“Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid (John 14:28). I heard this verse again last weekend. That was before latest mass shooting. At an elementary school. Again. I can’t believe there has been more than one mass shooting at an elementary school. I can’t believe there have been so many mass shootings, period. Well, I can believe all of it, unfortunately. But I don’t want to.
Often, I struggle with what I’m going to post here, what verse I’m going to focus on, but this time, I knew immediately that I was going to focus on John 14:28. I was going to write about how it’s one of those verses that leaves me feeling like I can never measure up, one of those verses that feels inapplicable to life as I know it on many days. The verse makes me feel this way because I live with anxiety and OCD.
If I still thought I had to be untroubled to be a faithful Christian or to grow spiritually in any way, I’d give up trying, I think.
Yet I haven’t given up, thanks to the Gospels telling me about times when Jesus was troubled. There was the time he wept when it seemed he arrived too late to save his friend Lazarus from death. He wept even though he knew Abba loved him and his friends and could still be found in the midst of the suffering and loss. Obviously, I can’t know exactly what he was feeling when he wept, but I’ve often wondered if his grief rose out of the suffering that had occurred before the massive sign that God was about to offer through him. He accepted that sometimes pain couldn’t be avoided, but his acceptance didn’t mean that he didn’t dread pain at the same time.
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you.
John 14: 27
The blood we’re told he sweated in the garden of Gethsemane is evidence of another troubled time, as is the moment on the cross when, feeling abandoned, even though on some level he must know he isn’t, (otherwise he’d have no one to implore) he cries out to God. I’d say “troubled” is a drastically inadequate word to describe how he’s feeling, yet I can also imagine him experiencing a kind of peace in this moment and the others because he knows what God is asking him to do, and that’s to respond as each situation calls him to respond. This peace doesn’t come from comfort but from discerning his purpose and acting upon it in unselfish love.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say my own acceptance of anxiety and my willingness to share it with God manage it well, but anxiety feels less inescapable than it used to. Because I accept that certain situations are going to make me anxious. And I don’t have to make the physical experience of anxiety — the muscle tension, or the churning stomach, or the faster heartbeat — go away. It’s okay just to do what I can, to go through the motions that each moment calls for. It’s okay to go about life this way because all my experiences of anxiety and discomfort are temporary.
But I get the grief doesn’t feel temporary. It feels crushing, insurmountable. I’ve heard it said that grief doesn’t go away. It just changes.
So weep. Focus on one mundane task and in the next. Turn over tables if you need to. (We’re told that Jesus did at least once.) Then help clean up the mess afterwards, and don’t resort to violence. Let’s channel our tears and our anger into positive change.
Yes, Jesus prayed. He also stood up to the suffering of others by doing what he could to relieve it. Think what good we can do if we participate in that work of Love.
Work cited
The Bible. The New American Bible Revised Edition, Kindle edition, Fairbrother, 2011.
“As I have loved you, so you also should love one another” (John 13:34). This is the clarification Jesus offers after he gives his followers “a new commandment.” He says people will recognize his disciples if they “love one another” as he has loved them (35). In Matthew 5:44, he tells them they shouldn’t stop at loving the members of their own group. They should go so far as to “love [their] enemies” [italics mine].
He models the version of the commandment that we get in Matthew when, from the cross, he asks his heavenly father to forgive those who have tortured, tormented, and abandoned him.
In what other ways does Jesus show love in the Gospels?
He loves the total person.
He tends not only to physical and spiritual needs, but also to intellectual, mental and emotional ones as well. He knows that even though I’m categorizing these needs separately, they’re never really separate. He teaches crowds using stories they can relate to. He doesn’t forget to feed the people will come to him before he sends them home. He meets emotional needs, not only by teaching people to hope for and to work for a just society (Google the Beatitudes), but also in another way.
He erases perceived dividing lines.
Jesus calls God his father and teaches us to do the same. (Actually, I’ve read that the word he uses translates to a more familiar name, one closer to Dad than to Father.) He excludes no one, and instead makes a point of including outcasts who approach him. Scripture tells us that he shared the experiences of both the just and the unjust. He was imprisoned and sentenced to death. He associated with tax collectors and people with traditions and practices different from the ones in which he had been brought up. I’d say there wasn’t anyone he wouldn’t connect with, though not everybody wanted to befriend him.
“As I have loved you, so you also should love one another”
John 13: 34
Marginalized people are not invisible to Jesus. The Bible tells us that in his time on earth, in a very patriarchal culture, he spoke to and touched women, even women with tainted reputations, and at least one woman who had been hemorrhaging for years. It’s my understanding that a woman with such a condition was considered unclean and would have been expected to keep distant from Jesus.
The Scriptures tell us about many more times when Jesus healed people whose health conditions isolated them and obscured their dignity in the eyes of the society in which they lived. As a person with a disability and mental health conditions, I think of these healings as helping to integrate people into their communities, as helping people contribute to their communities. Though it’s absolutely okay to want healing, no one should be sent the message that they have to be healed of what makes them different before they can be whole and be equal to everyone else. Helping someone heal is by far not the only way to help a person contribute to and integrate into a community.
