Giving Up: Anxiety - February 21, 2016
I have always been a “worrier”. It’s just my nature, apparently. As a child, I laid awake night after night, replaying the events of the day in my head, and stressing about things I couldn’t control – the house burning down, my family dying, the monster that lived under my bed that would snap my toes off if I dared to put my foot over the edge of the mattress after my mother put me to bed. You get the idea.
I’m the kid who slept with a light on. Until high school, when I decided that I had better learn to sleep in the dark because a future college roommate might not appreciate my need for a nightlight. See what I’m doing there? Even my decision to live without a nightlight is based on ANOTHER anxiety – that I will tick off a hypothetical roommate. Anxiety is a powerful motivator for me. Of course, the funny bit is that when I did get to college, the gap under my dorm room door let in so much light from the hall that our room was brighter than my bedroom at home.
So, today I want to talk about living with and living beyond anxiety. I picked this as the first topic of my “Giving Up” sermon series because this is the one that’s the most personal. Before I begin, though, we need some ground rules that will apply to this whole series.
1. I am NOT a therapist or any sort of mental health expert. I speak out of my own experiences and the shared experiences of others.
2. Moving through the particular sort of dark place that keeps you from drawing closer to God is between you and the Spirit. I can help with suggestions, tools and information, but the Spirit is the one who provides the work of healing.
3. Some of the topics we’ll discuss are, in their extreme forms, recognized as mental health disorders. Anxiety and depression are examples that immediately come to mind. If you have or think you have a mental health issue, see a professional and decide together what treatment might best help you. Over the years, I’ve needed help myself for both depression and anxiety. When you are under the sway of either or both, it’s hard to see a way out, and meds and therapy may be what you need to get you through the worst of the journey.
4. BUT, when you feel better, begin to understand what gifts might be found in the journey through those dark places.
In her amazing book, “Learning to Walk in the Dark”, Barbara Brown Taylor talks about the differences between what she describes as “full solar” Christianity and “lunar” Christianity. You know the solar type, and the solar church. All is well there. ALL THE TIME. And you fit in until you have your own dark experience. A death. A divorce. A devastating medical diagnosis, a mental health issue, a job loss. The full solar church, seeing you in the dark, will stand in the light and try to pull you back from the dark, with all the best intentions. Along the way, you may hear gentle or not so gentle suggestions that your darkness has come about because you didn’t pray enough, didn’t have enough faith, doubted when you should have trusted, etc. If you continue to ask awkward questions from you place in the darkness, such churchy people may run away, because they don’t have answers, and because your questions bring up their own fear of the dark.
This Lenten season, we are going to dive into some of those experiences and emotions that send us or keep us in the darkness, and see what happens if we live with the darkness for a while, and ask what it has to teach us. After all, we worship a God who created the light AND the darkness, day and night, and who made us as creatures with emotions.
No emotion in itself is a bad thing. Think about this for a minute. Fear, anger, anxiety, sorrow, joy, etc., all have their place. They help us survive. Our “lizard brain” – the brain stem, tells us to fight or runaway when our survival depends upon making a correct and rapid choice. It’s when a situation needs more thought, though, that we can get into trouble if we don’t tap into our higher thinking abilities.
Let’s try a little thought experiment here. Think about something that makes you anxious. Snakes. Spiders. Running out of coffee. Lunch with your boss. Burglars. Whatever. Sit with this something for a minute.
Now, notice how you feel. Did you tense up? Did your heart rate go up? Did you want to hide or run away? Did your palms clench or start to sweat? Did you want to squash the spider? Welcome to your lizard brain and the fight or flight reflex. This is your brain on anxiety. If you need a quick fix when you start to feel this emotion, here it is: Close your eyes and inhale deeply for a slow count of two. Hold your breath for another two-count, and then exhale for two. Do a quick check to see if you are feeling calmer. If so, move on. If not, like the shampoo commercials say, repeat.
Anxiety is a good short-term emotion, but in the long term living an anxious life is really bad for you. Anxiety triggers the production of stress hormones in your body which over the long run make you sick. Anxiety also limits your ability to engage in higher-level thinking and thus hinders your good judgment.
In today’s Old Testament lesson, it’s clear that Abraham is anxious about his future. I totally get that. He’s trusted and obeyed God’s call and leading, peeling back layer after layer of the things that made him feel secure: his native land, his status as a wealthy man in his community, his friends, his nephew Lot, and he had nearly lost his wife to Pharaoh while passing through Egypt, and the future he thought he would have has vanished.
If you read Genesis 13-15, depending on how you count, God has promised Abraham at least five times that he will have land, heirs, and by extension, a future, but Abram is focused on what he has given up. He’s focused on the perceived losses rather than the promised gains.
Do you blame him? I’ve certainly spent a lot of my life going over and over what I don’t have, rather than being thankful for what I’ve been given.
Here’s your next suggestion for easing anxiety and reshaping your focus. I make two mental lists each night as I’m getting ready for bed: a list of all the things I’ve done that day, no matter how trivial. It gives me clarity about how I’ve spent my time, and a sense of direction and sometimes an awareness that I need to re-boot my plan for tomorrow. Focus on what got done, NOT what you didn’t do. This isn’t about making yourself feel more anxious or guilty. The second list is the things I’m grateful for. Depending on the day, it might be a VERY short list, but there’s always something. This helps me reshape my anxiety and focus not on worry, but on gratitude. Southern black preachers refer to this as having “an attitude of gratitude”.
