First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
15 August 2004
What Stress I Am Under...
Okay, everybody, take a look in your bulletins and read the sermon title. Now, raise your hands if it sounds like something you have said in the last ten days. You can identify...yes? Me too. We are no strangers to the strains that end up putting us on medication, into therapy, or in the doghouse when our tempers fray and our coping mechanisms fail.
The remarkable thing, however, is not that there is stress in our lives. Stress is a naturally-occurring phenomenon. Researchers tell us that we actually need a certain level of daily stress in order to be creative, motivated and responsive to others. So if a deadline or a creative challenge or a crying baby stresses you out, don't worry, be happy. It's good for you. Ordinary stress, physiological or psychological, is not going to kill us. What is remarkable is that these days so many of us seem willing to tolerate higher and higher levels of stress.
Of course, if your house gets blown apart by a hurricane, your kid gets arrested for shoplifting, or your doctor gives you bad news about your last mammogram, you don't have a choice about how high your stress level goes. Or if you are a refugee in a camp in Burundi, a soldier on patrol in Baghdad, the mother of a teenage boy in Dorchester on a hot summer night, or you live next door to a famous financial institution and the Feds have just raised the terror alert to red, it'd be a miracle if your stress levels were not off the charts.
But some of the stresses that have us worried about stroke, acid reflux and road rage are unconnected to such personal, natural and political terrors. Many others have to do with our insertion in a world of dizzying choices, so many choices that (psychologists report) we feel disempowered by them, frustrated and depressed by sheer variety. Our ordinary stresses have a lot to do as well with all the powerful images of success and the good life with which we are daily bombarded. We are set up for stress by high expectations about relationships, parenting, the kids' SAT scores, and by those large human questions such as whether our teeth are as white as God and Crest intended—stresses manufactured, in other words, by economic and cultural interests against which we seem to have fewer and fewer defenses, given the mediocre state of our spiritual lives and the steady erosion of the power of traditional communities of wisdom to anchor us.
We have become so inured to these manipulations that even the most sophisticated and sincere among us have a hard time getting a clear read on what our heart-of-hearts deeply hopes for in this life. Even the most idealistic and committed among us are surprisingly easy prey for corporate marketing departments who every day determine on their own what is good for our well-being. These interests have a story to tell about what it means to be a fulfilled and contented human being. It is a powerful and appealing myth that they tell artfully and well. And too many of us believe it.
The story we have to tell about the source and meaning of a good and happy life is, I believe, far more powerful, but it seems that we believe it less and less, that we rarely rely on it ourselves, and that we are increasingly reluctant to tell it. What an irony that we who have the Greatest Story Ever Told have lost confidence in its power to ground and shape us, and have ceded the ground to Madison Avenue, where there is nothing but aggressive confidence in formative myth! (They have read our story too—they know, as Jesus said, that wherever we put our money, our hearts soon follow. And it's our hearts as well as our wallets they are after,)
Perhaps we have come to acquiesce in our own unhealth because we sense that to de-stress our lives through faith in the old, old story of a trustworthy God in whom we may safely rest will require changes too radical to contemplate. We may long to simplify our lives, to choose a downward rather than an upward mobility, to rely on our faith, learn to pray and observe more faithfully the pleasures, rhythms and rituals of a grounded life, but we are have a hard time taking the first step to make it come true and a harder time helping our children resist.
The thought of what it will take to de-stress stresses us out all the more. And so we accept the unacceptable, take the pills, pay our therapists, and settle for small oases—a day or two without email, a week-end away without the cell phone.
Now, before I get carried away denouncing the evils of modern life and our complicity in our own predicament (which is seductively easy to do, but sometimes a cheap sort of sermon), let me admit that I don't have a quick fix for you and that I myself am among the worst offenders when it comes to a failure of nerve about getting rid of stress. Stress is as much my daily bread as the next person's, and I have the added burden of having trained to be a minister in a day and age when the reigning definition of a good pastor is that he or she is "a non-anxious presence." In my case, not likely.
Fortunately for us, our new minister, Dan Smith, looks pretty calm, and he just told me that he's planning to preach about Sabbath rest next week. I'm sure he'll have some answers for us, and I am really looking forward to hearing him. (No pressure there, Dan!)
In the meanwhile, let's listen to Jesus.
In the unsettling passage we just read, Jesus announces in an anguished tone that he is anxious too—anxious to get on with a ministry that he describes as a work of provocation and controversy, not of soothing assurances and superficial peace. His is a mission that could strip him and his followers of the comforts of home and family and even of his church. All the traditional loyalties will be on the table to be weighed against the graceful reality of the kingdom of God that Jesus is passionately (even recklessly) announcing and embodying.
