Feel

Jesus is drawing closer and closer to Golgotha and to the cross.  He is the only one who senses his own path, the only one who seems to know that something terrible is coming.  Scholars have surmised for centuries about how much Jesus knew. Did he know he would be crucified? How much could he see? How much could he know?

Jesus seems to feel that something terrible is coming. He seems to know that he will die, but not how or precisely when.  His impending death creates pain for him.  He becomes troubled, lonely, he struggles with God. He offers us small glimpses into his struggle both in John's gospel and in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Jesus seems to get more and more lonely. As he approachea the cross, the disciples do not seem to be able to hear his distress. Though they are physically present up until a few days before his death, yet Jesus seems incredibly alone.

Meanwhile the disciples are having a great time.  They are planning the rescue of Jerusalem from the Romans. They are trying to gather a large following for Jesus. They are busy making introductions. There are some Greeks in town and they want to see Jesus.The disciples seem excited to raise Jesus' profile, to get things moving. The Greeks speak to Phillip, who tells Andrew and together they go to Jesus to try to schedule a meeting.  When can you meet with the Greeks, Jesus? And Jesus gives them the strangest response.  He doesn't answer their question at all. Instead he starts talking about dying...

The hour is coming for the Son of Man to be glorified, he says.  And then Jesus launches into this speech that the disciples don't seem to get at all. He talks about how a grain must fall into the earth and die before it can bear fruit. And in the middle of this speech, Jesus stops explaining theology and has a moment of vulnerability. 

Now my soul is troubled, he says. I wish I could make it go away...but what can I say? Father, glorify thy name...

I wish that I could make it all go away.

Jesus sensed that he was going to die. He felt restless, troubled, conflicted. His anticipation of something terrible was causing him emotional pain. But he did not avoid this feeling, he just articulated it as he walked closer to his death. He did not try to change anything or argue with God. He did not pretend that everything was OK. He just spoke about what was on his heart, like he was making an observation. I am troubled. I am in pain, he said. It is his pain that alerts him to his predicament. 

Now my soul is troubled. The word in the ancient Greek means to be disturbed, agitated, like boiling water...

Jesus told the disciples exactly what he was feeling and the disciples didn't listen. They could not or would not hear him because what he was telling them was troubling. He was saying that he was upset and no one could bear to hear it.

It is hard for us to hear one another's pain. It's hard to look in the face of trouble. We tend to want to fix peoples problems, to get rid of their pain as soon as possible. The worst kind of counselors are people who  give lots of advice or tell you that everything is going to be OK. I had a counselor like that in Seminary.  My father-in-law had been diagnosed with cancer and I felt so sad for him that I went to a counselor in Washington DC.  

This woman was terrible. She told me not to feel bad.  She told me that her father was in much worse shape.  I felt completely ignored and even angry after my session with her.  It was as if she could not bear to really hear me out.  She just wanted to cure my pain, get rid of it.  And somehow that just made it worse. I felt like she should have paid me!

Americans hate pain.  We are disciples of numbness. We try to anesthetize ourselves at the slightest provocation. When we have an ache, Advil,  fever, Tylenol. Our mantra is get rid of the pain. Make it go away.  Pain is bad.  It is a sign that something is going wrong, a sign of failure. That is what we believe.

But pain is not always a bad thing.  It is something that needs to be heard.  It is a warning sign.  Pain delivers a message.  And God asks us to feel it, and to listen to it. And then, perhaps most importantly, to ask ourselves how God can be glorified in it.

The country has been rocked by the killing of young Trayvon Martin. A young black boy was shot by a neighborhood watch president in a gated community. The boy was walking home from a convenience store with a bag of skittles. He was an honor student. And now he is gone.

What happened? Well, the matter is under investigation, but we can safely say that this man made a horrible mistake.  This man assumed that because the boy did not look familiar, because he was black, because he was a stranger, that he was up to no good. The man was wrong.  He made an assumption and he was wrong and now a child is dead.

We do not want to listen when bad things happen, when people are upset, when there is injustice. But moments of pain, moments of great injustice are moments when God can be glorified. People's hearts and minds can change because something has gone terribly wrong. If the pain causes us to wake up, we can change, grow, become better disciples.

From the pain of the Trayvon Martin tragedy, we have much to learn, about how we judge one another too quickly, how we judge based on appearances, how we do not listen to one another.  We have much to learn about our culture of fear and retribution, about the violence that we promote in movies like the Hunger Games where young people are rewarded by shooting one another to the death. This tragedy was horrible but shame on us if we do not look at it carefully and learn from the pain of our mistakes.

I have always wondered, if someone had really heard Jesus, would it have helped him, even just a little? But no one wanted to hear his pain.  And so Jesus gets more and more lonely the closer her gets to Golgotha and to the cross. We could not stand the pain so we abandoned our Lord. The disciples didn't just abandon Jesus at the cross, they abandoned him much earlier, when they did not acknowledge his pain.

