Be Kind to the Mind

Once a quarter, the Sunday service at Open Table (United Church of Christ) features the story of one of our members or participants.  On "fifth Sundays" a volunteer shares with us a story from her or his faith journey.  We cultivate storytelling as a spiritual practice because we are storytelling creatures. Telling our stories is a way of doing the inner work of reflecting spiritually and the outer work of connecting to others.  We help hear one another into awareness of God's work in our own lives, and we listen in these sacred moments to ways we can join in God's work in the world.  These stories always seem to include experiences of pain or challenge as well as increased compassion and hope.

But these stories are often difficult to tell and meant for our community alone, stories shared among a people where trust has been established.  

Last night we were honored that one of our own shared with us the story of her struggle with mental illness.  We heard of the terrors experienced from delusional thinking and visual hallucinations.  We learned of a ten-year struggle to find the right medications and overcome the burdensome stigma of mental illness, of one caring doctor who "never gave up" in those ten long years, and of a faithful life partner, too.  And we received important facts about the prevalence of mental illness that cuts across all demographic categories.

Thankfully, our society at last is being more enlightened about mental illnesses and disorders and less skittish about discussing and disclosing them.  We are hopeful that medical research is coming ever closer to understanding and addressing, for instance, the skyrocketing number of children being diagnosed with autism, and of elders dealing with Alzheimer's.  We pray for for treatments to help teens and adults experiencing eating disorders and drug addictions and postpartum depression and bi-polar disorder and alcoholism.   

The Justice and Witness Ministry of the UCC advocates for mental health.  Our denomination has declared: “Good health is part of God's intention for all people. Health involves the whole person, body, mind, and spirit. Health is a concern of the whole community and healing and health care are valid ways of proclaiming the gospel and ministering in the name of Jesus Christ.”

In lieu of a sermon, I share today the link to an article by a neuropsychologist that offers all of us a practical perspective on ways to minimize harm that can come to our minds and bodies.  I've preached before on themes related to facing into our pain rather than remaining in denial.  This article does not contradict that point but balances it helpfully, I believe.  It came to me through the wonderful Charter for Compassion, which I follow on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CharterforCompassion .  

Here is the article by Dr. Rick Hanson:

Just One Thing: Minimize Painful Experiences
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/just_one_thing_minimize_painful_experiences

JESUSCARE

Text: Mark 5: 21-43

     Today’s Gospel reading gives us more detail, pathos, and suspense than usual from the terse writer of Mark.   How can our hearts not go out to a dying twelve-year-old girl—and to her father, so desperate to save her that he, an important synagogue leader, falls prostrate before Jesus?  How can we not be a bit repelled—let’s be honest—by a woman with an embarrassing gynecological condition, a woman ostracized for being ritually unclean, a woman who waylays Jesus as he's en route to the child?

As I think about Jesus being called, simultaneously, to heal two desperate people in two separate locations, I think of the classic superhero dilemma. You know. Where the bad guy creates two mutually irresolvable disasters, and Superman or Spiderman (yes, comic books require a male hero) must decide if he will save the woman he loves or an entire city doomed for destruction.  He can’t be in two places at one time.  Neither can Jesus—who’s not even a real superhero.

Then I think about my own limitations, and yours, as we join Jesus in healing a wounded world.  Must I as a minister of the Gospel, must we as a caring congregation, must all of us as citizens of this nation whose founding we celebrate in three days—must we do triage to help the few we can?  Must we admit our personal, congregational, and societal limits in order to do some bit of good, or else waste our efforts on those beyond saving, or quit trying altogether?  

I suppose this week’s top headline brought the problem of human limitations to the forefront of this Gospel reading for me.  You know the headline I’m talking about but which CNN and FOX news both got wrong when they first broadcast it on Thursday. I’m talking about the Supreme Court’s ruling that the Affordable Care Act IS constitutional.  With all the attention on what some derisively call Obamacare and its promises of universal healthcare, I’ve tried to imagine what Jesuscare looks like.   So I’ve looked with fresh eyes at today’s stories about Jesus’ health care plan for the kingdom of God. 

Not that I think the Bible contains instructions for reforming health care in America.  But Mark’s Gospel says an awful lot about healing.  And I do find in today’s paired healing stories something that prods me to ask about the personal and systemic limits we face in addressing problems today as U.S. citizens and as modern followers of Jesus.

