Who hasn’t read The Shack, the book by William Paul Young that’s sold millions? At the heart of the book is a pain so deep, so searing and disturbing, Mack, the book’s main character, nearly goes mad in his grief. It’s the pain of a parent who loses a child. He labels his pain, “the great sadness.” The book is a lamentation of loss swallowed up by the great love of God. Mack’s pain is experienced early in the book and it overshadows the story until the love of God is finally understood and experienced in the form of forgiveness and grace and acceptance. The author of The Shack claims it is a metaphor for “the house you build out of your own pain.” If that’s true, all of us have a shack we’ve built and continue to refresh and remodel or else your shack has become a deserted, dilapidated old thing abandoned as you’ve been released from its power to imprison you.

Following the battle on Mt. Gilboa, a messenger sought out David with the news that both King Saul and his son Jonathan were killed. The messenger clearly believed he was bringing good news to David. And why wouldn’t the messenger think so? David was the heir apparent to the throne. But David did not rejoice with the news. From somewhere deep within him a howl boiled up so articulate and anguished that hearing its poetry so many years later, we still shudder under its power and pain. David understood tragedy and what it was to ache with loss. In his grief, David articulated a universal pain all of us feel:  Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD. Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications! (Psalm 130:1, NRSV) David’s lament is a cry of pain and we’re not quite sure what to do with that. What do we do? Likely, we pretend not to notice as this sort of pain is too raw for our timid spirits.

In describing the experience of a mother of a small child who had just died in the hospital, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross observed that she looked numb, blank and expressionless. So she said to her, “You look like you’re in such pain that you might scream.” And the woman blurted out, “Do you have a screaming room in the hospital?” She was serious. Kübler-Ross said back to her, “No, but we do have a chapel,” which was a silly answer because the mother immediately replied, “I need just the opposite. I need to scream and rage and curse. I’ve just been sitting in the parking lot and cursing and screaming at God. ‘God why did you let this happen to my child? Why did you let this happen to me?’” And Kübler-Ross answered, “Do it here. It’s better to do it with somebody than out in a parking lot all alone.”

These words from II Samuel are a scream of pain, and David would not be quieted, he would not be comforted, and he would not be ignored. David ordered his lament be taught to the people of Judah. “Write this down and teach it to the people,” he commanded, “so they will know how to speak of the pain that fills their hearts and seeks its own release.” Pain can silence us, you know. We can lose so much that no words can be found to speak of it. It is important for us to find the songs and symbols and rituals by which we may articulate our hurt.

Over the years, we have come to embrace the Vietnam Memorial in Washington as a symbol of our national hurt and pain over soldiers who served in that terrible time in the 60’s and 70’s but also as a continuing reminder of the devastation and loss a nation feels over any losses of war. Amazing photographs from the Wall speak to us as eloquent, but silent, witnesses, telling us of the deeply felt griefs that attend a pilgrimage of pain to the dark and haunting wall of that memorial.

Parents, now elderly, come. Surviving children, now grown and older than the age of most of those whose names are carved on that memorial, come as if drawn by a mysterious, unknown power. Wives and sweethearts come. Veterans wearing camouflage jackets of uniforms long outgrown visit the monument, some in wheelchairs, some on crutches – soldiers with a strong sense of guilt come. One veteran explained that at the memorial, most people feel a strange sense of guilt. Some feel guilty because they fought the war and did not die as their friends died. Some feel guilty because they did not fight the war and in fact protested it; others feel guilty because they neither fought the war nor protested it, and indeed, never gave much thought to the war until they were confronted with the solemn silence of the black marble monument and all those silent names.

Maya Lin, the architect of the Wall, in designing this funereal symbol said that looking at the Vietnam Memorial would be like “looking at a wound in the earth.” The way to healing begins by refusing to be silent. It begins by embracing a pain we refuse to ignore.

It’s interesting to read how Jesus handled his own grief at the grave of Lazarus. Fully present in his own feelings, Jesus wept. He felt the darkness of his soul’s pain and expressed exactly what he felt. He didn’t try to stifle his tears by damming them up inside. Instead, he openly wept. Then he resolutely called Lazarus from the tomb and Lazarus stepped out wrapped in dead man’s linens. Jesus said something that most of us miss because we’re distracted by the appearance of a dead man from the stench of death. Jesus looked up into the wideness of heaven and confessed quietly to God, “Father, I thank you that you heard me.”

Simple isn’t it? David commanded the people of Israel to stop in their joy that they could finally lift up a new king and commanded them to see this as a moment to remember. We’re invited, no we’re commanded, to launch our griefs and our deepest pain into the depths of God’s love knowing God hears our cries and attends to our sorrows.

Otis Redding gave voice to the lyrics and others have since covered the Chris Brown song, “Try a Little Tenderness.” It’s hard not to sing the song without a sense of soul because the lyrics are so plaintive about our need to experience life as tenderly as possible. All of us desperately need a little tenderness to counteract the sapping of hope.

