Read this! It's Paul, I know, but you can do this. I believe in you. 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1
For me, it was vanilla flavored vodka. It wasn’t even some great event. We weren’t at a party or a wedding or in some random frat boy’s basement. We were just drinking vanilla vodka cokes and watching Saturday Night Live. And, I think, it was even Diet Coke. But by the time the second musical performance came around, wham, it hit me, and I spent the rest of the night hugging the cold tile in the bathroom. For my mom, it was Kahlua. So, sad, I know, right? She went with a group of friends to meet a friend coming in from Arizona. The flight was super delayed, so, she says, they went to the airport bar to wait it out. Apparently, they had a great time, and my mom, somehow, drank an entire bottle of Kahlua, and I’m not sure what she mixed it with, if anything. Well, the rest is history. Her friend’s flight landed, they grabbed her luggage, and dropped my mom at one of the friend’s houses. They left her in the tender care of Nally’s mom and then went back out to the bars to party some more. So fast forward twenty-five years, and on some Thanksgiving day, we’re all at my Grandma’s house, and someone pulls out a bottle of Kahlua. You know, just a little to drizzle over some ice cream. So good. And my mom has to leave the room. She can’t even stand the smell of it. So she tells us the tragic story of how she once drank too much and could never, ever, have it, ever again. I mean, no Kahlua, ever again? That’s just devastating. How could someone be so unable to tolerate that sweet yet bitter coffee vanilla caramel deliciousness for the rest of their lives? How can it be that someone must reject something that is so good?
Of course, this happens to us in other ways, too. We eat spaghetti and meatballs during the first months of pregnancy, and there goes that option for a quick and easy dinner plan. Levi, last summer, took a big spill on his bike and said, “I’m never going to ride a bike ever again!” I have a super tough time when I meet “Jasons” or “Robs” simply because of a few tragic encounters in my pre-teen and teenage years. I cannot stand the smell of funeral flowers, and I gave up softball after just one season. A certain song was playing on the radio just when you got the bad news, and now, you can’t ever listen to that song again. A certain smell takes you back to when you were little and heard your parents fighting, or you can no longer stomach that ham and bean soup mom would make every week for your whole childhood. Someone told you you weren’t a “math person” so you gave up and decided to be “bad at math.” Your first taste of beer or whisky or tobacco or a chemical high and you’re hooked, and you spend way too much time and energy and money pursuing the stuff until you’ve wasted your life. We are forever changed by our experiences, sometimes, so much so, that even good things in and of themselves, things that are fun or nourishing or invigorating, can never be experienced again, simply because we had one bad experience with it. Some things that other people can enjoy just fine are off limits for us, simply because we aren’t built to avoid abusing it.
We, on the outside, don’t understand it at all. How can it be that someone now hates or can no longer tolerate something that is so, so good?
I think we ask this question about the church all the time, but in different forms. We ask, why aren’t more people here? Why are so many churches closing? Don’t folks know how good it is here? Don’t they know that this place is home? That we are family? Why are so many people rejecting this church? This place where we have known love and community and connection and the actual spirit of God? But guys, all it takes is one bad experience, one bad encounter, to turn something good in to something that can never, ever be stomached again. Ask me sometime about how I feel about vanilla Cokes or pink carnations.
He was told that who he loved was unacceptable. She left after the congregation took his side in a messy divorce. They were made to feel unwelcome because they are struggling with their gender identity. They could get married in the church, but he would not be allowed to take communion because he is not a member. He offered to play his classical guitar during the worship service, but first he’d need to “try out” because he was not a professional musician. Their autistic son asked uncomfortable questions. She was told that if she prayed harder, her depression would go away. She was sexually abused by her youth group leader. He never could speak in tongues. She kept coming forward to accept Christ into her heart, year after year, and nothing ever happened. She introduced her daughter to the pastor, and he said she must not be a Christian since she named her after a Buddhist concept of loving-kindness. He had a lot of doubts when everyone else seemed to be so sure. They came to church a little late one Sunday, and the doors were already locked.
That’s all it takes for some of us. Just one bad experience. And that’s it. It’s enough for you never to return to church or think about God or faith or Jesus ever again.
Spiritual trauma takes many forms. And different people have varying sensitivities to that trauma. For some, not being allowed to doubt or ask certain questions is enough to turn them off from a religious community for the rest of their lives. Others have had atrocious, reprehensible experiences that scarred not only their spiritual lives, but their emotional, mental, relational, and physical lives as well. Some of us have the spirituality of an orchid; we need to be cared for delicately, carefully, our environment kept just right in order to achieve maximum growth and potential. Others of us are dandelions. Our faith is persistent, we are resilient, and we can thrive in almost any setting. For some of us, if we are mowed over, we bounce right back. Others of us may never recover. But for all of us, if the soil has been poisoned, if our roots have been pulled from the ground, if we have been blocked from the sun’s rays, if we’ve been separated from living water or we’ve been so constricted that we have no room to grow, whether dandelion or orchid, our spiritual potential is dramatically cut short, we find ourselves separated from community, and we leave our spirituality behind, resigned to let that aspect of our lives whither while we attempt to feed the other elements of our lives without it.
