The Power of Being Seen

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Luke 21:25-28

“There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

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His nickname in prison was Trunk, as in Trunk Full of Guns. It wasn’t a bad nickname to have in prison because people thought you were a little crazy, which helps when you are a scrawny teenager who's never been in a fight. As Trunk tells the story in an Esquire Magazine article ten years ago, it was July 6th, 2003. He was nervous, but determined. He and two teens even younger than him were armed like a militia; rifles, shotguns, machetes, handguns, and 2,000 rounds of ammunition. Trunk wasn’t going to a range.

They took to the streets at around 3am. After a failed carjacking attempt, Trunk told his would be accomplices to head back to his house, regroup, and rethink their plan. That’s when the police officer spotted them: three young men dressed in black trench coats and armed to the teeth. Reflecting on that moment, Trunk says, the officer: “jumped behind the door of his car and told us to drop them. It was a standoff. I saw that he was shaking. I kept thinking that he must have a family. I was like, 'I don't want to be the bad guy.' I never wanted to be the bad guy. I still thought of myself as a decent person. I was still able to put myself in his shoes. I hadn't gone past the point of no return.” Trunk still had empathy.

When the officer shouted Down, no one moved. But then slowly, Trunk gave the command to put down their weapons. He spent ten years in prison, a best case scenario for him. And oddly enough, Prison is what saved him, because according to Trunk, he had no other choice but to learn how to talk with other people. If he didn’t, he would have been crushed.

Many years later and Trunk now helps people who were just like him: ostracized, unnoticed, and unseen.

When asked if anything would have prevented him from feeling the way that he did or attempting what he did, Trunk said “I wanted attention. If someone would have come up to me and said, 'You don't have to do this, you don't have to have this strange strength, we accept you,' I would have broken down and given up.” If someone had just seen him, really seen him.

The worst sin, says George Bernad Shaw, toward another person is not to hate them, but rather to not see them, which says to them you don’t matter. We have become quite accustomed to that sin. We struggle forming relationships with the people around us. David Brooks in his book, How to Know a Person, which is the book that jump started this whole series, says “we’re living in the middle of some sort of vast emotional, relational, and spiritual crisis. It is as if people across society have lost the ability to see and understand one another, which has produced a culture that is brutalizing and isolating.”

And all sorts of data backs this up. In the last twenty years, suicide rates have increased by 33%. More than ⅓ of all teens say they regularly feel sad and a sense of hopelessness. We are spending less time with friends and more time alone, making us feel more lonely than ever before, especially young people and young mother in particular. Not to mention that the time we are spending with family and friends can feel tense due to our political climate and ever growing distrust of one another.

In Luke, Jesus speaks of a time when there will be signs in the sun, moon, and stars. There will be distress among the nations, confusion about what’s happening on the earth, and people overwhelmed with fear. When these things happen, our redemption is near, says Jesus.

When we read these texts, often the question is when, when will these things occur? When is our redemption coming? The truth is we are caught up in this in-between time. On one hand our redemption has already come with the death and resurrection of Jesus. Yet on the other hand, we are still waiting for Christ’s return, for things on earth to be as they are in heaven.

We are living in this already, but not yet time. And Advent captures the essence of that time so well. The Christ child has already come, but we prepare ourselves for when Jesus comes again. Which is why asking when is the wrong question. Instead of asking when these things happen, Luke encourages us to ask how, how shall we live in the meantime?

And one of, if not the best answer, to how we can live right now, in this season when we are so lonely, so quick to dismiss, so overcome with fear of the other, is to raise our heads, look each other in the eye, and truly see each other.

We need to learn how we can know and understand one another. We need empathy. This can all be learned.

But for us followers of Jesus, it is not just some skill set. It is also a spiritual practice, a way of being in the world, one that we have lost along the way. Our schools and universities no longer teach these skills.

And a life of social media doesn’t help, because, as Brooks notes, “social media you can have the illusion of social contact without having to perform the gestures that actually build trust, care, and affection. Stimulation replaces intimacy. There is judgement everywhere and understanding nowhere.”

But social media isn’t all to blame. For some the problem is egotism, or all about me thinking. For others it’s anxiety, worry and fear about how others see you. Nothing shuts down a conversation quicker than that fear.

And still for others, perhaps most prominent right now, is the notion that you already know who a person is because of some small piece of information you know about them. They voted this way so they must be like this. They look a certain way, so that means they act and think this way. Some of the generalizations may have some truth to them, but they are also false to some degree, not to mention hurtful.

