Sermon: "Enough"

I preached this sermon at the Thursday night healing service at American University. The Biblical texts are Exodus 16:13-21 and 2 Corinthians 12:1-10.

The Israelites were finally free.

After years of suffering under the iron hand of the Egyptian pharaoh, this long oppressed people had followed a new leader, Moses, away from slavery and into a new reality of liberation. The Egyptian army had been cast into the sea and the Israelite tribe, with much rejoicing, set out to find a new, beautiful home.

Two months into the journey, though, things have gotten real. Food and water are in shorty supply, and people are beginning to wonder just what kind of freedom this Moses—and this YHWH God he claims to represent—has gotten them into. In fact, some among the Israelites are wondering whether it would have been better to suffer with full bellies in Egypt rather than to die of starvation in this alien wilderness.

Luckily for Moses’ street cred, God has an idea. “I’ll rain bread from heaven for you,” says God. “That ought to satisfy those complaining Israelites. Heck, I’ll even throw in some quail for good measure.” So that’s where Moses and the Israelites find themselves, waking in the morning to a fine dew that evaporates to leave behind miraculous bread, “as fine as frost on the ground.” The Israelites call it manhu, which means, “what is it?” We transliterate it as “manna.” Manna, whatever that is, from heaven. Enough to feed a people.  

As it turns out, it’s just enough to feed a people, because it seems there are certain rules and regulations involved in the gathering of this mysterious bread from heaven. Try to hoard it—heck, try to save even a little bit of what you’ve gathered for tomorrow—and you’ll find that it’s gone bad by the time the sun rises on a new day. This isn’t Chinese take-out, and there will be no leftovers from this particular meal. It bears noting that this looks like bad economics on God’s part. What a waste, all that extra manna going to rot. And of course there’s the nearsighted personal finance advice that this passage seems to give. My parents have drilled it into my head the importance of savings since I got my first allowance. And here’s God, explicitly telling the Israelites not to put some aside for a rainy day, or for a drought-like desert day as the case might be.

I do think there are hints here about God’s economy, what author Shane Claiborne calls “an economy rooted in love.” Nobody hoards in this economy. Nobody gets more than any other. But nobody goes hungry either. It’s the economy the early disciples of Christ followed in the Book of Acts, sharing all of their possessions and ensuring that nobody was in permanent need. Nobody goes wanting. Everybody has enough.

This “enough” that God offers the Israelites in this passage from Exodus is grace, sheer grace. It’s a gift offered by God to feed God’s people. And it’s a gift, please note, that doesn’t simply leave the Israelites where they are. It’s a gift that transforms. It teaches them a new way of being, with God, within their own individual lives, and with each other. In the desert places, in the hungry places, the places that are not yet the promised land, there is regenerating grace to be found.

There is, then, a social aspect to grace, to the love of God manifest in our lives. But in our own personal desert spaces, too, and in the hungry yearnings of our communities, we look for God’s grace. Or perhaps we are not looking for grace, and it finds us anyway. Perhaps we are looking for something…can I say more?

This is the position that Paul finds himself in as he writes yet another letter to the Corinthians. Here Paul is pulling a characteristic Pauline trick of saying that he’s not going to boast about himself while actually boasting about himself. “Oh, I won’t boast,” says Paul, “but I will tell you about some anonymous someone—nudge nudge wink wink—who had these miraculous visions.” And then Paul pauses, and takes on a truly vulnerable tone. He tells his Corinthian readers that he’s hurting, that he’s really hurting. That he’s looking for God to take something from him, some part of him that causes him a deep pain. We don’t know what it is, exactly, but we know that Paul wants done with it. He wants complete healing. And he has to settle for grace.

I love the way that Paul recounts God’s words to him, because I think it can be such an accurate reflection of our experience with grace. “My grace is sufficient for you,” says God. Sufficient. Not extravagant, necessarily. Not everything that we’re looking for. Just sufficient. Just barely enough.

I heard this text, really heard it, for the first time while I was in the hospital at Sibley, soon to be diagnosed with a form of bipolar disorder. The thing with bipolar disorder, like many other diseases, is that there’s no cure. Nobody could tell me that this thing, this painful part of me that I just wanted to go away, would disappear or fade away. I prayed and prayed, and never did God promise me that God would take this away from me. I did get some kind of assurance. I did feel, sometimes, the presence of God, just as I did feel, sometimes, what felt like the absence of God. God had not abandoned me. I did get grace. And I had to ask myself: is this enough?