On the surface, this Gospel passage suggests there are no limitations on Jesus’s healing.  Everyone, it seems, has access to his miraculous power: from the twelve-year-old daughter of the prestigious synagogue leader to a woman considered ritually unclean because for twelve years she suffered from menstrual bleeding.  Both the privileged and the pariahs are healed.  Both the petted and the pathetic.  Yes, even gynecological issues are covered under Jesus’ health care benefits.  Even a woman abused by the previous health care system that had, the story says, taken her very last penny but had left her sicker than before.  Even a woman with the “preexisting condition” of a twelve-year-old illness.  (The number twelve repeated in this story, by the way, signifies completeness, fullness, as in the twelve tribes of Israel, as in the twelve disciples.)  Jesus’s plan seems to cover everyone fully.  Even the desperately poor.  Even a seemingly incurable woman all other physicians have failed to cure.  Even a seemingly dead girl.  I’d call that universal health care.

But surely there are limits to the resources that support Jesus’ health care system.   True, he heals many. But he didn’t heal everyone in the enormous crowds clamoring for his care.  How many others never got close enough to see him, much less to touch his garment?  How many others called out to him in vain? And what was the cost to him and his followers for these healings?

Jesus himself knew human limitations.  He was not a nonstop healing machine.  At times he had to withdraw from the crowds to replenish his body and spirit.  As I gratefully anticipate the first week of vacation I’ve had in a year, I understand the need to withdraw for a while.  But I wonder . . . whose suffering went unrelieved while Jesus rested?  Mark’s Gospel shows Jesus growing overwhelmed by the crowds.  By this point in Mark’s narrative, readers start realizing Jesus is not going to be able to keep at it much longer.  If you try to heal everyone, then your limited resources—physical or financial or spiritual—will run out, right?

Let’s peek ahead in Mark to see if that’s the case. Immediately following today’s two stories of healing, Mark tells us Jesus traveled to his hometown of Nazareth—where it turned out that he tried but “he could do no deed of power there” (Mark 6:5), and Jesus’s skeptical homies scoffed at this prophet who was without honor in his hometown (Mark 6:4). 

Jesus had limitations.  But just because our resources are finite does not mean they are ineffective. Limited beings can still be powerful and generous and selfless and, indeed, innovative and collaborative.  Notice what Jesus does next to make his healing ministry sustainable.

Immediately after disappointing his hometown, Jesus implemented the next phase of his ministry, which was to instruct and then send out his disciples “two by two” (Mark 6:7) and Mark tells us they “cast out many demons and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them” (Mark 6:13).  An episode of failure perhaps created a paradigm shift for Jesus.  A healing ministry becomes sustainable only when others are empowered to participate as healers. 

For us, new church, this means that our growth, impact, and sustainability are tied to our willingness to share leadership and train others in the healing ways of Jesus and include all in a ministry of hope.  A Jesus model of leadership starts with a healer, who taps and trains others, who further maximizes the healing impact by equipping still others.  Members of our new church council will be talking with you soon as they seek to share leadership with you. Healing happens best in community. Today’s hymn expresses this idea as a prayer: “Healer of our every ill . . . teach us ALL your way of healing.”

For folks like us, raised in an individualistic and competitive culture, a dying child and hemorrhaging woman might seem to be competing for limited health resources, and we may feel pressed to choose which one gets our care.  We might be susceptible to inflammatory threats of "death panels."  Certainly resources are limited.  Hard choices have to be made.  Caring for our neighbors is not a license to be fiscally irresponsible.  I’m not so idealistic that I don’t get that. I don’t want my grandchildren to bear the burden of debt I help create. We must consider those who are not yet on this planet.  And there are many ways of understanding how we can do that best.

Yet I believe this also to be true: we have more than we think we have. We can cooperate to equip others to be healers of broken communities. That’s what the story of the feeding of the 5,000 teaches a few verses later.  If we don’t grasp our own fish and bread too tightly, then all will have enough.  We don’t have limitless resources—as a church, as a nation, as a planet.  But we have enough if we are compassionate.    If we prioritize care for one another, maybe my good health does not have to cost you your health.  If we can hear the words of Jesus to Jairus, the distraught father: “Do not fear; only believe," then healing can happen.

Even within our own congregation, if we all give in ways that truly challenge us, so that our giving then changes us, so that  we practice giving as an essential spiritual discipline, so that we cultivate gratitude and generosity, so that we don’t deplete some leaders without ever engaging others—then everyone receives what she or he needs.  If we as a faith community take turns serving and being served, giving and receiving, the healing ministry of Jesus is continued in a sustainable way.

