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Twinbrook Baptist Church Rockville, MD Ordinary Time October 21, 2007 Pastor: Kip Ingram Kip@TwinbrookBaptist.com |
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”Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.” On Memorial Day, May 27, 1995, actor Christopher Reeve was thrown headfirst from his horse during a jumping competition. Unable to free his hands from the bridle, his 215 pound body rammed his head straight down onto a jumping rail. The blow shattered the first two vertebrae in his neck. His body collapsed in a heap. He was unable to move or breathe. ”I was fighting for air like a drowning person,” he says. Paramedics stationed at the jumping derby rushed to him and, within three minutes, were able to start pumping oxygen into his lungs. ”I'm very lucky they reached me so quickly,” Chris says, ”because after four minutes of not breathing, brain damage begins.” When Chris regained consciousness after the surgery to immobilize his neck he assessed his situation. He was totally paralyzed. ”It dawned on me,” he says, ”I was going to be a huge burden to everybody, that I had ruined my life and everybody else's. Not fair to anybody. The best thing to do would be to slip away.”i But Christopher Reeve, the famous actor who played the invincible cartoon character of Superman would go on from his devastating and tragic fall to choose a positive and even optimistic outlook for his life. He chose to work with his situation and look for ways to make it liveable and meaningful. He did not walk again, but he chose to step forward with his life in whatever ways possible, from learning to breathe on his own for limited periods to raising awareness for spinal cord injury treatment. I honestly look at his life, his terrible loss, and wonder if I could have responded as he did. I am intrigued by people like Christopher Reeve, who seem to find resilience from someplace. Somewhere deep inside, where fundamental decisions are sorted out and made, people summon unrealized resources and make incredible choices to embrace the possible and struggle for the good. I am intrigued by how that happens, how some people respond in that way and how others seem to lose heart. What makes people, even people of faith, lose heart and give up in some area of their lives? Is it disappointment with some expectations that they have? Is it discouragement over circumstances that seem to be against them? Is it sadness and overwhelming feelings of loss? Or is it a more habitual way of reacting to difficulties, a kind of learned retreat? Or is it the tendency to internalize the lethargy and passivity of people around them who have given up? Somewhere within all of us, we make some fundamental decisions about our lives when confronted with challenges and difficulties There was once a certain city that had a judge in it. Now, this judge did not fear God nor did he respect any human being. The point we are to understand about this judge is that he is callous and uncaring when it came to decisions of the law. Also in this city was a widow. Widows in that time were probably close to the bottom in the social and legal pecking order. They had little power and few rights, even in court. But this widow is persistent in her efforts at justice. She keeps coming back to the judge to plead her case, to make her point, to let her voice be heard. She would not let up and would not lose heart. At first, the judge refused her and basically ignored her claims, but as time went on, she continued to work on him and wear on him. He eventually relented and granted her request for justice. He didn't care a thing about her or her case, but he acted on her behalf because she did not give up. In telling this story, Jesus brings home his point using this how much more kind of parable. In other words, if this unjust and uncaring judge grants justice to the widow, how much more would a caring and just God hear the cause of seeking people? When we consider this story in light of its purpose to encourage us not to lose heart, we can see many of the things that would cause someone to lose heart. There is the possible fear that it is a cold and heartless world out there where people, even judges, don't much care about us. There is the sense of loneliness as we wonder if there is anyone else out there to connect with and find support from. There is the tendency to despair over whether we have the power to make any difference. If we put ourselves in the place of the widow and feel her situation, we can understand how these temptations to lose heart might feel-the fearfulness that others don't care for her, the loneliness of her place in that society, the despair that her voice will not be heard. Nevertheless, don't you sense in the story that Jesus tells, that the widow has found her voice for justice and trusts it, even in the face of a callous judge? And in doing so, she also finds her power. We don't know where it comes from. The details of the story about her life are left open only for us to ponder. And yet, her resilience, her personal power, her voice is summoned from somewhere out of her life experiences. Actually, knowing what we know about the society at that time, a widow would be the last person one would think of as having power. But maybe that is why Jesus picks her as an example. If even someone like her can use her power to make a difference and not lose heart, then how about the rest of us? She used what she had available to her, perhaps that's the place to start for each of us? EmmyWerner has been nicknamed ”Mother Resilience” by her colleagues because of her longtime work in the field of resilience research. Her primary work for the last thirty years has been