After all, you say, ‘I’m rich, and I’ve grown wealthy, and I don’t need a thing.’ You don’t realize that you are miserable, pathetic, poor, blind, and naked. 18 My advice is that you buy gold from me that has been purified by fire so that you may be rich, and white clothing to wear so that your nakedness won’t be shamefully exposed, and ointment to put on your eyes so that you may see. 19 I correct and discipline those whom I love. So be earnest and change your hearts and lives. 20 Look! I’m standing at the door and knocking. If any hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to be with them, and will have dinner with them, and they will have dinner with me. 21 As for those who emerge victorious, I will allow them to sit with me on my throne, just as I emerged victorious and sat down with my Father on his throne. 22 If you can hear, listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.” (Common English Bible)
“The Wounded Healer:
Finding Strength in Our Scars,” Week One
It
was a moment straight out of a novel or a movie: the long-lost brother, not
knowing that he is in fact talking to his brother, realizes over the course of
their conversation that he is conversing with a sibling whom he has not seen in
years, decades, even. The reasons why can drive the entire plots of stories
such as these, but sometimes, reality does indeed rise to meet the level of
fiction.
You
probably haven’t ever heard the name of William Still, though in truth, you
should have—we all should have. If the world were truly just, his name and
deeds would be taught in every history class in the country, for he, along with
other 19th-century abolitionists, created the Underground Railroad
of Harriet Tubman and so many others. William Still is credited by historians
with having assisted 800 or more slaves to their eventual freedom, and he
worked for the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, which acted as a resource for
abolitionists and free blacks alike—free blacks like Mr. Still himself. You may
well have been imagining a white man, but William Still was black.
One
day, a freed slave named Peter came to the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society
for help in locating his parents and siblings. William was known for keeping
meticulous records, including of his own family, listened to Peter recount what
he knew about his family, and it began to dawn on him that they were in fact
brothers. The clincher was Peter describing how another brother of his was
whipped to death, and William exclaimed, “What if I told you I was your
brother!”
Afterwards,
Peter got to see his mother, whom he had not seen in 42 years.
Though
it might not occur to us to think so, these slaves who traveled the underground
railroad were essentially refugees, fleeing an oppressive government in search
of freedom. In this manner, we might liken them not to fugitives, as was the
case back then, but to the very same people we count as our ancestors, looking
to a new world to open a door to them that had before been closed in their
face. It is right for us to honor that quest for the open door, and it is
Biblical for us to honor it.
This
is a new sermon series that will take us up to the church season of Advent,
which is the time we prepare for Christmas. Before we arrive at the land of egg
nog and gingerbread, though, we have one more series to undertake together, and
it is based on a formative book which I first read in its entirety when I
arrived here and a colleague gave to me: The Wounded Healer by Henri Nouwen, a Dutch priest and theologian
who passed away about twenty years ago, but not before leaving behind him a
rich vein of theological and pastoral literature. Though relatively brief as
far as theological treatises go, The Wounded Healer is arguably Nouwen’s magnum
opus: accessible, lucid, poignant, and passionate in its fundamental premise
that only by understanding our own wounds and scars can we as Christians and as
ministers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ then, in turn, heal others of their own
wounds and scars.
The
Wounded Healer is a four-chapter book with a prologue, and we have five weeks
in all, so we will be able to spend a week on each section, beginning with the
book’s prologue, in which Nouwen writes in part:
As
Antonio Porchia says, “A door opens to me. I go in and am faced with a hundred
closed doors.” (Voices, Chicago, 1969) Any new insight which suggested an
answer led me to many new questions, which remained unanswered. But I wanted at
least to prevent the temptation of not entering any doors at all out of fear of
the closed ones…in the middle of all fragmentation, one image slowly arose as
the focus of all considerations: the image of the wounded healer…(a minister’s)
service will not be perceived as authentic unless it comes from a heart wounded
by the suffering about which he speaks. Thus, nothing can be written about
ministry without a deeper understanding of the ways in which the minister can make
his own wounds available as a source of healing.
In truth, what Nouwen is saying here,
in a single sentence, is that our experience is what defines us. It is not a
new notion—the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus famously wrote that
character is destiny—but it is a notion that we tend to forget and are in
frequent need of reminding of.
