Rev. Laura Ruth Jarrett ~ First Church Somerville
Sunday, June 22, 2008 ~ Pentecost 6
"A student doesn't get a better desk than her teacher. A laborer doesn't make more money than his boss. Be content—pleased, even—when you, my students, my harvest hands, get the same treatment I get. If they call me, the Master, 'Dungface,' what can the workers expect?
"Don't be intimidated. Eventually everything is going to be out in the open, and everyone will know how things really are. So don't hesitate to go public now.
"Don't be bluffed into silence by the threats of bullies. There's nothing they can do to your soul, your core being. Save your fear for God, who holds your entire life—body and soul—in his hands.
"What's the price of a pet canary? Some loose change, right? And God cares what happens to it even more than you do. He pays even greater attention to you, down to the last detail—even numbering the hairs on your head! So don't be intimidated by all this bully talk. You're worth more than a million canaries.
"Stand up for me against world opinion and I'll stand up for you before my Father in heaven. If you turn tail and run, do you think I'll cover for you?
"Don't think I've come to make life cozy. I've come to cut—make a sharp knife-cut between son and father, daughter and mother, bride and mother-in-law—cut through these cozy domestic arrangements and free you for God. Well-meaning family members can be your worst enemies. If you prefer father or mother over me, you don't deserve me. If you prefer son or daughter over me, you don't deserve me.
"If you don't go all the way with me, through thick and thin, you don't deserve me. If your first concern is to look after yourself, you'll never find yourself. But if you forget about yourself and look to me, you'll find both yourself and me. Matthew 10:24-39 (The Message)
In a monastery, monks were sitting praying. A farmer came running by all in a panic shouting, "My cows are gone, my cows are gone. Have you seen my cows?" The master of the monks turned to the monks, smiled and said, "Aren't we lucky we have no cows?!"
There are, in all the religious systems I know something about, teaching about the paradox of having and not having, gaining and losing, losing and gaining. You think you have something, but it turns out what you have is nothing. And conversely, you have nothing, but in fact, it turns out that your nothing is everything.
In Christianity, this paradoxical teaching is in the portion of Matthew's gospel in today's lectionary, read so well just now by Ian. This teaching is a part of the body of work we have inherited, we think directly from Jesus. We think Jesus actually said these words, and someone wrote them down. This body of work is a collection of sayings used by the gospel authors Matthew and Mark. Matthew shapes these sayings of Jesus by including them in his gospel divided into five discourses, prefaced and interspersed with brief biographies of Jesus and some of those close to Jesus, and with stories of Jesus' doings.
Here is this paradox translated in the New Revised Standard Version: Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.
In the Amplified Bible it is translated: “Whoever finds his lower life will lose the higher life, and whoever loses his lower life on My account will find the higher life.”
Eugene Petersen in his translation of Matthew puts it this way: “If your first concern is to look after yourself, you'll never find yourself. But if you forget about yourself, and look to me, you'll find both yourself and me.”
Those of us who are so busy securing our lives, those of us whose only concern is ourselves, those of us who are intent only on material lives can easily and often forget to be alive and I mean alive to beauty, love, companionship, and all the other avenues God uses to attract our attention.
I'm particularly interested in exploring the second part of this teaching of Jesus - those of us who lose our lives, for divine sake; those of us who look to God, those of us who lose our lower life will find, will find ourselves and God, will find the higher life. I’m particularly interested in losing and what can be gained through loss.
Loss is common as dirt. It happens to all of us, little losses, big unspeakable losses, and everyday, something new losses, our hairline, our other sock, our ability to remember the name of the one we have loved for so many years.
Here are other losses, loss of vigor, of continence, love, zest, loss of our early innocence, loss of a job or sufficient economic means.
We rail against loss because through our whole life we have been learning how to gain - gain food, continence, control, independence, housing, money, prestige, love. And we spend lots and lots of energy worrying about loss, about how not to lose, about how to minimize loss, how not to feel the grief of loss.
We are, most often, not in control of the losses in our lives. As a species, we truly dislike this loss of control. Often as a way of vying for control, we get attached to what we have lost. Sometimes long after our grief over our loss is spent, we hold on to our losses as a way of recognizing ourselves - I am a widower, I will never love again. I am single, I will never be loved. I have the worst luck. I am a person who has been done wrong. We make identities for ourselves out of our losses.
