Rev. Tessie Mandeville
November 4, 2007
Christ Covenant MCC
Decatur, GA 30030

For six weeks now we’ve been talking about Building Relationships in Beloved Community. Each week we have looked at different values and spiritual principles that are meant to guide us in our relationships with one another. And though I could continue this sermon series for decades, I want to draw it to a close today by talking about the core value of trust.

It is Walter Anderson who said, “We’re never so vulnerable than when we trust someone—but paradoxically, if we cannot trust, neither can we find love or joy.” We all have opportunities for trust. There’s a man named Sam Keen who is a former theology professor and journalist. When he was 62 years old, he became a flying trapeze artist. His ranch is north of San Francisco and it is rigged with a full flying trapeze. In his book, Learning to Fly: Trapeze—Reflections on Fear, Trust, and the Joy of Letting Go, he tells us that flying trapeze is more than recreational sport. It serves as a vehicle of profound inner discovery and transformation. Learning to fly involves cultivating equanimity, trust, and the willingness to let go—in the real sense of the term.

In his book he talks about the flyer and the catcher. The flyer has to be willing to let go of one trapeze to be caught in midair by another. He says prior to the leap from one trapeze to the other, fear seems more adequate than trust. But flying, like faith, hope and love is an existential act that cannot be merely talked about or envisioned. It must be acted out. In order to fly, we must let go.

Letting go and trusting God, trusting one another, and even ourselves leaves us feeling quite vulnerable and exposed. And if I were to go around our sanctuary this morning, we’d all have at least one story of how our trust was betrayed. We all have wounds of trust. We’ve been hurt in our intimate relationships; our friends have hurt us; our families of origin have inflicted wounds of trust in us.

It is the mystic Rumi who says, “Let a teacher wave away the flies and put a plaster on the wound. Don’t turn your head. Keep looking at the bandaged place. That’s where the light enters you.” So I ask us this morning to keep looking at the wounded place. That’s where the light enters you and me. But don't keep looking at the wounded place out of a sense of being victimized, but invite the light to enter that place.

We all have wounds of trust and they need light in them in order to heal. I learned a lot about wounds as I journeyed with my Mom through some difficult health issues. After she had a heart attack and subsequent surgery, the leg wound where they harvested the vein for the bypass surgery had a difficult time healing. She had countless appointments in what was called the “wound clinic.” I watched nurses unwrap the layers of bandage on my Mom’s leg so that they could get to the wound. And once they got to the wound, light and air got into it, but the nurses and doctors also cut into the wound, which made it much bigger and it seemed counter-intuitive to me that they would do that. But I learned that in order for the wound to heal, they had to cut away the unhealthy tissue so that they could get to the living, breathing tissue deep inside her leg. Healing couldn’t happen without uncovering the wound, without looking at the wound.

We need to keep looking at the wounded place not out of a sense of victimization but because that’s where the light enters us. We have to pay attention to it. We have to unwrap and uncover and un-layer all that we’ve placed on top of it so that we can get to the healing deep inside. Our wounds remind us of where we’ve been hurt but they can also remind of us of the healing power of God and the healing power of beloved community.

In our gospel story this morning, we meet a man who is paralyzed. We don’t know what kind of paralysis the man has or what his diagnosis is. We assume it is physical paralysis but the story doesn’t tell us that. Perhaps he was paralyzed in other ways because Jesus doesn’t say to him, “You are cured.” He says, “Stand up, take your mat, and go home.” Maybe the man was paralyzed by some traumatic event in his life. Maybe he had post traumatic stress disorder and it left him immobile and unable to cope in the day to day of life. I’ve never been physically paralyzed but when my brother was killed by gun violence ten years ago last month, I was mute for six months. I barely uttered a word because I was so paralyzed by grief and loss.

Think about what paralyzes us and keep us stagnant and unable to move. Things like fear. Anger and rage. Deep sadness. Betrayal of trust. Some paralyses are not physical but deeply spiritual. To put it another way: What kind of mat are you laying on this morning that you don’t think you can get up from? We have to keep looking at the wounded place because that’s where the light enters in. That’s where the healing happens.

