CENTERING:

Let us make a bargain with our souls. Let us not trade integrity for approval or trade authenticity for anything at all. Let us learn to ask for what we need in work, in relationships, from our friends and from our religion. A wise man once said, ‘Knock and it shall be opened, seek and you shall find, ask and you shall receive.’ We need help in believing this for, though it is true, it seems terribly unlikely. And so we often seek too little and let ourselves be treated badly, even like dirt. If we let ourselves be treated like dirt for too long, it can begin to feel natural. We’re not dirt; we’re stardust. We’re the stuff of which the universe is made. Let us honor that. Let us seek relationships where we are cherished and not settle for less. Let us never make bargains where we lose our souls, our authenticity, for that’s no bargain at all. And it’s a terrible price to pay for the pretense that everything is still together. We cannot love our neighbors as ourselves until we know how to love ourselves. Yet how many times have we sold out for something so much less than we are. How many times have we treated or allowed ourselves to be treated, not as people, but as things. Let us not settle for less.

Let us make a bargain with our souls and remember that within each of us is a seed of God, a spark of the divine, and the hope of the world. It is so important. Let us take these few quiet moments to get in touch with our true centers.

SERMON:

We’re in the middle of an extended series of sermons that are talking about the Elizabeth Kubler-Ross developed in her 1969 book on stages of death and dying. There are five stages that we tend to go through when we are grieving the loss of anything important.

Her has been used mostly in hospice work and hospital care, but I first began to realize how broad the is when I was invited to a three day business conference in Chicago ten or twelve years ago. One of the key speakers was going to be Mortimer Adler. I had read some of his books and attended his university and wanted to hear him. So I went in mostly to hear this 90-something year old man (who was still sharp as a tack).

During this business conference, one junior executive from the Bose Company that makes those great little speakers did a presentation on how his company struggled going through what you could call a paradigm shift in understanding the sound business and their future in it. He went through graphs, charts and pictures. I realized what he was doing was going through the five stages of grief that had been used to deal with death and dying. And that’s when I realized that these are the stages that we go through to grieve the death of anything that’s been important to us, to resist having to change.

The first thing we do when significant change comes is to resort to the ‘ostrich school’, where we stick our heads in the sand and our fannies in the air and we look silly only to everyone else. If that doesn’t work, then we get mad. If you were here last week, you got to see the full-blown tantrum that I got to throw at the beginning of the sermon. And we try to use anger to control people, to frighten people or the universe or God back into line. We’re saying, ‘Look, I really mean it!’

When that can’t work, we come to the third stage, which is called bargaining. In some ways, it’s the funniest of the stages. It is certainly the most creative. Bargaining is where we ask our brain to trick us. We’ve all had the wool pulled over our eyes by charlatans somewhere or other. But in bargaining, we contrive with ourselves to pull the wool over our own eyes. It’s really quite a trick. Many of the bargains we make are dramatic and very funny. You can think of examples in your personal life and relationships and your job, from all over the place.

I brought you just three from religion because I’m trying to focus on how we change or try to avoid changing dealing with religious beliefs that may have served us once but that have died a long time ago and we just don’t know what to do with them or how to replace them.

The first example is the longest but probably the most fun. When I was in graduate school, there was another doctoral student who was a couple of years ahead of me. I’ve told this story before and I’ve always protected his name. But I figure it’s been twenty years, he’s past it and he could certainly deal with it anyway. It was Steven Post. He was the grandson of Emily Post. And though his family was pretty well off, Steven was a very bright young man and was on, I think, a full ride scholarship at the University of Chicago. He also had a wicked sense of humor and he loved tormenting people.

We were sitting at a Wednesday luncheon one week. This university really didn’t have much of a sense of community. You mostly sat at home in your apartment or you sat in the library and you read and that was called Life. But they tried to fake community by subsidizing a Wednesday luncheon once a week. And we would have a very nice lunch with wine and guest speakers, sometimes world famous speakers. I went to all of them that I could.

Students and faculty would sit together at tables and have a chance to talk. I was sitting across from Steven at this table and we were sitting next to a professor who had been the dean of the school for fifteen years. I knew Steven slightly because after the Wednesday luncheon, he and I were in a very intense, advanced seminar that met from 1:30 to 4:30 every Wednesday afternoon and we were always the two who showed up about twenty minutes early after the luncheon and took notes or read or chatted a little bit. But I didn’t know much about him.

