Show Notes
Genesis 25:19-34 | Psalm 119:105-112 | Romans 8:1-11 | Matthew 13:1-9,18-23
Chapters
- (00:00:02) - A Sense of Who Is My Brother
- (00:06:52) - The Parable of the Sower and Paul's Letters
- (00:18:12) - How to Love Yourself Completely
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] In the name of God, who is love. Amen.
[00:00:10] I have a brother named Mac.
[00:00:13] He's my only sibling. He's two years younger than I am. And if I wanted to give you a sense of who he is in his essence, I could do so in a variety of ways.
[00:00:27] I could describe him for you. I might start with a physical description. He and I look almost exactly alike.
[00:00:35] So much so that when he was visiting with his family last week and we were at a concert at the Village, he said at least four people came up to him saying, gosh, Travis, wait, wait, no, you're not Travis. And I expect they just thought he was like a more attractive version of me who was maybe using a little bit of a new skin and could grow a better beard.
[00:01:01] I can't grow any beard. Wish I could.
[00:01:05] I could describe his voice. Our voice is almost identical on the phone. We both have this odd amalgamated accent that's part Texas, part Georgia, part California, owing to the amount we moved around together as a child.
[00:01:21] And I could describe the way he moves through the world. I could give you description of his charact.
[00:01:28] He's an enneagram7. So he's incredibly adventurous, always up for the next exciting thing.
[00:01:36] He's incredibly loyal. He's a very devoted, caring, loving father and husband.
[00:01:44] He's also very curious. He's always got a growth mindset and is up for learning more.
[00:01:51] But if I want to flesh out a sense of who he is in a little bit more vividness for you, I might tell you stories about Mac.
[00:02:00] I might describe how he was as such a peculiar little kid, constantly cycling through different obsessions.
[00:02:10] First it was Ken Griffey Jr. And the Seattle Mariners. Then it was golf, which he played avidly. Then it was, somewhat perplexingly, Jason Priestley and Beverly Hills 90210 and perhaps to his embarrassment, the Little Mermaid, which I think had mostly to do with his obsession and crush on the mermaid, Ariel.
[00:02:36] He of course loves the band Phish, who He's seen about 100 times, about 50 times with yours truly. And he had this odd habit as a little boy of whenever we went to stay in a different hotel room on vacation, ripping the sheets and covers off one of the bed and making a little nest for himself in the bathtub.
[00:02:58] He'd always sleep in the bathtub.
[00:03:01] Or I could tell you about how the first New Year's after my mom died, when I put our family dog in my parents car and drove overnight from Houston, Texas to Atlanta, Georgia, where he was building a taco truck Taco truck business. When I woke up that first New Year's Day and found myself so overcome with grief that I couldn't stop crying or get up off the floor. How he picked me up, shoved me out the door with the instruction to go on a long run, and when I came back, found a raid on the floor, a number of photographs of him, me and my mom, and a big note that said, this is our life.
[00:03:59] It's difficult using language to give one another a sense of who or what something is in its true essence, in its deepest self. We can't ever penetrate the mystery of who or what something is entirely our minds or even our hearts, and especially not our words.
[00:04:25] So we do the best we can.
[00:04:27] And when it comes to the mysteries of our faith, of trying to figure out and puzzle through who God is and what it is to live in this world as humans, with our own complex accumulation of, of weirdness and idiosyncrasy, we can only get so far using language.
[00:04:54] And that's why I love the Bible.
[00:04:57] The Bible I always think of as a library of texts, not as a single book.
[00:05:05] It was written over a period of at least 1500 years by about 40 different authors, if not more. And I think of the Bible in as this record of human beings trying to understand and how to describe who or what that mystery of God and of our existence as human creatures actually evolves.
[00:05:28] It's like God's nature is this gem and we get all these different facets as we turn this sacred text and try to find different ways in.