We live in a time when the song needs to be refreshed as a reminder to us that heartfelt kindness needs a revival. Otherwise we’ll be overwhelmed by the cynicism of our day that threatens to redefine us.

“Be kind …  for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle” Philo, Jewish philosopher who lived squarely in the time of Jesus, said these words consistent with the great teacher from Nazareth (“do unto others as you would have them do unto you”) and very much in the spirit of Paul (“Be ye kind to one another”). Words like those were written in a terrible time and more than likely it was the simple truths that needed to be emphasized to one another … something along the lines of sanity spoken into an insane time. In all of Philo’s writings, there’s no mention of this Galilean teacher and miracle worker who would surely have been known by Philo. However, he’s clearly commenting on a universal need of his day, namely, that people are burdened daily by the sheer challenge of living in tough times.

Perhaps we live in just such a time. Although we don’t live under the oppressive power of a emperor’s hard-fisted regime bent on stifling every element of our lives, we do live in an oppressive time that makes our lives burdensome. The economy has taken its toll and millions are struggling to hold their lives together. Thoreau observed “Most men live lives of quiet desperation.” A life described as “quiet desperation” may be as close as one can come to describing a loss of soul.

Richard Rohr wrote in his daily devotional for today:  “Walter Brueggemann says the job of the prophet is to free people from their numbness. That is also the task of the church. It is to wake people up, to bring them to consciousness, and not just to comfort them in their unconscious state. I am afraid a lot of soft piety and too quick religious comfort does precisely that. The giveaway is when one finds no attitude of service, volunteerism, or compassion for the outsider emerging from one’s attendance at church services.”

It’s such a small thing to be kind. It’s an act of intentional consciousness as antidote to the numbness of being overwhelmed by our burdensome lives … but what a world of change can be unleashed by it.

Everyone has a special childhood fear of some kind or another. And for many, the fears of childhood are so strong we remember them clearly into adulthood. Thankfully, most of our childhood fears are not based on reality but figments of our fruitful imagination based on all things we don’t understand. Do you remember how frightening your childhood was? There were ghosts in the closets and behind the doors. There were monsters under the bed or in the attic. There were all kinds of scary sounds we didn’t understand. Things that go bump in the night and “lions and tigers and bears, oh my.”

We adults can smile about those things now; every child can understand that every adult has at one time or another experienced the same fears we feel on occasion. Every adult, no matter how brave they may appear, has cried like little babies when they were scared. Everyone’s had their scary moments and cried out in the night for their parents to come and turn on their bedroom lights and hold them until they could go to sleep.

Just before halftime of Super Bowl XXIX, a commercial, carrying the theme, “The right equipment makes the difference,” offered a fresh twist on the story of David and Goliath. Picture an adolescent with shoulder-length hair wearing a simple smock cut to mid-thigh and short sleeves so his young athletic build had the freedom of a full-range of movement. Dangling from his left hand was a leather sling and in his right hand was the shepherd’s staff on which he leaned ever so slightly as it offered him support.

Standing before him was a line-up of the most intimidating, burly men one could imagine, most of them with long dark hair wearing uncut shaggy beards. All of them were wearing bronze armor with crested helmets and clutching either a sword or a spear. The men taunted the small boy who stood alone in front of them. Then the tallest and fiercest of the men stepped forward.

Unshaken and unwaveringly calm, the boy fingered the round smooth stone in his hand as he loaded it into the sling and began to slowly twirl the stone over his head, faster and faster the sling blurred as the camera zoomed in closer. Suddenly the sling stopped as it was unfurled and the camera’s focus shifted to the giant’s stunned face as the stone that was spinning in the sling was now embedded into his forehead. The giant slumped to his knees and his whole body fell forward and the boy moved in to retrieve the stone. After prying it out of the giant’s forehead, he looked at it in the palm of his hand and smiled, then he held it up to the camera to reveal the Wilson Sporting Goods logo. Welcome to the Madison Avenue version of the Bible …

There are giants in the land that frighten us still. Even the toughest among us feel fear like little children when we’re afraid. The giants we face today torment and bedevil us. Fear is a potent, powerful enemy and we can become enslaved by our fears. Some fears are so traumatic you don’t go a day without thinking about them. They follow you like your shadow. Our injuries don’t even have to be exotic or life threatening to be significant. They can be ordinary experiences that are painful and personal for them to stick to us like flypaper. In fact, they can be so ordinary that we underestimate their power. They can lurk just under the surface and we consider so insignificant we’re too embarrassed to deal with them. Unresolved, they become crippling and we suffer immensely. Fear is an amazingly powerful emotion and most of us are emotional prisoners to our fear.