Another way of facing the limits—within America’s newly upheld healthcare system or within Jesuscare—is to ask if our healing mission should be broadly or narrowly focused?  How specific is Jesus’s mission statement?  I’m told that a really good mission statement is precise enough to guide an organization in every decision it makes.  But Jesus’s great commandment to love God, neighbor, and self seems broad.  And I wonder if today’s story suggests Jesus himself got diverted at times. 

I hope he did.  I think he did.  What I love best about this story is that Jesus is on his way to help one person but gets detoured by another who reached out to him, and he paused long enough to do the deeper healing of her soul.  He said he was going to do one thing, but he ended up doing another.

Have you ever taken a detour in life?  Have you ever set out with one intention and ended up doing something else that turned out to be a more joyous or satisfying or healing experience than the original might have been?  Some of us are the ADHD- types who are too interruptible.  Others of us are too inflexible.  Today’s story tells me that Jesus probably knew what if felt like to be buffeted by all those clamoring for  help. Seems he both improvised and stayed the course.

We as a congregation have a mission statement that grounds us.  It’s written on the front of every worship bulletin and it does truly guide us in our ongoing discernment in how to be the church God is calling us to be.  But we can’t hear a Still Speaking God if we pour concrete around those words.

At last week's retreat, the church council generated three simple themes for the coming church year: growth, service, and leadership.  You’ll hear more about what these three words mean to us as Jenni leads our 6:00 discussion hour. You’ll also have a chance to share your hopes and dreams for the coming year with our new council members there to listen to you.  A clear mission or focus for a church, and for a particular year in the life of that church, is a good thing. 

But let’s stay relational more than organizational. Let’s be strategic but let’s also be at times spontaneous. Let’s remain alert enough to notice when a suffering soul pushes her way into our midst. 

I encourage you to study the issues of the day, but whatever your opinions about Obamacare—I invite you to ground yourself in Jesuscare.  It’s a healthcare plan for the whole person—body, mind, and spirit. 

Today we are blessing the work of a new church council.  But all of us are, in Jesuscare, both the healed and the healer. All of us can identify with someone in this story:  We have rushed a child to an emergency room and can feel the father’s terror.  We have depended on others for care and compassion and empathize with a sick and ostracized woman. We have overextended ourselves for the good of family or community and can imagine Jesus’s possible feelings of exhaustion and inadequacy.

Yet in this story, Jesus accomplishes the superhero feat: he saves both the woman on the seashore and the child in the village.  And somehow the story teller’s repeated details running through both stories suggest that saving one is not in conflict with saving the other. In fact, these two healings may be inextricably connected.  Jesus, for instance, seems to have Jairus’ little daughter in mind even while he addresses the hemorrhaging woman as “daughter.” Listen to Jesus’s closing cryptic words: “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”

Did you catch that odd contradiction?  Jesus says the woman’s faith has already healed her.  And then adds, “Go . . . and be healed.” 

Maybe Jesuscare is ongoing and complex. 

Maybe the kind of healing that Jesus offers is never complete until the entire community is healed and whole. 

May it be so, O God.

INVITATION TO THE TABLE

Today’s gospel story ends with Jesus telling the little girl’s family to give her something to eat.  Healing is complete when we come to the Table.  Eating in that day was a communal event, often a celebratory rite.  Like a child who has been resurrected, we participate now in celebrating resurrection.  Arise!

The Hidden God

Exodus 33: 12-23

Moses said to the Lord, “See, you have said to me, ‘Bring up this people’; but you have not let me know whom you will send with me. Yet you have said, ‘I know you by name, and you have also found favor in my sight.’ ¹³Now if I have found favor in your sight, show me your ways, so that I may know you and find favor in your sight. Consider too that this nation is your people.” He said, “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.”  And he said to him, “If your presence will not go, do not carry us up from here. ¹⁶For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people, unless you go with us? In this way, we shall be distinct, I and your people, from every people on the face of the earth.” ¹⁷The Lord said to Moses, “I will do the very thing that you have asked; for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name.” ¹⁸Moses said, “Show me your glory, I pray.” ¹⁹And he said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you the name, ‘The Lord’; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. ²⁰But,” he said, “you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.” ²¹And the Lord continued, “See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock; ²²and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; ²³then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.”

