Apophatica

Lord, the Lord Almighty,

May those who hope in you

Not be disgraced because of me;

God of Israel,

May those who seek you

Not be put to shame because of me.

Psalm 69:6

This passage is a prayer for each of us to pray daily.  Not only clergy, but every person who professes to live into a call to uphold the grace and mercy of God should live this as a mantra.  It’s not always easy.  I am a pastor, but I am also a human.  I sin.  I make mistakes.  I fall flat on my face and occasionally need someone to pick me up and hand me a tissue for my bloody nose.  I am neither called to be nor capable of being perfect.  But at the very least, I have to act and speak so that my tainted ways do not spill over onto someone else and prevent him or her from experiencing the love of God.

Although all who have been called to the vocation of ordained ministry know this (or at least should), sometimes there are failures that have tragic consequences.  A young girl that I know had the faith in a loving and merciful God forcibly ripped from her thirteen year-old soul.  She believed that God protected her and kept her safe.  She had faith that God watched over her and kept the forces of evil and destroyers of innocence at bay.  She trusted that those who spoke for and represented the Almighty would use their God-given authority to heal and forgive and cast out demons to teach her and treat her well.  She was horribly mistaken.

After this young girl of African descent was repeatedly raped by her pastor, she was left with two seeds growing with in her: a child in her womb, and a welling anger at a God who could allow such things to happen.  The very person who was the hands and feet of the healer Himself, tore a wound in her mind, body, and spirit that may never be mended.  She teeters between justifiable anger in an all-powerful deity who chose to sit back and watch her be violated and the disbelief that such a God could possibly exist.  The rug has been ripped out from under her and she is left with the wind knocked out of her, gasping for air, feeling that everything she has believed in is a lie; and right now, nobody can convince her otherwise.

In their Artist’s Song, the band Lost in the Trees pined, “Sing out your hymn of faith ’cause I have none – your song is my fortress.”  For now, this is all we can do for this young lady and all who have had their hope in life taken from them.  For all those who believed that there really was a light in the darkness and that life isn’t just a cruel joke, but were left crying in the dark while those outside laughed in derision; for all of those who looked up to the ambassadors of a loving God just to be left feeling that God looked the other way while they robbed them of their faith like a thief in the night, we sing for them.  We sing our hymn of faith because they have none and hope that our words will become their fortress.

This wasn’t the first time, by far, nor will it be the last time that one of God’s children are harmed by the very ones that God called to defend them.  It would be better to have a millstone hung from their neck . . . .  While we can set up boundaries and a safe haven to prevent such things from happening in the future, we can’t be vigilantes for those who have already been wronged.  As even now my fists are clenched and I want to make this man pay for taking what wasn’t his and hope that the legal system does its job, I am reminded of my own ability to cause hurt for those around me.  To whom much is given, much is expected.

As our voices float into the night sky and fall like gentle rain upon those innocents who thirst for healing, let us keep on singing our hymn of faith for them: May those who seek you not be put to shame because of me.

Amen and Amen.

Bella Bond was found in a bag along Boston’s shoreline.  It is apparent that the two year-old was beaten/suffocated to death by her mother’s boyfriend who thought she was a demon.  Bella’s mother is a prostitute and drug addict who had a history of having children taken away from her by the state.

Too many of our youth are in unhealthy home environments and a significant number of them have no voice to speak out with.  While we have systems in place to deal with abusive and unstable parents, there are still many who fall through the cracks and end up dead either physically or emotionally.  Those who are “lucky” enough to survive the hostile environment they have the misfortune of being born in to, often end up dealing with emotional wounds the rest of their lives that lead to the perpetuation of destructive behavior.  Few, however, find a constructive way to work through their healing – people such as Marshall Mathers.

Mathers, the rapper known as Eminem, was no stranger to an environment that led to a fractured soul.  An addict mother with Munchausen’s Syndrome, a father who pulled a disappearing act, an uncle who was his same age who committed suicide, and other unhealthy factors were a reality at their home on 8 Mile in Detroit.

