| Dwelling
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis September 22, 2002, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill II Samuel 12 "God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him." "My mother's basic prescription for bad feelings-hurt, frustration, disappointment, injured pride," writes Marilyn McEntyre, "was, 'Don't dwell on it.' She practices what she preaches, being a lifetime member of the'Snap-out-of-it-and-get-on-with-it' school of mental health. I admire the ability she shares with other purposeful and effective people," my friend continues, "to let things go, get on with the gardening, get over herself and go visit the sick or forget her troubles and sing while she cooks the spaghetti. Unfortunately," Marilyn confesses, "I missed that gene in the DNA lottery and became instead much more like my brooding father who could sit for hours in a chair not reading the Sunday paper, eyes closed or gazing into middle space, 'dwelling on' something." Now were we a congregation of life-long, cradle to grave Presbyterians-especially of Scottish descent, we would be a gathering whose character had been shaped by parents who were members of the "Snap-out-of-it-and-get-on-with-it" school of mental health. Neither a firm pat-on-the-back for our successes, nor a good cry-in-the-beer of our failures will do for those who must move on to the tasks at hand. Yet even those of us raised in Presbyterian households--where we learned not only not to dwell on our feelings but also not to have them-were raised, as well, in a society that has made an industry of dwelling on ourselves and, especially, on our bad feelings. In fact, we are a nation whose common life and politics seems currently to be the result of our dwelling, in these dark days, upon national feelings of hurt, frustration, disappointment and injured pride. Depending upon your perspective, our narcissism is about to reach its zenith or nadir as we move closer to a policy of unilateral preemptive strikes. Missing is the witness given those who believe they rather were born to be about the loving purposes of a God in whose hand the destiny of all peoples and nations is held. But I get ahead of myself! Dwelling on ourselves is, of course, what we do best. It is what we do necessarily when we have loved and lost to death a dear one in whose arms we have been held, on whose knee we have been taught, by whose side we have rejoiced all our days. Surely to be reckoned with, as well, are the very real traumas to the soul and psyche that require both time and space to heal before we can return to whatever semblance of wholeness a human being may know this side of the grave. But dwelling on ourselves is also what we do narcissistically. "The more obscure root words of 'dwell' in the Old English are: to be stunned, benumbed, torpid, even stupefied. You can dwell in things too long, it seems, and get stuck," says McEntyre. We can let ourselves be defined by whatever hurt, frustration or disappointment we have suffered until dwelling on our lot becomes a way of being in the world. "Whether we become victims or survivors," writes Frank Pitman, "may depend less on the intensity of the trauma than on how we define it," may depend less on the details of our past than our chosen response to those details, as we either get stuck in that past or as we head toward the future for which we were made. Nowhere has this lost truth been more powerfully developed than in Victor Frankl's now classic little book entitled Man's Search for Meaning. Writing out of his own experience in Auschwitz, where his father, mother, brother and wife died or were sent to the gas ovens, Frankl insists that, no matter how dark the situation, human beings always have the freedom to choose their attitude in the face of every suffering. Though even more than the freedom to choose our attitude, said Frankl, human beings are given the responsibility to seek out life's meaning especially when life's circumstances have left us powerless, tempting us to define ourselves over and over again as victims to whom a good life will forever be owed. For Frankl, no matter the details of our lives, human beings were made by God to dwell purposefully in the world rather than tirelessly on our selves. "I wish to stress," he writes, "that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within [the self or the psyche]…being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone other than oneself-be it meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets [one's] self-by giving oneself to a cause to serve or another person to love-the more human [we are]": the more we become the persons we were born to be. Or as my friend put it, "The creative tension between dwelling in and moving on, pausing and pursuing, enjoying an image and enjoying the plot has to be kept in balance." In relation to our post-modern, therapeutic sensibilities, David dwelt in the biblical plot as one who kept that balance starkly. While the child born of his lust was alive, he besought God for the child. Then, to the consternation of his servants, when he learned of the child's death, he arose, washed, anointed himself, changed his clothes, worshipped, then went to his own house and ate. "What is this thing you have done?" his servants asked incredulously. "While the child was still alive," says David, "I fasted and wept; for I said, 'Who knows whether the Lord will be gracious to me, that the child