The Cost of Healing

 Luke 8:26-39

This last week, I took a class for religious leaders at Northwestern downtown.  It was a great week. We were mostly pastors and rabbis with a few denominational leaders, chaplains and school principals in a room talking about our faith and our ministry.  A word that kept coming up over the course of the week was the word “transformation.” It’s not surprising. Yes, it’s a word that comes up all the time in our ancient scriptures and, clearly, it’s a word that describes things that are happening all over the place right now.  

Our churches and synagogues are in seasons of transformation. Our schools are. Our society is in so many ways.  Those of us gathered at this event last week talked about what it was like to look at change in the face and listen for what it is calling us towards. But, as we pastors and rabbis all discussed various times over the course of the week, transformation of all kinds--whether it’s in our own hearts or in our wider society--doesn’t come easily. 

Transformation asks us to take risks. It asks us to be courageous. It admits: something’s not right here, something needs to be changed. Transformation shines a light on things we’ve tried to hide.

While we like change and new directions, the piece that we sort of conveniently put to the side is that transformation comes with exposure to something we need to change.  It brings something out into the open for everyone to see. 

For example: “Here’s this family secret that we’ve been keeping quiet that’s pushing the everyone to the brink.” Or, “here’s this personal detail I’ve been keeping in the shadow that I need to work through.” When we bring that out into the light, the future before us shifts. if it’s a mind-bender for us to individually do this, it’s just as much of a mind-bender, and even a trip, when society does it.

In the story we heard of today, there’s a man who is possessed, naked, out of control, living with the dead; 

And then, by the healing power of Jesus, he is saved, clothed, sitting at Jesus’ feet and in his right mind. This. Is. Great. News. This tormented man is healed and free…and yet, he (and Jesus) are the only ones celebrating. Did you catch that?  The bible says that the community doesn’t find any joy in this story.  In fact, they are counting the cost associated with this healing and they are finding it to be just a little too high. 

Jesus heals for free. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t costs.

So. The costs.

1. At face value, there is the cost of loss.  While this healing was good news for the man, it wasn’t for the pigs. The pigs were lost when the mob of demons entered into them. They ran off a cliff. There is a deep economic loss for the owners of the herd, especially if they make a living selling the animals.  

When you consider the cost of change in society or in your self, what is the economic cost to you? 

2. For the man who’s healed, there is the cost of a new vocation in life.  Any of you who have ever changed jobs know what I’m talking about. What do you lose when you leave an old job or even vocation?  Maybe you’re the parent of a newly graduated child and your vocation as a parent is shifting. There’s some loss. Maybe you’ve changed careers and, either your salary changed, or your responsibilities. For this man, the change is obviously dramatic.  He is turned into a disciple. Jesus calls him to activism and tells him to go and proclaim what God has done. He is freed and sent to share the good news.  In your case, what would be the economic cost of healing to you? What would answering a call to activism cost you? 

3. And finally, there is the cost of uncertainty. There is the cost of change. Remember, this guy is changed but no one wants that change but him and Jesus. Everyone else seems to resent it or they’re completely terrified by the way his transformation messes with this neat little system they have in place. We try to control the things and people that scare us.  Out of sight out of mind.  And when they couldn’t keep him locked away up out there in the cemetery, when everything is brought into the light in this story, 

This cost is steep. 

Too steep, in fact. Did you catch the way The Message version of the bible translates the verses that describe the people’s reaction to what happened? “too much change too fast.” 

Scripture actually says that the people were fine in the storm.  They were fine with of having this man chained up outside of town. Yes, perhaps they acknowledged his awkward presence up there, but now, they’re afraid of the calm.  They had a deal worked out. They had a system worked out: They had some kind of logic that was twisted into “we chain him up and it keeps him safe and us safe. It keeps the peace (even if it’s uneasy peace).” Now, they feel this change and this dis-ease and they can’t handle it.  And they ask Jesus to leave.

