The Search for What Saves Us

a sermon given by the Rev. Claire Feingold Thoryn

on Sunday, May 4, 2008

 at The First Parish in Lincoln

To listen to this sermon click here.

“Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.”

– Mary Oliver

First Reading: Selection from Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and The Search for What Saves Us, Rebecca Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock.

 This is one of the most powerful books I have ever read.  Two women, a minister and a theologian, came together to write an argument against atonement theology.  Atonement theology says that human beings are saved because Jesus died on the cross: Jesus suffered so that our sins would be forgiven. Parker and Brock argue that this theology is based in misconception and affirms violence, abuse, and silence. Parker writes:

[Atonement theology fails to serve life.]  It takes a historical event of violence and misapplies it to a spiritual truth.  Jesus’ death on the cross was not a spiritual illumination.  It was a public execution performed by an oppressive empire.  The brutality of this violence is mystified, absorbed into a spiritual affirmation.

What happens when violent realities are transubstantiated into spiritual teachings?

You’ve heard it or said it yourself.  A mother loses her son to suicide.  In an effort to comfort her you say, “God has a purpose in this.  He sends pain to make us strong.  You may not feel it now, but you will learn to give thanks for this experience, because through it, God will strengthen your faith.”

… Tragedy is renamed a spiritual trial, designed by God for the mother’s edification.  God becomes the sender of torture, who injures us then comforts us—a perverse love.

When Jesus’ crucifixion serves as a metaphor for…transformation, or…God’s abiding presence, violence is justified as sacred (43-44).

…To say that Jesus’ executioners did what was historically necessary for salvation is to say that state terrorism is a good thing, that torture and murder are the will of God.  It is to say that those who loved and missed Jesus, those who did not want him to die, were wrong, that enemies who cared nothing for him were right.  We believe that there is no ethical way to hold that the Romans did the right thing.  We will not say we are grateful for or glad someone was tortured and murdered on our behalf (49).

Second Reading: Mark 5:25-34

Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years.  She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse.  She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, for she said, “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.”  Immediately her hemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease.  Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my clothes?” And his disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, ‘Who touched me?’” He looked all around to see who had done it.  But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth.  He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”

At this year’s Christmas Fair Sam Perkins won the raffle to pick a sermon topic.  He picked the topic of suffering.  So if you suffer through this sermon you can blame him.  I did a quick search of past sermons to see when I had last preached on suffering and it was exactly a year ago.  Some topics need to be taken up at least once a year.  So thank you, Sam.

The  basic argument of atonement theology is that Jesus died for you.  Jesus suffered and died and it was holy and right that he did.  An execution by the government is recast as the murder of a son by his father. State violence is redefined as intimate violence.  “Atonement theology then says that this intimate violence saves life.” From this comes the reasoning that when we suffer, we take up the cross of Jesus.  When a woman is beaten by her spouse, when a child is abused by an adult, this intimate violence is explained to the victim as holy and redemptive suffering. In receiving pain, we suffer as Jesus suffered and in our suffering we will be blessed.

Brock writes:  “Conventional doctrines say Jesus saved the world by dying.  But the people who killed Jesus hated him.  It’s wrong to confuse hate with love” (3). In the course of their book, Parker and Brock embrace the theology of Universalism, which says that nothing can separate us from the love of God. Universalism affirms that the true message of Jesus lies in the lessons of his life, not his death.  They quote one of America’s first Universalists, Hosea Ballou, who said in his 1805 Treatise on Atonement:

‘The belief that the great Jehovah was offended with his creatures [to such a] degree, that nothing but the death of Christ, or the endless misery of mankind, could appease his anger, is an idea that has done more injury to the Christian religion than the writings of all its opposers, for many centuries. The error has been fatal to the life and spirit of the religion of Christ in our world; all those principles which are to be dreaded by men have been believed to exist in God…’

A sermon on suffering is really a sermon on how we deal with suffering.  How we make sense of it, how we get through it, how we live with it, and how we rise up and speak out to stop it. War, famine, natural disasters, abuse, domestic violence.  Our own sufferings, whatever they are, whatever it is we carry in our heart.  Jesus’ suffering is not unique. 

