On Trusting Ourselves

"On Trusting Ourselves"

Mark 7:24-30 TRUST Stewardship Campaign
March 14, 2010

From there he set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and
did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, but a
woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and
she came and bowed down at his feet. Now the woman was a Gentile, of
Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. He said
to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw
it to the dogs.” But she answered him, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the
children’s crumbs.” Then he said to her, “For saying that, you may go—the demon has
left your daughter.” So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon
gone.

In this continuing series on A SABBATH TRUST, I was kind of put into a dilemma, and
that dilemma was what to do with the focus of trusting yourself, when so much of our
actual religious tradition seems to warn us against that very idea. In so much of
Scripture one finds the idea that one should never rely upon one’s own sense of
wisdom, one’s own instincts about a situation, and instead rely upon the Lord, rely upon
God alone, trust God alone.   Well, it’s hard disagree with that idea, because so often
we don’t lean on those everlasting arms…we lean on everything but those everlasting
arms—we trust money, power, friendships, partners and spouses more than we do
God. Surely that is what those cautionary words from Scripture are trying to tell us—to
trust God first and foremost, and from there all other kinds of trust can flow.

But the reality is that deep trust in God is not possible if one cannot trust oneself, just
like you cannot love another human being unless one has some measure of love for
oneself, a care for oneself. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” Jesus tells us,
and of course, the assumption in that command is that one does actually love oneself,
and that it is impossible to truly and completely love another with having some measure
of love for yourself. I think the problem comes when we interpret a love of self with
selfishness, with this idea that to care for oneself, to have regard for oneself, to take
care of your own emotional and spiritual and physical needs is somehow a selfish act,
an unholy act, something that someone like Jesus would never do, because, after all,
he self sacrifices himself, he intentionally goes to the cross, giving himself away,
selflessly. And yet, if you actually read the Gospels, you know that indeed, he did love
himself, he did take care of himself, in all those moments when he tore himself away
from the clamoring crowds, the needy crowds, and he went away to take care of his
own soul, his own needs. And when people questioned him, challenged him, he trusted
himself, he trusted that God had indeed given him this particular work to do, despite
what people said to him, that nothing good has ever come out of Galilee, that prophets
don’t look like him, talk like him, and believe like he did. Surely he trusted God more
than other person on earth, and yet, even then, he had trust himself, had to trust that
what he thought God was saying through him and to him, was true, and was indeed the
voice and work of God.   If you don’t believe in yourself, you can’t quite truly believe in
God, not fully, not truly, because if you don’t trust your own experience, your own
experience of how God has met you and cared for you in this life, you can’t quite trust
whether or not God will be there the next time, and thus trust is impossible.

I think most of you know that I spent my first six years of ministry ordained into a
denomination that worked primarily with the gay and lesbian community, a
denomination called the Metropolitan Community Church. It was very small
denomination of perhaps 250 churches worldwide, compared to some 5500 churches in
the United Church of Christ, which is itself considered a small denomination, compared
to say, the United Methodists and the Southern Baptists, with their tens of thousands of
churches. Much of my ministry was doing the work that no other ministers would do—
the baptism of children with two mothers, or the funerals of people who were not
welcomed by their family, nor the typical church, but yet, so much of what I did was very
much geared to the experience of rejection that so many of my friends and I had
experienced at the hands of friends and family, a rejection that strengthened and
affirmed by the church in general. I spend a lot a time dealing with what the lesbian
poet Audre Lord talked about in her poem, A Litany of Survival, in which she says that
many in the lesbian and gay community are:

imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother's milk

They have been told since the beginning that they were not supposed to be, that they
were not loved by God, not if they continued to be gay, as if it was a choice, that there
was nothing worse than who they were and are, and their love and lovemaking was a
horrible, horrible thing. Obviously, I spent a lot of time trying to wean people from that
toxic milk of self-hatred, often perpetrated by my own religion, but I have to admit that
this kind of work got old and wearisome very quickly, this constant working with people
on what the Bible does and does not say about homosexuality, being as honest and
fair-minded as I could be about the issue.

