GREIF INTO GRIEVANCE
1 Kings 18:18-40, Luke 9:51-56
[Since spoken communication differs from written, some of the grammar and syntax of this transcript may seem awkward in written form. To keep integrity with the spirit of the original delivery, the transcript seeks to stay close to the exact words spoken.]
This morning I begin the first of a three part series on forgiveness. And I would ask you, as we begin this new enterprise, to join me in prayer. Let us pray. O come Holy Spirit, come as the fire and burn. Come as the wind and cleanse. Come as the light and reveal. Come as the water and refresh. Holy and loving God, convict us, convert us, and consecrate us until we are wholly and completely yours. Amen.
Jimmy and Kenny stuck my face to a dresser with bubble gum. It was during one of our family reunions of which I know I have spoken before from this pulpit. I always wanted to hang out with Kenny and Jimmy because they were older. But I was just a kid who chewed a lot of bubble gum. See, each day after putt putt, we'd go to the candy store and I'd buy one, sometimes even two, of those Big Daddy bubble gum sticks. If you grew up during the time when I grew up, you'll remember them. They were huge, at least a foot long and I would buy one and I would jam the whole thing in my mouth and I'd chew it all at once.
So one day, Kenny and Jimmy got tired of my chasing them around and they caught me and took me by the arms and legs, put bubble gum on my face, and they stuck it to a dresser.
I hated them after that, that summer. I was determined to get my revenge. It was delicious as I thought about it at night. I pictured that huge bottle of Aunt Jemima syrup, the one that's really shaped like Aunt Jemima, and I pictured draining the whole thing in their sleeping bags before they went to sleep. I pictured half chewed globs of Big Daddy bubble gum there near the feet. I could picture it; I could taste it. Vengeance, it tasted sweet!
So the disciples were walking along with Jesus and basically they asked him, "Shall we torch the town?" The background of the story is this. Picture a map of Israel and up here in the north is Galilee, where Jesus was born, where he did a lot of his ministry and hanging out. Down here is Judea, where Jerusalem is, where he ended his ministry. Between those two places is Samaria. And we all know from our Sunday school lessons that Samaria is the land of the Samaritans, who were hated by the Jews. They were the enemies, the sort of bastard child of the people of Israel. They had been taken over by a foreign power way back when and they had intermarried with the Gentiles. Their religion had become a strange mixture of idolatry and old belief. They were the enemies.
It was rather remarkable that Jesus proposed going into one of the towns of the Samaritans and preaching the Gospel. So he sent a couple of disciples ahead to prepare for a visit there. They came back and said, "They don't want you because your face is set to Jerusalem. Because you're a Jew."
"They dissed you Jesus! Shall we torch the town? We have the power of Heaven at our fingertips!" You see, they were thinking about the story that I read this morning from the Hebrews scripture, the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal; the story that would have happened at the very town they were proposing to visit near Mount Carmel, before the land of the Samaritans was Samaria, when it was still part of Israel. That story about Elijah battling the enemies of Israel, the prophets of Baal, who after their pathetic incantations couldn't make this pile of wood catch fire. But Elijah snaps his fingers and it burns up like balsa wood in a forest fire. Then the people gathered up the 450 prophets of Baal and they slaughtered them.
They showed them who God was! They showed them who the true God was! Revenge is sweet!
"Shall we torch the town? They dissed you Jesus!"
Revenge is sweet. Sure it's a clichÈ, but things become clichÈs, people say them a lot, because there's some truth to them. So I'm beginning this sermon series on forgiveness by talking about why it's so gosh darn hard to forgive, to use forgiveness as a first option. Because vengeance is sweet. You've tasted it, haven't you? That summer with Kenny and Jimmy and the dresser, it tasted like the bubble gum I was going to stick to Jimmy and Kenny's legs in my little revenge scheme. Of course it's a trivial thing around which to base my sermon here this morning, a trivial thing that seemed big at the time. But what are such trivial things but those things that seem big to small minds? Like the sleight at the office; the refusal to do it the way you're telling them to do it and acknowledge your authority; the guy who cuts you off on the freeway.
What do we do when someone has dished out the bitterness of grief, somebody who has hurt us, but try to seek the sweet taste of vengeance, of retribution, in order to right the wrong that's been done to us. It's a very ancient methodology to attain justice! The lex talionis, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth--that was a huge leap forward in human culture because it was a heck of a lot better than a life for an eye, or a limb for a tooth. Gil Bailie, my friend and in some ways my theological mentor, says that our natural reaction as human beings to griefÖwhen somebody gives us griefÖis to turn our grief into grievance. It's in our human anthropological DNA.
Fred Luskin, in his book, Forgive for GoodÖI list that book in your bulletin; I list a few books you might want to consider reading along with this series on forgivenessÖLuskin tells the story of a lot of people in that book who are struggling with grievances of one kind or another. One of them is the story of a woman named Dana. Dana was promised a promotion by her superiors and when it came time for her promotion, she was passed up in favor of somebody from the outside. The management said they wanted new blood. Like any of us she was upset, angry and incensed about it, as she should be. But the problem was that a year and a half later, she was still dwelling on the fact that she had been passed up for a promotion. It was all she could think about. It was dominating her life.
Luskin says that people who find it hard to forgive often deal with their grief by creating what he calls a grievance story. Grief hardens into grievance and for some it becomes the story that runs their life, the operating principle of their life. And here's the ironic thing: people who are carrying around a grievance story tend to like their grievance story. It's sort of like their pet that you carry around. It comforts us to think about the wrong that someone has done to us. How we might fantasize about ways of getting back at themÖand usually they're things we can never accomplish. Even if we did, we wonder if they would really satisfy us.
