Wounded People

The church is full of wounded people--emotionally, psychologically and spiritually broken, bruised, bleeding.

I'm one of them. My wounds are minor when compared with others' wounds. But they're real to me. They still hurt. They made me the person I am. They might even be making me into the person I'm becoming.

Like so many others, most of my wounds come from childhood: my father's alcoholism; his assaults on my mother; their divorce and then growing up in a household with only one parent, my mother who worked full-time at minimum wage jobs to support my sister and me; living in or near poverty; bullying by peers; and physical (although never sexual), emotional and spiritual abuse in elementary and secondary Roman Catholic schools.

In high school, I watched my principal turn into a street fighter, battering a classmate of mine in front of the whole class, his punches falling upon the defenseless boy who was held from behind in a bear hug by another priest.

That day, I resolved I would withdraw further from others. I would become invisible. Keep quiet, I told myself. Hide. Run, if you're discovered. Survive.

My theme song then was one by Simon and Garfunkel, the words of which I still remember:  "I am a rock. I am an island. And an island never cries."

After high-school, I went to work-- not to college--a priest my senior year having told me that that I was fit only for a job or for Vietnam.  I painted houses for awhile. And then I got a job, working as a messenger in a bank.

Someone there said to me, "You never smile." Another person said, "You're an old soul." I know what that means now.

I was a wounded soul. On my island, it was dark. I was lonely and anxious.

Going to university, when it finally happened, was my way of saying goodbye to the island, although at the time, I didn't know I was doing so.

I went to the University of Louisville part-time at first, the bank paying for my course work. I'd major in finance, I thought. With a bachelor's degree, I'd be only the second in my family with one. I'd get a good job and never be poor again. I'd show everyone--those priests and nuns who'd told me I was stupid and would have no future. They'd see that I could do something with my life. Become someone of significance.

After trying finance and loathing it, I left the bank and enrolled at U of L full-time. I switched my major from finance to history, philosophy and literature. I wanted to understand people. To understand myself.

I loved my courses and worked hard to learn as much as I could and to get As in everything. It helped that I was studying what I enjoyed. I'd become a teacher and try to influence my students for the good. At least, I'd do them no harm.

My wounds were still there, though. Still bleeding, as it were. Still aching. I felt lonely, depressed and anxious, although at the time I didn't have the words to name my inner torment and turmoil.

One day--thanks to God's grace--I decided I needed help. I was tired of the darkness. I was ready for the light.

I went to the university's counseling center and started working regularly with a therapist. He coaxed me out of my isolation and into involvement in life beyond the classroom and library and campus job. He was one of several healers God placed on my journey toward wholeness.

He was able to listen deeply and to probe gently with his questions.  In him I found someone I could trust. I started lifting the bandages on my wounds, exposing them to light and air, cleansing them, applying medicine to them.

Because of my counselor,  I visited the university's Ecumenical Center and eventually became an active member of that diverse community of faith. I met Penny, a fellow undergraduate, and we fell in love. I experienced God's love for me. Penny is also one of those healers God has sent into my life.

I also made friends there with two wonderful, Godly priests: Father Bob Burchell, an Episcopal priest who is now with the saints in heaven; and Father Bob Ray, a Roman Catholic priest and one of the presenters at my ordination many years later. The "Bobs," as we students called them and the two other ministers who had the same first names, were agents of the Holy Spirit.They were essential in the healing of many of my emotional and spiritual wounds.

The "Bobs's" example led me ultimately out of the secular work of banking and later university and agency public relations and into the healing profession of ordained ministry in the Episcopal Church.

I am a priest today because of them, and because of two earlier examples of loving priests from my high-school days: my high-school golf coach, Father Bob Korst; and my history teacher my senior year, Father Peter Donnelly. They saved my life as a student at DeSales High School, showing me that I could excel academically and achieve something in life.

And it was Father Rocco, a sometimes volatile personality in the classroom (but not an abuser), who introduced me to the power of stories, initiated me into the life of writing and inspired me to pursue writing as a profession.

Over the past nearly 40 years, I have continued to seek the healing of my wounds. I have regularly received spiritual direction from monks, priests, nuns--both in the Roman Catholic and in the Episcopal faith traditions.

