Sermon for Friends Congregational Church
“Changing ‘Whys’ to ‘Hows’”
Delivered by Reverend Dan De Leon
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Psalm 121; Genesis 32:22-31; Luke 18:1-8
You could say that this morning’s Scriptures are about justice, or you could say that they are about blessing. Either way, you would be right. But first comes the struggle. In order to get to justice and blessing in today’s Scriptures, there has to first be a struggle.
And did you struggle this week? Think about it for a moment: Did you struggle this week? And what was your struggle? Did you struggle this morning? Some times it takes all of our might, all of our willpower, just to get out of bed in the morning, doesn’t it? Have you had a day lately when the alarm went off or the sun pried open your eyes and you thought, “It’s just too hard. I can’t get out of bed. I don’t have it in me to get up and face the day…not today. I can’t do it.”
It’s a struggle…and you’re not alone. I, for one, struggled waking up this morning. My brother’s wife had a c-section Wednesday and brought an 8-lb., 11-oz. beautiful baby girl into the world, so we took a quick trip to Austin to celebrate and share our joy this weekend. Sounds great, I know, but mixed in with this great joy were a few other factors: Mac surprised us Friday with his first ear infection in months, yesterday found me in Coupland for our Brazos Association Meeting and last night Stacy and I attended an engagement party for a friend of ours, followed by my band having a show back in Austin. When the alarm went off this morning at 5am, it was a struggle to get out of bed.
This example is a little playful—sure—but it’s a pretty candid portrayal of how we look at struggle in our lives. We struggle to get out of bed. We struggle to meet a deadline. We struggle to get to work on time. We struggle with a paper or a thesis. We struggle with credit card debt and car payments. And we struggle with not having enough time or peace of mind to tackle all these things because we’ve said ‘yes’ to too many other things. That is how we look at struggle.
Let’s look at Jacob’s story of struggle. Everything that defined Jacob as a person—his family, his possessions, his whole life—they had crossed the ford of the Jabbok and left Jacob all alone: disarmed, helpless. And this is when the Divine figure comes to wrestle with Jacob through the night, and somehow Jacob finds it within himself to fight the good fight. He struggles…and he doesn’t let up until daybreak. That struggle earns him a new name: Israel, which means “struggles with God.” When you take in this story, how do you think God looks at our notion of struggle? How do you think God defines “struggle”?
Or let me ask it this way: Do you think that in our struggles to meet the deadline and all that stuff that we achieve a blessing? Probably not. But we know how to struggle that way. It makes sense to us. We know how to manage our own struggles so we ask ‘why’ about the world’s struggles…
Why is there genocide in Darfur? Why are there so many people in our country who are homeless and without healthcare? Why are thousands of American troops coming home from their tours in Iraq suffering with post-traumatic stress disorder, and not receiving any kind of counseling or treatment? Why do children in our community not have coats and blankets and backpacks and school supplies? Why do people have so much hatred against Muslims, Hispanics, and any number of different groups in our society? Why, when you ask some people on the street what they think of when you say the word ‘church,’ they respond by saying, ‘oppression’? Why? Why? Why?
We know how to deal with our own struggles, so we look at the world’s struggles, the struggles all around us, and we just ask ‘why’ and leave it at that—as if by asking ‘why,’ enough attention has been given to fix the conundrum.
When I first started serving in ministry, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I was four years away from being ordained and a lifetime away from understanding that no two people in the church are ever the same. In no area of the church is this more obvious than with teenagers. If paintings represented the different age groups of the Church, teenagers would be a Jackson Pollock: creatively disorganized and chaotically beautiful.
In the “Jackson Pollock” youth group at First Baptist Church, Austin, where I first began this thing called ‘ministry,’ Wade was the loud yellow that splattered all over the canvass. Wade was the angry orange that exploded and the raging red that flew all over the picture. Wade was a loose cannon. Wade stood out, and at the aggressive age of 14, Wade liked that.
I could handle most of the kids and their quirks. I struggled with mediating our discussions to include everyone. I struggled with making sure humor was respectful. I struggled with trying to comfort a confused16-year-old girl who had discovered that her mother was dying of cancer, and then turning around to break up a ridiculous fight between two 13-year-old boys over a foosball game gone sour. I struggled with that, and I learned how to struggle as I went. Wade was a different story.
Wade was charming, charismatic, and clever, but he was also manipulative, disrespectful and often inappropriate. To put it mildly, Wade was unpredictable. You never knew what kind of personality or problem Wade would bring with him to church.
Wade said things that crushed his peers’ self-confidence. Wade did things that destroyed what little trust adults had in him. If you showed him a rule, Wade broke it. If you showed him a boundary, he crossed it. If you did him a favor, Wade returned it with grief. And if you gave him a second chance, Wade would always make you regret it.