And yet, over and over again, people struggled, and I kept wondering why, despite the
evidence, despite their own experiences of their love for another person of the same
gender, did they—we—continue to beat themselves up, spiritually and emotionally.
That mystery all came to head one day in Dallas, as I was sitting with yet another
person dealing with this issue, a young man who had come from a very fundamentalist
Christian background, Bible in hand, wanting to be convinced by me that who he was
was OK with God, I suppose, but not being able to let go of that imprint of fear and self-
hatred he had been fed since that day early on his life when he realized that he was
different, that he wasn’t going to be what his church and family wanted him to be.
Sitting with him, I could just feel myself being deflated by having yet the same
conversation about this issue with yet another 20 year old whose understanding of
Scripture was as a black and white as the church he came from. And all of sudden it
struck me, it struck me that what this young man wasn’t doing, and hadn’t been taught
to do by his own particular religious background, was to trust himself, to believe what
he had experienced deeply in his own bones, and then, of course, it would be possible
for him trust his experience as a gay man, and to trust the goodness of his love
making. “Look,” I said, “you got to trust yourself, and trust what you know, and what
you’ve experienced in the arms of someone you love, and then you’ve got to trust that
God knows what you know, and what you’ve experienced, that God knows the
goodness of your heart, and this, whatever and however you define it, is the truth you
know, the truth you’ve come to trust about what you’ve experienced in this life. And
then,” I said to him, in one of the few moments in my life where I think I got all of it just
about right, I said to him, “and you have to trust the goodness of God, that God sees
your heart, and knows, knows you and loves you”—sort of the way that Sojourner Truth
talks about “none but Jesus could hear me”. “But first, you’ve got to trust yourself,
because you can’t trust God until you can find some measure of trust in yourself and
the truth of your own experience.”

Since then, since that moment in my office in Dallas, it seems more and more true to
me, that all truth starts here, with our experience as human beings, even our
experiences of God start here, and not over there, but here, within us. Think about our
Scripture today, when the Syrophoenician woman comes after Jesus, and gets rebuffed
by him, told no by Jesus. I want to remind you about the background here, how utterly
unusual it was for a woman to approach a man and ask for what she needed, especially
a man that was not her relative. And it gets even more interesting when you factor in
that she is not a Jew, but a Gentile, an unclean, spiritually dirty Gentile, and so when
she approaches Jesus, she has two strikes against her, and this Jesus, well, he is not
willing to throw her another baseball, not willing to hear her request. It’s an odd, even
disturbing moment for many of us because of Jesus’ attitude, but if one can get beyond
some of that doctrinal milk that was fed us a child, the kind of poisonous milk that said
that Jesus could never really be as human as we are, then it doesn’t seem so
uncomfortable, so painful to hear.

Yes, Jesus was actually having a bad day, I suspect, a wearisome day, and he went
into default mode, into the belief system that he had been taught with his own mother’s
milk, and that was that the Jews were God’s special people and everyone else was,
well, just “everyone else,” at best; at worst, they were dogs, gentile dogs, a common
derogatory term used by Jews for Gentiles, designated as socially and spiritually
unclean as dogs were considered in that culture.   I know it hurts somewhat to see
Jesus in such a light, to see him be so exclusionary in that moment, to a woman who
simply wanted her daughter healed. And yet, for me, it makes him more human, more
real, and this moment makes him as a vulnerable to human prejudices as I am, and you
are. As I’ve said in moments to myself after reading texts like this, where Jesus comes
off looking a bit ragged, I always think that this kind of savior I want to saved by, and if
this Jesus is who God is, then this is the kind of God I can believe in. Not because
Jesus was a bit off base here, of course, but because he was willing to be corrected,
willing to be engage with others, and hear their own truth, the powerful truth of their
own experience.   This Syrophoenician woman knew she was no dog, and she knew
she was worthy of Jesus’ attention, and she said so. She was the kind of woman that
former African American slave and abolitionist spoke of when she spoke those words:

If the first woman God ever made
was strong enough to turn the world
upside down, all alone
together women ought to be able to turn it
rightside up again.

And Jesus, this Jesus that Sojourner Truth knew was the only one that heard her grief
when her children were being sold into slavery, this Jesus stood corrected, this woman’
s truth, a truth she knew in her own bones, a truth that she trusted out of her own
experience, despite all those forces that told her that she wasn’t right, couldn’t be right,
would never be right, that truth changed Jesus, changed his mind, and he healed her
daughter, made her whole, so humbled by her faith was he, and so incredibly
impressed by the confidence she had in this God who she believed, deep in her bones,
included her in the realm of God.

