Sunday, November 29, 2015

Raise your heads!

First Sunday of Advent, Year C, 2015

The Rev'd Richard Smith, Ph.D.


It’s Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter, and the Chronicles of Narnia, that kind of fantastical imagery that Luke is using in today’s gospel.

When all hell breaks loose, he says -- when there are “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” -- when all this happens, the Son of Man will appear on clouds of glory.

Years after the destruction of the Jewish Temple by the Romans, Luke is writing in retrospect for a community still devastated by what had happened.

That Temple had been the center of the Jewish universe. It was not only where Jews came into contact with God, the place to offer sacrifice and celebrate the great festivals and rituals that had made them Jews. It was also the center of their life and culture as a people. The destruction of the Temple was the end of their world.

The Roman historian Josephus describes what the Romans did to the Jews:
Men and women, old and young, insurgents and priests, those who fought and those who begged for mercy, were cut down in indiscriminate carnage. The number of the slain exceeded that of the slayers. The Roman legionaries had to climb over heaps of dead to carry on the work of extermination.
 That was the horror that Luke’s people were still reeling from as they heard the words of today’s gospel.

Our modern world has known similar horrors: The Nazi and Armenian holocausts; the dropping of the atom bombs; 9/11; the melting glaciers, deadly hurricanes, interminable droughts, dying species; the unbelievable devastation now taking place in Syria. The list goes on.
And this week the world celebrates World AIDS Day. That pandemic was, for many of us, the end of our world.

There have been so many advances in treating this disease. Although Africa and those in poverty still bear the brunt of the pandemic, in the developed world people with HIV can now expect a normal life span, and there are new medicines like Truvada to prevent contracting HIV. We have a long way to go, but still we’ve come so far, with so much to celebrate on AIDS Day this year.

And yet, like Luke’s community in the wake of the Temple’s destruction, we are still reeling from the shock of what we went through in those dark days: the loss of so many loved ones; 20-somethings, emaciated, walking with canes; all the purple lesions, night sweats and diarrhea; the confusion and panic and stigma; the sheer helplessness we felt in the midst of it all.

We who lived through the height of that crisis will never be the same because of what we went through. We still carry the scars from those horrible, horrible days.

So we hear today’s gospel much like Luke’s community once did, like veterans of a horrific war, survivors of a horrendous devastation, still trembling, still trying to get our bearings in the world.

How do we stand now in the wake of all this? We can’t un-know what we learned and experienced back then, can’t un-see what we saw. How are we to be now, in the wake of it all?

In the very midst of hell breaking loose, with many understandably fainting from fear and foreboding, Jesus says to those who saw the destruction of the Temple, “Stand up, raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near."

The last word in this story is not death or tears or sadness, but redemption. This is a word of hope.

All that suffering will be redeemed, all the scars from the past healed and transformed into things of beauty and compassion. All the pain and confusion will have been worth it, been redeemed, because they will have led us, finally, not to tears and death, but to greater life and love and laughter. The last word here, unbelievable as it may seem, is redemption.

These words of hope resonate with something deep inside each of us, because, after everything life may throw at you, you are, deep down, a creature of hope. We humanoids can’t help ourselves. Even in the most devastating moments, we stubbornly hope, even against hope.

 Tony Kushner, in his epic play AIDS in America, has the main character, a man with AIDS, address these words to an angel:
I've lived through such terrible times and there are people who live through much worse. But you see them living anyway. When they're more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they're burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children - they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don't know if that's just the animal. I don't know if it's not braver to die, but I recognize the habit; the addiction to being alive. So we live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that's it, that's the best I can do. It's so much not enough. It's so inadequate. But still bless me anyway. I want more life.
A propensity to hope, even against hope. We can’t help ourselves. It’s how the Creator made us.

 St. Augustine once said that hope has two beautiful daughters, and their names are anger and courage: anger at the way things are, and courage to make sure they don’t stay that way.

