Sermon for Friends Congregational Church
“I Feel the Pain of Everyone, but Lately I Feel Nothing”
Delivered by Reverend Dan De Leon
Sunday, July 1, 2007
Psalm 16; 1 Kings 19:15-16, 19-21; Galatians 5:22-25; Luke 9:51-62
Over the course of the last two weeks, I have waited in a lot of different lines: grocery store checkout lines, airport check-in lines, airport security lines, food court lines, the line to get on the plane, the line to get off the plane, the baggage claim line, shuttle bus lines, air train lines, diesel train lines, hotel check-in lines, conference registration lines, and, of course, traffic (because I consider traffic to be a line). I’m sure that in the last two weeks, if you started thinking about it, you’ve spent your fair share of time in different lines, as well.
Do you know how much time the average American spends in his or her lifetime waiting in line? Two to three years of their life—two to three years of our lives spent waiting in line.
You probably can’t recall all those moments you spent waiting in line in your entire life to date, so let’s just look at the last two weeks. Look at the last two weeks of your life that you spent waiting in lines and ask yourself this question: Was it worth it?
Having been a youth minister for many years, and having been a child of Disney World-obsessed parents before that, I’ve spent a lot of time waiting in lines for amusement park rides. Go with me now to a hot summer of month of June—not too long ago—in Arlington, Texas. The story is simple and anticlimactic. A few adventuresome middle school youth and I decided we wanted to ride the Mr. Freeze roller coaster at Six Flags. For those of you not familiar with the Mr. Freeze coaster, it’s not for the faint of heart—literally and figuratively. As opposed to most coasters that take you up that steep initial hill for a good 3 minutes before dropping you into an ensuing 1 minute of pure thrills, the Mr. Freeze coaster shoots you out into a series of hills, turns, drops and loops going from zero to God knows how many miles per hour in about 3 seconds. What more could you want?
So, we got in line at the Mr. Freeze ride, and we waited and we waited and we waited. Fifteen minutes passed, then 30, then 45. And at last we were just inches away from this pointless monstrosity of a ride that would reward us with 2 minutes of thrills. And then everything stopped. The ride stopped working, the line stopped moving and the ride attendants announced that the Mr. Freeze roller coaster was being fixed, and there was no telling how long it would take to fix it.
This made us angry. It frustrated us. So, the middle school boys and I discussed the situation like rational human beings. We said, “Dude, we’ve waited this long. I’m not leaving now. Are you leaving? I’m not leaving. I’ve seen this a hundred times. They’re going to fix it in a few minutes. No problem.” So, we sat and waited for another 15 minutes before we gave up the ghost and left the Mr. Freeze line.
There’s something about waiting in lines that makes us forget about everything except our mission at hand and how that mission will fulfill us. “I’ve waited this long, I’m not turning around now!” And it’s in this obsessive moment that Jesus comes to us and says, “Follow me.” It’s in those moments when we’re determined to receive something or to reach a certain destination that Jesus Christ says, “Hey, Bill, Jane, John, Julia…follow me.” And how many times do you think we’ve been waiting in lines in our lives and we have not so much as heard that voice of divine invitation whispering in our ears?
I know that waiting in a line for a roller coaster seems trivial in this context. But there’s something that happens to us when we wait in lines. We forget. We obsess. We become indifferent about anything that might interfere with our mission: be it to ride a roller coaster, vote for a political candidate or get on a plane. When we wait in a line, everything becomes about me: my hunger, my thirst, my discomfort, my need for a bathroom! And the message that Jesus reminds us of this morning is that through all that waiting, in the end, it’s never about us. It’s never about me.
“Jesus, I’ll follow you wherever you go” Translation: “I’ll wait in line with you, Jesus, no matter what, because I know the destination is going to be worth all the unforeseen hassle I’m about to enter into.” And Jesus says, “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”
“Jesus, I’ll be right with you, just let me handle these funeral arrangements for my dad.” And Jesus says, “Let the dead bury their own dead. As for you, go and proclaim the Kingdom of God.”
“Jesus, I’ll follow you, but let me say goodbye to my family.” And Jesus says, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.”
Jesus spoke those words with authority and clarity and passion, because he was talking to a humanity that was waiting in line—waiting for something to happen—and they had been waiting so long that they had not only forgotten about the world outside of their own boundary lines, they had forgotten about who they really were. They had lost sight of themselves, their true selves, and Jesus said, “Follow me,” so they would regain their sight. In a culture where we spend two to three years of our lives waiting in lines with tunnel vision outlooks, are we any different?
