February 5, 2006 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

The Body Broken

Dana Ferguson
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Isaiah 40:21–31
1 Corinthians 9:16–23

“But those who wait for the Lord
shall renew their strength.”

Isaiah 40:31 (NRSV)

The beginning and the end of all Christian leadership
is to give our life for others. Thinking about martyrdom
can be an escape unless we realize that real martyrdom means
a witness that starts with the willingness to cry with those who cry,
laugh with those who laugh, and to make one’s own painful and joyful
experiences available as sources of clarification and understanding.

Henri J. M. Nouwen
The Wounded Healer:
Ministry in Contemporary Society

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It seems the tables have been turned today. Instead of my being the one telling the preacher to keep it crisp, I’m the preacher being told to keep it crisp. Turns out folks are nervous that communion is going to take a little extra time in these days of renovation. They think that you are actually going to have a really hard time getting those little communion cups back into the tray instead of into the pew racks that are normally in front of you. However, I have greater confidence in you than that. Not only do I think you can drink your grape juice and get the cup back in the tray before it’s passed, I think you might actually help serve one another—holding the tray while your neighbor serves themselves. But all the same, I’ve been told to keep it crisp! And unlike some other preachers who have been told the same, I’m actually confident of my ability to do so.

Over the Christmas holidays, I read Joan Didion’s new book, The Year of Magical Thinking. In it she recounts the year of her husband’s death and her need to remember and put together all the pieces of the events that led up to his death and followed it. As I flipped the pages, my husband asked, “Is it a good book?” “I’m fascinated by it,” I responded. “By her need to put together all the moments of what happened—and some of the rituals and things she hangs on to get through life in those moments. But,” I said, “I’m not sure that it would be so interesting if you hadn’t had a traumatic event in your life.” “Everyone,” Wayne said, “has had a traumatic event in their life, Dana.”

The more I live this life, unfortunately, the more I discover he is right. This life isn’t always easy. It has been true since the very beginning of time, since the beginning of our story as God’s people. We discover in Isaiah today the Israelites in great distress. They are living in exile. And they are honestly grappling with the tough questions of faith: Is God there? Does God care? Do we matter at all? These are the very questions that we often find buried in the heart of our Christian faith, the ones that sneak up on us in the dark night, in the midst of crisis and trauma and tragedy. Like the Israelites, we too find ourselves in times of exile—separated from one’s we love, from the life or health we cherish, even from ourselves. Most of us live lives that at some point have been broken. We carry with us fear or grief, shame or longing.

What can make it even more painful are the messages we hear from society. Instead of revealing our true wounded souls, we get messages over and over to present ourselves as healthy, happy, ready for the challenge, stronger than the pack, brighter than our schoolmates, heartier than our competitors and neighbors. It’s a dangerous message. It’s a message that the Israelites didn’t subscribe to, and for it, their faith lives and community life were richer and fuller. As it turns out, the questions and doubts that we often bury can be the exact sources of hope and conviction in our faith, the very foundation from which God resurrects new life and new possibilities. The act of denial then can come at high costs.

Author Kenji Yoshino contends that, over and over in our society, individuals are called upon to cover up who they truly are. In his book, Covering, he deals with the issues of civil rights, the strides we have made and the progress yet to be made. He argues that although we have made it illegal to discriminate because of race or gender or sexual orientation, we call upon folks to pretend not to be who they really are, to cover it up. He writes,

All civil rights groups feel the bit of the covering demand. African Americans are told to “dress white” and to abandon “street talk”; Asian Americans are told to avoid seeming “fresh off the boat”; women are told to “play like men” at work and to make their child care responsibilities invisible; Jews are told not to be “too Jewish”; Muslims, especially after 9/11, are told to drop their veils and their Arabic; the disabled are told to hide the paraphernalia they use to manage their disabilities.

He continues, “This is so despite the fact that American society has seemingly committed itself, after decades of struggle, to treat people in these groups as full equals” (p. 22).

