Readings
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This Week's Sermon Date: January 17, 2010 Title: God Does Windows Message Delivered By: Jim Stentzel I’d like to talk about part of my faith journey. Not because it’s special, but because there may be points where you can relate. You may recognize some of the wonder and mystery of the mountaintop … and the loneliness and desperation of the valley. Three things for background…. First: My early life specialties were math and logic. A plus B had to equal C. No mystery or mysticism, please. God had to make perfect, logical sense. No surprises, God! Second: God has ways to deal with people like that. Sometimes gently taking us by the hand; sometimes dragging us kicking and screaming. Third, fear and guilt are the enemies of faith. I would like to make the case this morning that faith increases in direct proportion to our walking into our fear and letting go of our guilt. [That sounds a lot like a mathematical equation, doesn’t it?] Fear: My deepest fear is death. Cathy’s. My children. My siblings. Yours. Mine. Since early childhood death has made me want to run and hide, to “go to my room” and pull the blinds. God knows I needed time and space for grief, for healing. But God became restless when I stayed too long in that room. “I’m going to my room, God.” It took me decades to realize the power of those four words. How lovingly they were said. And how liberating they have proven to be – past, present and, I pray, future. I was 12 years-old when my 16-year-old brother killed himself. Chuck had gone into an alcohol-induced rage when arrested and taken to the county jail. He was transferred to the state mental hospital where he tied a bed-sheet to the bars on the window. “I’m going to my room, God.” My mother died two years later. She fell off a ladder while washing windows. For reasons only God understands, I left school that day at lunchtime and went home to see her lying unconscious on the pavement. “I’m going to my room, God.” Working as a missionary-journalist in South Korea in the early 1970s, I met the wives of nine political prisoners. In a fabrication the government created to justify new repression, their husbands were accused of being communist infiltrators. I wrote dozens of articles documenting the injustice, only to awake one morning to hear about the mournful cries of the nine women: Their husbands had all been hanged by the U.S.-supported military dictatorship. “I’m going to my room, God.” I was beginning to get the idea that God continually wanted me to walk into my deepest fear and “look death in the face.” Sometimes that made me angry at God. But I’m a risk-taker. I have even been known to play the horses. So I gambled that God knew what She was doing. For 10 years beginning in 1988 I became an “AIDS buddy”: A friend and regular visitor with persons dying of AIDS. These relationships became a combination of inspiring and depressing. One of the painful realities – which you know too well – was seeing families disown and churches reject persons with AIDS. While in southern, small-town Ohio I went to burial services attended by only two or three persons. “I’m going to my room, God.” Cathy told you last week how she dragged me to Ohio so she could attend seminary in Dayton. That’s when I decided, what the heck, I might as well “walk into my fear” on a bolder scale – by training to be a hospital chaplain. I quickly discovered that I had lots to learn about life and death. Including how to minister to siblings screaming at each other as their mother lay dying in the hospital emergency room at 2 a.m.: “She told us ‘no extraordinary measures’!! yelled a brother. “But we can’t just do nothing!!” a sister shouted back. I was there to offer spiritual help, but I was paralyzed. The pain and anger and guilt – it was too palpable. “I’m going to my room, God.” I met a World War Two veteran who, shortly before his death, tearfully told stories he had suppressed for decades. Stories about the horrors of war. An incredible reservoir of dammed-up pain and guilt poured forth: persons he had killed, buddies he’d seen killed. Later I prayed with an 80-year-old man who had a deathbed confession: He had sexually abused his daughter. “You may want to talk with her before you die,” I said. “She’s gone,” he said. “Took her own life.” “I’m going to my room, God.” Through the AIDS buddy and hospital chaplaincy programs I got introduced to Hospice: palliative care, managing pain but not fighting one’s process of dying. For many dying persons and their loved ones, hospice is a godsend. It certainly was also a gift of God for me as chaplain and pastor. For weeks and sometimes months I was privileged to Ed was an 82-year-old guy who amazed me with his life stories and death questions. Initially he reminded me of my German mathematical self. But in the last few weeks of his life, he became fascinated with a recurring dream: he was sliding down a playground-like slide into a brightly lit tunnel. “Do you think death could be like that?” he asked. At first he was baffled by the dream, maybe even a little frightened. Gradually he came to believe that dying like that might be a real trip. The morning of the day he died, he told me that he’d had the dream again. That afternoon Cathy and I were blessed to be with him as he slid into that tunnel. Sometimes the final hours of life can be, well, surprising. My sister, Jane, after nine years of a stubbornly heroic battle with breast cancer, was resting peacefully a few hours before she died. The morphine was doing its job. Suddenly she opened her eyes wide, looked straight into mine, and yelled, “God damn you! I know you’re praying for me to live and, damn it, I’m ready to die!” I believe God is continually inviting us to walk into our fear and to let go of our guilt. I still have so much to learn. Part of my ongoing journey is a movement from guilt to grace. For decades I felt guilt over the suicide of my brother and the death of my mother. Thoughts of “If only I had said or done [such and such].” Just as surely as God moves us from fear to faith, I believe God moves us from guilt to grace. One example: In 1998 Cathy and I moved to Cleveland to be near her father and mother in the last five years of their lives. I loved both of them dearly, but felt a special kinship with Cathy’s dad. Okay, he didn’t like my politics, religion, and lifestyle choices. Despite that he was always loving and affirming. Our physical relationship, however, never went beyond polite, formal handshakes. Until the day before he died. As Cathy and I were leaving his hospice room, I knelt on the floor in front of his wheelchair to hold his hand and say goodbye. He reached out both hands, gently pulled my head forward, and kissed me on the lips…. A moment of grace. I believe today’s gospel lesson [John 2:1-11] ultimately concerns grace. Remember: 180 gallons of water intended for the Jewish rites of purification were transformed into 180 gallons of good wine. Like some Christians today, there were Jews in Jesus’ day who were stuck on Old Things – traditions, legalisms, rituals – including ancient rituals for handling sin and guilt. I believe Jesus was showing the wedding-goers then, and us today, that while letting go of guilt is good and necessary, accepting God’s abundant grace – drinking the new wine – takes us into a whole new dimension. The danger of us individuals “going to our rooms” is that we can stay there too long = escaping, hiding, refusing to re-engage. The room becomes a prison of the soul. The same is true for churches “going into their sanctuaries”. Unless they “keep the windows open” to God’s ongoing revelation, it’s slow death for the Spirit. Let’s dare to be risk-takers, as individuals and as a congregation. Let’s keep the windows open and let the winds of the Spirit blow where they will. Amen.
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