may live?' But now he is dead; why should I fast? Can I bring him back again?" The creative tension between dwelling in and moving on immediately gives way, in the next verse, to the future and so to the birth of Solomon, under whose reign a dwelling place for God would be built. David therefore returns, chastened after a season of self-absorption, to dwell in the greater story of God's saving purposes. It is more than time, my friends, for us to do the same as Christ's church in these dark days ahead. For far too long, the church has been dwelling on itself and has defined its ministry by way of the culture's narcissism. In fact, it is way past time for the church's strange captivity to the therapeutic model of ministry to come to an end and for a prophetic dwelling in the plot of God's redemptive activity in the world to find its voice once again. How complicit we ministers have been in keeping generations of Christians stuck in their psyches, in keeping churches obsessed with internecine battles going nowhere; and how safely silent congregations have been in relation to the witness they are given to bear to what God is doing in the world to make and keep human life human! Let me be clear. Our moving on by way of the plot of God's saving purposes in human history does not preclude the human activity of dwelling. Rather, the prophetic witness of the church in these times, when the question of life's meaning and purpose is really up, becomes a different order of dwelling: a dwelling, says McEntyre, that "seems to be the predicate of all meaningful action," a dwelling, says the writer of the First Letter of John, not in ourselves and our divisions, but in God who is love. God first loved us, says this ancient preacher, by sending his only Son to dwell with us that we might dwell in the world through him. We meet him first in these pages where the plot of our salvation unfolds. We must "allow ourselves to be found," says Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "where God has acted once and for all for the salvation of [humankind.] Forgetting and losing ourselves, we, too, pass through the Red Sea, through the desert, across the Jordan into the promised land. With Israel we fall into doubt and unbelief and through punishment and repentance experience again God's help and faithfulness…. We are torn out of our own existence and set down in the midst of the holy history of God on earth. There God dealt with us, and there [God] still deals with us, our needs and our sins, in judgment and in grace. It is not," says Bonhoeffer, "that God is the spectator and sharer of our present life, however important that is; but rather that we are the reverent listeners and participants in God's action in the sacred story, the history of the Christ on earth. And only in so far as we are there, is God with us today also." In other words, scripture is the dwelling place for those who would live on earth through Christ. There we meet him and there he takes us by the hand to see the world of God's making through him. What we see as those who dwell in him, in the second place, is the other through his eyes: we see God's image stamped on the other as one who has, in Christ, been redeemed, often all evidence to the contrary! "We love," says this letter, "because God first loved us. Those who say, 'I love God,' and hate their brothers or sisters whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen." Hence there is a dwelling with and for one another born not of our good feelings nor of our personal need nor of our personal hurt, but through Christ who died for that one and rose for that one too. We are to dwell in the flesh and blood of the other, as God dwelt in our flesh. Frankl tells the story of his entering Auschwitz with the manuscript of his book, his life's work, hidden in his clothes, such that when he surrendered his clothes, he surrendered who he was in the world. In turn he "inherited the worn-out rags of an inmate who had already been sent to the gas chamber immediately after his arrival at the Auschwitz railway station. Instead of the many pages of my manuscript," he recalls, "I found in a pocket of the newly acquired coat one single page torn out of a Hebrew prayer book, containing the most important Jewish prayer, Shema Yisrael." Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one. As we dwell in the flesh of our brother or sister who is, to our eyes, as good as dead, our life is given the meaning it could not be given without our dwelling together in the one God who is love. Then finally and oh so relevantly, the writer of this letter tells us that dwelling in such love casts out fear. We think we fear the other, the enemy, the stranger. But the One before whose judgment we must stand at the end of all of our histories, the One who alone is worth our fear, is also the One who has come to dwell with us. We see him in the hungry we have not fed,the homeless we have not taken in, the prisoner we have not visited, the stranger we have not befriended, the enemy we have not loved. It is, I tell you, an untried strategy against the terror without and the terror within! It is, I promise you, worth your life because it was worth the life of God's son for us. May we therefore, my friends, by his grace in this present darkness, be turned more and more to become the community that dwells in him, that sees the other through him, that abides without fear in the God he came to reveal who is love. |