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“Finding Our Way,” Rev. Dr. Barb Wilkins-Crowder, 7/19/15

“Finding Our Way”

Rev. Dr. Barb Wilkins-Crowder

 Romans 7: 15-25a

¹⁵I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. ¹⁶Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. ¹⁷But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. ¹⁸For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. ¹⁹For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. ²⁰Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.

21 So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. ²²For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, ²³but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. ²⁴Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? ²⁵Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

So then, with my mind I am a slave to the law of God, but with my flesh I am a slave to the law of sin.

Every summer for about the last decade my husband has made special effort to get my kids out into the mountains for a backpacking weekend. The first few years they were part of a large father/daughter group and another almost as large father/son group. Then, as those kids started to age and leave home, the groups collapsed to one and the last few years the groups has been a cousins group with my husband and his brother as the only adults. Most of the mothers connected to the groups had little interest in going. I mean we are talking about 40 pounds on your back, dehydrated meals and no hygiene facilities for 3 days. And, we are talking about a chance for the mother’s to be at home with a weekend off of some mothering duties!

Somewhere along the way, the participants got confident enough in their orienteering and trekking skills, that they started venturing off of the high traffic trails onto the hard-to-access, sometimes really high altitude, isolated trails.

Some years they got reminded that there is no straight line up a hill; or down a hill. A couple of years involved dehydration, unrelenting nausea, stumbling back off the mountain and even helicopter rescues. Those years they learned that not only is the route off the mountain often not a straight line, but neither is the road home.

On most mountainsides, even if you want to, you can’t take a straight line to the top – or the bottom. Things get in your way; rocks, gullies, fallen trees, snow fields, crevices and drop-offs will mess up any straight line trajectory you might choose to set.

And, then there is leg strength, lung capacity and emotional fortitude (otherwise known as stubbornness). Even if all those factors are strong and ready, the mountainside has a way of showing you who is boss.

But, we have days when we think it … don’t we? We think, “I know what I am doing – I know how to manage this – I am strong enough and smart enough – I’m going on MY route – as straight up and straight back down as I want to go!”

Yet, even when all the factors are strong and ready, the mountainside (and life) has a way of showing us who is boss.

In other words, you gotta learn to love the switchbacks and the detours and the climbing over or under parts of the journey. And we also might just as well love the getting lost parts of the journey – because is just might be true that we often have the best chance of really finding ourselves when we get good and lost.

‘ that which I set out to do, I don’t do. That which I hate, I somehow find myself doing just that ‘

For as long as humans have walked this earth and been self-aware enough to know that what we don’t know is so much more than what we do know … for about that long we have been on a quest to understand and analyze why we do what we do, why we don’t do what we should, why we let ourselves down, why we give in to temptation and bad choices and what God has to say about all that.

And, just like mountainsides, this kind of quest has no easy straight lines.

Instead of felled trees or gullies, this quest has blocks and challenges and traps we call shadow, habit, neuroses, personalities, wounds, traumas, resistance, and all those complex brain chemistry factors.

Even if you aren’t particularly familiar or comfortable with the language of psychology and human development, you are likely familiar with names like Jung, Freud, Kohlberg, Piaget, Gilligan, Fowler, Wilbur, Kegan, or Beck. No, not so much. Alright. How about the psychological theory of Paul?

That is what we have in today’s text.

Paul’s theory of human development here in today’s text is pretty simple. We are broken from the beginning and we always will be broken. We will keep taking right turns when we know the best option for us is to the left. But, it is not our fault and we can’t control it. It is sin living in us. There is a war inside of us between our sin controlled self and our inner being that delights in God’s law. We must be saved from the outside. Jesus saves us from the outside and then we make ourselves slaves to God’s law. That is the sum total of the Christian journey and faith development for Paul.

This is one of the old sacred texts that is just hard for me to read.   Precisely because I think there is such important, lasting, universal truth here. But also because the language and conclusions are such a challenge for our modern ears and brains and progressive, post-modern faith constructs.

This passage is also hard because it hits me in the core of my being. Paul’s wrestling here is mine. My intellectual and academic journey has been all about the wrestling Paul is doing here. My life journey has been filled with Paul’s angst and desire to understand why, oh, why we do the very things we know will bring us more suffering.