After 30 years in prison, Nelson Mandela spoke eloquently of his fears. Not only had he defeated apartheid, the giant in his life, he had been elected the president of South Africa. In his inaugural address in 1994, he said these words:  “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us.”

How big is your fear? Are you standing on the field of battle frozen in a silence that consumes you or are you down at the brook selecting five smooth stones confident that God will help you meet the challenge?

His name was Charles and he was a fellow student at the seminary when I was there working on my Masters. Charles carried all his books in a backpack slung over his shoulders – not because backpacks were in, because they were not popular then like they are now. Rather, he carried his books in a backpack because he had to as both hands were busy with maneuvering on the two forearm crutches he used in order to get around. Charles was a student preparing for ministry just like every other student at the time – only he was unlike every other student in that he suffered from a particularly complicated form of cerebral palsy. His disease had struck him as a young child as it often does. The usual symptoms were evident – he slurred every word he tried forcibly to speak, his limbs would not act according to his instructions to them and his arms and legs would flay from side to side making walking anything but easy.

What I liked most about Charles was the homemade sign he hung around his neck like his own self-statement. On it was a simple Bible reference, Exodus 4:11. In that simple verse was wrapped a sermon of profound implications for anyone inquisitive enough to look it up. When I read the Scripture, it describes when God ignited the bush in the desert where Moses was watching idly over his father-in-law’s flocks. God then described a mission he wanted to take Moses on that would place him in front of the Egyptian Pharaoh asking Pharaoh to “let my people go.” After God gave Moses signs of power and authority, Moses finally blurted out his most personal excuse:  “Please, LORD, I have never been eloquent, for I am slow of speech and slow of tongue” (Exodus 4:10). To which God responded, “Who made man’s mouth? Or who makes him dumb or deaf, or seeing or blind? Is it not I, the LORD?” (Exodus 4:11)

Charles could have withdrawn into the betrayal of his body because he was the least likely student to ever become a professional minister. What church would hire Charles as their pastor when they couldn’t understand what he was saying? He could have shut down all efforts to extend himself outside the disease giving in to its arbitrary and severe boundaries. But unlike Moses, the great emancipator of Israel, Charles bravely ignored his limitations and hung a sign around his neck for anyone curious enough to reach for their Bibles to read. “Who makes tongues? Is it not I, the LORD?”

Charles figured, even if he couldn’t speak with great eloquence, he could still speak a message in ways other than words. The words of St. Francis of Assisi must have been Charles’ inspiration:  “Preach the gospel,” he said, “and if necessary use words.” And so Charles, struggling down the hall to his next class, grunting and straining with every movement, preached a sermon to a school of preachers. With every painful flailing step, Charles preached powerfully to us: “Preachers, tell your story! Tell it with words if you have them. If you can’t form the words, tell it with acts of kindness. Tell it with mercy and God’s gracious welcome.”

The world is just not that big … and like-minded churches are connected by the slenderest of threads. Some threads are created whenever any one of us moves away and joins another church in another city. A wormhole of affection can be created that way between two congregations simply because of lives that are shared and relationships that are maintained. Most often, it comes from how one church sees the world similarly to another … through grace rather than shame … by seeing persons as wounded rather than vile … and choosing to love them because of their wounds rather than rejecting them because of whatever “ism” is in their lives.

Those threads can come from either clergy or laity. Joey Pyle - last summer’s intern at HBC - now serves as Associate Pastor of the Spring Creek Church in Oklahoma City and we have connections with that good church. Our friend Steve Graham, former pastor at Second Baptist Liberty, was the founding pastor at Spring Creek. This past week, Steve shared an experience he had recently while worshiping at Spring Creek with Pastor Preston Clegg who now serves as their pastor. In preparing the congregation for the experience of communion, Preston told the church this story …

Communion around Spring Creek is always a special time for me.  It’s special because of the event itself, but it’s also meaningful because of where the bread is purchased.  We purchase our communion bread from a baker in downtown Oklahoma City.  It’s just a small bakery shop with one employee and a million fragrances.  I enjoy chatting with the baker every month when I visit the shop.  I always learn something from him, and I love to watch him make the bread.  He makes it right there in front of you.  It’s always fresh.  Every month he takes me back to a small room in the back of the bakery.  A table stands in the center of the room, and jars of flour line the shelves around the walls of the room.  The jars have labels on the front of them.  One label reads LEAVENED while another says UNLEAVENED. One jar says WHEAT while another reads RYE.  Jars like this surround the room.

This week I walked into the bakery, and he greeted me with a smile. “Let me guess, communion time at Spring Creek,” he said.

“Well, sort of,” I replied.  I told him about this gathering.  “We are hosting a meeting of Oklahoma Baptists.”

He said, “You mean, I am feeding all the Baptists in the state of Oklahoma!!!”