Look at the hemorrhaging woman, who suffered for 12 years.  Look at the recent, unspeakably horrifying story of the Austrian woman and children imprisoned and raped for decades.  Look at all those in the midst of war, grief, loneliness, and abuse.  Look at all those battling the inner war of severe depression.  No, Jesus’s suffering is not unique.  We all have our dark places within, our wounds that won’t stop bleeding. 

Mary Oliver has a poem that begins:

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

A friend of mine once summed up his entire theology in one sentence.  “We’re all in this together” he said. We are all in this together.  It’s our connections with each other that help us through.  Suffering exists.  It was not sent by God to teach us and torture us, but nevertheless, suffering exists.  Human beings hurt each other.  And human beings help each other. 

Parker tells a story about a woman in her congregation who helped her brother in his suffering.  Lyle came back from World War II a changed man.  He was like a ghost—he didn’t speak, didn’t sleep, barely ate.  He didn’t seem to recognize anyone.  He sat all day in a rocking chair in the parlor, his face like a stone.  His sister Maxine kept him company.  Whenever she could she would sit with him and tell stories.  When she ran out of things to say, she would just sit quietly with him, snapping beans or mending socks.  For weeks and months this went on, Lyle sitting and rocking, totally unresponsive. 

Then one night, late, after everyone had gone to bed, Maxine was sitting with Lyle, quietly knitting, when the eyes in Lyle’s still face filled with tears.  The tears spilled over and began to run down his face.  Maxine noticed.  She got up and put her arms around her brother.  Held in his sister’s embrace, Lyle began to cry full force, great gusts of sobbing, and Maxine held him.  Then he began to talk.  He talked of the noise, the cold, the smoke, the death of his buddies.  And then he spoke of the camps, the mass graves, the smell.  He talked all night.  Maxine listened. 

When the morning came, she cooked him breakfast.  He ate.  Then he went out and did the morning chores.

A traumatized human being was able to return to feeling, to speaking, and to the ordinary tasks of life because another person offered him her presence and was able to remain present to the account of terror and grief without turning away.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

She didn’t tell him that this was all part of God’s plan.  She didn’t tell him it was all for the best.  She was simply a loving presence.  She reflected God’s love to her brother and cared for him in his suffering.

We are all in this together.  We need to reach out, to gather our faith, to grab for the cloak of someone who can help us find healing.  Rebecca Parker had her own pain. She was abused as a child, and as a young pastor went through an abortion and a divorce from her first husband.  She was hurting deeply.  But she held her suffering within, not trusting that anyone could offer her the steady presence that Maxine had offered Lyle.

Sometimes, with our ideas about privacy and keeping up appearances, we think we can’t bring our pain to another.  Especially in church.  Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopalian priest, describes this as the “full sun effect”, pretending as though our lives and souls are always in full sun, when really we all have times of waxing and waning.  She writes:

One thing that had always troubled me was the way people disappeared from church when their lives were breaking down. Separation and divorce were the most common explanations for long absences, but so were depression, alcoholism, job loss, and mortal illness. One new widow told me that she could not come to church because she started crying the moment she sat down in a pew. A young man freshly diagnosed with AIDS said that he stayed away because he was too frightened to answer questions and too angry to sing hymns. I understood their reasoning, but I was sorry that church did not strike these eclipsed souls as a place they could bring the dark fruits of their equally dark nights.

Some of them returned when their moons had filled out a little and others did not, but even people in no apparent crisis seemed to suffer from the full-sun effect. As enjoyable as it could be to spend a couple of hours on Sunday morning with people who were at their best, it was also possible to see the strain in some of the smiles, the effort it took to present the most positive, most faithful version of the self. Sometimes I could almost read the truth written out above people’s heads. “Please don’t believe me. This is only a shard of who I really am.” The cost of the pretense was the loss of the real human texture underneath, but since we all thought that was what was expected of us, that was what we delivered.