There is a cost of transformation. 

In this story, there’s a lot that is brought out into the open.  This man isn’t well. He’s tormented. He’s naked. Being naked all kinds of vulnerable. It is all kinds of fear. What will people see? What will people think? What if we admit that our family is a little messed up right now? Or that we have something really tough that we’re working through? Or what if I bring out into the open the truth of some kind of systemic thing that I’m grappling with? Or something that I need to grapple with but don’t really want to? Do we take a chance? Or do we say, “there’s not really anything I can do. This is too big. Too much. Out of sight out of mind.” 

What do we need to see in order to be healed?
What is it in our lives in the life that needs healing?
What is it in our society that needs healing? 
Where am I practicing control because I am freaked out by the cost of what calm would bring?

In 2018, Kendrick Lamar released an album called “Damn.” Kendrick Lamar, is rapper, a songwriter and record producer. He’s the kind of artist that, when I listen to his album, makes me stop. And ask: “what?” and skip back in the song to see if I heard he right.  This album, “Damn.,” was the first non-classical, non-jazz album that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for music. And in it, his poetry is about storm. “Where,”

he asks through the poetry of his lyrics, “can one find a sense of peace, a sense of safety, a sense of trust?” He is exploring a sense of humanity in these tracks. 

In his song “FEEL.,” he’s showing how this storm beats on the walls:

I feel like friends been overrated
I feel like the family been faking
I feel like the feelings are changing
Feel like my daughter compromised and jaded
Feel like you wanna scrutinize how I made it

He created this album before the pandemic but it puts words to the storms: the racial deaths, the war deaths,  the shootings. African American professor, Luke Powery says: the great resignation, the “great hater-a-tion,” pandemic—pandemonium. The storm. 

What do you need healing from?
What do we need healing from?

Because Jesus shows us: the calm is possible.

This isn’t a bible story that happened a long time ago and now, because of the resurrection, it’s all fixed and we don’t live like this any more.  We are right here between these words.  We see the things and the ones that we chain up. We need the healer’s presence in our midst. We still need liberation. 

But there is a cost to the calm.  Please leave, the people say to Jesus. The calm was too much to bear.  The chaos was familiar. The healer’s presence healed too deep.

Today is Juneteenth.    On June 19th, we celebrate the truth that the last enslaved African Americans learned they were freed in 1865. This is a day to celebrate freedom and African American achievement, art and education. It is a day to celebrate liberation in all of its’ beauty.  

It is a day to ask the dangerous question of what needs to be healed? To shine a light on the things we’ve tried to hide to consider the cost of freeing our hearts of freeing our world from the things that bind us. And to move forward despite the cost because our liberation depends on it. 

Transformation, growth, and an opening of our hearts are central to our faith.  So we’ve got to ask the difficult questions.

What needs to be healed that only the presence of Jesus can heal? 
Where are we as a society called to change? 
Where are you?

What do you imagine? (a message about queer politics, outrageous biblical characters and things we don't know)

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

For many, many decades, even lifetimes, things had been predictable.  Maybe not perfect, but predictable. Folks had these familiar ways of interacting with each other. Everyone knew their place. Everyone was on the same page about what was okay in society and what was not okay, maybe even forbidden.  Religion was anchored by these age-old, steady principals that weren’t really questioned.  (Of course, this was the way God functioned in the world!). But then, things turned upside down. There were cataclysmic events that made folks question their religious anchors.  The people had to leave home and with it, leave all the old patterns and beliefs, …when they came back to life as they knew it, nothing was quite the same.  

The government was dissolving—(that was the monarchy in their case). Some of the infrastructure was changing or disappearing.   The old symbolism was eroding.  Those pillar truths that supported religion were being shaken.