I remember the words we both heard and shouted so often in those dark AIDS years “Act up! Fight back!” -- words of anger and courage, words of hope. And how so many reached out to care for the dying, transforming all that pain and grief into something truly beautiful and powerful.

 I’ve seen a similar hope in undocumented immigrants who stand up and tell their stories before crowds of strangers and before Senate committees, calling for reform.

 And mothers who’ve lost kids to gun violence stand up and demand a change in our gun laws.

 Recently I listened to a man whose marriage had fallen apart. He told me about the months he’d spent paralyzed by anger both at himself and his partner, and about his fear of losing everything, including the close relationship he’d had with his son.

 Then, after many dark months sorting through all the anger and grief and depression, he suddenly decided -- it was a decision -- to step out of the darkness and live into the hope that he could make all the necessary and difficult decisions, create a new life, one in which he and his son would be even closer than before.

 Today’s gospel is about redemption; it’s about the hope that the One who made us placed deep in our hearts. We are invited to see the future through the eyes of hope.

 It’s true that your past and how you perceive it has a lot to do with making you the person you are today -- the opportunities you were given, your family background, education, and health.

 But it’s also true that the future and how you perceive that also makes you who you are. How you perceive your future governs and shapes how you are in the present, whether you eagerly move forward with confidence and grace, or hold back in fear, living a diminished life.

 If we perceive the future to be, as George Orwell believed, “a boot stamping on a human face forever,” then this will shape how we live now -- either striking out in anger and desperation at the injustice of it all or cowering in fear and despair.

 But if we have a hunch that today’s gospel just may be right, that the future is full of redemption, then we move forward differently, with confidence and gratitude and hope.

  • If in the world to come God will wipe every tear from our eyes, then we wipe the tears from each other's eyes now.
  • If in the world to come all people will live in peace, then we let the weapons fall from our hands now.
  • If in the world to come every refugee and every immigrant and every person sleeping on the street will have a home, then we reach out our hands in friendship and welcome now. 

The way we perceive our future shapes how we are in the present.

 So on this first Sunday of Advent, we turn the calendar page to start the new church year, whisper a prayer of thanks and hope, roll up our sleeves, and get back to work.

 Raise your heads. Tomorrow is already on the way, and it is full of redemption and hope.

Sunday, November 22, 2015

A Way Past the Trauma

The Feast of Christ the King
Sunday, November 22, 2015
The Rev'd Dr Richard Smith




There are lots of good-hearted jokes about the memory loss that can afflict us as we age. Here’s one:
An older gentleman named Harry was telling a friend about a restaurant where he and his wife had eaten a couple of days before. Harry was trying hard to remember the name of that restaurant, but just couldn’t. So Harry asked his friend, “What is the name of that flower that smells so nice?” His friend says, “You mean a rose?” Harry says,”Yeah, that’s it! A rose.” Then he turns to his wife and says, “Rose, what’s the name of the place where we ate the other night?’
In today's gospel, Jesus says he came to testify to the truth. The Greek word he uses for truth means, literally, not forgetting. Part of Jesus’ telling the truth means not letting us forget. Not letting us forget what?

One theologian suggests what Jesus, in his entire life and ministry, is trying to keep us from forgetting is an ancient, primal trauma that occurred somewhere at the very beginning of the human story, an unhealed trauma that continues to distort every human heart to this day. That trauma --whatever it was, we’ll never know its exact historical details--is what the scriptures try to describe in a mythical way in the ancient story of Cain and Abel, the story in which Cain violently murders his brother Abel. That ancient trauma -- of a brother murdering a brother -- has never been healed, and so it still plays itself out very dramatically today.

Mental health professionals say that when we go through a trauma, whether physical or emotional, it can take some time and effort to heal. Sometimes children who have been abused can take years before they are able to speak about the pain they went through. The memory is too painful to bear, so they block it out, bury it. But eventually, if they are to be whole again, they have to recall the pain and the trauma and tend it in a conscious and loving way. If they can do this hard healing work, their hearts can become more supple and alive, forgiving and compassionate. But without that healing, the trauma continues to fester, and can explode like a grenade, harming them and those around them in addictions, violence, perhaps suicide.