Abraham falls asleep as the sun sets that night, and feels a “thick and dreadful darkness” come upon him. BUT then, in the darkness, the Lord speaks words of assurance to him, and seals his covenant with a smoking firepot and a blazing torch. God speaks to Abraham’s greatest anxiety, that he will not have an heir, and promises him not only that will have ancestors to inherit the land, but also that Abraham will die in peace. (And given that he’s just been through several military encounters, I think God is addressing both the spoken and the unspoken anxiety in this story.)
So, when you are having a tough time and the lizard brain kicks in, you are not alone. Being anxious is part of being human, but only PART. It’s not a pleasant thing to do, but live with the anxiety for a bit and see what it is trying to tell you. Ask yourself why the situation has evoked this feeling, and whether there is something to learn from it. I over-react to the smell of anything smoky. I have to consciously remind myself that this is because we survived an actual fire, but that on EVERY OTHER OCCASION that has not been the case. Then I can react in a calmer way.
If there is no rational source for your anxiety, it doesn’t mean that you aren’t anxious, in fact, that may be a worse situation, because you can’t put a finger on the source. As I said at the beginning of this message, there are real, treatable mental illnesses that involve anxiety. I am NOT saying “if you just pray more, or read your Bible more, your anxiety will go away without meds or talk therapy” – that sounds an awful lot like the bad theology of those full solar churches I talked about earlier. What I will tell you is what helped me. While at a retreat, several folks suggested that unattributed anxiety, especially when it interfered with relationships, daily activities and decision-making likely does not come from God.
Hence, ASK. PRAY. Say, “Lord, I am feeling anxious about -----------------. If this is from you, please show me why. If this is NOT from you, I bind this and lay it at the foot of the cross. Amen.”
Then walk away and leave it there. This is so hard to do. It takes practice, but it happens. I’ll close with a personal experience. When I had the opportunity to come here as your pastor, I was excited but also anxious. That’s pretty normal when you are beginning a new job, but my anxiety each week, especially on Saturday nights, was through the roof. Was the sermon any good? Would I be an effective preacher again? All this worry and stress kept me awake on the very night when I needed to be well-rested.
So, it finally occurred to me to take the advice from some friends in a retreat and prayer community in North Carolina. I talked to my anxiety, and I talked to God. I asked that if this anxiety was from God, that I would learn from it, and that if was in fact designed to make me a less effective pastor and preacher, that I would give to Jesus and leave it at the foot of the cross. That anxiety was keeping me from doing what God has called and gifted me to do. When I began to pray this way, this particular anxiety left me. I still worry about losing my notes, tripping on that tricky step on the altar, etc., but I can be focused and attentive on Sunday mornings so that God can speak through me, or if necessary, in spite of me.
Thanks be to God!
I have always been a “worrier”. It’s just my nature, apparently. As a child, I laid awake night after night, replaying the events of the day in my head, and stressing about things I couldn’t control – the house burning down, my family dying, the monster that lived under my bed that would snap my toes off if I dared to put my foot over the edge of the mattress after my mother put me to bed. You get the idea.
I’m the kid who slept with a light on. Until high school, when I decided that I had better learn to sleep in the dark because a future college roommate might not appreciate my need for a nightlight. See what I’m doing there? Even my decision to live without a nightlight is based on ANOTHER anxiety – that I will tick off a hypothetical roommate. Anxiety is a powerful motivator for me. Of course, the funny bit is that when I did get to college, the gap under my dorm room door let in so much light from the hall that our room was brighter than my bedroom at home.
So, today I want to talk about living with and living beyond anxiety. I picked this as the first topic of my “Giving Up” sermon series because this is the one that’s the most personal. Before I begin, though, we need some ground rules that will apply to this whole series.
1. I am NOT a therapist or any sort of mental health expert. I speak out of my own experiences and the shared experiences of others.
2. Moving through the particular sort of dark place that keeps you from drawing closer to God is between you and the Spirit. I can help with suggestions, tools and information, but the Spirit is the one who provides the work of healing.
3. Some of the topics we’ll discuss are, in their extreme forms, recognized as mental health disorders. Anxiety and depression are examples that immediately come to mind. If you have or think you have a mental health issue, see a professional and decide together what treatment might best help you. Over the years, I’ve needed help myself for both depression and anxiety. When you are under the sway of either or both, it’s hard to see a way out, and meds and therapy may be what you need to get you through the worst of the journey.
4. BUT, when you feel better, begin to understand what gifts might be found in the journey through those dark places.
In her amazing book, “Learning to Walk in the Dark”, Barbara Brown Taylor talks about the differences between what she describes as “full solar” Christianity and “lunar” Christianity. You know the solar type, and the solar church. All is well there. ALL THE TIME. And you fit in until you have your own dark experience. A death. A divorce. A devastating medical diagnosis, a mental health issue, a job loss. The full solar church, seeing you in the dark, will stand in the light and try to pull you back from the dark, with all the best intentions. Along the way, you may hear gentle or not so gentle suggestions that your darkness has come about because you didn’t pray enough, didn’t have enough faith, doubted when you should have trusted, etc. If you continue to ask awkward questions from you place in the darkness, such churchy people may run away, because they don’t have answers, and because your questions bring up their own fear of the dark.
