Sermon - No One Deserves It, Everyone Gets It

           It is always a sweet and precious experience for me to dedicate and anoint the children of Lake Street Church. Babies, even when feeling fussy or upset are pretty much oblivious to the actual anointing.  I’ve never had a baby say, “Don’t do that to me!”  But this is not the case with older children.  With an older child I explain ahead of time what am going to do.  But this doesn’t always help. I once anointed the forehead of a five-year- old, who, glaring at me, immediately wiped the oil off her forehead.  A four-year-old once covered his forehead with his hand—so I ended up anointing the back of his hand. And then there was the three-year-old who came to the chancel and ran circles around me.  Trying to anoint the forehead of a moving toddler is enough to make you dizzy.  While our children can make us light-headed they also keep us light-hearted.  Their ebullient energy is a source of great joy.  They grow up so quickly.  As Barbara Kingsolver once observed, “It kills you to see them grow up.  But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn’t.”

           We do grow up, and we often carry into adulthood the unresolved conflicts of our childhood.  Unresolved conflicts create discomfort.  When conflicted or troubled, the healthy response is to seek professional help.  For those at Lake Street Church seeking the counsel of a psychotherapist couldn’t be easier.  There are so many social workers, psychologists and pastoral psychotherapists in this congregation that when you turned to greet those about you, chances are you greeted one of them.  I have asked them not to  give out their business cards during the Doxology.  At Lake Street Church we are rooted, connected and appropriate. All of us need help sometimes, and it is a good thing to know that if you need help at Lake Street Church, it is no more than a pew away. 

         Certain childhood memories make a life-long impression and the painful experiences have a way of burrowing into our minds. And those who have had especially scarring or jarring childhood experiences inevitably talk about their struggle for self- esteem or their struggle to let go of self-blame and shame.  This terrible feeling of unworthiness—that we are unfit, undeserving, that no matter what we do we just can't measure up—this deep-seated sense of being unworthy is almost always the result of unhealed psychological wounds from childhood.   

        Occasionally when we sing Amazing Grace, someone will approach me with a request, “Can we change a few of the words? Whenever I sing, ‘Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me,’ it pains me.  I’ve been trying my whole adult life not to feel like a wretch. I’ve been trying my whole adult life to pump up my self-esteem. “When I sing those words it makes me feel like I’m not good enough—like a can’t measure up.” 

       Conversations such as these open a deeper door to understanding.  Psychological unworthiness is the feeling that life is not giving me what I deserve. I don’t deserve low self-esteem. I don’t deserve to feel like a wretch.  Psychological unworthiness stems from unresolved conflicts and unhealed psychological pain.  But spiritual unworthiness is rooted in the deeper awareness life itself is a gift and a gift is never earned.  “I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.”  Psychological unworthiness causes us to feel alienated from ourselves. Spiritual unworthiness is a paradox.  It’s only by emptying ourselves that we become full.  Psychological wretchedness causes us to feel small when we want to feel large.  Spiritual wretchedness helps us to recognize our insignificance not as a curse but a sacred and holy thing.    

       Prior to my first trip to India, a friend of ours named Steven, learned we were

planning to visit the Taj Mahal.   Steven’s eyes lit up, “The Taj Mahal is really something. Pictures don't do it justice. Seeing it is an experience.  When I first walked through the gate,” he said, “I looked up and there it was. I was overwhelmed and the first words to come out of my mouth were ‘I am not worthy.’”

      As we prepared for our trip I thought to myself, "Ah, come on Steven, you’re being a little melodramatic. After all, it’s a building.”  But when we walked through that gate and I looked up at the Taj Mahal, I understood exactly what he meant.  The mesmerizing beauty of the Taj is palpable.  To see a picture of it is not to experience the real thing.  The energy from it, the perfection of its lines and curves, its elegance, its sheer size is so overwhelming, that while I stood there I felt at once reduced.  It gives the appearance of floating on air.  I chuckled because I knew what Steven meant when he said, “I am not worthy.”

       Whether the Taj Mahal, the Grand Canyon, the Serengeti Plain in Africa, the Rocky Mountains or the vast deserts of the Southwest, most of us have had at least one experience of standing in the presence of incalculable and indescribable beauty—of being whittled down to size, humbled, reduced in the presence of that which is to big for words. Feeling psychologically unworthy causes us pain.  Spiritual unworthiness creates humility and gratitude. 

      In our lesson today, Jesus says to his disciples, "There is no greater love, than to lay down one's life for another."  To give up one’s life for another is the greatest gift one human being can give another.  There are countless stories of soldiers laying down their lives for comrades, parents laying down their lives for their children, of someone risking a life to donate a kidney—of a firefighter rushing into an inferno to pull someone out. “There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for another.” 

        Have you ever asked yourself what it would be like to be on the receiving end of someone else sacrificing his or her life so you could live?  What would it be like to be the recipient of so great a love?  What's it like to be the one who lives because another has made the supreme sacrifice?  If someone were to make this sacrifice for you I seriously doubt you would say, "Ah yes, I deserved that. Doggone it, I am good enough, I am smart enough, I am worthy enough.  Everyone I know who has been on the receiving end of such a sacrifice, says the same thing: “I didn’t deserve that. I am not worthy of such a sacrifice.” 

       Of this gift no one is worthy.  But the truth is, others are laying down their lives for us all the time and we scarcely notice.  Truth is, this saying of Jesus is a metaphor that extends into the minutes and moments of our everyday lives.  Think of it this way:  Anyone who gives you undivided attention for just a moment, a minute or an hour, is laying down his or her life for you. Whether you have positive or negative memories of your parents, when you were little, someone had to change your diapers, someone had to feed you, hold you. Even if your growing up was painful, you wouldn’t be here today had not others—perfectly  or imperfectly—laid down their lives for you.  Maybe you didn’t get what you wanted or needed, but you got enough to make it possible for you to be here today.         

       How many people this week have put aside their needs to listen to your needs?  Who embraced you, looked you in the eye—shared your pain?  Who laughed with you? Who reached out in some small way to tell you they care about you?  How many people over the course of a week lay down their lives for us one minute at a time?  Whatever attention or affection is given to us, we do not deserve it, we cannot earn it—yet sometimes even strangers put aside their lives for us.

       One day as I drove toward the intersection of Chicago Ave. and Main St., I saw a woman trip in the crosswalk and roll head over heals.  In less than ten seconds people had surrounded her, picking her up and asking if she was okay. Every expression of kindness, even from strangers—every gesture of love no matter how small, every display of tenderness no matter how subtle—requires a person to put aside her or his life for a minute, a day or a year, for the sake of another.  If we could summon up all of these little moments, the sacrifices others have made for us—if we could see them and experience them all at once—the weight of these gifts would be enough to bring us to our knees, saying: "Lord have mercy, I do not deserve this.”

        I don’t know about you, but there are moments when for an instant I see drops of love, the streams of kindness, the rivers of mercy poured out for me in my life.  And when I see it this way I know that I am not worthy. I know this is something I cannot earn or achieve.  It is grace. And whenever I touch my own unworthiness, whenever I get out of my own way and open myself to the grace that comes to me through others, it’s profoundly amazing.  And all I can say is, “Lord, have mercy.”