During the luncheon, somehow we began talking about cults and Steven said, ‘Well, you know ‘cults’ is just what we call other people’s religions.’ The professor said, ‘It’s sounds like you’ve studied this.’ Now this is a man already in denial. And Steven said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘I’ve lived it. I’m a Moonie.’ Now that’ll stop a discussion! The professor, still clinging to denial, said, ‘Oh you were?’ ‘No,’ said Steven, ‘I am.’

This went on for awhile and then Steven said he was also the second person kidnapped by the de-programmers. His family had him kidnapped and taken to the de-programmers because he was an embarrassment to their blue blood. This wonderful professor said, ‘So, then that ended it?’ Steven said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘I saw through them from the start.’ And that really did end the discussion.

After lunch, for no reason I can be proud of, I didn’t want to go to that room with Steven. I didn’t want to be trapped there with him for twenty minutes. I just didn’t. So as I left the room, I turned left and I made it two or three steps before Steven grabbed my arm. He said, ‘Oh, no you don’t. We’re going up there! ‘ He said, ‘ You’re going to play.’ I said, ‘ Steven, I am not going to play!’ He said, ‘You’ll play.’ I said, ‘I won’t play!’ He said, ‘You’ll play.’ You’re too curious not to play.’ I said, ‘I’ll go up there, but I won’t play!’ He said, ‘See, you’re almost playing already.’

So we went up to the room and he said, ‘Come on, this is your chance of a lifetime. You’ve got a Moonie in front of you. You’ve got to be curious.’ I said, ‘I’m not going to play.’ He said, ‘What do you want to know?’

I said, ‘Alright, I’ll play. What I don’t understand, Steven, is how you keep what you learn here in the same head where you keep the stuff you learn there without being schizophrenic. That’s what I want to know.’ And he said, ‘Oh, that.’ He said, ‘That’s easy. You just have to keep what you know and what you believe separate.’ And while I was thinking about that, he reached over and poked me: ‘You know, there’s a lot of that going on!’

There’s a notable historical example of this kind of bargaining, keeping what you know and what you believe separate. Not well known, but it ought to be better known. It comes from the early 18th century, It was Anglican priests in England and it was called latitudinarianism — one of those words for which the inventor should just be shot. These were priests who wanted to say, ‘Look, look, we know all these stories are myths. We know this isn’t true. I mean, nobody believes in, you know, virgin births and walking on water, and that corpses get up and walk and float up in the sky, We know this isn’t true.’ So they said all of this out loud to regain their intellectual integrity. Then they went back to church and repeated all the creeds and all the stories they just said they didn’t believe. That was called latitudinarianism because they took such great latitude with the teachings. It’s also called bargaining, because they kept what they knew and what they believed separate.

A third example is more current and it’s one I’m involved in, though I’m involved in it as a heretic. That’s the Jesus Seminar. This is a wonderful group of scholars, biblical scholars that have been meeting since 1985. Their stated purpose is to say, ‘Look, just like the latitudinarians, let’s just be honest about this. Let’s get scholars who’ll use their names to come out in public, make real arguments about the difference we have all known for two hundred years exists between myth and history, between symbols and metaphors and facts. Let’s have them say it out loud and put their name to it and invite any other scholar in the world who wants to come and join the argument to come do so on the conditions that they do it in public.’

Now that’s good stuff. That’s brave and remarkable scholarship and I was attracted by it as soon as I heard about it, which was about five years after they started. I called the founder of it, Bob Funk, on the phone and I said, ‘I read an article in the paper about this Jesus Seminar thing,’ And I said, ‘I don’t know what it is.’ He said, ‘What are your questions?’ And I said, ‘Alright, it’s this.’ I said, ‘This could really be absolutely honest, exciting and candid scholarship, or it could be a bunch of Christ-sating savages trying to destroy a religion. Which are you?’ And he said, ‘Well, you know, you couldn’t trust any answer I give you to that. If I were the latter, I’d lie about it. So the only way you’re going to find out is to come out and spend a few days with us and make up your own mind.’