This Lenten season, we are going to dive into some of those experiences and emotions that send us or keep us in the darkness, and see what happens if we live with the darkness for a while, and ask what it has to teach us. After all, we worship a God who created the light AND the darkness, day and night, and who made us as creatures with emotions.
No emotion in itself is a bad thing. Think about this for a minute. Fear, anger, anxiety, sorrow, joy, etc., all have their place. They help us survive. Our “lizard brain” – the brain stem, tells us to fight or runaway when our survival depends upon making a correct and rapid choice. It’s when a situation needs more thought, though, that we can get into trouble if we don’t tap into our higher thinking abilities.
Let’s try a little thought experiment here. Think about something that makes you anxious. Snakes. Spiders. Running out of coffee. Lunch with your boss. Burglars. Whatever. Sit with this something for a minute.
Now, notice how you feel. Did you tense up? Did your heart rate go up? Did you want to hide or run away? Did your palms clench or start to sweat? Did you want to squash the spider? Welcome to your lizard brain and the fight or flight reflex. This is your brain on anxiety. If you need a quick fix when you start to feel this emotion, here it is: Close your eyes and inhale deeply for a slow count of two. Hold your breath for another two-count, and then exhale for two. Do a quick check to see if you are feeling calmer. If so, move on. If not, like the shampoo commercials say, repeat.
Anxiety is a good short-term emotion, but in the long term living an anxious life is really bad for you. Anxiety triggers the production of stress hormones in your body which over the long run make you sick. Anxiety also limits your ability to engage in higher-level thinking and thus hinders your good judgment.
In today’s Old Testament lesson, it’s clear that Abraham is anxious about his future. I totally get that. He’s trusted and obeyed God’s call and leading, peeling back layer after layer of the things that made him feel secure: his native land, his status as a wealthy man in his community, his friends, his nephew Lot, and he had nearly lost his wife to Pharaoh while passing through Egypt, and the future he thought he would have has vanished.
If you read Genesis 13-15, depending on how you count, God has promised Abraham at least five times that he will have land, heirs, and by extension, a future, but Abram is focused on what he has given up. He’s focused on the perceived losses rather than the promised gains.
Do you blame him? I’ve certainly spent a lot of my life going over and over what I don’t have, rather than being thankful for what I’ve been given.
Here’s your next suggestion for easing anxiety and reshaping your focus. I make two mental lists each night as I’m getting ready for bed: a list of all the things I’ve done that day, no matter how trivial. It gives me clarity about how I’ve spent my time, and a sense of direction and sometimes an awareness that I need to re-boot my plan for tomorrow. Focus on what got done, NOT what you didn’t do. This isn’t about making yourself feel more anxious or guilty. The second list is the things I’m grateful for. Depending on the day, it might be a VERY short list, but there’s always something. This helps me reshape my anxiety and focus not on worry, but on gratitude. Southern black preachers refer to this as having “an attitude of gratitude”.
Abraham falls asleep as the sun sets that night, and feels a “thick and dreadful darkness” come upon him. BUT then, in the darkness, the Lord speaks words of assurance to him, and seals his covenant with a smoking firepot and a blazing torch. God speaks to Abraham’s greatest anxiety, that he will not have an heir, and promises him not only that will have ancestors to inherit the land, but also that Abraham will die in peace. (And given that he’s just been through several military encounters, I think God is addressing both the spoken and the unspoken anxiety in this story.)
So, when you are having a tough time and the lizard brain kicks in, you are not alone. Being anxious is part of being human, but only PART. It’s not a pleasant thing to do, but live with the anxiety for a bit and see what it is trying to tell you. Ask yourself why the situation has evoked this feeling, and whether there is something to learn from it. I over-react to the smell of anything smoky. I have to consciously remind myself that this is because we survived an actual fire, but that on EVERY OTHER OCCASION that has not been the case. Then I can react in a calmer way.
If there is no rational source for your anxiety, it doesn’t mean that you aren’t anxious, in fact, that may be a worse situation, because you can’t put a finger on the source. As I said at the beginning of this message, there are real, treatable mental illnesses that involve anxiety. I am NOT saying “if you just pray more, or read your Bible more, your anxiety will go away without meds or talk therapy” – that sounds an awful lot like the bad theology of those full solar churches I talked about earlier. What I will tell you is what helped me. While at a retreat, several folks suggested that unattributed anxiety, especially when it interfered with relationships, daily activities and decision-making likely does not come from God.
Hence, ASK. PRAY. Say, “Lord, I am feeling anxious about -----------------. If this is from you, please show me why. If this is NOT from you, I bind this and lay it at the foot of the cross. Amen.”
Then walk away and leave it there. This is so hard to do. It takes practice, but it happens. I’ll close with a personal experience. When I had the opportunity to come here as your pastor, I was excited but also anxious. That’s pretty normal when you are beginning a new job, but my anxiety each week, especially on Saturday nights, was through the roof. Was the sermon any good? Would I be an effective preacher again? All this worry and stress kept me awake on the very night when I needed to be well-rested.