He asks and answers questions.
When I think of Jesus interacting with a person, I think of him asking questions to lead that person to insight. I think of his conversations with Peter and his conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well. I also think of the times he used people’s questions as teaching opportunities. Some of the people with questions were Jewish and Roman authorities, but not all of questioners are identified in the Bible as holding official leadership positions. I think of the unnamed man who asked Jesus what else he needed to do to inherit eternal life.
He took breaks.
Jesus knew he needed to let God love him so that he could love others. He knew he needed times of withdrawing from crowds and of leaning on Abba. He prayed in deserts and gardens. He slept on a fishing boat in the middle of a storm, and he prayed when his closest friends were sleeping.
Jesus’ ways of loving looked different at different times in his earthly life. The question for us is, what do the ways he loves look like at different moments in our lives? Each of us will have different answers at different times. If two of us were to compare our answers, we would likely find similarities without having exactly the same answers.
Work cited
The Bible. The New American Bible Revised Edition, Kindle edition, Fairbrother, 2011.
When I heard the above statement this weekend, it stood out to me what the sentence doesn’t say. It doesn’t say, “My sheep hear my words.” It doesn’t say “My sheep hear my teachings,” and it doesn’t say, “My sheep hear my instructions.” It says, “My sheep hear my voice. [Italics mine]”
A voice isn’t an idea. It isn’t a string of ideas forming a message. Like the many human inventions that it surpasses, it’s a carrier for the message. It can be small and brittle like a glass bottle. It can be warm and gentle as a May breeze, as harsh and loud as the ship’s whistle or as gravelly as the air in a worn parking lot on a gusty March day.
Words can say one thing while the voice that delivers them says the opposite. One voice can be similar to another, but no voice is exactly the same. (At least I think this last statement is true. I’m far from a voice scientist. I’m only writing from my experience.) To communicate with another living creature using one’s voice can be a powerful and intimate experience — intimate, I think, because the process that voices use to communicate is only partly a conscious one. A familiar quality of a certain voice can touch us in ways we can’t quite put into words.
. . . I know them, and they follow me.
John 10:27
That’s why I find it so fitting that John 10:27 says “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me” God reaches us in ways that go beyond any means — words being one — that we use to create order around us. God speaks with the voice of the Spirit and gives us the ears of the Spirit to hear that voice. That’s what I thought when I found the picture I’m including with this post. To me, the picture looks like a flame in the shape of an ear. This image reminds me that the ears of the spirit are sensitive to the vibrations of Divine Love and that the heart of the Spirit responds to this Love by sharing it.
Work cited
The Bible. The New American Bible Revised Edition, Kindle edition, Fairbrother, 2011.
When I heard the first reading this week feelings of dread, guilt, anger, and anxiety came over me. I heard the story from Acts as a conflict between completely holy good guys — the apostles — and the totally blind and fearful bad guys — the men at the top of the Jewish religious hierarchy in Jerusalem at the time. The writer in me is bothered by stories involving flat, purely good or purely bad people.
I’m bothered by stories that are simplistic in this way because I have a hard time imagining myself and people I know on either side of the line that seems so clearly drawn between good and evil. I know I’m far from perfect. Actually, the apostles mentioned in the gospel reading were imperfect, too. Too bad the passage from Acts doesn’t record them acknowledging their weaknesses and outs to the people and how Jesus responded to these. I like to think that even though the passage doesn’t include such confessions, they were included in the apostles’ preaching. I like to think the Holy Spirit used their openness and humility as some of the qualities that allowed the message they were sent to convey to spread. After all, we read about the weaknesses, imperfections, and frailties that I just mentioned elsewhere in the New Testament. I think we know about them because the apostles knew the frailties of their humanity and the humanity of their followers were an important part of their mission.
This realization helped me consider the first reading in a different light. It also got me thinking about what other qualities and approaches help the Good News sound more like good news to me than it often does. I thought it might be a good idea to present these approaches as a series of positive suggestions, so here they are:
Do speak from your own experience.
That’s what the apostles were doing. Unfortunately, sometimes their experiences can feel distant from our own. Creeds and verses by themselves can feel so empty to someone who’s at a different point on the spiritual journey. Acknowledge all this. Consider sharing experiences of God that you’ve had. These may not feel so distant to you or to the person you’re conversing with. If you have trouble thinking of your own experiences to share, or if you’re not comfortable sharing, maybe now isn’t yet the time for sharing. Maybe it’s a time for prayer and reflection. Maybe you’re in the garden or behind the locked doors, and that’s okay. These places are stops on the spiritual journey.
Do meet the other person where they are.
Notice I’ve referred to “the person” and “conversing.” Whenever possible, talk to a person, not to a group. Sometimes even when you need to talk to a group, it can be helpful to think of the exchange in terms of talking to a group of individual people rather than to a group whose members are indistinguishable from each other. Talk to people, not at people, and take steps to learn about the needs and experiences of your audience. Get to know your audience. This involves learning and listening, sometimes for a long time, before speaking. Tip #1 can help create an environment where people feel safe sharing their experiences, questions, struggles, and doubts, and creating this environment is how we listen and learn. Once we learn about the questions and needs of our audience or of the person we are conversing with, we need to acknowledge those questions and needs and try to respond to them as concretely as possible. I think concrete responses are what gives the Gospel the most credibility. In the Gospel reading from John listed above, Jesus uses concrete verbs in response to Peter’s declarations of love, and I’ve never seen the verbs in this exchange translated as “teach.” They’re caretaking verbs.
