Cellar Voices, Balcony People Hebrews 12: 1-2; John 10: 11-16, Third Sunday of Easter, (April 25) 2009 Kyle Childress

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1 1 Cellar Voices, Balcony People Hebrews 12: 1-2; John 10: 11-16, Third Sunday of Easter, (April 25) 2009 Kyle Childress In a classic sermon on this Hebrews text, the great preacher Carlyle Marney remembered his first inkling of the meaning of the graffiti in a public restroom. Marney said, As though it were only yesterday, I can remember that 4 going on 5 autumn day when I read those words over the copper trough in the boys [room] and I realized that those words smelled acrid too. I could not read them yet but I could smell them. They darkened me. I did not ask for them, they were just there, given. And within a few years I would be taken up into the world they represented. I believe it was Freud who said that our first five years of development define for us scripts of behavior that we will likely repeat unconsciously for the rest of our lives. According to these theories, for some of us there are anal, controlling scenarios. For others there are oral, hungering scenarios. For some the issue is anxiety and trust. And others it is order and decency. From early on we were given scripts to work with and we spend our lives responding, reacting, and repeating these scripts. Some of us were given bad scripts to work with, and even great actors like Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson can t make the script of Love Guru into a great work of art. Aristotle thought that we could only become as virtuous and moral as the world we are born into because moral excellence is based upon habit and

2 2 most habits are ingrained before we are old enough to know whether or not they are good or not. So if we re given bad scripts and bad habits from the days of our childhood this is bad news. The book of Exodus uses different language but we know what it s talking about when it says, The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation. My friend, Chuck Rush, who is a pastor in Summit, New Jersey, tells of a pastoral call he made with a family having to deal with the mother-inlaw. The man had married a girl from China, whose mother lived in Manhattan. The mother/mother-in-law had been a toddler during Mao s reign of terror in the Cultural Revolution that starved 25 million people to death. She was able to get out of China and come to the U. S. when her husband jumped ship from the Chinese Navy into the Hudson River and was finally able to bring her here. She managed to live the rest of her life without learning English and was now enfeebled and needed home health care. My friend went with the son-in-law to see the elderly woman. The son-in-law explained that the home health care providers refused to go into the apartment until some changes were made. The pastor and son-in-law walked into the dingy hall of the 110 year-old tenements and pushed open the door into a tiny, dark apartment. It was dark, not only from the lack of windows but also because there were boxes stacked from the floor to the ceiling, so high they impeded the single light bulb hanging in the middle of

3 3 the room. The apt. was crammed with cases of cans of tuna, crates of dry noodles, and stack after stack of Chinese foodstuffs. They slowly made their way through the labyrinth of boxes to the kitchen, also completely filled with boxes and crates, and there sat Grandma in a tiny corner watching a small TV. The anxiety-filled elderly woman told her son-in-law in her fast-paced Chinese that the health-care workers wanted to take her stuff. They tried to reason with her that no one was going to take her stuff. And it didn t matter to her that her relatively well-off son-in-law and daughter could and would take care of her. In her mind she was only safe in this constricted prison, a toddler s nightmare that had consumed more and more of her world as she grew older. The childhood scripts of deprivations, distortion, and abuse stays with us long after the events and issues that originally caused them are gone. Some years ago there was a disturbing documentary film Deliver Us From Evil that deals with Father Oliver O Grady, a thirty year pedophile priest who served various parishes in California. All three of the victims they interviewed had substantial problems getting on with their lives as adults. The feelings of self-loathing, distressing anxiety, and an inability to simply feel normal were constants years after the episodes. One of the women, now in her late 40 s, described how for years when she was driving down the California highways, if she saw the make and model car that the Priest drove and in which she had been molested, she would irrationally slam on the brakes or speed by it out of control with such anxiety that she didn t know what she was doing at the moment.

4 4 Carlyle Marney called these old scripts our cellar voices. These are the voices from the darkness down deep that tell us we are worthless, that we re stupid, that we re failures, and that it (whatever it was) was our fault. These cellar voices show up in the middle of the night when no one is around or when we find ourselves reacting compulsively when we re not even thinking. The door slams and you find yourself wincing. A tone of voice is heard and you immediately get angry or you immediately close in upon yourself. You find yourself reacting to someone because of something they ve hooked in you from your past. Present experiences, present voices can feed these old cellar voices. The old criticisms come back to us when we hear someone criticizing us now or we hear the person today saying the same old message that we are worthless that we received so many years ago. These are our cellar voices and they keep us living out the old childhood scripts no matter how destructive they are. We have to pay attention to our cellar voices. We have to learn to bring them into the healing light of the day and see them for what they are. They are in our lives even though we never invited them in and we will wrestle with them all the days of our lives. What s more these cellar voices spread among our loved ones and they end up repeating them in their lives. My friend Chuck Rush, whom I mentioned a moment ago, says that years ago he and his family were stuck in a major traffic jam going into Washington DC. Chuck and his wife were taking the children to see the sites and they got caught. Chuck had an intense temper, which he inherited from his father, and he let loose, cursing the traffic, the guy immediately in front of him, the city of Washington DC, the U.S. Dept. of Transportation,