(I long ago made peace with my birth church, as it were, appreciating the ways the church formed me spiritually and made me the God-seeker I am. No institution is perfect. All fall short of the glory of God, to paraphrase the Apostle Paul.)

Over four decades, I've spent innumerable hours in individual and group psychotherapy and have fervently studied that discipline inside and outside the classroom. The healing of the psyche (the soul) is a passion of mine.

I continue to see a therapist, who is helping me to deal with my wounds and to become a healthier and happier person. I need this outside help for a lot of reasons, including professionally: as a priest, I'm regularly ministering with and to wounded people.

I'm a Wounded Healer, to quote the title of the late priest/spiritual guide Henri Nouwen.

God has called me to work with the wounded, because I know what that experience is like; I know that healing is possible; and I want to be God's healing hands placed upon those wounds.

Still, I never knew the work would be so painful at times, especially because the wounded can and do sometimes wound others, including the healers themselves. I'm learning ways to protect myself from further wounding.

If you're a wounded person, even a wounding one, I invite you to move from the darkness and into the light. God will heal your wounds, if you ask him and let him. You can be a whole person, which is God's will for all of us.

Jesus is our exemplar as THE wounded healer--always healing and never wounding. He heals through the hands of his body on earth, the church, and through worship, prayer, holy study, spiritual direction, and, yes, psychotherapy.

He heals those wounds of ours that are invisible to the eye, but that are ruinous to our spirits, robbing us of the fullness of life.

The journey toward healing and wholeness is worth taking. I know. Isn't it time for you to start?

Christ transforms culture

Richard Niebuhr's book, Christ and Culture, made a huge impact on me in seminary. (Occasionally, I'll review other books that have had such an effect on me, in hopes of inspiring you to read them and to be changed by them.)

Christ and Culture, published in 1951, has exerted a powerful influence on many spiritual and even secular leaders over the years. And it goes on influencing people.

Richard Niebuhr, born in Missouri in 1894 and died in 1962, was the son of a Protestant pastor. He was the younger brother of Reinhold Niebuhr, another famous theologian. Richard earned his PhD at Yale and later taught at its Divinity School. He published many books.

In Christ and Culture, Niebuhr looked at Christ's relationship to culture, culture being the sum total of human expression, including religion, art, literature, music, languages, political systems, and much more.

After surveying the ways that Christ and culture relate--Christ in and with culture, Christ over and against culture, for instance--Niebuhr concludes his analysis with a plea for Christ "transforming culture."

Niebuhr's assumption is that culture is not fully what God intends it to be. It must change. Culture, including American culture, does not fully embody and express God's relentless and passionate concern for the poor and marginalized, for a just world, for forgiveness, reconciliation and peace among his children.

The role of Christians, therefore, as expressed in our Baptismal Covenant in The Book of Common Prayer, is to repent of sin, to resist evil, to strive for justice and peace, to respect the dignity of every human being. In Baptism, we pledge to carry on Christ's work, furthering God's kingdom of justice, freedom and peace.

Every time we pray the Lord's Prayer, we pray "...thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven...." Heaven--where everything conforms to God's loving plan, and not to the world's unloving plan-- is not just out there, beyond space and time; but heaven is, potentially, right here in the physical world and in everything that constitutes this world, including human beings, our relationships, government, institutions. Everything.

The New Testament writings proclaim that Jesus Christ is Lord. He is Lord of all--not just a part of our lives, that one hour of  Sunday worship, the quick prayer in a moment of desperation, the "dues" we pay to the church, that carpenter-Gothic building at Kimbrough and Walnut Streets in Springfield, Mo., called Christ Episcopal Church.

No. Christ is Lord of all creation, ruling all things through active, loving concern. He rules most visibly (his hope is) through his disciples, everyone who acknowledges him as Savior and who follows him as Lord.  To follow Jesus Christ means to conform one's life to his teaching and actions of love, mercy and justice. .

And we need plenty of help from God to do so, especially today.