So, it finally occurred to me to take the advice from some friends in a retreat and prayer community in North Carolina. I talked to my anxiety, and I talked to God. I asked that if this anxiety was from God, that I would learn from it, and that if was in fact designed to make me a less effective pastor and preacher, that I would give to Jesus and leave it at the foot of the cross. That anxiety was keeping me from doing what God has called and gifted me to do. When I began to pray this way, this particular anxiety left me. I still worry about losing my notes, tripping on that tricky step on the altar, etc., but I can be focused and attentive on Sunday mornings so that God can speak through me, or if necessary, in spite of me.
Thanks be to God!
Giving Up: Impatience - February 28, 2016
Today’s sermon is the next in our series of “Giving Up” things that distract us and keep us from being close to one another and from drawing closer to God. After talking about anxiety last week, impatience may seem like a step down on the scale of serious issues, but I’m willing to bet that for most of you, this is one of the most common feelings you experience. “Fess up, who has been impatient in the last 24 hours?
I drive in Massachusetts, which by definition means that I am exposed to impatient people and am tempted to be impatient myself on a daily basis. That little horn tap that’s so common here took some getting used to. In my part of the South, the only time you use your horn is in an extreme emergency, or when you’re really ticked off. Here it seems to be a normal part of the driving experience. The first few times I got the beep, it triggered a great deal of anxiety. Did I do something wrong? Am I about to be hit? Then I realized it wasn’t usually about me, and I don’t let a honk change how I’m driving, so if you get behind me after church today and I’m not going fast enough or turning quickly enough, sorry. But anxiety was last week’s topic, so back to impatience.
We live in an impatient world. Masked in the guise of “you earned it, you deserve it”, we are bombarded daily with the suggestion that we shouldn’t have to wait for anything. New car? Take out a six year loan. Want to re-do your kitchen? There’s a home equity loan for that. That vacation you’ve “earned”? Put it on a new credit card. The combination of impatience and entitlement can lead to plenty of bad choices which we pay for later.
In my research for this week’s sermon I found an article by a psychologist who proposes that IMpatience is the emotion, and patience is the absence of impatience, not a thing in and of itself. Given how we have developed over time, I see her point. Like anxiety, a healthy dose of impatience leads us to make decisions about how we spend our time. If a project takes longer than we expect, our feeling impatient causes us to examine the original motive for taking on the project, and forces us to choose whether we should push forward or change our goals. Finding the balance between patience and impatience is the tricky bit. Someone who is overly patient, for whatever reason, may end up muddled in a project or a relationship that is clearly going nowhere, but they aren’t willing to change course. On the other hand, someone who is overly impatient simply hops from project to project and never develops a sense of what I would call “stick-to-it-tivenss”.
In the article I read, one of the points the author made that hit home with me is that it is not impatience itself that is the cause of bad choices, but the combination of the feeling of impatience with other emotions. For example, take that most common of all situations, the grocery store checkout line. Like me, do you ALWAYS end up in the slow line? When you get to register, does the clerk ALWAYS need to change the tape? I get frustrated, as well as impatient. The impatience I feel when standing in line is a normal thing, but the combination of that and frustration leads me to the stupid choice to go get in a different line, where the clerk will, of course, immediately slow down AND run out of register tape just as I get to the register.
My other most common combination of frustration and impatience is when a lane is closed on my route somewhere. I know that highway engineers tell you to stay in the lane that’s closing and merge at the end – this makes the most efficient use of all the lanes for as long as possible. BUT, it also ticks off all the people, like me, who obediently move over as soon as we see the sign, and then spend a mile or two creeping along, while those “other” drivers zip right on by in the other, now mostly empty, lane. I’m impatient, but I’m also motivated to obey the merge sign quickly, and I don’t want to tick off the other drivers by waiting to merge after I’ve zipped past them the mile before. I can’t win.
I have driven in urban areas and heavy traffic for years now. I had an important epiphany when I realized that on most days at least, the traffic isn’t my fault, nor is it the fault of the other drivers. It’s just too many cars on an inadequate road.
When I hit that grocery line, I try to remind myself of similar things. I used to work retail, and I know that as a clerk, your day can be much better or much worse because of the attitude of your customers. If they are demanding, rude and pushy, you tend to want to respond in kind. The latest round of rudeness I see all the time is folks who are so driven to keep up with their text messages or email or whatever that they go through the entire checkout process and never speak to or make eye contact with the clerk. I remember being in a store while I was on the phone with my daughter. As I reached the front of the line, I told her I was getting ready to checkout and that I would call her back later. I had a pleasant interaction with the clerk, and as she handed me my purchase, she said, “Thank you for getting off your phone. You are the first customer I’ve had all day who actually looked at me.” That’s sad. We’re better than that.
I picked these particular topics to talk about during this Lenten season because they separate us from each other and from God. Impatient overload leads to us having a mindset that we are more important than other people and they should just get out of the way and let us do our jobs.
I see and hear this all the time. Timesaving gadgets are sold to us by claiming that they will make us more efficient. And we have “earned” or “deserve” these gadgets somehow. We’re worth it. Really?
In this morning’s first reading, the prophet Isaiah is reminding the Jews in exile that they are chasing after distractions, spending their money for what isn’t food and their earnings for what doesn’t satisfy. Does that sound like an infomercial to you?
Instead, he reminds them that God offers a rich feast of all that they need. And it’s free. They just have to put away the distractions and look. It’s right there if they can only see.