Now my roommate at Wesley asked me what I was preaching on tonight, and when I told him, he told me I better not come in here and preach some version of “God doesn’t give you more than we can handle.” My roommate was a student at Virginia Tech when the mass shooting happened in 2007, and he had more than his share of well-meaning Christians telling him things like, “God has a plan” and “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.” I know Mark covered this a few months back, but that’s just a false statement. It indicates that God is handing us, as atomized individuals, suffering, and that we’re supposed to go it alone on our own God-given strength. My roommate says simply, of the shootings at Virginia Tech, “It was more than I could handle.”

I think Paul is going through this experience of feeling the absence of God, is feeling that he has more than he could handle. And God’s response doesn’t seem very encouraging. “My grace is sufficient for you.” It’s barely enough. And not, “I will take away your weakness,” but rather, “My power is made perfect in weakness.” God’s power is made perfect in weakness. That’s a tough one to understand. It sounds like it’s saying that our places of pain are just part of God’s plan. I don’t think they’re part of God’s plan. But I do think that God is present in our places of weakness, and that this allows us to lead from a place of vulnerability instead of a place of coercive strength. That those places in our lives that seem so repugnant also can make us more intentional, perhaps more tender, perhaps more real. It’s the realization that we ourselves might be good enough.

There’s a concept in the New Testament that seminary professors call the “already-not yet tension.” It’s a theme in a lot of Paul’s letters. On the one hand Christ is risen, and all reality has changed because of it, so much so that Paul can ask, “Where is your victory, death?” On the other hand, Christ is not yet come. We still live in a broken world. And in this passage from 2nd Corinthians Paul is experiencing that tension. God’s grace is sufficient. It is already present. It is transforming his life. But the promised land of a complete healing is not yet. The Israelites in the desert are not feasting. But they do have enough.

Now in the communion liturgy in which we will participate in just a few moments, gathered around a table together, we will hear these words: “By your Spirit make us one with Christ, one with each other, and one in ministry to all the world, until Christ comes in final victory and we feast at his heavenly banquet.” The communion that we partake of is a foretaste, quite literally, of the eternal feast to come. We are to expect abundance. We are to expect grace overflowing. But the meal that we share sometimes seems so meager, doesn’t it. Just some pasteurized grape fruit and some bread. Just a few of us, gathered in a circle in a dimly lit chapel, sharing something that doesn’t seem much like a feast. Just a few wandering nomads collecting scraps of bread and hoping they will be enough. And I think that everything that we do as Christians is a bit like that. We gather for worship and for community, and it is not the ringing of heavenly voices. We do our small acts for justice, we go on service trips or go to rallies or write to our members of Congress, and it is not the kingdom of God come on earth, it is rather just a few of us up against systems of oppression and injustice and violence that seem to go on and on. We are anointed with oil and all of our aches and pains and problems do not magically disappear.

But we keep doing these things. We keep pointing toward our hope in a kingdom yet to come. We keep discovering God and each other, God in each other. We keep believing that these small acts, like grace, can be transformative, can move us to somewhere we have not yet been. It doesn’t seem like much. It doesn’t always seem like a miracle. It doesn’t always seem like the kingdom of God come on earth.

But it just might be enough.

The foot of the cross

The other day I was heading to class at Mount Vernon Square and was walking in front of Mount Vernon Place UMC. They have a big wooden cross up there, in front of the those expansive steps. Sitting at the foot of the cross, leaning back against it and facing 9th Street, was a man with his hood up arguing loudly to himself about coal power. It was a cold and rainy day. I'm assuming that this guy didn't have much of anywhere else to go, although I could be wrong.

And I figure that the foot of the cross is always populated by people who aren't sure they have much of another place to go. Who feel like nobody is hearing them but themselves. For cold rainy days.

And I wonder what that has to do with the golden crosses in our sanctuaries.

And I wonder what it means for me, not stopping, just passing by.

Dance it out

Today, on the corner in Chinatown where my ears are often assaulted by the paranoid ranting of one our more creative DC-area hate groups, there was a single person, armed with a laptop connected to an amplifier, blaring dance hall tunes.

Dancing with abandon.

Some people stopped, watched, laughed. Others passed by, head down.

I did some mix of the two, and smiled.

I don't know who you are. Keep dancing, please.

The first time I really understood Christmas

I post it every year, because it’s true:

The first time I really understood the Nativity was in Yanoun, in the northern West Bank. The shepherds we were with–Mohammad and Mohammad, not joking–showed us where they keep their sheep. It was a low, dark, cave. Noisy, crowded with animals, and smelling like–well–sheep shit. The mangers were rusty, with sheep pushing at each other to find space to eat. Not the sort of place you’d want to have a kid. I remember thinking: “If God can be born here, I guess God can be born anywhere.”

(To support the people of Yanoun, who are sorely pressed by military occupation and nearby settlements, check out the Ecumenical Accompaniment Program of the World Council of Churches, which maintains a nonviolent accompaniment and human rights observation presence in the village.)

