Wide Open.

2 Corinthians 6:1-13 

So, to this day, my husband doesn’t believe me when I tell him that I ran cross country. I really did. I promise. It was in high school and I ran for three years. It was intense. We ran every day, sometimes twice a day, before school and after school, before our jobs at pizza parlors and ice cream shops, in the rain, in the heat, on weekends, and on vacations. I remember one Thanksgiving I’d just gorged myself on turkey and oyster stuffing and that cranberry sauce in a can, and then I tied up my running shoes and ran a straight lin
e down the Grant County roads, past nothing more than corn and soybeans and more corn.  I came back and it was time for pumpkin pie.

And when it came time for a meet, when it was race day and we’d warmed up and eaten our bagels and drank our water and stretched our calves, we’d line up at the starting line, our fingers on the start buttons of our watches, and wait for the gun. We were a line of anxious, nervous, overly-carbohydrated girls, ready to endure the pain of the next seventeen to twenty-four minutes. And the gun would go off and we’d run. We’d slap through mud and up hills, cut each other off at the turns, stick our elbows out to catch a competitor’s rib or two. And then, after the laps around the baseball fields and through the narrow trails between cheap high school landscaping, we’d see it. The finish line. And with our lungs on fire and sweat dripping behind our knees, we were then expected to kick it in to high gear. Give it our all. Accelerate through the pain, even though our tank was on empty, and pass one more girl, shave off one more second, “leave it all on the course,” as we used to say.

And yet, it was such a fine line between keeping a little bit in reserve, just in case, and then having that to accelerate to the finish line, and finding that extra something that you didn’t know you had to push you to the end. 

Do you pace yourself? Or do you go all out, right away, and hope against hope you get to the finish line before you collapse?

Were you doubting your workouts, your strength, your preparation, your very self so much that you felt like you had to be conservative, pace yourself, take it easy in the beginning, just in case you tripped on an exposed root or got a cramp in your side or spent too much energy in the beginning and had nothing left at the end? Or do you start the race with your whole heart, with the throttle wide open, with only the hope that somehow you can sustain it, somehow you can make it to the finish line before you collapse from exhaustion?

Do you keep some in reserve?

Or.

Do you let it all go and hope that somehow you’ll still have enough to make it through?

Do you keep your heart tucked safely behind your ribs, or do you wear it on your sleeve, vulnerable to anyone with a knife or a stick or an active email account or a twitter handle or just a really sharp pencil?

In our reading today, Paul has opened his heart wide. He’s risking making a fool of himself, resorting to begging, and even violating societal rules of boundaries and humility. One commentary says, “Whatever may be his fear of appearing foolish, of violating decorum and going “too far” [Paul] does not scruple to open his heart wide.” In the words of my therapist, he is “oversharing.” In this pleading, vulnerable petition to the Corinthians, Paul doesn’t have anything left in his tank. He gives them everything he has. He leaves it all on the field. A wide open heart.

I think this text makes us a little squirmy. A little squeamish. Seeing Paul be this emphatic, this emotional, this over-the-top. It’s like you’re eavesdropping on your neighbors’ domestic dispute, or watching the nerd profess his love for the cheerleading captain. It’s like you’re in the next aisle while a bewildered and exhausted mom is doing everything she can to appease her temper-tantrumming two year old so she can grab the groceries and go. It’s like Paul is on the Maury Povich show trying to woo his girlfriend back and convince her that even though it’s not his baby they can still be a family, they can make this work.

Paul is almost boasting about how much he’s given up for this community. Boasting about how humble he is. This isn’t the clearly articulated argument Paul. This isn’t the logical, reserved, pharisaic Paul. This is a passionate, wild, no holds barred, everything but the kitchen sink Paul. Paul at his wits end. Paul throwing everything he has at the church in Corinth to make them understand, to help them “get it.” Paul with his heart, open wide.

And I think we’re all a little scared of passion. We’re all a little scared of emotion and vulnerability and revealing our need. We want to keep that in reserve. We want to put it in canning jars and keep it in the basement just in case we need it someday. We want to be sure we have enough to get us through retirement. We want to be careful, practical, never, ever wasteful.

And I think that’s ok. It’s good to plan. It’s good to conserve and be frugal and not waste. It’s good not to spill your messiest, germiest, deepest darkest slobbering feelings all over everyone you meet. I mean, we don’t want to scare them away. But most of the time, I don’t think that’s the reason why we hold ourselves back. I don’t think that’s the reason why we hide from each other.  I think we close our hearts because we’re embarrassed by our passion, by our hearts open wide. We don’t trust that we’ll still be loved if we reveal all that mess inside of ourselves. And we’re worried that if we do, if we give it all away, if we open our hearts wide, we’ll have nothing left.

