Reach Out & Touch Someone

Sunday, July 27, 2008

Readings:
1 Kings 3:5-12
Romans 8:26-39
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

Audio sermon link: http://fileresource.sitepro.com/filemanager/74/filecollections/422/E930C8EF-0605-3680-B58B-CFB6C2E76CC4.mp3


All three readings today relay two crucial things: that God is active in the world and in our lives. Also that that world can (and is often) a dark place in which it is hard to see God at work. In Romans today, Paul is intimately aware of the power of the Dark Side.

He is aware of what characterizes its power over the human soul. Its element of the unknown and fear, its ability to (without enormous efforts) bring about chaos and create conditions that have us feeling as if we are without options. Heath Ledger in Batman: Dark Knight engenders these devil-like qualities in his portrayal of The Joker. In a much older movie, The Chase, there is a devil-like figure of nearly equal (if less eerie) hands-offish-ness. Both characters remind us of the power of the devil to create such chaos and breeding ground for evil “without much effort”, as if to say “it didn’t take much”. Like a match before a pool of gasoline, it doesn’t take much. That gasoline is emblematic of our sinfulness. We’re wired for sin, for failure in the face of dwindling choices, for succumbing to fear and death; we wired to do wrong to one another. In The Chase, the devil-like character prods humans in a moment of vulnerability to turn on one another by their own choosing. It’s critical to notice the devil never lifts a hand against anyone – he simply gets us to “do it to one another”.

The character Kaiser Soze in The Usual Suspects has a memorable line when he says, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”. In Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, the devil is pictured as a cloaked androgynous figure who walks stealthily just beyond the crowd on the walk to Calvary. The devil preys on our feelings of there being no way out, no hope.

Pastor Mohn shared with us some of the writing of John Polkinghorne, physicist and theologian, who points out that when a child cries out in the middle of the night, a mother’s instinct is to reach out and tell the child “It’ll be fine. Everything’s OK”. Pastor Mohn paints the face of a bemused child that stares back, as if to say “Well, it’s not … can you see I’m crying?”

Translation: The world is not ‘an OK place’.

As much or as often as God reaches out to all of us to remind us that He loves us and He’s here. God is telling us today that He is the haven from the storm. Nothing can take that away: (not) death, nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nore height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God …’

And Pastor Mohn pointed out an important dichotomy. You can say ‘It’s OK’ all you want, but sometimes it’s just not enough. The baby needs for the mother to reach out and touch them, to touch the fear and the anxiety and quell it with a hug, with real, palpable contact. Analogously, God has reached out to us repeatedly through the disciples, the prophets and one another. But, at some point, He deemed it necessary to be among us, palpably, to allow us to see Him as one of us, reaching out to touch us and say ‘It’ll be OK’. The Word become flesh to quiet the crying infant in the night who is afraid and ‘not OK’.

Research indicates that touch is a critical feeling for a newborn infant. Babies that are not touched grow up with different pre-dispositions to feelings of hope calm, reassurance. I’ve written more than once (too often) in this blog that the Rabbi Harold Kushner has hypothesized that the Hebrew word for (Adam’s) ‘rib’ is ‘side’ indicating that when God created woman, He was creating another ‘side’ of God, presumably the ‘Mother’ side, the side that reassures us that all will ‘be OK’.

Pastor Mohn leaves us with this question: ‘How is the rest of the world to know this reassuring God today?’

The answer: ‘He sent you. He sent us.’

Reach out and touch someone …