It used to be predictable who held power in society (it was the elites: the king, the temple, the priesthood) and now, that was being challenged.  There was extraordinary social and even theological upheaval.  There was nostalgia for the way things had been back before it seemed like the world exploded (you know, nostalgia for the courts and the wise sages, the temple being the center of religion).  It had been a nation that knew what it was and that was clear and confident in who God was. And now? What a mess.

**********

There is something frightening about an open future where we can’t quite imagine how things will shake out. Like when a few too many support beams have been kicked out from under the house. Social philosopher, Judith Butler, wrote about this almost 2 decades ago in her book, Undoing Gender:  All these questions! All this change! All this uncertainty about how things are. And then, let’s not even get started on imagining what will be when everything feels a little out of control around us.

If this level of uncertainty doesn’t freak society out, it will at the very least, make it feel threatened. 

She really hit the nail on the head with how ancient Israel was grappling with change and instability around the time when the book of Proverbs came together.   The Israelites had been exiled in Babylon for 70 years. Now they were returning to Jerusalem, and things were different: their temple in Jerusalem which had been the center of religious life had been destroyed, there were all these working class Jews who had stayed behind who were now, different. Who was God? Where did they find God? Where were they headed? There weren’t clear or easy answers. 

Judith Butler wrote about how when we ask questions or poke holes in ideas that are tried and true, it stresses folks out because it makes the future feel unstable or cloudy.  People, she says, do one of several things when the future feels that unsteady. 

1. They can become frozen and they don’t want to rethink anything. It’s like they say: This is too much! I can’t process this! I will be here freaking out in the corner if you need me.

2. They become really nostalgic for the way things were:  Oh <<reflects wistfully>> remember when we were young how safe and predictable everything was?

3. Sometimes, she wrote, that regardless of our politics, we become so nostalgic that we even kick into a sort of cultural reverse-gear that uses moralism to pull us back to the way things were. We actively work to stop the change: "Reverse the currents! Stop the change! Back to tradition!"

Or, you could say, when everything around you is unraveling and you find yourself in a big open space full of piles of yarn, do you shout: fix grandpa’s sweater! Knit it back the way it was! Or Hmm, could we knit something new? Or could we throw away the knitting needles and weave a hammock instead? 

There is a fourth option when everything around us unraveling: Theologian, Elizabeth Stewart writes that it’s the job of queer politics to resist that tendency we have to run back to the tried and true when we’re stressed. 

And when I say politics, I don’t mean partisan, but politics in the sense of what do we want the world around us and the life we share to look like.” 

Just when we think something is concrete reality, queer politics pokes holes in it.  

It pokes holes in the ideas like: this is how women are supposed to behave. 
Or: This is how men are supposed to dress
Or: these are the two genders that exist. Period.
Or, this is the way we’ve always done it in the church.
This is who holds the power in society.
This is the way you _______ (fill in the blank)

Just when we think things are concrete, queer politics call us to the edge to think again. (To the edge of the dance floor? Or to the edge of the canvas? And then perhaps, while handing us a paintbrush, it asks us “what do you imagine?”)

The fourth option is stepping into that uncertain, scary space and courageously asking what can we be?

*************

In the case of the book of proverbs, Woman Wisdom bursts into the scene and it is undeniably different from anything we’ve seen. ever. in Hebrew scriptures up until this point.  

Women have nothing like this kind of role in the Torah like you see here in proverbs.  Biblical mothers like Rachel, Rebecca, Leah, Jocabed, and Sarah get this teeny, tiny amount of air time as supportive actors. Not until this time period in ancient Israel’s history do you start getting people like woman wisdom or even Queens Vashti and Esther breaking into scripture like this and taking up chapters and chapters in the story.   

In today’s reading, Woman Wisdom breaks into the street. She is loud and shouting! Confident and even flashy! Eloquent and poetic! stamping her feet in the public square, clapping her hands, look at me!  

Again, this is exactly the time when Judaism is starting to pull away from practicing religion in the temple (remember, the temple had been destroyed) and instead it’s settling into local synagogues and even the home which had traditionally been women’s domain. 