This passage is also hard because it is fragile ice for preaching. Whether or not Paul’s world understood that mental illness and addiction were so many degrees more difficult that simply keeping kosher laws or remembering to say the right prayers or wash your hands at the right time in the right way is not for this sermon today but let’s all be clear and honest right now and right here.

Mental illness is not a sin. Depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, psychotic breaks, attachment disorder, oppositional defiance behaviors, unresolved grief, post traumatic stress disorder, childhood wounds and developmental fractures and autism are not sin.

Addiction is not a sin. Hiding in your shadow is not a sin. Passive aggressive behavior is not a sin. Simmering, unexpressed anger is not a sin.   Chronic sadness is not a sin.

None of these are sin unless the entire human condition is a sin. And, for Paul, it is just about that clear. The human condition, for Paul, is to be in a constant state of wrestling between the sin that lives within us and drives us to bad choices and the small light of the inner part of us that looks to God.

Paul’s response to his wrestling with his shadows and darkness and weakness and failures is to call it all bad and separate it from his good, Christian, God-managed self.

He hands it all to God to fix. Total surrender to the law of Christ. That is Paul’s answer. He must be saved from himself and from the sin that owns him.

There’s some appeal there. For many of our more conservative brothers and sisters, whether Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim or Jew, this is their journey.   Their journey on the mountainside of life is a lean against God, trust in God’s choices and surrender every step every day journey.   Don’t be judgmental here folks. This style of walking the journey has saved many lives and hearts and souls. Addictions have been healed. Forgiveness found. Marriages saved and habits conquered.

But, but, but. If we don’t see human nature as all darkness. If we believe that God created us as images of the divine with the potential to bring healing, love and joy to the world’s and our own brokenness, then Paul’s advice here doesn’t work for us. If we don’t experience God as a fixer and director of our every step and action — If handing over total control and surrender feels like we are just refusing to grow up and out and beyond our self, then Paul’s gospel doesn’t work for us.

And, honestly, I think Paul’s text here is dangerous. It makes us too helpless. It sets us up against a parent God who we will surely find ways to resist forever. It leaves us forever in conflict and doubt with our very selves also.

But, a totally humanistic, self-developmental, rational, agnostic approach doesn’t work for me either.   But, again — Don’t judge. Addictions have been managed, wounds have been healed, marriages saved, suicides prevented with this approach also.

Churches like this one and mine in Lafayette. Well, most of the mainline churches these days are struggling to decide what it means to be worth people’s time, energy and money. And, we are struggling to know what it means to be relevant and make a difference in our culture and world. And we are struggling to know what it means to still embrace the Jesus way and what it means to be a Christian both within and beyond the American way of life.

I offer this to you and myself today. To be a thoughtful, relevant, compassionate, faithful Christian today means that we stand in the middle of the tension between total surrender of our sinful natures and total belief in humanity’s power and potential to fix its self. We stand up for our mentally ill and addiction battling brothers and sisters and claim that they are just as divinely made as we are. And we claim with all honesty and courage that we are as full of shadows, doubts, obsessions, anxieties, depressions, passiveness and anger as they are.

And, we refuse to hide out in excuses. We refuse to give ourselves the chance to blame God for not fixing it all, easing it all and healing it all. We claim the work we have to do. We climb the mountainside and we push forward on the path of faith and growth and bringing more light and hope to the world.

To be a thoughtful, relevant, compassionate, faithful Christian today is to say yes to the truth that still speaks in Paul’s words and to add the modern sensibility that , “there is more to the Christian journey than Paul’s path only”. To be a thoughtful, relevant, compassionate, faithful Christian today, seeking to keep moving on this Christian quest, is to keep claiming theology that adds responsibility and Christian action to our lives. To be a thoughtful, relevant, compassionate, faithful Christian is to admit that God is bigger than any parent metaphor; is more unknown than known and that God is as much in us and in this journey right here, right now as God is out there sitting and watching and waiting for us to start acting right.

There are no easy straight lines up the mountainside of life. And, we, as thoughtful, relevant, compassionate, faithful Christians, claim that there are no easy, straight lines to God. We proclaim that the Christian path is as full of switchbacks and obstacles as nature itself is. We accept that our human journey is to surrender and develop; to admit weakness and push for growth and insight; to yield to God’s possibilities and to stay on our path and see what lies ahead.

