You are not alone… when people around you are struggling

Psalm 10

Article from Rev. Violet Cucciniello Little… [1]

In Revelation 21:4 we read “… God will wipe every tear from their eyes.”

Our hearts break when we feel the pain of others.

This week, people in our congregation mourned… the loss of a child, the loss of a spouse, a brother, a sister, a friend…

This week, people in our congregation faced health, emotional, and mental health challenges. Today, some people really wanted to come to worship, and some of you made it… but others couldn’t… and some haven’t been able to make it week after week for a long time…

All around us, people are really struggling.

And often, we’re at a loss to know what to do when people are struggling around us.

Our hearts break when we notice the struggles.

When we look up and read the signs of homeless people at every busy intersection in Saint Paul and Minneapolis. “Father of two, humble and in need, anything helps”

“Homeless vet, trying to recover from PTSD, please help” 

“Hungry and tired, can you help me?”

Our hearts break…

When another person has been shot by a police officer… and I am not directly touched, but I know someone who is… and we try to imagine the devastation of the circle of loved ones—if only he hadn’t been driving on that street that night, if only she hadn’t approached the car so quickly— and then we try to imagine the devastation of the police officers.

As his statement was released this week, and I reflected on his face, Officer Mohamed Noor looked like someone who would fit right in among us, or at one of the Iftar dinners we attended, and he wrote that he “takes the family’s loss seriously and keeps them in his daily thoughts and prayers.” I believe that… and our hearts break because in just a few seconds, so many lives were changed forever. And we wonder how this cycle of violence can be stopped?

We spend sleepless hours worrying about people… one after another… people who have deep conflicts with their partners or other family, those who are facing difficult health concerns, those who are traveling and worn out, those who are caught in addiction, those who are disappointed, those who feel disconnected, those who are going through transitions that aren’t welcome… In my sleepless nights, I worry about those who struggle and worry about all the things I wish I was doing better to reach out to them. Ever feel like that?  In those sleepless nights of worry and anxiety about others… we can feel very much alone.

When we pray Psalm 10, we pray the words of someone else who has had sleepless nights.

“Why, O God, do you stand far off?

Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?

Don’t you see how the poor are suffering?

Meanwhile, we see all kinds of greed and bad behavior in the very highest places…
God, do something. Do not forget the oppressed.
    of those who suffer.
You offer them hope,
You offer them hope,
    and you pay attention
    to their cries for help.
    and everyone else in need,
    so that no one on earth
    can terrify others again.
When you think you ought to be God, you ought to know what to do, you ought to know how to get involved and help all those who are suffering... Whether you know what to do or not, you are not alone. As some of us learned at the “Come Together” evening two weeks ago, a first step can be opening up to see the struggles of others and practicing empathy. Then, based in that, trusting in God and working together, other actions can follow…

It’s like they think they can do anything they want and no one will ever hold them accountable.

They think you don’t exist and even if you did, you’re not going to do anything to intervene on behalf of those who need your presence and ability to change things for the better….

So, God, rise up!

Our deepest belief is that you do see.

You notice trouble and grief,

And here’s how this Psalm ends… beyond what we read earlier.

You listen to the longings

You defend orphans

You are not alone—when you see others struggling, you can know God sees too.

If you can’t access a sense of hope, you might go to the psalms (in about the middle of the Bible) and just scan them quickly, one by one, until you get to one that can be your prayer for today or in that sleepless night. And then stay with that one until you feel drawn to the next.

For those who rely on God but who wonder where God is, for those who really don’t believe in God… however you question God, however you cry out to God on behalf of others…

Rev. Little closed her writing with this thought and prayer:

“Now when I find myself with someone who is struggling, I sit and share the image of God that has given me so much comfort and strength over the years. And often I have placed their tears on my own cheek as a reminder of the God who indeed became flesh and still lives among us.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is despair, always may I proclaim your hope. Amen.”[2]

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[1] Rev. Violet Cucciniello Little, child of God, serves as pastor and mission developer of the Welcome Church in Philadelphia. She is also a psycholtherapist and trainer for Women of the ELCA’s racial justice ministries. Gather magazine, May 2017, page. 26.

[2] A fuller version of the prayer of Saint Francis:
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace: where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope; where there is sadness, joy. 
O divine One, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, 
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

When you’re jealous? You’re not alone.

Psalm 146 and Matthew 13:1-9

What makes you jealous?

Maybe it’s when someone else has something that you want… something beautiful or resources that make them appear to have things easier. Maybe it looks like every opportunity is coming their way, and it seems like no matter how hard you work for it, it’s just never that easy for you. Why is it that some people seem to have no troubles… and others seem to have more than their share?

When we’re feeling green with envy, we’re not alone.

Being jealous is really as old as the first humans we have stories about in the Bible… first, the seeds of doubt were planted in Adam’s and Eve’s minds about whether God really cared for them… and in the very next stories, one of their sons murders the other because of jealousy. He felt like God liked his brother’s gifts more than his… so Cain killed Abel. Everyone is left hurting and broken because of jealousy.

