Our Many Kinds of Broken--October 5, 2016
"...the creation itself will be set free from the bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies." [Romans 8:21-23]
They say that most cases of a so-called "24-hour-bug" case of the flu is really food poisoning. We just like the more pleasant-sounding euphemism of calling it a twenty-four-hour flu rather than saying you ate undercooked chicken and your body was protecting you from an invasion of really nasty little germs.
So you get sick at your stomach, and your whole GI tract seems to be up in arms against you, and pretty much you feel miserable until the next day. But the stomach isn't the culprit--not really. It would be a colossal mistake to blame your stomach for your choice to eat from the sketchy new food truck on the corner or the hole-in-the-wall greasy spoon diner. Your stomach reacts the way it is supposed to--getting rid of the dangerous stuff in its system--all the hullaballoo is there to intended to rid the body of the offending tainted food. And, yes, as a result, your whole body feels pretty weak and sickly for the next day while it's all working its way through your system. Your whole self feels pretty crummy, to put it politely--not only your stomach that has to process the bad food, but also your head (which let you tell yourself to take the chance on a restaurant that skimped on hygiene) and your hands (which were the offending appendages that actually put the bad food in your mouth.
In other words, when you get a case of food poisoning, your whole body feels the sickness, but in different ways. Your gut bears the brunt of it, even though it's not really your gut's "fault," and then the rest of your body feels weak and sickly from the nausea.
Well, to be honest, that's not just you after a risky Taco Tuesday or convenience store sushi. That's all creation. That's the whole world. We are all sick--all of humanity suffers as a body, in different ways. Some, to be sure, bear a lot more of the brunt of the suffering than others do. And that suffering, like an upset stomach, makes the rest of the body queasy and weak. And that also means that other parts of humanity who inflict more of the damage on the rest suffer, too--like the head gets a headache and the arms and hands feel weak from the nausea your stomach is feeling.
All of humanity, and indeed, all of the world, suffers from our own destructive choices toward each other. We are all infected, and affected, by the sickness. The church's usual way of naming that sickness is sin, but sometimes church words bring their own baggage. You could call it brokenness, too--we are all broken. Victims get broken by the powerful and the violent, but the powerful and the violent are broken, too--affected by the pain of the victims just like the head and the hands that put the bad food in your mouth are also affected by the stomach's nausea. We are all tangled up with each other, a part of each other, for good and for ill.
Sometimes it is fashionable for us, the ones who live pretty comfortable and insulated lives away from the worst of the suffering, to be critical of the folks who cry out that they are hurting the most. You and I do the same thing, too, when we are sick with food poisoning--we blame our stomachs for being upset, when it was really our own poor dinner choice that made our stomachs so sick in the first place. We don't like to acknowledge that our choice, say, of the undercooked pork chop, ended up causing pain for our stomach, which means pain for our whole body, too. It's always easier to blame the center of the discomfort. "It's my stomach's fault! Why is it being so disagreeable? Why is it making me feel so weak? Why is it making the rest of my body feel like it's been hit by a truck? Why can't my stomach just quiet down and take it?" Well, come on--I'm the one had the bad oysters. My choice (my brain), my action (my hands).
Well, let's project that analogy back on how we often look at the suffering of others in the world. From the vantage point of comfortable, fully-employed, well-taken-care-of folks, who have stacks of privileges we were just given in life, we can find ourselves getting upset or critical of others when they start crying out about the suffering in their lives, their neighborhoods, their corner of the world. "Why are they acting up? Why are they making such a ruckus? Why are they making me so uncomfortable?" And from there, it's easy to just be dismissive or scornful: "They should just be nice and not make a fuss. They shouldn't complain--it makes the rest of us feel sick. They shouldn't disturb the peace of everybody else. I don't like them drawing such attention to their situation." Think about how foolish that sounds if we are talking about an upset stomach and a case of food poisoning. The stomach reacts to the poison--the tainted beef or uncooked shrimp or whatever--the way it is supposed to, and because it suffers, the whole body suffers.
