Untying the Knots
1) The Wisdom of the Skin Horse

Matthew 4:1-11

February 10, 2008, First Sunday in Lent

A young and successful executive was traveling down a neighborhood street, going a bit too fast in his new Jaguar. He was watching for kids darting out between parked cars ands slowed down when he thought he saw something. As his car passed, no children appeared. Instead a brick smashed into the Jag’s side door! He slammed on the brakes and backed the Jag to the spot where the brick had been thrown. The angry driver then jumped out of the car, grabbed the nearest kid and pushed him up against a parked car shouting, “What was that all about and who are you? Just what the heck are you doing!? That’s a new car and that brick you threw is going to cost a lot of money. Why did you do it?”

The young boy was apologetic. “Please, mister…please, I’m sorry but I didn’t know what else to do,” he pleaded. “I threw the brick because no one else would stop.” With tears dripping down his face and off his chin, the youth pointed to a spot just around a parked car. “It’s my brother,” he said. “He rolled off the curb and fell out of his wheelchair and I can’t lift him up.” Now sobbing, the boy asked the stunned executive, “Would you please help me get him back into his wheelchair? He’s hurt and he is too heavy for me.”

Moved beyond words, the driver tried to swallow the rapidly swelling lump in his throat – he hurriedly lifted the handicapped boy back into the wheelchair, then took out a linen handkerchief and dabbed at the fresh scrapes and cuts. A quick look told him that everything was going to be ok… “Thank you and may God bless you,” the grateful child told the stranger.

Too shook up for words, the man simply watched the boy push his wheelchair-bound brother down the sidewalk toward their home. It was a long slow walk back to the Jaguar. The damage was very noticeable, but the driver never bothered to repair the dented side door. He kept the dent there to remind him of this message “Don’t go through life so fast that someone has to throw a brick at you to get your attention!” God whispers in our souls and speaks in our hearts. Sometimes when we don’t have time to listen, God has to throw a brick at us. It is our choice to listen or not.

It is so human to go through life so wrapped up in ourselves that we totally miss moments of ministry and grace. We get all tied up in what we are about, in our humanity, that we forget we are supposed to be disciples of God. We were created and called for a purpose. During this season of Lent I want to talk about how we get ourselves so tied up and how we can untie those knots in our lives, and live and be the kind of people Jesus wants us to be. To that end I have devised this series entitled Untying the Knots.

Some time ago I received a compendium of dumb things people have said entitled, Brain Cramps. One of them is a quote from Mariah Carey where she says:

Whenever I watch TV and see those starving kids all over the world, I can’t help but cry. I mean I’d love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff.

It is hard to imagine that someone could be that cold and clueless. There is a lot of pain and suffering in the world and there are many who have worked hard not to notice so they can live their lives pain free.

No one wants to have pain in their lives. The human response is to flee from pain. People go to the doctor to be relieved of pain. People get drunk or high on drugs to relieve the pain of boredom, or loneliness. Or if the pain gets to be too great people commit suicide. We are taught from a very early age to believe that pain is a sign that something is wrong, and to take care of it so that we won’t be in pain.

And in many ways this is where we find Jesus today in the temptation dealing with pain. But the pain he is dealing with is that of the pain of testing; testing to see if he will use his status to forego pain in his Life. Jesus is being challenged in the wilderness to be equal to God. Jesus, in Mathew has just been baptized; he has just heard that he is God’s Son, now the Spirit leads him into the wilderness to wrestle with what it means to be God’s Son. By going into the wilderness Jesus is not trying to escape God’s will – to hide from it, such as we hear about in Jonah when he goes the opposite way from where God wants him to go. Rather the Spirit leads him into the wilderness to be challenged – to be tested.

The Rev. Dr. Fred Craddock writes concerning Jesus’ temptations:

Jesus’ victory in the desert (was not) achieved by denouncing the tempting offers. On the contrary, in the course of his ministry he did feed the poor; he did perform wonders among the people; his ministry did have and continues to have enormous political impact. Rather, Jesus’ response to every test was to refuse to try to be like God or to be God. As Paul put it, he "did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant" (Phil. 2:6-7). He did not use the power of the spirit to claim exemption or to avoid the painful difficulties of the path of service.

And this is a key difference between Jesus and the rest of humanity. We try to avoid the painful difficulties. We prefer to let others carry our cross.

It is the issue of vulnerability; allowing ourselves to be touched by others, allowing ourselves to led by others. Even though he was God’s Son Jesus did not claim exemption from vulnerability. He kept himself open to the injustices of the world and tangled with them. He allowed his heart to be broken by the blindness of others and sought to give them sight and understanding. Dr. Fred Epstein, an internationally renowned pediatric neurosurgeon once wrote:

The question, “why do children suffer?” has no answer, unless it’s simply, “To break our hearts.” Once our hearts get broken, they never fully heal. They always ache. But perhaps a broken heart is a more loving instrument. Perhaps only after our hearts have cracked wide open, have finally and totally unclenched, can we truly know love without boundaries.

To claim our humanity is to recognize that we are the same as every other person. To claim our humanity is to know that because of our status as Christians, or as Americans, or as successful, or as wealthy we are not exempt from pain, and suffering, from carrying our cross, or from caring for other people in their suffering. To claim our humanity is, as Epstein says, to know love without boundaries.

Another way to think about it is to be real. The quest to be who, or what we really are. Margery Williams wrote the beloved child’s and adult story The Velveteen Rabbit. It is the story of a stuffed rabbit’s journey to become real. The sage of the story is the old skin horse. At one point we hear him talking to the velveteen rabbit about becoming real. We read:

The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

To be real is to be affected by the joys and pains of others.

In his book The Wounded Healer Henri Nouwen talks about the Messiah as one who is real, and really with the people. He shares a legend from the Jewish Talmud:

Rabbi Yoshua ben Levi came upon Elijah the prophet while he was standing at the entrance of Rabbi Simeron be Yohai’s cave. He asked Elijah, “When will the Messiah come?” Elijah replied, “Go and ask him yourself.”

“Where is he?”

“Sitting at the gates of the city.”

“How shall I know him?”

“He is sitting among the poor covered with wounds. The others unbind all their wounds at the same time and then bind them up again. But he unbinds one at a time and binds it up again, saying to himself, ‘Perhaps I shall be needed: if so I must always be ready so as not to delay for a moment.’” (Taken from the tractate Sanhedrin)

The Messiah is the one who is not above the sufferings of humanity, or entering into them with humanity. The Messiah is not above dying a shameful death on a cross. The Messiah is one who loves the people into reality. In a well-to-do first world culture it is easy to think that we don’t have to dirty ourselves, or live with the flies, death, and stuff of the third world. We can create our own fake reality that does not include pain and suffering. We can try, but then again we hear of the one we call our Lord going to the desert and turning down the temptation to forego suffering. He winds up on Golgotha. Jesus was not just tempted in today’s passage; he was tempted throughout his life. Simon told him not to go to Jerusalem, Jesus had his Gethsemane where he said to God that he would really like to skip the cross. Like Jesus, the testing for us and for the Church today never ceases.

Are we willing to be vulnerable or not? That is a knot that we have to work to untie in our lives and in the world. If people can look at the hungry of the world and only see skinny children, then we have to untie that knot and teach them to see the child who is hungry. We have to call them to join the human race, and get real, get in amongst the flies and death and create life and hope. No one can be too good for that, not even the Messiah.

Amen

© 2008 Rev. Dr. Thomas T. Peters