How can we prepare to welcome Christ when we can’t engage with the Christ who is in our neighbor? How can we sing “What Child is This” when we have no interest in the child of God right next to us.

Afterall, our God is El Roi, the God who sees me. That’s the name Hagar gives God in the book of Genesis. You are seen and known by God. You are loved deeply and understood completely. And if we know how God sees us, then we will know how we ought to see not only ourselves, but others too.

Advent is about preparing ourselves so that we might see, know, and understand Jesus Christ. And the best preparation we can undergo to receive Christ is to see and know others the way God knows and sees us.

When we do so, we are giving others the grace, love, and attention that we have received and that others so desperately need; just ask Trunk.

So this month at Cross of Grace is all about learning how to get to know the beloved child of God sitting right next to you; the neighbor across the street; the family member you struggle to speak with, the stranger at the coffee shop, or the quiet kid who feels like nobody notices him.

This is holy, practical work and we will cover real, pragmatic skills throughout this series. And we will put those skills to practice along the way. On Wednesdays over dinner, we will do some exercises to strengthen our listening, learn how to ask better questions, and how we can grow in empathy.

And then every day in December, starting today, our digital Advent Calendar devotional will reveal an article, a song, a prayer, a reflection, something that will aid us in this spiritual practice of seeing others more clearly.

Because if we can see others the way God sees them, the way God sees us, maybe we won’t be so lonely, our culture won't be so brutal or isolating.

There is still hope. We aren’t past the point of no return. Our redemption is drawing near, if we just open our eyes to see.

Amen.

Ashes and Grief

Luke 22:39-46

[Jesus] came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives; and the disciples followed him. When he reached the place, he said to them, “Pray that you may not come into the time of trial.” Then he withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, knelt down, and prayed, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done.” Then an angel from heaven appeared to him and gave him strength. In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground. When he got up from prayer, he came to the disciples and found them sleeping because of grief, and he said to them, “Why are you sleeping? Get up and pray that you may not come into the time of trial.”

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How many of you have had the good fortune of visiting Disney World or Disneyland? Whatever the case, Disney is the most magical place on earth, right? – especially if you’re a child, but even for some of you grown-ups, too. I remember being skeptical and cynical and sort of a Scrooge about Disney the first time we took the boys when they were little, because I was doing the math… I was counting the cost… I was lamenting how much more or better or different we could be doing with all of that money, besides giving it to The Mouse. (And we have friends who work there, so we weren’t even paying for all of the things!)

But, we got there and I drank the Kool-Aid real quick. I bought it all hook-line-and-sinker, because the boys were excited and in awe and enamored by the rides and the fireworks, by Buzz and Woody, by Goofy and Mickey, and all the rest, coming to life, right before their very eyes. At one point, after dropping $27 dollars (or something similarly ridiculous) on a Buzz Light Year action figure/drink cup, probably with no more than 10 ounces of lemonade inside, I declared, “Walt Disney can have all of my money.” The boys were just having that much fun.

Well, Disney works really hard at making their parks “the most magical places on earth.” Among so many ingeniously “imagineered” things, did you know that Disney has paint colors they’ve named “Go Away Green,” and “Bye Bye Blue?” They’re the colors Disney uses to neutralize and “disappear” the unappealing, unattractive – but necessary – parts of any public space, like garbage cans, mechanical boxes, fences and partitions … even the utilitarian buildings you might see from the monorails and Skyliner gondola ride are hidden in plain sight with these cleverly camouflaged paint colors. And all of that is great, for fairy tales and child’s play and a week’s vacation in Never Neverland.

But tonight – Ash Wednesday – is about precisely the opposite. It’s about doing anything and everything BUT “disappearing” the unappealing, unattractive, ugly parts of our lives as people on the planet. Tonight is about laying them bear – the shame, the death, and the sin of it all. It’s about calling it out, owning it, rubbing it into our foreheads for ourselves and others to see, and trusting that God will do God’s thing with this dust and these ashes and the brokenness they represent – that God will forgive it, redeem it, wipe it off, wash it away, transform it into something other than the mere smudge and smut that stains us all.

And I’d like to take this all a bit further – dig a bit deeper, maybe – this time around for our Lenten walk in the weeks ahead. If you read my newsletter article for February, you know I tried to get you all thinking about this plan long before tonight.

Over the course of the last several months, I’ve been particularly moved by Anderson Cooper’s All There Is podcast. He started it after the death of his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, a couple of years ago, when he began to take on the monumental, emotionally taxing, spiritually draining task of going through her things – and reliving his life and hers and theirs together – as the last living adult in his immediate family.