And here Paul is, revealing his mess. Laying it all on the line. Cashing in his chips and prying open those dusty jars of pickled cucumbers. 

I think the Corinthians were very comfortable with their 10% tithe. They wanted to love God with 10% of themselves, 10% of their time, 10% of their resources, maybe 10 and a half percent of their love. Any more, and people might look at them like they’re freaks. People will think they’re being counter cultural, they’ll think they’re in a cult and drinking the kool-aid and they’ll have to start letting in the hungry folks from the street and the lonely folks from the retirement homes and the over-sugared kids with ADHD. 

No. 10% is good. 10% is manageable. I can make it to the finish line if I just use 10% at a time. If I pace myself. If I only stay home and write checks to food pantries but don’t share a meal with someone with broken teeth and a stutter. If I only dish out the meals in the kitchen, and never venture to talk to the homeless man in the dining room.

The Corinthians wanted a gospel of reason and moderation. Something logical, practical, reasonable. Something they can put in a box and take out and polish on holidays and pass on to the kids when they die. Something that is orderly and makes sense and is simple and understood and doesn’t ask more from us than we think we can reasonably give. They’re holding back, just in case. You never know.

But Paul says no. Don’t keep it in reserve. Use it. Use it now. Open wide your hearts. Lay it all on the line. Be vulnerable. Be real. Show your mess. Take risks. Let others in.

You know, the whole, “When someone hits you on your right cheek, give him your left also. When someone takes your cloak, give him your coat as well. And when someone forces you to walk one mile, walk with him two.” When you’re asked to run the race, kick it in to high gear as soon as the starting pistol goes off. You may not make it to the end. You might use it all up in the first mile. But do it anyway. See what happens. Trust that you have enough.

Open wide your hearts. 

Start a ministry where you serve free food to anyone, and you worry about funds and sustainability and practicality later.

Open your doors to folks who will probably use your bathrooms to bathe themselves and will fill their coat pockets with sugar packets and steal the toilet paper right out of the dispensers.

Share a story you’ve never told before with someone who feels ashamed all the time.

Go beyond signing facebook petitions and giving lip service to the atrocities of racism and ask hard questions of special interest groups, of our capitalist system, of our white majority. 

Start uncomfortable conversations. 

Refuse to accept that violence is the norm of our day.

Listen to those living on the margins. Try doing something their way.

Let yourself feel the pain of all the really tough things you have suffered in your life. 

And then share that pain with someone else.

Give up your desire to please and to keep this false sense of “peace” and challenge the status quo, explore and learn something new, follow your bliss and do that thing you say you’ll do when the kids are grown, when you retire, when you finally land that job or pay off that debt. Step out of the boat, walk on water. 

Because when you open wide your hearts, then, then you can receive the messy stuff of grace. If you hold back, if you keep some in reserve, you’re never going to need the grace. And grace only comes when you really, really need it. 

And then when you get it, you can give away all that messy, gooey, sticky grace.

Let your heart be a mess of intake and outtake, a traffic jam of inbound and outbound, a thunderstorm of colliding high and low pressures.

Open wide your hearts. Take the risks. Stand up for justice. Demand change. Stand in the line of fire for the sake of another. Be vulnerable. Maybe you’ll see Jesus.

This isn’t efficient. It’s a mess. It’s collision and reaction and explosion and confusion. It’s everyone speaking in different languages and yet still somehow understanding each other. It’s walking around with flames on your head. It’s God making connections and healing hurts and raising the dead. It’s pandemonium and chaos and mystery and connection. 

It’s what grace looks, and feels, and sounds and tastes like. 

Open your heart. That place where arteries and veins come together. Where the blue and the red meet. Where the abundance of oxygen and the lack of it comes back to this muscle of sinew and energy and electric pulses. 

Open wide your hearts. It’ll hurt. Like open heart surgery. But it’s where the life is, Paul says. It’s where Jesus is.

Open your hearts —wide. 

And then get ready for the collision. The collision of human hearts all tangled up and bleeding together. The collision of vulnerability and grace and sacrifice and joy and the messiness of humanity. Get ready for the traffic pile-up of forgiveness and change and transformation.

Get ready for the collision of humanity and deity. Of God, who was made into messy, vulnerable, open flesh, open wide, for all of us. Jesus, who hit the ground running and opened his heart wide even unto death, and then beyond.

