Lift, Nudge, Dwell

Psalm 146

It’s Friday afternoon, your house is a mess, you’re vacuuming when your 13-year-old daughter calls and asks for a ride home from school. You look at the stacks of laundry, you listen to your two younger kids, hungry and grouchy, arguing in the next room. You look at the clock and calculate when you need to leave to pick your spouse up from work. You say to your daughter, “do you have money for the city bus?” “Sure,” she says, and you turn the vacuum back on.

You’re really getting the house in shape and then you see the clock again – she should be home by now. And this is November in Winnipeg – was she wearing a heavy coat when she left this morning? You don’t think so.

You’re anxious as you look both ways down the street. You load the grumbling kids in the car and drive past her school as you pick up your spouse at work. You drive through the school’s neighborhood, your own neighborhood, the streets in between. You talk to your neighbors, “Have you seen her?” you ask everywhere. No one has. You go home and call her friends, one by one, no one has seen her since school.

A parents’ worst day. And tomorrow won’t be any better. How many days in a row can be your worst day? How many “If only” questions can you torment yourself with?

If you’re Wilma and Cliff Derksen of Winnipeg, after seven weeks of praying and searching, seven weeks of panic and guilt, seven weeks without rest or peace, your 13-year-old daughter Candance will be found in a shed, hands and feet tied, frozen to death. A quarter of a mile from home.

Wilma and Cliff Derksen are Mennonite, part of a strong church community, they know their neighbors. The day the police knock on their door to say the worst words thinkable – your daughter is dead – that day, the Derksens home fills up with their friends, their family, their church family. No one can fix this, but they gather together to hold love and anguish face to face.

Night falls, the crows thins. One more knock on the door, it’s a man they don’t recognize. “I’m a parent of a murdered child, too,” he says. They gather all that anguish around the kitchen table and he tells a terrible story, his daughter murdered a few years before. He pulls out a black book and shows them dates of each trial, notes on each trial, records of bills and expenses. He pours out anger at the court system, which after three trials and a few years of jail time, exonerated the man accused of murdering his daughter. He pours out sorrow that his family, his career, his health has fallen apart.

The Derksens are Mennonite, they heed Jesus’ call to forgive countless times, to love enemies. Listening to his story the Derksens realize that forgiveness is not only their path of faith. Forgiveness is their path to healing and wholeness.
They’re headed that direction anyway, but this father’s confession helps them take the first step. “If he hadn’t come at that point, it might have been different,” Wilma said later. “The way I look at it in hindsight, he forced us to consider another option. We said to each other, ‘How do we get out of this?’”[1] Psalm 146 calls out to these grieving parents:
Do not put your trust in princes,
In mortals, in whom there is no help.
(In courts and judges and juries and jails)
When mortals’ breath departs, they return to the earth;
On that very day their plans perish.
Happy are those whose help is the God of Israel,
Whose hope is in the Lord their God…who executes justice.

After Candace’s funeral Wilma tells reporters that she hasn’t fully forgiven Candance’s killer yet, but “We have all done something dreadful in our lives, or felt the urge to.”[2]

Wilma and Cliff Derksen live with anguish and grief, they cherish memories of their 13-year-old daughter Candace, they walk the healing path of forgiveness, they struggle, but their family stays together, they trust each other, they trust their faith community, they pray.

And 20 years go by. Police match DNA from the shed where Candace died to a man who’d been living not far from the Derksens at the time. So now they face the man accused of tying her up and they see his face as they wonder just why he wanted her tied up, why that pleased him, and forgiving him now seems impossible for Wilma.

She’s grieving and raging to her church friends about this man, about her desire for revenge, about his sexual insanity. The next day one of her church friends calls. They get together and this woman confesses to Wilma that she has struggled with addiction to pornography, bondage and sadomasochism.

And Wilma is looking into a face she loves and thinking of a man she can’t stand to look at. Wilma says of that moment, “I remembered I loved her. We had worked in the ministry together. This whole dysfunction, this whole side of her, had been hidden from me. She was so scared. She had seen my anger. And now would I stay locked in that anger and direct it to her? Would I reject her?”[3] Forgiving her friend and forgiving the man accused of killing her daughter are all tied up together. And there they are, sitting at a table to hold love and anguish, together.

