June 13, 2010
Texts:
Gospel: Lk. 7: 36-50
Epistle: 2 Cor. 7: 8-13, 16
I share today because there are some things in our community that happen to us that reveal both our vulnerabilities and our strengths in community, and how faith can help us begin to overcome our shortcomings. Also, I share because we are a close community, and in the weave of relationships we may say or do or feel things between one another which do not “bear one another’s burdens,” but rather create burdens, in our very human limitations. I was moved and inspired reading Fred’s recent sermon “stewarding the mysteries of God.” I share my personal story not because it’s very remarkable (it’s mostly not), or because it not resolvable (it has been resolved—thanks to Meade, our mission group, our community’s leadership team, and the power and inspiration of forgiveness). As Fred said in the sermon, I am a Christian who has been “introduced to and persuaded by the mysteries of God” and have chosen, with grace, “to be a faithful steward of those mysteries.” I want to share how those 4 mysteries Fred sited informed my responses to being caught in the cross-hairs of the need to forgive, and, in turn, be forgiven. Those 4 mysteries are Resurrection, Ascension, Conversion (specifically Paul’s conversion), and the coming of the Holy Spirit—which led the disciples to act with boldness and power in the Spirit, born of forgiveness and confidence in the risen Christ. These mysteries help me make sense of a personal and public dilemma, one which would have gone quite differently had I not been privileged to be part of this 8th Day Faith Community and our tradition of faithfulness.
So, let me start with the Gospel, by saying that forgiveness is arguably the central spiritual practice Jesus taught. Luke picks this up in a very large way, writing what is known as the “Gospel of Mercy” or the “Gospel of Great Pardons” according to theologians. Again and again, Luke redeems and reconciles the lost and wrong with forgiveness: the sinful woman (today’s Gospel reading), the lost sheep, the lost coin, the prodigal son, Jesus even forgiving his own executioners, and the forgiving of the thief he was on the cross along side. Jesus taught happiness & blessing thru relentless mercy; Jesus acted to reconcile & respond to suffering with vigilant compassion and unyielding forgiveness. The Gospel of Luke’s amazing picture of the woman ‘who has shown great love,’ who’d been forgiven (prior to the story happening, it appears), comes into a dinner party at Simon’s, a Pharisee’s, house, bows at Jesus’ feet and utterly loses it. She begins adorning the feet of Jesus with precious ointment, and then kissing his feet. Then she is crying, crying so hard I imagine she’s losing all composure, probably sobbing, and then drying his feet with her hair. The sense given by the passage is that ‘she loves abundantly because she was forgiven abundantly.’ It’s not that’s she’s forgiven because she’s loving toward Jesus, but that this love is an overflow of forgiveness she’s experienced deeply and abundantly, so much so that she doesn’t need to worry about the social inappropriateness of such lavish affection. She SO knows the happiness and blessing of Jesus’ forgiveness, an utterly surprising mystery if ever there was one, that she embodies that mystery with unmistakeably generous and uncontrolled loving. The person in the picture is one who’s moved beyond the shame and disgrace of her sin, and welcomed the chance to show love in both generous and un-selfconscious response. It’s unmistakeable confidence to live freely, utterly restored. It’s Resurrection! So the central question for me becomes: How do we do what the forgiven woman did? How do we recognize God’s mercy, and when can recognize and can receive it, how do we accept the forgiving cancellation of our debts so we are able to show our depth of love?
