Roger Ray, pastor
April 14, 2013 Easter 3
Psalm 30
Thanksgiving for Recovery from Grave Illness
1 I will extol you, O Lord, for you have drawn me up, and did not let my foes rejoice over me.
2 O Lord my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me.
3 O Lord, you brought up my soul from Sheol, restored me to life from among those gone down to the Pit.*
4 Sing praises to the Lord, O you his faithful ones, and give thanks to his holy name.
5 For his anger is but for a moment; his favor is for a lifetime.
Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning.
6 As for me, I said in my prosperity, 'I shall never be moved.'
7 By your favor, O Lord, you had established me as a strong mountain;
you hid your face; I was dismayed.
8 To you, O Lord, I cried, and to the Lord I made supplication:
9 'What profit is there in my death, if I go down to the Pit?
Will the dust praise you? Will it tell of your faithfulness?
10 Hear, O Lord, and be gracious to me! O Lord, be my helper!'
11 You have turned my mourning into dancing; you have taken off my sackcloth and clothed me with joy, so that my soul* may praise you and not be silent. O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever.
Human beings invented religion when they became sufficiently self aware to realize that they were going to die one day. Bishop John Spong argues persuasively in his book, A New Christianity for a New Age, that humans needed to invent supernatural deities in the heavens governing over an unseen after life in order to cope with the existential awareness that like birds and trees, fish and flowers, we have only a few short years to live under the sun.
And it is true enough that an awful of the sillier parts of religious life amount to little more than a kind of existential whistling in the grave yard, assuring ourselves that we should not fear being snuffed out of existence because our imaginary friends in the clouds are going to take us to eternal reward when we die.
But that is not the better part of even very ancient religions. Even among the poems and philosophical musings that echo down from the dawn of human civilization are insights that are helpful far beyond any opium for the anxiety caused by mortality.
I was privileged a few years ago to hear the famous Old Testament professor, Walter Brueggemann talking about the importance of the Biblical lament. If you took every passage of the Bible about heaven or hell or your soul or any afterlife reference and printed it together, you would have about a dozen pages. A great deal of the Hebrew Bible is devoted to human self expression of fear, depression, anxiety, confusion along with supplications for hope, health, and even meaning.
Much of the wisdom literature of the Old Testament is not written as if it is God speaking to us, it is written in the voice of us asking God why? Why do we suffer? Who do bad people seem to prosper and good people seem to fail?
Most of us grew up in churches where the word "salvation" always had to do with going to heaven when you die but that's not how it is generally used in the Bible. When, in that walking on the water story in Matthew (14:30), Peter decides that it would be a good idea to walk out on the water to meet Jesus and Peter quickly sinks under the waves and is drowning. Matthew says that Peter cried out, "Lord, save me."
Now, who among us, if you were to take this account on its face, believes that Peter, as he was drowning, was saying to Jesus, "Please die for my sins on the cross so that I can go to heaven after out drown in this lake?" Clearly, the only salvation Peter was looking for was a hand back into the boat.
When we read in the Psalms where David is saying, "my enemies are encamped all around me, my strength is run out," when he says "save me," he has a very specific agenda in mind..... something to the tune of, "Dear God, please let me live to wake up in my own bed tomorrow."
The real meaning of the word, "salvation" is "to be made whole." If your life is broken by health issues, then being healed is salvation to you. If your life is broken by mental illness, disturbed relationships or even grievous sin then salvation comes in the form of being empowered to get your life back on track.
I was sorry to learn this week of the suicide death of the adult son of the famous evangelical pastor, Rick Warren. I was certainly one of the people who published sharp criticisms of President Obama for inviting Rick Warren, an outspoken anti-gay evangelical, to take part in the first Obama inauguration. I don't like the body of Warren's work and it would be hypocritical of me not to confirm that now but I am proud of the fact that when his son, Matthew, took his own life, Warren did not fall prey to the culture of shame and denial so often associated with religion.
Being a religious person does not alter the course of events in this capricious universe in which we live. Mental illness, cancer, diseases as well as car accidents, addiction and freaks of nature, plague people of faith just as much as they do anyone else in the world. I have no idea what the nature of Matthew Warren's mental illness was. I will not speculate about what caused his depression and why he chose to end his own life but because I have lost close friends in the same way, I simply acknowledge the loss of a young man's life and the hole left in a family and a congregation as a result.