So I did. And I was stunned. This was some of the most honest religious scholarship I’d ever seen. They were really doing it. However, in the background, they were playing a mental game. Ninety nine percent of the fellows in the Jesus Seminar are Christians, and they are making about the same bargain the latitudinarians did. Once you’ve thrown out the three-story universe, once you’ve said, ‘We know there isn’t anything living up there above the clouds. We know that God isn’t a being, God is a concept. It’s an idea, not a critter.’ Once you’ve said all of this out loud, you can no longer have a God who sees, hears, cares, or loves. Now take your pick, but you can’t have it both ways. And most of them don’t or won’t see that. That’s bargaining. This is bargaining going on by some of the scholars that I respect as much as anybody in the world. So I’m not making fun of people for doing it. I do think it’s disingenuous, but it is a disingenuousness that we all do.

What we’re doing in bargaining is we’re taking a God, to put it that way, that was alive once, maybe not in our lifetime, but was alive once and it’s dead now. And we stuff it and we prop it up on the altar where it used to sit and we bow down before it and we pretend nothing has changed. But it has changed, because it is no longer giving life to us. We’re faking it. That’s why it’s bargaining. Theologians call this idolatry. A god for theologians is a center of allegiance and orientation and if we live around it, it can give us a more authentic sense of life.

That’s what a god is about. It isn’t a critter. This isn’t a creature at Disney World. It’s a center of value, orientation and allegiance. And an idol is something that pretends to be like that, but we find, usually too late, that it got it’s power by sucking the life out of us rather than helping put more worthy life into us. An idol cannot give life. I think of bargaining as a kind of idolatry.

But I have another image from my childhood that I think of too. I grew up in the North where we had oak trees everywhere and acorns all over the ground in the fall. And I used to love acorns. I liked the little things and I would keep some in my room. I never knew why, but I think part of it, looking back on it, was that it always seemed to me that an acorn was a miracle waiting to happen. Somehow that little nut knew how to become an oak tree. That’s amazing to me. Put the thing in the ground and give it water and give it the right conditions and this thing will become something just immense. And I thought it was miraculous.

Later on, when I was older, at an art fair, I saw a truly magnificent acorn about three inches high that had been carved by an artist. Now the part of it that made no sense at all, and that has always bothered me, was that the artist had carved it out of walnut. If you know woods, you know oak is hard to carve. It splinters and walnut is very easy to carve. Still it was cheating and it wasn’t right. But it was a pretty acorn and I bought it and I liked it and it really was a magnificent carving.

I kept it for some years and looking back was surprised to find that after a few years, the fascination wore off. And the fascination wore off because it wasn’t really an acorn. It was a fake acorn. What makes acorns real is their potential: the fact that they know how to become alive and become something big. Bigger than you can handle. That’s the miracle in an acorn.

This thing, this was just an imitation of an acorn carved by an artist. It was dead. It couldn’t come alive, ever. It couldn’t do anything. It was a fake acorn. That’s what bargaining is like. Bargaining is like putting up a fake acorn and pretending it’s a real one when it has no potential to come alive and no potential to give life. It’s only the memory of the yearning for the nostalgic feeling that once maybe this old belief was supposed to give life though it doesn’t anymore. And we do this in religion all the time and we do it in life all the time.

One of my current favorite authors is a physician, a woman named Rachel Naomi Remen who has worked for about twenty years in San Francisco with terminal patients, cancer patients, AIDS patients. And since she’s so gifted at this, she’s also worked with a lot of physicians and done workshops for other physicians.

One of the exercises she has them do is to make two lists. One is a list of the things they really truly value in their personal life; the other is a list of the things they really value and work by in their profession. She said the two lists are never the same and they’re often very, very different. Sometimes someone will put something like kindness number two in their personal life and number fifteen in their professional life. There are so many things more important than kindness. I mean, you have to know your chemistry, you have to know your biology, you have to know your anatomy, you have to be able to do the diagnosis. There’s a whole list of things that count for more than kindness in the practice of medicine. And yet, in their personal life kindness is one of the things that makes them feel real and makes them feel alive. So living by values they don’t really care much about is the bargain they have made with their profession.