We stand as broken and confused and saddened by ourselves as Paul did.   And, in that brokenness, confusion and sadness, we build a community and a faith path where any one can bring the experience of getting lost and looking for home.

My husband and I were Star Trek nerds long before we met almost 23 years ago. My apologies to those who might not have followed all the movies and series but I have to use an illustration from one of those series. Jeff and I bonded and fell in love while sharing the lessons and dreams of the “Next Generation” series and movies. We raised our kids while finding time to escape weekly with the “Voyager” crew. We stayed mostly connected to the “Deep Space Nine” series but neverreally got hooked by any of the characters or missions. And, as soon as they were old enough for us to share the Voyager series with them, we made them watching every episode via Friday night Netflix marathons. But, somehow we never connected to the latest in the family of Star Trek, the “Enterprise” series that went backward in time to tell the story of the launching of humans into space and their first encounters with other worlds and other peoples. I couldn’t get pat the first episode. That’s how disappointed I was with it.

But, this summer as Jeff and I start to feel the transition of our home into an empty nest, as we both spend our evenings aware that our son is headed off to his freshman year of college in just a few short weeks. As we both wonder and worry about his readiness to face grown up life and stress, we have found watching the series helpful. One or 2 episodes a night. They just might last till we find ourselves in our empty nest.

But …. It’s a mess really. The whole series was a mixed metaphor. Because it was written from 2001 to 2005 but its plot was set long before that of the original series written from 1966 to 1969, it was stuck with some of the same missteps of that original series. In a narrative about a humanity grown beyond the bounds of prejudice and war conflicts — ready for galactic diversity and spreading the values of curiosity, discovery and peace – they were still stuck with the misogyny, racism, violence and skepticism of diversity that lived in the American culture of the late 60s. So, I know why I rejected it when it first aired in 2001.

But, I am a bit more humble now than I was then. I am a bit more realistic about the mess we all are. We are finding our way out of sexism, racism, able-bodyism, moralism, shaming of mental illness, homophobia, greed, violence and suspicion of diversity but the mountainside is full of switchbacks, obstacles and getting lost on our way.

That’s a long setup to bring you one specific reference from the series. Forgive me for finding my way there slowly. Over parts of 3 seasons; 27 episodes (that was about 18 months in real time), the crew of Enterprise is lost in a belief that they must destroy an entire species before that species destroys Earth. They are lost in a thirst for revenge, blind fear of what the future might hold, prejudice of a people they neither know nor understand and the dimmed out vision that comes with feeling like the weight of the world is on your shoulders. Those 27 episodes are filled with switchbacks, wrong turns, missteps and feeling alone and unsheltered under the stars. The writers finally bring the story line to resolution and immediately drop the crew into a new mess of chaos and conflict that none of them could have seen coming.

One of the characters loses it. He vents his frustration on the calmest, sanest person he can find, stomps, rails his arms in the air and has a good ole temper tantrum. But, later, when he feels grown up enough to face the chaos and mess they are in, he apologizes with these words … “I was way out of line. I was just all set to get home. I wasn’t expecting to be in the middle of another situation!”

We all just want to get home. But life throws situations at us. It’s a mess really. Its mixed metaphors and mixed messages. Its making progress and its switchbacks. Its feeling healthy and feeling sickened by ourselves and others. Its compassion and enlightenment and healing “isms” and its hate and jealousy and greed continuing to live. It’s feeling confident in our orienting and self-care skills and getting lost in our shadows, habits, addictions and fears.

We all just want to get home.

It is good to feel lost… because it proves you have a navigational sense of where “Home” is. You know that a place that feels like being found exists. And maybe your current location isn’t that place but, Hallelujah, that unsettled, uneasy feeling of lost-ness just brought you closer to it.

To be a thoughtful, relevant, compassionate, faithful Christians today is to stand in this place, to share at that table, to pray together, cry together, celebrate together and make community that is Home in its own way to us and to anyone and everyone who shares our journey.

Thanks be to God for you, for your work in the world and for your finding your way toward a place and a community that feels like “being found” really is possible and “home” really does exist.

Amen and Amen.