Sermon

Heal Your Fear, Unleash Your Power:
Prescription for Greatness

Henri Nouwen
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Mattie Stepanek
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April 6, 2003

By Rev. Dr. G. Penny Nixon

It all started with an argument. James and John, walking along the road, were muttering back and forth in a heightened, kind of angry whisper. When they finally got to their destination and closed the door behind them, Jesus turned around and said, "What were you arguing about?" They said nothing; silence. They had been arguing all the way, but when asked the question: silence. They didn't tell Jesus what they were arguing about, but either he had overheard them (perhaps he was eavesdropping along the way) or he just instinctively knew what their conversation had been about.

He decided to use this moment as a teaching moment in their relationship. He said "If you want to be first, you must be last. In fact, if you want to be first, you have to learn to be the servant of all." He drew a child who was in the room into the midst and said, "Actually, if you want to be great in God's realm, you need to be like one of these." Children in that day, like today, had no power over anyone. They were powerless. And Jesus said, "This is really how I want you to be." Children have a way of openness that really disarms people. If you give a child the right kind of environment, that child will be open and loving to whomever they meet. Have you not witnessed the most uptight and straitlaced person, where when a child runs toward them, and all of the sudden, you just see them change and....open and...melt in the child's presence.

I've been really interested watching interviews with teachers and parents, both in the media and on the news about how parents are talking to their children about the war and the images of war they are seeing on television on the "all war, all the time" channels. I was particularly struck, this week, by one interview with a teacher in an elementary school. In this elementary school, from first grade up they teach conflict resolution to the children. From first grade on, children learn that there actually is another way to resolve conflicts on the playground and at home other than hitting and punching and fighting. They teach the children that talking is more powerful than fighting. So, over the years, these kids learn how to resolve conflicts with each other, and then grow up to be adults who practice non-violence and who have conflict resolution skills in building relationships. This teacher said, "I'm finding it very difficult to answer the children's questions, because they are coming to me out of the blue and saying 'How can adults act like this toward other adults? We thought that talking was more powerful than fighting.'"

"Become children," Jesus said. Evidently, Jesus’ teaching moment went right over their heads. In fact, Mark, as he always does in his gospels, couples their small faith with their slow wit. The disciples completely missed what Jesus taught. It wasn't even two or three days later that this story comes: James and John, the same two, came to him and said, "Teacher, we want you do to for us whatever we ask." Jesus said, in his inimitable way, answering a question with a question, "What is it that you would like me to do for you?" They replied, "Let one of us sit, in glory, on your right hand and the other at your left hand." (Apparently, they were leaving it up to Jesus to choose who was to sit on which side). This is the question that they asked him just days after he had said, "If you want to be great, become like a child."

Now, the Gospel says right after this that Jesus said, "You don't know what you're asking. Can you walk down the same path I'm about to walk?" "Oh, yes, yes, yes," they replied. Then Jesus said, "Look, let me try it this way: If you want to be great, learn to be a servant of all, for the first will be last, and the last will be first. And while you see people lording it over each other, not so with you." It's funny, in that text, right after they say this, it says "The ten [the other people] became indignant at James and John." I think they were indignant because James and John thought to ask the question before they did. What I love about the Gospels is that it portrays people as they really are and sometimes the disciples say such silly things that it gives us a chance to talk about the silly things that go on in our minds; we just don't have to say them out loud. For example, "who will be greatest?" and "what kind of position of honor will I get?" The disciples say these things so that later on we can make fun of them. It's much easier to make fun of them than to make fun of ourselves. And yet, in our minds, many of us have these same questions, and aspirations and longings. Jesus ended by saying, "The human one, this child of God, came not to be served but to serve."

I think what is really going on is that each time Jesus has these conversations with those closest to him, they come right after the time that he would say to them, "You know, I'm not going to be with you always." And so I think what was really happening is that they were getting really upset about his leaving them. They were scrambling to find answers to the questions in their minds. "How are we going to do this without our leader? Who's going to do what? Who are we going to look to? How are we going to organize ourselves?" I think this is what they were asking. But they didn't seem to be catching on to what was being taught. The night before he was to be executed, Jesus spent that last meal with them: the one seen as our central ritual here in this place, the (communion) table. As they walked in the door and sat down, they knew that death was not only pending, but imminent. Jesus began to disrobe, picked up a towel, tied it around his waist, and began washing their feet, clearly demonstrating that actions speak far louder than words.

