasis on communion, which comes back around at the end, but by and large, this is the sermon text. 

I want to tell the people that we were made with an unquenchable desire for something other than ourselves lodged deep down in our guts. I want to tell the people that the longing that they feel is real and powerful and motivating. I want to tell them that it is right, and a good and joyful thing always and everywhere to reach out to another. In times of sorrow and in times of celebration, in times of loneliness and in times of togetherness, in times of comfortable stasis and in times of life-altering fracture, we find our way to one another, and this is as it should be.

The ancient Israelites understood this truth and believed in it so much that they wrote it into their story of creation. The Lord God sees that it was not good for the first human to be alone, the scriptures tell us, and so God seek to create a companion, an aide, for the human. God creates and creates. God makes every living creature and the human names each (what a powerful thing, naming!) and still, at the end, no aide was found for the human.

And then,

After hiding the human in the depth of sleep,

The Lord God gently takes a piece of the human and shapes it into another.

The entirety of creation has passed by at this point. The sky, the seas, the ground, the depths of the earth, the stars, the plants, everything that lives on the earth or in the ocean or soars through the sky, all of the majesty and the marvel, and it is this other, this singular other and none other, that brings the human to song upon waking. This, finally, is the creation, the help, that meets the depth of the human’s longing. This is bone of bone and flesh of flesh. And the human names her Woman and names himself Man and knows that to this one he will cling.

Our lives bear out of the enduring truth of this story. We have all met others in our lives that we have clung to. Good friends. Good family members. Mentors. Partners. The expansiveness of the human’s hymn is so often forgotten. This, at last, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. This, finally, God, finally, is one who feels so close to me that they must have a piece of me hidden inside of them, in their very being, deep down in their bones. My eyes can see the great goodness of Creation inside this one and it makes me sing. To this one I will hold. With this one I will stay.

We all long for these others in our lives, throughout our lives.

But.

We do not live in an idyllic garden, surrounded by every good thing to eat, at peace with each other and Creation around us. We live here. We live here, in this world, with people who will disappoint us and hurt us and leave us. We live in this world where it is so easy to miss the humanity of someone else, to, in our blindness, miss a piece of ourselves inside of another. We see glimmers of the good world we were made for, the good relationships we were shaped to hope for, but we are all the same surrounded by pain, and in our pain, we hurt others. We may not want to. We may not understand why or how we do it. But to be human in this world is to struggle with the pain given to us and the pain we give away.

Jesus understood this. Jesus, the Word Made Flesh who lived among us, the Word present at creation who knows us better than we know ourselves and loves us still, Jesus understood that humans struggle with pain. So when someone asked him, “Is it legal for a man to leave a woman destitute, without any way to live, shamed, ostracized, unable to find a home? Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”, Jesus told them, “No.” Jesus said, “I understand how you have permitted yourselves to live, why you have given yourselves permission to cause lifelong pain to another, but you must understand: From the beginning, God called you to one another. God entrusted you to each other’s care. God joined you together, flesh of each other’s flesh and bone of each other’s bone, and you must not separate yourselves in this way. You must understand this. When you are joined, you have a burden of care for each other, and you must abide by this, and be worthy of it. To do otherwise is betrayal. To do otherwise is pain.” When I read this story from Mark, which contains such harsh words and such harsh teaching, I hear Jesus pleading with us, feeling our pain, understanding our desire for freedom from it, and begging us, “Be careful with one another. Care for one another. Please understand that you belong to one another.”

And as if he knew that we would miss this, that we would get distracted by all the complexity that marriage entails and misunderstand our burden of care for each other, the writer of Mark’s gospel tells us another story of togetherness. You see, people had been bringing little children to Jesus, but the disciples wanted to keep them away. They spoke sternly to them.

Jesus, upon seeing this, is indignant. Not only have they misunderstood that they must care for one another, but they have misunderstood again that there are some that we must extend particular care for. It was not only the women of this time who were vulnerable to this painful world, it was also the children. (And I think, in our heart of hearts, we understand that not much has changed in the millennia since Christ walked this Earth.) Jesus, heartbroken and full of love for these little ones who had come to see him and had been turned away, speaks to his disciples and he says, “Do not do this thing. Do not stop them. Let the little children come to me. Don’t you see? The World to Come, in all its goodness and togetherness, belongs to them. You have so much to learn from these ones, from their love and tenderness, their curiosity and their wonder.”

And Jesus lifts the children up in his arms, as he will lift up all of us in his outstretched arms on Golgotha, and Jesus blesses them. These ones who had been told that they had no place beside Jesus are the ones who are particularly blessed by him. When the God of the Universe came to this world in flesh and bone, he reached out to the ones who could give him nothing but love and answered their love with blessing. And even as he held them, he spoke to those who would have stood in the way of that blessing. “These belong to me, just as you belong to each other. Do not stop this.”

The writer of Hebrews gives us an argument for understanding Jesus’ actions here in the Gospel of Mark. In beautiful language, the writer reminds us that God has always been speaking to us, speaking to the ancestors in the past in many various ways, but that God has spoken anew in Jesus. God has spoken anew not by a prophet or by an angel, but by a Son, who is truly God as the Father and the Spirit are. He cares for us (and what are we that God cares for us, is mindful of us?), and he carries us along throughout our lives. Though he has returned to glory, for a while he lived here on this earth, moving through the world in flesh and bone just like us, and died, just as we will all die, and in this death brought us all to glory.

It is in the final verses of our reading from Hebrews that the author ties all of this together, our whole story from the man and the woman in the garden, to Jesus and the women and the children, to today. The author writes, “It was fitting that God, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through sufferings. For the one who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one Father. For this reason Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters, saying,

‘I will proclaim your name to my brothers and sisters,
in the midst of the congregation I will praise you.’”

Jesus has been here on this Earth. He knows our pain as deeply as we know it, and how we struggle with it, and how we suffer, because he suffered it too. And still, despite all that pain, God calls us God’s children, ones to be brought to glory. Despite everything, Jesus, who has brought us along with him, is not ashamed to call us his sisters and brothers. Before the world, he claims us as his.

And in calling us brothers and sisters, he gives us back to each other. He calls us again to care for each other.

For we are our brothers’ keepers. We are our sisters’ keepers. We are each others’ keepers. Flesh of flesh and bone of bone, we belong to each other and we are called to care for one another.

And so, we gather around this table for this meal, siblings together claimed by the Most High God, to remember what God in Christ has done for us. God has called us to each other from the very beginning, all humans everywhere together, and God has called us back to God, coming down from Majesty to suffer and die for us, that we might return back to majesty in love and thanksgiving. We gather this morning with Christians around the world, other daughters and sons of God, brothers and sisters together with Christ, to bring the pain that the world has given us and leave it on the cross, to be reconciled to each other, and to be given strength to care for each other as brothers and sisters ought. Best of all, God meets us here. Christ joins us when we share this meal that remembers him and in his presence we find love and joy, peace and comfort, strength for today and hope for tomorrow. In communion, Jesus gathers all of us once again up into his arms, blesses us, and gives us back to each other.

And what God has joined, let no one tear asunder.

Amen.