Today's Sermon

 

"The Vulnerable Way:  Do Unto Others 2"

 

The Vulnerable Way:  Do Unto Others 2

            I have been reading in preparation for a series on miracles we will be doing in the spring, and I came across what might be a helpful image for how to read the Bible. Some people struggle with how to understand the Bible.  The image is from New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson.  He says rather than getting caught up in the question of whether scripture is either historical or pure metaphor, take an “imaginal” approach to it.  The meaning is twofold:  imagine the world the biblical storytellers inhabited and use it as a tool to imagine a new world into being.  By entering a way of seeing the world in which God is present and active and working toward a heavenly vision, we participate with God in bringing that world about.  The journey of a Christian is not only to be concerned with what was, but to dream into being what could be.

            The stories, the teachings, the writings, even the laws invite us to imagine a way, the kingdom of heaven or God it’s called in the Bible.  It’s a reality that Jesus spoke about as both coming and sprouting up all the time.  You hear it in today’s passage from the prophet Isaiah.  We get confused about what prophets do.  We think they predict the future, but that’s not usually the point.  Sometimes we talk of prophets as truth-tellers, specifically those who speak truth to power and that’s true, but that doesn’t do the term justice.  Prophets in their forewarning of what’s going wrong, in their speaking the truth, invite us to see, to imagine a world where things are right, where beings are well. Johnson would say that imagining is part of how we make it so.

Listen to today’s reading from Isaiah and what it would have us imagine:

Isaiah 11:6-9 (New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition)
6 The wolf shall live with the lamb;
    the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
the calf and the lion will feed together,
    and a little child shall lead them.
7 The cow and the bear shall graze;
    their young shall lie down together;
    and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
8 The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
    and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
9 They will not hurt or destroy
    on all my holy mountain,
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
    as the waters cover the sea. 

It’s a prophetic image because it calls us to a reality we don’t inhabit, but once we can see it, we start to join in its forming.  We tend to concentrate on the unlikeliness of the pairings.  That’s what makes it powerful—the wolf and the lamb, the calf and the lion, a still nursing child safe in the presence of a venomous snake (that’s what an asp is, if you were wondering). We see the image and then we sit back and say, “One day,” and we say it quite longingly, but then we sit back passively and wait.

            However, there’s something to be done to speed its coming and the images of the passage give us clues. One jumped out at me.  Look at the passage through the lens of vulnerability. Each pairing is of a vulnerable figure and another that could do it harm, yet that vulnerability is never exploited. It is offered in and held in trust, trust or naivete, but either way it is safe.  This is what makes the pairing possible. 

            We are in a series on doing unto others as we would have done unto us, this foundational teaching of Jesus and so many spiritual teachers.  Vulnerability is connected because it is through the proper offering and receiving of vulnerability that new possibilities emerge.  Vulnerability is a term associated with weakness, but it is extremely powerful.  Brene Brown, author, speaker, professor of social work has gained a lot of traction for her work on shame and vulnerability, shame as the power to shut down and vulnerability for its power to open up.  She writes, “The origin of the word "courage" comes from the word ‘cour’, which mean heart, and it means to completely share your story with your whole heart.”[1]To be vulnerable with someone is to open up a space for something to happen between parties.  You may know this more easily by the experience of its opposite.  You know when someone comes at you not to explore new ground or share from the heart, but to set a verbal trap so they can hit you with their agenda?  That’s the opposite of vulnerability.  They’re not opening up anything.  They don’t really want to know what you think, but they sure want you to know what they do.  They’re coming in mouth open, but heart and ears closed.

            Vulnerability, on the other hand says “Here’s a piece of me.”  Now the ground is sacred.  What you do with it matters.  You can probably call to mind when someone was very reverent with the sacred ground you offered, or when you were especially careful with territory another shared with you.  Maybe you can even recount the impact this had on them or you.  Sometimes our vulnerability gets offered up without our choosing.  It’s even more important to tread carefully because the potential for harm is even greater. 

            I’ve likely told this story before in some setting here if not in a sermon, but I’ll employ it differently today.  I was in a dining hall, visiting a summer camp in North Carolina doing some research.  A child from a school on a field trip drops his tray.  It’s a middle school group, the height of vulnerability, and you can guess what happened next.  The other students start to cheer, mockingly, but before they get very far into it, the camp director, not a particularly agile looking guy, leaps out of his seat across from me and dashes over to the kid exclaiming as he ran, “It’s all right! It’s all right!  It’s all right!”  Sacred ground.  You are safe here.  Do unto others as you would have done. 

            In Isaiah’s vision, nobody exploits the other.  You can measure someone by what they do with another’s vulnerability and how they treat the vulnerable.  This is why it’s so sinister—and it’s repeated time and again throughout history—when the powerful make the most vulnerable in society a perceived threat, the enemy, the scapegoat for problems of which they are not or are a disproportionately small part.  This is the antithesis of the prophetic vision, which proclaims “They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain” (v. 9).

            Let’s imagine what it could look like instead.  What in our current frame of view appears impossible but your heart desires.  What images for our shared world would be as unbelievable as the wolf and the lamb but also as transformative “if only”?  Stay on the level of metaphor, images, because they’re more powerful.  Let’s take one minute together and pray the spirit would give us images onto which we can hold and toward which we can journey. 

-Silence-

            What image came up for you?  Jot in down. Share it with someone.  Take it to your prayer time. 

            I imagine a world where there’s a child, probably middle school, carrying their tray.  They trip or stumble and cascading off goes what they were carrying and…nobody gets up to rush across quieting the crowd by shouting, “It’s all right!” because they don’t have to because in that world, which is an evolved state of this world, no one would be inclined to take that moment of vulnerability of another and exploit it for gain or entertainment.

            Just imagine…

            Amen.

[1]Brené Brown, The Power of Vulnerability: Teachings of Authenticity, Connections and Courage