Mathers could have easily turned to the things that so many troubled youth do.  Drugs, violence, gangs, all awaited him and he started down the path toward them.  But then he realized he had a talent.  He found that poetic expression through rap was healing.

If only more youth had a creative outlet to express themselves and find the healing they need.  Unfortunately, too many parents and teachers are telling kids to do something constructive and that they will never make it on artistic ability.  They need to get a real job and deal with the emotional wounds that fester inside on their own.  As parents, teachers, and mentors, we need to encourage our youth to express themselves.  We need to give them a voice and let them find peace in their words while they still have them.  Bella will never have a chance this side of the veil to heal, but there is still hope for so many others.  Hopefully through this expression they can clean out the skeletons in their closet and redeem the vision that still lingers in the headlights.

Cleaning Out My Closet is Eminem’s moving account of dealing with the emotions from his childhood.  Headlights is the sequel and apology to his mother for being so harsh.  Grab your tissues and enjoy.

When my brother, Trent, was in kindergarten, he was completely smitten over an adorable little girl named Katie Milligan.  She was always full of energy and was the kind of kid that everyone always doted over because of her infectious smile and endless curiosity. You couldn’t help but like her and, in our small school, she was everyone’s little sister.

I can’t honestly say that I remember the day clearly or how I found out, but I can recall Trent being sad about something and my mom explaining that one of his classmates had died.  The only thing I can recall thinking at the time was, how is it possible for someone so young to die?  Only old people are supposed to die.  Unfortunately, the cosmos didn’t operate the way I thought it should.

Katie’s dad, Mack, was a farmer and they lived out on a country road that ran between Holcomb and Kings right across from the cemetery where my grandparents would later be buried.  Perhaps Mack had nobody else to keep an eye on Katie and perhaps he just wanted some special daddy/daughter time as he shared with her what his work was like.  I can only imagine the panic Mack must have felt when he glanced over and noticed Katie was no longer sitting next to him on his tractor, nor the horror that rattled him to the core of his soul when he looked back and saw her tiny body that had been crushed by the rear tire.

There was a flurry of talk as is common for a small town and everyone developed their own opinion about the horrific tragedy as if they were somehow entitled to one.  Ultimately, there were two camps of thought: those who thought Mack was irresponsible for letting his daughter ride unrestrained in the tractor with him, and those whose hearts ached for him.  Most people had a leg in each camp. 

I can’t recall if people ran to the side of Mack and his wife to support them during this crisis.  I don’t know if anyone attempted to console or comfort them where no words could undo what had been done.  It seems to me that most avoided Mack and his family altogether.  Maybe this is just the faulty memory of a then eight year-old, but I think there is some truth to it.  Most were probably uncomfortable because they didn’t know what to say.  Others maybe were afraid that what ever bad karma Mack had summoned would rub off on them and the Angel of Death would come for their young, too.  Maybe they were uncomfortable around Katie’s mom who, with a history of mental illness, snapped with the death of her daughter.  It’s hard to say what the reason was, but my recollection is that they were alone as they lowered the little casket into the same ground that my ancestors reposed in.

—–

I’m sure there were other tragedies that rattled the small school’s teacher and student body, but most involved those who had moved on and made it at least into early adulthood.  People like my second cousin Karl who died at 22 when he crashed his homemade Ultralite airplane or when my aunt’s best friend, Greg, was killed in a car crash at 25.  Mostly, though I just remember fighting a lot and spending what seemed like the majority of my time in the principal’s office as a result of those fights.

Bullies were in great supply at Kings School.  With a student body of only about 250, there seemed to be a particularly high ratio of bullies.  I liked to think of myself as a bully-slayer (admittedly falsely altruistic and self-aggrandizing thinking indeed) and, as I continued to grow and become physically stronger, I would find myself toe to toe with them on a regular basis.  One such person was Justin Anders.

