Mark 5:18-20
Some boundaries are not geographical. They aren't the divisions drawn by the register of deeds. They aren't the case histories of property researched by an abstractor. They aren't the property lines haggled over by neighbors.
Some boundaries are emotional, social, spiritual. You can't draw such borders. They are human thresholds. Everyone has limits to who they are, who they want to be, or choose to be. Everyone has a sense of where their fringe is--where the fullness of their personhood has "brimmed out" so to speak, where there is room for adjustment, and where the needle is nearly on empty.
Those boundaries are never the same for everyone. You can subdivide a tract of land or a neighborhood in prescribed ways. Like most of the small towns in Kansas, you can make all the streets go east and west, north and south. You can make the blocks a uniform size in every town.
You can't do that with people. You can't hold up a preformed grid pattern and expect that everyone's social, spiritual, and emotional boundaries are going to be the same. Each person comes with their own map, their own limits and boundaries of selfhood established.
The problem is, most of these personal boundaries I'm talking about are not clear. They aren't clear to other people and sometimes aren't even clear to us.
I read an article about a woman who wandered into the Boston City Mission. The woman was seeking help. She was clearly stressed and disturbed in many ways. Half-way through her conversation with a mission worker, the woman paused, reached into her purse, took out a whistle, and to quote this article, "she just blew the hell out of it."
Have you ever felt like that? Wished you had a whistle handy so you could, when you needed to, just blow the living daylights out of it? Part of what was happening for the woman was her boundaries of selfhood were shifting. Some of her sense of self was becoming restricted--she was becoming confined by a smaller and smaller perimeter.
Another part of it was she felt like some of her protective boundaries had been breached by "the enemy"--whoever or whatever that was for her. She felt like she was under attack and had lost a strategic border that defined who she was and who she wanted to be. Maybe she was trying to literally blow the hell out of herself.
Many times, that is the only way we come to discover what the limits are of others, or our own selfhood--especially our false self. We may not know exactly where the boundaries are until someone starts pushing up against them. Or when, by some circumstance, we are forced to grow beyond our self-made boundaries. Or, when someone wants to get to know us, and they start exploring where the edges are, we may make some startling self-discoveries.
The woman who wandered into the mission may not have known where her boundaries were before, but she knew where they were now. It was crystal clear. And the only thing she could think to do was to blow the whistle of anxiety, not only so others could hear, but also to sound the alarm of her false self as well.
What we've been looking at, all during Lent, through these messages, and reading the book, The Deeper Journey, has been about boundaries. The false self the book talks about has set the boundaries of our spirituality. The false self has tried to draw the lines so that God has been put on the far side of those boundaries. The false self has created protective walls around us, so that God can peek in the windows, but never really get in.
But what God has done through Jesus Christ is destroy those false boundary lines. Our false self has been trying to protect us from God. It does so by drawing the lines tighter and tighter, getting us more and more constricted, until we are living a small life in a small world.
Every time God appears to be getting too close to who we are, trying to break open those false boundaries of self, the false self blows the whistle. Loudly. Passionately. A number of you who have been reading the book have blown the whistle of resistance. The false self has blown the whistle of warning and rationalization and excuses so loudly in your ears, early enough, that you gave up or gave in.
But you can't get to the Resurrection without going through the Crucifixion. There has to be a death. Of Christ. And with Christ, the death of the false self. That's why the false self blows the whistle so shrilly in your ears. It doesn't want to die.
While thinking about this, this week, I realized I had a perfect example of what I'm trying to say, just down the hall from my office. Michelle, our church administrator is pregnant. You all know that. This baby, Mason, is being stubborn. He is a week to 10 days over due. Labor starts and then stops.
It's like he really doesn't want his boundaries to change--even though he is becoming more and more cramped in too confined of a space. It's like Michelle and Jordon are talking to the little guy, trying to convince him to give up his little self-styled world. But in that little world, he thinks all his needs are taken care of. His boundaries are just fine--to him. He's protected. He's fed. He's warm. What could be wrong with a self-created world like that? I wonder if a baby, in the throes of the birth process, thinks it's dying. In fact, the infant is going through birth.
Michelle and Jordon, in talking to little Mason, say something like, "But out here is a big, wide world. You will be free to grow and move about. There is color and texture and tastes and smells. There are arms that want to hold you. Yes, it is a world very different from the one you are enclosed in right now. But the world out here, outside your boundaries is amazing! It's amazing out here! Just break free. Come on out. Experience it for yourself!"