Consider for a moment the church in
Philadelphia (not Pennsylvania) to whom John of Patmos is addressing in this
passage from Revelation 3. It is the same church that, immediately prior, John
famously rebukes for being neither hot or cold but lukewarm, but (and this
would have been a great installment for our last sermon series on taking famous
Bible verses out of context!) we forget why exactly the church in Philadelphia
is seen as lukewarm: because, as John writes, they have placed their faith not
in God, but in material idols—“After all, you say, ‘I’m rich, and I’ve grown
wealthy, and I don’t need a thing.’”
If that is the sum total of our human
experience—the pursuit of mammon—then we need John’s words, and Nouwen’s words,
more than ever, for both John and Henri Nouwen speak of the need to open up a
new door to new experiences in our lives. John evokes the image of God Himself
standing and knocking at our doors, and Nouwen speaks of having to resist the
temptation to not open any door that may be available to us.
The overall lesson is the same: we are
meant to fashion for ourselves new experiences, new opportunities, new chances
to grow in our faith and to branch out into the faith of others. Our own growth
is limited if we only look inward—we must be continually looking for that open
door that has been placed in front of us, and ironically, sometimes we miss
that door even when it is in as plain of sight as the beautiful Gothic doors to
our sanctuary.
On the day before my ordination, I
posted a poem to my Facebook page. The poem itself is anonymous, but I came
across it because one of my college friends had shared it years previous upon
her conversion to Judaism and her ceremonial mikveh. The poem reads:
Either
you will go through this door or you will not go through
If
you go through, there is always the risk of remembering your name
Things
look at you doubly, and you must look back and let them happen
If
you do not go through, it is possible to live worthily, to maintain your
attitudes, to hold your position, to die bravely
But
much will blind you, much will evade you, at what cost who knows?
The
door itself makes no promises
It
is only a door
If you choose not to go through an open
spiritual door in your life, yes, it is still possible to live a decent life,
to stay true to who you are, and to one day die with dignity. But what will you
have given up to remain in stasis, to remain only who you were and not who you
one day could become? That may seem a luxury to us, but only because of our
relative privilege, like the church in Philadelphia. I promise you that for
someone like Peter Still, going through that door was not a luxury, it was an
imperative. He could not bear being enslaved, saw the open door before him, and
strode through it.
I use that language deliberately.
Spiritually, we are refugee slaves ourselves, on the run from our enslavement
to sin and on the route that, we hope and pray, leads us heavenward towards
God.
It means that we should be able and
willing to similarly open the doors that present themselves to us in the form
of the choices we make—the choice to show Christian compassion and charity, the
chance to reach out and try to understand someone’s story, the chance to create
a new relationship where previously there had been only you and a stranger.
These are the sorts of choices that
define us, as people and as Christians. Being Christian is not simply defined
by your baptism, by some water and some words that I speak over you, no, being
Christian is defined by the doors that John and Nouwen write of, the doors that
may be closed but that can be opened with the love of Christ.
As a church and as a religion, we shut
ourselves off from the world far too often. We put too much faith, as the
Philadelphian church did, in our own human-made trappings of comfort and we
become unwilling to branch out and actually step outside the door into the
unknown, into the wilderness, into the mission field that Jesus would in fact
have us dare to tread foot in. My proof, as it were, is the existence of
another door, the rolled-away stone that once sealed the tomb of our Savior but
was cast aside on the third day as a sign that the grave had indeed been
conquered.
Yet even with death defeated, our ultimate
home is not the home we live in now, and so we, as refugees, live and worship
alongside other refugees. It is incumbent upon us to honor them, then, with the
consideration of an open door, a set table, and a kind and caring presence.
I like being able to end my sermons
with my own words, but today, I deviate from that rule because, in the spirit
of honoring our roles as spiritual refugees, I thought it best to instead honor
another fellow traveler from long ago, Emma Lazarus, by telling to you her
words in the second half her most famous poem, “The New Colossus,” whose words
are etched for eternity into the Statue of Liberty that has stood to greet
refugees from the world over as they arrive upon our shores:
“Keep,
ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With
silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your
huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The
wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send
these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.
I
lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Ah, there it is, that image of the door
again. With the light of God illuminating our sight, may we too strive to find
it, like the Easter tomb’s stone, open, with the life that it promises to each
of us lovingly and gloriously laid out to behold.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
October 16, 2016
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