This feminine image of the Spirit is taken from artist Doris Klein's website: http://www.dorisklein.com/feminine.html.  Ruah, the title of the painting, is a feminine Hebrew word meaning breath, wind, inspiration or spirit. This image portrays God as an older, wise woman who breathes spirit and life into a figure gently supported in her hands.

What kind of God do you need?

The reading from Exodus tells us what kind of God Moses thought HE needed.

Although in some respects the Moses story is a narrative about Moses and the people he is leading, at its essence, the Moses story is about Moses and the God who leads him, even as that God remains somewhat hidden from him.  You’ll recall that, according to the biblical story, the Moses-and-God relationship began when God spoke to Moses in a burning bush and Moses responded by asking for God’s name.  God replied evasively:  “I Am Who I AM.”  As the Moses story nears its conclusion and Moses nears the end of his life, Moses asks, according to today’s reading, to SEE the one whom he has never been able to name.  Again, God slips from Moses’s grasp.  “I’ll be present to you,” God assures him (verse 13).  “And my goodness will pass before you” (verse 19).  “But,” he says, “you will never see my face.”  Moses wants to name God and to see God.  Instead, God promises to be present with Moses and to give him evidence of God’s goodness.  But Moses’ God will never be definitively namable or fully visible.  Moses’ God is bigger than a single name or image.  In fact, in the Ten Commandments God had given Moses, near the top of the list, are restrictions on the use of God’s name and the creation of God’s image. 

Like Moses, we often want to summon and relate to God on our terms.  We often think the part of God we have been shown is the totality of God.  But over and over again, God says, “You cannot reduce me to your words and images.  What you DO experience of me is only a small part of the Divine Mystery.”  Yet we keep forgetting that God—the “I Am Who I Am”—is always more than what we imagine God to be.  We freeze God into familiar poses and lock God into little boxes of our creation.  And whenever we convince ourselves that ONE name for God captures God’s totality, we construct a false idol rather than experience the presence and goodness of God that can never be contained.  We worship the Father-God, believing that one image IS God.  When we rely on one or a few names for God, we commit idolatry and prevent ourselves from a fuller experience of the Sacred.  In God’s basic ground rules, conferred from Mt. Sinai, God is saying, “To fully experience my presence and goodness, you can’t reduce me to your culture’s idea of who I am.”

And yet we verbal, visual creatures need words and images to process our experiences.  Perhaps what we can try to do is simply remember that our God Talk and God Pictures are incomplete.  So we keep reaching for more expansive and inclusive ways of expressing who God is—and who God’s people are.

God’s people, I believe, come from all ages, races, cultures, physical abilities, socio-economic levels, sexual orientations . . . and genders.  The United Church of Christ (www.ucc.org) considers it a matter of justice to speak about people in inclusive ways, and since gender inclusion has presented a particular challenge for reforming Christian discourse, let me specifically lobby for gender-inclusive language.  Until 30-40 years ago, masculine pronouns were the default pronouns in the English language.  That practice is no longer considered grammatical--or just.  The word “men” at one time was used to represent men and women; the word “mankind” was used to mean “all people."  But those terms sometimes did just refer to men, leaving it up to women to try to figure out through the context if they were really included in a statement.  Using gender-inclusive language is a way to make God’s welcome explicit.  Besides, gender-inclusive language is often more true to the original Hebrew and Greek words of the Bible.  For instance, in the original Greek the angel greeted the shepherds with the Christmas message of “peace on earth, good will to all people”—rather than “good will to men”—as the KJV later translated those originally inclusive words.  We’re sometimes more biblical in using words that explicitly include both genders.

The fact that grammar handbooks for the last 30 years have prescribed gender-inclusive language shows how mainstream is this expectation—in the academy, in commerce, in law.  To say “people" rather than “mankind“ is not a matter of political correctness; it is a matter of simple justice.  Because words matter.  Language not only reflects our world—it shapes our world.  If the children of Open Table grow up believing that male is the norm—they will understand their place in the world differently than if they hear in the words and images around them an equality between men and women—not a sameness, but an equality.  We can use language that does not privilege one gender over another.  We can create a culture that supports women and men equally in their spiritual growth and access to church leadership.  We don’t have to anxiously police one another’s speech any more than we need to police other ways we try to act with justice in an imperfect world.  But we can become more aware of ways our word choices affect our relationships and roles.

