Refined Courage

sermon by Carrie Eikler
Micah 3:1-4, Luke 1:68-79
December 9, 2012 (Advent 2)

You know me.  I stand up here every two weeks and share my insights into the gospel, stories from my life.  It’s not an easy thing.  It’s not necessarily a fun thing.  Frankly, it’s quite a vulnerable thing. But it is a blessed thing, for me in my life, and hopefully for you. 

And if you know me, you know how much I love the PBS icon Julia Child.  Not just because she was a fascinating cook and media personality, but because she was so…real. 

One of the most beloved scenes in her French Chef episodes, is when she attempt s to flip a potato pancake.  As she is holding the pan over the flame (or probably, the electric range), she is sweating over all the heat and exertion she has been putting in the kitchen, and as she’s kind of out of breath and she says “When you flip anything…you just have to have the courage of your convictions” and she flips this loose mass of potatoes and some fall out of the side to which she delightfully responds “Well that didn’t go very well, but you can always pick it up.  [and she plops it back into the pan] And if you are alone in the kitchen, who is going to see?”

Courage.  From the Latin cor, or from the heart. 
Courage. 
What you’ve got when do you the things you don’t think you can do. 
Courage. 
A little known prophet named Malachi speaking about God’s power and judgment. 
Courage. 
A man name Zecheriah, rendered mute by his understandable doubts, proclaiming greatness of an unseen God in the face of immediate occupation. 
Courage.

Maybe what got you out of bed this moring.

One thing I like about these two texts today, is that they are courageous words spoken from minor characters.  Malachi, eh…he was one of the minor prophets.  Not an Isaiah, or Jeremiah, or even an Amos.  In the face of these prophets, Malachi is a short, simple book about “bored priests, unfaithful husbands, and complaining laity.” [i]

And the reading from Luke comes from Zecheriah…who?  we might ask ourselves.  Zechariah.  Husband of Elizabeth.  Father of John the Baptist.  When an angel tells him that Elizabeth will bear a child, he scoffs and snorts riiight. And he is rendered mute, unable to speak, until the child is born.  And after nine months of not speaking, watching the evidence of the truth of this prophecy growing larger and larger, he *bursts* out with this song of praise.

So really, these are *eh* kind of characters and prophets in our tradition.  Easily forgotten.  Nothing too grand.  But what they say, and how we can receive what they say, can pierce us to the heart.  Can burn us like the refiner’s fire.

And really, each day of our life is like this.  Small struggles, perhaps insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but they are huge in our lives.  They each take some small (and big) acts of courage.   Actions that require us to move from our heart.  And I know that it may sound strange, but I’m sure you can attest…
 any act of courage you have undertaken, requires an enormous amount…of vulnerability.

And we don’t like vulnerability.  Vulnerability means opening ourselves up to get hurt.  Vulnerability means fleeing from the heat of our God’s love for fear we will be consumed completely.  Only that’s not what Malachi says.  God’s fire is not about consumption.  Judgment is not about condemnation.  In the heat of God’s fire for us we come out-- not perfected-- but righteous.  We come out more loved than we thought possible.  More worthy than our world would have us believe.

Advent is a time of waiting.  But not really a kick your feet up and lean back sort of waiting
If you have been a woman pregnant and waiting to give birth,
or a man waiting to be a father,
or an angel who has waited with someone who is scared
—and I’m sure those three have covered everyone here—
you know…this type of waiting and expectation is infused with intense vulnerability. 

And it changes you.

The vulnerability of Advent is not something we think about, because vulnerability is not something we like to think about.  Am I right?  I mean, if I actually had to stop and think about my vulnerabilities, I’d probably be incapacitated for hours.

We protect ourselves by hiding where and how we are vulnerable, for fear that others might find that weak spot—that place of pain—and exploit it, and hurt us.  So we act like it’s not there. 

Brené Brown is a shame and vulnerability expert.  That sure does sound appealing, doesn’t it?  Brown gave a speech at a TEDx Conference a few years ago that went viral—meaning, it took off across the internet.  Some of you may have heard of these TED Conferences.  TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design.  They were created, as they put it, to share ideas worth spreading.  Notable Nobel Prize winners, scientists, former presidents have all been speakers.  Brown is a social work professor who researches shame and vulnerability.  Much of her research focuses on how we experience
and process
and use
and avoid
shame and vulnerability
 in our contemporary American context.

So what is vulnerability?  Well Brown says, “When I ask people what is vulnerability the answers were things like
                         my first date after my divorce,
                                           saying I love you first,
                                                 asking for a raise,
sitting with my wife who has Stage III breast cancer and trying to make plans for our children,

To me,” she says “vulnerability is courage. It's about the willingness to show up and be seen in our lives. And… those moments when we show up… are the most powerful meaning-making moments of our lives even if they don't go well. I think they define who we are.”[ii]

The scriptures today all have a thread of vulnerability to the outside world and the strength to move through the fire, the struggle, the occupation, the inability to speak and come out on the other side—not just alive, not just stronger--but completely transformed.