Justin and I could never seem to see eye to eye.  He was at least a year older than I was (I believe he was held back) and was an eighth grader when I was in seventh.  He was “dating” a friend of mine who had a certain affinity for bad boys and I was a bit envious.  A fair dose of jealousy combined with a misguided hunger for revenge led me to a fight at recess that left Justin with a fractured eye socket and orders from his doctor not to watch TV all summer lest the ultraviolet rays blind him in that eye.  As we sat outside the principal’s office glaring at each other – me with a venomous stare and him with a swollen eye – I honestly can’t say that I felt any pity for him.

As I ponder the enmity that I had for Justin for being a bully, a loser, and a down-right mean person, I am fully aware that I was far from innocent and that the lens I viewed him through was severely tainted.  Memory flatters the rememberer, but reality holds no judgment. 

Justin didn’t have a life that was any easier than mine.  It most ways, circumstance had dealt him a rather shitty hand.  His parents were divorced, his dad didn’t have much, if anything, to do with him, his mother was mentally unstable, and his step-dad had run over and killed his sister, Katie, with a tractor four years before.  There’s no question about it – life was rough for Justin Anders.

There are a lot of things in my life that, if granted the chance, I would do over.  Unfortunately, we don’t get do-overs.  As the rapper Eminem says, “We only got one shot.”  We merely get to do better the next time, God forbid, such a chance presents itself.  I was far too young to do things right when my life’s path intersected that of Mack and Justin.  I would like to think, though, that if I come across another Mack Milligan that I will put my hand on his shoulder and weep with him for all of the hopes and dreams that would never be.  For the brokenness that only a father can know at the loss of his little girl and that I would say nothing, just letting sighs too deep for words intercede where there is nothing that can be said. 

If I ever come across another Justin Anders, as much as I may be quick to judgment and anger at first, I hope that I will do things better.  I hope that I will extend an open hand of peace toward him instead of a clenched fist of hate.  I hope that I will take his hand in mind, look him in the eye, and say, “Yeah.  Life sucks sometimes, brother.  But it gets better when we face it together.”  Let it be so.  Amen.

The railroad tracks felt like they divided us from the rest of the world.  Running north-south along the eastern edge of town, they were the border between our tiny town and No Man’s Land.  Even one step beyond those tracks and you were no longer in Holcomb.  The Doan’s, who lived not even 500 yards beyond the tracks toward highway 251, seemed like foreigners to me. 

A few times a day, freight trains would roll from their stop at the intermodal hub in Rochelle carrying who knows what up north to farms and factories.  The trains rolled along behind the grain elevator that spewed out corn dust that would cover our house across the street and create a living hell for anyone with asthma. 

There were no crossing arms or lights because everyone was used to the trains.  They were as much a part of our small-town existence as the tiny post office and the sea of corn and soy beans that came up to the other side of the unmarked road that ran alongside the tracks.  Life was simple and there was no sense of urgency as folks walked from one end of town to the other.  Only the old and infirm bothered with cars to get around unless you were crossing the tracks and going out of town. 

It wasn’t necessarily a friendly town.  You wouldn’t find folks sitting on their front porch drinking sweat tea and waving at neighbors strolling by, but most everyone knew each other and would lend a helping hand when needed. 

There was no need for a crossing arm or lights and bells at the three crossings because, even though nobody could tell you what time the two or three trains would roll by each day, their schedule was as much a part of our circadian rhythms as going to bed and waking up.  It wasn’t even that people felt the need to be careful of the trains because there wasn’t really anything to be careful of.  There was no way that anyone would be in the path of one of these trains because such things just didn’t happen.  Except for when it did.

Sandy Stumpf was heading to work via the middle crossing that was next to Doris and Charlie Vogel’s red and white house.  Perhaps she was focused on what she had to do at work and perhaps she wasn’t completely awake yet, but although she noticed the train near the crossing and that the train was moving, she thought the train had already passed and was moving in the other direction.  Unfortunately, she was wrong. 