Just one bad experience, and then never again. No more Kahlua Mocha Milkshakes, no more vanilla Cokes, no more pews or organs or Scripture or Sunday mornings. That’s it.
So what can we do about it? How can we tend to the pain of all of this spiritual trauma all around us? I’m not quite sure. But I think maybe Paul has some words for us today.
And oof. I struggle with Paul. I struggle with his Hellenistic dualities, I struggle with his rules and his bravado, I struggle with all the ways that his words have been misconstrued and applied to different contexts so that the Christian faith feels suffocating, I feel inept, and Paul’s words get used to drawn lines covered in razor wire to define who is “in” and who is “out.” But something told me to enter back in to this Pauline space this week — years after being the target of so many of his words, years after so many of his scripture bombs had been thrown at who I am, and at those I love. Maybe there’s something at the heart of his words that shouldn’t be thrown out just yet.
And there it is, right in that first verse in our reading today, it’s about the spirit. It’s about what is at the heart. The rest can just fall away, if it happens to make one of God’s beloveds violently ill. We don’t lose heart. We don’t lose what is at the heart. We don’t, as my mom loves to say, “throw the baby out with the bath water.” The hard thing for us, I think, is that we sure do love our bath water. The hard thing, I think, is that we find so much comfort in our building, in our history, in our customs and rituals and liturgies and stories, we mistake that for the baby. We love our hymnals and our doxology and our creeds and our order of worship. We love our spires and our white columns and our Sunday school and our committee meetings. And so we mistake all that for the baby. We invite people in and offer them Kahlua and vanilla vodka and spaghetti and meatballs and a pick-up softball game after the service. None of these things are bad. In fact, they are all pretty good. But for those who have had just one bad experience, these things will never hold their goodness for them ever again. Paul is telling the Corinthians, and telling us, that even if all of that falls away, if we lose all of these outer things, our inner nature is still being renewed day by day. And for some folks, in order for them to come back to the heart of what truly matters, we are going to have to learn to speak in a new language, we are going to have to learn some new rhythms, we are going to have to attend to the spiritual trauma that organs and buildings and communion wafers and pulpits represent. Because all of that is not the heart of what matters. They may be good for us. We may enjoy them very much. They may feed us with rich and delicious food. But they may also be keeping other people out. They may also be too painful and too poisonous for some to even taste.
Paul is imploring all of us to look to that which is inside of ourselves, look to that which cannot be seen, look to the uncompromising love and acceptance and healing power of Christ, because that’s the church, that’s what’s eternal. If we need to strip ourselves of all the “bath water” in order to express that uncompromising love and acceptance and healing power of Christ to those who have been traumatized by the Church, then we’ve got to do it. We’ve got to clear away all the oppressive language and the hurtful ideologies and the unattainable value systems in order to get to the heart of what is “the eternal weight of glory beyond all measure,” which is the baby, born in Bethlehem, to two peasant parents, who wandered around teaching us about uncompromising love and acceptance and resurrection and renewal and sacrificial love, who will be crucified on the cross, simply because he loved too much, and who will come back again to tell us that death is not the end. That’s at the heart of it all. That’s the spirit of our faith. That’s the good and nourishing and life giving and healing food that all people can find palatable.
The bathwater goes cold. It gets dirty and murky. We are all going to die. This building will crumble. Nature is in a constant state of change. So, I ask, as the church changes, as this church changes, can we hold on to the spirit of faith that is in accordance with scripture, can we carry with us the heart of what is inside of us that is being renewed day by day, and can we let go of all the other stuff that might cause pain to someone, that might keep them from getting back on that bike or trying a new cocktail, or entering in to a spiritual space, risking relationships in community, or finding new language with which to talk about the love of God? Will our bathwater keep them away from the baby?
Paul tells us that we are to hold on to the same spirit of faith that is in accordance with the scriptures. And what is the spirit of our faith? It’s presence with Christ. It’s extending grace to more and more people. It’s increasing our thanksgiving, to the glory of God. The rest is just bathwater. Sometimes cozy. Sometimes warm. Sometimes cleansing and calming. But also sometimes scalding. Also sometimes far too frigid. Sometimes, it’s dirty and polluted. It could be drowning. Let’s keep the baby. And let’s be open to all the places where we might need to throw the bathwater out.
My mom still can’t drink Kahlua. But she’s really in to wine now. No more vanilla Cokes for me, but I do enjoy an occasional gin and tonic, and we’ve been playing around with manhattans here and there. I can’t stand carnations and other “funeral flowers,” but we’re growing some sunflowers in our backyard and I enjoy a good lavender body lotion. After a lot of rest, support, encouragement and a new location, Levi got back on his bike. The baby is alive. Let’s go find him. Let’s share him, no matter where that takes us, no matter how that changes us, no matter what we need to leave behind.
Thanks be to God.
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