For those of you who don’t know, Anderson Cooper’s father died when Anderson was just ten years old, and his older brother, Carter, died by suicide when he was 23, and Anderson was 21. Carter jumped from the 14th floor of their New York apartment while their mother watched.

So, left with all of that history, tragedy, and sadness, Anderson was left to digest and deal with the grief he soon realized he’d never been taught or trained or equipped to do well. And he began to record his reflections about it all and to share conversations with others who’d traveled the road of grief and sorrow, too, so that he could learn from their experience and wisdom – and share it with whoever else might want to listen.

I’ve been so moved by those conversations and inspired by the simple truth that grief is – or will be – the common ground we all share as human beings, that it felt like a holy calling and a faithful responsibility to do together, and for each other, however much we’re able: the good work of teaching and learning and praying about and equipping one another to grieve well, I mean – or at least to broach the topic and engage the notion that that’s possible, and a worthwhile endeavor, to grieve well – during this coming season of Lent.

And in many ways, it should be nothing new. Like I’ve already said, it’s so much a part of what brings us together on Ash Wednesday. And I think there’s something about the common ground of grief that makes this service and our Good Friday worship every year, too, so compelling for so many of us. (More of us typically come together for those two worship experiences than all the Wednesdays in between. But I’m hoping to change that this time around.)

Because it seems to me that – as hard as it can be – something about it all draws us to the ritual of and to the reflection on the grief that gathers us. So I’d like to do more of that, more deliberately in the weeks ahead. And while we don’t always know or acknowledge or have language for it, our penchant for this is a great part of the human experience – and it would and should and could be, for us, a deep, meaningful, exercise of faith as children of God.

In scripture, we read about Job, in the throes of relentless grief, repenting in dust and ashes. We know that, in Old Testament days, prophets and priests, kings and commoners, put on sackcloth and covered their heads with earth and dirt and dust and ashes, too. In the book of Judges, we read about the women of Israel who made an annual, public display of their grief over the murder of Jepthah’s daughter – one of their own – so that the nation would never forget it. In Jeremiah, we read about the wailing of Rachel being heard in Ramah for God’s children who were lost and banished into exile. And, of course we know of Jesus, weeping over Jerusalem, mourning the loss of his friend Lazarus, shedding tears as thick as blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, and crying from the cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”

My point is, this is God’s desire for us, believe it or not – to acknowledge, wrestle with, and experience the grief that finds us in this life. There’s no such thing as – or at least not enough – “Go Away Green,” or “Bye Bye Blue” – or “Go Away Grief” or “Bye Bye Blues” as the case may be – when it comes to the sorrows of this world. It’s hard and feels unholy and it can be unfair too much of the time. And our inclination can be to cover over it and pray it away and paint it into oblivion if we could – or sleep, and sleep-walk our way through it like the disciples in tonight’s Gospel.

But tonight … the ashes on our heads … these Lenten days that lie ahead … the cross of Christ that waits for us down the road … all of it is an invitation to see that grief and sorrow are part of life in the world, that no one escapes it, that none of us is immune from it, that not even the God we know in Jesus could shake it at every turn.

And that’s what this obnoxious wall is all about. Each week we’ll bring something forward to this shrine of grief and sorrow. We will grieve those we’ve loved and lost on this side of Heaven. We will grieve the loss of and damage to creation. We will grieve our regrets, our missed opportunities, the generational sorrows of our people, God’s children, the Church, and more. I suspect it will be hard and holy. I imagine it will beautiful and brutal, at times. And I pray it will be instructive and healing and unburdening and life-giving and hopeful, in the end, too.

There’s a poet named Denise Levertov who wrote this about grief:

To speak of sorrow
works upon it
moves it from its
crouched place barring
the way to and from the soul’s hall.

That’s what I hope we’ll do with our grief in the days ahead. Speak of it, at the very least, so that it doesn’t block our connection to God’s greatest desire for us. Not deny or hide or run from it. Not keep quiet about the challenge it can be to our faith. Not feel bad or guilty for wishing it wasn’t ours to bear.

And I hope we’ll trust what God can do with it … what God can do with us … if we will let our grief and sorrow be; if we feel it; if we learn to live with these ashes for more than just an evening, perhaps; more than just a season, even; as more than just a symbol, and as something God is always undoing, always making new, always redeeming, always raising from the dead … to new life … with love and full of hope, in Jesus’ name.

Amen