26th Sunday after Pentecost
November 13, 2016
Isaiah 65:17-25
Or watch here (in 2 parts because I went over YouTube’s
15 minute limit):
I was at a conference on Wednesday morning when a
colleague from a different state commented that she felt like she had PTSD from
this election cycle. Another colleague agreed, and we wondered if we as a
nation have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as a result of the tension and
divisiveness of this election season. The election’s over. But does it feel
over? We heard so much negativity, criticism, name-calling, and wild
accusations that we couldn’t always tell whether they were rumor or fact, that
I think most, if not all, of us are still reeling from it. We’re still
recovering from it, as if we had national PTSD.
Most
often, we often hear about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder with regards to our
vets, those who have served our country. Veterans’ Day was the other holiday
this past week, you know. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs estimates
that about a third of Vietnam vets have PTSD, as many as 10% of vets of the
Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm, and about 11% of veterans of the current war
in Afghanistan.[1] It’s a mental disorder
that’s caused by experiencing something traumatic, like active combat, but can
also include things on the home front like a car accident, abuse, a bombing, or
even natural events like an earthquake or hurricane.
A
fellow pastor here in Baltimore is experiencing it after she was carjacked at
gunpoint a couple weeks ago in front of the church she serves. She’s
taking a month off to mentally and emotionally recover from it, it affected her
that much. I’m the pastor on call for that church during this time and I invite
you to join me in holding her and her family in prayer as she recovers from
that traumatic experience. Two of her young grandchildren were with her when it
happened. She’s extremely shaken.
Now,
people can go through the same thing and yet not be affected in the same way.
An event may be traumatic for you and not for me; we’re all wired different
ways. Yet this election season seems to have been traumatic for pretty much
everyone. Almost everyone was talking about it, worrying about it, people of
faith were praying about it, it had just about everyone on edge. You could feel
it in the air when you went out in public. And even though Election Day’s over,
people are still talking about it, processing what happened, worrying about the
consequences and long-term effects.
It
creates a bit of an incongruity with our Isaiah reading. We know where we are;
how do we get to this vision Isaiah describes?
“For
I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not
be remembered or come to mind… For I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and
its people as a delight… No more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or
the cry of distress. No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a
few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime... They shall build
houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.”
Finally, “the wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw
like the ox… They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the
Lord.”
How
do we get there, from where we are now? Can you even imagine it? The wolf and
the lamb shall feed together. The donkey and the elephant shall break bread
together. Clinton and Trump supporters will share a meal. Does it even sound
possible? Well, the answer in the church is yes.
[pause] Because it even happens in this
church. Now, don’t start looking suspiciously at your neighbors trying to
figure out who didn’t vote the same way you did. That is not going to help
anything. And we certainly don’t need to add to the suspicion and distrust that
was amplified during the election season. We have enough of that. What we need
more of is trust and confidence and giving other people the benefit of the
doubt first, and, as brothers and sisters in Christ, remembering that that is
our first identity, that is the thing about each person that is the most
important. You were made in the image of the one living God. God made you, and
your neighbor. And before you start to think, well, maybe God messed up on my
neighbor (because I know how some of you think!), remember that God said
humanity was created very good.
Remember that God calls you and your
neighbor beloved. Remember that God loves you and your neighbor.
One
of the workshops I went to at this conference was about conflict
transformation. I’ve taken a few such workshops since starting this
appointment, and this one was facilitated by an expert in the field, the guy
who wrote the book on JustPeace, Dr. Craig Gilliam. One of the things he said
about conflict is that [slowly] sometimes we want to win so much that we stop
seeing people as people, and instead start seeing people as objects. Sometimes
we get so caught up that we forget that our opponent is also made in God’s
image, is also beloved, is also a child of the living God. Sometimes we forget,
and instead we just see them as an obstacle to getting what we want, or getting
what we think we deserve. Sometimes our desire to win blinds us to seeing a
person’s humanity, and we focus so much on our cause, we forget that they are
also a child of God. Has that ever happened to you?