a longitudinal study of 505 native Hawaiians on the small island of Kauai. Most of these people were born into poverty and were the children of sugar plantation workers. ”Many of them grew up in homes dominated by fears of even greater poverty, where alcoholism and anger and abuse were just the way of life.” She followed a group of people from late adolescence into middle age, where the general expectation was that they would simply become victims of their own circumstances and sink ”into a swamp of crime and unemployment” and despair. And many did. But she noticed that about one-third did not ”sink at all; they did well in school, began promising careers and - most important - defined themselves as capable and competent adults. One woman profiled, Leilani, is a working mother of three sons; she is in her thirties, and put it like this: 'I am proud of myself as a person now. I have received so much fulfillment in being a wife, mother, and worker. I feel I've finally grown up.'”ii Resilience research is finding the following six things to be true. First, there is no timeline or deadline for finding resilience and the ability not to lose heart. The ability to turn yourself around and claim your life as God's child is always a possibility. Second, about one-third of children who come from poor, neglected, abusive homes are still able to cope and do well by the time they are teenagers despite their circumstances. By the way, just as an aside, if you want to know what people are capable of, don't just look at the statistical average. There is an old joke about the statistician who came to the pool for a swim. He asked someone what the average depth of the water was, and was told it was 5 feet. He jumped in and drowned, because while it was 2 feet on one end, it was 8 feet on the other end where he jumped. Statistical averages don't always give us the full truth. Third, researchers are finding that faith is a vital element-faith in something beyond the immediate challenges. As people of faith, we can draw from and appreciate this insight. Fourth, most resilient people don't do it alone. They almost unconsciously seek out a support network-friends, co-workers, extended family members, others in the community. Fifth, the resilient folks tend to look toward the future, making plans and setting goals toward which they move. Sixth, the resilient ones tend to trust their own God-given strength for acting and making a difference in their lives. In all this, there is a good kind of ”survivor's pride” which only encourages them as they face other tasks in life We all have within us a capacity to find resilience and not lost heart. As people of resurrection faith, we have a history of hope we can draw from, and a community of support we can turn to. We can grow and learn from any situation. We can even be like the parrot in the following humorous story: A writer is sitting at his computer trying to write, when his parrot starts calling him names. ”You're so stupid, you're lazy, you don't feed me enough, I hate you,” the parrot screeches. The writer tries to calm the parrot down, but to no avail. Starting to do a slow burn, the writer threatens the parrot. ”If you don't stop making that noise, and I mean stop it now,” the writer yells, ”I'm putting you in the freezer, and I mean it.” The parrot doesn't take the warning seriously and keeps up a steady flow of criticism. ”You're a pet-hater, you have a thing against birds, my beak is bigger than yours,” and so on until, in a rage, the writer puts the parrot in the freezer. Twenty minutes later, the writer takes the parrot out. Shivering and full of frost, the parrot apologizes. ”I'll never do that again. I've learned my lesson. I know what I did wrong and I'll never interrupt you again while you're writing. But tell me,” the parrot asks, ”I'm really curious. Just what did the turkey do?'”iii There is no situation we face that we cannot learn from and grow through, if we don't lose heart Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. The connection with prayer is important, because if we lose heart, I think our praying is the first to reflect it. Oh, we may still pray words and go through the motions, but the passion and the meaning are just not there. Prayer is such an intimate thing, a radical thing, where we risk ourselves by opening them up to God and exposing our deepest concerns. By doing so, we risk not only the passion of hope and the possibility of good things, but also the disappointment of expectations and the hurt of discouragement. We can avoid the disappointment and discouragement by not letting ourselves care very much, but then we also avoid true hope for our world, and joy in feeling resilient and not losing heart. In this sense, prayer is like a barometer which reflects what is going on with our heart as people of faith One final thing about this story and not losing heart-remember that God's character is much more than that of the judge. The callous judge acts in spite of who he is. A loving God acts because of who God is. We can take heart that God will hear our prayers and respond with loving concern. Maybe not always in the way we might think or expect, but we're talking about God after all, whose ways are not always our ways. Yet one thing remains sure-God will care for us all with an everlasting love. What better resource for not losing heart and moving forward with our lives on the journey of faith! i. "Still Me" at www.resiliencycenter.com ii. Info. and quotes from this paragraph and the one following are taken from, "Finding Strength: How to Overcome Anything," in Psychology Today, May/June 1998. iii. Morley Glicken, Learning from Resilient People. |
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