When it's your own gut that is making you nauseous, you know that if your stomach is upset, something you ate is likely the culprit. And more to the point, if you want your whole body to feel better, you do what you need to do in order to make your stomach feel better. You take the pink stuff; you take some other medicine for the nausea, maybe. You stick to the BRAT diet and eat just bananas and toast for the next day. Yes, you make a special effort to make your stomach get through the illness. And you know that if your stomach gets better, then the whole of your body will be made well, too. Nobody says, "Well, how come we're so focused on the stomach here? What about my elbow? Doesn't my left ear matter? Don't my toes matter? Why do I only give medicine to my stomach right now? Why not some of the pink stuff on my knees, too? They're feeling weak, too!" Well, yes, of course--but they are not fighting off food poisoning right now. The source of the pain is in the stomach--taking care of it will take care of the whole body. Of course your whole body matters when you are hit with food poisoning--but the source of the discomfort is in your gut. Heal the stomach, and your whole body gets to feeling better. That's not "special treatment" of your stomach, and it's not a denial that your elbows or knees or left ear are important, too. But they aren't facing an onslaught of raw chicken right now, and your stomach is. It's when you take care of the most vulnerable part of you--the part that is under attack by sloppy street vendor chili dogs--that the whole of you is made well.
The perspective of the New Testament says the same about all of humanity, indeed, all of the world. We are all connected to one another, and the suffering of the most vulnerable comes back to me--not only because if I am honest, I am sometimes a contributing cause to the hurt of others, but also because their unrest touches on the rest of humanity. And instead of angrily scowling at the vulnerable ones who suffer and cry out about it, if I am moved to help them, I will find that the whole body called humanity is made well. It is, of course, always easier to want to dismiss the voices of unrest and say they are just agitating or complaining, but if I recognize that my stomach's way of dealing with the sickness I have inflicted on it is to agitate the rest of my body to expel the bad food, then I should recognize the same in the body called humanity. Sometimes the outcry, the agitation, the unrest, is how the body rids itself of the poison. And if I want the whole body--of which I am a part--to be well, I need to attend to the parts that are suffering most right now, the parts which are most vulnerable.
Dr. King said it beautifully back in 1957 in his piece, "Nonviolence and Racial Justice," written for The Christian Century. King wrote: "The nonviolent resister must often express his protest through noncooperation or boycotts, but he realizes that noncooperation and boycotts are not ends themselves; they are merely means to awaken a sense of moral shame in the opponent. The end is redemption and reconciliation. The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness." In other words, the point of the dissent is to make the body whole. The goal is not to punish one part of the body at the expense of another, or to ignore a part of the body and focus only on the parts that aren't suffering. The goal is "redemption... reconciliation...the creation of the beloved community." In other words, the goal is always to make the whole body whole again.
Paul reminds us in Romans 8 that all of creation is sick, groaning and waiting for that redemption. All of humanity is caught up in our cruelty to one another, our indifference to the most vulnerable, and our quickness to resort to violence with each other--whether it is in a household throwing dinner dishes at the wall, in a neighborhood where shots are fired in the night when death could have been avoided, to the ways we marginalize others and then criticize them for saying something about it, to the weapons of terror and murder used by one nation or group against another. We are all sick with it. And our hope cannot just be for my little corner of the world to be put right--you can't make the head feel better without dealing with the stomach. The goal has to be making the whole body well. That means for the followers of Jesus, we can never settle for a vision that is smaller than everybody being cared for, everybody being precious and beloved, and everybody being looked out for--not just the people like me or near me or who resemble me. And that means it is outright antithetical to our faith to adopt the "Me first" or "My corner of the world first" mentality, if we are going to take the New Testament seriously. All creation is groaning, because all humanity and all creation is broken. We are broken in many ways, but we are all broken. And my wellness can only come when all are being attended to. My healing can only come as I attend to the healing of the most vulnerable among us, just like the whole body only feels better when you attend to the stomach bug that is the site of the pain.
The amazing word of hope today from the Scriptures is that God intends to make all of creation well and whole again. It is not too big a task, and it is not too much to hope for. But if our vision shrinks to only being concerned with me-and-my-interests getting well, we will all continue to languish. God's vision is to make us all well, and that starts day by day with care for the most vulnerable and most pained right now.
How will we respond to people around us differently if we dare to see ourselves as all part of the same sick-but-recovering body? Let this day be different. Let it begin now.
