Shaky Valentine’s Days

Given the commercial success of the Christmas holiday season the American marketing machine is steadily trying to duplicate Christmas in other Christian holidays on the calendar like Halloween and St. Valentine’s Day. As consumer advertising ramps up expectations for many who for what ever reason aren’t in a position to celebrate romance with a “special someone” will find the day a strain and possibly a painful reminder of loss.

For couples in conflict Marriage and Family Therapist Don Elium write a piece on “How Do I Face a Shaky Valentine’s Day” offering advice to a question about romantic expectations in the midst of conflict. The core of his advice is that the person reading the piece should act in love towards their partner. The focus isn’t on the feeling, the focus is on generosity of mind and behavior towards the other.

Those of you who know conflict will know just how hard this is. When we are in conflict we devolve into reflexive behaviors of:

• entitlement thinking
• victim mentality
• manipulative or coercive strategies
• using power to get what we want from the other at the other’s expense
• self-preservation strategies that prompt us to punish (fight) or withdraw (flight)

God’s Bad Marriage with Humanity

This isn’t a sermon about “how to make your marriage work”, the book of Genesis tells the story of the beginnings of God’s bad marriage with us. God created the world to be a place of wholeness and safety, but as we saw last week in the complaints of TXBlue08 instead we have a world of fear and pain and we don’t believe God can be trusted with his world. We like Lamech have embraced strategies of violence, threat, intimidation and control in order to get what we want at our neighbor’s expense. All along the way we justify our behavior on the basis of the poor track record of the other and both our legitimate needs and the entitlements we feel.

So far in the story God once tried to give the world a fresh start by preserving the finest, most moral most responsible family he could find in the world, but the legacy even of that best of all families degenerated into the same kind of violent conflict that plagued the world before the flood.

A Persistent Lover In A Difficult Relationship

One of the most difficult thing for anyone in a difficult relationship, whether that be a romantic relationship, or a parent-child relationship, or even a friendship relationship, is to realize that you cannot control the outcome of the relationship. By definition a relationship is what two parties build together, not one.

Many times in a relationship one party (at least) that wants to see healing within the conflict anguishes over the question “what can I possibly DO to resolve this relationship” and unfortunately the answer is “nothing”. That isn’t to say there isn’t hope for the relationship, but rather neither side of the relationship has CONTROL over the outcome because of the definition of a relationship.

If you have a safe deposit box in the bank you only have one key to that box. In order to open that box you need the bank to furnish the other key. Similarly the bank cannot open that box without violating it without your key. Relationships are like this. BOTH sides must participate in the salvation of the relationship if the relationship is to be saved.

Don Elium, who wrote the Shaky Valentine’s piece isn’t promoting himself as a Christian MTF, but what he is saying is that if you want your relationship to have any shot what you need to do is bless even if the relationship isn’t working. If your relational partners has become your adversary what you need to do is to love your enemy.

Evil, Ripened Bananas and People

If you have a container of bananas, and one ripe banana in that container you’ll lose the entire container of bananas. Why? Ethylene. Ripened fruit emits ethylene which will ripen the fruit around it.

People and evil are like this. Even if most of the people in a town are well behaved and responsible it only takes one or a few bad actors to make the town fearful, resentful and potentially hostile. Pretty quickly people are tribing up and concocting their own mental lists of “good people” and “bad people” and trying to figure out how to preserve themselves against their adversaries.

We instinctively assume that if we can eliminate, or marginalize the “bad people” then everything will be OK, but the Noah’s ark story argues against this. Alexander Solzhenitsyn made this observation while he was in the Gulag:

…. It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil.

…. If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

God is not willing and so he begins a process of reclaiming humanity through the heart of one man, Abram.

God picked Abram

Unlike the Noah story where God picks the most moral, most obedient, most responsible man he could find in all the world, in this case God picks Abram.

We have no reason to believe Abram was any worse than anyone else, but neither do we have an idea that he was much better.

• According to Joshua 24 Terah and his people (including Abram) worshiped other gods.
• We also know that Abram married his half-sister Sarai, something that the later Mosaic law would condemn.
• We also know that Abram’s wife is barren. Barrenness is emblematic of brokenness in the ancient world where a woman’s value is derived from her ability to produce children. Barrenness is also, sometimes an indication in common religion of the lack of God’s favor. If you recall it is exactly in this area that the consequences of Eve’s rebellion were located. Childbearing would be painful and full of frustration.

When the LORD calls him Abram is NOT illustrated as being morally superior to anyone else. God simply chooses Abram and that’s how the story begins. Christians throughout the history of the church have called this choice “election”. 

God picks Abram, and Abram needs to respond. God begins the conversation and the relationship with Abram with a command, and the text gives no indication God coerces or manipulates Abram into the choice. Abram must leave his land, his relatives, and his father’s house and go to a land that the LORD will show him. The LORD is very specific about what he is to leave, and very fuzzy on where he is leading him to.

If Abram follows the command of the LORD the results will be dramatic. So far in the story there has been a lot of cursing, limiting and death. Now the tune suddenly changes. Verse 2 is dripping with the word “blessing” and the conclusion of verse two is that Abram who will be blessed will go on to be a blessing.

