God, we are all ears today.
Send your Holy Spirit to enlighten and encourage us to dare to reach and
receive your divine healing. Your sacred
spirit calls us to come close and listen.
We are fully here in this place—alive and aware of your presence. Amen
I am a person who has sought after
healing from adolescence. I knew, before
I knew much else about God, that it was in God that I would finally find my
yearning for wholeness realized. As I
have told you before, I tried it all—healing services, every book on healing
known to humankind, it seems, tapes, CD’s, holistic doctors, everything I could
find that promised healing. And, all the
time I knew it came from God—I just didn’t know how. In my sixth decade of life, I have come to
understand much about healing and the relationship between my body, the Body of
Christ, and God, the creator.
I have,
most importantly, come to understand three things:
·
I have come to understand that the God who
created me did so exactly to plan. I do
not have to change who I am to be whole.
And that is about far more than just sexuality. It seems that I have spent my life
apologizing to someone or another about something or another. I am a well-practiced apologizer. In fact, I have the art of apology down so
well, that I hardly notice when I am apologizing again. And, what do I know now? I know that the fine art of apologizing is
not one of the “Gifts” of the Spirit.
Are you an apologizer, too—perhaps for your past, your sexuality, or
spirituality? Perhaps you apologize for
needing feedback and connection in this life.
Or perhaps you find yourself apologizing simply for being. Now hear this—this is the good news through
the grace of God—there is no need for you to apologize to the world for who are
and what you need. I believe that God
wants us to save our “I’m sorries” for the occasional step on the toe, or angry
word, or the bump in the grocery check-out line; or for the, hopefully rare, disagreements
or misunderstandings.
Think about
it. Do you apologize or say “I’m sorry”
a lot, you may be ready to stop and see if your apologies come from a tender
heart determined to mend the everyday hurts of life or from a broken and
fearful heart yearning for acceptance and relationship with others. The first step to heart-healing comes in the
complete embrace of ourselves exactly as we are in this moment. God calls us to pause and think together, “God,
you created me and love me. I am beloved
and loveable just as I am.”
·
Is there someone you need to forgive in order to
heal your heart? God understands how
hard it is to forgive. It must pain the
Spirit of God and the Order of the Universe to forgive us over and over again,
but Sacred Wholeness through Divine Love allows no room for resentment or
offense. This then is the message that
we receive—being in the state of divine wholeness, where our hearts are healed,
leaves no room for unforgiving thoughts, bitterness, or anger. Do you have room in your heart for Sacred
Wholeness or is your heart full of the record of all of life’s offenses which,
stewing together like a giant boiling pot of toxins, crowd out the possibility
of God’ healing work in your heart? Forgiveness
comes hard unless we allow God to soften our hearts and help us say, “I forgive
and forgive and forgive—God, teach me to forgive as soon as I feel the anger or
hurt start to build so that there is always room for your Sacred Wholeness in
my heart.
·
The third thing that I’ve learned along the way
is that I can’t heal my own heart. Only
God can pour Sacred Wholeness into the darkest parts of my heart—the deep
recesses where hidden pain still lies waiting to steal my peace away. And so, I have begun to allow God to show me
those places—and that isn’t always pleasant.
But this I know, when I allow God to shine the Holy Light of compassion
into those bruised and scarred places, I am clearing the way for more and more
of the gift of Sacred Wholeness. I used
to begrudge this work—whether I did it alone or with another—but now I rejoice
when I can clear the next room and allow God’s light to be permanently on. Sherrie and I have been moving—ugh—and we
both long for the day when everything is in place and the house is whole. It is with this same longing that I approach
the healing of my heart—bit by bit—even box by box—it all becomes whole.
There is a poem by Esther Yff-Prins that is a beautiful
telling of this process. It is brief and
I would like to read it to you—I invite you to close your eyes:
Open
Slowly, the
descent begins,
Moving down,
Down into the
Corridors of
my heart.
Tenderly,
gently,
Consent
unbars the door
Of a hidden
chamber.
Now I touch
the
Breath of my
soul;
Taste the
depth of
My longing;
Hear the
echoing
Silence
within.
Now I
encounter
The welcome
Of the
Divine,
Pulsating,
poignant,
Irresistible.
Awed by the
Language of
God
At the center
of my being
I linger,
embraced
In wordless
benediction,
Sheltered in
the Sacred.
Hmmm, “Sheltered in
the Sacred.” What does that truly mean? I believe that one pitfall we may fall into
in this process of allowing God to heal our hearts is to imagine that a healed
heart is a completely new and shiny heart.
While God makes all things new, God does not take away the learning and
growing that our formerly broken and shattered hearts have given to us. There is an interesting story; I don’t recall
the source, about a village where a young person stated with great pride that they
had the most beautiful, flawless, sparkling clean heart. An older, wiser person challenged the
younger. Through the magic of ancient
story-telling, the crowd looked at the older one’s heart. It beat strong and smooth, but the group saw
that it was full of scars, one scar after another. There were holes in places and some places
where pieces had been put back in the holes but didn’t quite fit right. The older one looked at the younger one and
said, “I would never trade my heart for yours.
Every scar represents a person I’ve given my love -- I tear out a piece and
give it to them. Sometimes they give me a piece of their broken heart, which I
fit along jagged edges. When the person doesn’t return my love, a painful gouge
is left. Those gouges stay open, reminding me that I love these people too.
Perhaps someday they will return and fill that space.” God heals our hearts and transforms our
regrets into gratitude and our brokenness into joy.
This
acknowledgement that we must allow God to heal our hearts is integral to
becoming a church of radical inclusion.
We enter into Sacred Wholeness not just for our own pleasure, but also
so that we can lead others through the same process. As more and more people seek and find this
church as an oasis of true welcome, healing, comfort, and community, we must be
ready—ready to offer welcome and healing, comfort and community. Jesus tells us, in the scripture we heard
today, that what comes out of our mouths is the most important as it comes from
the heart. We do not want to be like the
Pharisees who, having no authentic experience of God’s Sacred Wholeness, would,
instead focus on rules and conditions—pushing the less acceptable to outside
the circle of believers. We seek to have
what it takes to lead others to God’s reign of justice—justice for the world
and justice for ourselves, but we cannot expect people who still yearn for
Sacred Wholeness—that gift from God—to stand for justice and peace. And in this standing for justice and peace,
we make a difference in the world. We
stand as healed and whole people ready to invite others to that same circle of healing
and wholeness so that they can stand for justice and peace as well. And, as we draw the circle wider and wider, we
must all begin to take an active role in the welcoming and telling.
Our Native American
Healing Prayer this morning keeps our focus right—the one who prays does so to
be able to serve—and ends the prayer like this:
“Mother, heal my
heart so that I can see the gifts of yours that can live through me”.
And, so, together we pray in that same spirit, Mother, Father, Creator
God, Great Spirit of Healing and Health, make us whole in this moment, teach us
to value our own wholeness always over anger and pain, and show us the way to
welcome others to this great circle of Sacred Unity and Love. And all God’s people said, amen and amen.
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