Alas, too many Christians  regard themselves as  merely consumers of religious services. How can it be otherwise? We live in a consumer culture. I understand  consumers of religion, because I used to be one. Perhaps I still am in some ways.

We consumers of religion might not articulate our relationship to Christ's church in just such a phrase, but, in the words of the Prayer Book, our many "things done and left undone" would demonstrate just such a relationship.

Consumers seek out the church primarily when we need something, such as a beautiful  Christmas or Easter service, a place for a wedding, a baptism, a funeral, a priest to say a prayer at the bedside, preaching that confirms existing beliefs and choices, or some other specific service.

Please understand:  It is good when people seek out the church, as I did a long time ago, even if it's just for a one-time service, because there is, at least, a chance that the church might become more than a spiritual mall.

Through the Spirit, church can become a community with Christ and others, where we consumers of religious services can begin to grow into the "full stature of Christ," as the writer of Hebrews puts it. This process  is life-long  and is completed  in the life to come.

At the same time, increasing numbers of us consumers are weary of conforming, in St. Paul's words, to the world. Some of us are conforming ourselves to Christ by the renewal of our minds, which is usually painful, a kind of death-and-resurrection experience.

When we make that transition from conforming to the culture to conforming to Christ, we discover that our true and eternal identity is not that of consumers of religious services, but that of members of Christ's body, the church, and servants of Christ. 

Engaged in daily conversion, as Trappist monk Thomas Merton put it, we're conforming to Christ--and being transformed by him--through our regular reading and study of the Bible; by taking an active part in Christian education weekly; by praying daily, worshiping weekly, giving generously and even sacrificially, joining other Christians in ministry.

In the words of New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson, we're learning and living Jesus Christ today.

The Episcopal Church and Christ Episcopal Church rightly and proudly proclaim that we welcome all people. And we do (and we can do a much better job of it).

We welcome religious consumers, in hopes that they'll meet the living God at a wedding or funeral or baptism or in a prayer at the bedside and start that life-long journey of growing in Christ.

And become part of what Richard Niebuhr aptly described--and called Christians to embrace--Christ transforming culture.

When the preacher speaks, maybe it's God calling

Most people come to church for comfort, not discomfort.

I like to preach messages of comfort, not ones of discomfort, because I would rather people like me than dislike me for what I have to say. 

But sometimes God has other plans for me and my sermon on Sunday.

Yesterday, I preached on Amos 8.1-12. Amos was a Hebrew prophet who spoke to the powerful in the northern kingdom of Israel. Amos was unpopular because he spoke God's truth. Many prophets were stoned to death for telling the truth, which people didn't want to hear.

Since Amos's time, eight centuries before the birth of Jesus, prophets have fared little better. Jesus, God himself with us, was crucified for telling the truth.

In the text yesterday, Amos speaks for God, rebuking the powerful in Israel for abandoning him and committing injustice and oppressing the poor and the needy. 

Here is some of what Amos says: "Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land....(who) practice deceit with false balances, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat....I will never forget any of their deeds...."

In my sermon yesterday, I spoke about Amos and his context, and then I applied the text, which is what seminaries teach students to do when they preach. Few people are bothered by sermons about "then," but lots of people are bothered by sermons about "now."

I spoke about what many people considered a recent injustice--the U.S. House of Representatives' eliminating food stamps from the farm bill. I mentioned the Tennessee congressman who had quoted St. Paul, that if you don't work, you don't eat. I said the congressman had misinterpreted the apostle.

I cited the evidence that most people who received food stamps were not "parasites," as another congressman once said, but the elderly, the disabled, the chronically unemployed, children. 

I said that nearly 60 percent of public school students in Springfield were receiving free or discounted school lunches because they were suffering from "food insecurity."

In the prophetic tradition, I issued a call to action, making a few suggestions about how we, the followers of God's mercy and compassion, Jesus Christ, might act for justice. 

You can hear the sermon for yourself at www.christepiscopalchurch.com. 

Several people disagreed with what I had said from the pulpit, even viscerally,  telling me so directly or indirectly. They said I had politicized the pulpit, that I had divided people. I am sure that many others also disagreed with me. Many people did agree with what I had to say; they told me so.