As society became increasingly aware of the way harmful attitudes about race or physical difference or sexuality or other differences are forged and perpetuated through language, theologians have been showing us that our language about God has also been in need of expansion. 

Did you recognize the chorus from an old hymn we sang after the Hebrew Bible reading?  How did you feel about altering the words “He hideth my soul in the cleft of the rock” to "SHE hideth my soul in the cleft of the rock”?  Did you find it irreverent to change the pronouns from male to female?  If so, why?  Is God a particular gender for you?  Does God have male anatomy—or any anatomy?  (time for silence)

Radical feminist Mary Daly came to believe that Christianity was irredeemably patriarchal.  She did not see how women could remain Christian and so she exited the Christian camp with this shocking explanation: “If God is male, then male is God. The divine patriarch castrates women as long as he is allowed to live on in the human imagination.”

But other feminist theologians acknowledge that while women have often been excluded and limited by the Church, Christian theology is inherently inclusive and loving—even if it hasn’t always been practiced so inclusively and lovingly.  Like these feminist Christians, I find myself hopeful that the Church is reforming.  And one way to do so is through an awareness of our worship words and images for God and humanity.

In 1995 the United Church of Christ published the most thoroughly inclusive hymnal to date.  It has been lauded for the addition of many new and beautiful lyrics to expand our images for God—such as the hymn “Bring Many Names” we sang at the start of our service.  The New Century Hymnal also altered many traditional hymns to eliminate “any suggestion that God is king, father, or lord”—images of God that are not only exclusively male but also, for some, troubling with their connotations of domination over others.[i]   The responses to this hymnal have varied.  As important as inclusive language is to me, I agree with some critics that some of the revisions are “clunky”.  But the songs we sing and the words we say are important—maybe more important than the cozy feeling we have when we sing a familiar hymn.  Maybe we are learning new songs now so that the ones who follow us will have familiar and inspiring words that include all people and that let God out of the box we’ve kept “him” in.

I may be the poorest of preachers, but one thing the children of Open Table will know is that God’s earthly representatives can come in female form.  Our little girls and boys will understand God and themselves differently because they have seen women and men serving God equally.  Christians have hidden the fullness of god behind masculine nouns and pronouns for God, but scholars are now rediscovering “rich feminine imagery for God and God’s people in scripture”[ii].  There are rich resources we have yet to mine.

Wittgenstein said that “the limits of our language are the limits of our world”[iii] .  Perhaps it is also true that the limits of our language are the limits of our God. 

If you have never imaged God as mother, I would encourage you to try that for just a moment.  And if that feels uncomfortable, then all the more reason to sit with that image for awhile.  Picture in your mind’s eye not your mother, but Mother God-- who blesses, who cares, who feeds, who nurtures and guides, who holds you and heals you.  (time for silence)

Moses thought he needed a God he could name and hold and see and control. 

I don’t want a God I can put in my pocket.  I don’t need a God I can call like a dog on command.

I need a God who holds me.  I need a God who summons me. 

God told Moses that he would never see God’s face.  I suppose you and I will never know if that divine face is feminine or masculine.  But I doubt that God is a physical being.  What we can see is OF God, not God.  What we see is what God leaves in God’s wake: goodness and glory.  We see God’s back, according to this story, as God slips on ahead of us, trailing behind goodness.  That’s how we experience God, says the Moses story.  If you try to pour concrete around God, you’ll realize you’ve built a garden variety idol.  For God is on the move: a force for good, an energy of life and love.  We feel God’s presence.  And wherever goodness is found, we catch the faintest glimpse of God.  For me that glimpse is sometimes aglow in shades of palest pink.

Benediction:  May the blessing of God go before you.  May her grace and peace abound.  May her spirit live within you.  May her love wrap you round.  May her blessing remain with you always.  May you walk on holy ground.  (Miriam Therese Winter)

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[i] Sokolove, Deborah.  “More Than Words” in New Feminist Christianity: Many Voices, Many Views.  Eds. Mary Hunt and Diann L. New.  Woodstock: Skylights Path, 2010, pp. 186-187.

[ii] http://www.ucc.org/worship/inclusive-language/

[iii] Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Qtd. by Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza.  “Critical Feminist Biblical Studies” in New Feminist Christianity: Many Voices, Many Views.  Eds. Mary Hunt and Diann L. New.  Woodstock: Skylights Path, 2010, p. 89.