Let me beging another story, another person in another picture. It was an ordinary day, with another email from Meade on a Thurs. morning: “We really should do background checks on our members!” was the email’s lead. I opened the email, and saw a large, uncaptioned picture of myself in a play from 1980, “The Cup of Trembling,” in which I played a Nazi Gestapo interrogator who was attempting to get the confession from Deitrich Bonhoeffer during his inprisonment in 1944-45, just before he was slain by the Nazis. There I was in the picture, enlarged big as life, in a 30 year-old black and white photo, 25 years old, blonde, in a Gestapo brown shirt and thin tie, doing the Nazi salute in front of the well-known flag with a large Nazi swastika on it. I immediately emailed Meade back: “wrong message, wrong messenger.” But it was too late. This message had gone out to the entire 8th Day list serve. I felt this sickening, sinking feeling in my stomach; the first response was in my gut. Then my mind began racing: I began to be very concerned about the implications of this picture: What if some of the Jewish clients I was seeing saw this picture? What if the president of the company (who is a Conservative Jew) who manages the consulting contract I do for the Navy somehow got access to this? What if my social work Licensure Board got this, and from it believed I was a sworn member of the Nazi Party? What would the 8th Day Faith Community make of this? Would I have to resign as part of the leadership team? I was concerned for my private practice and my ability to function as a professional. In short, it pushed all my “insecurity” buttons, as the culture defines them. Suddenly, I was very afraid. What if I cannot function in as a social worker because this got out on the internet? In short, I was full of hurt and fear, and this grew rapidly into anger. I was flooded with feelings, concerned for my reputation and livelihood, and all because Meade decided to send a bad joke out over the list serve for 8th Day. I was feeling off balance and victimized.
The mission group meeting the next day was difficult. Yes, of course Meade was sorry she’d done this, and saw the harm in it almost immediately. We instantly flew into problem-solving mode, and with Meade this is always fast-forward. But within me, the situation was still very unsettled, and I didn’t quite know why. Meade and I developed 3 or 4 step strategy for solving the problem, and I can’t thank her enough for using her computer expertise contacts and time and energy to throw herself into a solution. This effort on her part was a demonstration of sincere regret—Paul called ‘Godly repentance’—which she also expressed emotionally, too, and I accepted. I told her it felt like forgiveness would be premature, since someone could post this somewhere—even as a joke—it would be difficult to stop. I felt emotionally vulnerable & overwhelmed, as if this poisonous email was going to be my demise, my end. In this horrible fantasy, further loss and poverty possibly loomed ahead before me and my family as I faced disgrace of people believing I was a Nazi. This stewing soup of mixed emotions and ill-informed conclusions grew to a boil, and probably boiled over the next week, when I emailed Meade that I wasn’t sure I could be her spiritual director, and wasn’t sure I could be on the leadership team anymore until this was cleared up. I was feeling shaky and upset, not sleeping well, and was disturbed by nagging, intrusive, negative self-talk throughout my prayer time daily. I was also distracted and unfocused working with clients. These are quite unusual reactions for me. I talked with Carol at some length about what was going on from the beginning, but this was an unusually strong emotional response to something that Meade was seemingly so committed to and active in resolving. She was devoted to personally calling each person on the list serve—over 70—to make sure they had deleted and not saved a copy of the email. Why was this feeling so painful inside, then? Strangely, over the next week, this sense of being out of control gathered dark momentum. It felt like a looming death. Something, and not just a sense of ego, of being seen in the world as you think you should be seen, was dying. It felt like grief. I had lost something in Meade’s act, and could work myself into justifying why it was OK to be so incensed with frustration and even agitated with anger. “THIS was righteous anger,” I told myself. “I’ve been wronged.” And the “negative self-talk” continued, and led to no where except more intrusive, negative thoughts, feelings and attitudes.