Furthermore, we’re told that prior to taking Peter aside, Jesus reveals who he is by sharing a meal with his friends. Keep that in mind.
When we don’t know how to respond to a particular question or struggle, I think it’s important that we don’t respond with theology or a verse. There are times for sharing these inheritances, but I don’t think these are helpful when a person is hurting or has questions — unless the person is in a similar place spiritually to the one you’re in. Respond in ways that resonate with the person. Remember that the reading from Revelation says all of creation praises the Lord, so look for ways to respond with what already appeals to the person and what he or she can already take in with his or her senses and experience. And keep the conversation going in two directions, if the other person stays willing to continue it. What seems helpful in the beginning of a conversation may not turn out to be. Stay open to listening and changing directions throughout the conversation.
Do acknowledge what the other person offers.
Look for qualities and contributions you admire. Share what you appreciate about the person and what he or she has taught you. Acknowledge what you didn’t know before you met him or her, and thank the person for giving you additional perspective. To me, doing this is the foundation of good communication and a healthy relationship.
I don’t recommend rushing to tell the person that his or her admirable qualities or achievements come from God. Pushing for this acknowledgment can make it seem like you think the person doesn’t have value on his or her own or that you don’t think they have free will. Someone who has, at best, a complicated relationship with faith may shut down if he or she feels you are implying this. Gratitude to God may arise naturally in the person at a different point in the spiritual journey.
Do wait for an invitation and offer one.
Various Scriptures tell us to knock, to seek and to ask. We’re told to ask God for what we want and need, even though we’re also told that God already knows what we need. Why should we not give others the same space to ask us about our spirituality. Remember that God respects the other person’s free will and doesn’t force a relationship with the Divine on the other person. Why should God’s children be any less courteous?
Pushiness and anger get attention, but they risk making the Good News not sound or feel like Good News. Is expressing anger sometimes necessary to convey the need for change? Perhaps. Jesus did turn over tables in the temple court. But that isn’t how we see him interacting with people most of the time. Often, instead of allowing its message to affect change, pushiness can garble a message. Anger that is expressed unproductively can do even more to get in the way of a message. It can be a catalyst, but it’s not a solution. I find it hard to believe that militancy can achieve long-term, positive goals.
Are there places we are invited to go by virtue of living under a representative government? Absolutely. We can be clear about what what’s important to us. But we still need to respond to these invitations with respect, humility, and courtesy.
And we need to connect with others in invitational ways. Receiving an invitation is so much less anxiety- and anger-inducing them being scolded, threatened, punished, pushed, or forced. I don’t think anxiety and anger are likely to generate the responses we want long-term.
Do open yourself to challenging conversations within your spiritual community.
In the first reading, the apostles are brought before religious authorities because of the message they have been sharing. Jesus was brought before both religious and civil authorities because of what he said and did. Nobody is perfect, and chances are, nobody involved is pure evil.
Do assume that opposition isn’t personal and is well-intentioned.
Is there opposition that is personal and isn’t well-intentioned? Sure there is. But chances are, the person has his or her perspective because of a lifetime’s worth of experiences, experiences which may be different from yours. (Remember the forgiveness we are told Jesus gave from the cross to people who caused his agony, people weren’t even asking for it. I’ll be the first to say that that’s a hard forgiveness to give. I’m not good at it God, please keep trying to help me.) Experiences alter how we see and what we see. As a result, we sometimes go about our goals in imperfect ways, totally wrong ways, in destructive ways, or in counterproductive ways. It can happen to you, and it can happen to people you disagree with. That’s why we need to work on answers that respond to individual questions and meet individual needs.
Do remember that change comes from God and from within.
It’s not our job to change someone. However, we might be able to help someone see the need to change. Often this happens not through words but actions. And I don’t mean adopting a particular prayer posture or displaying a particular image publicly. I mean doing the other things on this list.
Am I saying that only home and church are the places for expressions of faith? Absolutely not. But I don’t think the presence of a posture, or an image, or a Bible has as much of an impact without the other approaches on this list. Also, I think that even if you aren’t adopting a certain posture publicly just to be seen, to someone alienated from organized religion, it can seem like you’re doing what you’re doing only to be seen.
And maybe, in the best sense, you are praying or displaying that image in hopes of starting a conversation. But I have a question? Would you pray the same way if you knew no one could see? If the answer is yes, fine. Just don’t forget the other tips on this list, and be courteous. Pray like the sinner, not like the self-righteous man.
If we want to offer the world and everyone in it God’s love, we need to behave like everyone is created in the image of God and thus has something to offer us.
The Bible. The New American Bible Revised Edition, Kindle edition, Fairbrother, 2011.
Sitting with the Sacred 