Psalm 139.1-18
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning,
Plymouth Congregational UCC
Fort Collins, Colorado
 
In the 2009 science fiction film, Avatar, there is an alien race called the Navi, and one of the distinctive things about this movie is that a linguistics professor from USC created an entire language for the Navi. And the way this species said “hello” in that new language, Kal ti, literally means, “I see you.”

If you were creating a language from scratch, would you think of using “I see you” or I behold you” as a way of saying, “Hello”?

There are certainly moments in each of our lives when we feel unseen, even invisible, as if people don’t notice us or intentionally ignore us. If you are the new kid in class or you’ve just moved across the country, you want your classmates and neighbors to notice you, to connect with you, and to offer a friendly welcome. You want them to say, “I see you.” Even for those of us who are somewhat shy, we want to be seen. And that is especially true in a church — even more so in a religious tradition that is a little unfamiliar. We want to be seen and acknowledged and welcomed. As someone who is a bit introverted, coffee hour can be the most daunting part of a visit to a new church. Everyone else seems to belong, seems to know others, seems to have friends to connect with. It can be awkward, unless someone sees you, comes up, and engages you in conversation.

When I was serving as associate conference minister in Connecticut, and then realized that I needed to be back in parish ministry, I found a church in Vermont that was looking for a minister, so I drove up early on a Sunday morning to check it out…just to be an unannounced visitor there. Now, one of the things to know about archetypal New Englanders is that they a bit laconic…not known for interpersonal warmth, exuberance, or friendliness. In Maine, unless you were born there, you are “from away” and on Cape Cod, they call you a “wash-ashore.” So, attending the service in a lovely white meeting house in Vermont, I was able to walk in, worship with them, go to coffee hour, and drive home to Connecticut, and the only greeting I received was a cursory handshake from the interim minister. Needless to say, I realized that this church and I were not meant for each other.

When we in the church fail to say “Hello!” we are neglecting a big piece of what it means to be Christian, because we are missing the bond of fellowship and connection. When we don’t say, “Hello!” we are sending the message, “I don’t see you.” I hope the message that we send at Plymouth — especially our longtime members is that not only do we see you, not only are you welcome here, you belong! No one is “from away.”

For years, I have had an intentional practice of saying “Hello!” and smiling to people on the Spring Creek Trail behind our house as I walk Chumley, the golden retriever who owns me. I notice that most people will return the greeting. Sometimes runners with intense expressions on their faces won’t say “Hi” through their grimace. And the other group who I notice won’t make eye contact or say, “Hello!” is the cohort of children who have been trained not to — the kids whose parents have drummed “stranger-danger” into them for years. While we all want our kids to be safe, I wonder sometimes if we’ve overdone it and we are creating a self-isolating group of folks who will soon be adults. You’ve undoubtedly read about the loneliness epidemic in our society, and congregations like ours can be part of the solution as a locus of true intergenerational community.

Whether any person looks you in the eye and says, “I see you,” there is a greater force in the universe who, as the psalmist says, “has searched you and known you, and is acquainted with all your ways.”
So, here’s a question for you: Is it good news or bad news that God sees you, knows you from the inside out, really gets who you are? I suppose that depends on how you envision God and God’s activity in the world. Is your image of God like St. Nick? “He sees you when you’re sleeping; he knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.” And if that’s the case it may not be such good news, because we all mess up royally every now and again…and nobody wants to get a lump of coal in their stocking. But God isn’t St. Nick.

But what if you have a different image of God? In a large section of American Christianity people imagine God primarily as a judge. And if God is playing the part of the judge, your part is…well, the accused. The most famous sermon preached in colonial American was “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and we’re still trying to recover from the Calvinist notion of Total Depravity that ungirds it.

To be sure, all of us miss the mark with varying degrees of regularity, but that doesn’t mean that God gives up on us. I love the poetic section of this psalm that assures us that God is with us.

“Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascent to heaven, you are there;
If I make my bed in the underworld, you are there.
If I take to the wings of the morning
And settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
Even there your hand shall lead me,
And your right hand shall hold me fast.” vv. 7-10

We are not left on our own! God sees us, knows us, pursues us, and won’t reject us, even when we fall short.

†

There was a wise Jesuit from South India named Anthony de Mello who wrote beautiful parables and aphorisms. And one of my favorites has only six words: “Imagine God beholding you…and smiling.” Hear that again: “Imagine God beholding you…and smiling.”

Will you humor me? Take a moment and turn to the person next to you and really look at them — behold them! And once you’ve exchanged glances with your neighbor…by a show of hands, how many of you saw someone smile at you?

That person your neighbor smiled at is a beloved child of God. That person is fearfully and wonderfully made, a gift of God and a gift of Creation. That person is you. “Imagine God beholding you…and smiling.”

Maybe some of us have a little nagging voice in the back of our heads that says, “Yes, but…” Yes, but I’m not devout enough or successful enough or young enough or thin enough or old enough or physically able enough.”

You are enough. I see you. There is not a person in this room who is not enough. Each of you is “fearfully and wonderfully made by God, who right hand now holds you fast.”

Each of us needs to be seen and loved, and even when our human families fall short of our needs, there is a greater parent that says, “I see you. I know you from the inside out. You are fearfully and wonderfully made. I love you.”

I’m going to leave you with a question to ponder. And for some of us this is a real conundrum, so I hope you will write this down or remember it and pose the question several times this week: What does God see in you that brings a smile to her face?

Whatever your answer, do more of that, because God’s world needs it dearly.

