Looking in the Mirror: In strength, weakness – sermon by Aldred Neufeldt – Oct 14, 2012

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Sermon by Aldred H. Neufeldt

Looking in the Mirror 3:  In strength, weakness 

October 14, 2012 

Texts: Psalm 90: 1 – 4, 12-17, Jonah 2:1-10, Hebrews 5:7 – 6:10

In today’s sermon we return to our Fall theme and question: “what reflection of God do we see when we look at our bodies in the mirror?”  That we ask the question should not be a surprise.  Christians cannot be other than a people who honour the body.   We start with the assurance we are created by God and in the image of God. No matter how much we know about cell division and DNA strands, every birth of a new baby is a miracle – each newborn a unique and marvellous creation with endless possibilities.  With advancing age we become aware of its frailty and fate; yet, the essential goodness of our bodies remains unescapable.  When Jesus instructs us to love our neighbours as ourselves – including ‘the least of these’ – it’s a reminder that there is a little of God in each of us – body and spirit, body and soul, are intertwined. This message was so important it’s repeated in 3 Gospels (Matt., Mark & Luke) and 3 other New Testament books.

My task is to explore reflections when our bodies betray us, when our bodies fail – more than just the breaking of a limb or surgery to remove an appendix – to the point we become aware that our bodies may not recover the resilience always assumed – when we have to re-evaluate our assumptions about what this container of our soul can do. 

Secular writings dating back to Plato talk about two halves of life – that of youthful/young adult assumptions of strength and vigor contrasted with that of maturity with assumptions of bodily decline.  Carl Jung[1] famously built on this idea by exploring the core human activities of both halves.  ‘Mid-life crisis’ captures this division, though such division isn’t linked only to age.

Biblical literature, too, uses this metaphor to underline that it’s not just about our physical selves, it’s also about our spiritual selves – perhaps dominantly about our spiritual selves.  Today’s reading from the Book of Hebrews illustrates this – contrasting a child-like faith with a mature one. The call is to “press on to maturity (perfection)” (Heb. 6:1), leaving behind the basic understanding of Christ and salvation learned as a child.  In the preceding verses the writer makes plain the reason for this word of wisdom – many in the new church seemed to be stuck on the simplistic teachings of childhood. Basic teachings are fine while one is young, the writer says, but if our understanding of “the word of righteousness” (5:13) doesn’t grow, our bodies may age but our spiritual life remains like that of an infant.

This link between body and spirit in the two halves of lfe is central to a recent book by Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest and notable author.[2] He builds on Jung’s idea of core activities, and speaks to spiritual life – picking up the concern set by the writer of Hebrews – the challenge of not becoming stuck in child-like understandings of faith and God.

The first half is all about growing our strengths.  Parents note it’s beginning when two-year old children challenge them with the word ‘no’.  The ‘terrible twos,’ as sometimes called, is a misnomer.  It’s not ‘terrible’ – two year olds are just doing their job – separating their identity from that of their parents.  By saying ‘no’, they’re demonstrating they’re in control of their own bodies. 

The next major leap – to separate one’s identity from that family and begin forming lasting relationships with others – begins in adolescence and sets the course for much of adult life.  Most obvious is fascination with the body that is at an all time high, but lasts much beyond.  Not so obvious, but very real, is an interest in testing the faith issues learned as a child.

At age 13 or 14 I liked comic books.  At the back of many was an Ad by Charles Atlas, a famous body builder. It featured a cartoon strip of a skinny guy with his girl on the beach. A muscle bound brute walks by, kicks sand in his face, and walks away with the girl.  Over the strip, in big letters, was the question: “Are you a 90 lb weakling?” – followed by a tag line “I can make you a new man in only 15 minutes a day.” 

Mostly, I ignored the Ad. But, I was a skinny kid, at an age where girls were getting to be interesting, and that 90 lb. weakling thing niggled at my mind – to the point I found an old iron bar of 20 lbs and began exercising. The funny thing is I didn’t really think my skinny body lent itself to being gorged with muscles.  Nor did I think the cartoon represented well how boys and girls, or men and women, related to each other.  But, for a few months, I used that iron bar.  And, it turned out to to be a good thing.  No, I didn’t meet the love of my life.  That summer I was asked to help a farmer bring in his hay and found, to my great satisfaction, I could pick up and throw 35 and 40 lb haybales onto hayracks along with the rest of the ‘men’.  My self-concept satisfied, I forgot the iron bar.