We’ve been talking about confession, about healing the past few weeks. We’ve shared anointing, we’ve been considering how confession moves us on a path toward healing and wholeness. Sometimes our confession will move someone else on a path of healing and wholeness. The man who had lost everything in his obsession with punishment for his daughter’s killer, the woman struggling with sex addiction, their confessions move Wilma and Cliff Derksen into utter, heart-breaking clarity about their own healing and wholeness. Doesn’t make it easy, doesn’t mean it doesn’t still break their hearts every day, but as Wilma says if she had chosen revenge, “It would have been easier in the beginning. But then it would have gotten harder. I think I would have lost Cliff, I think I would have lost my children. In some ways I would be doing to others what he did to Candance.”[4]

Wilma and Cliff get glory and befuddlement from the people around them. But at least some of the glory should go to these people who provided Divine Nudges to the Derksens on their journey toward healing and wholeness. The father who hasn’t found healing himself. The woman who bared her deepest secret to another good church lady who might have never looked at her with love again.
The Psalmist sings
Happy are those whose help is the God of Israel,
Whose hope is in the Lord their 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.
 
I would add, Praise God who puts people in our path that nudge us toward healing, toward wholeness, who sit around a table with us and hold love and anguish, together. Praise God who feeds the hungry through Rachel Beck and her family. Praise God who gathers us up to love one another in this community of faith.
And the Psalmist’s song has sounded off-key to my ears at times this week.
The Lord sets the prisoners free;
The Lord opens the eyes of the blind.
The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down;
The Lord loves the righteous.
The Lord watches over the strangers, the aliens, the sojourners;          
God upholds the orphan and the widow.
 
Why didn’t God lift Candace up? Why didn’t God put someone in her path who could nudge her onto a different block and away from that man?

God, what you up to when Rakeyia Scott watched her husband shot and killed by police? Whose arms did you wrap around her on the worst day of her life? God, where are your nudges amidst the despair and anger bubbling over in Charlotte?  God, who did you lift out of harm’s way when a young man shot and killed 5 people in a Macy’s in Washington State yesterday? God, what are you up to in these final weeks before a country full of scared, sad, suspicious people consider how to vote for president?
We read
Do not put your trust in princes,
In mortals, in whom there is no help.
Happy are those whose help is the God of Israel,
Whose hope is in the Lord their God…
Who sets the prisoners free,
opens the eyes of the blind,
lifts up those who are bowed down;
watches over the strangers, the aliens, the sojourners,
upholds the orphan and the widow.
 
If we want to praise God for putting people in the Derksen’s path that nudge them toward forgiveness and healing, do we blame God for not fully intervening and protecting their daughter Candace?

That’s a rational way to look at God’s activity in this world. And our rational, scale-balancing brains may be Divinely-created but they certainly don’t hold Divine truths adequately.

It’s really hard to be a person of faith if we worry about being naïve. If we don’t want to believe outside of what we can prove. If we hold our faith to concrete tests. A curious faith, a faith full of questions – that can enrich our spiritual lives. But a faith we’re holding to tests is nervous. Do you have a robust faith or a wary faith?

When I started seminary I had a wary faith. I didn’t want to believe or say anything that I wasn’t totally certain of. I planned to strip away everything outdated and offensive and shallow about faith and find a healthy, fresh core of belief that I could claim with clarity, with certainty, with a clear conscience. Maybe you can relate?

I’ve found that, at least for me, faith doesn’t work that way. There’s nothing life-giving about shaving away at faith to make it provable. But a lot of people, especially learned people, feel the pressure to let go of naïve faith, to give up on anything that might seem superstitious. Do you ever feel old-fashioned because you go to church? Do you ever feel naïve when you pray?

I learned the Derksen’s story from reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book David and Goliath. All of Malcolm Gladwell’s writing, and his new podcast, is profound, relevant, and fresh. It’s all grounded in a deep care for humanity, a heart for justice and equality. And Malcolm Gladwell has these values from his Mennonite upbringing, from his parents, from his nature. And he wandered away from faith, from church, for years. Then he started this book David and Goliath and got to know Wilma and Cliff Derksen, and asked himself, Where do two people find the power to forgive in a moment like that?”[5] and this question, this curiosity, this longing, brought him back to faith.

We don’t cling to faith when everything is going well, when life is easy, when God’s blessings are obvious everywhere we turn. It seems surprising, but also rings deeply true, that when we’re facing the most obstacles, when our need is deepest, when we can’t go farther on our own, many root into faith.