What we do in bargaining is to try to protect life in the wrong way. It’s trying to protect life the way you try to protect butterflies when you stick pins through them and put them under glass. It’s the way you try to protect something when you take that magnificent carving of an acorn (out of walnut), and you put it in a glass museum case and you put it on display. It truly is magnificent — but it’s dead. And it can’t ever give real life to anything.

Part of what is so ironic and sad about all of this bargaining is that all of these games we’re playing are being played against the background and within a world where the possibilities are miraculous and are all over the place and we won’t see them. One of Jesus’ famous lines was to tell a story and then say, ‘If you have eyes to see this and ears to hear this,’ and for the most part the people who listened to him didn’t and we don’t either.

To care for life the right way, to use the image of the glass case, would take a different kind of glass case. Instead of a glass museum case, the way you’d care for life would be with a greenhouse. Something big and protective and nourishing that can let little living things grow into big living things. Even bigger living things than we know how to handle.

But it can’t happen until we’re ready for it. Because until we have eyes to see, we couldn’t see it if it were put right in front of us. Naturally, there’s a story about this too. It’s comes from Hinduism. It’s a great story about Shiva, the Lord of the universe in Hinduism and Shakti, his divine consort. They’re sitting up there in their heavenly space sort of watching mortals, and they are filled with compassion for the suffering that they see as a part of life and with respect for the efforts that people make in so many ways and the love that they see and all of the human drama that they see below them.

Shakti is moved particularly by one poor man that she sees, a poor beggar who is wearing sandals so worn through that they’re tied together with string and a coat so thin, it won’t help him if the night gets too cold. And she turns to her husband and she says, ‘Look, look at this man, this is a good man, I’ve seen into his heart, it’s a good heart. This is a good man and he’s suffering. Can’t you do something for him?’ And Shiva looks down for an instant and says, ‘Nope.’ And she says, ‘What do you mean, nope? You’re the Lord of the universe! You can do anything! What do you mean, you can’t do anything for him? Give him some gold.’

Shiva said, ‘Wouldn’t matter, I could give him gold and it wouldn’t matter. He’s not ready for it.’ So Shakti said, ‘Give him the gold and let him see if he’s ready for it!’ This is apparently how divine husband and wife arguments go. So Shiva drops a bag of gold in the path, in front of this beggar. The poor beggar in the meantime is coming around the corner thinking to himself, ‘I’m so hungry. Will I be able to beg enough money today to have food or will I go hungry again tonight? Is it going to be too cold? Where am I going to sleep? Am I going to freeze to death? What am I going to do?’ And then he sees this thing in the road and says, ‘Oh my God. Look at that! A rock and I almost kicked it! If I had kicked the rock, I would have torn my sandals apart and now I’d have to go be going barefoot. It’s a good thing for me that I was watching.’ And he stepped over the bag of gold and went on his way.

When religious stories talk like this, you know, they’re always using words in imaginative ways. This didn’t mean a bag of gold coins. This meant the bags of ‘gold’ that are lying all over the place all the time. What are bags of gold? They’re the possibility of finding a religion for your head and your heart. They’re a possibility of bringing together what you know and what you believe. A possibility of bringing together what we love and what we do, how we live and who we are. These are the bags of gold that lie in the road around us that we don’t see until we’re ready.

There are miracles that can happen here on the road of life. And sometimes those bags contain things even richer and more miraculous than gold. Sometimes, they contain acorns.

OPENING WORDS

From our many private lives and as many individual worlds we gather here for a hundred different reasons. There are people who are mostly curious or who could use some new friends, people with the vague feeling that there could be more to life than there has been, and those with the very strong feeling there could be more. Some who bring hungry minds and want questions and answers, and others who bring hungry hearts and want comfort.

Some here are young, hoping for direction for the life which lies mostly ahead. Others are closer to the end of their journey and do not want to be ignored just because they are old.

There are parents missing children, students missing home, lovers, ex-lovers, and those who would be lovers. There are those in whom life is bubbling up and others over whom dark shadows may have crept, who wonder how to go on.

We’re here for all the obvious reasons and for some secret reasons known only to ourselves. Everyone who has come here hopes for something from this morning. And perhaps we shall find it, for this is a good and a safe place to be. I’m glad you’re here and I’m glad to be here again with you, for

it is a sacred time, this,

and a sacred place, this:

a place for questions more profound than answers,

vulnerability more powerful than strength,

and a peace that can pass all understanding.

