The real deal

 

John 2: 2-11
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
January 23, 2022

Photo of a person with white skin wearing a black sweater, blue, black and white camo underwear, blue jeans, black belt, showing their abdomen with a large vertical incision
sewn with stitches and words written around it in black ink: (clockwise) Confusion, 
I, Hope, Presence, Repair, Redemption, Loss, Fear, Pain, Healing, Fight,
Function, Inclusion

Earlier this week I came across this quote by Sarah Ban Breathnach: “[The] authentic self is the soul made visible.” Visible as in unmistakable, obvious, conspicuous. It’s not easy being authentic, especially when you are unmistakably other, when you are conspicuously different from the dominant culture, and there are those who are not only afraid of difference but who are actively working to control and defeat it. To control and defeat you. It’s not easy being authentic when you are having to educate people about what it means to be you and to be forgiving when it hurts. It’s not easy being authentic when you are constantly on your guard, having to hide your difference because for you being conspicuous is dangerous.



This story of the wedding at Cana reads like a coming out story, especially when we pair it with the following story of Jesus clearing the temple. In the first story, Jesus appears judicious with who he is; in the next, he is quite conspicuous, on his own terms, dangerously so, flipping tables, driving out the moneychangers with a whip of cords, letting his zeal consume him. Jesus’ mother, who is conspicuously unnamed in this gospel, knows her son, what he is about, and like any mother is most likely not only proud of who he has become but is hopeful for the change he will bring. But it’s not her story to tell or to move forward.

Jesus at the Gay Bar by Jay Hulme

And yet no matter who Jesus thinks he is, that’s no way to talk to your mother. In any good story there is tension, even between people who love each other. Maybe even especially between people who love each other. We want what we want. They want what they want. We want the best for each other, and there are oftentimes that all of that conflicts with the other.



Sometimes in the gaps of a story we can use our imagination. I can imagine that in between Jesus referring to his mother as “Woman” and Mary giving the servants instructions, there is an uneasy silence between them. I imagine that Mary is giving her son “The Look”. You know the one. You’ve given it or received it or both, the one that says, “You wanna try that again?” Jesus may not have wanted to reveal his divinity, his glory, what I would call his whole authentic self but in doing so he revealed his oh-so-human relationship with his mother.

Breathe by Becky Hemsley

It's also not easy holding space for someone to be their authentic self, especially if they are close to us. Why is that? Don’t we want for our loved one to be whole, to be true to themselves? Of course we do. But on some level it touches our insecurity, our old wounds of when we were told “you’re too loud”, “you’re too much”, “you’re too quiet”, “you’re too slow”, “you can’t do that”, or worse, when there was silence. Beloved Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh said, “To understand the suffering of others, we must first touch our own suffering and listen to it.” More often than not, the last thing we want to do is touch our own suffering, especially if it is recent or buried or easily triggered. And yet being connected to our own suffering is what makes deep compassion and empathy possible. Being connected to our own suffering is what makes for courage. Not just our own courage but the courage needed by others who have so much more to lose when they are their authentic selves.



Poet Amanda Gorman recently published an essay in the New York Times titled “Why I Almost Didn’t Read My Poem at the Inauguration”. In it she said she was terrified of failing her people and her poetry. She would be more than conspicuous; she could be a target. She could get COVID. She had to decide whether her poem was worth the risks involved. She wrote, “Maybe being brave enough doesn’t mean lessening my fear, but listening to it.” She continued, “I look at fear not as cowardice, but as a call forward, a summons to fight for what we hold dear. And now more than ever, we have every right to be affected, afflicted, affronted. If you’re alive, you’re afraid. If you’re not afraid, then you’re not paying attention. The only thing we have to fear is having no fear itself — having no feeling on behalf of whom and what we’ve lost, whom and what we love.”

Being less than who we are, not embracing who we are, not allowing others to do the same, comes with a price. Verse 70 in the Gospel of Thomas reads, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” We are our wounds and our gifts, light and darkness, wise and foolish, we know who we are and we haven’t the faintest idea. Our past, our present, and our future selves co-exist in us. Isn’t it amazing that we can be so many different people in the one person? When we deny our fear or our suffering, our wounds, when we deny others, we also deny ourselves the depth of our hope and our joy. It all travels the same way from the same heart.



Church is the beloved community, the kindom on earth where we can be the real deal and we can make courageous space for others to be the same. If we are brought together by any shared belief, it is that Jesus didn’t turn anyone away and neither should we. Welcome is one thing; being included and valued is about healing and liberation and shared power.

When things change inside you, things change around you.

Last week we read these words (from enfleshed.com) as we called ourselves to worship:



This body of Christ is a holy collection of lives and stories.

Braided into each other, the one is made of the many.

This body, God has woven together:

That we may find our hope in each other.

That we may hold grief in community.

That we may remember no life is disposable.

By the Spirit, we are made one body.

Joined together, let us seek the flourishing of all.



Our authentic self as Church is when we are obviously, conspicuously, unmistakably being the Church. In our grief and in our hope, in our weariness and in our yearning, in our wounds and in our gifts, the big victories and the small miracles, when we worry about the future and when we show up at the last minute, when we’re not sure if the risks are worth it and when we don’t count the cost. Isn’t it amazing that we can be our authentic selves, different people, exactly who we are and still be the one Church, one community? When we seek the flourishing of all, and all means all, it is then we are the real deal. And being the real deal—that is the joy that sustains us, you, me, for the living of these days. And the world can’t take that away. Amen.