Biblical scholar, Elizabeth Stewart, whites this whole thing about how we can actually see this tension between what Judiasm was and what it’s becoming getting worked out here in scripture.  

The whole book of Proverbs toggles between these different people who are working it out.  In one chapter you have the obedient son or student who’s looking for clear instruction or guidance.  There is no mystery there. There’s just a common sense patriarchal, family, living by the rules. In the next chapter we find one of a whole cast of interesting women characters called Woman Wisdom who is  non-conventional and shouting in the streets. 

If we preform our gender, (I learn and preform what it means to be a woman) and if we preform our humanity, (I learn and preform what it means to be human), Elizabeth Stewart says that lady wisdom is “performing [her] humanity subversively.” She is pushing the envelope as a woman character. On purpose.  Whether or not it was the intention, she is making us think again about something.  She’s undoing us. Unraveling us. 

And it sounds like this when we digest this scripture: 

“Wait. Wait a second. Is Lady Wisdom, …God? Or God’s wife? Or some previous iteration of the word made flesh?” What exactly going on here? Why is this woman behaving like this?”

And we start asking dangerous questions. 

Truth is, social transformation always depends on some brave people who are willing to risk kicking a leg out from under tradition. And that doesn’t happen unless we go right up to the edge of what we know.  

Change, growth and transformation in ancient Israel would depend on a daringness to risk, a willingness to imagine, and the courage to talk about or even live out what seemed like it was impossible.  

We get a window into that with the book of proverbs.

*****

In the gospel of John, not the piece we read today, a different piece, there’s this story about a Samaritan woman who goes to a well.  Jesus unexpectedly finds her there.  Because of her life story, this woman, you could say, lives on the edge and, as she talks, Jesus goes to the edge there with her.  (Hanging out on the edge with people is kind of one of Jesus’ signature moves).

He asks her dangerous questions. He blows her mind. He knocks down walls. They work something out in their conversation that’s recorded in the bible. She is undone by him. It’s like he says to her: “Imagine, what we will become!” 

She is transformed, runs back to her community and all these Samaritan people in her town start believing in the extraordinary expression of God in Jesus.  

*****

Can you think of someone who has blown your mind? 
So much so that some pillar in you has been undone? 

Or a time when God has said to you: “hey. here’s a nugget of scripture. Put this in conversation with your daily life and see what you get.”

You know, we look at our Christian tradition sometimes as if it weren’t this living thing but stagnant.  Like God revealed themselves to us thousands of years ago and now, well, we just have to learn those ancient lessons.  Nope. We Christians confess that, yes, God created the world, and then came to dwell in it, and then, as we celebrated it last week with Pentecost, continues to be alive in it right here, right now by the power of the Holy Spirit.  The life of faith is never about staying in one place.  The Holy Spirit is always coaxing us forward. The life of faith is always about growing.  

And this unsteady, uncertain place? This place that feels a little scary or even threatening? That is where the growth and the transformation happen. 

And you, queer family, are there, often at the edge of comfort, dancing with risk and ready to lend us your telescope so we can see what is out there that’s calling us forward.  

Last week, there was an interview with Aiyana Elizabeth Johnson that aired. She’s a marine biologist and climate activist.  She’s amazing for a million different reasons

You know climate change is tough to talk about and to think about right now.  She posed this question in her interview: "Instead of how bad will it be," she asks, "what if we get this right?"  What will the world look like in 50 years, 100 years, 500 years?

For example, The healed lung of our great forests grown back to health? Oceans that provide enough for coastal communities to live? Clean and healthy air for all of us to breathe? It’s mighty easy to critique, but to build something? that takes effort.  

So today, let’s let ourselves be drawn out into this creative space I ask you, what if we get it right? What will this world look like?  What do you see when you take a hold of that telescope and look out there?  