I replied, “No, not all of them; just the best of them.” So I tried to explain this group to him. I told him about CBF churches in Oklahoma, and what they stood for.  I told him about our missions and ministries.  He listened intently at first, and then he began to walk around the room.  He pulled a cup of flour from this jar, and a cup of flour from that jar.  He walked over to a couple of jars in the corner.

One said YOUNG, and another said OLD.  He took a cup from each and spread it over the table.

“Can you get both of those in one loaf?” I asked.

“Don’t worry,” he replied. He drew a cup from a jar marked RICH and one labeled POOR.

“Are you sure about this?” He looked me square in the eyes and said, “Yes, this is good news for ALL the people.”

He took a cup from a jar labeled LIBERAL and a jar labeled CONSERVATIVE.

“Two entirely different outlooks,” I said.

“But it’s the same love, isn’t it? It’s the same love.” Then he began to walk around the room and take flour from jars that came from all over the world. He took a cup from the HISPANIC jar and the ANGLO jar. He took a cup from a jar labeled INDIA and one from KENYA and another from AFRICAN-AMERICAN.

“All that in one loaf?”

“It’s one kingdom. It’s ONE kingdom.”

Finally, he took a cup from a jar labeled DEMOCRAT and another labeled REPUBLICAN.

I said, “My gosh, that has to be two separate loaves right there. You can’t get both of those in one loaf.”

He smiled and said, “I thought you had a higher calling and a different mission altogether.”

I knew he was right.

He took all that flour and kneaded the dough, and was able to get all that in one loaf. He handed the bread to me.  Now I could be wrong about this.  I am not sure about it.  But when he handed the bread to me, I could have sworn there were holes in his hands.

“I don’t know how you did this. This really is a miracle.”

He said, “That’s what I do.”

“Yes, that’s what you do.”

The congregation could hear the gunshot as Dr. George Tiller was murdered in the narthex of his own Lutheran church in Wichita on a sunny Sunday morning. Tiller’s wife, who sang in the church choir, also heard the single shot that killed him. Dr. Tiller was serving with two others as ushers for the church where he and his family had worshiped for years. After the shooting, his alleged killer was arrested two hours north of Wichita as he approached Kansas City on Interstate 35. He was traveling at the posted speed limit and the officers who arrested him surrounded his car with their weapons drawn. Without a word, the suspect got out of his car and raised his hands compliantly above his head. He seemed expectant this would happen before he reached his home.

Dr. Tiller had been assassinated in front of a handful of fellow members who witnessed the shooter aim and fire. No one else was hurt as the shooter kept Tiller’s friends at bay with threats of shooting them. While no one else was shot, Tiller’s family (wife, children, grandchildren) and friends, his church, his community and even the nation have been wounded in grief.

No matter what one may think about the complicated moral and ethical issues of abortion, Dr. Tiller was apparently abiding by both federal and state laws that severely restrict how and when an abortion may be done.

Phill Kline, a well-known Kansas City attorney was elected several years ago as Kansas Attorney General running on a right-wing pro-life platform that held Tiller as the poster child for the cause. Once elected, the Attorney General consistently hounded Dr. Tiller for records with counter-charges that Kline’s office exceeded the rights of privacy normally accorded patients in his efforts to stop “Tiller the Baby Killer” from serving women who chose to have an abortion. Kline’s open conflict with Tiller left him as a political victim to the backlash of voters who perceived the Attorney General’s efforts had been more personal than legal. Kline was replaced in the fall elections and Tiller was subsequently acquitted of all charges.

What set Tiller apart from others who provide reproductive services was his willingness to conduct third-trimester abortions for the women who needed them for medical reasons related to the mother’s health or the medical viability of the fetus. Tiller had endured decades of harassment in order to serve women and the social, moral and physical complications of pregnancy. He had been previously shot in both arms in 1993 by a woman who is still in prison serving a sentence for that crime.

Because he was willing to do abortions, Tiller worked as a medical provider with few peers. Some of those peers have been harassed out of practice unwilling to live with the threats from the minority fringe of persons so opposed to abortion they regularly talked in violent terms about those who legally provided reproductive services. One can imagine how cautiously medical students might think or feel about any practice that even remotely addresses the reproductive needs of women.

In the aftermath of his death Sunday, a casual reading of the strident voices from extremist bloggers and other cultural voices of the far right play like a view into the dark side of Christian fundamentalism with its loud claims and less-than-subtle violent threats to those who become targets of their tactics. An argument that connects those extremist views to the actions of this middle-aged extremist with mental problems should be considered.

How shall we measure the profound grief we feel over Dr. Tiller’s murder? How shall we declare the unquestioned condemnation this shooting deserves? How do we account for the voices of the secular right-wing press, who consider Tiller’s death as the moral harvest of his chosen medical practice? The terrorists have silenced one of their targets … but will their tyranny over law prevail?