When Jesus tells the parable of the fig tree (by the way, there are a lot of fig trees in the Holy Land, and he uses them often in his stories), he describes the impatient landowner who wants figs, and he wants them now. Jesus doesn’t say if it’s fig season, or how old the tree is, just that when the landlord comes, he expects figs and he doesn’t get any. His solution is to destroy the tree. Maybe he’ll plant more grapevines there, maybe a different kind of tree. Anything but that non-producing fig tree.
I googled “fig trees and vineyards” and found lots of opinions on both side about planting a fig tree in a vineyard. Some folks think it’s crazy, some talk about how they enjoy feasting on the figs, a refreshing treat since they ripen about the time of the grape harvest. My best guess is that the tree in this story was what gardening people call a “volunteer” plant. It appeared, the gardener recognized it, and wants to give it a chance. The owner is frustrated and impatient. He wants figs and he wants them now. The gardener knows something the owner doesn’t. It takes a fig tree five years to produce its first crop. After that, if well-tended, it will produce for years. So, he persuades the landowner to focus on the bigger picture, the long term scenario, rather than his desire for instant gratification.
What do these passages have to say to us? We live in a hurried world, in a culture that puts efficiency and time management above all else. Schedules, reminders, doing more in one day than you ever thought possible. It’s exhausting. We can’t do it all, all day, every day, or even any day. It’s a myth. We rush from one thing to another, without ever giving ourselves time to slow down and enjoy anything. We are that vineyard owner, running about from field to field, frustrated because we can’t have our figs NOW. If something we encounter doesn’t meet our needs right then, it must be useless. Chop it down, throw it away, never think about it again.
God is the gardener. God knows that there is a time and purpose for everything under heaven, and only he knows how this will all play out. Meantime, he rejects nothing. That unproductive fig tree? Nothing is wrong with it that some time, attention and fertilizer won’t cure. This parable is a reminder to us to have patience. To look at the big picture. To see those we encounter, in traffic, on the street, at the store, in our families, as God’s beloved creatures. When we pause and see others that way, we are also seeing how God sees us. Surely that’s worth our time.
Today’s sermon is the next in our series of “Giving Up” things that distract us and keep us from being close to one another and from drawing closer to God. After talking about anxiety last week, impatience may seem like a step down on the scale of serious issues, but I’m willing to bet that for most of you, this is one of the most common feelings you experience. “Fess up, who has been impatient in the last 24 hours?
I drive in Massachusetts, which by definition means that I am exposed to impatient people and am tempted to be impatient myself on a daily basis. That little horn tap that’s so common here took some getting used to. In my part of the South, the only time you use your horn is in an extreme emergency, or when you’re really ticked off. Here it seems to be a normal part of the driving experience. The first few times I got the beep, it triggered a great deal of anxiety. Did I do something wrong? Am I about to be hit? Then I realized it wasn’t usually about me, and I don’t let a honk change how I’m driving, so if you get behind me after church today and I’m not going fast enough or turning quickly enough, sorry. But anxiety was last week’s topic, so back to impatience.
We live in an impatient world. Masked in the guise of “you earned it, you deserve it”, we are bombarded daily with the suggestion that we shouldn’t have to wait for anything. New car? Take out a six year loan. Want to re-do your kitchen? There’s a home equity loan for that. That vacation you’ve “earned”? Put it on a new credit card. The combination of impatience and entitlement can lead to plenty of bad choices which we pay for later.
In my research for this week’s sermon I found an article by a psychologist who proposes that IMpatience is the emotion, and patience is the absence of impatience, not a thing in and of itself. Given how we have developed over time, I see her point. Like anxiety, a healthy dose of impatience leads us to make decisions about how we spend our time. If a project takes longer than we expect, our feeling impatient causes us to examine the original motive for taking on the project, and forces us to choose whether we should push forward or change our goals. Finding the balance between patience and impatience is the tricky bit. Someone who is overly patient, for whatever reason, may end up muddled in a project or a relationship that is clearly going nowhere, but they aren’t willing to change course. On the other hand, someone who is overly impatient simply hops from project to project and never develops a sense of what I would call “stick-to-it-tivenss”.
In the article I read, one of the points the author made that hit home with me is that it is not impatience itself that is the cause of bad choices, but the combination of the feeling of impatience with other emotions. For example, take that most common of all situations, the grocery store checkout line. Like me, do you ALWAYS end up in the slow line? When you get to register, does the clerk ALWAYS need to change the tape? I get frustrated, as well as impatient. The impatience I feel when standing in line is a normal thing, but the combination of that and frustration leads me to the stupid choice to go get in a different line, where the clerk will, of course, immediately slow down AND run out of register tape just as I get to the register.
My other most common combination of frustration and impatience is when a lane is closed on my route somewhere. I know that highway engineers tell you to stay in the lane that’s closing and merge at the end – this makes the most efficient use of all the lanes for as long as possible. BUT, it also ticks off all the people, like me, who obediently move over as soon as we see the sign, and then spend a mile or two creeping along, while those “other” drivers zip right on by in the other, now mostly empty, lane. I’m impatient, but I’m also motivated to obey the merge sign quickly, and I don’t want to tick off the other drivers by waiting to merge after I’ve zipped past them the mile before. I can’t win.