5 5 the Senate, the House of Representatives and everyone else he could think of. He got it out of his system and there was a pause of silence. In the back car-seat, was their son Ian, who was a toddler and was just learning to talk. As his dad hollered and cussed the traffic, the toddler sat in his car-seat, sucking his thumb, and looking around at the traffic. When the silence came, he took his thumb out of his mouth and said, Damn traffic. Even before he knew what traffic was, his father had taught him to curse it. Chuck said that at that moment he knew he couldn t pass the anger on to another generation and went to therapy to deal with his anger and his family s legacy of anger as soon as he got home. Besides passing on our cellar voices to our loved ones, it is also easy for our cellar voices to deform our faith so that we understand God as a cellar god. The worst case is when persons experience abuse at the hands of a religious professional or leader. The person is abused but so is God. Church historian Martin Marty says that Christianity can be divided up into two versions and he does not mean liberal and conservative. Marty says that there are mean and non-mean Christians and mean and non-mean churches. For the most part, mean churches and mean Christianity has a god which speaks, leads, and inspires from the cellar. May God save us from our cellar voices and our cellar churches. So hear the good news of the gospel. It doesn t have to be like this! We do not have to live out the scripts given us from childhood. We don t have to be deformed by our cellar voices. God does save us.

6 6 Jesus tells us in our Gospel lesson from John chapter 10, My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me; and I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of my hand (John 10: 27-28). Jesus is the Good Shepherd and we can learn to listen to his voice instead of our cellar voices. His voice heals and comforts, encourages and calls us onward to wholeness and light and hope. In his presence, people were healed, enemies reconciled, people caught in destructive ways of living were able to change, people came together and supported one another, and they learned to be peacemakers. All of that is what church is supposed to be, can be, and from time to time is. The good news is that when we follow the Good Shepherd, when we come through the waters of baptism, we are handed a new script. It is God s script. It is the script that not only heals and gives hope, it says we can live differently. We learn to listen for the voice of our Good Shepherd and join with others who are doing the same. Three weeks ago we buried Hero Mitchell. For most all of Hero s adult life he suffered from a severe form of schizophrenia. Much of his physical disabilities resulted from some of the early medications tried in controlling his illness. From age 55 until his death at age 81, Hero was in some form of assisted living or nursing home. Because of his illness, his four children were estranged from him and it was only in the last year or so some reconciliation came about.

7 7 I mention this because the good news for Hero is that when he came here to Austin Heights, we didn t know his old script and we didn t treat him according to his old script. It didn t mean there were no problems or that everything was perfectly fine but it did mean that Hero had an opportunity to begin again to start fresh. The gospel word for that is grace. By the grace of the Good Shepherd we are given a new start and handed a fresh script. But that s not all. The good news is also we are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses who are encouraging us, giving us hope, and who are pulling for us. Carlyle Marney calls these our balcony people. They are in the balcony cheering us onward. Our balcony people are made up of those from the past and present who call us toward the goodness God has for us. And they counter the cellar voices which are always whispering at us pulling us downward. These balcony people are not perfect. Look at the balcony people listed in Hebrews 11 Moses, David, Rahab and others none of whom were perfect. But all of whom were trying to live according to the new script of God. It is common for people to think of God as the referee of life. God is watching us to see if we mess up, if we follow the rules or not, and there to judge us when we break a rule. But the truth is, using this analogy, God is more like the trainer or manager in our corner than the referee. When we find ourselves in the middle of the battles of life, when we are weary from struggling with our cellar voices, God is in our corner encouraging,

8 8 coaching, telling us to keep our left up, keep our head down, and our feet moving. To stay with this analogy for a moment, our balcony people are the crowd who are on our side, cheering for us. So who are your balcony people? Who are the ones in your life who also know the voice of the Good Shepherd and who encourage you to follow the new script of God? Included in our balcony people are counselors and therapists who help us bring the dark, cellar voices into the light of healing and give us some of the tools we need to move beyond the cellar voices. There are teachers and coaches, neighbors, spouses, and friends who listen to us, love us, and give us a new chance, time and time again. They bless us instead of cursing us. They are the people with whom we open up and grow. Jack Nicholson, in the movie As Good as It Gets says, She made me want to be a better man. Who are the people in your life who help you want to be a better person? Christian teaching says these balcony people help us want to be the person God has created us to be. Like Beatrice in The Divine Comedy, who guided and inspired Dante to grow closer to God and in so doing become the better person God intended him to be. All of this is what church is to be. It is our calling. When we are together we are in the middle of a balcony people, where we learn to live out the new script, where we know that we all struggle with cellar voices, and

9 9 are patient with one another. It is among one another where we can change, where we can be different. One of the earliest Christian documents after the close of the New Testament is called The Didache, which begins with these words: There are two ways, one of life and one of death. And there is a great difference between the two. Cellar voices call us to the way of death. But we can hear the voice of the Good Shepherd who calls us to life. Which way will you choose? Amen and amen.