Sermon - When Feeling Insecure Is Holy

       No doubt all of us are distressed by the events in Israel and Lebanon these past few days. Once again, our government has failed to take a leadership role in resolving the conflict. But as this war breaks out, President Bush is sitting with G8 leaders.  It’s a joke, really.  Maybe even a Divine joke.  This president—who speaks simplistically about everyone’s right to defend themselves—is forced to deal with the complexity of other world leaders. In the White House it’s pretty easy to reach agreement with all your friends surrounding you.  The G8 meeting is more complicated and demanding.  It’s like a Divine joke. I for one always like it when God plays the jokester.  If we are going to personify God, then let’s get rid of the avenging warrior God and replace it with God as a standup comic, say, a God who is like Lily Tomlin or George Carlin.  Personally, I prefer a God who is more like a standup comic.  This is the way God comes across in the story of Abraham and Sarah. Abraham is 100 and Sarah is 90.  God tells them that Sarah will become pregnant and bear a son.  Sarah breaks out in uncontrolled laughter. Then Abraham, unable to contain himself, laughs so hard he falls over on his face. They both just crack up. Who could blame them?  In one account God asks Sarah, “Why are you laughing?” She recovers and says, “I wasn’t laughing.”  And God says, “Oh yes you did, you laughed.  You both laughed.”  Scared stiff, Abraham and Sarah deny the whole thing.  But God gets the last laugh and says to them, “Because you think this is a joke, when your son is born, you shall call him Isaac, meaning “he laughs.”

       This is how things go for Abraham and Sarah.  With a straight face God tells them what to do and no sooner do they do it. They do it certain that everything will turn out in a predictable way. But it doesn’t.  When it comes to our expectations, life is a non-conformist. We live our lives believing we know where we are headed and what to expect next—but around the next corner lies, what?  Look back on your own life.  Look back 5, 10 or 20 years.  Could you have really imagined that you’d be where you are?    The mystery of how things turn out.  The mystery of where we end up.  

         In this way, life is a joke.  Where are you going after you leave this sanctuary today? How do you know you will get there? How about tomorrow, next week, next year, or five or ten years?  We really don’t know.    

          Of all of the sentences that people have spoken to me throughout my ministry—uttered in hospital rooms, in funeral homes, at wedding celebrations or sitting on the sofa on my study—there is one sentence I hear in the best and worst of times.  It is spoken out of the agony of despair, and the heart of joy.  It is, "I never thought I would be here….  I never could have imagined that this was possible."   Sometimes we find ourselves in an unbelievably good place—or grief stricken.  The point is we can’t predict it; we never really know when the ground will shift.

            We live with the fantasy that we know where we are going, that we know where our lives are headed, and this works up to a point.  Like Abraham and Sarah we think we understand what the deal is, but then comes the punch line we never expected.    

           Once a week National Public Radio runs a feature called This I Believe.  Sometimes famous people read their essay.  Sometimes unknown, everyday people say what they believe. It’s a stirring segment.  People speak with sincerity about their deepest convictions. Each statement is intelligent and heartfelt.  “This I believe”—what would you say?   If you were to write a 500-word essay about what you believe and read it on national radio, what would your statement be?  If you boiled all of your beliefs down to a core conviction, what would that conviction be?  

          What is the hub in the wheel of your life?  What is the central principle that governs your living? And where would you turn if your deepest conviction was shattered?

            Stephanie Ericsson was two and a half months pregnant when she learned her husband had died suddenly of a heart attack.  She had believed that after the baby was born she would live happily ever after with her husband. But out of the blue, one day he had a heart attack and died.  Suddenly the solid ground of her belief turned to quicksand.  She writes about this experience in her book Companion Through the Darkness. “We are humbled before the great events of life—events over which we have no power, no influence—events that do not play fair. [What brings us to our knees] is our certainty that we have control. To be humbled like this is not meant to be punishment, but rather a [preparation for something miraculous to occur]. The miracle is that we become teachable again. Humble. Graced. In touch with powers greater than us. It feels humiliating, when ironically, it’s humanizing.”