As a 10 year old boy, I was three miles south in a classroom in Kings when the driver’s side of Sandy Stumpf’s car was crushed by the reversing train.  The train dragged her car off of the road and deposited it in the Vogel’s back yard near the basketball court that they erected for the town’s youth.  Miraculously, Sandy wasn’t fatally injured, but she was pinned inside her car by the crushed driver’s side door leaving her mostly immobile.  More than the pain of being hit, the fear and panic of being trapped overwhelmed her. 

My grandfather, Jim Hilliard, had been chief of our modest volunteer fire department, but was since retired when he saw what had happened and went to Sandy’s aid.  My grandpa had an uncanny knack for finding the scene of the accident as it was ironically him who found his best friend’s truck in a ditch near a country road after his friend had suffered a fatal heart attack.

Sandy needed to be extricated from her car, so there was nothing in that sense that my grandpa could do.  As they waited for emergency vehicles and as the paramedics sawed into her car to get her out, my grandpa knelt next to her and held her hand through the process.  He couldn’t physically get her out and back on her feet, but he provided support and encouragement in a way that gave her the strength to get through her potentially tragic ordeal.  When Sandy was finally free of her car and received the treatment she needed and in the days to follow, both Sandy and other townsfolk called Grandpa Jim a guardian angel.  Many said, “If I ever have an emergency, I want Jim Hilliard to be there with me.”

Sandy would outlive my grandpa by a number of years as he died about two years later at the age of 57.  Many gathered at his funeral and remembered his strong spirit as another angel was taken home.  It wasn’t many years later after his funeral that Sandy would also find herself in a casket – the victim of murder by poisoning at the hand of her husband.  She wasn’t his first wife that had mysteriously turned up dead.  Such is life in a small town where angels and demons play on the same field and eat of what has been reaped from the same soil, but it is the angels that give us strength, even long after they have returned to that hallowed ground.

There are many kinds of prophets.  Some are real, actual prophets.  Some are false prophets who lie to achieve their own ends.  Some are delusional and believe that they are sent by God or that they are some sort of messiah.  Others are somewhere in between.  Vernon Howell was on that spectrum. 

Vernon had a rough childhood and some of the psychological effects showed.  He turned to his mother’s fundamentalist Seventh Day Adventist church, but was kicked out when he told the pastor that he had a revelation that he was supposed to marry the pastor’s daughter.  He then joined a reformist group that had splintered off from the Adventists and soon claimed that he had a vision that he was supposed to lead the group.  It was believed that he was having an affair with the 77 year-old widow of the founder of this sect and he gained support from her to take over the group. Understandably, her son, George Roden, felt that he was the rightful heir and challenged Vernon to a resurrection contest.  Roden exhumed a body to make it look like he had resurrected someone and Vernon told police about the incident.  When a third person came along and claimed to be the messiah and leader of the group, Roden killed him with an axe and was sent to a mental hospital.

Vernon finally took control of the group and engaged in many questionable practices including spiritual marriages, statutory rape of his “spiritual brides,” and child abuse.  Vernon had another vision that he was the incarnation of Cyrus the Great, the Persian king who freed the Jews from Babylonian captivity and sent them back to Israel.  He felt that it was his duty to reestablish the Davidic monarchy in Jerusalem and so, adopting the Persian name for king Cyrus as his last name, he changed his name to David Koresh.  After a 51 day seige, Koresh and 80 of his followers were killed 22 years ago today (April 19th).

This was a very sad and unfortunate example of a psychologically troubled person with a messiah complex leading vulnerable people to their doom.  I won’t get into how well or poorly the FBI handled the situation or why those people were so easily manipulated, but it just goes to show how dangerous a false prophet can be.  Likewise, a real prophet can be conversely as healthy.

So what is a prophet anyway?  From the Old Testament, we tend to see them as a person with a message from God.  It was typically a message of doom and gloom and warning for a people who had chosen to go against the will of an almighty God.  Are there still prophets today or has their function changed?  I would venture to say that they do and it has.  Peter exemplified what a modern-day prophet looks like in the book of Acts.