A little over a year ago, on one Sunday after mass, we walked up to 16th Street where a young man, Bennie Martinez, had been shot and killed the night before. We prayed for him and his family. A few days later I went to his funeral at St. Peter’s. I learned that, when he was 11 years old, he saw his mother get shot and killed by gang members on the front steps of their family home up on York Street. Bennie had never healed from that trauma, with all its bitter pain. Eventually, to seek retaliation for what had happened to his mom and their family, it led him into the other gang, the rival to the one that had killed his mom. As a leader in that rival gang, he himself inflicted violence on others. So the cycle of violence continued and eventually he himself fell victim to it that night up on 16th Street. The ancient trauma of Cain and Abel playing itself out in our neighborhood.

Entire societies can go also go through trauma. Our own country did not heal from the trauma of 9/11, and because we did not heal, all our unresolved pain and anger exploded onto the world like a huge grenade in the invasion of Iraq. The effects of that unhealed trauma are now felt all through not only Iraq but also Syria and Beirut, throughout the Middle East, the city of Paris, and Africa. The trauma of Cain and Abel -- of a brother murdering a brother -- playing itself out today on the world stage.

We’re coming up on the holiday season, and maybe you saw the article about Pope Francis in the Chronicle. Let me read a portion:
In a mass Thursday, Pope Francis called Christmas celebrations this year "a charade" because so many nations wage violence, according to media reports.
...the head of the Catholic Church said God and Jesus were weeping "because we have chosen the way of war, the way of hatred, the way of enmities," Vatican news reported.
"Christmas is approaching. There will be lights, parties, Christmas trees and nativity scenes... it's all a charade. The world continues to go to war," he said,
It comes less than a week after terrorist attacks in Paris prompted nations to step up bombardment in Syria, where the United States has launched 6,300 airstrikes in the past 15 months, destroying 4,517 buildings, according to government data from November. Other nations, including Russia, France and Saudi Arabia, have also collectively dropped more than 1,000 bombs on Syria.
The offensive is meant to counter the Islamic State, or ISIS, which has expanded its reign of brutality across parts of Syria and Iraq, where sectarian violence persists more than a decade after the 2003 invasion [of Iraq by the United States].
Russia continues to support militant rebels fighting in Ukraine, Saudi Arabia has also recently waged a months-long bombing campaign in Yemen, and President Barack Obama recently announced indefinite prolongation of the 14-year war in Afghanistan.
"We should ask for the grace to weep for this world, which does not recognize the path to peace. To weep for those who live for war and have the cynicism to deny it," the pontiff said Thursday.
"What shall remain? Ruins, thousands of children without education, so many innocent victims, and lots of money in the pockets of arms dealers...
...The men who work war, who make war, are cursed—they are criminals."
Or as we could say, these men are still caught up in the bitterness and pain of the ancient trauma. Not having healed from it themselves, they unleash that bitterness and pain like a grenade on the rest of the world.

When Jesus testifies to the truth, when by his life and teachings he refuses to let us forget that trauma that lies buried at the beginning of the human story, he does so to offer us a way past the pain, a way past that trauma. He offers an alternative to the violence and retaliation that is the way of Pilate in today’s gospel. He offers the path of nonviolence.

This alternative path of nonviolence is what Jesus is referring to when he says his kingdom is not from this world. Many preachers have taken his words to mean never on earth, but always in heaven; or not now in present time, but off somewhere in the future; or not a matter of the exterior world, but of the interior, spiritual life alone.

Jesus spoils all of these possible misinterpretations by going on to say, “If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to be executed.” In other words, “Your soldiers hold me, Pilate, but my companions will not attack you even to save me from being killed. Your Roman Empire, Pilate, is based on the injustice of violence, but my kingdom is based on the justice of nonviolence.”