Now, of course, I know, I know all the problems that come with trusting yourself, and the
most obvious one, the one that must be stated always, is that you and I, we could be
wrong: sometimes our trust in ourselves is obviously misplaced, and who hasn’t
experienced a moment of over confidence, when we were quite sure we were right
about this or that, and then suddenly found out how wrong we really were.   Listen, as I’
ve said many times about many things—“I think I’m right—everything I have
experienced so far has born out the truth of that experience, but, you know, of course, I
could be wrong.” And if you and I are wrong, if we find out that our trust in ourselves in
this or that moment was misplaced, well, it happens, because that too is what it means
to be a human, and if Jesus can get it wrong with the Syrophoenician woman, well, so
can I, and so can you. Amidst those moments when I am wrong—rare as they may be,
of course—in the midst of those moments, I go back to what I tell folks who are
struggling with their sexual identity and that is to trust in the goodness of God, the
mercy of God, the understanding of God. We can trust in God’s goodness, a
goodness that forgives us when we get it wrong. And I can’t help but think that part of
the reason why God is so often merciful with us and our mistakes is because of
moments like we heard in the Gospel reading today, moments when God, in Christ,
realized that there was much fractured wisdom in this creation of clay and spit, this
mortal coil that is the human being that God loves so much.

There is a wonderful story, whose origins are now lost to history, told in the first person,
that goes likes this:

God was walking the streets, looking for a home for his son. He knocked on my door.
Well, I suppose I could let him rent the little spare bedroom, I thought. He read my
thoughts. “I was looking to buy,” he said.

“Oh, I don’t think I really want to sell,” I replied. “I need the place for myself, you see.
But you could use the back room. The rent’s quite low. Why don’t you come in have a
look?”

So he came in, and he looked around. “I like it,” he said. “I’ll take it, on your own
terms.”

Once he was settled in, I began to wonder whether I’d been a bit mean. There the son
was, cooped up in that little spare bedroom. God must have been having similar
thoughts, because he was there again at my door.

“Would you have any more space now, do you think?” he asked gently.

“Well, I’ve been thinking, and I could offer your son an extra room to rent now.”

“Thank you,” said God. “I’ll take the extra room. Maybe you’ll decide to give my son
more room later on. Meanwhile, I like what I see.”

Time went on. I was feeling a bit uneasy about this transaction.

“I’d like to give you some more rooms,” I kept telling God, “but you see, it’s a bit
difficult. I need some space for me.”

“I understand,” God kept saying. “I’ll wait. I like what I see.”

Eventually, I decided to offer God the whole top floor. He accepted gratefully, on behalf
of his son. “Well, I can spare it really,” I told him. “I’d really like to let you have the
whole house, but I’m not sure…”

“I understand,” said God. “I’ll wait. I like what I see.”

A bit more time went by, and there was God again at my door. “I just want you to
know,” he said, “that I’m still very interested in buying your house. I wouldn’t put you
out. We’d work it out together. Your house would be mine and my son would live
here.”

“Actually,” he added, “you’d have more space than ever before.”

“I really can’t see how that could be true,” I replied, hesitating on the doorstep.

“I know,” said God. “And to be honest, I can’t really explain it. It’s something you have
to discover for yourself. It only happens if you let my son have the whole house.”

“A bit risky,” I said.

“Yes, but try me,” encouraged God.

“I’m not sure. I’ll let you know.”

I’ll wait,” said God. “I like what I see.” (One Hundred Wisdom Stories From Around The
World 132-33)

We spend our lives doing that, negotiating with God, wondering how much and how
deeply to trust in God, and yet, even in that hesitation, even in that struggle, God likes
what God sees, and that means there is room to get it wrong sometimes, room enough
for us to fall flat on our face, while, at the same time, there is also room to trust our
experience, to trust our truth, knowing that God, in some odd way, God likes what God
sees, that God trusts us, even in our hesitation, even in our beautiful imperfection. To
love others we must learn to love ourselves, and to trust God fully we must come to
trust ourselves, maybe not as fully as we trust God, but trust ourselves we must,
because if we can’t trust ourselves and our own experiences, how can we ever trust our
experience of the living God, who, despite all of our shadow, our hesitation, likes what
he sees? Amen.