Open wide your hearts. Don’t leave anything in the tank. Run the race with wild, persevering, abandon. When you collapse at the finish line, you’ll land among all those soft mushy open hearts. You will have no idea how you made it. You will be completely empty of anything you thought you had left. And you’ll be full of so much grace. You’ll be embraced by the widest, wildest, most vulnerable heart of all. The heart of Christ.

Thanks be to God.

Of Weasels and Weaving

 Mark 4:26-34

When I was a freshman in college, aside from the trumped up PE class, the remedial calculus, and Introduction to Western Literature, I had to take what was called a “first year seminar.” I think it was a chance for those of us who were new to higher education and the liberal arts to take a step back and think about what all this might be about, think about why we signed off on all those loans and moved in to that tiny dorm room with the girl from West Michigan, before we dove in to the minutia and detailed particularities of our chosen majors and got lost in the parties and clubs and Lake Michigan beach that was just twenty minute drive down the road. In this class, we read philosophy, we read novels, we read speeches and poetry, and one particular, life changing essay by pulitzer prize winning author, Annie Dillard. The essay was called “Living like Weasels.”

Now I’m so very tempted to just stop right now, pull out the essay, and read it for you all and we can call it a day. The essay is beautiful and rich and a far greater testament to the intimacy and the brutality, and the intense passion that is the kingdom of God. But because I am a people pleaser, and I am afraid of being accused of not doing my own homework, I guess I’ll just summarize it here. 

Around sunset, Annie Dillard liked to walk a few blocks past her house in the suburbs to a pond, nestled between gated housing developments and the highway. She would go there to sit. To watch. To be.

While there, she encounters a weasel. She’s sitting on a log and thinking her thoughts, and there it is, her first encounter with a weasel. And she has this moment with it. She enters, as Howard Thurman would say, the “genuine” of the weasel, and the weasel enters in to the genuine in her. Suddenly there is no Annie. No weasel. No pond, or sunset, or rotting log. And there is also only Annie, and only the weasel, and only the pond and the sunset and the log. 

Weasels are wild and reckless things she says. Unpredictable. They are predators. Ruthlessly going for the jugular at the neck until the victim gives in to the circle that is life. 

She tells the story of a man who shot an eagle out of the sky, and when it landed with a thud onto the earth and he ran over to collect his prize, he found, firmly attached to the eagle’s neck, the skull of a weasel. Somehow, maybe it was the eagle looking for lunch, or maybe it was the trumped up vibrato of a wild and reckless weasel, but somehow, there was an encounter between the rodent and the scavenging bird of prey. Did the eagle eat what little it could reach of the weasel while it gripped its neck whatever the cost? Did the weasel simply refuse to let go until it lost everything of what it was except that grip to the neck? And then the eagle carried this millstone of a scull around its neck for the rest of its life, soaring above the tree line, swooping above the waves, nesting in the highest branches always with this weasel, clamped to the side of its neck?

It’s like that, she says.  But she never really tells us exactly what the “it” is that she’s referring to.

All the best things are like that though. The best things that can only be experienced through the wonder and intimacy and delicacy and precariousness of the physical things in our everyday worlds. 

It’s like this. It’s like that. Jesus says. Annie says. A weasel or a rose or a seed or a pearl. This thing we can’t quite get ahold of is like a coin in a field and bread that is broken, and vines and branches and a sower who went out to sow. That’s what it’s like, this kingdom of God - always at the tip of our tongues, always slipping through our fingers, but always, always leaving some hint, some kind of evidence that it was there or that it’s coming or that it’s here right now. The kingdom of God is like that moment that Annie Dillard has staring eye to eye with that weasel. They’re locked in an embrace of sorts, they’re entranced by the other, they’re intimately connected, and then poof, it’s gone, just like that, “enchantment” broken. She experienced a moment of the kingdom of God, and that made her think of the story of the weasel and the eagle, and of passionate intensity and gripping dedication, and relentless commitment to never letting go. She’s doing what Jesus is showing us how to do in our passage today. She’s looking at the world around her and finding the sacred, the intimate moments, that reveal to her that there is so much more around us than a “simple” drainage pond on the side of the highway. And she connecting it to more stories, more encounters of the world, weaving together likenesses until the warp and the weft combine to make one big tapestry.

It’s like this.

It’s like that.

It’s like a lamp under a bushel basket.

It’s like seed, scattered on the ground, and the guy who throws it out there goes about his life. He sleeps. He wakes up. And somehow, he doesn’t know how, but somehow the seed sprouts and grows and the “earth produces of itself.”