It is a sacred time, this. Let us begin it together in song.

CENTERING

There’s a story about two Buddhist monks, an old master and his young student. There had been a heavy rain the night before, and what had been a tiny creek had become by morning a raging torrent of water more than a foot deep.

Standing by the edge of the new river was a young woman. She clearly wanted to cross the river, but she was very frail, and was unlikely to survive the swift current.

The young student looked away from her because this order of monks had sworn strict vows against ever talking to a woman, let alone touching one. The young monk had learned his lesson well, so he ignored her. The older monk, however, walked over to the young woman and asked if she would like help crossing the river. The astonished woman nodded yes, surprised that he would even acknowledge her. ‘Then, please, climb onto my shoulders,’ said the monk, ‘and I will carry you.’ She did as he asked and he carried her across the river. On the other side, he set her down, bowed silently to her, and went on his way.

The young monk followed along behind his master in angry silence for several hours, but the farther they walked the angrier he became. At last he couldn’t control himself, and he confronted his teacher with his bottled fury. ‘How could you? How could you touch her? What about your holy vows? How could you touch that woman?’

The old man looked into the angry face of his student, and at last he said quietly, ‘My young friend, I set that woman down three hours ago. Are you still carrying her?’

This is, among other things, a time to set down loads we’ve been carrying too long. Angers, resentments, grudges, accusations, and a whole host of furies that can both possess and cripple us. If we cannot let go of them, they will not let go of us. We’re all carrying loads, small or large, that have outlived whatever usefulness they may ever have had. It would be a shame for us to leave here with the same heavy loads we came in with.

What are you still carrying that you ought to set down?

Think of those things, name them to yourself, and you may be halfway to setting them down. Let us become more aware of those angers and fears we have carried too long. In these quiet moments I invite you to turn them into prayers or turn them into flames in the candles of memory and hope.

SERMON

(The following was a kind of loud and angry dramatic tantrum. It was shouted, screamed, accompanied by a furious expression and the violence of hitting chairs, pulpit, and walls — hard — with a rolled-up magazine).

‘NO! By God, no son of mine is going to do anything that stupid!’

‘As long as you live under my roof, you’ll do it myway. Aagh!’

‘You may be my daughter, but you’re an idiot!’

‘Son, no real man would have been such a wimp.’

‘And, , you wouldn’t behave that way if you were a bit more feminine! Aagh!’ (flinging the rolled-up magazine across the stage, then sitting on the stool, holding the microphone.)

Recognize that?

Everyone here knows that voice. And that face. We’ve done it or had it done to us. We’ve seen and felt it. We seem to be hard-wired for it.

Years ago I read a study done with some monkeys, juvenile monkeys that had never seen an male monkey of their species. They’d been raised by their mothers. When they were several months old, they were shown a movie of an male monkey doing his anger face, his fear face, with his screaming and gesturing just about like I just did. All of the young monkeys who had never seen an male monkey before in their lives shrieked and ran terrified to hide behind their mothers.

We seem to be programmed to know how to control others through anger, and how to be controlled through it. It seems to be absolutely natural. Being natural doesn’t mean it’s good. Revenge and greed are also natural. And I have read that revenge and greed are the two emotions that produce the most stress in our lives. Anger is full brother to both revenge and greed. Like them, it’s concerned with keeping things our way, inside ourboundaries, ourcomfort levels and our beliefs. It’s absolutely natural.

So it’s no wonder that anger turns up in a list like Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s list of the five stages that humans tend to go through in grieving the loss of something. She wrote the book in 1969 about terminal patients who had to come to terms with the one fact that they didn’t want to come to terms with at all — the fact that they were going to die. But since then many others have realized that this is a that works in a tremendous number of cases. These are stages we recognize in going through the loss of a religion, of a belief system, of a world view, of a relationship, of anything we once trusted and believed was the way things should be and which we have to come to terms with losing.

The first stage we go through is avoidance or denial. This is the ‘ostrich’ school, where we stick our heads in the sand and our fannies in the air and look silly to everyone but ourselves — trying to pretend that nothing’s really changed. Everything’s the way it was. It’ll be okay. I don’t have to worry about this.

