21st Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 25A

21st Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 25A October 25, 2020 When I was in my mid-twenties, working in the inner-city soup kitchen known as Stewpot, my job was to create and run a morning enrichment program for Senior Citizens and Adults with Mental Disabilities. One of my favorite days was always art therapy day, when the Occupational Therapists and their students from the local med-school would come in and offer art therapy to the participants in my program. On this particular day, the art therapists gave the assignment: if you could design a t-shirt that you could wear around all the time, what would it look like? The participants were given a piece of paper and some oil-based crayons and got to work. One participant who was a particular favorite of mine was Miss Virginia, an elderly black woman who had never had children and whose husband had died years before. She lived on a small, fixed income, and she was mischievous and child-like, fun-loving and wise. Virginia called me over to assist her, and I looked down to see that with the help of some of the students, she had written on her paper “Love Everybody.” She told me she wanted me to help her write her name on there and gave me specific details as to how she wanted it. I clarified it multiple times to make sure I understood what she was asking, and then finally wrote her name on the paper. She was immediately pleased, and I was humorously puzzled because her t-shirt design that had originally read: “Love Everybody” now said “Love Virginia Everybody.” It was a powerful learning for me in my early 20’s, that no matter how different each of us is, we all have that basic desire to be loved by everybody, and if we were all as honest as Miss Virginia, we’d wear it around on a t-shirt, too. But, now that I’m older, I’ve been pondering the other human characteristic that we all share, no matter our differences: that is what is it that flips the switch in each of us between our motto being “Love everybody” and “Love ME everybody!” Because we all know that as Christians, we are supposed to “Love everybody,” but much of the time, we act in ways that try to demand “Love ME Everybody.” Our gospel passage for today is perhaps one of the most well-known passages of scripture in the gospels. We are on week 5 of Jesus fighting with one group or another in the temple after he has ridden triumphantly into Jerusalem and driven the money-changers out of the temple. In our reading for today, a lawyer seeks to test Jesus by asking him, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Jesus answers, “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” Now, this is not new information. Any Jews listening would have known the law. But here is what is new about this. First, Jesus changes the words that he is quoting from Deuteronomy 6:5 and instead quoting it as it is written: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might…” Jesus changes might to mind. And then Jesus takes the second part from Leviticus 19:18 “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.” So he pairs these two commandments in a new and different way than their original contexts, and the love that Jesus is referencing here is a love that looks like listening and keeping God’s commandments for the sake of personal and communal wellbeing. And, it’s a love that looks like kindness, generosity, and respect for our neighbors — and in particular, it looks like eschewing all claims to “vengeance” and “bearing grudges.” This is all at the heart of our Christian faith and practice, and it is worth remembering in this season where it seems extra-difficult to love our neighbors. But it still doesn’t answer the question I’ve been pondering about what is it that can help us flip the switch in our hearts and minds and souls to go from “Love ME Everybody” to “Love Everybody.” This past week, I had multiple conversations with all different people about how each person is not ok right now. “I was yelling at the customer service rep so loudly my wife came running in and fussed at me that I was going to have a stroke, and then I started yelling at her.” “I just feel like all of this emotion is built up inside me, like it’s behind a giant dam, and anytime anything happens, I’m afraid it’s going to all come flooding out.” “I’m normally pretty laid back, like a 4 on a scale of 1 to 10; but these days, I’m operating on a level of about a 7 all the time, and then, when I get worked up, I am off the chart-like 11 and higher. My husband thinks I’ve lost my mind.” If you are feeling this way, too, these days, know that you are not alone. But here’s some good news. There are ways that we can flip the switch back toward a more loving way of being in this world, a more loving way toward ourselves and toward our neighbors (and our poor spouses and family and customer service reps who have to put up with our crazy). Because here’s the thing that I learned in a podcast this week, that has helped me and changed me. Most of us in this current moment are suffering from Burnout. Burnout occurs when we get trapped in a stressful emotion and thus in the stress cycle of that emotion. Our bodies are unable to let go of that emotion, and so it just continues to build up inside us until it erupts, and we find ourselves acting in ways that are not loving to whoever happens to be closest to us in the moment. But, the good news that I learned from the podcast is that there are 7 ways that we can help our bodies complete the stress cycle and in those ways we can flip the switch back to being more loving to ourselves and to all those around us. This is all from Brene Brown’s podcast Unlocking Us, and she interviews twin sisters Emily and Amelia Nagoski who both have PhD level degrees in their fields and who have written a book on Burnout together. I’ll put a link to the podcast as an endnote to this sermon (and on our FB page) in case you want to go listen to the whole thing. It’s all really helpful (but there is some profanity in it, so be mindful of when and where you listen.) The sisters report that the 3 components of burnout are emotional exhaustion, decreased sense of accomplishment, and depersonalization. And here’s how they define these. Emotional exhaustion is “the fatigue that comes from caring too much for too long.” “Depersonalization [is] the depletion of empathy, caring and compassion, and…decreased sense of accomplishment [is] the unconquerable sense of futility, feeling that nothing you do makes any difference.”i. They talk about how just because a stressful situation is done or over, it does not mean that the feeling or emotion we have associated with the situation has been completed. Instead, if we aren’t able to see the emotion through to its end, then we get stuck, the emotion gets lodged in our bodies, and we suffer burnout. (There’s so much more to this, and it’s really worth your time to listen to it our read the transcript.) But they have identified 7 ways we can complete the stress response cycle and thus be more loving to ourselves and each other. The first and most efficient is physical activity. Second is breathing—taking a set amount of time to not focus on your thoughts but instead to focus on simply breathing in and out. Third is positive social interaction. Fourth is laughter. Fifth is giving and receiving a 20 second hug. Sixth is crying—not focusing on why you are crying but instead on the act of crying itself. And seventh is creating something. They say that your body will tell you, you’ll feel it in your body, when you have completed the stress cycle. And I’m going to conclude with some of their closing words from the podcast: “And thank God you know how to begin to feel better because if you can’t stay well enough to continue dealing with the stressors, you are going to burn out and stop trying to make the world a better place, and we need… Everybody… The world is in a bad enough state right now, we need everybody on board, which means we need everybody taking care of themselves. And if there’s anything we learned in the process of writing the book, it is that the cure for burnout isn’t and can’t be self-care, it has to be all of us caring for each other.” This week, your invitation is to look for ways to take care of yourself so that you can “Love Everybody.” [i] https://brenebrown.com/podcast/brene-with-emily-and-amelia-nagoski-on-burnout-and-how-to-complete-the-stress-cycle/