In order to look at the wound, we have to unwrap and uncover and un-layer all that we’ve placed on top of it so that we can get to the healing deep inside. We think if we wrap ourselves up, if we cover up those places where we’ve been wounded, that we are protecting ourselves. But in fact what we are doing is shutting ourselves off from the deep healing that is possible. The man who is paralyzed is being taken by four of his friends to see Jesus. But when they arrive at Jesus’ home, it’s so crowded, they can’t get in. So they take their friend to the top of the house in order to let him down through the roof. But in order to get to Jesus, to get to the healing that they wanted, they had to uncover the roof.

The roofs in the Middle East at that time were made from crossbeams covered with thatch and hardened mud. This man’s friends had to dig through layers and layers of dried mud to get to Jesus, to get to the healing they knew was possible. We have to unwrap and uncover and un-layer all that we’ve placed on top of our wounds so that we can get to the healing deep inside.

And what we know to be true is that when his friends put him in the presence of Jesus, he was released from whatever condition had paralyzed him.

This man’s friends believed in his healing even when perhaps he didn’t. That’s why they took him to Jesus. We don’t know if the man asked to go there himself. Maybe he had such a deep wound of trust that he didn’t care about life anymore. And this is where beloved community comes in. The author Jean Bloomquist says it best when she says, “When we are unable to trust, the community trusts for us and with us. When we let go, we are held by others and by God—in faith, in prayer, in hope. The community, through its covenant with God, keeps the possibility of trust and hope alive. The community reassures us that trust is; its existence is not contingent on our personal ability or inability to trust at any given moment.”

This means that in beloved community we not only learn how to trust others; we learn how to be trustworthy people. We learn how to show others that they can trust us to be with them in some of the most painful moments of their lives. One of the biggest tests of trust in beloved community is to ask ourselves: Can people heal around me? Am I a safe person? Because here’s the thing: We don’t call this room a sanctuary for nothing. We all need to trust that when we come through these doors we can be who we are. And sometimes that means we need to be able to completely fall apart in church. And I tell you today that it’s okay to be messy in church. It is okay to cry, to feel pain, to feel whatever you feel because this is our sanctuary. Because community means, “Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free.”

Trusting God, trusting one another and even ourselves is a challenging task. It’s a leap of faith. It’s a letting go. When we agree that trust will be one of our core values it doesn’t mean that we won’t hurt one another sometimes. It doesn’t mean that we won’t disappoint one another sometimes. After all, we are a perfectly imperfect group of people. I hope what it means for us is that we have one another’s best intentions at heart; that we want what is best for one another even when we don’t always live up to it. “Trust is not a naïve act of denial or repression; it is a movement out of the past, into the present, and toward the future—toward healing, life, and hope.”

For six weeks we’ve talked about values and spiritual principles and we have agreed that we can act with courage, we can be honest, we can practice reconciliation, we can live with integrity, we can work toward sustainability, and with the help of God, we can heal our wounds of trust. If you take the ‘C’ from courage, the
‘H’ from honesty, the ‘R’ from reconciliation, the ‘I’ from integrity, the ‘S’ from sustainability and the ‘T’ from trust, it spells CHRIST. In the relationships that we are building with one another, Christ must be at the center of everything.

My invitation to all of us this morning is to make a new “CHRIST Covenant” with one another. And as we do this, we will come to live out the truth that Christ Covenant is not only the name of our church; it is also a commitment, an agreement that we make to hold fast to our values and spiritual principles in relationship with one another.

I’ve always heard the saying, “Let Go and Let God.” I used to think it was about giving up and giving over to God what I couldn’t handle. It was a passive resignation. But I understand it differently now. “To let go and let God” is about action. It is about flying. It is about choosing to swing out toward God, toward one another, trusting that God will catch us and in beloved community, we will catch one another, because our relationships with one another matter. Let is always be so. Amen.

Copyright © 2007 by Rev. Tessie Mandeville. Permission granted for non- profit circulation with attribution of author and venue. Other rights reserved.