When that doesn’t work, the next thing many of us try is anger. And the anger is used to say, ‘Look, I really mean it! Get back in line! Stay the way it’s supposed to be! Don’t make me change my world!’

We use anger when a person, or a belief system, or a world, or a god, has become bigger than we know how to be comfortable with it being and bigger than we are willing to permit it to be. It’s immensely powerful, this anger stuff.

Now, there is legitimate anger. There’s anger that can be a very healthy sign. There are many kinds of anger. Those would all be different sermons. Today I only want to talk about anger that’s used to control people, and how anger controls us.

It seems to happen at two levels, in two ways. First it happens as the ‘fear face’ and the shouting and the threats help to control us by creating fear. There is a threat of violence. Someone that angry could do God-knows-what to you. And if they’re bigger and stronger than you, you should be afraid. But some of the fear that anger can create will stay with you forever. It’s awful.

And that’s the second way that it works. It works first through creating fear, and it works secondly through infection. We get infected with anger, and we carry it with us, sometimes, for the rest of our lives, unwilling and unable to let loose of it, like the young Buddhist monk in the story.

I know people, you know people, who went through this in religion. They had a religious experience in their past, in their youth, whenever. Some idiot taught them about an angry, hateful God, and taught them only that. Someone told them about a religion or a God that wouldn’t allow them to be who they really were and needed to be, whoever that was. The religion wouldn’t respect their questions, and it wouldn’t respect their souls, and it wouldn’t respect them, and they are angry as hell — still. I have met people sixty years old who are still angry over something they heard in church with force when they were ten. If anger infects us, it can last an entire lifetime.

One of the most famous sermons — not the best, but one of the most famous sermons in American history — is still, from about 250 years ago, a sermon by Jonathan Edwards. This was an amazing man. He enrolled at Yale University when he was thirteen years old. This was one of the most brilliant minds in American history. Some have called him America’s most original theologian. He’s influenced a tremendous number of horrible religions. Jonathan Edwards was a Calvinist, and the sermon that’s so famous — and I’ve read it, and it’s terrifying to read — is called ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,’ and if you ever are tired of watching ‘Halloween, Part Thirteen,’ find that sermon and read it, it’s amazing.

He draws pictures of how hateful we are to God. He says, ‘Imagine, we’re more hateful to God than a spider. This was apparently not a man who loved arachnids, either. Imagine, he said, God is holding us between his fingertips like He would hold a hateful spider by a thin silken line, over the flaming pits of hell. There’s nothing about us that’s attractive or lovable, and the only thing that keeps him from dropping us into hell is the fact that he’s God.

You can get infected with that notion of a hateful God in ways that can keep you infected forever. It’s absolutely powerful stuff. And it doesn’t only happen in religion, as you know.

About ten or twelve years ago I was the theme speaker for a week-long Unitarian summer camp at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. That’s about 500 s and 300 kids and teenagers who were there for a week, and the theme speaker does a sermon each morning, so you can develop a theme over the five programs.

I didn’t know many people there. They come from all over the country to this camp. But since I was the most visible person there that week, I got hunted down a lot and was surprised at the number of people who wanted to confess something that week. I listened to a fair number — five or six — confessions that people just needed to make, things they needed to feel that they had somewhere safe to talk about.

The most memorable was a woman, one of the angrier people I’ve seen, who was talking about her ex-husband — who, if he had a soul, it was evil. She went on for ten minutes in detail so rich, so vivid, almost so bloody, it was clear that this wound was absolutely fresh and dripping. It was horrible to hear. I don’t know what any outsider might have really thought of the relationship if they’d seen it, but it was clear how it affected her, and she hated it and was still furious. And finally I said, ‘When was this over? When did this happen?’

‘Ten years ago.’

Ten years ago, and she’s still so infected by anger she cannot live. Ten years. It’s astonishing.

And it can be worse than that. It can be cosmic. There are, if you think about it, a lot of things to be angry about. Life isn’t fair.

On September 11th a whole new generation learned that life cannot be made safe. Friends desert you. Governments murder and lie. Partners, lovers, wound up being who they were instead of who your needed them to be. And you won’t forgive them for it. It can happen anywhere, and you can hate an entire world for it.

