josephholubsermons
October 23, 2011 - Pent 19
Matthew 22:36-40
The Story of Another Is Holy Ground
“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”
Jesus said, to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all
your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.
This is the greatest and first commandment.
And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as
yourself. On these two
commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” - Matthew
22:36-40
One of the things I enjoy
immensely and find to be intensely meaningful is working with our
confirmation age youth – middle school youth.
I have had a few people tell me that because I feel that way I am
abnormal.
I don’t see it that way at all.
If youth are given the opportunity, they convey an
unvarnished honesty and a
willingness to think creatively.
Perhaps my approach is somewhat unconventional in that I
challenge them to think
critically and to be involved in shaping their own conclusions about
matters of faith and life rather than me
rigidly dictate to them what
I think they ought to think.
I also have experienced that if I am open to them, I can learn
much from them; that they can be my teachers as well as I their teacher.
It is very much a
two-way-street. It reminds
me of the prophet Isaiah who said,
“and a little child shall lead
them” (Isaiah 11:6) or when Jesus said,
“Unless you become like children you shall not experience the kingdom of
God.” (Matthew 18:1-4)
With the creative help of my team leaders, I create our own confirmation
curriculum stressing key aspects of the Christian Faith, making sure it
is interactive and experiential as well as stimulating intellectually
and emotionally. Last
Wednesday evening’s experience is a good example of why I enjoy and love
these youth so much and treasure my experience with them.
The past couple of sessions we have been focusing in on a couple of
questions. One is,
“Where is it that we might
experience the Divine presence in life?”
A related question has been,
“Does faith
remove us from life or cause
us to engage life at a
deeper level than merely the superficial?”
In our last couple of sessions we have turned to Jesus’ life and
teachings to seek perspectives on these questions.
One of the passages we looked at was this very one that is
our gospel for today:
“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”
Jesus said, to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all
your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.
This is the greatest and first commandment.
And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as
yourself. On these two
commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
Wednesday evening, I gave each youth a
different picture of a human
face. Examples
included, a teen aged-girl with her face in her hand crying;
a very old man with an
incredibly wrinkled face and a distressed expression; the grizzled face
of a man wearing a stocking cap with a scraggly beard and sad eyes;
the face of an older woman with
brown skin and a nose ring; the face of a brown-skinned child with a
wound on his face and bandage on his eye; the face of a black child who
looked as if her situation reflected poverty; the face a young man in a
wheelchair – perhaps quadriplegic.
I then asked the youth to use their
imaginations and
develop a story about the
life behind the face; to give a
story to the face; give the face a personal name and a geographic
location; express what the hopes
and dreams of this person might be; what the
biggest obstacle in his-her
life might be; their greatest
need; and to write it in the first person.
In others words, I asked them to write a brief self-portrait for
the life that lived behind the face.
Their responses were nothing less than
profound.
I will share three of them.
I gave them no help other than with their grammar. I did
not change any of their words, figures of speech or expressions.
Of the face of the girl weeping
one youth wrote:
My name is Ruthie, and I live in
Denver. I am a very
sensitive and shy. I
don’t know why, but there are kids at school who bully me.
It is terrible! I
hate school. I go to school afraid everyday that they will bully me.
My biggest hope in life is that these kids would not bully me,
and that I find a friend who would support me.
People don’t see that I am a nice person because I don’t show it.
I am afraid. I need
God or someone to help me be stronger and to get these kids to stop
bullying me.
The youth who had the grizzled
face of the bearded man wearing the stocking cap wrote:
My name is Pete.
I live in Chicago. I
am homeless and usually sleep outside in a park.
I have no family. My
biggest problem is that I have a mental illness and cannot get help with
it. My illness keeps me
from living in a normal way.
Sometimes I act a little strange and people think I am a bad
person and are afraid of me.
But I am not bad. I
just have a hard time. My
biggest need is getting food and staying warm in the winter.
Another youth wrote this of the
old man with the wrinkled face.
I am Al.
I live in a home for old people.
I am lonely. I sit
in my room by myself all day.
I am 90 years old. I
have a son, but he lives far away and never comes to see me.
I have cancer. I
forget things. My wife died
a long time ago. I have
pain that doesn’t go away.
I need help from the people who work here – even to eat.
I think I am going to die soon.
One-by-one each youth presented his-her portrait, and then we had a
discussion. I asked the
question. Do these
portraits tells us anything about what it might mean
to love God and neighbor?
One of the youth said, “To
love God is to listen to our neighbor’s story.”
“Listen to our neighbor’s story,”
she said.
Ah yes, “and a little child
shall lead them.” (Isaiah 11:6) “Unless
you become like children you cannot experience the kingdom of God.”
(Matthew 18:3)
I think my young friend is on to something.
Everybody has a story to tell.
When people come to us here at LOTM looking for help, they almost
always want to tell their story.
Now if you are a cynic, you
might feel they are merely trying to manipulate to get something from
us. But we discourage that
kind of dismissive cynicism.
Cynicism, in that form, is merely camouflage for the attitude,
“I don’t want to be
bothered with you – go away.”
At that moment
we have a choice. We can
either listen or not listen.
We can listen and, in listening, risk opening a little bridge
between self and the other – or not listen and closing off any
possibility of connection.
That’s the choice we have as we make our way through the winding courses
of everyday life no matter who we are. That’s part of what we see going
on in the world right now from Occupy Wall Street to the movements for
liberation from despotism in the Middle East – people trying to get
their stories heard. The
confirmation youth is right on target.
Perhaps the first baby
step in loving neighbor as self is being willing to
simply listen to another’s story.
But that is no easy task because in order to listen we must
quiet our own stories – and
silence the noise of our own self-serving agendas that distract us and
often drown out the stories of others.
The most profound thing about these portraits the youth composed was not
so much the specifics of the content of their portraits (which were very
cool), but their willingness to climb inside a nameless face of another
human being and give that face the
dignity of a story.
They inspire me to take seriously the faces that I encounter on
a daily basis and to confer dignity by opening my life, if even just a
crack, to the story behind the face that stands before me.
A significant portion of my ministry over these past 36 years has been
given to listening to the stories of others.
I have listened to stories in hospital rooms, nursing homes,
the homes of the homebound, funeral homes,
church camps, on mountaintops
and gleaning fields, family rooms, soup kitchens and at kitchen tables.
I have listened to the stories of the sick, the lonely, the lost,
the unemployed, the emotionally wounded, the homeless, the broken, the
forsaken, the guilt-ridden, the grieving, the angry, the arrogant, the
distraught, the depressed, the despaired, the addicted and the dying.
After all these stories and all that listening, I can say
that, more times than not, I have left with a sense that I have
encountered
Something Greater than
merely myself; engaged Something
More than just my own little self-absorbed world that encases me
like a shell; Something I may even name as Divine.
I have experienced the story of
another as holy ground – a place to meet the Divine.
For me today the bottom line
of these words of Jesus is that the God-experience lies in a deeper
experience of this life; at a deeper level of this life.
Jesus’ words pull me deeper into life, not remove me from life –
and the deeper into life I go, the more profound my experience of the
Divine. Jesus’ words point
me toward the other and into the depth of another’s story.
There are even times that in the face that is before me, I
sometimes even see a faint reflection of the face of Jesus.
Will opening oneself up to the stories of others solve all the world’s
problems. No.
But it is in the experience of engaging the story of another and
the life behind the face that
limitless possibilities for change and transformation, renewal and
hope to spring to life..
Teacher,
which commandment in the law is the greatest?”
Jesus said, to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all
your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.
This is the greatest and first commandment.
And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as
yourself. On these two
commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”