Proper 21 A Cultivating the Mind of Christ

Our minds are precious commodities, as we sometimes find out when someone we love loses their cognitive abilities.  The person may forget important things, like their own name, or your relationship to them. My Aunt Dot who died a year ago, gradually lost the ability to speak as she aged into her late 80s, although she retained the ability to understand what people were saying to her.

Michael J. Fox, the actor, was diagnosed with a nervous system disease, Parkinson’s, that may lead to various problems with brain function, including dementia.  President Reagan developed Alzheimer’s Disease late in life and retired from all public appearances.  And here several parishioners of Holy Trinity have dealt with this and other dementias in their life.

Those who love someone with a brain dysfunction grieve the loss of the person they knew, as they seem to lose their personality with the loss of the ability to remember and to speak their mind.  If dementia is the loss of ourselves, what does it mean to have the mind of Christ, which Paul encourages the people of Philippi to do in our reading today?

Having the mind of Christ is not giving up our own mind, but taking on the best and most loving aspects of Christ.  As Paul sees it, the mind of Christ is the mind of one who does not put himself first, but humbles himself, putting others in front, even to the point of death.

This mind of Christ comes from our acknowledging the love we have received, the compassion, and sharing in the spirit as Christians in Christian community.  We mirror then what we have received.  In community we are heard, we are accepted for who we are, we are brought into a fold of love and compassion, where the interests of the other are put before our own interests.

Now as soon as I say all this about Christian community, anyone can say, but what about the times when Christian community is not loving, when there are arguments and rifts?  One thing I have learned is that if we are encouraged in scripture to do something, it’s because that thing really needs encouragement, so the Philippians probably really needed to hear Paul encourage them to have the compassionate mind of Christ.  Their Christian community probably also needed to be reminded about the basis of their gathering in Christ.

Paul’s words about humility point to the great humility that was in Christ.  God is in work in us, as Paul writes to the Philippians in his last sentence—which is the best news of all. Most of us can’t hope to give up worrying about our own issues and concerns and to put others first, and we must have God at work in us to keep us moving along the path to having the mind of Christ.

Paul does not say how God works so that we can have the mind of Christ, but I do believe we participate with God’s work in us and help this along.  We meditate or read scripture, or pray daily, not just on Sunday.   It is a lifelong work that God is doing in us, and the humility of Christ works in us for the peace and justice of the world, one person at a time.

Humility itself is nearly a banned word in our culture.  But don’t mistake humility for being humiliated, or for abasing yourself by putting yourself or your talents down.  Humility involves deciding that God is in charge and then acting that way. The mind of Christ is the mind that participates with God working in us—this mind gives time to being for others, not in a martyr-like way, but in a giving that naturally comes from our love for others.  This giving is not the constant self-denial of someone who pities themself, who boasts about how good they are.  This mind rests in God’s love and naturally wants to include others in compassion.

The mind of Christ is a mind attuned to God around us, through us and in us.  This mind connects with the love that the world needs. This mind is centered on the spirit of compassion, encouraged by Christ’s words of love to us.

It has been said that we are what we think about all day. If you think about your plants, you are a gardener; if you think about your check book, you are an accountant. If you think thoughts of love, you are a compassionate person; if you think thoughts of anger and revenge, you are not.  You can train yourself to be compassionate by reading about the compassion of Christ, praying to be more compassionate, and by being more compassionate toward your own self.  If in your mind you are not worthy how can anyone else be worthy of compassion?  We can take the example of twelve step programs that help train those with addictions to change their thinking about themselves so that they can be more fully human, and thus more compassionate toward themselves and the world.

If dementia scares us, because it is the loss of the best part of the mind, then opposite of this kind of loss is cultivating our own mind of Christ; to fully engage with God’s work within us—the work of love and compassion, the work of the sharing the spirit with each other.

May this place be a place where we take Paul’s words seriously and assist each other in this work to develop the mind of Christ, the mind of humble compassion for the world.