Lord Jesus, heal this whole body called humanity, starting where it hurts with the most vulnerable and pained, so that indeed all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be made well.
They say that most cases of a so-called "24-hour-bug" case of the flu is really food poisoning. We just like the more pleasant-sounding euphemism of calling it a twenty-four-hour flu rather than saying you ate undercooked chicken and your body was protecting you from an invasion of really nasty little germs.
So you get sick at your stomach, and your whole GI tract seems to be up in arms against you, and pretty much you feel miserable until the next day. But the stomach isn't the culprit--not really. It would be a colossal mistake to blame your stomach for your choice to eat from the sketchy new food truck on the corner or the hole-in-the-wall greasy spoon diner. Your stomach reacts the way it is supposed to--getting rid of the dangerous stuff in its system--all the hullaballoo is there to intended to rid the body of the offending tainted food. And, yes, as a result, your whole body feels pretty weak and sickly for the next day while it's all working its way through your system. Your whole self feels pretty crummy, to put it politely--not only your stomach that has to process the bad food, but also your head (which let you tell yourself to take the chance on a restaurant that skimped on hygiene) and your hands (which were the offending appendages that actually put the bad food in your mouth.
In other words, when you get a case of food poisoning, your whole body feels the sickness, but in different ways. Your gut bears the brunt of it, even though it's not really your gut's "fault," and then the rest of your body feels weak and sickly from the nausea.
Well, to be honest, that's not just you after a risky Taco Tuesday or convenience store sushi. That's all creation. That's the whole world. We are all sick--all of humanity suffers as a body, in different ways. Some, to be sure, bear a lot more of the brunt of the suffering than others do. And that suffering, like an upset stomach, makes the rest of the body queasy and weak. And that also means that other parts of humanity who inflict more of the damage on the rest suffer, too--like the head gets a headache and the arms and hands feel weak from the nausea your stomach is feeling.
All of humanity, and indeed, all of the world, suffers from our own destructive choices toward each other. We are all infected, and affected, by the sickness. The church's usual way of naming that sickness is sin, but sometimes church words bring their own baggage. You could call it brokenness, too--we are all broken. Victims get broken by the powerful and the violent, but the powerful and the violent are broken, too--affected by the pain of the victims just like the head and the hands that put the bad food in your mouth are also affected by the stomach's nausea. We are all tangled up with each other, a part of each other, for good and for ill.
Sometimes it is fashionable for us, the ones who live pretty comfortable and insulated lives away from the worst of the suffering, to be critical of the folks who cry out that they are hurting the most. You and I do the same thing, too, when we are sick with food poisoning--we blame our stomachs for being upset, when it was really our own poor dinner choice that made our stomachs so sick in the first place. We don't like to acknowledge that our choice, say, of the undercooked pork chop, ended up causing pain for our stomach, which means pain for our whole body, too. It's always easier to blame the center of the discomfort. "It's my stomach's fault! Why is it being so disagreeable? Why is it making me feel so weak? Why is it making the rest of my body feel like it's been hit by a truck? Why can't my stomach just quiet down and take it?" Well, come on--I'm the one had the bad oysters. My choice (my brain), my action (my hands).
Well, let's project that analogy back on how we often look at the suffering of others in the world. From the vantage point of comfortable, fully-employed, well-taken-care-of folks, who have stacks of privileges we were just given in life, we can find ourselves getting upset or critical of others when they start crying out about the suffering in their lives, their neighborhoods, their corner of the world. "Why are they acting up? Why are they making such a ruckus? Why are they making me so uncomfortable?" And from there, it's easy to just be dismissive or scornful: "They should just be nice and not make a fuss. They shouldn't complain--it makes the rest of us feel sick. They shouldn't disturb the peace of everybody else. I don't like them drawing such attention to their situation." Think about how foolish that sounds if we are talking about an upset stomach and a case of food poisoning. The stomach reacts to the poison--the tainted beef or uncooked shrimp or whatever--the way it is supposed to, and because it suffers, the whole body suffers.