There is a band called Dinosaur Junior, and they have a song that’s been coming into my mind lately. I forget the name of the song, but the lyrics are easy to remember: “I feel the pain of everyone, but lately I feel nothing. I feel the pain of everyone, but lately I feel nothing.” Now, Dinosaur Junior isn’t a Christian band, but I hear a Christian message in those lyrics: “I feel the pain of everyone, but lately I feel nothing.”
Ours is a culture rampant with individualism. The days of community are smoldering in the ashes of a fire that keeps the individual cozy and warm. Ours is a culture that never asks the question, “How can I help you,” but always boasts the question, “How can you help me,” as if another human being’s worth is determined by how quickly and how much they can help me: the individual. And in these days of rampant individualism where I wait in line for what I want and nothing, by God, will get in my way, perhaps Jesus is whispering, “I feel the pain of everyone, but lately I feel nothing.”
This is heaviest tragedy the Church can ever experience: a Savior that feels the pain of all of God’s creation, but now feels nothing. How tragic it is that the Church would worship at the altar of a cross that has been reduced to an idol instead of a symbol of God’s love and symbol of Christ’s empathy. Why has this happened in our culture?
Jesus’ ministry was about love above all else, yes, but the way that Jesus expressed that love was through a word that often falls on deaf ears in our 21st century Western culture: ‘empathy.’ When you think of it like that, it changes how we look at the cross. If Jesus took on all of our troubles, pain, sorrows, affliction and brokenness and exposed that injustice of our human world in his death on the cross, then how are we supposed to look at this cross now? Changes things, doesn’t it? The cross is less about my Jesus and more about who Jesus calls us to love and serve. So, look at this cross. What comes to mind? When you survey the wondrous cross, what comes to mind?
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, African American males have been considered an “endangered species” since the late 1980s. The number one cause of death of African American males in this country between the ages of 15 and 24 is homicide. And this is such a frequent occurrence that it doesn’t make the news anymore, but Paris Hilton and Anna Nicole’s baby are top headlines everyday. Maybe that comes to mind.
Or since we’re talking about waiting in lines: After the tsunamis hit Southeast Asia only a couple of years ago, do you know how long hundreds of people waited in lines to get a bottle of drinking water? Six hours.
You might think, “I don’t see these things when I look at the cross.” That’s normal. Sometimes when I’m in this sanctuary getting obsessive about things, I look at the cross and I think, “Is that exactly in the center of the table? Because it has to be perfect!” What I’m saying is that when I survey the wondrous cross I seldom initially think of the orphan or the widow or the HIV AIDS victim or the man in prison or the family separated by the effects of Hurricane Katrina or the thousands of people in our own community of Bryan-College Station who spend as much time thinking about whether to spend their paychecks on medicine or food as we spend thinking about whether to eat out or cook dinner at home. But because we love God, we are required to love all of God’s beloved. And because we follow Christ, we are called to follow Christ’s beloved into the reality of their worlds. We can’t begin to do that if we are focused on the ‘I’ of this culture’s individualism. We can only begin to do that if we focus on the ‘we’ of God’s community. And when we focus on God’s community, then the stories start coming together, and the forgotten ones receive a voice, and the tragedies that go unnoticed in our daily news become vivid reality, and this community, revealed by God’s grace, manifests itself on the cross of Jesus Christ.
Maybe the problem is that we’re waiting in the wrong lines. I was driving down the street the other night and I noticed a line of people wrapped around a building. They were waiting on the store in that building to open the next day so they could be the first to get their hands on the new iPhone. I’m not condemning the iPhone. It looks pretty cool. But that line… It’s in those lines that we become so self-absorbed that we not only forget about others, but we lose sight of who we really are. We become numb to ourselves when obsession seeps in. And Jesus says, “I feel the pain of everyone, but lately I feel nothing.”
We find our identity, we find our true selves, in community with all of God’s people. And the world notices that kind of community just like I noticed that line of anxious people waiting for an iPhone. But the world is not going to notice the Church that lets the culture of individualism seep into its walls. When the Church becomes an ‘I’ place where I worship my Jesus, then it is just another institution in this ‘I’ culture. As German theologian Deitrich Bonhoffer reminds us, “Unless the Church is radically different from the world, the world will never take the Church seriously.” When we live in community, the world notices and the world changes.
In three days, we celebrate this country’s independence and the subsequent culture that has come to be from that independence. As people of faith, let us celebrate a different kind of liberation. Let us celebrate our freedom from the shackles of individualism, and let us celebrate that freedom by living in community with one another; for it’s in community that Jesus feels the pain of everyone and resurrects it into joy. And let us uplift the brokenness of this world to our God so that all of us—all of God’s community—will be blessed. Amen.