Proper 20A The Wilderness

We have been hearing about the freeing of the slaves of Israel from Egypt the past few weeks and the leadership of Moses—they were given direction by God through Moses, a reluctant leader, to hide their first born sons who were being killed by Pharaoh; plagues were sent to Egypt; then Pharaoh let them go, but he he reneged and chased them into the Red Sea where the waters parted for Israel but drowned the Egyptians and their chariots.  This brings us to today’s story of the grumbling of the Israelites in the wildneness: “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in Egypt,  when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us into the wilderness to kill the whole assembly with hunger.”

I can relate to this feeling of wilderness.  Often in times of being between one thing and not quite starting another—whether it is moving into a new job, a new relationship, or just being in limbo in myself—I get very scared like the Israelites today.

This place of no man’s land, the wilderness, can be a place of unsettledness, when a person knows where they came from but don’t know yet where they are going.  In those limbo times, I remember that in the past I knew exactly what to expect, when to expect it, and felt more in control of my life, even though that life was not a full life, I was not my full self, was not using all the gifts God has given me.  That time before looked so much better than the wandering and uncertainty of the wilderness that I forgot what it was really like, and how less a person I was in the enslavement of my self.

When the future is in a fog, it is easier for me to have selective memory about the past, to romanticize it, to forget about the hard things, the false things about myself or others, to think of only the things I have lost, not the things I needed to get rid of to live more honestly and faithfully. 

But the wilderness is a time of liminality—that’s a fancy word for a threshold, a place where we have left something behind, but are not yet where we are going.  It is a place of waiting, but also of learning.  A fallow place, like a field that is lying dormant for a season.  The purpose of that dormancy is the building up of the nutrients of the soil, of allowing the nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium to reconstitute, readying the soil for another season of planting.

For the Israelits,  Moses brought God into their moment of liminality.  Moses prayed on behalf of his grumbling community about the hunger they felt and God heard their grumbling and responded with what they needed—bread and meat.  It seemed like a miracle.  They were in a desert and suddenly quails were coming every morning and manna every evening.  They began to see that there was nourishment in the middle of nothingness and began to eat.  Their physical hunger began to be fed and in their spiritual hunger they saw that God was listening to them in their distress.  They began to trust in God in the middle of waiting on this threshold of their lives.

The wilderness was a place of learning the faithfulness of God for the Israelites and it can be for us too.  Because the wilderness is a place of difference, a new place, it takes me out of myself, my old habits and ways of being, my old ways of thinking and acting.  This time of newness and uncertainty makes it easier to rely more on God’s grace, if I can only stay in the place of newness and let God take care of me.

Whenever the place we’re in challenges us, God is as near to us as our prayer. We may not see quails and manna come from heaven, but you can be sure that God’s abundant love for you surrounds you in your place of uncertainty.  God sends us miracles of people and assistance in unlikely ways, so we need to be specially looking for God’s hand.

And more importantly, while we think we know what we want our future to be, God may be trying to give us something different and even more wonderful.  It has happened in my life many times.  I cannot know what wonderful things God has in store for me.  Like the workers in the vineyard today, I may be coming to the grapes at the end of the day, expecting only a partial wage, but God is going to give me the whole day’s pay.  Others may grumble with envy, but I can rejoice that God is in my future, keeping me safe in the present uncertainty. 

The Israelites grumbled today in their time of limality, but they learned that God has ways we cannot always fathom, mercy greater than we know, and love for us in ways we do not expect.  The lesson in the wilderness is always that God cares deeply and is close at hand listening for our cries of distress. 

And even more, God led the Israelites to the wilderness to ready them for the land of promise.  God had so much more in store for them than meat and bread, God had prepared a place where they would be free to worship and build their lives with God’s hand in their future.