It’s like a tiny mustard seed, that when planted, gets huge and overgrown and out of control and the birds of the air can make nests in its branches. You get enough of these threads and an image of the whole starts to form. 

But the most important thing, the most important thing that we have to hold on to, that we must latch on to with our tightest grip, that we must lock our jaws upon, is that question itself. “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it?”

Look around you, Jesus is saying, we can’t hold the Kingdom of God in our hands, no more than we could hold water. We can’t put it in a box and say, “here it is! Oh good! I’m so glad that we’ve found it.” We can’t fully understand or name or control this thing that Jesus is inaugurating. We can only experience it, describe what it’s like, point in the direction from where it came, and then keep looking around for more. It’s just one thread. But it’s a thread. 

The kingdom of God is like exhausted children telling ghost stories with flashlights under their chins. The kingdom of God is like a cluttered house and the single mom who saves the yogurt containers because they can’t be recycled. The kingdom of God is like those two trees you go past everyday on your way to the dog park. It’s like cats scratching at the bottom of an empty food bowl. It’s like confused disciples and bewildered crowds. It’s like late night Netflix binges and like saying “I’m sorry” and hearing “I love you” for the very first time. It’s ponds in the suburbs and losing yourself in the eyes of a weasel. It’s like latching your whole self to a thing and never, ever, letting go. It’s like remembering how easy it is to forget that all this stuff, all this earth and wheat and leaves and clouds and the stories themselves, are so much like the kingdom that the division between the two things falls away, the “like” disappears, and when we experience it for exactly what it is, there it is, the kingdom of God. We stop seeing the individual threads, and a pattern starts to emerge. The kingdom of God is in that thread, because the kingdom of God is all the threads.

The kingdom of God is like a seed. And the kingdom of God is the seed. Jesus himself is so very much like God in God’s self, that the division between the two blurs. Jesus shows us what God is like. And Jesus is God. 

Jesus wants us to approach the whole world, approach him, like that. WIth so much intensity and determination and stubbornness that the divisions we set up between ourselves and all these other things disappear. We become so like Christ that we become “Christians” - or literally, “little Christs.” We grab on to the neck of the kingdom and we refuse to let go, no matter what happens, no matter if this is how it all ends. So that when our story is done, they’ll know what we could never let go of. They’ll know what we were so committed to that it cost us everything we had and everything we are. They’ll see our thread that was necessary to make the whole.

See, Jesus is showing us in this passage that it’s not about “understanding,” or comprehending, or writing a creed or a dissertation about how you know all that right answers. It’s about the experience. It’s about looking so hard for the kingdom of God in this world, in all the fleshy, incarnated, devastating, brokenness of this world, that we can no longer differentiate ourselves from it. The kingdom is in us. The kingdom becomes us. Or maybe rather, we become the kingdom. We weave ourselves so intimately with this world that we become the world.  

I know I’m swooping in here with flowery and philosophical language and I’m getting carried away with the imagery and metaphors and the stuff, but really, what I want us to keep looking at, what I want to keep looking for, are all those encounters - encounters with weasels and eagles and seeds and mustard bushes and bread and befuddled people - those encounters where we lose ourselves, for just a moment, where we look into the eyes of the other and we get lost, and thus, somehow, we’re found. We experience this life, this precious and frustrating and anxious and terrifying thing with so much intensity that we see the holy in it all, we see the kingdom, right here, right in front of us, in pianos and candles and pews and hymnals. We see it in the threads. We latch on to this life stuff so tightly that we never let it go, so that when it finally kills us, everyone will know, everyone will see how we made the kingdom of God real in our own lives. 

And there’s a resurrection in that. There’s a living beyond our lives and our selves when we fully enter in, when we fully clamp on to that thing that we will give our whole lives to. 

And that’s what Jesus did. He fully entered in. He embraced all the stuff. He ate and he drank and felt the sand between his toes. He got dirty and he got hurt and he bled and he looked around and saw the kingdom. He said, “Here it is. It’s like this. It’s this.” Clamp your jaws on that. Look so deeply in that you lose yourself. Give it everything you have. Don’t let it go. Weave yourself fully into that tapestry.

The kingdom of God is like a man, sent from God, who, though in the form of God, didn’t consider equality with God something to cling to, but rather entered in to this world, clung to this world so completely that he was human, he clamped on to all the things that humans experienced, that he was so like a human he was a human, and he died the most human of deaths. He became so human that God exalted him to the highest of places, soaring above us all, so that we can bow and proclaim that Jesus Christ is Lord. So that we can grab a hold of him, and never let go. So that we can be a thread in that tapestry of the kingdom of God.

Thanks be to God.