Black-eyed Susan: Helena
James 1:2-4, 2 Cor. 12:6-10
August 13, 2017 - St. Paul’s UMC
Sometimes life gives us a black eye, but the Black-eyed Susan illustrates for us that beauty can radiate from darkness. The lesson of the black-eyed Susan...hold on to hope!
CALL TO WORSHIP
This morning as we gather for worship, I encourage you to sit back, take a deep breath, or two, and allow the music to wash over you. I encourage you to reflect: how is it with your soul? Or, more specifically, think of a dark time in your life. As you look back on that time, how was God with you in that darkness?
SERMON
I had a colleague a few years back who had gone through a bitter divorce. As a result, she refused to perform weddings and harbored much bitterness toward men...all men. A few short years later, I found myself going through a divorce. As it was all unfolding, I remember thinking one evening, amidst all the pain, darkness, and confusion, that I didn’t want to become a bitter hardened person. I didn’t want to be angry toward all men. But how do we prevent ourselves from getting to that place of anger and bitterness? How do we deal with what life throws at us in such a way that our hearts grow rather than shrivel up?
BLACK-EYED SUSAN
The black-eyed Susan speaks to us and gives us hope. This common field flower is all over the place. I know you’ve seen them. They have bright yellow daisy-like petals that unfold from a dark center. The colorful petals emanating from the dark center speak of beauty that emerges from pain, from the black eye.
Life gives each of us a black eye now and then. How we handle our black eyes matters. It will shape us. The question is, how? We can wallow in self-pity, get stuck in our pain; the negativity can fester and we become angry, bitter people. OR we can deal with the stuff life throws at us. Embrace the difficulty. Feel the pain. Express the anger, but move through it, holding onto hope, holding onto faith, trusting God. Then we will find we grow from the experience and that beauty unfolds from the darkness. The black-eyed Susan, with its dark center and bright petals, gives us hope that the darkness we experience can serve to incubate new growth, just as a cocoon serves as a dark place from which a butterfly emerges.
Thorn in the flesh
The apostle Paul knows what that is like to get a black eye and offers us words of wisdom in his second letter to the Corinthians.
From 2 CORINTHIANS 12:6-10 NRSV
…a thorn was given me in the flesh…Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me,9but the Lord said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for poweris made perfect in weakness.” …10Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.
There is lots of discussion in the commentaries and all kinds of theories about what this thorn was…but maybe it doesn’t matter. Whatever it was, it bothered Paul. It was sharp. It stabbed him. It was a source of pain that he preferred to eliminate. The variety of translations writes “I appealed to the Lord three times. Three different times I begged the Lord. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me.” We all have thorns in our side from time to time. Things that stab us, hurt us, become a source of pain for us. We want to get rid of them. Paul prayed, pleaded with God three times to remove it. But God did not. Instead, God assured Paul, “My grace is sufficient for you. My grace is all you need. Turn to me and you will discover that my power works best in weakness.”
Our culture teaches us to be self-sufficient, self-reliant. (And as a parent of two 20-something girls, believe me, I value self-sufficiency and independence and hope they find it soon!) However, God values something different. God values dependency. Dependency on him.Dependency on grace, especially when we feel weak and vulnerable in pain. And though God’s grace won’t take away the pain, it will help us overcome it. This letter reminds us to allow pain and darkness to lead us to depend on God more fully. God’s grace is sufficient.
So, what does this look like?
James 1:2-4
Another time life gave me a black eye, I was experiencing a significant ministry failure. I was questioning myself, my giftedness, my future. It was a dark period. I was trying to move forward with my life, but I wasn’t sure how. I felt defeated. I came across this verse on a spiritual retreat. “Consider it a sheer gift, friends, when tests and challenges come at you from all sides. You know that under pressure, your faith-life is forced out into the open and shows its true colors. So don’t try to get out of anything prematurely. Let it do its work so you become mature and well-developed, not deficient in any way.” That is James 1:2-4 in The Message. The part that spoke deep to my core was So don’t try to get out of anything prematurely. Let it do its work on you so you become mature. Yikes! I was praying to get out of my situation, and quickly! I did not like being in that place. It was dark and painful and uncomfortable. I was asking God to get me out! But maybe I was seeking the wrong thing. Maybe the better approach is not so much to escape, but to allow the experience to unfold into beauty. Maybe as we depend on the Spirit, good things can come out of even the most horrible situations.
Unfolding Beauty
And so, I allowed God to work in me, through my divorce. It was not easy and it took much intentionality, but many beautiful things emerged for me. Now, I am not saying the experience was beautiful. I wish it did not happen. But good things did unfold. For example, I learned that I can do stuff! I can fix a toilet—not just replace the flapper, but replace the guts and stop the leak into the wooden floor! (By the way, the instructions, and the helpful man at Home Depot, did not tell me I would need a turkey baster and a 5X12 quilting ruler to complete the task!) In that way my divorce was empowering. More significantly, it softened my heart. I have high expectations for myself. For years I kept up a great facade that everything was OK and I am handling it. But when my marriage fell apart, I had to admit that my expectations of perfection (planted deep in my soul through my 10+ years of gymnastic training) and the facade I had built were both tumbling down. I started peeking out from behind that facade, and instead of encountering the judgement I expected, I discovered people had great compassion. I feared being judged, and some did judge me, but more people cared for me, more people showered me with grace and compassion. In fact, I discovered that even God did not judge me. God still loved me just the same. That is beautiful. That is powerful. Bright yellow petals unfolding from the black eye.
The Spirit has a way of working in us, through other people, working through even difficult events, to bring about beauty, to help us grow, to shape our hearts to be more like Jesus. But it doesn’t happen naturally. With great intention and perseverance, I sought to not become bitter and angry. God’s grace is sufficient.
Henri Nouwen
Henri Nouwen writes, “There’s a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance. (Ecc. 3:4) But what I want to tell you is that these times are connected. Mourning and dancing are part of the same movement of grace. Somehow, in the midst of your mourning, the first steps of the dance take place. The cries that well up from your losses belong to the song of praise. ... Quite often, right in the midst of your crying, your smile comes through your tears. And while you are in mourning, you already are working on the choreography of your dance. Your tears of grief have softened your spirit and opened up the possibility to say ‘thanks.’ You can claim your unique journey as God’s way to mold your heart and bring you joy.” (Henri NouwenSpiritual Formation)
Strength in the Spirit
No matter what our experiences or how they came about, the Spirit invites us into the task of gathering the broken pieces. The Spirit mends them together with threads of grace, shaping them into a unique mosaic of beauty. Through the work of the Spirit, the black eye can open into beautiful petals. Just as a cocoon serves to incubate the transformation into a butterfly, so the Spirit can use dark times to transform us and bring forth new life. We trust in God that the holy darkness serves as a cocoon rather than a coffin. That is what allows the dark center to unfold in brilliant display of color.
CONCLUSION
Now, I have not matured in my faith enough to be grateful for dark times, or to count them as sheer gifts as James directs us, but I have learned that when I trust God in dark times, then like a butterfly, we can emerge freer, wiser, and more beautiful. And so next time life gives us a black eye, may the black-eyed Susan give us hope and remind us to we allow the Spirit to work in us, to work through our situation, so that one day beauty will unfold. For God’s grace IS sufficient.
May the darkness in your life serve as a cocoon rather than a coffin!