What is the land of promise that God has in store for you?  Are you willing to wait in the wilderness, to listen for the voice of God, to receive the abundance of God’s grace?  Are you ready to grow with God in your wilderness, to prepare for the land of promise in your future?

Proper 19A Forgiveness

I have lived in two areas of the country where there is stone work in fields and houses—upstate New York and here in Central Kentucky.  One thing I have noticed is that the really old stone walls are quite interesting. They may be sagging where the ground had given way, or crooked, following the land as it settles into gravity or is pushed aside when a tree decides to sprout around it.  The stones may be askew, not straight horizontally or in a perfect line.  But even when the wall is falling down, it is still beautiful. While a newly constructed wall around a housing development may try to copy the old walls, it is just not the same—there is no ivy growing on it, it seems nearly too perfect to be real, and sometimes the new wall can even look fake.  There is something about the integrity of the century old wall, something enduring when you know it was built to last a long time, even though it looks like you could pick up the stones from its rubble.

The integrity of a wall that has stood the test of time is much like people who have stood the test of forgiveness. Why do I call forgiveness a test?  Because whether you are the recipient or the giver, it is not easy. 

Being forgiven is our inheritance as Christians.  We were forgiven before we even did anything to merit it.  Forgiveness is the free gift of the loving God who sent his only son to forgive us.  Accepting this forgiveness is not easy for us to do.  We tend to believe we are not worthy, we have done too many unforgiveable things.  Or on the contrary, we believe we are not as bad as some people we know who need forgiveness more than we do.

Whatever stance—feeling unworthy or not as in need as someone worse than us, we are playing God. God is the one who has given us forgiveness.  Are we too proud, too narcissistic, too arrogant to believe we are God instead?  God gives us this gift of forgiveness, not so we can go our merry way and say “Oh I’m not so bad if I am forgiven—God will love me no matter what.”  This is self-congrulatory and not what God intends. God intends us to accept forgiveness, not by glossing over and trivializing our weaknesses, but by saying yes to them. To own up to them, be honest about them.  Not in a humiliation, but in repentence.  In this sense, God is asking us to accept forgiveness by getting the mind of God. 

The new testament scholar Bill Countryman says that forgiveness of ourselves as God forgives us cannot be real without our stepping into our humanity with full knowledge of our frailities.  When we acknowledge our frailties openly and honestly, not with guilt, but with truth, we begin to love as God loves us.   God wants for us to be whole.  This wholeness encompasses our human problems, our little lies about ourselves, our deceptions about how good or evil we are. Because once you really acknowledge these frailties, you cannot go back, you must go forward.

God’s forgiveness is not about wallowing in the past, what we did, what we left undone, it is about living a new future in God’s guidance and love.  When we accept that we are forgiven, we no longer need to deceive ourselves about how much we miss the mark.  We can without fear accept that we have these issues, whether big or small, and that God has taken us under the wing of love into new life.

New life involves taking our frailties and wanting to turn ourselves around—the meaning of the word repentence.  It is not a duty, it is a gift.  It is not because we may be punished, it is because we are already loved.  When we get our minds around that love, we want to turn to God, the one who loves us so much, and turn our lives into lives of love too.

When we see a wall that has lived through a lot of life, it is sturdy but a little worse for the wear.  If we live with integrity about being forgiven, we too will withstand the fear of being honest with ourselves.  We will persevere in getting through those days when we said or did the wrong thing, or did not take action when we could have. By accepting God’s forgiveness we look at ourselves honestly and say God help me to do better next time.  Because I know I am forgiven and am loved, I can become a healing force in the world, just as Christ was given as a healing force for the world.

The message of the good news in today’s gospel is not that we will be punished if we don’t forgive—how can punishment be good news? The good news is that God forgives us, and by accepting that gift of love, turning our minds toward the healing power of God, we can more easily forgive others as well.