The most classic version of this story, still one of the best to read, is the story of Job. It’s a little boring to read; you just kind of have to read through it fast and then tell the story to yourself in less time, and it gets better. Now, since I suspect some of you have not been reading your bible this week, or this year, I’ll give you the Cliff Notes version:

Job is a righteous man, a good man. He’s never done anything wrong. Probably even his butler loved him. He has a wife and children and land and money and everything. And God and Satan are up there… whoever wrote this story have God and Satan sitting up on a cloud somewhere looking down watching this, and they can see it pretty clearly. And God is saying, ‘Look how faithful Job is.’ Why he loves me with all his heart.

And Satan says, ‘Of course he does. You’ve been good to him. He’s got everything. Of course he loves you. Start taking stuff away. See if he still loves you then.’

God said, ‘Oh no, his faith is pure.’

Satan said, ‘All right. Tell you what. You let me mess with him, and we’ll see how long he keeps loving you. ‘

So God says, ‘All right.’

Satan starts messing with him. And the man loses everything. He loses his land and his children, his family. They die. He loses everything. And throughout this, his faith is certainly tested. And it comes to the point, which for some people is the most famous line in the story. I know that in the seventies I heard some feminists say it was the only character in the story worthy of respect. Job’s wife’s line is, ‘Curse God and die!’

Now, let’s take this out of mythic language. Otherwise we’ll have this cartoon picture of someone yelling at a cloud and some lightning bolts making him dead and so on and so forth, and whoever wrote the story didn’t think that’s the way the world worked. ‘Curse God and die’ is something that today we would say differently. We might say, ‘When life is unjust, curse life, curse it to its core.’ And if you do that, you will find, something inside of you dies. Something in your spirit will die. Something in your ability to greet life with joy will die. Curse life and die. That’s one option.

Job took the other route. He said, ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.’

Now, you can make that sound like Job was just a pious wimp. But take that out of mythic language too, to understand what that sounds like when you say it in real life. This is someone saying, ‘Life is hard. It is a mess. It is a mixed bag. It’s been just awful. I’ve lost everyone I loved. I’ve lost everything I thought I had. I’ve lost all the things that I thought were the real blessing of life.’ That’s the package life comes in, and you don’t just take it or leave it. If you just take it, like a rotten deal but the only deal you’ve got, you lose your verve and your joy. You become cynical. You don’t just take the gift of life, you bless it. ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.’ Blessed be the name of the Lord.’

Not ‘I’ll put up with him because he’s the only god whose name I know.’

You don’t just accept this miserable, rotten life. That’s the gift that’s offered. That’s the package the miracles come in. It also hurts. You bless it. The miracle in the story of Job that’s not commented on often enough is that what Job succeeded in doing was in transforming anger into gratitude, and gratitude is the antidote for anger.

The studies that say that greed and revenge are the most stress-producing emotions we have also say that gratitude is the most stress-reducing emotion we have. The only durable escape from anger is gratitude, and it is one of the hardest transitions we are ever asked to make. After every great loss we have to learn how to choose life again, and it’s hard.

I saw the Job story played out, actually played out in reverse. In Job everyone died but him. I saw this story nineteen years ago. It’s one I’ve never used in a sermon before.

I was doing my chaplaincy training in the summer of 1982 at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in downtown Chicago, and I chose the leukemia ward for my assignment. I wanted heavy work. I wanted real work. And when I got on the ward the first day and went to the staff meeting to introduce myself, the nurses said, ‘Oh, so you’re the new student chaplain.’

‘Yes.’

‘Good! You go see the woman in Room 11.’

‘Why?’

‘Cause it’s your turn. We can’t stand any more of her. You go see her. Oh, and welcome to the ward.’

This didn’t sound like the introduction to something pleasant, and it wasn’t.

I went into Room 11 and saw the angriest human I have ever been around, with one of the saddest stories I’ve ever heard. It was a 29-year-old woman who was dying of leukemia. When I came in the room, she said ‘What are you?’

I told her I was a chaplain. I can’t repeat a single word that she said. The fact that I was a chaplain was such a vile, vulgar betrayal of any notion that there could possibly be a God, that she spent ten minutes telling me what a vile, miserable, slime-ball (these are the kind words) I was. I remember thinking during that ten minutes. She has used every profane and vulgar word I’ve ever heard, and she’s even used them in some creative new combinations I’d never thought of. It wasn’t pleasant. I also thought, I have no idea how to respond to this woman. I agree with everything she’s saying.