Whether you agreed or disagreed with the sermon yesterday, thank you for listening.

To everyone who gathers at Christ Church faithfully from week to week to receive God's Word made flesh in the sermon and in the sacrament,  I say:

Thank God that we preachers in the Episcopal Church are free to speak from the heart--from our own hearts and from God's heart about those great ultimate themes of love, mercy, compassion, freedom, justice, forgiveness, reconciliation, peace, love. 

Thank God, in our church, we are are free to agree or disagree.

And, if you find yourself disagreeing with a sermon (yes, I have disagreed with sermons),  you might just listen for that Voice beneath the other voices of anger, frustration, guilt, perhaps.

When I have done so, I have found that beneath the voices of my discomfort God was often speaking to me. He was telling me something that I didn't  want to hear, but that he wanted me to hear--and embrace in faith--for deeper life in Christ. 

Is it well with your soul?

I start every day (and end every day) with God. After reading Morning Prayer and doing some reflecting and writing in my journal--the latter being a daily habit since 1972--I engage in 15 minutes of contemplative prayer. Think of this prayer as listening prayer. The Prayer Book Catechism reminds us that prayer is speaking--and listening to God.

Each day, after setting my alarm clock, I get comfortable in my chair, close my eyes, and pay close attention to my breathing. "In.....and....out." The breaths flow in and out--not hurriedly, but gently. Rhythmically. "In...and...out." Again and again.

As I breathe, I listen for God's word to me. His gift to me for the day. And the word today is "trust." My mind is crowded with many other words, many random thoughts. Mine is a busy mind, not a quiet one. An anxious mind, not a calm one. I think of the work week ahead. Appointments in and out of the church office. Hospital visits. A vestry meeting Tuesday night. Men's Fellowship the next morning at 6.30. The Thursday evening Eucharist. A funeral or two and reception on Friday, usually my day off. These are the known activities of the week, the scheduled ones, and then there are the many others that will arise in the course of each day.

Understand: I am not bemoaning my schedule; plenty of clergy and lay people do all the above and probably more in just one day. No, I'm not complaining. I'm doing what God called me to do and what I willingly took on in ordination and when I said yes to Christ's Church's call to serve you as rector. I have learned in the course of 27 years of ordained ministry that God blesses me through my service to him and, I hope, blesses the people whom I serve in God's name.

In my listening prayer today, I continually return to my word from God, trust. I respond to each thought with that word. Trust means surrendering my power and my plans to God. My preoccupations. It means giving up everything to God--holding nothing back, but letting go of everything. The worries and fears. The pressures. The self-doubts. Trust it all to God, not to me. And I do. And there is peace this morning. Peace edges its way into my crowded mind and hasty soul. I know, in that peace, that God is in charge. And, in the words of that old hymn, "It is well with my soul."

Holding onto hope

The other day, I listened to a public radio report on research into suicide notes.

Yes, it's a sobering topic but an instructive one.

A researcher, a linguist, has developed a complex computer program that reads through all the notes, sorts and sifts them, and then identifies certain key words and phrases common to the notes.

When the research is complete and published one day, medical personnel, educators, clergy will have further help in identifying people with suicidal thoughts and will be better able to intervene and save lives.

What did you learn  from the notes?  the radio interviewer asked the researcher.

He said that beyond mundane concerns like instructing a friend or loved one left behind to pay the mortgage or get the dog to the vet for its shots, nearly every note mentioned the loss of hope.

Without hope, there is only despair, which can lead some people to suicide. It did for the people who wrote those tragic notes.

Despair is cumulative. Crisis after crisis. Stress upon stress. Pain added to pain. It all builds up. The weight of suffering, especially when carried alone, becomes too much. And too often, the person so afflicted sees only one way out and, sadly, that is by taking his or her own life.

But might hope also be cumulative? Can hope be planted in the soul, tended and then allowed to flower like roses in the garden?

I think so. And the time to start is now. And the way to start is through prayer. Daily prayer, the constant turning of one's attention to God, is the beginning of hope.

Despair takes root and blossoms into darkness and death when one thinks that one knows more than God, that there is no solution, that there cannot possibly be resurrection from the grave on the third day.