Forgiving others is not simple—the same process is involved—honesty.  First, honesty with ourselves about the hurt done to us by another. Then acting on that hurt and anger in ways that are healing, not more hurtful.  It may mean writing a letter that is never sent, to tell someone exactly what their behavior, words, or lack of action had meant.  It may mean having a heart to heart talk that does not glide over the problem, but allows both of you to hear the other.  Forgiving other people does not involve simple answers that throw darkness over what has transpired, but throwing light and love on your relationship with others. 

A chaplain visited some prisoners who were convicted of child abuse.  As she was leaving she asked what message they had for people outside.  They said, don’t forgive us too quickly.  What they needed was not to have their frailty glossed over and treated as if it were nothing, but to be held to account to improve their frailty, as if what they did mattered.

What each of us does matters.  What we have done or left undone matters, otherwise God would not have bothered to want to love us into wholeness through forgiving us before we even have messed up.  This forgiveness opens a door for us to love ourselves so much that we say we matter and what we do matters.  If we matter that much to God, then all our relationships matter that much too. 

Like a stone wall that has weathered real environmental changes, we can stand with integrity in God’s love and forgiveness, forgiving others as we are forgiven and helping bring God’s kingdom to fruition now.

Proper 18A The armor of light

As we enter into September, the light starts to take on a new aspect.  The sun begins to sink a little on the horizon and we slide toward the autumnal equinox—the moment of equal parts daylight and darkness that will begin the loss of daylight until the winter solstice.

There are some people who do not look forward to this decrease in daylight, whose bodies respond chemically—they develop in their teens usually, a syndrome called seasonal affective disorder.  It is characterized by depressed mood and most of the symptoms of depression, and usually starts in late autumn and winter, although some people also have it in summer.

The main treatment for SAD is light—taking long walks or otherwise getting exposure to sunlight or using a special lamp that mimics sunlight can help get improve symptoms.

When St Paul writes to the Roman Christians about clothing themselves with the armor of light, he also is referring to the kinds of sickness we encounter when we seek darkness rather than the light of Christ.

The darkness Paul writes about includes seeking the things that don’t last, the things not of the soul but of the world.  He starts with reminding us that the first and greatest commandment is to love your neighbor and yourself.  Loving others seems to be easy if they are close to us and love us too, but Paul is reminding the Christians of Rome of neighbors, not just family and friends.  The darkness of not loving our neighbors makes us seek pleasure for the sake of pleasure, focuses us on easy love not on hard love.

What would it be like to clothe ourselves in the light of Christ? 

We would seek to learn how Christ showed us God’s love—reading scripture, spending time with God in prayer and meditation to build our relationship. 

We would seek to be with others who we know are good at showing God’s love, to learn from them, watch their behavior, their talk, what rituals help them focus on God’s love.

We would steep ourselves in the sacraments. We would nourish ourselves in the prayers of confession, intercession on behalf of the world, and most importantly the body and blood of Christ that feed us with that love we seek to emulate.

We would thank God daily for the blessings of our lives—because in nurturing grateful hearts, our hearts also learn to love even the challenges that we encounter. When we learn gratefulness, our whole lives take on joy and we learn the courage to live in truth and beauty.

We would take time to love ourselves. We would do those things that nurture our body and soul, our relationships with others, take quiet time to rest, treat our bodies as lovingly as possible.  When we love ourselves, we have more love to give to others.  And we then become one of those models who others look to when they want to learn to clothe themselves in the light of love.

Finally, learning to love is learning to trust God. When we trust God with our lives, we give up worrying about the mundane things of life, and when we have less anxiety in our lives, we have more room to love the entire world.  Instead of fretting about the world, we love it by giving back what blessings God has given us.

Putting on the armor of light is putting on the love of Christ for all to see.  It is being a shining light for the world, casting beams into the darkness around us—the darkness of the bullies at school, the darkness of an angry boss at work, the darkness of the loss and grief of old age.  Our love can change the world, our light does make a difference.