A few months ago I received a call from a doctor's office asking me to come pick up an elderly woman whom the doctor believed should not be trusted to drive herself home. The woman was in distress. Because of deep grief, she had not been able to sleep or eat and she was run down and at the breaking point. Before I took her home, the physician's assistant called me back into a consulting room and said, "Dr. Ray, I know that you'll agree with me that the real problem with this patient is that she is not close enough to Jesus Christ."
I will not repeat what I said to that outrageously inappropriate and condescending unprofessional statement because I would like for at least our internet audience to enjoy the illusion that I can be a nice person in stressful situations and yet, no matter how ignorant and uninformed this medical professional's dismissal of a beautiful grieving widow's spiritual condition was, it is not far from the kind of magical self delusion common among religious people.
Had I been inclined to be instructive in that moment, much of what I would like to say to pious Christians is wrapped up in the quote you have heard me repeat from Soren Kierkegaard in the past, that is that "prayer does not change the one to whom we pray but it changes the one who prays."
That is, our silent, internal prayers do not then change the mind of God and cause divine intervention. Lots of people tell themselves that "God answers prayers," in a magical manner but Matthew Warren didn't die because Rick Warren didn't pray hard enough.
The mortality rate in our liberal, post supernatural theist church is exactly the same as the mortality rate down at Six Flags Over Jesus or at Warren's Saddleback church. It is 100%. Pray all you want, everybody dies.
So what is the benefit of being in a spiritual community? Why pray? It is this.... two years ago when the most powerful tornado in recorded history wiped out a huge swath of Joplin, MO, in insurance jargon, those hundreds of people who lost their lives and thousands of homes that were destroyed were lost in what is sometimes call an "act of God." I say that's bologna. A tornado is not an act of God, it is simply a part of a capricious universe.
When we loaded up pick up trucks and went over to Joplin with food, tarps to cover houses, chain saws to clear roads and trash bags to help survivors to clean up their yards and homes.... that was an act of God. That was a sign of the compassion that is born of sitting in this room, singing hymns, studying religious texts, taking communion and passing the peace.
Our spirituality does not change how God acts in human history but it changes how we act in human history. My faith won't keep me from being depressed or getting cancer but I hope that it changes how I react to those painful aspects of the human condition. We pray, as they say in the AA program, to increase our conscious connection to God and to one another. When I pray for you when you are in the hospital, I don't think that I am sending your magical energy beams that knits your bones back together and seals your surgical wounds..... I am pausing for a moment to love you, to feel my concern for you and to compose my own heart into action.....
which in Ron Hertenstein's case this week, amounted to getting up and taking him some Andy's frozen custard after doctors used a circular saw to install a new knee in his right leg.
Now, you tell me, when you have been through some trauma, would you rather have some evangelical church put you on their prayer list or would you rather have someone bring you an Andy's Frozen Custard? See, you are all becoming theologically discerning here.
Our funeral services do not give some soul a boost on their way to heaven.... they give us a chance to express our grief and to console one another in our losses. Our worship services are not intended to satisfy the ego needs of a twisted deity that needs to be praised by his subjects.... our services are intended to strengthen our community in which we show love to one another when we are hurting and we challenge one another to rise up and work harder to live lives of love adorned by good deeds.
Comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable is not a platitude, it is literally what we do here. Your personal spirituality may certainly have ineffably mystical dimensions.... mine certainly does, but our corporate religious life is rooted in reality. There may be some kind of afterlife where souls reside in eternity but what I know for certain is that neither I nor anyone else knows anything at all about that existence and anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or crazy.
What I do know is that we live in a world in which love relationships that were supposed to be permanent sometimes come to an end. We inhabit bodies that sometimes turn on us such that good people die far too young.
I know that sometimes because of human evil or human indifference or human ignorance that people die in accidents, get sick, get left out of meaningful work, education or housing but that because of the human desire to be spiritual people that we can kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
There was a Russian poet who wrote that every morning he takes a razor in his right hand, looks into the mirror and makes the decision of whether he is going to shave or cut his throat. I've been at that point and I bet Rick Warren has too and I suspect that most of you have as well.
So what makes you decide to shave again rather than cut your throat? Most of the time, for me, it was because of my connections to people who cared about which decision I made. My spirituality doesn't make life perfect but it makes it clear that the world expects something of me.... that my daughter expects something of me, my friends expect something of me, you expect something of me.
On Thursday there will be a hundred homeless people lining up at Bill's Place expecting us to show up to pray with them..... I mean, bring them a hot meal..... I'll pray with them too but mostly we'll pray by ladling some hot stew into a bowl against the violence of the cold wind on the sidewalk.
There is an African proverb that teaches, "When you pray, move your feet." Because that is the only kind of prayer that really makes a difference.
