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March 18, 2007
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture: Joshua 5:9-12, Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
“Return Trip: A Little ‘Big Brother’ Looms in Us
All”
This story reminds me to be grateful for those who participate in “Big
Brother, Big Sister” programs! We all need all the good “brothering” and
“sistering” we can get! We need those “big brother, little brother” parts
of ourselves – even when they seem at such odds. We are in time of
learning to honor the whole “self” we are – whether as person, as family, as
congregation, community, nation, world.
We do not have much choice any more as to all the “parts” who make us whole!
Especially the parts that seem hardest to “fit” together. How do we love and
nurture the “big brother” part of resentful obedience in us – while giving the “little
brother” part of rebellious challenge the room to grow – even to leave and return?
I want to suggest this morning that a way to look at these parts lies in the
parts of our own brains – the so called “limiting” left brain and “liberating” right
brain! Even with one “heart” – father/mother – loving them both? See
where it leads us.
Today we reach that point in our Lenten journey of choice between “returning”
and “no return.” Will we try to live our whole lives in “lostness,” on the
road, or even on the run – lost in wilderness or at sea – avoiding, escaping, ignoring,
denying the tougher issues of our everyday lives? Or will we risk being found,
coming home again to ourselves, to the settings where we “belong,” – yet coming
home again as if for the very first time! As if to remain awake and aware,
alive and alert, to all we have learned in our lostness, our blindness, even our
deadness – to others and eventually to ourselves? For we can run from
ourselves, but we cannot hide. Part of ourselves is always in search of
renewal.
How lost do we have to be before we are open to being found? How blind
before we are open to seeing again? How dead before becoming fully alive?
There is such a thing as “hitting bottom” in our lives, of spiraling so out of
control as to reach a point where it may become ruthlessly and relentlessly
clear we have nothing to show for our lives but ourselves! Every other
resource, every advantage, every support has been stripped away. We have
to find it somewhere somehow deeply within ourselves to accept that we are
powerless in any sense we ever have known power in our lives before.
Nobody else can do it for us. We cannot even do it for ourselves in any
sense or way we have done it before. All our defenses are down.
All our resistance is gone.
Life is not a one-way ticket. Life is about leaving and returning,
getting lost and coming home, exiling and repatriating, denying ourselves and
accepting ourselves. How do we one any one of these experiences without
the other? How do we know found without knowing lost? Sight without
knowing blindness? Life without knowing death? How do we avoid our
complicity in the whole of the human experience? How do we deny that what
can happen to any one of us can happen to all of us? That we are all in
this together? Every part of the body, precisely for how different each
part is, is fully needed for us to be whole?
Basketball players such as our Wolf Pack today talking about “leaving it all
on the floor” -- holding nothing back of themselves, playing each game as intensely
and completely as if it were their last. There is so much more to life, to
living, for ourselves and for others, than we can see when we become so preoccupied
with our own narrow interests and investments in life. How do we learn to
keep ourselves open to the spirit of adventure, of journey, of exploration and discovery,
of radical difference and newness occurring again and again in our lives?
No matter where we are, who we are with, what we are doing – God is not done with
us yet! And we are all in this together. Each is a part of us all.
We hear what God says to Joshua and the people of Israel coming out of the wilderness.
There they learned to trust God completely with their well-being everyday.
Now “coming home,” so to speak, to the “promised land,” their temptation will be
to forget all they learned by their lostness, their wandering, their making life
up as they went along! God says in words meant for each of us – “Today I
have rolled away from you this disgrace of Egypt.” “What is the “disgrace”
that may be weighing us down or holding us back? How far back do we go to
find it? How do we let it go? God is saying to each and to all of
us, I am setting you fully free from what might be called all that “Big Brother”
in you! All that fear and intimidation you felt of being your true
selves in bondage.
As slaves to pharaoh we always had to be so aware of the danger of doing anything
out of the ordinary, of breaking with any routines and expectations.
Everything about us served at the mercy and pleasure of this unquestionable, unchallengeable
external authority in our lives! This one had such power with us that we internalized
every oppression. (I remember that phrase coming from Franz Fanon’s The
Wretched of the Earth. Adds a dimension to what we sing each Sunday
this season – about “saved ‘a wretched’ like me”!) We became our own worst
enemies because pharaoh now lived in us. We could not trust in or rely on
ourselves, or act in response to our sense of divine worth and calling.