Proper 17 A Embracing your cross

Last week we heard Peter proclaim that Jesus was the messiah.  This week we see that Peter didn’t really understand what was to happen to the messiah and denied that Jesus would suffer and die at the hands of Roman authorities.  Peter goes from being a rock for his proclamation to a stumbling block to the good news for his denial of suffering.

For some Christians I know, Peter had it right—being Christian for them is about good things happening, happiness and good fortune, feeling good always.  But for other Christians, taking up the cross is central to their understanding, and they believe they can’t be Christian until they feel guilty and bad about themselves.

But both these type of Christians seem to me to be missing the core of the gospel message, which is to lose your life so you can gain it.  Another Christian paradox, but when you have lived it you understand fully how this works.

Pain and suffering are all around us—emotional troubles, mental illness, physical disability, poverty, and for many, being sidelined from access to good jobs and homes and schools and other opportunities for living fully into their talents.  In fact, I believe that Jesus is saying that we each have our cross to bear, none of us is exempt, whether we seem to have it all, like Bill Gates, or seem to have nothing at all.  This is the human condition and one of the first things we learn as we become adults—life can be challenging, can sometimes even seem to beat us down.

Jesus says, don’t shy away from those calamities of life, but embrace them even.  This is the heart of the paradox.  Like the fire response we learned as kids—if you have fire on your body, don’t run, drop and roll.  Counterintuitive and really hard to do, which is why we have to practice it. 

How does one embrace life’s calamities and challenge?  Jesus gave us the answer—by going towards it fully aware of its meaning, just like he moved toward Jerusalem, ready for the most frightening calamity of all, death.

Moving toward our challenges involved great courage, courage to enter into dark and scary places, to encounter things about ourselves or other people that we don’t want to encounter. 

The psychologist Carl Jung called those dark places our shadow selves. Going into grief or loss or disappointment can call up the parts of our psyches that we would rather not claim. You can identify the shadow part of yourself by how you react to other people—if someone’s personality trait really bugs you, chances are they are exhibiting your own shadow personality trait. 

Example, oversimplified:  if you are normally generous and giving and those who are stingy with their time and talent really bug you, chances are that being stingy is your shadow self.  You have parts of that stinginess in you, but you can’t embrace it.  What Jesus tells us, and Carl Jung found in his work with people, is that you can’t be a whole person if you are constantly denying your shadow self.  If the person claims they are totally generous all the time and never have feelings of wanting to be stingy, they are not being honest, they are not picking up their cross.

A person’s cross can be anything that really challenges us to get outside our clean little box we have constructed for ourselves.  Any life event, big or small, any person who gives us grief, anything that makes us want to close our eyes and deny that it exists—that is a cross for us.

The first part of the paradox is that by not denying, not closing our eyes, but opening them wide and entering into this frightening or challenging moment, we have begun to take up our cross, to lose our life as we know it.  Which leads to the second part of the paradox, finding a new life.

Kathleen Norris (A Cloister Walk): “The point of our crises and calamities is not to frighten us or beat us into submission, but to encourage us to change, to allow us to heal and grow.”

Think about something you did that seemed impossible—grieving the loss of someone close, taking a job you didn’t think you could do, trusting someone or forgiving them when you didn’t want to, being so disappointed you didn’t know you could go on.  Whatever it was that made you decide to enter into this calamity, when you came out on the other side of it, you had been changed.

If you really embraced the challenge, if you really kept your eyes open and your feet on the ground, then you gave God the chance to heal you, to embrace you in love.  One way this happens is in Christian community. By coming here and sharing your pain, sorrow, disappointment, you allow God to share in it through the community’s love for you.  We don’t take it away from you, but we support you as you walk through whatever fire God is giving you. Here you are given courage in fear, hope in despair, healing for wounds, and new life from the old.  Just like some seeds must undergo fire before they can become new plants, so too, we each undergo the fire of death in order to know what life can be.

I encourage you today to embrace your cross, bring it with you to this altar and be transformed in healing.