When it's your own gut that is making you nauseous, you know that if your stomach is upset, something you ate is likely the culprit. And more to the point, if you want your whole body to feel better, you do what you need to do in order to make your stomach feel better. You take the pink stuff; you take some other medicine for the nausea, maybe. You stick to the BRAT diet and eat just bananas and toast for the next day. Yes, you make a special effort to make your stomach get through the illness. And you know that if your stomach gets better, then the whole of your body will be made well, too. Nobody says, "Well, how come we're so focused on the stomach here? What about my elbow? Doesn't my left ear matter? Don't my toes matter? Why do I only give medicine to my stomach right now? Why not some of the pink stuff on my knees, too? They're feeling weak, too!" Well, yes, of course--but they are not fighting off food poisoning right now. The source of the pain is in the stomach--taking care of it will take care of the whole body. Of course your whole body matters when you are hit with food poisoning--but the source of the discomfort is in your gut. Heal the stomach, and your whole body gets to feeling better. That's not "special treatment" of your stomach, and it's not a denial that your elbows or knees or left ear are important, too. But they aren't facing an onslaught of raw chicken right now, and your stomach is. It's when you take care of the most vulnerable part of you--the part that is under attack by sloppy street vendor chili dogs--that the whole of you is made well.
The perspective of the New Testament says the same about all of humanity, indeed, all of the world. We are all connected to one another, and the suffering of the most vulnerable comes back to me--not only because if I am honest, I am sometimes a contributing cause to the hurt of others, but also because their unrest touches on the rest of humanity. And instead of angrily scowling at the vulnerable ones who suffer and cry out about it, if I am moved to help them, I will find that the whole body called humanity is made well. It is, of course, always easier to want to dismiss the voices of unrest and say they are just agitating or complaining, but if I recognize that my stomach's way of dealing with the sickness I have inflicted on it is to agitate the rest of my body to expel the bad food, then I should recognize the same in the body called humanity. Sometimes the outcry, the agitation, the unrest, is how the body rids itself of the poison. And if I want the whole body--of which I am a part--to be well, I need to attend to the parts that are suffering most right now, the parts which are most vulnerable.
Dr. King said it beautifully back in 1957 in his piece, "Nonviolence and Racial Justice," written for The Christian Century. King wrote: "The nonviolent resister must often express his protest through noncooperation or boycotts, but he realizes that noncooperation and boycotts are not ends themselves; they are merely means to awaken a sense of moral shame in the opponent. The end is redemption and reconciliation. The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness." In other words, the point of the dissent is to make the body whole. The goal is not to punish one part of the body at the expense of another, or to ignore a part of the body and focus only on the parts that aren't suffering. The goal is "redemption... reconciliation...the creation of the beloved community." In other words, the goal is always to make the whole body whole again.
Paul reminds us in Romans 8 that all of creation is sick, groaning and waiting for that redemption. All of humanity is caught up in our cruelty to one another, our indifference to the most vulnerable, and our quickness to resort to violence with each other--whether it is in a household throwing dinner dishes at the wall, in a neighborhood where shots are fired in the night when death could have been avoided, to the ways we marginalize others and then criticize them for saying something about it, to the weapons of terror and murder used by one nation or group against another. We are all sick with it. And our hope cannot just be for my little corner of the world to be put right--you can't make the head feel better without dealing with the stomach. The goal has to be making the whole body well. That means for the followers of Jesus, we can never settle for a vision that is smaller than everybody being cared for, everybody being precious and beloved, and everybody being looked out for--not just the people like me or near me or who resemble me. And that means it is outright antithetical to our faith to adopt the "Me first" or "My corner of the world first" mentality, if we are going to take the New Testament seriously. All creation is groaning, because all humanity and all creation is broken. We are broken in many ways, but we are all broken. And my wellness can only come when all are being attended to. My healing can only come as I attend to the healing of the most vulnerable among us, just like the whole body only feels better when you attend to the stomach bug that is the site of the pain.
The amazing word of hope today from the Scriptures is that God intends to make all of creation well and whole again. It is not too big a task, and it is not too much to hope for. But if our vision shrinks to only being concerned with me-and-my-interests getting well, we will all continue to languish. God's vision is to make us all well, and that starts day by day with care for the most vulnerable and most pained right now.
How will we respond to people around us differently if we dare to see ourselves as all part of the same sick-but-recovering body? Let this day be different. Let it begin now.
Lord Jesus, heal this whole body called humanity, starting where it hurts with the most vulnerable and pained, so that indeed all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be made well.
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