I want to say that I don’t think we shouldn’t grieve our losses. Grief work is important spiritual work. It is a necessary process for healing. By not grieving at all, or by holding on to grief that has run its course, by making identities of our losses, we can slow down our movement toward God. We can lose spiritual momentum, confidence, and agility. We can fall out of touch with the impulse and intuition for God's presence. This is spiritual death, spiritual annihilation, existential absence. Our spirit dies before our bodies die. Resurrection and new life become impossible in this life and perhaps the next. This is hell.
But I believe that work of the church is not only to show up to see our friends, though this is indeed a good reason to come to church. With all my heart, I believe the work of the church is to be the place and space, where after loss and more loss, we practice as a community entering new life again and again, on this side of heaven. Our work as Christian people is to always looking for God's nudging.
John Snow, a professor of Pastoral Care from my time at the Episcopal Divinity school said it's not what happens to you that is important. What is important, is what you do with what happens to you.
Now that the barn has burn down, we can see the moon.
Now that we have been laid low by loss, Jesus may lift us up.
Now that we are desperate for comfort and consolation, God may come in the form of Spirit. It is what Jesus promised. We must remember to look.
Although some people are so devastated by their losses that they cannot recover, many of us, through prayer, and through the practice of putting ourselves to work on behalf of justice, kindness, and mercy for, with, and in community, find ourselves newly opened, creatively intuned to God, to Jesus, to Spirit.
I believe that one of the meaning of the paradoxical teaching, you must give up your life in order to gain your life is that through loss, because of desperation or grace, we are opened to receive lessons, insight, love, and a kind of open-heartedness that can help us in our journey toward the heart of God. Ultimately, this is Christianity.
Did you read in the Globe last week about Diainne Odell who lived in an iron lung for almost 60 years? She lost almost everything, but she got a high school diploma, took college courses and she wrote a children’s book. She was, Frank McMeen said, one of the kindest and most considerate people you could meet.
My neighbor told me yesterday morning, that the three years of cancer and cancer treatment taught her not to be afraid. Our own Barbara Huber, after a near fatal heart attack 27 years ago, she learned to appreciate her children, and God’s movement in her life. A friend told me that her 30 years of sobriety has taught her that she is equal to all of God’s people. Another friend who survived unspeakable childhood violation has published a book of Christian meditations for women who have survived unspeakable childhood violation. These are the stories of Christian practice and journey.
Christianity is a practice. It is prayer, rest, art, song, good works, welcoming the stranger, all practices of the Christian journey toward God. Christianity is not an obedience to dogma. The only obedience that is required in Christianity are the commandments to love God, and to love your neighbor as yourself. Other than these two commandments, the only obedience required is the obedience you discern in your prayers and in community, obedience that will lead you and guide you in your movement toward the heart of God.
Dar Williams, the poet songwriter wrote, "What do you love more than love." The answer I’d love to give for myself is nothing. There is nothing that I love more than love. But oh, there’s my new iPod Touch. Ouch. Oh, my anxiety, it makes me feel so important and in control. My false identities, my clinging to old wounds and arguments, my idea that I am always a nice person, my idea that being nice is a substitute for being ethical. Other than these, there is nothing I love more than love.
But who would I be if I weren’t anxious, if I weren’t controlling, if I wasn’t the still wounded teenager now grown up, the very nice person? My father, whom I thought I lost 30 years ago when I came out, but who is now no longer lost to me, helped me with this sermon. He sent me a sermon outline that I might use, and the outline is full of references to scripture that explain how God does not lose us, when we ourselves have lost and are lost. God counts the sheep that are God’s own. God has counted the hairs on our head. God knew us when we were being formed inside our mother’s bodies. My dad reminded me that even when we experience loss, even when we are lost to ourselves because we have decided to loose what binds us, even when we are forsaken by our families, or when we lose our families, our teeth, our memories, God does not lose us. We are not ever, even when God is silent, lost to God. That is impossible.
It is the reason we come to church to see our friends, even when we are lost and when we weep in church, it is to be reminded by our friends that we are not lost.
Our job as Christian spiritual beings is to be on the journey, looking for ways to let God shine in us, to see God anew. Somehow, almost always, if we look for it, we are consoled in our losses by new gifts of awareness. We cannot live without loss. But we can try to live as if we could be fully alive, alive to God, alive to love.