It is a miserable story. She’s 29. She and her husband had had some rough years, but then they worked it out, and for the last half dozen years they’d had a wonderful marriage. They had two young children who were delights. Life had finally settled in to being absolutely idyllic. And then four months ago she’d been diagnosed with an extremely aggressive kind of leukemia. And she was dying, and there was nothing that could be done. And she was so furious. There weren’t enough things in the world to absorb the hate that she had. I listened for ten minutes, looking for some way to get out of the room and finally found it, and I got up to leave and she said, ‘You’ll be back tomorrow.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’ll page you. You’ll be here every day ‘til I die, and you’ll listen to this story every day until I die.’

God, No!

She paged me the next day and the day after and the day after and every day the story got angrier and louder. The nurses closed the door as soon as I went in the room. It was very painful. I never knew what to do. It was my very first assignment as a student chaplain, and it was clear that I had failed absolutely, completely at every part of it.

I thought about it over the weekend and on Monday I took it to our chaplains’ group and I confessed. I told the story I’ll admit it was fun using all those words. And I said, ‘I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to go back there again.’ John Serkland was the chaplain who taught this — he’d been a chaplain 25 years; he was really quite gifted at it — John said, ‘Do you want me to save you?’

And I said, ‘Save me? Hell yes, John! I have no shame left. You save me and I’ll bow at your feet. I’ll worship you. I’ll put up an idol of you at home in a little shrine. Anything you want.’

And he said, ‘All right.’

I said, ‘Do you honestly think you can do something here?’

‘Yes.’

Part of me wanted to see him fail. Part wondered what ‘succeeding’ might look like, and whether he or anyone could really do it in Room 11.

John went with me the next day. He said he had to get in costume. He wore his chaplain collar, so there’d be no mistaking what he was. We walked into the room together the next day, and this woman spotted immediately what was going on. How I wish I could tell you the words she really used. But the gist of it was, ‘Well, this young fool has failed, so he’s brought the old fat fool.’

I closed the door. John sat in a chair near the head of the bed, and she let him have it. For ten minutes, the same story, which had become much more polished, much more violent, much more vulgar, even much more angry than it had been the week before when I’d heard five performances of it. And at the end of the story, John sat there — he had never taken his eyes off her — and he said just three words: ‘You expected more.’

She tried to answer. She’d form words and grit her teeth and go through six emotions, and words wouldn’t come out, and she’d form more words. The words wouldn’t come out.’ And finally tears ran down both of her cheeks.’ She looked at John and quietly said, ‘Yes.’

And he reached over for the first time and took her hand and said, ‘Yes. I’ll come back tomorrow.’

I think that’s the most magical moment I’ve ever seen. Those three words broke the spell. There wasn’t anything to add. There was no need to insult the woman’s intelligence by saying there isn’t more. Any idiot could tell that. That’s what was so frustrating and infuriating. She expected more. Of course she expected more. She’s 29 years old. She’s got a marriage that had just become healthy and good in the past couple years, and she expected to grow old and wise together with this man she loved. She’s got two little kids she expected to watch grow up and have kids of their own. Of course she expected more. There wasn’t more. There’s just that. Die in anger or find a way to pull off a miracle.

She died about two weeks later. But from that afternoon, from that Tuesday afternoon on, she was a different person. At least she was a different person for me. Her husband and kids said that she was the person they’d always known. She was loving, she was caring, she was kind. It became terribly important to her, in her last few days, to tell the people she loved how much she loved them.

I had a short talk with her three days before she died. She was getting weaker, and we all knew that it wouldn’t be long. I said, ‘How do you sum it up now? I know how you summed it up two weeks ago. How do you sum it up now?’

She thought about it, then smiled and finally said, ‘With gratitude. Compared to infinite, she said, this wasn’t much. Compared to the 85 years I thought I’d have, it wasn’t very much. But this is what there was. The gift was for 29 years, with some trouble, some pain, a lousy ending way too soon, a lot of love, two amazing children, and more miracles, more miracles than anybody could deserve. I am so grateful for the chance, for the gift.’ We held hands and cried together — not in anger, but in gratitude.

Blessed be.