Christmas: Flickering light

Well. Here it is. Not sure if it's what I expected but it's what happened. Merry Christmas. I hope that today you can take some time look for ways--often tentative, fragile ways--that God is being born in unexpected places in your life. 

We are waiting.
In refugee camps, crowded with stories, crowded with pain, we are waiting.
In checkpoint lines, in terminals, interminable, we are waiting.
By hospital bedsides, with loved ones encased in tubes, we are waiting.
At psych ward nurses' stations, shuffling, in line for red pills, blue pills, pink pills, we are waiting.
By corner liquor stores, hands outstretched, pleading, we are waiting.
On Metro grates and airplanes, soup kitchen lines and traffic lanes, waiting, waiting, waiting.
All our lives this world has taught us: avoid it at all costs.
And yet, here we are anyway, desperate for distraction, driven to frustration, to panic even. 
Waiting.
We wait, and in our waiting we gain some small sense of a waiting that echoes forever in the hallways of time.
We wait, and on those rare occasions when we sense others waiting, too, we--if we are in our right minds--weep.
We wait, and on those rare occasions when we sense others waiting, too, we--if we are in our right minds--dance for joy.
Do we dare to ask if God is here?
Do we dare to risk confusion? Disappointment? Amazement?
We are told of a light in the darkness.
And in this deepest night of our waiting, do we begin to perceive it?
We are so tired of waiting.
And we are looking, searching, on horizons and in hearts,
For this dawning, this flickering, fragile suggestion of the great light that is to come. 

Advent: Looking, searching

And we are looking, searching, on horizons and in hearts...

What's going on here? Check out the Advent blog idea here.

Advent: Tired

We are so tired of waiting.

What's going on here? Check out the Advent blog idea here.

Advent: deepest night

And in this deepest night of our waiting, do we begin to perceive it?

What's going on here? Check out the Advent blog idea here.

Longest Night

I delivered this message at a Longest Night service at Wesley UMC last night. A Longest Night service is a service intended for those who have a difficult time around the holidays. Maybe they have  lost a loved one, making this time of gathering with family and friends particularly difficult. Or maybe they suffer from anxiety and depression. Or maybe the stress of the holidays in the U.S. is just too much. Maybe this will be helpful to you, too:

I don’t know why you’re here.

I don’t know if the loss of a loved one makes this time of year, this time of gathering with friends and family, particularly hard to bear. I don’t know if the horrific events in Connecticut last week are at the forefront of your mind. I don’t know if you’re one of the many people across this country who suffers from anxiety and depression around the holiday season. I don’t know if this time of shortened days and cold nights wears on your body and your soul. I don’t know if you are feeling, for whatever reason, that—in the words of the Psalmist—the waters have come up to your neck. That you are sinking in deep mire, where there is no foothold.

I do know this. I know that there is room, in the middle of the ‘tis the seasons and the bells and the tinsel and the ads blaring at you to “buy now before it’s too late.” Room for feelings of hurt and of loss. Room for you.

As Mary and Joseph approach Bethlehem, they do so cut off from their families. Scared. Confused. The Nativity itself, far from a picaresque scene for holiday cards, was a scene of desperate poverty. Their only shelter was likely a shallow cave. Mary’s baby was laid down in a dirty feeding trough. Before the angels and the shepherds, before the fireworks, there was only an isolated family huddled together, uncertain of the future, anxious, afraid.

The poverty of this family makes me think of a letter, written by the great psychoanalyst Carl Jung, to a young Christian woman. Jung wrote: “I admire Christians, because when you see someone who is hungry or thirsty, you see Jesus. When you welcome a stranger, someone who is ‘strange,’ you welcome Jesus. When you clothe someone who is naked, you clothe Jesus. What I do not understand, however, is that Christians never seem to recognize Jesus in their own poverty. You always want to do good to the poor outside you and at the same time you deny the poor person living inside you. Why can’t you see Jesus in your own poverty, in your own hunger and thirst? In all that is ‘strange’ inside you; in the violence and the anguish that are beyond your control! You are called to welcome all this, not to deny its existence, but to accept that it is there and to meet Jesus there.”

Each of us comes here tonight with our own poverties. And perhaps we have been taught to deny or repress those poverties, those hurting places in our lives. Particularly around this season of the year, we are meant to be cheerful, full of peace and goodwill. But our Savior was born in darkness and in poverty, and today we can still find God being born in the midst of our hurt and our mourning. Jesus, this child to be born, this God with us, is no stranger to the darkness.

The Psalmist prays: “My tears have been my food day and night,/While people say to me continually,/“Where is your God?” And perhaps you have been asking yourself this same question. Where is my God? The Christmas story tells us to look in places that we don’t expect. In caves. In dark places. As Jung writes, we look for Jesus “In all that is ‘strange’ inside us; in the violence and the anguish that are beyond our control.”