There is risk often in fully claiming our identities, whether it is about who we are, where we have been, or what challenges we struggle with. Deep inside, we want to be accepted, not ridiculed or judged or cast away. So we pretend. Or as Yoshino put it, we cover and work hard at assimilating. “Assimilation,” he writes, “is the magic in the American dream—just as in our actual dreams, magic helps us become not just Americans, but the kind of Americans we seek to be. Just conform, the dream whispers, and you will be respected, protected, accepted.” I think Yoshino is right. Society whispers over and over to us to cover up and fit in. But I think it is even more pervasive than he addresses. Society says to all of us, in some sense or another. cover up—cover up that which has wounded us, or grieved us, caused us pain, or challenged us. Anything that might convey weakness we are told to cover up.

And so we discover in Isaiah an important lesson: the importance of being totally honest with ourselves and the world about the challenges in our life—not to cover them up but to claim them and deal with them, to claim our situations with the same honesty and despair that the Israelites did and to listen to the voice of prophets and apostles around us. Isaiah made it clear to those feeling desperate in exile that their future wasn’t dependent upon their own strength but upon the strength of God who does not faint or grow weary. Although we may grow weary, God never does, and this is the power God then gives to us. So wait. Wait, believing with great confidence in the power of a loving God who does not count even one as insignificant or obscure or unimportant. For those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength.

A few weeks ago I had a conversation with a member of the congregation who is struggling with a life-threatening disease. Having heard my story of battling cancer, she asked me, “Did you ever get over being afraid of dying?” I pondered. Part of me wanted to cover. Part of me wanted to pretend that I never had any doubts in my life of faith, that I was simply rock solid without moments of weakness and wavering. But that would only have been covering. I had come to terms with the fact that life might end far sooner than I wanted, but I believed then, as I do now, that that doesn’t negate God’s love for me in any way, that the story of God’s love for me—and for all humanity, for that matter—doesn’t begin with me and it surely doesn’t end when my life on this earth ends. It is a story that continues on and on just as I will continue on and on in the next life wrapped tightly in the arms of a loving God. I had deep convictions about my faith, and yet there was one fear I could never lay down. And so I had to respond to her question with a “No.” I didn’t ever fully get over being afraid of death. The place that I couldn’t come to terms with it was as a mother. I told her, “I couldn’t bear to think about leaving my children without their mother.” That scared me. Of that I was deeply afraid. It might not have been what we expect our pastor to say—to claim weakness and fear—but that was the truth. And I’m convinced that valid and valuable ministry happens through truth, whether it’s what we’d want it be or not.

Bringing our whole selves to ministry isn’t always the self we’d like to bring. We’d like to shine it up, eliminate the flaws, cover up the short comings. But that isn’t what we are called to do in ministry. We are called to come to one another, ready to serve, not as perfect creatures but as the people we are authentically. It’s what Paul is writing about when he says he became weak. In Paul’s time, the weak were often considered those of least means. It’s one of the reasons he contends that he will not accept pay for preaching the gospel. (Glad the times have changed!) Paul’s goal is meeting people on their terms even if it meant foregoing compensation. The point is that he met people where they were, on their ground, in their terms, in their places of triumph or pain, joy or struggle. He operated on the principle that by preaching the gospel to all sorts of people, meeting them on their ground, he is affirming that nothing, no human institution or practice or distinction, can be permitted to impede the message that God cares passionately about all of God’s creatures

Preacher Mary Anderson writes in the Christian Century, “We can slink away in despair and denial or we can crawl back into God’s big saving hands. Isaiah proclaimed, and the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus confirmed, that this God who knows all, creates all, controls all, and plans all also loves all. God has no inconsequential creatures or untended corners of the universe. God tells us how precious we are in God’s sight” (“Who Is Like Thee?” 26 January 2000). And that is exactly the message that Paul was bound to share. And so are we. That no matter what this day or the next day might bring, it can never change the love and care God has for us or our obligation to share that faith.

