3.28.21 - On Numbness and Powerlessness (Kenny Camacho)
Good morning, everybody. It’s good to be able to speak with you today. Today, we are starting a new series called In the Valley, and the big idea is that the Bible doesn’t run from hard emotions or low times. We see suffering, sadness, depression, and grief throughout this book; in nearly every chapter, as a matter of fact! And this is no accident, because as it turns out, the Bible isn’t just a book about how we are supposed to live: it has also long served as a resource for helping people through the low and even defeated places in which we sometimes find ourselves. If we read the book carefully, and treat the hard times it records not as aberrations or mistakes but as part of why Scripture exists at all!, we can find a hope here that is not rooted in learning to be happy or ignoring pain...but in recognizing God’s presence with us, even in the depths of our despair. The idea is that God is here, too: with us, understanding us, and always and forever in love with us. Which is all to say that God promises we are not alone...wherever we may be.
The preaching team and I decided to develop this series now, in the second spring of our pandemic lives and as we are all praying and hoping we are just maybe on the leading edge of returning to some of the things that make life seem more normal, because the more we have thought about it, the more we believe that it would be a mistake to treat this last year as a “blip” we can move past and forget. It’s been stressful and hard for every one of us; I know that is true. It’s been hard for Revolution as a church, too: without a building or regular in-person meetings to anchor us, our community has splintered in some ways, and although I’m genuinely excited about the opportunities we will have in the year ahead, I also know we won’t get through all of this unscathed, as a church: there are folks who have left our community and won’t come back. People here have experienced death and loss and grief that is still reshaping who they are. The Revolution we’re going to return to won’t be the same as the one we left, some 54 weeks ago. But if we try to just bury all this hardship, or pretend none of this ever happened, we’re giving up on any good it still might generate! We say all the time that God is not done with us--and he’s not! He’s working, even in this mess. It would be a mistake to give up on that.
So, in the weeks ahead, we want to think about where we are, about how our friends here in this community might be struggling. And we want to address all of this together because no matter what you’re going through, if we can bring it into the light, God will use this church family to help you shoulder it, and even to help all of us still learn something from the road you have traveled.
This first week, I want to talk briefly about two things. Well, maybe three things--we’ll see how far we get! The first is my own experience in the last few months with numbness and powerlessness. That’s the road I’ve been walking, mental health-wise, and I know more good will come from sharing where I am with you than burying it down within myself! The second thing I want to talk to you about is where I’m seeing my reflection in Scripture these days. In particular, I want to talk about the book of Ecclesiastes. And then finally, I want to talk to you about one thing I’m learning from that reflection. It’s going to be a bit of an unusual sermon--maybe a bit less like listening to someone read an essay than it usually is!--but I’m praying it sets the stage for us in the weeks ahead.
So, Thing #1: where I’m at. As most of you know, my entire family battled Covid-19 throughout most of February and March. It started with my girls, Evangeline and Cecilia, who tested positive just after Valentine’s Day. Although they weren’t experiencing any serious symptoms, we went into a panic in our house trying to figure out how to isolate them in their bedroom in order to keep the rest of us safe. For 3 days, we gated them off and brought them food to their door and tried to make things seem a bit more normal by having movie watch-parties on computers in the evenings. Then, on February 19, Graham and I tested positive, too. This changed the game, as now we needed to keep Meredith safe from the rest of us, so she quarantined upstairs and we brought her food! This all seemed to work, and for the next few weeks, I battled fatigue and minor flu symptoms and we kept pressing on. Then, with things apparently behind us and cleared from quarantine, we tried to seize a moment of immunity to finally go visit my folks in South Carolina, who we hadn’t seen since last summer. On Friday, March 5, with Meredith still testing negative over and over again, we headed down. And then, on the morning of March 6, while at my parents’ house, Meredith got a positive PCR test. We turned around and came home so Meredith could isolate. I was devastated: for a year, we had said no to so many things to try and keep my parents safe. And in the end, we took the coronavirus right into their home. We thought we were through it...but we got sucked right back in.
Meredith’s bout was similar to mine, but on her third night of feeling pretty sick, she had her first panic attack. She woke me at 2:30 in the morning, afraid she was going to die without having a chance to tell the kids goodbye. She was fine, in the end--but after this, I really shut down. On the same day, the church website was hacked and stolen; all our emails were disabled. I felt helpless and totally cut off, and after a year of trying to be a good leader and trying to hold things together and trying to make responsible decisions, I just broke: I’d poisoned my parents, I couldn’t help my partner, the only ways I had to reach my church family were broken. I couldn’t physically see anyone. And I went completely numb. Maybe more so than any other time in my life. I knew there were things I should be feeling, but I couldn’t feel them. I was just getting up, doing what I was required to do, and going to bed again. Nothing felt...well, nothing felt like anything at all.