But the gospel declares that God has conquered death--that Jesus Christ is risen from the grave and is alive. The God of all-powerful love is the only reliable ground of hope.

 As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., said, "God makes a way where there is no way."

Sometimes, our mortal eyes can't see the way, but God can always see it.

So, hold onto hope, for hope is God holding onto you in the darkness until the light of dawn comes.

Loving as Jesus loves: indiscriminately.

The News-Leader reports today on a local ordinance that would prohibit discrimination locally against people who are gay, bisexual or transgender.

A group of local pastors--I was one of them-- signed a letter to the paper expressing our concerns about  another pastor's use of four Scripture passages, which have been used historically to justify discrimination--and worse--against God's gay, bisexual and transgendered children.

In the same letter, we called for support of the anti-discrimination ordinance.

This last Sunday, I preached about God's indiscriminate love in Jesus Christ. Christ's love embraces all people. And Jesus calls his followers to extend his love--his love being our willing and working for the flourishing of everyone.

Here is the text of my Sunday sermon. As always I welcome your comments.


Easter Five/c
The Rev. Kenneth L. Chumbley
April 28, 2013
Acts 11.1-18; Psalm 148; Revelation 21.1-6; John 13.31-35

I love this time of the year. The gloom of winter gives way to the glories of spring—cardinals singing, flowers blooming, trees bursting into green blossoms.  And—sniffle and cough—allergies!

Still, spring is my favorite of nature’s seasons for so many reasons and for so many reminders of God’s life-giving love.

Here’s an analogy: God’s love is like the sun that shines onto the earth, into our world, and life flourishes in the sun’s light. Today in the gospel, Jesus talks with us about the importance of God’s love. He gives us the love commandment.

He’s given it to us before. I guess we need reminders that love is what the Christian faith is about, fundamentally. It’s not about doctrines, dogmas, creeds, tomes of theology, as important as they are.

Love alone is of ultimate importance.

Love one another, Jesus says, as I have loved you. By this—this love—people will know that you are my disciples, followers of the way, the truth, the life.

He urges us to live according to this commandment. To love in the way God loves. Love…indiscriminately. Love the way the sun’s light shines upon everything.

In today’s gospel from John, Jesus is at supper with his disciples, his last meal with them, and he commands them to love people who are part of that immediate and intimate fellowship. To love one another indiscriminately.

Jesus loves even his disciple Judas, who even now plots his betrayal and death. He wants Judas to flourish, but perhaps knows that Judas will choose the way of death, not of life.

Love one another, my little ones, Jesus says to his disciples. Love the one who gossips about you. Love the one who has hurt you.;  Love the one who is impossible to get alone with. Love the one you don’t understand. Love the one in the dirty clothes. Love the one who makes more money that you do. Love the one who makes much less than you.

Love one another the way, I love you Jesus says, and so show yourselves to be Christians, followers of mine.

Don’t just speak love. Act it. Love as I do, Jesus says, indiscriminately. Working actively for the flourishing of others. Whoever they are. Love as intensively as the sun, whose rays fall on the earth in equal measure, bringing forth life in its fullness.

But don’t stop there in your loving, little ones.

Jesus does not mean that we are to love just one another—just the people in the pew with us. Just other Christians. Just Episcopalians. But he intends that we love everyone: Jews, Muslims, Hindus, atheists, agnostics, and people who just don't care.

God’s love is indiscriminate. So love that way, Jesus says. The way he himself lives. The light that that shines from the Father into the Son and from the Son into us and through us onto others through the power of love, the Holy Spirit. Jesus’ love is to shine out of us, with its full intensity. To blaze like the sun at noontime.

God’s love for everyone is the message of the Acts reading this morning. Today’s text expands on the implications of the gospel—the words of Jesus himself. Acts is the church’s interpretation of the love commandment for a new situation.

Peter has this vision of a huge pice of cloth dropping down from heaven, and it’s full of unclean creatures, which Jews have been warned to stay away from, or God will stay away from them.

