my life at the seashore: março 2017

Misery loves company. Actually, misery requires the company of a witness, so that the misery can be seen and heard—and eventually processed. Sharing the load makes it easier to bear. Perhaps the message of this sermon is summed up in the classic church bulletin blooper: Don’t let your worries kill you, let the church help.^[7]
Worries, misery, burdens, griefs — whatever your circumstances, you can bear anything with enough help from your support system. How do I know this? Because God chose to experience human misery by through the body of Jesus Christ. I am talking about surviving the daily grind^[8] that often feels like pushing rocks uphill. With some help from your friends you can make it through, for with God all things are possible, no matter your circumstance. Today I hope we’ll learn some of what Lent is about: self-discipline, justice and the courage to say no.

“If you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things?”
Let me add some specifics. What if you knew that your only child, a daughter whom you love beyond words, would contract a rare and incurable disease and, by the age of twelve, you would have to hold her hand as she lost her hair and her life. If you knew this before conceiving this child, would you still choose to the path that brings this child into your life?
That’s the plot for the movie Arrival.^[9] Amy Adams plays a mother named Louise, and yes, it has some very cool aliens in it, too, the Heptapods, but Arrival is so not about aliens. It’s about love and loss, the depths of language and what might happen were the world’s nations to choose, someday, to cooperate. Arrival has become my Lenten prayer. And did I mention it has cool aliens, individuals from a heavenly place, who propose a new way of being. (Sounds like Jesus….) The humans in Arrival are tempted to destroy the aliens because, well, have you been keeping up with the news? We are a paranoid and fearful species, quick to label what we do not understand as evil.

Today, Jesus meets up with the very devil, the Aramaic word for “devil” would’ve implied “a slanderer” or one who is the source of gnawing ridicule.^[10] Turning to today’s scripture, the Aramaic^[11] word for temptation in today’s lesson would mean to test and to prove one’s self. Perhaps we could consider this story Jesus’ proving ground, his personal retreat to get ready for public ministry. Since no one was there with Jesus, and there was no reporter on hand to cover these events, this story cannot be a historical account. No, it’s better than that and truer than any history could ever be. This lesson is all about the universal inner struggle we share, the struggles we endure, and the demons we must face down.

Focus on Matthew 4:5-7, Jesus Sings the Blues

My favorite queer theologian, Marcella Althaus-Reid,^[12] writes beautifully of Jesus in the wilderness. She describes the type-scene of the desert as “the location where many people who did not fit in with society were to be found.”^[13] Jesus, she writes, “is an isolated man who is hungry, unemployed… He has no money to buy [bread], neither has he a family who will provide for him)…” Focusing on Matthew 4:5-7, Althaus-Reid argues that Jesus is experiencing “suicidal thoughts.”^[14]
As in the Hitchcock classic of 1940, Rebecca, where Mrs. Danvers played by the deliciously evil Judith Anderson goads Joan Fontaine to “Go ahead. Jump. Jump, and it will all be over.”^[15] So does the devil gnaw at Jesus, just as our demons gnaw at us. Althaus-Reid continues: “This [Jesus] is a man who is wondering if anyone in the entire universe would care if he threw himself from the pinnacle of the temple, [Was this a] religious protest [?] …Were the temple authorities, traditions and regulations driving him mad?”^[16]
What’s eating you? What burdens are your carrying? There’s a lot of mean-n-crazy floating around today.
Want to hear something really awful? (No really, it’s terrible. You’ve got to hear this.) The World Health Organization figures that someone, somewhere in the world, commits suicide every 40 seconds. 75% of these suicides occur in locations of war and poverty. That’s why it’s important that we understand the realities of poverty just as our Muslim sisters and brothers honor poverty during Ramadan. There’s no better time than Lent to volunteer with one of Calvary’s poverty-fighting ministries. There’s no better antidote to depression than helping someone who needs your help.

Later on in Arrival—and this is not a spoiler—Louise declares, “Despite knowing the [pain of this life’s journey and where it leads, I [choose to] embrace it, and I welcome every moment of it.”^[17] She decides to accept the sour along with the sweet, the yin along with the yang, the joy along with the grief — is the only way through, the yin with the yang, because this life is not a buffet where we get to pass by the suffering. Poet David Whyte puts it this way:

“I want to know if you are wiling
to live, day by day, with the consequence[s] of love
and the bitter unwanted passion of your sure defeat.”^[18] ^[19]

Compassion is all that Lent demands. Compassion means we all suffer together. When you suffer, I suffer. When I suffer, you suffer. The Christian bonus is this: Jesus suffers with us. Knowing that he would be sabotaged because of his political and religious opinions, Jesus still called together his friends, even the ones who would fail him, and—of all things they could’ve done—he chose to love them, and share a meal, and sing.^[20]
Sung at the PianoI feel like going on,I feel like going on,Though trails mount on ev’ry hand,I feel like going on