A few weeks ago, I talked to my counselor about all this, and he pointed out that going numb isn’t always a bad thing. Like shock, it happens in extreme situations in order to help us get through them. It was a defense mechanism, a way we have of protecting ourselves. But as a Christian, one of the most important things I believe comes from Jesus’s words in John 10:10:
John 10:10
The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that [you] may have life and have it abundantly.
For better or worse, I want abundant life: I want to feel and experience the things that are happening to me! But the opposite of that was happening. I felt like this verse and its promises weren’t really for me right now, or maybe anymore.
What I’m saying is that I know this experience didn’t happen to me--isn’t happening to me still--for nothing. It’s not a “blip” to forget; there’s something to learn here, something to share. I don’t see it yet, at least not fully. But if I let what I’m going through die in silence with me, it truly is useless. This isn’t quite depression, which I have wrestled before, too. I feel like, just like I’ve lost my sense of smell!, I’ve lost deeper senses I use to experience the world, too.
One thing I’ve done this week--and the second thing I want to share today--is I’ve been looking for a reflection of myself in Scripture. Where is this “numbness” there? When did God lead someone to share their own story, in the same way I feel like he’s pressing me to share mine? This question led me, first, to the book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament. It also led me to Paul’s letter to the Romans...but we’ll get there in a minute.
I don’t want to get too deep in the weeds with Ecclesiastes, but I will say that if what I’m saying today resonates with you, you should read it this week. Read it today, even; it’s not long. If you do, you’ll find that it’s a work of “wisdom writing” authored by someone called “The Teacher” in the text and identified as King Solomon in Jewish tradition. In the book, this Teacher says that he has set out over the course of his life to try and understand the fullness of human experience on this earth. Why are we here? Why do we feel the things we feel, delight in the things in which we delight, suffer in the ways that we suffer? He starts by saying,
Ecclesiastes 1:13
It is an unhappy business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with.
Some days, I agree. But nonetheless, what the Teacher discovers is that
Ecclesiastes 1:14-15
I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind. What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be counted.
By “vanity,” the Teacher means that the things we make we make to prop up our own glory...but they are empty, in and of themselves. The book goes through long stretches where the Teacher wonders about this: humans work tirelessly to make things that crumble and fade...and meanwhile, God--in the Nature he has created--builds work after work that is eternal, that outlasts human beings, who think of themselves as the pinnacle of his handiwork. In chapter 3, there’s a lengthy poem we often hear at funerals and other solemn events, where the Teacher says, among other things, that there
Ecclesiastes 3:1-2, 4, 7
Is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; [...] a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; [...] a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.
What we tend to want is to be the ones who establish these times, who get to say when they will be. But what the Teacher is saying he has learned is that the control is always God’s: we don’t get to choose. Which means for me, as someone whose been going through a season where I’ve had so little control, and where my best efforts to keep myself safe, to keep my parents safe, to keep Meredith safe all fell apart, that it’s easiest to feel defeated...but Ecclesiastes is trying to remind me that, for perhaps the worse and maybe even for the better!, I’m not God.
What I’m getting at is that today, as I’m feeling powerless over my life and numb to my emotions about this, I see myself here, in Ecclesiastes. I see, in the Teacher, someone else wrestling with the apparent meaninglessness and insecurity of this whole thing. And frankly, it’s a surprising gift to have his company!
Sometimes, when we think of the Bible, we fixate on how it can instruct us in our lives, what it can say about what we should or shouldn’t do. But the Bible also bears witness to what it means to simply be a human person in this world. It includes these books, like Ecclesiastes, where we don’t get any real answers...but we do get to see someone else walk through those dry places, those valleys, in between the question and the answer. And that’s a wild and wonderful thing to contemplate: this book declares as sacred long passages that don’t give answers. What can we learn from that? What does it teach us about what God values, about what God wants us to be doing in the world?
In the middle of chapter 3, the Teacher says something that I’ve been stuck on all week. He says,
Ecclesiastes 3:10-15
I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. [...] I perceived that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it. God has done it, so that people fear before him. That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already has been; and God seeks what has been driven away.