His kingdom is not from here. His is a different strategy. The strategy of nonviolence.
We’re about to immerse ourselves in that strategy once again as we re-enter the story of the incarnation, of God coming among us simply because he loved us, because he was crazy about us, loved hanging out with us, sharing our ups and downs, our joys and struggles. Sharing as well our own brokenness, including the ancient trauma of Cain and Abel. This is how he went about the task of healing.

This healing involved him breaking the cycle of that traumatic violence. Rather than striking back at the ones who sought to kill him, he submitted to it, dying at their hands without bitterness or retaliation, forgiving them, loving them to the end, loving them and not taking it back.

Through this path of nonviolence and love, he transformed the trauma into something life-giving. This is the story of his death and resurrection -- of violence being absorbed, suffering being redeemed, the primal trauma being healed, life and love having the final say. It’s a story we become part of each time we come to this table.

At the height of the civil rights struggle, Dr. King echoed this story of Jesus’ death and resurrection in these words addressed to his enemies:
We will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. We will not hate you, but we cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws. Do to us what you will and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children; send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities and drag us out on some wayside road, beating us and leaving us half dead, and we will still love you. But we will soon wear you down by our capacity to suffer. And in winning our freedom we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process.
I spent part of yesterday morning with the parents of Alex Nieto. They went through their own trauma over a year ago when their son was shot with 48 bullets by the police. I see them now so bravely transforming that trauma, redeeming the suffering. They show this in the compassion they show to other families who have lost children to police violence, crying with them, hugging them, standing in vigil with them, marching with them, working for the reform of our justice system.

Earlier in the week I was with two African-American mothers, Paulette and Maddie, whose sons were killed by gun violence. In each case, the pain is immense, sometimes feels unbearable. But I see how they, too, heal that trauma of losing their sons. They show it by their powerful and relentless work to end gun violence. They carry large pictures of their sons as they stand in vigils across the city, telling their painful stories to political leaders, often with tears running down their cheeks, calling for gun control laws, and doing so with great power and eloquence.

On this Feast of Christ the King, with Advent just a few days away, may we do as Dr. King, the Nieto’s, Paulette and Maddie are doing -- embracing once again the strategy of Jesus, letting love be stronger than the pain, doing what we can to heal the ancient trauma of our human family.

Sunday, November 1, 2015

Thin Days

Feast of All Saints, November 1, 2015, 
the Rev'd Dr Richard Smith


These are thin days --  the Feast of All Saints, El Dia de los Muertos, the Feast of All Souls -- thin days when the membrane between heaven and earth becomes very thin, when we who are still walking the planet are brought closer to those who have gone before us.

Over here we have icons of some of better-known spiritual ancestors: Oscar Romero, Harvey Milk, Our Lady, St. Joseph, many others.

And a few moments ago in the garden we called out the names of some of those who have gone before us. On the altar in the back, many of us have photos of beloved friends and family members who have died, including Nico, Dennis Gould, and others from this community.

It’s a time of remembering, of giving thanks, and of grieving, which can be a wild ride.

If psychotherapists and philosophers can chart the path of grief and measure its duration and predict its stages, it’s only because they’re not up to their necks in it; they have the luxury of sitting back and observing. But when you’re in the midst of it, it’s a different story. It's as though you yourself are an occupied land. Grief has a life of its own, and there’s really nothing you can do about it. You can’t go around it; you can only find your way through it.

My first experience with grief came when my friend Tony died during my sophomore of high school. Our high school was along the shore of Lake Washington in Seattle. Some huge trees had been cut down and the logs were floating near the shoreline. Tony went out on the logs, jumping playfully from one to another, when he slipped and fell between them. The logs closed over him, and they were too huge for him to push them apart and climb back up, and so he tragically drowned, leaving all of us, his friends, in trauma and shock.

Weeks later the grief would creep up on me unawares. I’d be getting dressed for school, or walking to class, or waiting in line at the grocery store and something would make me think of Tony and suddenly I’d burst into tears. This was my first experience with grief, and it left me frightened and confused. Grief can be a wild ride.

