January 28, 2018
Mark 1:21-28
By Rev. Jennifer Garrison Brownell
Even if I don’t make them formally, I’m a sucker for those kind of New Year resolutions that involve great new systems for doing things. A new planner? All over it. Remember that book that came out a few years ago The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo? Subtitled; The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. Look at each thing, Kondo advised, and ask yourself if it gives you joy? If not, don’t keep it in your house. According to the book, you can also help the objects in your life experience more joy. Your socks are happier if they are folded in relaxed pairs, not balled up so tightly they can’t breathe. But your t-shirts prefer to rolled than folded. What a great way to start the new year! I thought when I read Kondo’s book one New Year. With unstressed clothing!
At the beginning of each year, I start out with lots of great ideas about how THIS year will be more organized, tidier, happier. And riiiiiiight about now, 28 days into the New Year, the new system falls apart, the resolution to be more organized and tidier, healthier and happier fails, and I’m back to the old scramble for the next 11 months.
How about you? Do you make new years resolutions? And if you make them, do you keep them? And why is it so hard to stick with what we resolve?
For one answer to that, we can turn to another round of self-help books about how to institute a new habit. I don’t know about you, but as soon as I hear that all it takes is 10,000 hours of practice to be expert at something (as pop psychologist Malcolm Gladwell insists) or even 66 days to form a new habit (as some other experts say), it all seems a bit daunting, and I’m tempted to give up before I even begin.
Here’s the problem.
These self help gurus all are very good at telling us how to change our behavior, but not so good at helping us dig below the surface of our behavior to the next level, who we are. Again – yes, we can change our behavior, but unless we transform who we ARE, the behavior will keep returning again and again.
This past week I spent with a group of women clergy learning about the enneagram. The enneagram is a personality assessment tool, and what it does is show us that as much as we identify with our behavior, our outward personality – who are in the world is not who we really are. And the purpose of the enneagram is to recognize the difference between the way we act, what we think of our personality and our soul’s beautiful essence, the person that God intended us to be.
All of us create personalities over our lifetime – our survival depends on it as children. But as we mature, the behaviors, what we call our personality, serves only to cover up our essence, our true self.
Students of the enneagram say that your personality – the behaviors you engage in every moment of every day with your family, at work, at school and even as you listen to these words right now – is the protective layer you build up over a lifetime to protect your soul, the real you, your true essence.
There’s lots of detail we don’t have time for today, but painted in very broad strokes, one of the pieces of wisdom the enneagram teaches is that we each act from one of three centers – the thinking center, the feeling center or the doing centers.
According to Suzanne Stabile who taught last week, all of us are born with the capacity to act from all three of these centers. So, you arrive a fully balanced human able to think, to feel and to act. But at some point in early childhood, one of these centers was damaged, pushed to the back. So for survival, either your ability to feel, to think or act withdrew to a place of safety. But that also meant that one of these centers – thinking, feeling or doing – could not or did not develop fully or at all. Your worldview, then, was created by processing information in a particular way.
Here’s an example. We all came to worship together today –and you may think that everyone else is here for the same reason you are. But we all arrived leading with one of these and underdeveloped in one
Some of us came here leading with
thinking ( new ideas or connection with intellect),
feeling (an emotional response),
doing (from social justice to making coffee)
Each of these are good, as far as they go. But none of them by themselves create a whole and balanced human. So, the task for each of us is not to diminish the primary center, but to pull up the one that most often lies dormant.
If you usually process the world with thinking – how can you add feeling or doing? What gifts might you uncover if you are willing to look through new lenses?
In the scripture today, before he even performs this first healing miracle in the gospel of Mark, Jesus is recognized as one who has authority. Authority! It’s such a powerful word. I wonder if Jesus is unique, is recognized as one with authority because unlike the rest of us, he’s balanced in all three of his centers. Jesus thinks, Jesus feels, Jesus acts.
No wonder he amazed those around him. Here is one who thinks, understands with his intellect and is able to teach so that all understand. And here is one who at the same moment feels deeply, who deeply loves, who laughs and who feels anguish. And here is one who acts, who moves to heal because he knows he has the power to do so. All three in equal measure, all the time.
And then, this authority, this totally balanced person is approached by a man. In Jesus time, they said of this man that he was possessed by a demon, a demon that recognizes Jesus at once for who he is, not just as one with authority, but as the son of God, the messiah.
As progressive, 21st century people, we don’t usually say that people are demon possessed, we have other diagnostic language. For today, let’s say this. Let’s say that Jesus encountered a person who was radically off balance, whose thinking or feeling or doing center was totally repressed or damaged, so much so that the true man himself could not even speak. And he speaks (or as some translations say “squawks,”) saying “Are you here to destroy us?”
It’s not the man’s true essence which is in danger of being destroyed by an encounter with Jesus. It’s that layer that has built up over time – what we could call the personality, the way of being in the world. And that false layer, that untrue self cannot withstand the balanced scrutiny of an encounter with Jesus. Jesus looks at the man and sees who he really is, under the behavior that seems so bizarre or unsettling, and under that gaze, the false personality disappears, leaving only the essence, the true person, the soul that God created with love and care.
We are reluctant, I think, to attribute healing to Jesus. And certainly, there has been pain and even abuse perpetrated in the name of divine healing. All I know is how it works in my own life. In 2007, I had a series of health events that resulted in a diagnosis of depression and anxiety. (It’s interesting how often those two go together). Since that time, I have taken medicine, exercised, regulated my sleep habits, gone to therapy – and all of these help keep me more balanced. Medicine, movement, therapy, sleep – all work together, and day by day they keep curing me. But it’s Jesus who’s healing me.
Because what keeps me doing these things: keeps me taking the medicine, moving my body, making the next appointment with my therapist, going to bed when I would much rather stay up and worry, what keeps me going is exposing myself regularly to the compassionate, authoritative gaze of Jesus. Under that gaze, I see what and who I was really created to be, and I am motivated to get up each day and be that person as much as I can. It’s not always easy –sometimes that mask, the untrue self pops up squawking and insisting she doesn’t way to die. It’s not always easy, but it’s always better.
What I have learned myself by looking Jesus in the face, Jesus doesn’t want you to just change your behavior – to stop looking at porn or binge drinking on the weekends or wadding your socks into tense unhappy balls. Jesus wants you to be who you were created to be. Anything less is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titantic and what’s on the surface may be changing, but the ship is still going down.
You may not suffer from depression/anxiety as I do. But I know that each one of us is unbalanced in some way. And here’s what I know. As Matt Skinner says, “Mark depicts Jesus as the one uniquely authorized, commissioned, or empowered to declare and institute the reign of God. Through Jesus, then, we glimpse characteristics of this reign. It is intrusive, breaking old boundaries that benefited another kind of rule. It is about liberating people from the powers that afflict them and keep all creation — including human bodies and human societies — from flourishing. It is about articulating God’s intentions for the world, defying or reconfiguring some traditions to do so, if need be…Churches that observe Epiphany devote the season to celebrating and considering the means by which Christ becomes visible and known to the world. Where are we still amazed by Jesus’ authority, by his teachings and deeds’ potential to upend our assumptions about what’s possible? Where can we see souls set free from destructive tendencies and powers that we thought were beyond anyone’s control?”
Amen.