That first part I have highlighted here, about God putting “eternity into man’s heart,” is incredible to me. The Teacher is saying that God gives us the ability to think about eternity...but not the ability to understand it. Which means our frustrations are part of our design! So, why would things be this way? Why do we ask questions about existence we will never have the tools to answer? Well, my hypothesis is that God puts eternity into our hearts so there is a space in us big enough for him. We are inspired to wonder because God is a bottomless question, an infinite answer.
And then, at the end of this passage, the Teacher says something else that doesn’t even quite make sense. He says that there is nothing new, God has done all that has ever been done and he has established already all that will ever happen...and then, God seeks what has been driven away. In the picture the Teacher is painting, the only thing that is impermanent, the only thing that is frustrated, the only thing that is limited is our understanding of God. I think that must be what “has been driven away”. Our frustrations are hardwired into us by a God who makes us aware of what we cannot understand. But then, that same God seeks what has been driven away: he comes after us. He comes after us...and keeps us company here, even in our lowest places.
All of this is to say that in our numbness, in our inability to control things, in our defeat and surrender, really--which is what I’ve been feeling!--we’re not abandoned to this emptiness and fear. That’s the third thing this morning: as I look at Scripture and the reflection of myself I find there, I’m learning that just as my numbness serves a purpose in protecting me when I’m scared, my feelings of failure and powerlessness right now are preparing me to see what God is doing. That feeling of loneliness is exactly what breaks through the kind of arrogance that a sense of control creates in order to prime my heart for God’s company. For your company. A season of not feeling primes me for a new encounter with what it is to be loved, to share love, to have joy, and I can strive to be open to that. That isn’t to say that these better feelings are just around the corner! I have no idea how wide this valley I’m in might be. But whereas feeling like I can’t control anything seemed like a bad thing at the start of all this, it’s starting to seem like a good thing now...because it is a relief to trust in a God bigger than I am.
I honestly don’t know how you all are hearing this, if it resonates with you…or if it just feels like a Sunday where I’m off in left field somewhere. But if you’re with me in any of this--if you’re struggling right now, particularly because you feel like you have no control and you’re just worn out from the worries of the last year--here’s what I want to challenge you, and what I want to challenge myself, to do today:
First, if we find reflections of ourselves and our struggles in Scripture, we need to remember that the only reason they’re there to find is because someone took the time to share them. What we can learn from that is how important it is to name and describe and share what we’re feeling, even when it feels like we’re stuck in the middle of the experience. You don’t need to be out on the other side to have a testimony! It’s altogether more helpful for people to see how you live in the mess. Whatever you’re feeling, write it down, talk to somebody, share it. I am so, so happy to be that person for you...but it can be anyone you trust. Don’t keep it to yourself!
Second, keep bringing how you feel to God in prayer. I wrestle with this sometimes because I have no idea what to say! But Paul says something absolutely amazing in his letter to the Romans about this. He writes that,
the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.
“Groaning too deep for words.” I know what that sounds like in my own prayers, in my own self. Don’t be afraid to bring yourself as you are to God in prayer.
And lastly, stay on the lookout. I said earlier that God puts eternity into our hearts so there is a space in us big enough for him. We ache with uncertainty over the absence of what only God can bring to us. As we pray, watch for him, wait for him. I know this is hard! But don’t miss the small miracles God brings into your life day in and day out because your eyes are only set on the big miracle you think you need. Watch for him.
What we all might find is that these practices not only help us feel some company in hard times, and not only help us name what we are feeling, but they might also help us shift our focus from ourselves and our frustrations...to the loving attention God gives to us.
I said earlier that I’ve lost my sense of smell from having coronavirus. It’s super-weird, and I keep wondering when it will come back. To that end, I’ve been doing some Googling...and you know what they say to do if you lose your sense of smell? Nose training exercises. No joke! I’m supposed to find 4 or 5 super-familiar smells to me and then sniff them 3-4 times each day. The theory--as weird as it sounds--is that it will help my nose “remember.”
There’s an analogy here, right? When we’re experiencing emotional numbness, spiritual numbness...maybe part of the answer is finding those super-familiar “spiritual smells”--maybe they are favorite verses, a comforting worship song, the routine of daily prayer, a habit of practical service--and training ourselves with them. It’s not a guarantee some miracle will happen; I still can’t really smell! But I find it comforting to think that, when my nose starts to wake up, things it loves will come first. That’s cheesy, I know. But as someone feeling a bit numb, too...I want my soul to wake up to the best things, too. I want to be reminded that God is here with me; that he’s always been here, if I can relearn to “smell” him, so to speak! And the consistency of his presence, the faithfulness of his love for me...that’s always been and will always be where my hope, where my value, really comes from.
I’ll pray for us.