In this time of uncertainty, what do you see from your spot there on the edge? Do you see each one of us living as our beautifully created selves without fear of violence?  Do you an end to gun violence? A world without Parkinson's?  A magnificent redwood forest? What do you see? What do you imagine?

During a song later on in the service, we’ll sing a song that Jesse Lava wrote a few years ago about the Samaritan Woman who met Jesus at the well out on the edge. 

During that song or maybe another point in the service like communion, I’ll invite you to answer this question: In this time of cultural upheaval and change that we’re living through, in this time that feels so uncertain,“what if we get it right?”  (write that down) what will the world look like? When you're ready with your answer, come up and fasten your idea up here.

****

Out there on the edge is this creative space.  God bless you, queer ones for “making cultural trouble” (as Elizabeth Stewart wrote decades ago—John Lewis said a version of a few years ago). God bless you for cracking open these creative spaces where change happens.  Where would we be without the ways that you draw us out and bless us?  We love you.

Defiant Hope (a sermon about a world gone mad, mother eagles, and planting trees)

 Acts 2:1-21

A few weeks ago, my dad was over and helping us in our yard. He planted a whole row of pink Easter begonias in the front and then he and I went to work planting and weeding and mulching. At one point, he asked me about a pathetic little pine twig that I had half planted in a flowerpot.  

“Is this a plant?” he asked me.

Like many Chicago houses, our neighbor’s house is maybe 10-12 feet away from ours and between us we have a cement gangway. In the crack where the sidewalk meets their house, a little pine tree had sprouted. We don’t have any pine trees in our tiny yard, nor do our neighbors and my only guess is that it sprouted from our Christmas tree which I threw out the side door onto the patio in December. It is possible that the dead tree lay in the patio for an embarrassing number of weeks before I hauled it to the back alley.  I think, while it was there, it may have left a seed.  When I pulled on that little sprout, the entire root came out. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it in that moment, so I stuffed it into a flower pot. Later that afternoon, my dad commented to me that he had re-planted the little seeding in a pot.  

“Maybe it will grow into something,” he said.  

That little pot with the tiny sapling has been sitting next to my door in the gangway for several weeks now and I look at it all the time. It has new green needles sprouting at the tips of it’s tiny two branches.

There is something that is hopeful about planting a tree.  I have no doubt that the years before us will bring both heartache and joy and I don’t know what that balance of the two will look like; but, I know that when we plant a tree, it is an act of hope for the future.

I’ve had to dig deep to find hope these last couple of weeks.  Not only are my family and I heartsick at the unexpected death of my mother-in-law, Mercedes, a week and a half ago, I am heartsick at what has unfolded these last weeks in Buffalo, Uvalde, Tulsa, and more places. I’ve volleyed between rage and numbness, between fear and disbelief.

On the surface of things, our lives appear normal in my family: the kids go to school, we make dinner, we walk the dog, wash the clothes, pay the bills. We go to graduation parties and birthday parties. We make plans. And yet, beneath that there is a river rushing that all is not right in this shattered world for so many reasons. Open the newspaper for five minutes and you see our broken humanity spilling out all over itself.  How do we hang onto hope when the heartbreak is this deep?  

I’m pretty sure this is not only part of my call as a person of faith to hold on to hope, but it’s part of my call as a pastor to you all. And I have shook my head all week looking for an answer to that question. I’m not sure if I found the right answer, but, God found me. 

*****

Most worship services here at LMC, we celebrate communion. Sometimes, communion is called “The Last Supper.” Have you ever noticed that? However, It’s actually not the last supper.  Jesus shows up many times after that meal after he has been resurrected: He has fish on the beach over a charcoal campfire with his disciples, he shows up for dinner in the town of Emmaus. In those 40 days after God raised Jesus, he shows up all over the place, eating and teaching and hanging out. He, in fact, eats many more meals after that so called Last Supper. The very worst, the unimaginable has happened—Jesus was crucified—but there he is with scars in his hands reminding folks to take heart to have courage.  