        We go along from day to day believing we live on solid ground.  But we never know when the rug will be pulled out.  The sudden loss of a relationship, unexpected accidents, unforeseen illnesses, losing a job—we never know what awaits us. Sitting in my office this past Wednesday I heard the sound of screeching tires and then a crash.   Opening my window, I looked out and saw both drivers getting out of their cars, both looking shocked, stunned—both asking, “What happened?”  To be human is to be subject to having the rug pulled out.  The other side of this is that sometimes we unexpectedly

get a magic carpet ride.  We think we are living on unmovable ground, but sooner or later it shifts. We think life is solid, but it’s fluid.   “Underneath our ordinary lives, underneath all the talking we do, all the thoughts in our minds, all the actions we take, there’s this fundamental groundlessness. It’s there bubbling along all the time.” [Pema Chodron]  We think we know where we stand in one moment, and in the next we lose our footing.

        Twenty-five hundred years ago, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said it is impossible to step into the same river twice.  We step into the river one minute and step into it again, different water but the same river. 

        Every night approximately 30 people sleep in Hilda’s Place, the homeless shelter for adults in our Church House.  It’s not uncommon for most people to think that homeless people are living out of touch with reality.  But the truth is, homeless people live closer to the truth than most of us.  In truth, we are all closer to being homeless than we realize. But homelessness is not only literally about losing your home, it is metaphorically about losing your power. We think we have power over our lives. And when it comes to certain things, we do have limited power.  We can make choices about what we’ll do, how we live and who we’ll live with.  But life has a power of its own that renders us powerless.

     A number of years ago, while returning from a meeting at the church, as I drove down Forest Ave., I was broadsided by a pickup truck.  My car was crushed and my ribs were broken. The paramedics and fire trucks came. I was immobilized—completely powerless.  I couldn’t see it coming.  But there I was—POW!—in a matter of seconds immobilized and utterly helpless.  It was a strange experience, because as I was carefully placed on the stretcher, I had the thought, “Oh no, the car is totaled and I’ve had it for only six months.” But it was a distant thought. Then, as I was lifted into the ambulance, every care and concern fell away.  The funny thing about letting go is that you don’t have to do anything.  Letting go is just relaxing and letting things be. In one form or another we’ve all had experiences like this.  Something happens and we resist it—we can’t imagine a life that’s different from the one we know. But when we let go, we accept what we are in—and voilá, everything is all right.  Everything is in its right place.  Feeling insecure is the fear of losing control.  But when you know that being in control is just an idea we have, you let go.          

       In her book Lovingkindness, Sharon Salzberg tells the story of a friend whose seven- year-old daughter woke up screaming in the middle of the night.  The mother went to her and asked, “What’s the matter?  Did you have a bad dream?”  Her daughter answered, “Yes, I dreamed that I was out in a garden because I was chasing the dog and a gigantic swarm of bees surrounded me, and then I died.”

              The mother was incredulous.  “You actually died?  I have dreamed of nearly dying, but never actually died.  What was it like?”  The little girl answered, “I suffered a lot and then I stopped struggling, and it was all right.”

          We spend most of our lives trying to “nail everything down,” trying to make everything solid and secure. We do this because the idea of not being in control, not having power over our lives, terrifies us. But there are profound and poignant moments that remind us that like Abraham and Sarah, we are only fooling ourselves because we never know. And seeing this, we touch our insecurity, and touching our insecurity we have a choice.  Will we hold on for dear life or let ourselves go? To let go is to allow ourselves to be ourselves. To let go is to allow others to be who they are.  To let go is to let God be God in us.  Learning to let go of the need of control—learning to allow—is  not something we master. It is the challenge of every moment. It is learning to trust the universe, God, others and ourselves. When everything suits us there’s no reason to open up. But the moments in life that pinch us are the ones that teach us.   And this is why insecurity is holy.  To see in every moment that we are stepping out into what is unknown, uncharted and shaky—to see this and to let go of resistance and struggling against our insecurity—allows us to pray, “God of our life, through all the circling years we trust in you; in all the past, through all our hopes and fears, your hand we view.  With each new day, when morning lifts the veil, we own your mercies, Lord, which never fail.”  

                                                                                                                                                                   Blessed be