He is well aware of the adverse reaction he is stirring up with his healing and truth-telling, his open arms and his passion; and so he pointedly chooses images of fire (which is a biblical way of talking about judgment and cleansing) and images of discord and disruption. If the new relationships of the kingdom—based on mercy, not blood, belief or land—undermine the traditions, then so be it. (And friends, if this willingness of Jesus to break the things we value does not make you profoundly uncomfortable, then either you are Mother Teresa or you are not listening.)
Then Jesus speaks about his "baptism"—a kind of crossroads, a crisis fast approaching, an experience, he intimates, that all his followers will also have one day. For all of us who do follow him, this crisis might be big, bold, obvious and immediate, like Jesus' own crucifixion. It is more likely, however, that it will be more subtle and less dramatic; that it will unfold over time.
It could be a sense prompted by a passion for justice that you must change your profession and do a new thing; or an inner voice insisting that you finally break that debilitating habit that has kept your soul in thrall and prevented you from loving the way you were meant to love; or a growing inner attraction to God that finally leads you to a scary but joyful new capacity to give away who you are and what you have. It could be a single moment of insight, or a long season of life. Whichever it is, it will be a crisis for you, a crossroads at which you will finally come to accept the fact that you will never be happy unless you let your heart be governed fully by something or someone for whom you are willing to make sacrifices.
Reading our gospel for today, it struck me that the mad levels of stress we accept every day and the stress Jesus says that he is under are connected by this notion of governance and sacrifice. His stress is what happens when you are impelled from within. It arises from his faithfulness to a grounding vocation that has shaped everything about him and governs him completely. It is the impatient energy of a person in love.
A lot of our stress arises from not surrendering to something that governs us in a truly grounding way. Our tendency is to live a somewhat more spiritually-aimless life that makes only momentary, fragmentary sense.We hedge our bets about anything that feels like a final claim on us, and expend energy perfecting our defenses.
If Jesus is under stress, that stress stems from the urgency to know and do God's will. If we are under stress, it is often because we are so easily blown around by distractions and so passively governed by unexamined wants and needs that we can't figure out our own will, let alone God's.
We get confused about our heart's best interests rather early on in life. John Ortberg tells a story about the search for grounded happiness and fulfillment in his family. He has three little kids who regularly worship at the shrine of the golden arches. It's the only place they'll eat. And they always want the same thing. It's just a couple of basic food items and a cheap little plastic prize, but in a moment of marketing genius the folks at McDonald's gave it a great name—the Happy Meal. The Meal of Great Joy. You aren't buying McNuggets and a Hercules Ring, you're buying happiness.
Every now and then Ortberg tries to talk them out of it. He gives them a dollar to buy their own cheap little plastic toys, but they want a Happy Meal. They cry for a Happy Meal. A lot. He does not want to be the father who won't buy his kids the Meal of Great Joy, so he buys them the Happy Meal, and it makes them happy—for about a minute. (The only one that Happy Meals bring lasting happiness to is McDonald's.)
You would think, Ortberg says, that kids would eventually catch on and say, "You know, I keep getting these Happy Meals and they don't give me lasting happiness so I'm not going to buy them anymore. I'm not going to set myself up for the stress of disappointment." But it never happens. They keep buying Happy Meals and they keep not working. No young adult ever returns home to say to her parents, "Remember that Happy Meal you gave me? That's where I found lasting contentment and lifelong joy. I knew that if I could just have that Happy Meal, I would be anchored for a lifetime. And I am. Thanks, folks."
Contentment, meaning, purpose, fulfillment, a centered and meaningful life—as Ortberg says, many of us still believe it's just a Happy Meal away, only our Happy Meals keep getting more expensive, more complicated, more dangerous, more self-defeating and more elusive. And our stress keeps rising. We dream of a mystery inheritance or a Powerball win that will be the escape hatch that permits us, say, to live the simple life in Tuscany or raise llamas in Vermont, forgetting, as they say in AA, that wherever we go, we takes ourselves with us.
The truth is that there is no such thing as a geographical cure for the stress that arises in us from spiritual aimlessness—unless, of course, you decide against Tuscany and go instead on the open road to Someplace New with Jesus. There is also no satisfaction for our deepest hunger at McDonald's. The Happy Meal we are after is the one at which Jesus breaks bread for free, pours abundant wine with joy, and gives us the whopping prize of acceptance, mercy, forgiveness—and the bonus of a world to serve, full of brothers and sisters to care for. These things are ours when by grace we come to rest under the governance of the God who loves us, stress-free, world without end. Amen.
© 2004, J Mary Luti