Service on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/seeyouonsunday/videos/489538887145726 and YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeV9VuLcsP4
I wonder if you have an idea of positive and negative emotions. And most of us did not grow up with the internet and maybe without self-help books. Probably without good therapy or any therapy. And so I wonder if you grew up with or you’re understanding of positive and negative emotions were about classifying emotions into good ones and bad ones, ones that were to be desired and expressed and ones that should not happen and should not exist; of course those are some form and variation of our feelings and emotions are conversation for today: fear, lament, rage.
And today’s sermon was hard to put together because I think there are generations of us who were brought up with zero coping skills for how to handle and regulate our own emotions, be present for someone else’s emotions, or God forbid, be vulnerable enough to reveal them to someone else. Feelings don’t stay buried just because you’ve decided not to feel them. They are not rocks; they are seeds and they grow. There are not good and bad emotions. There are generally healthy and less healthy ways of coping with feelings but even then that’s probably Complicated by all kinds of factors. There are different ways to nurture them and care for them.
I think our feelings live on a spectrum of intensity. Discomfort and Terror on a spectrum of fear. And disappointed to lament (passionate grief and sorrow).And annoyance and rage on a spectrum of anger, even if the nuances between infuriated and rageful are different for each of us.
Now there is a lot to be afraid of, sad over, angry about.
I think we need to set fear and its context before we move any further and talk about them in their generalities. There are fears rooted in the past: reminders of pastimes that we were afraid and trigger that fear in us again. There are fears and tears in the moment and there are fears rooted and some hypothetical future that may or may not ever come to pass. I think often our fears in the moment are also rooted in something in the future. I’m afraid of that spider because what if it crawls on me with all eight of its creepy legs and then maybe it’s going to bite me but maybe not it may just continue to be creepy. I’m afraid to go to that alone because what if nobody talks to me. I’m afraid to try this new thing because what if it fails. We shouldn’t do that because what if you get hurt and there is pain . Our future fears, and be incredibly debilitating and just as real in our minds as any spider walking around the building.
I think a lot of all three of these feelings come down to a response that the world, my world, your world is not what we expected, hoped, or as it ought to be in little ways or big ways. The end of a marriage or relationship brings all kinds of feelings because there was an expectation that that relationship would stay. The death of a parent or a loved one is our feelings and response to the world not having them in it anymore. Or in our future fears case, that the world will not be as it should be whether its community, relationship, love, some version of success.
I have talked about how Kelly and I do not have the time to landscape that the previous owner had. So we have, on occasion, been surprised by what grows in our yard.
Now despite our name we never had rose bushes growing in our yard. In fact no one I knew growing up had one. They always seemed like something special, something that needed to be nurtured and cared for, that rose bushes were finicky and particular and they just sounded like a lot of work. In fact, Kelly tells about her mom who bought a rose bush every year and couldn’t get them to grow and survive.
But in our yard was a rose bush. Bush might be a little generous; it was more of a vine. Anyway, it would grow along the fence next to the gate that we use to get in and out of the yard. And that thing was determined to grow and would grow into where we walked which is absolutely unacceptable for something with thorns to be growing into the walkway it had to go. We cut it down to the ground. It grew back. We dug down and pulled it up at the root as best we could under a fence. It grew back. Its will to live was astonishing and my will not to get stabbed by Thorns one it won’t come back.
If we try to bury them or if we hold on clinging to our fear, anger, grief, it grows roots like that thorn thing, deep and invasive and prepared to come back. And it grows up in thorns and it affects everything else in your life. Wounding your relationships, your purpose, your sense of yourself.
The answer is community, vulnerability, and trust. Our psalmist, in their anger and lament and fear, they trusted still that God was there, would continue to be there, and would care for her. Mary, as part of an oppressed people, was filled with fear, rage, and lament, and it overflowed from her in this song. Anger is never holier than when it acts in defense of the dignity of a person or piece of creation.
Mary’s words weren’t just her own. They had been said by the prophet Isaiah before her. And Jesus crying out on the cross “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me,” came from the psalms. I mean, haven’t we all turned on a sad song to help us say the words when we could not? So often communities, like churches, bottle up all the feelings for somewhere else, some private place, but We are born knowing how to cry, but it takes another to teach us how to cry well and with purpose.
We stave off fear in its most dangerous forms when we allow our agony to be held safely by a number of others. We learn to lament in community and poems and songs. in the tears of each other and the stories of what was and what could yet be. We challenge our rage to be holy together–to find in it the care and defense of others, the love we give.
And hope. Fear, lament, and rage turn in on themselves, turn dangerous when there is no hope. So may we be bearers of hope, carry on despite the fear, lament honestly so others can learn to do the same, and rage in love on behalf of God’s creation and creatures.