I have driven in urban areas and heavy traffic for years now. I had an important epiphany when I realized that on most days at least, the traffic isn’t my fault, nor is it the fault of the other drivers. It’s just too many cars on an inadequate road.
When I hit that grocery line, I try to remind myself of similar things. I used to work retail, and I know that as a clerk, your day can be much better or much worse because of the attitude of your customers. If they are demanding, rude and pushy, you tend to want to respond in kind. The latest round of rudeness I see all the time is folks who are so driven to keep up with their text messages or email or whatever that they go through the entire checkout process and never speak to or make eye contact with the clerk. I remember being in a store while I was on the phone with my daughter. As I reached the front of the line, I told her I was getting ready to checkout and that I would call her back later. I had a pleasant interaction with the clerk, and as she handed me my purchase, she said, “Thank you for getting off your phone. You are the first customer I’ve had all day who actually looked at me.” That’s sad. We’re better than that.
I picked these particular topics to talk about during this Lenten season because they separate us from each other and from God. Impatient overload leads to us having a mindset that we are more important than other people and they should just get out of the way and let us do our jobs.
I see and hear this all the time. Timesaving gadgets are sold to us by claiming that they will make us more efficient. And we have “earned” or “deserve” these gadgets somehow. We’re worth it. Really?
In this morning’s first reading, the prophet Isaiah is reminding the Jews in exile that they are chasing after distractions, spending their money for what isn’t food and their earnings for what doesn’t satisfy. Does that sound like an infomercial to you?
Instead, he reminds them that God offers a rich feast of all that they need. And it’s free. They just have to put away the distractions and look. It’s right there if they can only see.
When Jesus tells the parable of the fig tree (by the way, there are a lot of fig trees in the Holy Land, and he uses them often in his stories), he describes the impatient landowner who wants figs, and he wants them now. Jesus doesn’t say if it’s fig season, or how old the tree is, just that when the landlord comes, he expects figs and he doesn’t get any. His solution is to destroy the tree. Maybe he’ll plant more grapevines there, maybe a different kind of tree. Anything but that non-producing fig tree.
I googled “fig trees and vineyards” and found lots of opinions on both side about planting a fig tree in a vineyard. Some folks think it’s crazy, some talk about how they enjoy feasting on the figs, a refreshing treat since they ripen about the time of the grape harvest. My best guess is that the tree in this story was what gardening people call a “volunteer” plant. It appeared, the gardener recognized it, and wants to give it a chance. The owner is frustrated and impatient. He wants figs and he wants them now. The gardener knows something the owner doesn’t. It takes a fig tree five years to produce its first crop. After that, if well-tended, it will produce for years. So, he persuades the landowner to focus on the bigger picture, the long term scenario, rather than his desire for instant gratification.
What do these passages have to say to us? We live in a hurried world, in a culture that puts efficiency and time management above all else. Schedules, reminders, doing more in one day than you ever thought possible. It’s exhausting. We can’t do it all, all day, every day, or even any day. It’s a myth. We rush from one thing to another, without ever giving ourselves time to slow down and enjoy anything. We are that vineyard owner, running about from field to field, frustrated because we can’t have our figs NOW. If something we encounter doesn’t meet our needs right then, it must be useless. Chop it down, throw it away, never think about it again.
God is the gardener. God knows that there is a time and purpose for everything under heaven, and only he knows how this will all play out. Meantime, he rejects nothing. That unproductive fig tree? Nothing is wrong with it that some time, attention and fertilizer won’t cure. This parable is a reminder to us to have patience. To look at the big picture. To see those we encounter, in traffic, on the street, at the store, in our families, as God’s beloved creatures. When we pause and see others that way, we are also seeing how God sees us. Surely that’s worth our time.
Giving Up: Judgmentalism - March 6, 2016
When I was planning this sermon series, I really wasn’t thinking about the fact that by now we’d be deep into the primary season in the American election cycle. Ugh. Whether you’re on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, the network news, in the library parking lot or at the corner pub, you can’t escape it. If I had a nickel for each politically related post I’ve seen in the past few weeks, I’d be on a beach somewhere with one those drinks with a little paper umbrella in it, enjoying a nice paid vacation.
And I have to admit, I’m guilty of the political judgmentalism, too. I try not to repost the comments I find offensive, but I realize I have put more than my share of things out there that may be more offensive than educational to people on the other side of the fence.
I’m not alone, though. Translators do it, and characters in the Bible demonstrate it.
The story of the Prodigal Son, today’s text from Luke’s gospel, is a prime example of both.
First, translation is hard. It involves making judgment calls about what word to use when moving from one language to another. How many of you have taken a foreign language? You know that you can’t create a word-for word translation from one language to another that makes any sense. If you don’t believe me, go home and read the computer-translated instruction manual for something you bought that was made in a non-English speaking country. Here is an example from my friend Elisabeth. These were the English instructions for a gift for her husband, Stephen.
He received a gift from the AP Calculus folks, a power bank for recharging his electronic devices. The instructions, however, are inscrutable. I offer them verbatim:
1. Charge, should be in the position of the ventilation is too high or too low temperature.
2. Do not put this product on the water, Light or damprain Cream.
3. Do not drop, strong beat, Vibration or shake the Production Products.
4. Charging, the mobile power hosts a slight fever, which is a normal phenomenon.
So, proof that translation is not a “word for word” process. It requires human beings with a knowledge of the languages involved, and it involves making judgment calls about the “best” word to use, the “right” meaning. The words you choose, as translator, shade the meaning of the text.