So in that vulnerable moment, each knowing that Jesus was about to be taken from any grasp they had on him, he got down and washed their feet--a startling act in those days when only servants washed a visitors feet.. As he began washing their feet, and while they could still feel the coolness of the water, he said, "Love each other as I have loved you. Be the servant of all." The more time we spend with these Gospel teachings, the more we realize that many of them are quite countercultural to the mainstream. What Jesus loved to do more than anything else was to turn things upside down, so the first will be last and the last will be first. If you want to be great, be like a child. If you really want to know what true leadership is, serve. This is what he calls people to again and again.

I read a book this week by Henri Nouwen, a French priest, who has written many, many books, and taught at Yale and Harvard. In the last decade of his life, he took a completely different turn. He decided to do something else with his life, for though he wrote about prayer, and communion with the Beloved, he began to realize that the more time he spent on the lecture circuit, the more that he wrote, the more he was in demand, the further he got away from that which he was preaching and teaching and trying to embody. In the last decade of his life, he let go of all that great esteem of teaching at a place like Yale and Harvard and spent every day, until his dying day, at L'Arche, which is a community outside of Toronto for mentally disabled people. For the rest of his life, he wrote his books at L’Arche. His books take a dramatic turn; the intelligent words, the studied theology and the brilliant metaphors that he had used were not the way he could communicate in this community. People didn't care about his vocabulary; they didn't care about his professorships at Harvard and Yale; they didn't care about his degrees. What they cared about was touch, presence and love in the present moment. That's all that they knew. He began to change his thinking about what it meant to be a servant.

I'm not suggesting that we need to do something that drastic. Perhaps the drastic thing, or the radical thing that needs to happen to each of us is to begin to change our minds about how we look at things like service. In fact, when Henri Nouwen writes, he uses the metaphor of the table that so touched me that I wanted to share it, in my own way, with you. He said that every time we gather, our lives are really like this bread on the table, because we say Jesus took bread, he blessed it, he broke it and he gave it. That's really what our lives are meant to be.

We are taken—have you ever met somebody, and you thought 'I am so taken with him, or her.' That's what the "taken" means. It's kind of "chosen". When we know our own "chosenness", we see that other people are truly chosen. For those of us that have experienced rejection by our parents, work, or by our religious institutions, it is particularly meaningful for us. In some sense, we are chosen to do that which we alone can do in the world. That's why it's so important to us as queer people to move beyond "I'm gay, and I'm Christian, and I'm a person of faith; all this is good. We must also ask "What is my calling as a queer person in the world?"

Then we're blessed. You can live with great gratitude or bitterness. It's really a choice that we make each and every day. If you want to, you can find something to be bitter about. (Remember those sassy queens I was talking about last week?) But we are blessed. Some of you know Elisabeth Middelburg, who's a chaplain at Kaiser and has just has been called as the pastor at MCC Guerneville. A few months ago she decided that she sees her ministry at Kaiser not just to patients, but also to medical staff and caregivers as well. She put up a flyer that read "Blessing of the Hands. If you would like your hands blessed and have a personal prayer, we'll be meeting in this room at these times”. One flyer among many on the bulletin boards at Kaiser. She offered it two days in three or four different blocks of time. In those two days, over two hundred and fifty people came to have their hands blessed. Now, these are people that are not used to going to church and using words like "blessing," but obviously the longing was deep. Elisabeth thought she might have ten or twenty people, so she asked two people to help her. There were two hundred and fifty people! It just blew her away. She called me in the middle of it and said "You won't believe this. They're lined up down the hall." She massaged their hands with lotion as a blessing. She said people just poured out their hearts to her. They longed to be blessed.

You know, even though I've been a minister almost twenty years, I'm still caught off guard when people come up to me and say, "Will you bless me?" Because, just for a split second, my first thought is 'Me bless you? Why me? I'm nobody. Bless you?' I realize that at some level it has absolutely nothing to do with my being a minister. It's about being human with each other. And because I am human and share solidarity and joy and suffering and gratitude, I can bless whoever wants to be blessed. I can receive, in return, from whomever. You would not believe some of the people that have blessed me.