The dramatic promise is intensified. Abram will be the starting point for an entirely different revolution in humanity’s relationship with its maker. Those who bless Abram will be blessed, and those who take this blessing and opportunity lightly will be exiled from the blessing. Abram will be the dividing line for humanity, not the waters of the flood or the wood of the ark.

Abram Begins the Walk of Faith

So Abram begins the walk of faith, taking God’s word for his blessing, deciding to trust in God’s character, or at least take a chance on it.

When he has wandered into Canaan the LORD comes to him again and tells him that this land will be the land he gives his family, so Abram builds and altar. As Abram goes further south, he builds another alter and begins to “call on the name of the LORD” or to worship him. The relationship has begun.

How Relationships Mature

This will be by no means the end of the story, it is only the beginning. At this point it the relationship God and Abram’s relationship seems all about candy and flowers. Abram feels fortunate that God has picked him, and Abram is anticipating all of the rich promises God has offered in the deal. Hasn’t Abram done what God asked? When is the payoff going to come? Won’t this be Abram’s dream come true?

It will, but the one thing Abram has yet to realize is that you can’t enter into a mature relationship without having to confront the you YOU really are.

Back to the Shaky Valentines

The genius of Dr. Elium’s admonition for Valentine’s day is that the truth in any of our difficult relationships is that our hands are not clean. The entitlement thinking, the victim posing, the biased perspective that I am right and my partner needs to bow down and worship me for the inherent wonderful person that I am all feeds into the conflict. The conflict is revelatory and some of what it is revealing is that I am selfish and that I would really like to simply use the other to get what I want.

At this point in Abram’s relationship with God this is the foundation of the relationship. Abram, like Eve, simply wishes to use the LORD to get what he wants, children, fame, wealth, and to have a meaningful place in human history. God is indeed committing himself to give Abram these things, but before Abram can in fact BE these things, Abram needs to change and it will be the context of the relationship in which Abram will have to self-confront in order to be transformed into the man God will use.

Dr. Elium says the following:

Instead of cursing the weeds, carefully water the seeds of what you want to grow in your partner AND yourself. Resentment and hate has taken residence in your mind and heart. Accept that they both are present today, while bringing attention to the direction you want to move toward.

Being loving toward your partner not because it feels good to them, but because what the effect of being and acting loving does inside of you. This will help you start liking yourself again in the relationship. You have turned into a very unloving person in this marriage.

Lent

In the Christian tradition lent is a period of self-examination. Lent is a time when we get in touch with not the me I imagine myself to be, fooled by all my self-serving biases, but the me I really am. The me that difficult relationships reveal me to be.

We will journey with Abram on his path of self-discovery as the deepening relationship with the LORD shines a light on how Abram deep down inside is a user of people and a user of God. Abram is an everyman.

We will see Abram descend into misery as we see he really wants children not because he wishes to bless them, but because he wishes to be blessed by them in terms of his reputation and his imagination of the future.

We will see that God’s election of Abram is about not just rescuing Abram from himself but beginning a process in which all the families of the world will be blessed through him.

We will see that the blessing of God to Abram is in fact a regenerative blessing that will turn Abram into the kind of man who will be like the God who has pursued him. The purpose of this blessing is to transform humanity from being self-centered users of persons into lovers of persons, all the way up to and including your enemies.

A Better Valentine

There may be a lot of reasons why Valentine’s day is painful for you. You may not have, or have never received the kind of love that would make you spontaneously leap for joy. You may have lost a love, or a love you had hoped for. You may be in a relationship that is supposed to be about love but mostly what it brings you is pain.

To feel this sting is human, and even if every Valentine’s Day you’ve lived has met or exceeded your expectations, I can promise you that in the age of decay there will be a day when it all ends.

What I can also invite you into is nothing less than the invitation extended to Abram.

We read the text imagining that God only meant this for Abram, but in fact it is available to each of us. Some of the details are different. You might not need to leave, or to pack, or to on a literal journey, but it is the larger invitation that Abram wasn’t aware he was accepting of entering into a process that is designed to make you a lover.

A lover may or may not be loved. Jesus was a lover, who at times was not well loved. A lover is one who has learned how to love, not because of some payoff, but for the treasure of love itself.

In the New Testament the first Epistle of John says that “God is love”. We see this in Abram’s call. We will see that throughout Abram’s journey with God Abram will see that he is a user and not a lover, and will be invited into becoming a lover.

How do you become a lover? By doing. By being a lover.

Again, this is what Dr. Elium has gotten right. You become a lover by being a lover. The difficulty is that in this broken world lovers get hurt. How can you become a responsible lover.

The Christian answer is this. Because God has loved you and demonstrated his love in the person of Jesus. Because Jesus has demonstrated his love for you in freeing you from sin’s penalty and freeing you from death’s grip through the resurrection, now you can begin to love.

This isn’t to say you won’t get hurt. All lovers in this world get hurt, Jesus demonstrates that. Cheek turners get hit again. Forgivers get trespassed against again. What Jesus offers is that what lovers get is resurrection so that it isn’t true that you only live once. His invitation is to love, and love freely.

Abram didn’t need to follow, but he did need to follow if he was to become a lover. Will you follow? Will you enter into a relationship? Will you dare to love?