Beyond Barriers: Inward/Outward
Luke 5:12-16
Rev. Dr. Dale G. Tremper
“…Jesus often withdrew to some place where he could be alone and pray.” I have no problem identifying with Jesus’ need to get away from the crowds that were often pursuing him. Of course, it might help you to understand that I am a self-professed, practicing introvert, as is Pastor Monte. Some people are surprised that a pastor could be an introvert. After all, don’t pastors have to interact with all kinds of people in all kinds of situations, have the right words to say, etc.? To say nothing about standing in front of sometimes large groups of people on a regular basis and claiming to have something to say that is worth insisting on their attention…
Those of you women who were at the mini-retreat 8 days ago will have a little better understanding than average on this issue. We introverts are not necessarily shy or uncomfortable with other people. One clear sign of an introvert is that after we have been with a group of people we tend to feel drained, rather than energized. We need to get away to recharge and prepare ourselves for our next encounter. We value our “alone time”, whether in a “man cave”, reading a book, listening to music or taking a walk. Introverts are not necessarily profoundly self-aware or fully evolved, either. Ask me how I am feeling and I often don’t know the words to describe my emotional state. My feelings may be so locked up inside me that I can’t call them by name. Ladies, you are probably already aware that the average man is far less able to name whatever feelings he is having, as compared to the average woman.
As a young child, I spent many hours paging through my parents’ set of encyclopedias, being especially drawn to the illustrations of dinosaurs. It helped that, in spite of his questions about what dinosaurs had to do with Adam and Eve, my father and mother regularly took me to the Field Museum in Chicago, where I became well acquainted with all sorts of exotic creatures and the cave men and women in the full size dioramas. I had a lot of things to think about in my developing young brain.
Of course, it is usually much easier to pick an extrovert out of a crowd. Think of Kate Campbell or Joanna Foster, two of our most prominent extroverts: natural organizers, the life of every party. Most of us enjoy being around people who often have surprising things to say or are not afraid to draw attention to themselves.
Last Sunday in our “Beyond Barriers” class at 10am, when Pastor Monte asked Katie Clark to suggest an “ice-breaker” exercise, she didn’t hesitate before she asked that we share a Disney character with whom we identify ourselves. I had a little trouble with that task, not having seen many Disney movies in recent years, but the one that popped into my head was Mickey Mouse’s dog, Pluto: big, clumsy, faithful, loyal, not too smart, eager to please. That’s me, at least partly.
I have no idea what Disney character Jesus would have identified with. (It would be a fun family exercise over lunch or dinner to ask that question.) In spite of his need to frequently withdraw from crowds, Jesus also was famous for being the life of the party and calling others to enjoy feasting and lively conversation. It seems clear that Jesus was deeply introspective and yet compelling, bold, comfortable with himself and appealing to all kinds of people, except the uptight ones who have all the answers. It seems to me that Jesus devoted himself to overcoming the barriers, dichotomies and brokenness that separate people from themselves, one another and their divine purpose. I believe that one of the most striking characteristics of Jesus is his radical wholeness; a fully functional, fully evolved human being.
Yes, Jesus was a healer. He was that and many other things. Wherever he went, people tended to be healed, brought into alignment with their true, best selves. Jesus didn’t stay in one place for very long. Wherever he went, people experienced new life, breakthroughs in their inner selves or their broken bodies. In one little town, a man came along, ostracized in the community as a “leper”. The Greek word, “lepra” doesn’t tell us much in itself, except that it describes somebody with a skin disease. If you had eczema or skin allergies that people could see on your body, wherever you went, people were afraid of the worst possible consequences. The fear of leprosy was widespread, much like the near-panic our world has recently experienced regarding Ebola, in spite of its great rarity in North America. Three cases: you would have thought that we were all at risk! The same fear was in our society in the 80s and 90s regarding AIDS, and the same calls for isolation, cutting patients off from essential human contact until the LGBT community responded with courage, showing others how to do the same. As far as leprosy goes, visible skin conditions could be the first sign of a very serious disease that we know as Hansen’s disease that was severely disfiguring and incurable until recent years.
The book of Leviticus required that those with skin conditions be put out of town and loudly announce their presence whenever they encountered non-sufferers. If their skin returned to a normal, non-irritated state, they were to show themselves to a priest, who would declare them symptom-free and therefore “cured” and able to return to the human community. So, when Jesus boldly touched this “unclean” man, pronounced him “clean”, his skin condition immediately cleared up. He was supposed to find a priest and make the appropriate sacrifice before he could rejoin society. Instead, he apparently blabbed to everybody all around. Those who heard him believed him because they could see the difference in his body. So people with all kinds of diseases and afflictions came to Jesus from all around and Jesus went into hiding. Jesus was a healer. Have you ever realized that he was not a magician and that there were some things that he could not instantly cure? There are deeper maladies in the human condition that cry out for healing.