May it be so. Amen.
 
© 2019 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved. Please contact hal@plymouthucc.org for permission to reprint, which will typically be granted for non-profit uses.

Luke 13.10–17
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning,
Plymouth Congregational UCC
Fort Collins, Colorado
Jubilee Sunday
 
This is one of many stories in the Bible with a nameless female character…of course, she had a name, but the writer of Luke’s gospel doesn’t convey her identity, except that she was “bent over” and “unable to stand up straight.” I can’t fully imagine what it must have been like to live life doubled-over like that. It must have been painful to walk, to sleep, to do anything. [demonstrate] Can you imagine what the world looks like if you are bent over in that position? It would certainly be difficult to look at someone during a conversation. What would you see? You’d see the dirt and the dust on people’s feet. You might catch a glimpse of the sun or the sky if you turned sideways. Suffice it to say that your field of vision would be severely different that if you were standing straight and tall.

Did you notice that the woman doesn’t ask Jesus to heal her? He simply says, “You are healed from your ailment.” Perhaps she had given up hope of being healed. Perhaps she felt as though she was not entitled to a healing by Jesus. Maybe she didn’t know his reputation as a healer. I wonder if, after eighteen years, she had come to accept her condition as “her new normal.”

What are the parts of your life that need healing? Maybe, like me, you have a physical illness that is holding you back. Or perhaps you have a personality trait that you know is anything but helpful, but it just seems to be part of you. Could it be that you are experiencing a way of living that you’ve come to accept when in truth it could possibly be changed? Healing can take many forms, whether curative or restorative, as it was for the woman in this healing story, or it can mean coming fully into relationship with God, with self, and with others.

One of the things that plagues our congregation is the sin of self-reliance. We are a church full of real doers who are used to making a difference, and we are successful and accomplished in many different ways. Now, you may say, “Hal, that sounds like a blessing, rather than a sin.” And I think that our Protestant work ethic would affirm your assertion. And I call it a sin because I know it so well in my own life. I am so good at keeping things together, at maintaining control, at doing the right thing. I do that to such an extent that sometimes I forget to rely on God…at least until things begin to fall apart. One of the things that having a recurrence of cancer has taught me is that there are parts of our lives over which we are not in control.

There is an old Dutch aphorism that says, “If your little boat is about to be dashed against the rocks in a storm, row with all your strength and pray with all your might.” So, it’s not just a matter of letting it all be in God’s hands – we have a part to play and so does God. And the serenity prayer, written by UCC minister Reinhold Niebuhr, in its original form says, “God grant me the wisdom to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, the courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.” I love that prayer, which doesn’t let us off the hook – it demands courage to change things when possible – and it asks God to be present in the midst of the process.

But what if the doubled-over woman had accepted with serenity that her physical ailment could not be changed? I suspect that sometimes God knows what is possible when we have already given up hope. Are there broken aspects of your own life that you have come to accept too readily? If so, what would it look like to give God a chance to heal that?

I know that if you read, watch, or listen to the news that it is anything but hope-filled and that there are aspects of our culture and political discourse in which we want to throw in the towel. Today, we mark the four-hundredth anniversary of African enslavement in our nation, and every American is living its legacy. We experience mass shootings, and then the memory of them sinks into the background, becoming invisible like so many other shootings. We have unproductive vitriol and flaming tweets instead of honest political dialogue and diplomacy and statesmanship. Have we given up hope of ever experiencing something different? Have we come to accept institutionalized racism and gun violence and rancid politics as the new normal?

I am never going to encourage you to stop trying to use nonviolence to change the system, but instead I am going to ask you to open yourself to the possibility of God working within us and among us — changing the way we think, feel, and act. I invite you to open yourself to the possibility of God healing you and healing the world.

What if we could be agents of God and God’s healing? What if we open ourselves to the healing power of God’s love and the realm that Jesus proclaimed in order to do what we cannot do on our own? What if God can heal the world – tikkun olam is the Hebrew phrase our Jewish sisters and brothers use for this – but what if God needs us to be agents of love and transformation?

Last week I read a wonderful meditation by the progressive Franciscan, Father Richard Rohr about nonviolent transformation. And he offered this observation: “It’s when we come to the end of our own resources that we must draw upon the Infinite Life and Love within us to do what we alone cannot do.” And if we do not draw from that unfathomably deep well of love, then we commit the sin of self-sufficiency.

Our openness to working together with God and to healing can call forth within each of us as individuals and as a congregation the transformative power of love. Emilie Townes, a womanist ethicist and dean of Vanderbilt Divinity School, writes that “Part of the gift of healing is that it can open the doors in the rooms of our lives, and healing encourages us to walk through these doors to discover the grace and hope and judgment that may be inside each room.”[1]

Going Deeper means summoning the courage to open doors into rooms in our lives we wish we could seal forever. And Going Deeper means that we are not alone in any of those rooms, because even when we ourselves do not have the strength to face our brokenness alone, we have the healing power of God with us. And that is where we find humility as well as the grace of God.

If we are confined by our own brokenness, looking down into the dust all the time, it will be impossible for us to look forward, to envision what lies ahead, to blaze the trail that will lead us toward God’s realm of justice and peace and healing. So, let us open our hearts to God and to going deeper in the faith that binds us to reliance on the sacred.

Amen.
 
© 2019 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved. Please contact hal@plymouthucc.org for permission to reprint, which will typically be granted for non-profit uses.


[1] Emilie Townes in David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 3. (Louisville: WJK Press, 2010), p. 384.