[00:05:40] And the Bible, as this library of text contains all these different genres. We've got poems and songs and recorded histories and stories, even a couple plays and these sort of hallucinatory visions. And each of them is trying to give us a different way in that depending on our temperament and sensibility, or maybe just how, or maybe just depending on how we're doing that day, might resonate with to a different degree and give us one more glimpse of that mystery.
[00:06:14] And at its best, I don't think the Bible is trying to explain that mystery away or trying to give us a sense of closure around it, but it's trying to open our appreciation and capacity for awe, for wonder when we gaze into this mystery of God's being, which ultimately is love.
[00:06:37] And often, even on a Sunday morning, on a single Sunday morning, we're given a number of those facets, different ways in that might resonate and be helpful to us on any given day.
[00:06:52] This morning, if we look at these three Texts from our passages assigned in Scripture. We get three different pictures that are trying to describe or get at the. The mystery and the complexity of what it is to be a human being.
[00:07:08] First, we've got this story from Genesis, this story of two brothers, of Jacob and Esau, kind of locked in this tragic but also comic primal battle for their parents affection for God's favor, for power over one another. And when we read a story like that, and we can enter the experience of those characters and let their story resonate with our own story in some way that connects with our hearts, that connects emotionally.
[00:07:40] If we look at Paul's letters, we see someone trying to rationally explicate and work out for himself, using a human intellect, who God is and what it means to relate to this God. And as a human being.
[00:07:56] I always think of Paul as sort of like the first theologian proper in the Christian tradition. He's received all these stories about who Jesus was and he's had his own moment of conversion, this kind of mystical experience. And he's trying to explicate, using his rational mind, who Jesus was and what his ministry and death and resurrection meant for people who would follow in his footsteps.
[00:08:23] And if we look at the parable of Jesus, if we look at this parable of the sower we're given, we're in a different world entirely. We're in the world of poetry. We're in an artist's mind, an artist's heart. Jesus creates this scenario, this vision, a world we can enter where he's saying, this is what the kingdom of God is like. This is what it looks like, like to have your heart awakened and kindled by this reality of love. And it's a world that appeals to our imagination.
[00:08:58] Three different modes, three different ways of trying to explain the mystery of what it means to be human.
[00:09:07] Story, which connects with the heart, explication, and theology, which connects with the intellectual. And then art, poetry that connects to the imagination.
[00:09:20] And depending on where we are on any given day or what season of life we're in, one of these modes of getting at the mystery might have more appeal to us.
[00:09:31] I can remember when I was an adolescent in high school, around age 15 or 16, starting to take on a more intentional and deliberate and serious relation to my faith. Paul's letters really appealed to me because I had questions and I wanted clear answers. And when I was trying to navigate the world as a confused adolescent, it was really comforting to me to see this almost mathematical explication of how humans or how humans exist in the world.
[00:10:07] I would know what it felt like to have a vision of what my life should be and then to fall utterly short, to feel incapable of living up to that vision. So I'd read Paul's language about having this body of sin and also living into this vision of the new man.
[00:10:26] I could feel that tension between having the life of the flesh and then also being this new creation which, where I no longer live, but Christ in me.
[00:10:38] And I'd probably apply that sort of rational lens to this parable when I read it. I can remember reading this parable of the sower and like asking myself, well, which one am I?
[00:10:50] Which one am I? The good soil. Like I feel like I'm pretty good for the most part. I mean, I'm probably not like the richest of soil that would Yield like a 3x ray return on the crop. But like maybe I'm a 2x or maybe at least a 1x. I can be sort of a one to one exchange. But no, Travis, who are you kidding? You're probably like the rocky soil or the tangled rooted soil, the thorny soil where you're just a little too shallow, a little too distractible, a little too inclined to chase after the thousand shiny things out there rather than giving your life fully to Christ.
[00:11:28] When I read this parable now at the wizened age of 42, I think that what's helpful for me to see is that I'm in it in every single one of those conditions.
[00:11:45] There are times when I can be incredibly open and incredibly willing to let God's grace take root in me in a way that fulfills flourishes.