Resurrection
So, I was personally “in deep,” a kind of depressive funk I grew up with, that is all-too familiar a territory. Fred Taylor discussed how each of the mysteries he sited offers a bridge of hope to the future God wills for the church and the world. By the next Mon., just prior to the 3rd mission group meeting after the picture’s posting, this whole affair came to a head when I sent an angry email to Meade. I said far too much in the email in reactivity, such as the picture might mean that I could not function as a spiritual mentor for Meade, and that I was concerned if I could continue to function on the leadership team. This was anything but forgiving or a bridge of hope; this was vengeance. I had copied Connie and Marcia on the email, because they’ve both been my spiritual director recently. Connie, our moderator, on reading the email, called on Marcia to intervene and stand by to moderate the conflict in our mission group. As I told David Hilfiker and Marcia in our Sat. morning meeting, I had having the same dreams that I had when I actually did the “Cup of Trembling” play 30 years earlier, of actually being a Nazi, and punishing people sadistically. I shared with them how my German heritage and family’s bigotry had been a place of shame and secrecy, darkness and self-scrutiny, and that I felt as if I was being haunted by it through this picture and these dreams. Why was this simple picture, and its posting, having so much power over me? This was somehow awakening powerful “shadow” material in my soul, which I was undoubtedly projecting directly onto Meade, and not owning or working with faithfully. So, that became the work of the third mission group. The toxic nature of my upset and expressed anger had a poisoning effect on the preparations for the upcoming Creativity Workshop we’d been working on for months. All that came to a stop. In our mission group check-in, after some confusing and upsetting exchanges, I confessed my shame and fear, the “shadow” places that held me from seeing this as just a mistake that Meade had made, and had formed it into an overwhelming force that felt like it could bring my life to a halt.
I had begun looking through the Bible, hungry for parallels, and found some passages in 2 Cor. I found out how, in 2 Corinthians, Paul worked with an experience of being victimized, offended and hurt by his community, when a group of Jewish –Christian missionaries came following Paul’s first visit and criticized him mercilessly. At least one member of the community turned against Paul, openly defaming him. Paul demonstrated both humility and faithfulness by de-personalizing the whole matter. It turns out there were not really 2 letters to the Corinthians, but really 4 letters, 2 of which have been lost. Scholars got this by examining the first and second letters, looking for references to other communications, and the pattern of trips to that area in his Paul’s short, prolific career as a missionary. The letter we know as 1 Cor is probably the 2nd of the 4 letters, and the 3rd letter, also lost, is named a “letter of tears,” written in grief and distress about how he had been wronged by a member of the Corinthian community. He writes about the “letter of tears” in 2nd Corinthians, saying “I wrote you out of much distress and anguish of heart and with many tears, not to cause you pain, but to let you know the abundant love I have for you.” Paul’s love for his community was an expression of Jesus’ love for him, having forgiven Paul so much. He goes on to insist that others affirm their love for the offender, in saying “I urge you to affirm your love for him… Anyone whom you forgive, I also forgive. What I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, has been for your sake in the presence of Christ.” This was NOT about Paul being wronged, despite the fact that he definitely WAS wronged, but it is about an affirmation of love and forgiveness “in the presence of Christ.”
And later in this work, this verse caught my eye & heart:
2 Cor 7: 8-13,16 “For even if I made you sorry with my letter, I did not regret (but I did regret it, for I see that I grieved you with the letter, though only briefly). Now I rejoice, not because you were grieved, but because your grief led to repentance; for you felt a godly grief, so that you were not harmed in any way by us. …So although I wrote to you, it was not on account of the one who did the wrong, nor on account of the one who was wronged, but in order that your zeal for us might be made known to you before God. In this we find comfort. …I rejoice, because I have complete confidence in you.”
Then, as if to underscore how adversity and joy rise together, he invites the Corinthians to be part of the same amazing fundraising the Macedonians had done, when (2 Cor 8: 2) “during a severe ordeal of affliction, their abundant joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part.”
After writing an angry email to Meade, citing how I had been wronged, I felt really like I was the one who needed to apologize, and pray to put the whole thing into “the presence of Jesus.” So I did, and came to the mission group with a spiritual report I shared directly out of in our sharing time: It was a kind of Resurrection for me, when I read to the mission group—
“The work to reconsider my responses, if I had been in Meade’s position, and knowing that I have done things to hurt and harm others, has been helpful. It was also helpful to have wood delivered this week. As I piled the wood over 3 hours, the act of saying the Jesus prayer with my breath—“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”—while carrying & stacking a cord of wood helped to put my fears into better perspective. During the stacking of wood, I reflected on what happened to people when their lives were totally at risk for their faith and beliefs? If I experienced this much shame just being associated with the internet picture and all it potentially implied, it seems petty compared to the anxiety and persecution I would feel if I really were at risk for my life in my beliefs. As Christians, we must keep in mind the power of faith and community in the face of adversity—even unto death, where I believe God meets us and moves us to the next consciousness of forgiveness. That new and renewed consciousness is present to us now in Jesus as he is revealed in community’s response to difficulty. The community, particularly Meade, has responded with amazing support and deepened reassurance. I am so grateful.” This was new life. This was Resurrection.