During the past Christmas holidays, a group of Fourth Church volunteers traveled to the Mississippi coast for a post-Katrina mission trip. As is the tradition here at Fourth Church, participants write reflections about their experiences that are then posted on our website. I share with you this morning part of Patricia Kendall’s reflection. She writes,

The physical devastation wrought by Katrina along parts of the Gulf Coast matched the destruction of war-torn countries I’ve worked in. Yet there are stark differences between disasters in the U.S. and those encountered elsewhere in the world. Along Highway 90, Wal-Marts were functioning and Lowe’s was doing a booming business. The availability of consumer goods and building materials helps diminish suffering and ease hopelessness—to a point. The bruising toll such disasters take on families, on livelihoods, and on the psyche is universal. Moving forward after such devastating loss requires more than monetary support. It requires the presence of a supportive community spirit and the sweat of many brows.

“It cannot be done alone,” she writes and continues,

Although financial need still exists, many Gulf Coast residents need something unavailable at Wal-Mart or Lowe’s. They need a half-dozen pair of hands to demolish rotten walls and install new drywall. They need savvy amateur plumbers to make bathrooms functional. They need handy types who know how to wield a screw gun and T-square and have the patience to instruct those of us willing to learn. And, they also need the presence of caring souls who are interested in their stories, their struggles, their progress, and will listen while ripping soggy linoleum up off the kitchen floor.

This is exactly the ministry to which Paul calls us—meeting people where they are, on their grounds, in their terms. One commentator says that the central expression of love is also the central expression of the gospel. Love always engages others, precisely where they are; it does not require them to come over or up to one’s standards before it can be operative. In fact, one could argue that the only true engagement with others begins with meeting the other persons where they are.

When we come to this table today, we break bread and we hear these words of Christ: “This is my body given for you.” Our very Savior did it—broke himself open. Took on humanity and vulnerability and temptation that we might know the deep truth of God’s love for us. And so that is the example we have before us: to claim the stories of our lives and to break open ourselves that others might know the deep love of God through us—not through our unflawed lives or doubtless faith but through our authentic selves.

At the end of last year, I received a copy of letter released by four clergy colleagues in New Orleans. A quick word about one of those pastors and a brief commercial: One of the coauthors of the letter is the pastor of the St. Charles Avenue Presbyterian Church, which will be serving as our host for our second mission trip to the Gulf planned for this spring. Details about that trip are in your bulletin.

The letter these clergy wrote in many ways parallels the cry of the Israelites in exile. Following Hurricane Katrina, they are separated from the homeland they loved and cherished. The Israelites sat by the rivers of Babylon and wept. The people of New Orleans sit beside the broken levees and weep. Like the Israelites, from where they sit they can see no clear path to the dream of the future—of returning to a homeland restored, ready for them to occupy, and resume their lives in a place they can embrace as home. Like the prophet Isaiah, the clergy writing the letter honor the integrity of the questions about the past and the future. And yet they refuse to despair. With great faith and conviction, they claim their deep belief that God is present and that through the power of God’s spirit and God’s people, there is, indeed, hope for the future.

Their letter is titled “Why I Refuse to Despair.” It reads,

Though we are persons of faith, we are not unrealistic. We recognize the serious doubts and fears for the future voiced by our families and neighbors. Haunted by a legacy of political corruption and ineptitude, predictions of a diminished population and even the inevitable demise of our city abound. Uncertainty and despair assail us from every direction in the face of these new challenges. Whether from the guy down the block or our local and national “civil servants,” talk remains a cheap commodity in plentiful supply. Many even fear that for the rest of America, our pain and plight are yesterday’s news.

“We beg to differ,” they write.

We hold a brighter, though steadfast and unwavering vision. While the suffering of our citizens continues, despair is not an option. Belief and hope spring eternal on brighter days, but true fortitude manifests itself only in our darkest hours. We stake our undying faith knowing that God stands with those who suffer and with those who selflessly rescued the countless victims of nature’s wrath.

They conclude, “with trust in God and in the goodness of the human spirit, let us join hands and hearts in the journey toward tomorrow” (Rabbi Edward P. Cohn, et al, letter, 23 December 2005).

Why do you say, O Jacob,
and speak, O Israel,
“ My way is hid from the Lord,
and my right is disregarded by my God.”
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
his understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the faint,
and to him who has no might he increases his strength.
Even youths shall faint and be weary
and young men shall fall exhausted;
but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint.

All to God’s glory and honor and praise. Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church