[00:11:55] And there's a time where I can be incredibly distracted, a little bit shallow, a little over eager. And I think that rather than trying to sanitize or purge some of those aspects of myself that I would think are less optimal or less than helpful or bad, actually spiritual growth comes from accepting and, and integrating and actually loving them all.
[00:12:25] Loving the fact that I'm a little bit of a blessed mess.
[00:12:32] I'm imperfect, I'm flawed.
[00:12:36] And part of that imperfection and part of those flaws make me who I am.
[00:12:42] I can look at a story like Jacob and Esau and, and see that I'm all the characters in the narrative. Just like in a dream where we're all the characters to some degree that show up from our psyche. There's a little bit of Esau in me. I can be the sort of like rugged individualist, out hunting in the wilderness, out preparing stew in this very self resilient way. And I can be the Jacob who's resourceful in his own way and clever, but also a little scared, a little bit of a mama's boy, a little bit envious, a little bit conniving.
[00:13:21] And I can sell my birthright for a bowl of lentils on one day and have the wherewithal and the resourcefulness to get what I need out of life in the other.
[00:13:33] I'm Esau. And I'm Jacob. And I'm also Sarah. And I'm also Abraham. And I'm Isaac. And I'm Rebecca. And I'm. And I am you, and you are me.
[00:13:45] I'm as much Trump as I am Biden. I'm as much Mick Jagger as I am Paul McCartney.
[00:13:52] We.
[00:13:53] There is an aspect of each of us in every other person.
[00:13:59] And when I find myself getting judgmental, wanting to define what's good and what's bad for me, the salvation comes. And opening up myself to the fact that I can recognize a little bit myself in every person, even those that I might be inclined to judge.
[00:14:21] I remember when I went to seminary, I did so less out of a conviction around wanting to be a priest than out of a desire. I mean, really, at that point, all I knew I wanted in life was to be a poet.
[00:14:36] And the world wasn't clamoring for the poems of W. Travis Helms yet. So I thought, well, I'm going to go and study something interesting, these theological questions for three years. And by the end of it, I will have written the next great American poetry collection. And it'll be published to wide acclaim. And after I win my Pulitzer, I won't really have to worry about much else. I can just sit around and write all day.
[00:15:01] And so when I got to the seminary campus, I found myself putting in the effort I needed to learn church history and theology and Bible, but spending as much time as I could with different poets who were teaching at the university downtown. And there was one poet in particular, rather a poetry critic named Harold Bloom, whom I got super close with. Harold was this brilliant sort of larger than life literary critic who published over 30 books and was in absolutely brilliant mind. And I took a course with him and then found out that he was looking for a teaching assistant. So I said, harold, I would love to be your teaching assistant. And he said, well, Travis, you know, you'd have to have a car to get me to and from class. I said, well, Harold, I would procure one.
[00:15:51] Which is what I did. I borrowed a friend's car and I would get him to class every single day. And part of my job as well involved just like spending time with him. And part of that included taking him on daily walks. He was about 82 years old and had to do a lot of physical therapy. And I remember one day walking down the sidewalk with him in New Haven, asking him a question about some poet's poem and him responding and saying, well, my son. Well, my son, I think, or rather I really should say we, shouldn't I?
[00:16:24] Because all of us aren't we a multiplicity of selves.
[00:16:30] Before any of the fraught conversation about pronoun usage or the politics of they them, Harold was putting his finger on something crucial about what it is to be human.
[00:16:45] Every single one of us is not a single monolithic self.
[00:16:50] We are a complex arrangement of selves, a constellation of selves.
[00:16:57] The Travis standing before you is probably like Travis version 18 or something like that.
[00:17:04] I've had all these different iterations, different seasons of life where I've learned a little something, something's clarified me, or I've had to address myself to some difficulty, and the way I responded helped form or shape my habits and temperament. But if I close my eyes and go inside, I see that there are all these different selves that can show up in various degrees of strength at different times.