Annlee and I were in Ireland a few years ago biking, and staying at a bed and breakfasts. The proprietor was a woman named Kitty. Kitty was chatty! Chatty Kitty. We could hardly get out of the bed and breakfast and start our day because she was so chatty. She was trying to set us up with two Italian bikers who were also staying at the bed and breakfast. We were all looking at each other like 'she so does not get what's going on here." And that was after she'd asked us if we wanted twin beds three times in a row, and we'd said "No." She didn't get it. When we were leaving, she wanted to bless us, and I thought 'okay, if you stop talking, you can bless me; you bet, absolutely.' And we're standing there at the door, and, bless her heart, she had this holy water there by her door; I guess she liked to bless people. She dipped her hand right in that thing and slapped it on our heads. "Thank you, Kitty!" Even though it was kind of strange, at some level, it was really lovely. I would prefer a gentler blessing, but it was lovely that she wanted to bless us. How great would it be if we could be that free with each other, to bless each other in that way. That's why I think it's so important that each week when we gather, we bless each other at communion. It doesn't matter who you are. The last thing that we hear as we leave the service is "May the blessing of the Holy One remain with you now and always."

So we're taken, we're blessed and we're broken. You know, I didn't want to use that word for the longest time. I sat with it all week: broken. Because in my faith tradition growing up, "broken" meant that you were like this vessel that always had a crack in it. There was always a "hole in your bucket." You just were never all right. We called it "worm theology." I'm just a worm.... We used to sing this song "Weeds, we're all born weeds in God's flower garden of life." (Now you know I've come a long way, baby!) But I began to recognize brokenness this week as simply this: because we are human, we will, inevitably and uniquely, have sorrow and suffering that visit us from time to time. And so, from time to time—not as a state of being, and not in our essence—but from time to time we are broken. There are broken hearts. Have you ever had a broken heart? There are broken relationships. There are broken bodies. There's our broken world. And it's from this place of brokenness that often some of our greatest blessings come. And that doesn't glorify or magnify brokenness. It simply just is that somehow in the reversal of things, it is from those very places of pain come some of our greatest gifts.

I don't know if you've heard of a young boy named Mattie Stepanek. He's thirteen and has a rare form of Muscular Dystrophy. His mother has the adult form of it, and he's lost his two younger brothers and one sister when they were less than five years old. Mattie is on the New York Times best seller list because he's been writing poems since he was three years old. His story is amazing; you can look him up on the internet.

This is an excerpt from his writing: "When I grow up, I want to be a peacemaker. My biggest role model for this is Jimmy Carter, who has been a wonderful peanut farmer, politician, and peacemaker...I call him the 'perfect hero'. I would like to work as a mediator."

(This is a child who has a ventilator breathe for him at night, who wears an oxygen back pack to breathe for him during the day, who has very little motor skills or control over his nervous system).

"I would like to work as a mediator and share my poetry, essays and philosophy with others (he was eleven when he wrote this) so that they may be inspired to work with other people too. I want people to know that in every life, there are storms, but we must remember to play after every storm and to celebrate the gift of life as we have it, or else life becomes a task rather than a gift. We must always listen to the song in our heart and share that song with others."

Can you imagine asking a six year old, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" and he answers, "A peacemaker." Mattie is on a mission to heal the world and to bring peace--and it's all from his place of tremendous brokenness.

After we are taken, blessed and broken, we are given. We were made for this, really. Think about those times when you felt really good about yourself. I bet you that a few of those times, at least, happened when you were doing something for somebody else that made a difference; when you really served in a way that was selfless or maybe even served in a way that no one else knew about, or just helped somebody along the way. So what is it that we can be for each other? During this week, for me, some of the most touching images of war were not the horrifying pictures that we keep seeing, but the moments where you see people, especially across lines, recognize humanity and each other and serve each other. The Iraqi man, at peril to his own life, saw Private Jessica Lynch lying in the hospital bed. His words were "It cut my heart to see her" as well as his fellow Iraqi citizens around him.. But he decided that she needed help and he provided that help. We are made to give to each other. It's a touching picture, like the picture of the Marine who, with the carnage all around, is holding an Iraqi child, trying to save this child's life. And as complicated and complex and deeply saddening as the war is, there are so many moments when people show their true humanity amidst the death and destruction—because, that is what we are made for.

I have been so touched by you in this community who, time after time after time, really, in my eyes, are great. I'm touched by the ways that you serve and the ways that you are generous. It's a real antidote to the selfishness that often marks our community these days. We are taken, we're blessed, sometimes we're broken, but even in our brokenness we are given to each other for the healing of the world, and may you and I know great joy in this giving.

Amen.