Brown recounts “The most beautiful things I look back on in my life are coming out from underneath things I didn't know I could get out from underneath. …[those moments of struggle] those are the moments that made me,”

And what is Jesus’ life encapsulated in, if not vulnerability.  Born with animals, with a price on his head from the King.  Ended:  stripped, on a cross, a crown to mock him.  Think about it--our god was born not into opulence and power, but into vulnerability.  And that’s what makes his gospel seem like foolishness sometimes: loving your enemies, turning the cheek, being the servant, soulforce over brute force.  We think it’s foolishness because it requires us not to be brave, but to be courageous—to be vulnerable.

But that appears to be what we’re invited into this season.  To reconnect with vulnerability.  Whether through the fire we’ve been put through, or the cleansing we are experiencing, or the hard reality that our lives are simply beyond our control—if we open ourselves to that vulnerability, we are opening ourselves to known and transformed by God.  Transformed by the circumstances in our lives.

--

I’ll admit, it’s hard for me to resonate with Malachi’s image of fire, of the judgment from the righteous Lord.  It’s hard for me, even when it is “softened by Zechariah’s words that show us the end result of God’s work—[is that] light [will be given] to those who sit in darkness and [will guide] our feet into the way of peace.”[iii]

So I was happy when I came across a metaphor by Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, a physician, therapist, and storyteller. So let’s move away from the fiery furnace to the coolness of the ocean floor.  Our Advent theme is, after all, rooted in water imagery.  Imagine each of us an oyster.  Now this image may actually seem completely opposite of what a refining fire does—eliminating the impurities.  But somehow these two connected for me, and helped understand Malachi’s words and Zecheriah’s prophecy and how they invite us into transforming vulnerability.

So an oyster.

 Open up an oyster and you will see that it is “soft, tender, and vulnerable.
      Without the sanctuary of its shell it could not survive. 
           But oysters must open their shells in order to “breathe” water. 
Sometimes while an oyster is breathing, a grain of sand will enter its shell and become a part of its life from then on.

Such grains of sand cause pain, but an oyster does not alter its… nature because of this.
 It does not become hard and leathery in order not to feel.
            It continues to entrust itself to the ocean, to open and breathe in order to live. 
 But it does respond. 
Slowly and patiently, the oyster wraps the grain of sand in thin translucent layers until,
 over time,
it has created something of great value in the place where it was most vulnerable to its pain.  A pearl… might be thought of as an oyster’s response to its suffering. 

Sand is a way of life for an oyster.  If you are soft and tender and must live on the sandy floor of the ocean, making pearls becomes a necessity if you are to live well.”

As Dr. Remen reflects, “Disappointment and loss are a part of every life.  Many times we can put such things behind us and get on with the rest of our lives.  But not everything is amenable to this approach.  Some things are too big or too deep to do this, and we will have to leave important parts of ourselves behind if we treat them in this way.  These are the places where wisdom begins to grow in us.  It begins with suffering that we do not avoid or rationalize or put behind us.  It starts with the realization that our loss, whatever it is, has become a part of us and has altered our lives so profoundly that we cannot go back to the way it was before.

Something in us can transform such suffering into wisdom.  The process of turning pain into wisdom often looks like a sorting process.  First we experience everything.  Then one by one we let things go, the anger, the blame, the sense of injustice, and finally even the pain itself, until all we have left is a deeper sense of the value of life and a greater capacity to live it.”[iv]

Whether through fire, or water, the washer ringer or due to a grain of sand, or simply getting flipped wrong and falling out of the pan, or cancer or divorce or unemployment or Alzheimer’s… our pain is entrusted to God.
 

But it can burn.  It can burn like the hottest fires of hell, like soap in your eyes
and you wonder if there is a force that is putting you into it
           and a grace that can take you out. 

But the courage is there.  Call on it.  And it will refine you.  May it be so.

[Silence in Waiting Worship]

Hymn-How firm a foundation

Benediction – For my benediction, I leave with you the words of another little prophet of sorts: Christopher Robin from Winnie and the Pooh.  Christopher and Pooh are sitting in a tree one night, and the little boy tells the loveable bear, “If ever there is tomorrow when we're not together.. there is something you must always remember. you are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. but the most important thing is, even if we're apart.. I'll always be with you.”

 

                                                                                                                    

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[i] Schuller, Eileen M., “The Book of Malachi.”    The New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary vol VII. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996)

[ii] Brené Brown from interview “Brené Brown on Vulnerability” with Krista Tippet.  On Being (www.onbeing.org)

 

[iii]Advent Worship Resources in The Leader (Harrisonburg, VA: MennoMedia)

[iv] Remen, Rachel Naomi.  My Grandfather’s Blessings: Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging (New York: Penguin Press, 2000)