Do you remember Jesus’ Mission Statement, found in the previous chapter of Luke? “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me: because the Most High has anointed me to bring Good News to those who are poor. God has sent me to proclaim liberty to those held captive, recovery of sight to those who are blind, and release to those in prison- to proclaim the year of Our God’s favor.” Jesus’ agenda is our agenda! His work of breaking down barriers, setting people free and healing the human condition, from within and without, is not yet complete. We live in a broken, fragmented world; we participate in the fragmentation and transmit it to others until our healing is complete.
Brilliant Bible scholar Walter Wink, who has been a very important part of my life for at least 30 years, quoted the philosopher Sartre, who wrote, “Hell is other people”. I love Wink’s response: “But try living without them. Other people are hell only when they are deprived of relatedness, attraction and love.” In the last book that he wrote, Wink vividly describes an experience of radical separation that took much of his life to overcome. (Just Jesus: My Struggle to Become Human, pp. 20-21.)
The defining event of my childhood took place when I was nine years old. When I was a child, I lied quite often out of fear of my father’s wrath. One day when he came home from work, he asked me if I had put my bike in the garage. I answered yes, and ran out to the front yard to put it away. It was gone. I ran into the house shouting that my bike had been stolen. “Where was it?” Dad asked. “In the front yard,” I naïvely replied. “I thought you said it was in the garage,” he said. It was entrapment; he had hidden it himself.
After dinner that night, he and my mother convened a trial at the kitchen table where I stood before the bar of justice, being judged. They found me guilty of being a liar, and gave me two choices: to leave home for good, or to spend the night in the “brig” (a garage storeroom). Sensing that my life in my family was over, I opted to leave. They asked me to whom I planned to go. I said I would go live with my Aunt Sue and Uncle Dave. “Oh no, they wouldn’t want a liar living with them.” Then I suggested the preacher’s son, who was my best friend. But every suggestion met with the same refrain: “Oh, no, they wouldn’t want a liar living with them.” There appeared to be no alternative to the brig. It must have been fall. I can still remember the sound of the pecan tree being lashed by the wind.
After a while Dad came to the door and told me it was time to turn off the light. I was terrified. Now I was in total darkness, inside and out. Whatever hope I still had disappeared. Only years later, after my parents had died, my sister told me that she had been at her bedroom window, keeping watch, unable to do anything about it. My mother must have been devastated. She had to have known this was all wrong. She was Phi Beta Kappa, a prolific reader, and a person of compassion. But she had been taught to obey her husband. She must have finally been unable to take it any longer. Somehow she must have persuaded him to release me from their “jail.” It seemed like hours. It could as well have been eternity.
That night in a very profound sense I “died” emotionally.
The next afternoon I met Dad in the yard. “Do you still love me?” he asked.
“No,” I answered.
“Will you obey me?”
“Yes,” I replied. And I did.
True to his word, young Walter refused to forgive his father and distanced himself from his mother. He admits that many people “have suffered far worse trauma than I”. And yet, a wounded child has no perspective by which to prevent internal damage from festering. He acknowledged strengths he received from both parents, but says that it was only months before his mother died that he could “feel” that his parents did love him in a fleeting vision of them holding hands with each other at a bus station. Later, when his father committed suicide, he was angry that his father’s act had, in his words, “…robbed me of the last chance to be reconciled in this life”. Do you hear the broken, childish narcissism in that accusation? It took years and a lot of conscious study, reflection, prayer and therapy before he realized, again in his words, “…that they had just made a tragic mistake, and my refusal to love and forgive them had robbed all of us of much deserved happiness.” Only then, as a deeply committed and highly self-aware Christian, did he begin to give up his resistance to forgiveness.
I will never forget hearing a woman in a small, trust-based group a long time ago reflect upon her own brokenness in life and say, “My parents did their crummy best to raise me and I have done my crummy best to raise my own kids. Sometimes that is the best we can do.”
God works within us for healing and wholeness. Healing is an “inside job”. But inward healing is transmitted to others and to community. Just as inward healing requires insight and willingness, so outward healing requires a dawning awareness that other people have hurts and needs and limitations, just as we do. God’s purpose is to call us all, together, to become whole human beings. Each month, when we meet in Entry Point with those who are seeking to know more about this church and to live more fulfilling lives, we use a diagram that Pastor Monte designed, called the “Discipleship Circle” that shows that, while some parts of the Christian life will be more appealing to us than others at our current stage of life, to be whole we need to make choices in the areas of worship, connection, intentional spiritual growth and service in the world. These are called spiritual disciplines, all of them. All are needed for our wholeness and our healing.
There is no reason to take an inward spiritual journey without expressing it outwardly. We have no capacity to give our best selves to others without inward growth. Without both sides of the inward/outward dichotomy, we will never experience the strength and the integrity that God makes possible. Whether we are introverts or extroverts or those rare humans with full fully evolved personalities, God’s healing unites our inward self with our outward purpose and God’s purpose for us. In the process, we experience freedom, joy and fulfillment. Wherever you are now, carry on in the journey!