Ascension
And how did I arrive at that Resurrection? What was my process of transformation? There is a quality, as Fred said, in the Ascension, of moving from time (history, daily here & now) to a timelessness, a place and time where Jesus’ meaning for the disciples was more eternal than daily and real in a fixed sense. Rather than fix this personal experience in the realm of time (i.e., a person wronging me with an email, and the email & wrong can be fixed), there was a truly difficult and entrenched quality to this situation I had difficulty getting my head and heart around enough to understand. Here is where imagination can come in and be helpful. I used the “active imagination” technique used by Carl Jung to actually explore dreams and their images to discern precisely what the unconscious mind is trying to get the conscious mind to understand. This meant working with the images and scenes of the dreams and characters with the assumption that some part of myself is embodied in each part of the dream. I AM the Nazi. I am ALSO the interrogated one. I am also the interrogation cell in which the scene occurs. Somewhere in me IS the conviction that torture and murder is justified and justifiable, just as the US government held in the past administration. The re-living the dreams of being in the uniform, the shouting of Nazi oaths and beliefs during the play, and feeling myself to be acting like a Nazi—the same dreams I had when I was doing the play 30 years earlier—were happening nightly. What was my unconscious trying to get me to notice, to listen to and to hear? All the while, I was feeling more isolated from everyone, including Carol, with whom I wasn’t sharing this process or sense of shame. “What did I do to deserve all this?” I’d ask myself, again rehearsing the role of the victim.
The timelessness I experienced in the Active Imagination ‘play’ with these images and dreamed experiences broke thru into a kind of ascension. “For the risen Jesus to ascend into timelessness conveys that our distinctions of past, present and future are superseded. It means that even the past can be healed, that nothing is wasted—that pieces of our lives that we look back upon with shame or regret are not wasted. Our past can be healed. It can be redeemed.” Somehow, mysteriously, this re-enactment of split-off, negative aspects of my worst nightmares of myself, were able to be owned, named, claimed, and re-framed into a form I could understand and fully recognize. I could see myself, for real, in the picture. The important thing here is that, like the woman who experienced utter forgiveness, this released actual joy within me, immense relief, and a gush of wanting to explain how I’d been projecting all this negativity on everyone for weeks—AND I WAS SORRY! I asked for forgiveness for my misunderstanding, for my feelings of shame that distorted my responses and emotional vulnerability. I asked forgiveness of God, and of others—especially in the New Creation mission group, and received it.
The Risen Jesus is Still the Crucified Jesus
Fred discussed how in Saul’s conversion, Saul was struck down by the blinding light in the very mission of persecuting people—who believed Jesus was resurrected. There are lots of ways to understand Paul, but most direct way would be to ask him a question which would strip him of his projections—his sin—in persecuting the Christians: “Saul, why are you persecuting me?” Such a confrontation with his wrongdoing, and the blindness that followed, stripped Paul of all his defenses against the Lord. There is a way that the blindness, and our thrashing around in the darkness is the ultimate, intimate example of wrong-doing, which prevents us from living in the Light of God. I imagine this was an important part of the 3 years it took Paul to begin his ministry following the Damascus Road revelation. Paul had so internalized the crucified Christ through his receiving of Jesus’ forgiveness that he fully identified as continuing his life as another crucified Christ: “no longer me but Christ crucified in me.”