I hope that you are able to take time tonight to sit with whatever it is that brought you here. And to begin to ask a difficult question. Where is God in this? Where in this hurt, in this loss, in this fear, is Jesus being born?

God will not always be easy to see. The shepherds and the magi needed miraculous signs and direct messages from angels in order to see God. But God is at work in you, healing, easing alienation, suffering with you, standing alongside you.

This message—that God is with you, in the midst of what brings you here tonight—might not seem like enough. The birth of one child in a backwater occupied vassal state of the Roman Empire certainly did not seem like enough, either. But it is exactly here, and not on the Target sales floor, that we start to look for God being born to us. Because here, before the angels, before the shepherds, in the midst of the darkness and the fear, it is possible to find a quiet, fierce joy. The flickering hope of the great light to come.

You're talking about me

I was chillin' with my therapist/pastoral counselor the other evening, and we were talking about the Sandy Hook massacre, because really, what else do you talk about in therapy right now? I told my therapist that I felt choked up, like I didn't know what to say. He challenged me to think of what I might have to say given my particular situation.

The thing is, I've got some mixed feelings about the conversation happening right now in our country. After the shootings I saw a lot of posts on Facebook that said something to the effect of: "The conversation about guns is scapegoating [not true, I don't think] and the real conversation is about mental health."

I am all for a national conversation about mental health. We absolutely need more support for people in this country with mental illness.

But please do me a favor when you're having that conversation, and remember that you're talking about me.

I don't want to own a gun. And I'm sincerely grateful that Washington, DC has strict regulations on owning firearms. I am sincerely grateful that, at my lowest, I was not able to just walk into a shop and buy a gun here. I am pretty sure I wouldn't have hurt anyone else. But I very well might have hurt myself. 

I am one of the lucky ones in the country. As much debt as I'm in because of it, still, I was able to get treatment. And beyond that, I have a strong support network of friends and families and faith communities. So I'm really incredibly lucky. I was in the hospital with plenty of people who didn't have that kind of support and who were going to get booted from the hospital as soon as they were somewhat stabilized. They were going to be released into loneliness, maybe into homelessness, maybe into isolation.

So yes. We do need a national conversation about mental health in the country, and about the lack of support systems, and about the need for more and better treatment, and about the need to fight stigmatization and social isolation. But we need to have this conversation, not because people with mental illness are inherently more violent than anyone else--the common thread running through school shootings and other gun massacres in this country is not mental illness but white men with guns--but because there are too many people relegated to our streets and jails because there is nowhere else for you to go if you are mentally ill and don't have the money to pay for a private hospital. 

So please be part of the conversation about mental illness in this country. And please push for more support and better treatment. But please be careful that the conversation doesn't drift into one about profiling and stereotyping. 

Please remember that when you talk about mental illness, you're talking about millions of people.

Please remember that when you talk about mental illness, you're talking about me. 

Advent: We are told

We are told of a light in the darkness.

What's going on here? Check out the Advent blog idea here.

Advent: Risk

Do we dare to risk confusion? Disappointment? Amazement?

What's going on here? Check out the Advent blog idea here.

Advent: Do we dare?

Do we dare to ask if God is here?

What's going on here? Check out the Advent blog idea here.

Advent: Joy

We wait, and on those rare occasions when we sense others waiting, too, we--if we are in our right minds--dance for joy.

I don't have many words for what happened Friday. So weeping seemed an appropriate response. And dancing always seems an appropriately defiant response. 

What's going on here? Check out the Advent blog idea here.

Advent: Weep

We wait, and on those rare occasions when we sense others waiting, too, we--if we are in our right minds--weep.

I couldn't think of what else to day in response to the elementary school shooting today.

What's going on here? Check out the Advent blog idea here.

Advent: Hallways of time

We wait, and in our waiting we gain some small sense of a waiting that echoes forever in the hallways of time.

Advent: Here we are anyway

And yet, here we are anyway, desperate for distraction, driven to frustration, to panic even. Waiting.

Shared from a friend in Palestine

A friend living in Palestine shared this with me:

We are singled out,
waiting,
and strip-searched twice,
waiting,
in order to watch, 
waiting,
while our stuff is spread across a table,
waiting, 
and the guards accuse us of lying to our face. 
We are lying to their face
and pretending to read Mark Twain for six hours.

Advent: Avoid

All our lives this world has taught us: avoid it at all costs.

What's going on here? Check out the Advent blog idea here. 

Advent: Waiting, waiting, waiting

On Metro grates and airplanes, soup kitchen lines and traffic lanes, waiting, waiting, waiting.