You could say, in many ways, that the greatest failure of all eternity was the cross in all its pain and agony. And God used that pain for glories that would change the world. If we admit our failures, our mistakes, our pain, God can be glorified in them.

What if we, like Jesus, went to the pain instead of running from it? Instead of running and hiding, what if we let ourselves try to understand why we suffer? What if we looked at our pain, examined it? What if we asked ourselves, "Why does it hurt? Where did the pain come from? What can we learn from it and, most importantly, how can it be used to bring us and others closer to God?"

Pain is not evil. It is just hard. It is a sign of trouble and a sign of change.  Pain is a messenger. Pain is a teacher. Wake up and listen to your own discomfort and pain. We have so much to learn.

Lifting Up

The Hebrew people did not know how to be grateful. Perhaps their time in slavery had made them so miserable that all they could see was the negative. Once a slave, always a slave? Maybe God needed them to wander for forty years, and for an entire generation to die, just so that they could begin to lift themselves out of this mindset. It is your perspective which plays a large role in your happiness.

Free for the first time in their lives, they were upset because Moses did not offer them better food. They were complaining about the menu!

This complaining made God really mad, so God sent snakes. Poisonous snakes. And the people began to die. So they forgot about the menu or the long waits or the heat and they realized that all they really wanted was to stay alive. So they begged Moses to pray for them.  And Moses asks God for forgiveness.

Make a snake, God instructs. Put it on a pole. And when the people gaze upon it, they will be healed.

What a strange idea. God wanted Moses to display the source of their pain. And it would heal them.

When you speak the truth, you bring things into the light and that brings you closer to God, writes John's gospel. When you hide in the darkness, you hide from God.

Christ hung upon the cross as a model for what it means to bring the worst kind of human existence to light. This was an unjust death; the execution of an innocent man. It was brutal, unfair and extremely painful. And yet, God did not hide this death as an embarrassment or as a failure. God lifted up the sacrifice of His Son so that all of us might learn from it, so that all of us might be healed from it.

And that is why we wear the object of an execution around our neck, because it has become for us the source of healing and hope. And when you wear a cross, you are telling the world that you are willing to share your pain. You are called to lift up your cross, put the source of your pain on a pole and lift it up, for all to see.

AJ was a rower in college. He knew that he needed to loose weight. He kept exercising hard but the weight wouldn't come off, so he started to fast. From time to time, he would eat a lot and then throw up his food. He told no one.

AJ's coach praised him for getting the weight off. He was faster and stronger than ever. He was at the top of his game. But slowly, he became detached from his life. Things did not seem to matter much. He lived solely inside his own mind, a dark place where he thought of what he was going to eat and when. For five years, he ate and purged himself. His bones were depleted of calcium. He began to have tooth decay and his athletics floundered as he got weaker and weaker. He lived in a world of obsession and secrecy, a world of shame.

After five years, he was hospitalized. Like the Hebrew people, he realized that he could die. He began to speak. He told the truth and brought his illness into the light. He began to tell everyone, to speak about it in public. He lifted up his eating disorder as a way of educating others. "Everyone thinks that only women suffer from this illness, but men do too, especially athletes." This was the truth that he told.

When AJ began to tell the truth, he began to feel better. The battle was still on in his mind, but light was beginning to fight the darkness. When he began to lift up his illness as a witness to others, he began to really heal. And so did others.

Take up your cross, said Jesus, and follow me.

The symbol for medicine is a snake strung around a pole. This symbol has roots in ancient Greek mythology but it also has Biblical roots. It harkens back to Moses' serpent on the pole.

The work of darkness is rooted in shame, fear and secrecy. If you want to live your life fully, you must not be afraid to share your pain with others. Vulnerability is Christ-like. It takes courage. All creativity, ingenuity, and change comes from a place of vulnerability. Lift up your pain and let everyone know that God is at work in you.

Dale Regan, the headmaster of Episcopal was shot and killed just a week and a half ago. This was an act of incredible violence that shook the entire city. Killed by a teacher who had been terminated, the entire school was caught in shock, fear and grief. As the media descended upon us, we all felt this instinct to want to run and hide. Who wants to admit such a tragedy at a school? What if it hurt our reputation? What if parents decided to no longer send their children? Fear came down upon us all. What if we became known as the school where the headmaster was shot?

But as our pain was lifted up for all the world to see, the most amazing things happened. Love came pouring in. Pastors of all denominations came to us without us having to ask. Counselors came. A media firm came to help us manage the media. Emails poured in from all over the world; even the Archbishop of Perth in Australia sent his love and prayers. And the students started coming back. By Friday, there were four thousand people on the campus. And a rainbow came into the sky.

Our pain was lifted up. And miracles happened. We still have a long way to go to heal, but the first step is lifting up that cross. We were hurt, badly, but that is by no means the end of the story.