Imagine, God, through Jesus Christ, is telling us the same thing. "Come out of your self-styled, cramped in false life. Let the boundaries break. Let go of your self-styled world. Through Jesus Christ, be born into a totally different, wide open, amazing life! It'll be OK. I promise," says God.
But what do we do? We don't want to go through the pain of birth--of exchanging one world for another, of losing the definition of our self for a new definition in God.
A number of years ago, a friend gave me this book--Maps of the Holy Land. It's an interesting book to browse through once-in-a-while. What's interesting about this book is many of the maps in the book were drawn by the Crusaders or others who trampled through the Holy Land as invaders or explorers. Most of the maps are hardly accurate, based probably on assumed knowledge or speculation. The only way, of course, to test a map's authenticity and accuracy is to travel the land yourself and check it out (or look at it through satellite imagery).
And there were times when Alexander the Great was pushing out the limits of his empire. His armies literally walked off the edges of their known maps into unmapped territory. They were moving out into unexplored frontiers, drawing new and enlarged maps based on their experiences. Instead of reaching the end of the map and blowing the whistle of alarm, they kept their whistles in their pockets and pushed the boundaries.
Boundaries form the sense of comfortability within which we approach life. When we sense our boundaries are breaking down, or dissolving, or constricting, or expanding, that makes us anxious--that we have a sense a loss of control over our lives. The loss of our boundaries means we have to change.
But those boundaries, which create for us a usually false sense of safety, consistency, routine, and selfhood are always being threatened somewhere along their line. Because they are false, they are always breaking down somewhere. The false self is living in a constant process of mending or adjusting to the breaks.
Here's a good example of what the false self does: (Peanuts cartoon) Charlie Brown is flying his kite. He's really working at it. You can tell by the expression on his face. Lucy is standing back watching. She doesn't look hopeful. She watches Charlie Brown run down the field. All of a sudden there's a loud and painful "AUGH" shouted from off the frame. Lucy covers her face. She can't stand to look. In the last frame, Charlie Brown's kite is hanging from one side of the tree. Charlie Brown, all wrapped up in a thin cocoon of kite string is hanging from the other side of the tree.
What a great parable of what happens when we try to fly our own kites--to get our own false selves up in the air under our own power. The false self, that made such great promises, turns out to be a kite eating tree, always leaving us hanging.
That is, until God comes along, through Jesus Christ, and destroys all those false promises, cuts us down from the kite eating tree and totally breaks everything wide open. Birth happens. Over all change happens. Freedom happens.
Now here's the thing. All along during Lent, I have been talking, and those who have the book have been reading, about how to take care of your own false self, and allowing God, through the Cross formed love of Christ, to put to death your own false self. To destroy the small boundaries your own false self has imposed on you so that you can live in Christ, large and free.
But it's even bigger than that. There are millions of Charlie Brown's out there, people who have been tied up and hanging from the tree of their false self. No matter how many times they try to get their life in the air, the kite-eating-tree, the false self, gets them--as it got us--every time.
Once we have had our false self disposed of, and Christ's self has taken that place, then we recognize so many others who are dealing with that same, basic, debilitating problem. But as we have been changed, then we are to become offerings of our self to God for others. We are to become available to God for those who are still hanging from the kite-eating-tree.
What we are about is not just our own transformation. That isn't what Christ was about. Even though we like to personalize what Christ did, and make it about us, Christ didn't come to just transform you. Christ came to transform the world. But Christ had to start with you and me first. Once our false self dies with Christ on the Cross, then we become available to God to do the same as Christ has done for others. We participate in the ministry of Christ to transform the world. The world itself is hanging from a kite-eating-tree, and Christ has made us available to him so that we might serve him by freeing that world.
A few years back, this congregation studied the book, The Prayer of Jabez. It was about asking God to expand your boundaries. The prayer is found in 1 Chronicles 4:10,
Jabez called on the God of Israel, saying, “Oh that you would bless me and enlarge my border, and that your hand might be with me, and that you would keep me from hurt and harm!” And God granted what he asked. (NRSV)
God, through Christ, has fulfilled this prayer for all of us, by shattering the boundaries of our false self that kept us hemmed in and small and stuck. And God, through Christ, has, by taking away those boundaries of the false self, opened up to us all that is of God. And God, through Christ, has made us partners in that work of freeing the whole world from its false self. As we move through this Holy Week, towards the Cross and Resurrection, as you look upon those scenes, now you know what's really going on.
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