I thought of Wade when I looked at this morning’s text from Genesis, because I can honestly say looking back at those times that I wrestled with Wade. Youth ministry with Wade was a constant wrestling match. And after a tough time at the church with Wade or after a youth retreat that Wade had sabotaged with his foul language and blatantly unacceptable behavior, I would go home and ask the question: Why? Why is he like that? Why did he do that? Why did he say that? Why? Why? Why?
One day Wade ran away from home by ditching school. His parents were looking for him, and he was picked up by the police and dropped off to wait at a halfway house. I was called by a representative there, so I picked up Wade and got him to his folks.
The next day it was time to get serious. Wade found himself in a family therapist’s office surrounded by a host of caregivers: a therapist, his dad and his fiancé, his mom and her husband, his youth minister (this guy), and even his pastor. It was encouraging that so many people were there for Wade, but no one was happy to be there.
At one point in the meeting, when tensions were running high, the pastor finally snapped. And in a moment of machismo, with Wade and the pastor squaring off between each other, everyone else in the room becoming invisible, the pastor looked angrily at Wade and just said, “Why do you do this to us Wade? Does it turn you on? Why do you do it?” And Wade just raised his eyebrows and smiled.
Everyone in that room didn’t know how to handle the situation, including Wade, so we were left asking ‘why.’ That’s all we could do. You don’t know how to approach something, so you ask ‘why.’ Well, does anything ever change when we just ask ‘why’? Only if we ask it enough.
Jesus wants us to pray and he wants us to never give up in our prayer lives. And to reinforce this insistence on prayer, Jesus tells one of those tricky parables. A widow who has no family to back her up is crying out for justice. All she has is her own helpless voice and her desire for justice. She keeps bugging this unjust judge to solve her problems, and finally he’s so worn down by her pleas that he gives her want she wants. The squeaky wheel gets the oil.
The lesson is pretty obvious: If this unjust judge, who doesn’t believe in God and doesn’t care about people in general—if he can give the persistent widow the justice she craves, imagine how much more God will grant us justice; God who believes in us and who loves us…God, who is just. But then Jesus asks, “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”
The widow wants justice, so she cries out until she gets it. And when we ask ‘why, why, why,’ aren’t we really demanding justice?
Jesus wants us to understand why we should pray and never quit, so he tells us a story about a widow who wants justice so badly that she never quits hounding an indifferent man who has the power to tip the scales in her favor.
Why is there genocide? Why is there homelessness and malnutrition? Why is there hatred? Why is oppression acceptable? Why? Why? Why? These are our prayers, and when we lift up prayers like this often enough, the ‘why’ starts to become ‘how.’
How do I help end genocide? How do I end homelessness and malnutrition? How do I stop hatred? How do I silence oppression? How? How? How?
This is how Jesus wants us to pray and never quit: “Why did my friend commit suicide,” becomes, “How do I help prevent suicide?”
“Why do white students feel uninhibited enough to hang a noose from a tree in a schoolyard in Jena, Louisiana,” becomes, “How can I help young people around me understand that racism is unacceptable, because all people are equal and equally loved and important in the eyes of God?”
“Why does hatred exist,” becomes, “How do I live my life as evidence of God’s love?”
Bruce Cockburn says in his song, “Lovers in a Dangerous Time,” that you have to “kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.” We tend to ask ‘why’ about difficult situations in life because they seem so bad that we are convinced that there is nothing we can do about them. But if we keep asking ‘why,’ our questions become prayers; and God, the just judge, changes our why questions to how questions. When we pray like Jesus wants us to pray, never quitting, then we kick at the darkness of this world until it bleeds daylight.
When I mention Wade to you, it might make sense that I just asked ‘why’ about him. But what I didn’t stress in my portrayal of Wade is that he was a good kid. He was a great kid. What I didn’t mention was that I asked ‘why’ about Wade a lot…practically every week, and so did each of those caregivers in that therapist’s office. For me, my question of, “why is Wade so difficult,” became, “how can I help assure Wade that he is always welcome in our youth group, and that no matter how far he pushes the limit and how hard he pushes people’s buttons, we love him and God loves him.”
I was ordained in January of 2002. It had been 4 years since the last time I saw Wade. And when I was walking from the sanctuary to the fellowship hall of the church, I was stopped in my tracks by Wade. He was now a 20-year-old man, but he had that same smile, that same laugh and that same charm. I asked him how he was doing, and he raised his eyebrows and smiled and said, “I’m doing alright. Got a job. Still getting into trouble, though.” But I said, “That’s OK, Wade. I’m just glad you’re here.”
So, think of the times that you asked either in your mind our out loud this week, “Why? Why? Why?” Ask those questions again today and tomorrow and the next day, and don’t quit, because this is our struggle. Let us kick at the darkness of this world until it bleeds daylight. And at the end our journey that we share, we will be like Jacob: changed and blessed. Amen.