For example, a common way of translating the adjective that modifies “living” in v. 13 of this passage in Luke is “wild” or “riotous”. In fact, the Greek word just translates as “reckless”. So, this is a young man, who certainly demonstrates poor judgment, who has lost his money through reckless living. How does substituting “reckless” for “wild” or “riotous” change your mental picture of what happened to this kid? We don’t really know how he lost his money. Bad investments, fancy clothes, living above his pay grade? Not saving for the future?
Whatever it was, he’s tapped out. And that’s when he learns some important lessons about life, money and family.
As an original hearer of this story in the first century, your first response to this story would come in verse 12, when the son asks his father for his share of the family goods. I’m going to count to 3, and I want to you gasp in shock and horror. Ready, 1…2…3. (GASP) In those times, asking for your share of the family goods was the equivalent of declaring that your father, your family, is dead to you. All you want is the money and to move on. Does this sound like any teenager you know? Only a more extreme form of “I wish you were dead”, right?
What’s surprising is that the father complies. I imagine there was some history there - of frustration, arguments, anger and rebellion. Maybe the father had actually wished that this younger son would make tracks and leave. I am reminded of a friend, a high school counselor, who used to tell parents of seniors who were having a tough time with their kids that the kids were just doing their job, making the parents frustrated enough that when they were ready to leave home after graduation that the parents would be frustrated enough to help them pack!
For whatever reason, the young man in this story leaves for a far country, where he blows his money and ends up tending pigs. This description of his fate would have elicited a shocked response (3…2….1…gasp!) from Jesus’ listeners, given their dietary laws about pork.
So, this kid has gone about as low as he can go. He begins to see that he had it good back on the family estate, and decides he’d be better off as a slave there than as a free man hanging out with the pigs. With his apology well-rehearsed, he packs up and heads for home.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we see a tender glimpse of the father. The narrative in verse 20 tells us that while he was still a long way off, his father saw him, had compassion and ran to hug him. Can you imagine that scene? It makes me think that every day the father would walk to end of his estate and stand looking up and down the path, hoping against hope that he would see his son. What did he recognize? The stride? The way he held his shoulders? His hair? We’ll never know. What we do know is that in that moment, whatever anger and resentment there had been between them disappeared, and that that moment of reconciliation was a new beginning for them both.
The son is welcomed back as a son, not a slave, and the party starts. All is well, right?
Well, no. Waiting in the wings we have the elder brother. Patient, loyal, faithful, obedient. The “good” son. Apparently he’s so busy doing the work of the estate that he’s completely missed the dramatic homecoming. He only hears about it when he returns from the field and finds the feasting well under way.
Does he rejoice with his father? Does he go to meet his brother? No.
He’s the judgmental brother. He echoes and perhaps influenced how the translators interpreted that word “reckless” early in the story. He’s angry, and won’t go in and join the party. Once again, this father comes out looking for a distant son.
Big brother accuses the younger brother of wasting his father’s money with harlots. Hmm, that sounds more like wild or riotous living than reckless. And because of this, his judgment of his brother, he chooses to keep himself away from the party, from this joyous family reunion. And it seems to me that the elder brother’s comment to his father that the younger brother has wasted his money on “harlots” reflects his own assumptions about what his little brother was up to in that far country. Not only that, but the translators of the story seem to have decided that they agree with big brother’s interpretation of little brother’s activity.
This, Friends, is what being judgmental does to us. It shapes our narrative and it colors how we see one another. It keeps us from loving, and seeing, one another as God see us, and it keeps us from God’s party, that great heavenly banquet where we have all been offered a place.
Jesus ends the story there. We don’t know what happened to the elder brother. Is he content to sulk outside and nurse his hurt feelings while the feast goes on?
Are we?
Is it more important to hold a grudge and play God, like the brother in the story you heard tell few minutes ago, or can we accept the unconditional love and grace the Father offers us by mirroring that same love and grace to our fellow humans?
Our communion liturgy invites us to the table as God’s loved, forgiven and reconciled people.
As we move into this next week of Lent, we draw ever closer to the narrative of Holy Week, when God’s son makes the ultimate sacrifice to reconcile us all to God. Think and pray about where you need to practice reconciliation. Tear down the walls built by your own judgmentalism, and see your world, your community and yourself through the loving, compassionate eyes of the Father.
He’s waiting for you to come home.
When I was planning this sermon series, I really wasn’t thinking about the fact that by now we’d be deep into the primary season in the American election cycle. Ugh. Whether you’re on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, the network news, in the library parking lot or at the corner pub, you can’t escape it. If I had a nickel for each politically related post I’ve seen in the past few weeks, I’d be on a beach somewhere with one those drinks with a little paper umbrella in it, enjoying a nice paid vacation.
And I have to admit, I’m guilty of the political judgmentalism, too. I try not to repost the comments I find offensive, but I realize I have put more than my share of things out there that may be more offensive than educational to people on the other side of the fence.
I’m not alone, though. Translators do it, and characters in the Bible demonstrate it.
The story of the Prodigal Son, today’s text from Luke’s gospel, is a prime example of both.