One day, a priest at my school saw me in tears, and knew right away what was going on. He came over and put his arm around my shoulder and said simply, “Richard, you're going to have days like this. We all will.” And he was right.

This is our human story: the deeper the love, the deeper the grief. We will have days like this. We don’t think about this when we give our heart away, but this is our human story: that our first kiss and our first tear are linked.

A few months after Tony's death, my dad died, and this time I didn't know what to feel. My dad had left my family when I was a year old, leaving us in poverty and my mom to raise two kids on her own. I knew I loved my dad, and I cried when I got the news, but this moment was also filled with much anger and regret at what was not to be. Unresolved feelings toward my dad that I carry to this day.

If what an old priest once told me is true, that some of our relationships will be resolved only in heaven, then it certainly describes my dad and me. Coming to terms with our fractured relationship remains part of my own spiritual journey. Someday, in addition to all of my other conflicted feelings toward him, I hope I'll also be grateful for him.

I remember a reflection by Henri Nouwen about gratitude. He wrote,
To be grateful for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for all of our lives--the good as well as the bad, the moments of joy as well as the moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well as the rejections--that requires hard spiritual work.
Still, we are only truly grateful people when we can say thank you to all that has brought us to the present moment. As long as we keep dividing our lives between events and people we would like to remember and those we would rather forget, we cannot claim the fullness of our beings as a gift of God to be grateful for.
Part of my own spiritual work is in coming to be truly grateful for my dad.

Grief can be a wild ride. Eventually our loves as we know them come to an end, perhaps through death, perhaps through human frailty or sin or a combination. A young widow once asked, “Why didn’t someone tell me that all marriages end either in death or divorce?”

And in the face of this simple fact -- that love as we have known it must end -- we have a choice. We can become cold and cynical, thinking of love as a waste of our precious time and energy. “Don't go there. It's all going to end in tears. It's not worth it. Just live for yourself. Don’t give yourself away.”

Or we can take another path, harbor a crazy suspicion that there is more going on with love than meets the eye, more than conventional wisdom or scientific analysis will admit. That love is stronger than death, that life may be changed but it is not ended, and what may seem like an end is not the end at all. This is the suspicion we harbor in these thin days.

I love the moment in today’s gospel, in which an emotionally troubled, weeping Jesus is swept toward the tomb of the one he loves. He does not stand aloof, unmoved, like a philosophical observer with his act all together. No, this is one of those moments when the story of the Incarnation becomes vivid, when God is at our side, vulnerable as we are.

If he had not loved Lazarus and his sisters, he would not have stood there crying his heart out. Like us, Jesus cannot go around the experience of death and grief; he can only move forward by going through it.

So he goes into that dark night, where God is thought to be most absent, into the place of death and human tears, into our grieving with all it’s wild turns, and by his simple presence with us there he redeems even those dark moments.

Because when do we know that we have a friend? Is it when someone gives us good advice, or solves a problem we’re having? Perhaps. But even more I think it's when someone comes to us in a moment when we are vulnerable and in crisis and says, “I don’t know what to say or do, I don't have any solution for you, but I do want you to know that I'm with you, and I won't leave you alone.” Then we know we have a real friend.

It’ in this way, by fully entering into our own struggles with death and grief’s wild ride, by proving himself to be a friend, that Jesus redeems even those dark moments.

Some theologians say that ultimately everything is brought into God’s heart.

Some things happen that are in line with what God desires. God takes those things and presses them to his heart.
Other things happen that are not what God desires -- like human betrayal, violence, broken relationships. These things, God redeems, and then takes them to his heart.

In the end, the theologians say, everything is brought into God’s heart.

In these thin days, all our ancestors and all our relationships, including those with unfinished business, come once more into the heart. And I find myself asking: What if these theologians are right -- that no love is ever wasted, that even our most broken relationships are redeemed, and in the end nothing and no one is ever lost? What if that suspicion really were true? What if we really believed that?