In Acts 3, Peter and John come across a man who is carried daily on a mat to the temple steps where he can beg for money.  Instead of giving them money, Peter did what a true prophet does, he empowered the man so that he can have a good life of his own volition instead of based on what others provide.  The man was lame from birth.  We know that we have to be careful about reading these stories literally, because we lose the true meaning.  So, the man was not factually and physically unable to walk.  Instead, he was unwilling to hold himself up and face life with dignity.  In essence, he took it all lying down.

The man’s friends enabled him over the years and carried him on his mat so that he could continue to receive reinforcement for his complacency.  Perhaps his parents had taught him in a way that furthered his enablement and then his friends took over that role.  When Peter and John saw this, they knew what was going on.  Peter got down to his level, looked him in the eye, and empowered the man.  In essence, he told the man that he had worth and that his life mattered.  He put out his hand and helped him up.  Nobody had ever done this for him.  Imagine the feeling of dignity that he must have had when he realized that what everyone else had been doing for him out of pity, he could do himself because he mattered.  From that moment, he saw that he didn’t exist to have things done to him, but that he could affect change with his own life.

At first, the man clung to Peter, but he eventually stood up straight and let go.  How many times have we heard in the New Testament Jesus telling people to let go of him and to “go and do likewise.”  Through his prophetic words, Peter had not only empowered a man back to life, but he had also made a prophet out of this man.  Who better to spread a message of empowerment than one who was raised from the “dead” himself?

Understandably, the people were shocked at what had happened.  This man who for decades had been laying on his mat begging others to do for him, was full of life and vigor and determined to live his own life.  Peter asked them, “Why are you so surprised?”  Then he launched into a discourse about sin.  He challenged those who had witnessed this transformation to repent.  As individualistic westerners, we hear words like sin and repentance as something to do with the terrible things we do against God and how we need to seek forgiveness from them lest we be punished by a blood-thirsty God who is insatiable.  This isn’t what sin and repentance meant in the 1st century and it’s not what they mean now.

To sin, as you have likely heard in others’ sermons, is to miss the mark.  This is not a good/bad dualistic “X” in the sand that God has put down daring us to undershoot it.  To sin is to live a life other than that which is truly us.  It is to be anything other than ourselves.  We all have a meaning that lies at the depth of our being that we are meant to be true to.  Anything that is done contrary to who we really are is “missing the mark” and makes us suffer.  Sin is corporate as well as individual.  When we repent (literally, change our minds) we get a new mindset for ourselves that spreads in encouragement to others.  This is what empowerment is all about.  It’s encouraging others to live lives that are true to themselves and reassuring them that they will experience great peace and joy when they do so.  It’s reminding them that they matter and that they, too, have the power to change the world.

Some people are hurting.  Most of us are.  This is part of being human.  Some feel hurt more deeply than others and have a hard time seeing past it to where there is hope, dignity, and strength.  There is a Japanese saying for when a child gets hurt that goes “ittai, ittai, tondekke!”  This means, “pain, pain, fly away!”  When the man who couldn’t see beyond his own hurt came face to face with Peter, Peter said, “ittai, ittai, tondekke!” and the man was empowered and saw his worth.  That’s what we have to do as modern day prophets.  Sometimes we have to kneel down with someone who is hurting or feels conquered by life and show them that they matter.  Sometimes we even have to look in the mirror and do that for ourselves.  Enablement will only create a life of suffering and encouragement to live a life other than that which is true to ourselves, but empowerment will bring people back from the dead and let them live fulfilled lives for the first time.

On April 19th, a “prophet” died.  But on April 19th another prophet was born.  And on the 20th, 21st, etc.  All of us have the potential to be prophets if we merely chose to empower instead of enable.  If we choose to live lives that are true to ourselves and encourage others to do the same, we speak the very words of God and bring life into existence in co-creation with our Creator.  It takes a spiritual journey within to know who you really are, but ultimately, all you have to do to kindle hope in the world while having an enriched life is just be yourself.