Luskin says that grievance stories that we might be carrying around can be the driving force of our life. You know that you've run into somebody with a grievance story when you're talking to them at a cocktail party and they're telling you the same story they told you at the cocktail party six months ago about how somebody had wronged them, how they're a victim. Perhaps we might ask ourselves the question, "Is there such a person living inside of us?"
Captain Ahab, he's the quintessential guy with a grievance story. Moby Dick, Melville's great workÖsome of us perhaps have read it, all of us probably have heard about it. Captain Ahab is the main character. He's not the protagonist, but the main character, the one around whom the whole thing turns. And his whole life revolves around his quest for vengeance against the beast that had given him grief, the white whale that had bitten off his leg and ruined his life. His grievance story was the organizing principle of his life, as if he had looked into the eyes of the Medusa and it had frozen his imagination. Of course, the whole crew of the Pequod is going along with Captain Ahab on his maniacal quest for vengeance: Ishmael, Queequeg, Starbuck and Stubb. The whole crew! That story is a reminder too of how it's not just individuals that can be carrying around a grievance story. Peoples, tribes and nations can form as their organizing principle, a grievance story.
When I started reading Moby DickÖI always wanted to scale that literary mountain. I found myself reading it right after 9/11, just as we were beginning the war in Afghanistan. It was, as the young people say, "freaking me out," because I was reading about Captain Ahab's maniacal quest to find the white whale as I was reading the headlines about our country's quest to find bin Laden. Our desire to balance the scales by shedding some blood. I started to wonder whether 9/11 might be our grievance story and whether terrorism might be our white whale. I started really "freaking out" when I read the end of that bookÖand most of know the end, right? The Pequod goes down with Captain Ahab and the only one who survives is the one who tells the tale, Ishmael.
Vengeance, the thought of it, the prospect of it seems so sweet. As I think back on that summer of bubble gum, all those Big Daddy's, I remember I put two of them in my mouth at once and I got sick. Bubble gum never tasted the same after that. It's the thing we think we want, the empty calories of vengeance, the quick carbo hit of revenge. Anne Lamott says that vengeance is like eating rat poison and waiting around for the rat to die. I love that line. Think about it. Frederick Buechner says this and I think this just puts it so well. Here's a quote from Frederick Buechner, who I think taught over here at this little school? Or did he attend there? Anyway, he writes,
Of the seven deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past. To roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come. To savor to the last toothsome morsel, both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back. In many ways, it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.So what do we do with our grief so it doesn't harden into grievance? Maybe the first step, what this sermon is all about, the diagnosis part of the formula, is to recognize that that's what we do as human beings. I find myself doing it every day. But maybe if we recognize that that's what we do, we, as people called together by Jesus Christ, can know and begin to practice another possibility.
When I was in Cape Cod this August, in Hyannis PortÖI have this lovely deal where I provide pastoral services to a chapel in Hyannis Port and they let us stay and play there. I invited Rich and Grier to come and join us for a weekend and Rich did some music with the people of the chapel there. After church one day we did an impromptu hymn sing and somebody requested that we sing the hymn, What a Friend We Have in Jesus. Not my favorite hymn, a sentimental old standard that I associated most with Sunday school when I was around nine or ten years old. We were singing that hymn and we got to the second phrase of the song, "What a friend we have in Jesus. All our sins and griefs to bear." My mind went back to that summer. It went on a flight of fancy and I remembered that time with Kenny and Jimmy and the bubble gum and the dresser.
My mind went off on a flight of fancy and I had this vision, a Flannery O'Connor-esque vision, in that little church, a vision that looked sort of strange and odd, like the comic books of my youth. I pictured Jesus there on the cross up on the Mount of Calvary dealing with all the grief and pain of the world. It was strange, but I pictured the cross like a giant vacuum cleaner, vacuuming up all the grief and pain of the world. Then I saw myself stuck to that dresser. All my shame and my grief pinned to that dresser. All the crappy things that people had done to me in my life pinned to that dresser. I somehow unstuck myself and stood up straight and looked at that cross and found that all my thoughts of vengeance against Kenny and Jimmy had disappeared. They too were there, standing with me, looking up at that cross. Somehow I saw even that bubble gum getting unstuck from my face. My face got clean somehow looking up at that cross as all the pain and grief of the world was being drawn toward it like big blobs of gum. Even the pain of terrorism, Nazism and apartheid being drawn to Jesus at the cross and I looked up there on the Mount of Calvary and I saw Jesus making something beautiful out of all of it. I saw the light of the cross.
[Sung-] "All our sins and griefs to bear. What a privilege to carry, everything to God in prayer." I thought, maybe it's as simple as that. Maybe instead of letting grief become grievance, it's as simple as letting it go. Maybe prayer is another word for "letting it go" by the power of God and maybe it's true that when we experience the bitterness of grief that Jesus gives us a taste of something better, something truly sweeter than vengeance. The cross is the lens through which we can see another possibility for our lives through the power of God. The possibility not of being victims seeking vengeance, but indeed the glorious possibilityÖnot of being victims, but victors, of becoming heroes experiencing the power of God that gives us the ability to forgive and to be forgiven.
How else can you explain the miracle that happens when someone forgives? When someone is forgiven? How else can you explain the miracle that a woman named Marietta Jaeger experienced in forgiving the killer of her seven-year old daughter? And in that process experiencing the power and transformation of God? It's to her story that we will turn next week. And I hope you can join us. Amen.
September 7, 2008
The Reverend Jeffrey A. Vamos
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