[00:17:36] There's the two year old Travis who had to throw his pacifier away at a super early age, and this sort of narrative of trauma that I concoct around that. There's the Travis at age 13 who moved to a new school and was ostracized because he wore cowboy boots with shorts. There's the Travis who entered a fraternity and was so turned off by the misogyny and homophobia that he distanced himself from that fraternity and experienced all sorts of bullying as a result.
[00:18:05] We have all of these different iterations of ourselves, these versions of ourselves inside. And often, y', all, our way of managing that complexity is sort of like the way we read the Bible. We just want to like shove the unpleasant parts away.
[00:18:23] We want to quiet down or cut off or bind up the parts of us that don't fit the vision or the idea of who we think we are most deeply.
[00:18:35] But if you shove that stuff down too frequently, if you do it year after year, suppress those parts of yourselves that you think are less than savory, those parts aren't going to be too happy.
[00:18:50] They're going to come out sideways and they're going to create all sorts of damage for you and other people.
[00:18:58] And I think that just as we read the Bible as a way of increasing our sense of awe and wonder at the complexity of who God is, whom we can never wrap our minds around completely. So also the task of spiritual growth is learning how to love ourselves completely, loving each and every part of ourselves, no matter how difficult it might be be to do so.
[00:19:31] And I want to give us a chance to practice that this morning, if you're willing to.
[00:19:38] I invite you to close your eyes or to relax your gaze, if you prefer.
[00:19:46] You can put your hand on your heart if you want, or just get comfortable.
[00:19:55] Take a second to go inside and see if there's some past version of you who's begging for your attention, To see if maybe there's a scared little boy or little girl, if there's a frightened child in there somewhere, deep down, maybe a child who's working so hard to figure it out, who's working so hard to feel safe, to be good, to earn the love of his parents or other people around him or her.
[00:21:05] If they're a little kid somewhere deep down that feels so alone, we're so afraid, who thinks the world is a cold, dark, intimidating place.
[00:21:28] Can you see that child?
[00:21:33] Can you let them know that you see them?
[00:21:38] Maybe be a little curious of what they have to express, what they've been trying to tell you and need to tell you?
[00:21:48] And can you extend to them a little love?
[00:21:54] Let them know that it's okay that you're here for them.
[00:22:03] Thank them for having gotten you this far.
[00:22:11] Thank them for having done the best they could with what they had.
[00:22:19] Let them know you're here for them and you love them because you all are doing the best you can with what you have.
[00:22:37] And there's nothing any of you need to do to prove your goodness to earn acceptance, especially not to earn God's love, because God loves you exactly as you are in all your imperfection and complexity, in all your blessed mess.
[00:23:14] You can stay in that place if you'd like, or you can start to come back in the room.
[00:23:24] Our visiting chaplain this June was one of my best friends from Austin, Texas.
[00:23:33] He's a priest, and we have a habit of hearing each other's confessions every time we get together.
[00:23:40] And usually I've got, like, something that's eating at me, like a little thorn in my side where I'm like, if I could just get rid of that thing, like, then I'd be enough, then I'd be good, then I'd be worthy of God's love.
[00:23:56] And this time, when we made our confession, I kind of felt like I was maybe doing it wrong. I was like, I don't know, I could be a little more present to my kids.
[00:24:07] I could be a little more present to my spouse. But I don't feel that same sense of, like, this thing that's just like my impediment. And I don't know if I'm rationalizing or if I'm evading, but, like, that's all I've got.
[00:24:23] And he was like, it sounds like you're doing really good and I'm happy for you.
[00:24:31] And I think one of the big things that's changed for me since the time I last saw that friend is that I've engaged in this practice of trying to get to know and accept myself in that complexity and in my flawedness and my imperfection.
[00:24:53] What we just did is a version of sort of therapy of spiritual curiosity called internal family systems.
[00:25:02] And if you're curious about that, I'm not a pro. But there are pros in this town that are available to you, and they're available in pretty much every town. If you want to go deeper into that journey of getting to know yourself and of accepting yourself in all of your complexity and.