I tell this story not to suggest adolescents are vulnerable to media messages – I was and they are; nor to argue that my preoccupation with body was normal – it would something of a mystery if adolescents weren’t.  I tell this story to make the point that I wasn’t a passi
ve creature – it mattered how I thought about myself when hearing a seductive message.   A reasonably healthy self-concept developed in childhood along with basic grounding of spiritual self lessened the power of media.  The thing about adolesence is that it’s not only a time of bodily change and hormones – it also is time of great interest in matters of faith.  Faith and spirituality bubble happily alongside the hormones in our bodies.  Many adults say that their most formative spiritual experience was from engagement with a mentor during adolescence.

The issues adolescents become interested in – identity, security and sexuality/gender – are pursued throughout adulthood – they don’t just pre-occupy us, they totally take over.   The first half of life is devoted to establishing yourself, making a career and finding friends and a partner. Pursuit of success, security and containment – ‘looking good’ to ourselves and others – dominates most of us through young adulthood to middle age and beyond.   This is normal and not unimportant.  We all need boundaries, identity, safety, and some degree of order and consistency to get started.  We also need to feel ‘special’ – we all need some successes and positive feedback, otherwise we spend the rest of our lives demanding it.  But, when there is little time for simply living, pure friendship, useless beauty, or moments of communion with anything – one gets stuck in habits of thinking and behaving.

Spiritually, people in the first half of life are often drawn to order, to religious routine, to either/or categories. These become habits shaped by the norms and practices of our family and community.  Only after we’ve taken care of these basic elements of the life journey, are we ready to fill the container with content.  But, if one hasn’t taken care to nurture and grow one’s understanding of our deeper selves and faith along the way, the challenge spoken of in the book of Hebrews becomes evident.  The writer doesn’t put too fine a point on it – saying that their understanding of the good news remains that of an infant with a preference for ‘milk’ rather than ‘meat’.

There is comfort of staying with our habitual ways of doing things, thinking about things – to live in a sort of perpetual adolescence, Rohr says.  But in doing so, our containers remain largely empty and ill-defined – and increasingly discomforted when encounters with the world around us don’t fit our neat assumptions.  For many, the response is to draw tighter walls around us. 

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls”, Jung observed in 1944[3].  “They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn the literature of the whole world – all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls.  Thus the soul has gradually been turned into a Nazareth from which nothing good can come. 

In today’s society we have a more positive view of yoga and various kinds of diet than in Jung’s day, but the fundamental point remains.  There is a tendency to pursue routines of one kind or another in lieu of faith – with our ‘soul’ walled away. 

This doesn’t need to happen.  Good mirroring from an authentic mentor can provide a spiritual framework that lessens the impulse to look at Narcissus’s mirror or begging the attention of others. You have already been attended to, and have no need to protect your identity or prove it.  It just is, and your connectedness with God opens and deepens. 

But, for many, being so open is a problem.  It takes a crisis before deepened spiritual development can take place. “Normally a job, fortune, or reputation has to be lost,” writes Rohr, “a death has to be suffered, a house has to be flooded, or a disease has to be endured.” The crisis can be devastating. The crisis undoes you. The flood doesn’t just flood your house—it washes out your spiritual life. What you thought you knew about living the spiritual life no longer suffices for the life you are living.  Many of us have experienced crises of this nature.  Richard Rohr goes on to suggest that when this happens, we experience something of what Christ did.  His crucifixtion was the ultimate fall – the giving of his life – followed by resurrection in order that the church might be born and God’s wish for humanity advanced.

Richard Merton, a Cistercian monk with the wonderful ability to describe his inner life with God, speaks to this same issue of crisis.[4] We’re all like Jonah, Merton says.  Jonah was the prophet God ordered to go to Nineveh to tell its people of impending doom for their wickedness.  Rather than do as asked, he has an uncontrollable desire to go the opposite direction.  God points one way, our own ideals point to another. It was when Jonas was travelling as fast as he could away from Nineveh that he encountered a crisis.  A tremendous storm threatened the ship he was on and, at his suggestion, was thrown overboard – and swallowed by a great fish. 