In facing the fact of his pending crucifixion at the last supper in Luke, Jesus predicts Peter’s denial and feeling of unforgiveable shame at denying him 3 times before the cock crows. Our unforgiveable shame mobilizes us for action of expressing the love born of forgiveness, and so Peter becomes the one taking the initiative after the coming of the Holy Spirit in Pentecost—preaching, healing, turning, self-examining, eventually affirming with Cornelius the bridge of Jesus to the Gentiles, and thus affirms Paul’s ministry. Jesus also forgives the thief from the cross. The thief is aware of his wrongdoing, scolds the thief who taunts Jesus because they have done wrong, but then declares Jesus’ innocense. Then he pleads, “Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom.” Jesus again responds with forgiving reconciliation, an unthinkable balm of grace from a place of utter suffering: “Today, you will be with me in paradise.” It is because the power of unforgiveness is so vivid in the likes of Paul and Peter that they are mobized to act BOLDLY, out of such extraordinary and transformative love and commitment. Everywhere, they are breaking boundaries, transgressing social limits, and doing God’s work in bold and novel ways. In our own ways, in our own daily lives, may we do likewise.
Living into the Bridge of Forgiveness and Confidence
The way back from wrongdoing is forgiveness. But how do we authentically get there. How do we do what the disciples did after the coming of the Holy Spirit, trust that we can go and heal a person in obvious need? How do we act in confidence that the presence of Jesus, the very name of Jesus, in us can and will manifest, that our act of forgiveness can, even in some small way, become Jesus’ act through us? We have the example in Paul of a bridge from hurt and distress to restored confidence in forgiveness in his Damascus Road experience, but also in the 2 Cor. transformations. We also have the example in the gospel, where the woman in great need washes Jesus feet with perfume and tears and dries it with her hair.
So also the ‘victimization’ of Paul by the Christian-Jewish missionaries who followed him in Corinth. These wrongs were disclosed to his beloved Corinthian church with ‘tears & anguish,’ but then also DE-PERSONALIZED, made part of a general experience in the whole community, and made a cause for celebration of their zeal before God and restored confidence. Here is Paul, seemingly with his back against the wall, turning and rejoicing that they could support & forgive the one who defamed him, as a means to demonstrate “the zeal for us” that “might be made known to you before God.” Paul comments, “In this we find comfort.” He goes on to express how their alliance with their dear companion Titus, whom they boasted of, also feels his heart go out to all of them, “as he remembers the obedience of all of you, and how you welcomed him with fear and trembling.” He concludes joyously, “I rejoice, because I have complete confidence in you.” Complete confidence. That is what I felt about the process in our mission group, the clarity of honesty and the trust that such disclosure had and would yield forgiveness and wholeness. My heart burned within me in that mission group where I confessed my shame and need of forgiveness, even as I was expecting so much of Meade. Through tears and mutual trust, mercy and forgiveness was given and received. We continue to be a confessional and open group, necessary ingredients, I find, for any creative process.
We were even more accountable to work things thru because of our connection in mission group, and –trust me—the sparks will fly if you’re about trying to actually do something together. You will encounter some “shadow” material, in fact that closer you get the Light of God in what you’re doing, the more the shadow will show itself just by the contrast. The closer we got to the Light in the work of the Creativity Workshop and our intimate connection weekly, the more the shadow energies were exposed, our own personal strengths and vulnerabilities, some of which were disowned, unrecognized strengths or weaknesses that came out in the group process or our sharing the tasks. Those strengths and weakness were exposed and empowered thru our process as a mission group, preparing for the service of the workshop.
I’ve experienced forgiveness in many ways, mostly life-giving and generative. The lack of forgiveness, which I’ve also felt in facing broken relationships with my ex-wife and others, are death-giving, dead-end streets of victimization. Mercy and forgiveness, though seldom earned, are grace-filled and worthy gifts of the Spirit to be sought, given, and received in full-heartedness. They burn in our hearts, though they are more than just emotional. The times of un-forgiveness and forgiveness remain indelible memories in my mind, probably because they’re such whole-person experiences: mental, emotional, physical, interpersonal and, above all, spiritual. Jesus knew and lived this critically in his spiritual practice of forgiveness. How critical and central it seems that forgiveness is as the singular path toward deepened relationships, increased compassion, understanding and dialogue. We often hold back so much, as I did, when we have the capacity and potential to give, and forgive, so much.