[00:25:25] And each and every day, you can also do this on your own.
[00:25:31] Spend a little time getting to know that part of yourself within those versions of yourself who might be asking for your attention.
[00:25:42] And you can speak to yourself with that tenderness and gentleness and bring that curiosity to that complex part of your heart.
[00:25:54] Because y', all, when it comes down to it, I don't know if we can really love one another very well until we love ourselves.
[00:26:01] I don't know if we can really accept each other radically until we accept ourselves in all of our gorgeous imperfection.
[00:26:13] When my brother was in town this past weekend, we did something really beautiful Sunday night, which I'm sure a lot of you did as well, is we went to go see the band Widespread Panic on top of Snow King.
[00:26:27] Jimmy was there and I bet a bunch of y' all were there too. And our crew was fantastic. It was my brother and his wife and some of my best friends that I grew up, up with in Atlanta, people I'd seen tons of Panic shows with. And Jimmy was part of the crew. It was like fantastic. So were the people who are campfire speakers this night. It was a rockin show. And when it ended, my wife and sister in law decided to go down the gondola and my brother and I threw on headlamps and trail running shoes and decided to hike down Josie's and have a little adventure. And as we got back behind the observatory, almost immediately, all of the overstimulation and cacophony of the concert subsided, and we were in utter silence beneath a sea of stars. And my brother said, can we just sit here for a minute?
[00:27:21] And we turned our headlamps off and indeed sat there for way more than a minute, probably like an hour talking and gazing up at the night sky. And. And at one point he said to me, this thing that he loves to say. It's kind of like his whole life's theology in a sentence. He said, bro, bro, do you know that there are more stars in the sky than there are grains of sand on the seashores?
[00:27:49] And I fact checked him on this.
[00:27:51] It's true. They're, like, many times over more stars in the sky than there are grains of sand on the seashore. And he said, I don't know why, but that just gives me such a deep sense of peace that there's way more going on out there than I could ever understand, that there's some divine mind at work that's put this whole thing together, and we're just like this little tiny part of it.
[00:28:21] And then after that, as we.
[00:28:23] And continued our walk, he said something sort of heartbreaking. He said, and, like, I do need to be better.
[00:28:30] I do need to be. I need to be, like, better as a. As a husband, as a father. And I said, bro, that's, like, beautiful that you have that, like, impulse. You, like, experience this awe, and then it makes you want to do something with your life. But maybe what you need to do is, like, just learn to love that part of you that has the desire to be better.
[00:28:51] Love the entire part, the whole self of you who has this desire to bring itself into some new vision and possibility of flourishing.
[00:29:04] When I read this parable of the Sower, what I kind of came away with this week is that, yeah, were these different types of soil, but also, y', all, we're the sower himself.
[00:29:19] We are the. We are called to be people who are dispensing the seeds, making grace and possibility available for one another.
[00:29:31] There are times, like, maybe on that hillside that I scattered a little grace my brother's way. And there are times, like, on the floor of his apartment, apartment 13 years ago, that he cast that grace my way.
[00:29:45] We're the sowers of the seeds, and we're the soil, and we're the seeds themselves.
[00:29:51] We're these little miraculous, curious encapsulations of grace and goodness that God is flinging everywhere.
[00:30:01] We can be these little conduits and mechanisms of grace and goodness.
[00:30:07] Sometimes without even realizing it.
[00:30:09] Sometimes, despite ourselves, God is still working through each and every one of us.
[00:30:19] So open yourself to the mystery, all. Don't try to explain it away.
[00:30:24] Just open yourselves in awe and wonder to the mystery that God is, that life is, and that each and every one of you are.
[00:30:34] And then love it.
[00:30:36] Love the mystery.
[00:30:38] Love yourselves as completely as you can.
[00:30:43] Because at the end of the day, as a philosopher once said, we're all just walking each other home.
[00:30:52] Amen.