We needed all that time and experience in the wilderness – “time out,” as we
say, time away -- like the little brother leaving home, like the right brain
stretching the left -- to ”lose” ourselves to pharaoh’s control over us. We have
to ‘blind” ourselves to images of pharaoh’s dominance over us and within us.
We have to “die” to ourselves! -- God puts it bluntly -- in order to come alive
in new ways to God! Even to that “heart” who loves us brothers and sons,
both parts of the brain! Alive to God’s freedom and will for us to see
ourselves as God’s children -- whom God can deliver and for whom God can always,
in all ways, provide!
That is the heart of the “freedom meal,” the Passover feast here eaten for the
first time, not as “manna” in the wilderness but as produce of the new land!
As we approach Passover time with Jesus, that remains the challenge to us: How do
we partake of life in the new land -- without losing, abandoning, denying, betraying
the wilderness parts of ourselves?! How do we come home again, to ourselves
again, found again – while remembering what it is like for others as well as for
us to be lost?! To regain our sight, our vision, our hope – while remaining
in touch with the sightless, the visionless, the hopeless we know remain all around
us – and even within us?! Even to come alive again -- to put on the robe,
the sandals, the ring again – to feast on the fat calf and dance again! – while
retaining awareness, consciousness, compassion, solidarity, commitment, even struggle
in our own “deadness” for those who still die so needlessly all around us?!
What gets “little brother” (right brain) in trouble with “big brother” (left
brain) here is the same trouble “gospel” gets into with “law,” and Jesus gets
into with scribes and Pharisees, and, of course, with us! The very Church
that comes into the world as “little brother!” God love us – both
and all! Sisters and brothers, the gifts of returning, of repenting and
renewing, to others as to ourselves – the gifts of new home, new sight, new life
– are not for us some cheap kind of Hollywood “happy ending.” They are
always and only the costly beginning again! “Big brother’s” response in us
warns us we cannot quit while we are ahead -- even momentarily. We are not
like those who think that being “saved” -- as we might call this experience --
is the same as being ”safe!” As hiding light under a bushel! As
keeping good news for ourselves! As secretly lording ourselves over other
who are not so “enlightened” as us, who do not “get it” the same way we do!
This matter of being “found” -- being “sighted,” “enlightened,” “raised,” “enlivened”
-- “saved,” by whatever description, is not “safe” at all! I ask myself as
I ask each one of us and this congregation – how and where are we putting our lives
on the line? How and where are we remembering what it is like to be lost?
To be blind? To be dead? To be “unsaved” and therefore “uncharged” with sharing
the dangerous life of Jesus? With partaking the dangerous meal of Jesus?
Doing the dangerous work of Jesus? Bearing the dangerous witness of Jesus?
Taking the dangerous action of Jesus? Especially on this anniversary of the
war?
What are we doing to stop this war? Not only what are we doing together?
What keeps us from risking any kind of corporate witness and action? But what
are we doing as persons of life and disciples of Christ and even as members of the
United Methodist Church? The very Church of so many of those – so many of
us, I mean – who decided to make this war in the first place? Remember the
delegation of our bishops who asked before the war for audience with the president
and the vice-president -- as brothers in this shared faith – only to be turned down?
As if being “saved” is no longer being accountable?
What happens to me, I know, is that at least a little, sometimes more, of
this “big brother” looms in me – I suspect in each one of us. Something
about us -- for all of our desire to live freely and fully, to bear witness and
take action for justice and peace, for the general good of others –
Something about us that still gets suspicious of strange music and dancing –
such as “big brother” responds to when he hears it -- especially while we are
“in church!” Like “big brother,” “left brain,” we get so caught up in
safety of obedience to our duties and in loyalty to our routines. As soon
as anything new and different breaks into our lives, we turn self-defensive and
self-protective. We cannot afford to be open to question or challenge.
We have invested so much in things as they are – always have been, always should
be – forever and ever – Amen! Please just leave us alone!!
Then we hear what’s happening with “little brother.” “Big brother” in us
often does not even see for ourselves but believes (and projects!) the worst in
what we hear! We hear this dangerous ungrateful unholy unsaved “little
brother”-part of ourselves has come back home! And this too-loving, too-welcoming,
too-trusting, too-forgiving “father”-part of ourselves is throwing a party because
this brother is alive and found! We become furious! Even at our own
“big brother” part of ourselves! For we know in our hearts life is meant to
be “saved” -- delivered and set free! We are meant to break bondage to external
authority written once and for all on stone in our lives -- and to trust the writing
of God on our very own hearts -- day by day! We know in our hearts this “father/heart”
part of ourselves wants and seeks to love us as much in our “big brother” safer
ways as to love the “little brother” and even the “enemy” parts of ourselves in
their dangerous ways! And yet, something still keeps us from being set free.