The longer Rebecca Parker held in her grief and sadness, the more she became her own abuser.  The violence that had been acted on her as a child internalized into suicide attempts and isolation.  It was in reaching out and reaching in that she found healing.  With friends, therapy, truth-telling, she finally began to rebuild her shattered self. 

The hemorrhaging woman would not have been allowed to go to temple, to worship and find companionship.  Her flow of blood made her unclean, banned by the laws of her religion from being in the temple.  Isolated for 12 years, finally she reached in for her own faith, and she reached out for Jesus’ love.  She refused to suffer in silence.  She made a connection.  She reached out, and she was healed.

Serious depression, like physical pain, is suffering.  800 years ago, Thomas Aquinas in his theological writings acknowledge that some people have lives burdened with deep sadness.  In seeking cures for such melancholy, he describes the few things that seemed to help: weeping, the company of friends, naps, and hot baths.

Sometimes our suffering is so great that it seems nothing can help.  We can’t reach out and make a connection, or accept the care of others.  And even when our suffering overtakes us, I believe that nothing can separate us from the love of God.

Kate Braestrup is a Unitarian Universalist minister who works as a chaplain with the Maine Warden Service, the organization that enforces Maine’s game and outdoor recreation laws, and takes care of lost hikers, accidents, drownings, and other tragedies that can happen in the woods.  One day she was called to minister to a man named Dan whose sister Betsy’s car had been found abandoned.  Inside the car was a suicide note written at the end of her little blue diary.  Betsy’s body had just been found in the woods.  The wardens step away and let Kate care for Dan.

Betsy had been suffering for a long time, Dan told me. […] Their parents died in a car wreck when she was 17, and she never seemed to quite get over that. She had a bad spell after the baby was born, and then her husband left, and there was this really messy divorce going on, and Betsy was trying, she really was. She was in therapy and on medication, but she just couldn’t seem to get herself together.

[…]“Can the church bury her?” Dan asked me then.

It actually took him a few rephrasings to get the idea across to me, so strange and alien was it to my way of thinking: “Would a Christian church do a funeral for a suicide?”

Betsy had gone to a service at a church…the previous Sunday, Dan explained. […] The gist of the pastor’s message, according to Betsy, was that suicide was the one sin that God never, ever forgave. […]

I pictured Betsy at church with her blue diary, with her … despair exposed before the pastor and his pinched and stingy God.

“Um . . .” I said. And very carefully, after several deep and calming breaths: “I don’t know that pastor personally. I don’t know what he knows and doesn’t know about severe clinical depression. Which is what your sister died of.”  […]

“Dan,” I said. “Look around.” Obediently he peered through the rain-washed windshield, up the road toward the blurry outlines of half a dozen green trucks.

… “The game wardens have been walking in the rain all day, walking through the woods in the freezing rain trying to find your sister. They would have walked all day tomorrow, walked in the cold rain the rest of the week, searching for Betsy, so they could bring her home to you. And if there is one thing I am sure of—one thing I am very, very sure of, Dan—it is that God is not less kind, less committed, or less merciful than a Maine game warden.”

…He was staring back. He didn’t say a word. […]

“So I want you to know today, Dan, that there is no doubt in my mind, no doubt at all about where Betsy is right now. God is holding your sister close to His tender heart. Betsy is safe, she is forgiven, she is free at last from all her pain.”

“Oh,” Dan breathed. “Oh.”

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.  We are all in this together.

God is not depression. God is not disease. God is not war. God is not suffering.  God did not send us these things to torture us or test us. 

God is love.  God is compassion. God is connection. God is Presence. That Presence is in us, an indwelling spirit of compassion, and we can share that spirit with each other.

In the search for what saves us—

We are saved by hope.

We are saved by faith.

We are saved by love.

We are saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.

May we ever seek, and ever find, these salvations in each other, in God, and in ourselves.

Amen.

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