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The Rev. Richard Floyd Ridgefield-Crystal Lake Presbyterian Church Lent 3 Isaiah 55:1-9 So I’m lying on a table staring up at the ceiling. I’m cold, I’m wet, I’m hungry, and I have to go to the bathroom. And some maniac has just put six staples in my head, telling me “there’s really no point bothering with painkillers, so let’s just see if we can take it, okay?” I took it, but I didn’t like it. I was lying in that wretched state because, about an hour earlier, I had been driving along 176 out by Lipold Park. I knew the roads were slick, and I knew my car did not handle the roads very well, so I was going a good 10 miles an hour below the speed limit. Honest, officer, I was. There was a semi-truck in front of me, and I noticed he was at a dead stop. I hit the brakes and started to slide. Then I tried to turn the wheel, but ice and momentum carried me forward. I had a few seconds to contemplate what was about to happen. A pious man would have said a prayer. I said a kind of prayer. I think in that situation pretty much anything you say is a kind of prayer. In any case, I ploughed into the back of the semi-truck at about 35 miles an hour. A scary experience, but thankfully I walked away with only the aforementioned staples in my head, and a crushed car. So I was lying there in the emergency room, waiting for the stapling maniac to come back and tell me I could go home. And I thought to myself, this is excellent sermon material. (Preachers are always looking for good material.) I think one of the things we’re most afraid of in life is not being in control. And there’s nothing quite like sliding toward a semi-truck at 35 miles per hour with no brakes and no steering to give you a crash course in just how out of control you really are. It occurred to me that, maybe this is a metaphor for life. We’re all on ice. When everything’s calm, it can seem like we’re in control, driving along, looking pretty good, listening to our music, got it all together. But when life puts a semi-truck in front of us, we suddenly discover that we can’t really brake or steer. We’re not as in control as we think we are. And that makes us afraid. Doesn’t it seem like there’s a lot of fear in the air these days? Did you know that tomorrow is the five year anniversary of the color-coded Homeland Security Advisory System? Except for a few times when we’ve gone to code orange— high risk of terrorist attack— we’ve spent the last five years at code yellow— significant risk of terrorist attack. Doesn’t that help you to sleep at night? I wonder if we will ever see green. You know the litany of fears that follow us around. I’m not going to rub our noses in the woes of our world. We’re living in a code yellow world—and sometimes worse. We’re all driving on ice, whether we know it or not. So I think an important question for us is, how do we respond to this? Of course the natural response to fear is to defend ourselves. You know we have three brains—or at least, three parts of one brain. We have the neocortex, which is our “rational” brain, the one we like to think is in control most of the time. But we also have the middle part of the brain, which deals more with emotions, seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. And then, at bottom, we have the oldest part of our brain, sometimes called the reptilian brain. The reptilian brain is always active, even in deep sleep, searching for threats. When we’re afraid, that fear shoots right down past our neocortex, past our middle brain, and deep into our reptilian brain. Fear causes us to respond out of our most primitive instincts, and sometimes that’s not very pretty. Have you ever had someone jump out at you unexpectedly, startling you… and something deep inside of you just wants to beat the ever-loving daylights out of them? You know what I’m talking about? That’s your reptilian brain responding to a threat. I don’t use sermon titles, but I thought of a great title for this sermon: “Reptiles on Ice.” Reptiles on ice do not make the wisest decisions. So in response to threats, real or imagined, we cut ourselves off from the world, and cut ourselves off from other people. If we can just hunker down behind security fences and gates and locked doors, if we can just huddle together with family and friends and our kind of people—then we can be safe. The reptile brain sees other people as a threat, especially people who are different. So if we let fear rule the world, if we let the reptiles tell us what to do, we’ll all hunker down into smaller and smaller tribes of people, cut off from one another—and ultimately—cut off from God. Our reading from Isaiah imagines a very different world. “Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.” We sometimes say there’s no free lunch, but that’s exactly what we’re being invited to here. God invites us to a free lunch—a feast! So imagine all these fearful little tribes of people huddled together in their little fortified corners of the world. And God calls them out into the open, invites them to come to the feast sit down together and eat together. Do you see what’s happening here? God invites us out of fear and into community, into life together, life gathered around the table. That’s where we find real abundance. And, maybe surprisingly, that’s where we find real security, too. After I smashed into the semi-truck, the woman behind me pulled over and asked if I was okay. I went to the semi-truck driver and asked if he was okay. Of course that’s a bit like a fly buzzing into the rump of an elephant and asking if the elephant is alright. The EMTs showed me kindness, cleaning up my cut, making sure I was alright, telling me what to do next. I know they were doing their jobs, but, still, they were kind. My family came and took me to the emergency room—eventually. (It took three calls. The first two said I was bleeding by the side of the road. The last one said the car was damaged. That did the trick.) And as I’ve seen so many times in the past, a community forms in the emergency room waiting area, where very different people find themselves thrown together in a shared struggle and so they start to support each other. There was another family there—three generations in fact, a mother, a grandmother, and an infant. They wanted to know what happened to me; we asked what happened to them. The mother talked with Anna about the tooth Anna recently lost. Both of my girls played peak-a-boo with the infant. Back in the ER, a nurse made me comfortable and then made me uncomfortable by cleaning out my cut. And then even the maniac putting the staples in my head— how else was the cut going to heal? And though I tried for a little while to keep it all a secret— word got around pretty quickly and I received many kind thoughts and offers of help from people in this community. Do you see what I’m getting at here? What got me through this icy patch in my life was not a reptilian defense mechanism. It was the fact that I was not alone. It was the presence of others, looking out for me, caring for me, that got me through. At the Grammy Awards this year, the rapper Ludacris performed the song “Runaway Love.” It tells the story of Lisa and Nicole and Erica, three young girls caught up in webs of violence and abuse. They are “trying to figure out why the world is so cold…” As the song goes, each girl “is stuck up in the world on her own forced to think that hell is a place called home nothin’ else to do but get some clothes and pack she says shes bout to runaway and never come back.” The refrain, “Runaway Love” plays on at the end— but then we hear another voice say, “Close your eyes and picture us running away together.” [Ludacris, “Runaway Love,” from “Release Therapy” (2006)] We do live in a broken and fearful world—no point denying that. And our reptile brains tell us the only way to stay safe is to cut ourselves off from everyone else. But maybe our reptile brains are wrong. The hope of our faith is that we are not alone, that we are not stuck in the world on our own. We are invited to come to the feast together, to share the abundance of the earth together, to look out for one another, to care for one another. Only there, gathered together as a community around the table of God’s blessing, can we find true security and true peace. |