I close with some borrowed reflections on what it takes to be so free – to return
home again for the first time – to repent and renew our lives to our souls.
Our friend in Chicago, Bob Koehler, writes a regular column for syndication – See
www.commonwonders.com. This week’s is entitled “Hemorrhaging Nirvana”
and deals with our “big brother/left” and “little brother/right” brains.
Parts of ourselves loved and reconcilable in our “father/heart.”
Koehler begins with this quote – “Oh my gosh, I’m having a stroke! I’m
having a stroke! And in the next instant, the thought passed through my
mind, this is so cool!” The quote comes from a book by Dr. Jill Taylor,
My Stroke of Insight. (To order, visit
www.drjilltaylor.com.) Koehler calls it “a guided tour of the human brain.”
Dr. Taylor is a Harvard-trained neuroanatomist whose left brain shut down with a
cranial hemorrhage when she was 37. The book is full of “plain-language, enthusiastic
science.” But Koehler says its “preciousness” lies “in the door it courageously
opens to the mystery of the brain’s right hemisphere and beyond . . . to the pulsing
miracle of life and the vast universe that is our home!”
In 1996, while working at Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center, Dr. Taylor awoke
with a sharp pain behind her left eye. Her speech and motor functions failed.
“She melted into what she called a euphoric stupor and lost all sense of where ‘Dr.
Jill’ ended and the rest of the universe began.” It was the rupturing of a
congenitally deformed vein-artery connection deep in her brain – the first stage
of a potentially killer stroke. As befits her situation (all of our life situations??)
Koehler says nothing unfolds in her book as we might expect. The surest sign
of the Spirit is to lead us where we never (or only!) dreamed of going! The
bottom line, says Koehler, is “amazement” – “Ph.D.-level clarity and awareness of
detail combined with childlike exuberance!” – “the shattering of the self-created
box we live in that we call ‘life’!”
Here is what Taylor finds in the “right-brain/little brother” part of herself
–
Wow, what a strange and amazing thing
I am. What a bizarre being I am. Life! I am life! I am a
sea of water bound inside this membranous pouch. Here, in this form, I am
a conscious mind and this body is the vehicle through which I am ALIVE! I
am trillions of cells sharing a common mind. I am here, now, thriving as life.
Wow! What an unfathomable concept! I am cellular life, no – I am molecular
life with manual dexterity and a cognitive mind!”
Taylor goes on to recount orchestrating her own rescue that morning, then her
brain surgery, her eight years’ slow recovery of left-brain functions (such as preschool-level
reading!). Her book “bursts with hope” for all brain-injured persons – so
many of whom now are victims of this war! As well as with vital guidance to
medical practice. But Bob Koehler calls the book as well “a gift to every
spiritual seeker and peace activist” – “what I would describe as Taylor’s fearless
mapping of the physiology of compassion, the physiology of Nirvana.”
This book is about the wonder of
being human and as such is a plea and a prayer that we strive to be equal to how
big we really are! What a piece of work we are – 5 trillion cells functioning
in purposeful harmony! The two hemispheres of our brain yoked opposites!
One side, limit-setting rationality (time, judgment, ego) in perpetual interplay
with “the other side” – the eternal and unbounded now! Together, and only
together, do these two halves of our awareness make our human destiny!
Dare we say, it takes all “parts of the body?” All parts of the family?
All mother and father parts? All sister and brother parts? All law and
gospel parts? All Jesus, scribe, and Pharisee parts? All parts of Christ
and the Church? Faith and the world? Koehler goes on to observe, “A
healthy person, and a healthy society, honor and live more or less equally out of
both halves of the brain.” He asks Taylor in an interview how she would describe
our current balance. She says, 85-15 – in favor of the left-brain/big brother!
We not only fail to engage the right-brain/little brother, we mock them!
Koehler concludes, “That is to say, we live, and we strangle each other, in our
left-brain boxes, refusing to trust or even acknowledge that a different kind of
world is possible!” How much we need our right-brain little brother parts
– of self, of family, of church, of community, nation, and world – to push to the
edges of our every existence together – too see and to hear what never has been
before – and to bring it all back home again – as if for the very first time!
Let us keep on loving those big brother/little brother, left-brain/right-brain part
of ourselves – and each other -- back into right relation – now and forever!
Amen.
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