Other characters in the stories of the Bible—Sarah and Abraham, King David, just to name a few— also struggled with jealousy… it’s such a human struggle that nearly every one of the 10 Commandments relate somehow but especially the first and last ones. The first is… 1) I am the LORD your God, have no other gods before me…

Maybe that sounds like God is a jealous God. In fact, sometimes the Torah and prophets say that about God. “God is a jealous God.”[1] That’s confusing, but a key difference between how God is and how jealousy tends to work with humans is that God’s invitation is into relationship—and it seems like our jealousies are always getting in the way of relationship.

At the end of the 10 Commandments are these rules for living together harmoniously:  9) Do not covet your neighbors’ family, and 10) Do not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor.

Why not? Why shouldn’t we want what others have?

Well… it seems like from the very beginning, the root of brokenness is believing there’s not enough to go around. We tell ourselves a story—there’s not enough love and favor to go around. There’s only one person who could possibly bring happiness, and I can’t be with him or her. I won’t be happy until these things or opportunities come to me…

But today, more than ever, we see how getting what we want often leads to another set of wants… and the pattern of wanting what’s just out-of-reach becomes an unending path of unhappiness.

So many faith traditions—not just ours—point us to the wisdom of wanting less, letting go, emptying, so that we can receive what we can’t get by grasping for it. But it’s clearly a hard lesson to put into practice fully. If you are jealous about something today, you are not alone… there are plenty of us struggling with jealousy. At the root of jealousy is not being seen, not being valued—or at least thinking we are not seen or valued.[2] So, what kind of story might be an alternative?

On Friday, I officiated at a funeral of a man whose dying wish was to have a Lutheran pastor do his funeral. As a 22-year-old man, he was baptized in a Lutheran church, and although he had not attended, he wanted his funeral to acknowledge that baptism. I was the person that his wife found to do this, so in a very short time, I learned some wonderful things about Dennis Morrison. His family agreed that the parable of the sower that we heard from Matthew this morning was a great scripture.

Like the farmer in this story of Jesus, Dennis abundantly planted… vegetables and sunflowers bigger than he was in his garden. He planted lessons that his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and the Boy Scouts he mentored will take with them through their whole lives. Dennis planted stories that they’ll never forget. It’s not as if every seed he cast grew equally… sometimes, we’re more open to planting and growth than others, but his wife described how her beloved created a structure, a garden that helped people grow.

Sometimes, I think that when we come to the end of life and have to say goodbye, we worry about if we really did enough. Did we make the right choices? Did we learn everything we needed to? Did we make enough? Did we give enough? Was our faith enough? Were our doubts too big? It’s so much worry because of comparisons.

In this story from Jesus (the parable of the sower), we get a glimpse of how our worries and fears about whether there is enough can be erased by God who always has and gives enough—in fact, God gives plenty, more than enough. This farmer scatters so many seeds that even if birds eat some, thorns choke some, and the hot sun dries up some new sprouts, still there will be enough for good seeds to find good ground to root and sprout and grow… so we can know, it’s never too late. It’s never too late to say “thank you” for the gifts that God gave you. It’s not too late to say “I forgive you,” for anything that needs forgiving. It’s never too late to replace jealous thoughts with words of love, care, and comfort to one another as we make our way through the uncharted terrain of life now.

Maybe this is a story that Jesus puts into our imaginations to be more powerful than our jealous stories. There is enough. There is plenty, there is more than enough love, and care, and attention to go around.

In Psalm 146, the singer sings, “Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help. When their breath departs, they return to the earth; on that very day their plans are done….

Put your hope in the Lord your God, who made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them…

Who keeps faith forever. Who executes justice for the oppressed. Who gives food to the hungry…”

And on and on, the singer sings…. Naming the stories that point us to the hundreds of reasons why we might choose to praise God rather than give our hearts over to jealousy.

One more insight shared with me about jealousy this week… a colleague said that she was once told “If you don’t know what you want, pay attention to your envy and jealousy.”

What is the story we’re telling ourselves? And are those stories really true?

This same colleague has been practicing Centering Prayer. This is a practice of setting aside a certain amount of time every day (or even twice a day) to be still in God’s presence, open to what God wants to show us. For those of us who think we should be in control, or have to engineer everything, this prayer practice may not be relaxing, especially at first…(we’re not doing anything!) but over time, Centering Prayer is a way to practice being open to God working within us.

I can imagine looking over my jealousies with God. I can imagine God reminding me that I can’t see the whole picture, kind of like that poem Walk a Mile in His Moccasins.[3]

There may be tears in his soles that hurt
Though hidden away from view.

We do not know the full story of others…we don’t know how our stories will unfold—either to judge or to be jealous—and so we lean on God’s words and God’s way to teach us how to open our eyes to the ways God is so extravagant with seeds, with love, with a new story.

There is more than enough, not only for later… but we have access to God’s abundance right now, on the way to whatever we’re waiting for… You are seen by God, and “You are precious in God’s sight, and honored, and God loves you.”  (Isaiah 43:4)

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[1] Deuteronomy, Joshua, Ezekiel

[2] From Bev Stratton, “When I am feeling jealous…” Gather, May 2017.

[3] Judge Softly, Mary T. Lathrap, 1895, aaanativearts.com, accessed 7/14/2017.