If you have spent time in a call and response church tradition you know what to say:
God is good
[all the time]
And all the time
            [God is good]
Or God makes a way [when there is no way]

I’m sure all kinds of churches share this call and response. I learned these declarations of faith in black Baptist and African Methodist Episcopal churches. Churches filled with people whose ancestors taught each other to read under threat of beating, whipping, and death. Churches filled with people whose grandparents weren’t allowed to pray in the Baptist or Methodist church so they started their own churches.

People who could’ve looked around and said, “God’s not showing up for me, I’m not going to show up for God.” And instead are saying, “God is good, all the time, and all the time, God is good.”

Reverend Otis Moss III calls it the blue note gospel:
What is the Blue Note? It is who we are as a people. A people who look through the lens of the Blue Note, know, joy is married to sorrow and tragedy is forever engaged to triumph. Life with her sweet brutality and bitter blessings reminds us, praise and pain are first cousins, and worship and weeping constantly flirt with each other…. What is a Blue Note Gospel? A Blue Note Gospel is raising a son who finished two tours in Iraq, who loves Christ, community and his culture, but is gunned down by thugs on the streets of Chicago. That’s a Blue Note Gospel.[6]

What should we do when we gather in Jesus’ names on Sundays? We’ve had another hard week. Frantic schedules or empty days, strained relationships, health concerns, despair and fear when we see the news. I want to rejuvenate and inspire you so you have more energy and hope to start another week. But Otis Moss III reminds us that just preaching happy would never be enough for us, and it wouldn’t be on behalf of God.

He writes, “This blue note is a challenge to preaching and to the church. Can preaching recover a blues sensibility and dare speak with authority in the midst of tragedy? America is living stormy Monday, but the pulpit is preaching happy Sunday.”[7]

But happy Sunday has nothing to do with the gospel stories I read, filled with Jesus hanging out on the fringe, eating with the outcasts, loving the last, the lost, the least. Otis Moss III says, “The blues is a cultural legacy that dares to see the American landscape from the viewpoint of the underside.”[8] And that’s exactly where Jesus sees his world, from the underside.

Most of us at Stone Church don’t live on the underside of economics or education or racism. We might not feel rich when we compare ourselves to people on TV or the covers of magazines, but compared to the rest of the world we’re doing quite fine.

But there are ways we are struggling, physically and emotionally and spiritually and the ways that we’re on the underside are the places that our faith calls out to us. These are the places where God wants to lift us, to nudge us, to dwell with us. Where are the blues in your life? What song do you want to sing about your blues?

Phillip and I went hiking last weekend and on our way up the ridge I was watching the ground a lot – I’m always looking for snakes, they scare me so much, and I know there are some legitimately scary snakes on central Pennsylvania’s ridges. Watching the ground I enjoyed all the patches of cheery yellow and pockets of feisty red leaves as fall teased its way into our world.

We sat atop Stone Valley Vista and gazed across rolling farmland and dense forest and we were hungry. So as we hiked back down we decided to collect acorns for future pancakes. Soon our pockets were overflowing. Grey, brown, green acorns, with hats, without hats, acorns were everywhere. Where were all those acorns on our hike up the mountain? I’d been watching the ground, I’d seen hundreds of beautiful leaves, I never noticed the acorns. It took us longer to get down than it had taken us to hike up, because we stopped for so many acorns. We finally had to declare we were done, but even then, I saw acorns everywhere.

Our eyes take in more information than we can process at once, so our brains tell us what to pay attention to, and leave the rest in the background. I didn’t notice all those acorns on the way up because I wasn’t looking for them. But even days after our hike, we were seeing acorns all over as we moved through this beautiful world.

When we choose to look for it, we will start seeing it, everywhere. What does Stone Church help you learn to look for? How can Stone Church help you see it? Maybe you need glimpses of generosity. Maybe you’re aching to see self-sacrifice.

Can Stone Church help you see how God is good?
To see God setting prisoners free,
opening the eyes of the blind,
lifting up those who are bowed down;
watching over the strangers, the aliens, the sojourners,
upholding the orphan and the widow.

How can we be a community that trains each one of us to see how we can be God’s nudge on someone else’s journey toward healing and wholeness?

How can we learn to see?


[1] Gladwell, Malcom. David and Goliath.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5]How I rediscovered faith by Malcolm Gladwell: http://www.relevantmagazine.com/culture/books/how-i-rediscovered-faith#LHjCyqUMGWL3s5Bi.99
[6] A Blue Note Gospel by Otis Moss III: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-otis-moss-iii/blue-note-gospel_b_1126621.html
[7] The Blue Note Gospel by Otis Moss III: https://sojo.net/biography/otis-moss-iii
[8] Ibid.

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