This, Pastor Mary Luti writes, “is the story of our lives, the story of the church: The worst things imaginable happen. Yet, somehow, by grace and grit, we’re still here, weary and scarred, but breathing, more or less upright,” she says. Instead of the “last supper of death and dread,” she wonders if we could call it a “new supper of relief and resilience”?  

After Jesus eats all those meals in towns and villages and in upper rooms and on beaches, he ascends, like a balloon, to be with God; and then, God’s mighty and Holy Spirit rushes into this world which is where our bible story from Acts picks up today.

As I wrestle with hopelessness and grief this week, I learned something about that mighty wind that rushed into the house that original day of Pentecost.  The wind is connected by an unusual word back to two other bible stories with rushing winds. First: the story of creation where God’s spirit hovers, rushes and abides over the waters of the deep right before the creation of the universe.  It’s the same uniquely rushing wind according to scripture (1).   Second: It’s also the same word for wind used in a story in Deuteronomy (2) where a mother eagle is powerfully hovering over the nest of her chicks. Just like you might fan or blow on the hot coals of a campfire to get them to spark, the mother eagle is fanning her strong wings protectively and energetically over her nest.  She is hovering over her chicks and taking up any possible room that could be used to endanger them. 

These stories tell me two things. 1.  I’m comforted by the image of God protectively spreading her wings out over us and refreshing us with this rushing, fanning air. 2. that wind that billows over the face of the deep in creation rushes in right before something is about to happen. Same goes for those those strong protective wings of the mother eagle, fanning the nest. She hovers there ready and waiting. In the story from Genesis, creation is born, (“let there be light!”). In the story from Deuteronomy, the Eagle, after hovering in flight, suddenly grabs her chicks and shoots straight up into the sky.  When that wind rushes into the house on the ancient day of Pentecost, it marked a moment full of potential. It infused the air with God’s electric presence. It fanned oxygen onto the coals, it lifted and refreshed that stagnant heavy air in the house, for something was about to happen. God’s Spirit, while it comforts us and protects us, is always drawing us towards more than we can imagine.

*** 

African American scholar Imani Perry wrote last week that we must do more than cower in the face of ugliness of the world.  We must, she said, [raise our kids,] even into adulthood, to believe in the possibility of a loving and just world and that they have a responsibility to work for it.”   (3)

We are not done yet.  We have not eaten the last supper.  We are not done blessing one another, giving thanks, singing and shouting out.  There are feet to be washed, there’s justice to be righted, jails to be emptied, bellies to be filled.   There is rest to be taken, tears to be shared, laughter to be gifted, hands to be held. There are hearts to be consoled, dreams to be dreamed, visions to be seen.  There are trees to be planted.

In 1968, Wendell Berry, a poet and Kentucky farmer wrote a poem titled “February 2, 1968.” That time of the late 60s was a time of political and cultural rifts, even scorn, a time of bitter division, questioning of authority, mistrust, social turmoil.  Into that moment, he wrote:

In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter, 
war spreading, families dying, the world in danger,
I walk the rocky hillside sowing clover.

It’s “an earnest hope,” Kathryn Schifferdecker writes, “in a world gone mad…a defiant hope…In a world filled with so many reasons to despair.” Don’t I know it.

Wendell Berry plants clover.

In a cramped house, the early church breaks into a multitude of languages. 

In our own tattered world, we hope defiantly—even while heartbroken—for love is stronger than death.

1.  The word, merahefet from Genesis 1:2 means to hover or to move over.  An ancient translator translated this Hebrew word into Greek in an Ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures called the Septuagint. The translator used the same Greek work for Merahefet as they used to describe e rushing wind when they wrote the book of Acts

2.   Deut 32:11 

3.  “Unsettled Territory: How we must raise our children now,” for The Atlantic.  June 1, 2022