And yet, Peter hears God’s new word to him. The Spirit says, “Take up and eat.” God tells Peter to consume that which he had thought unclean. To take to himself that from which he'd religiously separated himself.

God’s love, Peter says, based on this new revelation, is for the Gentiles, too—not just the Jews, but for those non-Jews- THOSE people over there.

In God’s community, there’s so segregation. There’s no discrimination. But only equal love for all equally.

And in St. John’s revelation this morning, we see a new vision of what God intends for the human community—what God was doing in Jesus more than two millennia ago and what God is doing now in him and through him. God is creating a new heaven and earth, the new Jerusalem.

It will be a new creation in which the light of God’s love in Jesus brings forth the flourishing of everyone and everything.

It is springtime. Birds are singing for all. Flowers are springing up for all. Trees are bursting into green bud for all. And there are no more tears. and, let's hope, no more pollen and allergies!

God is working for this new human community of love as we participate in his work, loving with God’s indiscriminate love.

In the words of that children’s Sunday school song, Jesus wants us to be his sunbeams.

To let God’s light of love shine through us and onto one another right here; through us and onto everyone beyond this church through our giving and serving.

Through us, sunbeams of God’s love can shine on Haiti at the clinic of Les Timoun, where fragile, vulnerable babies need food and medicines to flourish.

Through us, sunbeams of God’s love can shine on the needy children at Bissett Elementary who need new shoes.

Through us, sunbeams of God’s love can shine on hungry people through our canned good offerings on Sundays, our cash gifts, and our volunteer hours to Crosslines. And please remember: our Crosslines gifts will be matched this month by a foundation.

And through us, sunbeams of God’s indiscriminate love can fall on God’s gay, bisexual, transgender children who are denied equal access in Springfield to housing, employment, medical care because of who they are.

Little children, Love, Jesus says today. Let the light of the Father and the Son’s love shine in you and through you in the power of God the Holy Spirit. Love as God loves in Jesus--indiscriminately--for the flourishing of life for all God’s children.

Love for that new community of earth—the new Jerusalem.

Christ Church, we are Jesus’ sunbeams of love. So shine. Shine on all. Amen

Hail Mary

In the Roman Catholic Church, May is the month of Mary--the Blessed Virgin, the mother of our Lord, the Theotokos or God bearer of Orthodox Christianity.

How well I remember May 1 from my Roman Catholic days. We, the faithful, focused our attention on Mary. We attended a special Mass in Mary's honor. In our classrooms, we listened to the nuns lecture on her significance.

Growing up in the church, I was frightened of God the Father--that exalted, almost Zeus-like dweller in heaven with the flowing white beard (Much later, on a visit to Rome, I saw the Father so depicted in  Michelangelo's painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and realized where that image had originated). I felt at home with Jesus, the Son of the Father; Jesus was my friend and companion, my comfort. I was puzzled by the Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost.

But Mary? Ah, Mary, she was pure goodness--the ideal mother. She was the first disciple of Jesus, who was both her son and her Lord.  She was the examplar of faithful living.

In the Roman Catholic tradition of my birth and early years, Mary was revered, even adored because of her place in salvation history. She said yes to God, declaring to that angelic messenger: "Let it be to me according to Thy will."

And she bore the Savior, nurtured him over the years, and watched him, through anguished eyes, suffer in his passion and die on the cross. Mary wept and wailed as her child suffered and died, the way mothers have wept and wailed since the beginning of time as they have watched their children perish in war, from hunger, thirst, privation of all kinds, in storms and floods. Alas, mothers will go on weeping for their lost children.

Today, thanks be to God, Mary is honored not just by Roman Catholics, but also by many Protestants. As an Episcopalian now, I go on honoring her.

Devotion to Mary is a part of my rule of life as an associate of the Society of St. Margaret, an order of women religious in the Episcopal Church. (Yes, we have nuns and monks in the Episcopal Church.).
And so I remember the Blessed Mother today, in May, and on feasts dedicated to her.

And I pray the Hail Mary, that prayer my own beloved mother taught me when I was a toddler and that I have prayed regularly ever since.

Please pray with me...

"Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with Thee. Blessed art Thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of Thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen."