Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
Matthew 11:16-19, 28-30
"But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, 'We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.' For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, 'He has a demon'; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!' Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds." "Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."
Two people in the news this week have died from the most painful and horrifying manner known to us. A sixteen-year-old Palestinian boy, Muhammad Hussein Abu Khdeir, was captured and burned alive, presumably in retaliation for the abduction and murder of three Israeli youths last month. The other was a retired Methodist pastor, Charles Moore, of Texas, who doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire.
The young man who died in a murderous immolation is just the most recent in a sixty yearlong violent conflict between Palestinian Muslims and Israeli Jews. The provocations behind this long and violent feud are real and yet workable solutions have been staring these two tribes in the face for three generations but the solutions elusive in an environment of sick religion, hate-speech, and unending escalation of passionate emotions that deny facts in favor of nurturing resentments, hostility, and a desire for bloody revenge.
Pastor Miller, on the other hand, took his own life. He was not, by his own reporting, mentally ill. He described himself as being desperate to draw attention to the unhealthy aspects of American divisions, irrational hostility, and heated, violent, divisions.
On the face of it, these two deaths couldn't be more different. One was murder and the other was suicide. What has made me think of them together is not simply because they both died in fire but because they both died because of the intransigence of the world's commitment to unhealthy, inflammatory, prejudice and hatred. One was a murder among two rival clans that just can't seem to let of their need for revenge long enough to stop the violence. The other was a suicide, a final, extreme, and, I will say, a misguided effort to draw the nation's attention to the insane divisions that have haunted us for generations.
There is a saying in Alcoholics Anonymous that says: Don't tell me how sick you have been. Tell me how well you want to be. When guys are trying to establish their reputation in an AA group, they will often tell stories; wild, fanciful, exaggerated stories, about how much they used to drink. Meeting time can be wasted, week after week, if they let that stuff go on, glorifying, and bragging about their drinking days. And so, to bring such story telling to a compassionate end, someone will just say: "Don't tell me how sick you have been. Tell me how well you want to be."
AA works for the people who really work the program because, in very simple, single sentence distillations of both psychology and spirituality, it keeps inviting people to choose health over illness, sanity over insanity, live over death. The program depends upon individual members of the group making the decision for themselves that they want to be health. They have to choose physical health, mental health, and spiritual health. They know that they have a disease that will surely kill them if they don't get healthy. Everyone who has spent any time in AA can list the people they know who drank themselves to death.
I attended a lot of meetings when I was a hospital chaplain working on the addiction unit. An epiphany came to me one evening when an elderly woman who had been sober for 30 years said, "I'm glad that I am an alcoholic because my drinking forced me to find this path to health." She went on to describe the insanity of a very sick marriage that led to very bad parenting. But it was the drunk driving arrests and trips to the emergency room that forced her into recovery. The illness gave her the reason to change, to choose health.
So that phrase, "Don't tell me how sick you've been, tell me how well you want to be," has stuck with me through the years. Many years ago when I was trying to deal with some very irrational conflict in the church where I was the pastor, the time for electing church leaders came up. We had some real stinkers in that church that had run off pastors and associate pastors for years. Creating drama, feeding gossip, and constantly trying to keep something stirred up. But they were long time members, and contributors, so they always got re-elected to the board.
But one year I read the job description for elders in this Disciples of Christ church. The elders, it said, were to nurture the spiritual health of the congregation. And I thought, a couple of these guys have been pouring poison in the well for decades.... They are not leaders; they are agitators, perpetual critics, and dishonest ones at that.
So I said to the nominating committee, let's only nominate congregational leaders who have helped the church to be healthy and refuse to re-elect anyone who has demonstrated that they would rather be unhealthy.
It was a novel and radical idea in that church as I suspect that it would be seen as a radical suggestion in most of the churches in our nation.
The committee immediately responded, "You can't do that!" And they named two or three people who were going to be very upset if they were not re-elected. And I insisted, if you are going to nominate anyone to take a board position, you need to be able to describe how they have helped to nurture the health of the congregation, so, none of those agitators were ever re-elected.
And they were angry and they tried to find backdoor ways to become influential again. I can see that there were long connecting lines between that decision to choose health over perpetual melodrama that lead to the end of my relationship with that church but I still defend it as being the right decision. I would rather be healthy than to find a way to survive in crazy-town.
Any gathering of people can become toxic because the relationships become sick. That's why there are spouse abuse shelters and runaway centers for families that have become toxic.
There was an entire department at MSU that was just shut down because the tenured professors had fallen into a level of melodrama that escalated to career and character assassination so that no student could survive the program. Huge and successful law firms here in town have split up and damaged the reputations and practices of everyone involved because the emotional environment had become sick.
Churches can be especially vulnerable to this because churches are voluntary organizations. There are over 300 churches in Springfield... no one is forced to attend any of them but anyone could change churches every few weeks and never run out of other options in a single lifetime.
Some people are only satisfied by melodrama on the level of human sacrifice... and it doesn't matter what the real issues are. In counseling, we call this a "conflict habituated" family system. They feel important and excited when they can create drama. They use their emotions to control the behaviors of the people around them. Jesus confronts this behavior in this passage from Matthew we read today. He says:
"But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, 'We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.'
Literally, "I was upset but you still didn't do what I wanted you to do." Because, in crazy-town logic, if I am upset, you have to change. In this insanity, I am not responsible for my moods, feelings, emotions.... You are and you have to be something different or do something differently in order to satisfy my expectations. At one level, this is just emotional manipulation, but it can become emotional terrorism.
Many people who find themselves in emotionally manipulative relationships at home, at work, at school, in politics or in church will tell you that they feel like they are always trying to tiptoe on egg shells. The least little thing can turn into hysterics.
Of course, in some churches, the clergy often feel that they are being asked to tap-dance in a minefield. They are expected to be scholarly and yet deny virtually all scholarship. They are to be prophetic but never say anything with which any donor might disagree. Hence, we have totally irrelevant churches being pastored by people who survive on anti-depressants and Prilosec.
Jesus, in this passage in Matthew, succinctly describes the insanity of trying to satisfy emotional terrorism. He says:
For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, 'He has a demon'; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!' Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds."
The poetic conclusion to this pericope can be read as a plea to return to sanity:
"Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."
We wrote in the vision statement for our church when we first opened our doors that it was our goal to create a healthy spiritual community. In part, because none of us ever wanted to be a part of an unhealthy church community ever again. And, in part, it was to show other churches that it can be done. You don't have to perpetuate hostilities. Israelis and Palestinians don't have to hate each other. Sunnis and Shi'a don't have to fight each other. Blacks and whites, Latinos and Anglos, liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, .... We don't have to keep setting one another on fire. We don't have to live in conflict for the rest of time.
We can leave Crazy-town if only we can all decide that we like being healthy more than we like the attention and power we think we get from being sick. Let's see if we cannot show the world how it is done. Don't tell me how sick you have been. Tell me how healthy you want to become.