First, translation is hard. It involves making judgment calls about what word to use when moving from one language to another. How many of you have taken a foreign language? You know that you can’t create a word-for word translation from one language to another that makes any sense. If you don’t believe me, go home and read the computer-translated instruction manual for something you bought that was made in a non-English speaking country. Here is an example from my friend Elisabeth. These were the English instructions for a gift for her husband, Stephen.
He received a gift from the AP Calculus folks, a power bank for recharging his electronic devices. The instructions, however, are inscrutable. I offer them verbatim:
1. Charge, should be in the position of the ventilation is too high or too low temperature.
2. Do not put this product on the water, Light or damprain Cream.
3. Do not drop, strong beat, Vibration or shake the Production Products.
4. Charging, the mobile power hosts a slight fever, which is a normal phenomenon.
So, proof that translation is not a “word for word” process. It requires human beings with a knowledge of the languages involved, and it involves making judgment calls about the “best” word to use, the “right” meaning. The words you choose, as translator, shade the meaning of the text.
For example, a common way of translating the adjective that modifies “living” in v. 13 of this passage in Luke is “wild” or “riotous”. In fact, the Greek word just translates as “reckless”. So, this is a young man, who certainly demonstrates poor judgment, who has lost his money through reckless living. How does substituting “reckless” for “wild” or “riotous” change your mental picture of what happened to this kid? We don’t really know how he lost his money. Bad investments, fancy clothes, living above his pay grade? Not saving for the future?
Whatever it was, he’s tapped out. And that’s when he learns some important lessons about life, money and family.
As an original hearer of this story in the first century, your first response to this story would come in verse 12, when the son asks his father for his share of the family goods. I’m going to count to 3, and I want to you gasp in shock and horror. Ready, 1…2…3. (GASP) In those times, asking for your share of the family goods was the equivalent of declaring that your father, your family, is dead to you. All you want is the money and to move on. Does this sound like any teenager you know? Only a more extreme form of “I wish you were dead”, right?
What’s surprising is that the father complies. I imagine there was some history there - of frustration, arguments, anger and rebellion. Maybe the father had actually wished that this younger son would make tracks and leave. I am reminded of a friend, a high school counselor, who used to tell parents of seniors who were having a tough time with their kids that the kids were just doing their job, making the parents frustrated enough that when they were ready to leave home after graduation that the parents would be frustrated enough to help them pack!
For whatever reason, the young man in this story leaves for a far country, where he blows his money and ends up tending pigs. This description of his fate would have elicited a shocked response (3…2….1…gasp!) from Jesus’ listeners, given their dietary laws about pork.
So, this kid has gone about as low as he can go. He begins to see that he had it good back on the family estate, and decides he’d be better off as a slave there than as a free man hanging out with the pigs. With his apology well-rehearsed, he packs up and heads for home.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we see a tender glimpse of the father. The narrative in verse 20 tells us that while he was still a long way off, his father saw him, had compassion and ran to hug him. Can you imagine that scene? It makes me think that every day the father would walk to end of his estate and stand looking up and down the path, hoping against hope that he would see his son. What did he recognize? The stride? The way he held his shoulders? His hair? We’ll never know. What we do know is that in that moment, whatever anger and resentment there had been between them disappeared, and that that moment of reconciliation was a new beginning for them both.
The son is welcomed back as a son, not a slave, and the party starts. All is well, right?
Well, no. Waiting in the wings we have the elder brother. Patient, loyal, faithful, obedient. The “good” son. Apparently he’s so busy doing the work of the estate that he’s completely missed the dramatic homecoming. He only hears about it when he returns from the field and finds the feasting well under way.
Does he rejoice with his father? Does he go to meet his brother? No.
He’s the judgmental brother. He echoes and perhaps influenced how the translators interpreted that word “reckless” early in the story. He’s angry, and won’t go in and join the party. Once again, this father comes out looking for a distant son.
Big brother accuses the younger brother of wasting his father’s money with harlots. Hmm, that sounds more like wild or riotous living than reckless. And because of this, his judgment of his brother, he chooses to keep himself away from the party, from this joyous family reunion. And it seems to me that the elder brother’s comment to his father that the younger brother has wasted his money on “harlots” reflects his own assumptions about what his little brother was up to in that far country. Not only that, but the translators of the story seem to have decided that they agree with big brother’s interpretation of little brother’s activity.
This, Friends, is what being judgmental does to us. It shapes our narrative and it colors how we see one another. It keeps us from loving, and seeing, one another as God see us, and it keeps us from God’s party, that great heavenly banquet where we have all been offered a place.
Jesus ends the story there. We don’t know what happened to the elder brother. Is he content to sulk outside and nurse his hurt feelings while the feast goes on?
Are we?
Is it more important to hold a grudge and play God, like the brother in the story you heard tell few minutes ago, or can we accept the unconditional love and grace the Father offers us by mirroring that same love and grace to our fellow humans?
Our communion liturgy invites us to the table as God’s loved, forgiven and reconciled people.
As we move into this next week of Lent, we draw ever closer to the narrative of Holy Week, when God’s son makes the ultimate sacrifice to reconcile us all to God. Think and pray about where you need to practice reconciliation. Tear down the walls built by your own judgmentalism, and see your world, your community and yourself through the loving, compassionate eyes of the Father.
He’s waiting for you to come home.