Lately,
when Isabel makes me really mad, instead of yelling at her about whatever she
did wrong, I manage to take a deep breath, and I tell her “I love you,” and
then I address the problem. See, she’s not the problem. Her being 4 is part of
the problem, because she’s still learning about how to act in different
situations and what’s acceptable and what’s not and developing empathy for how
someone feels when she hurts them, intentionally or not. She’s learning
boundaries and limits and what will happen if. And if I have less patience at
that moment to teach her, then we have a problem. But the problem isn’t her,
and the problem isn’t me. The problem, or the conflict, is that she’s still
learning and testing out every single what if she can think of to find out what
happens.
This
presenter said that when he’s called in to resolve a conflict, he’ll often
being by having the two people talk to each other. While they talk, he’ll write
on a board the problems that he hears them identify. And what he said is that
gradually, as they talk and he writes, they slowly begin to turn their chairs
so that they both face the board. They both face the board, where the problems
have been written down. Instead of thinking the other person is the problem,
they’re realizing just what the problem is, and it’s not the other person.
You’ve heard of “keep the main thing the main thing”? Well, I think you can
also say, “keep the problem the problem,” and the problem is not a person. The
problem is racism or sexism or homelessness or hunger or what-have-you. The
problem is not a person, or a group of people. Keep the problem the problem,
and face that together, instead of facing each other. It is possible to disagree
adamantly, and vehemently, and still be open to the other person’s humanity, to
honor their dignity and their choice to stand in a different place than me. Not
all of God’s children are the same, obviously. We don’t all make the same
choices, and we don’t have to make the same choices. There is a beautiful
diversity in God’s kingdom with lions and lambs, with oxen and wolves, with
donkeys and elephants and all the other parties out there. God didn’t make us
the same, and that’s okay. Because it’s okay, we have to remember to view each
other first as a child of God, worthy of the same dignity and respect and love
as everyone else.
Working
through PTSD takes time. I don’t know, maybe you don’t have it. I just know
that many of our brothers and sisters across are country do feel shell-shocked,
and not because of who won. We feel shell-shocked because of all the vitriol we
heard during the campaign season. We heard people say the worst things, we heard people’s humanity and human rights
denied. We heard people say that other people don’t matter, or aren’t even
worthy to be considered people. We heard people treated as objects.
I
will give one example, and it’s not even one I learned recently but back when I
was in college. My mom and stepdad had recently married and I was meeting much
of my stepdad’s family for the first time. I met a pair of step-cousins in
their early 20s and somehow it came up that they don’t use the word that rhymes
with witch but starts with a b. My step-cousins don’t use it, because properly
used in context, that word means a female dog. That’s the origin and the true
meaning of the word. And so, in slang, what that word implies then is that the
person is not human. You are calling them a dog, not even a person. (And that’s
a general you, because I don’t know who among you curses, because no one curses
around the preacher!) That word denies the person human dignity, and makes it
easier to objectify them. There are many, many more examples like that.
Even
when you get upset with someone, even if the conflict is so big and so tall
that you can’t see a way out of it, if you remember that the other person is
also a person, also a child of God, made in God’s image, and beloved by God, it
will make a world of difference. Treat each person with dignity, treat each
person as a person, whether it’s the person who cut you off driving or the
person at the store, or as we head into the holiday season, the person who
stole your parking space at the mall. We are all made in God’s image.
Different, and yet all part of God’s family. Remember, when one part of the
family hurts, we all hurt.
I’ll
give you one more example that’s going on this weekend. Here in our Conference,
we have a youth event every February in Ocean City called ROCK, with which many
of you are familiar. In the North Carolina Conference, they have a similar youth gathering,
only it’s held the second weekend in November and it’s called Pilgrimage. It’s
wrapping up this morning. The one time I went to Pilgrimage was with my first
appointment, which was a Hispanic church, and I took 5 youth to it from that
congregation. At this year’s Pilgrimage, someone anonymously put a clothespin
on the clothing of a Hispanic youth as they walked by with the words “Build a
Wall” on one side and “I love Trump” on the other side.” [Pause] That
dehumanizes. That hurts. That is not treating that person with dignity.
So
whether you have PTSD or not, remember our brothers and sisters who do. Their
worries and fears are as real to them as yours are to you. It’s going to take
our country a while to recover from this election. And there is no one who was
not affected by it; we were all affected by it. So, we all work through it
together. We take time together. We break bread together. We talk together. We
keep the problem the problem, and not any person. The only person we focus on
is the person of Jesus Christ. And with his help, we will recover and regain
our equilibrium and sense of well-being. Thanks be to God.