 

Tucked into the Book of Jonah is one of the great prayers of the Bible, as read earlier.  It acknowledges God’s sovereignty, surrenders to God’s plan and is a prayer of faith for deliverance. One senses that when Jonah was thrown overboard he fully expected to die. He seemed resigned to it and at the same time a hope was rising from within because he says: “Yet I will look again toward Your holy temple.” Somet
hing inside him still trusted even though he also felt that he had been cast outside of God’s sight – outside of God’s favor.

He must have come awfully close to death because he says that “the earth with its bars closed behind me forever” and then in the next moment he acknowledges that God brought his life back from the pit. His best moment is when he says that when his soul fainted within him, he remembered the Lord. It is the moment of the surrender of his will. He would no longer turn and run the other way; he would no longer fight the plan of God. The sign of Jonah, to Merton, was its anticipation of the death and resurrection of Jesus, the Christ – and the recognition that in weakness, renewed strength can emerge. 

While it’s hard to match the drama of Jonah’s near death and resurrection, the prayer is not unlike one I’ve prayed on an occasion of crisis – or ones you may have prayed.   

 

Growing into the second half of life doesn’t necessarily happen. You can stay stuck if you wish.  It’s not age related, though age helps. What a crisis does is create a situation where change is possible.  People, organizations, even countries rarely change in a significant way without experiencing a major crisis.

 

The journey into the maturity of an ‘elder’ begins when we honor the needs of the first half of life, but also can let go of their importance.  It begins when we can see loss as an opportunity to search for something new and more meaningful, when we see the old as not all that important in the scheme of life.  When that happens we are open to seeking the answer to the question: What is the contribution God would have me make in the world? 

 

To move into the second half of life we must be willing to be stretched beyond our comfort zones. Where once we might have been sastisfied with, nay sought, relatively simplistic reasons for how we spent our time, our purpose in life, these no longer satisfy.  We move into the second half of life because of spiritual restlessness and dissatisfaction with the status quo. We come to recognize that Jesus doesn’t offer a one-size-fits-all gospel. Instead, as Rohr suggests, Jesus offers us a vision of reality in which “God adjusts to the vagaries and failures of the moment. The ability to adjust to human disorder and failure is named God’s providence or compassion” (p. 56).

 

As we move beyond our first half understandings, we discover that God is less concerned about laws and more about relationships.  In all accounts of Jesus ministry, it’s notable that He never seemed angry at sinners – He got upset with those who thought they didn’t sin. We become less interested in eliminating the negative or fearful.  We gradually come to understand that a direct assault on these things takes an immense amount of energy, and may well be useless – it may even lead to another kind of evil and invite pushback from those attacked – think of the Koran burners in Florida, Rohr says.

As we become less infatuated with the strengths of our first half life and come to accept our weaknesses, a strange thing happens – we become more open to new possibilities – and, in the process discover new strengths.  What happens is that we learn to tell the difference between who we really are, and what people around us mirror to us that we are – or not.  This helps us to not take either insults or praise too seriously.  We attend to the soul, becoming more serious about and disciplined in our relationship with God – whether in prayer, in reflection, or other ways. 

This journey from weakness back to strength leads through complexity and paradox to a new simplicity where the painful and excluded parts of life are accepted, and where we can ask with the Psalmist to “teach us to count our days, that we might gain a wise heart.”

You may not know, but today’s Psalm reading (Psalm 90) is sometimes referred to as the prayer of Moses.  I can see Moses, towards the end of his life, sitting on the side of a mountain as he offers this prayer, reflecting on all the pains and troubles of leading his tribe through the wilderness – and, out of the most difficult times, his encounters with God.  That could be a metaphor for all of us – we all walk through our own wilderness.  We all have our times of pain and trouble.  And, together with Moses, can reflect on the meaning of our life, confident we are in God’s embrace:

 

…The days of our life are seventy years – or perhaps eighty, if we are strong;

 

 … So teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart.

 

Amen

[4] Thomas Merton (1981), The Sign of Jonas. New York: Harcourt