Playing Hurt

Hebrews 12:5-13

February 13, 2022 • Mount Pleasant UMC

Leading up to and during these Beijing Winter Olympics, I’ve received several emails from Voice of the Martyrs, a Christian organization fighting religious persecution around the world. VOM is reminding us to pray for believers in China. As the world is watching these games, persecution continues against the believers in China who aren’t part of the state-approved church. VOM reports that today in China, the online sale of Bibles is prohibited and that “the government has installed more than 170 million facial recognition cameras, many in or near churches, in an effort to identify those who attend worship services.” Many pastors, like Pastor Wang Yi, have been imprisoned for leading an unregistered church. Pastor Yi has been in prison for over 1,100 days, and his wife is under house arrest, prohibited from talking to or interacting with any church members. Pastor Yi loves his country, he says, but his first loyalty is to Jesus Christ, and that is a threat to the Chinese government (VOM email 1/23/22).

Such treatment is not new or unusual. China has a long record of religious persecution. According to some reports, there are somewhere around 100 million Chinese Christians who aren’t part of the state-approved church. In fact, so-called “unregistered” Christians now outnumber those who are part of official churches two to one. But it’s risky to be an “unregistered” Christian in China. Like those Jews who tried to be faithful when they were exiled from their homeland, they “face death all day long” for the sake of the Gospel (cf. Psalm 44:22; Romans 8:36). And yet the church continues to hold on and to grow. I remember a while back hearing an interview with a Chinese pastor who had spent a lot of time in prison, and when he was asked how Americans could help him and his church, he said, “We do not ask that the persecution would end; we ask for the strength to endure it.”

Now, that’s pretty humbling to those of us who are able to practice our faith without fear. We throw around the word “persecution” any time things don’t go our way, but we really don’t know the kind of suffering that those in the Chinese church (and elsewhere) experience. And yet, into each life comes times when things happen that leave us asking, “Why?” We’ve asked that question a lot over the last couple of years as life has been nothing like we expected it to be. A pandemic, a nation in turmoil, personal losses, maybe losing a job or losing a loved one—having to adjust when life just didn’t go the way we thought it would or should. We know, at least in our heads, that life is not easy, but when it impacts our hearts, when it changes our lives and knocks us off course, when it just isn’t easy to get out of bed—how do we respond? How should we respond? I don’t know specifically about you, but for me, when those things come, my temptation is to “sit this one out,” to go to the sidelines and wait, or give up or even quit altogether.

I’m not talking necessarily about physical injuries, though those certainly take their toll and have to be dealt with. But we know what to do with those (even if we don’t do it). We go to the doctor, get some medicine or schedule surgery or undergo tests or take therapy. But what do we do when the wounds can’t be seen? What do we do when we’re damaged inside, in our spirits, in the place only God sees? How do we keep on playing the game, even when we’re hurt?

Friends, it is no secret that the church in our day is wounded. Before the pandemic, pastors were leaving ministry at a rate of 250 per month due to conflict, burnout or moral failure. The pandemic has only added to that; the latest numbers from research firm The Barna Group says 38% of us have thought about quitting in the last year. Every year, about four thousand new churches are started, and that sounds good, until we consider that it’s also true that 3,700 churches close every year. Nearly 70% of United Methodist congregations report worship attendance that is either stagnant or declining (Schnase, Five Practices, pg. 128), and again, that was pre-pandemic. In the midst of the pandemic, we’re all seeing lower attendance. Our own Indiana Conference has not shown overall numerical growth for fifty years. I’ll never forget the Conference Statistician began his report this way: “Bishop, I have good news for you. We didn’t decline as much this year as last year.” When that is your good news, something’s broken. The church is wounded and is failing to do what Jesus called us to do. People are leaving the church (and Christ) at a sometimes alarming rate. The church is wounded, and we’re finding it difficult to believe that we can even stay in the race, let alone invite others to join us.

Add to that what this pandemic has done to individuals. Requests for counseling are at an all-time high, and calls to suicide hotlines have increased somewhere around 800% in the last two years. While we are hearing more about the need for good, quality mental health (which is a good thing), the need is overwhelming to those who are in the field. I spoke with a counselor a couple of months ago (one who was not my wife) and was told that every counselor they knew in the metro Indy area was booked three months out. That means if I’m having a crisis right now, the soonest I could get in to see a counselor is May. People are wounded and the caregivers can’t keep up. The church is wounded. People are wounded. Most days, most of us are playing hurt. What do we do with all this woundedness?

This morning, we’re continuing our slow walk through the first part of Hebrews 12 with the Olympics as a backdrop. As I’ve mentioned before, the New Testament often compares the Christian life to an athletic contest, and in particular, Hebrews offers wisdom for how we can live this faith and pursue “More Than Gold.” So far in this series, we’ve looked at the importance of remembering the witnesses and how we can remove any hindrances that get in our way. But this morning, I want to talk about this idea of playing hurt. How do we deal with our wounds? And the answer from Hebrews is this: we recover from injuries by actively pursuing healing.

That phrase “actively pursue” is very important to the healing process. Several years ago, I went in for some routine outpatient surgery, to remove a cyst from my hand. Unfortunately, I came out with more than I bargained for, because the surgeon nicked a tendon in my finger. There was an injury. Now, I could have stopped using my hand, excused myself from writing or typing because I was in pain, but that probably would have meant I’d lose some of the function in my hand. The only worthwhile course of action was to undergo therapy and treatment, to let an occupational therapist named Erin, whose job was to be mean and cause pain (I still remember her name because of that), work with me until I had most of my movement back. Similarly, after my most recent heart surgery a little over four years ago, I was prescribed cardiac rehabilitation. Now, insurance pays for 36 sessions. When those sessions were gone, I could have quit and just gone back to my old habits. A lot of people do that. But I chose to continue; I recently passed 500 sessions of rehab. (So, yes, you can tell people your pastor is in rehab.) One guy I work out with says he’s been doing it for over twenty years and that his doctor tells him he would not be alive today had he not kept it up. There are a lot of mornings, especially these winter mornings, when I would rather stay in bed than get up and go exercise, but because I know the good it does me, three days a week I drag myself over to the hospital and get on the treadmill.

Actively pursuing healing, Hebrews says, requires our active participation. It doesn’t just happen on its own. In fact, The Message rendition of verse 12 says, “Don’t sit around on your hands! No more dragging your feet!” Healing is painful, without a doubt, but it does us no good to simply sit on the sidelines. Bishop Tom Wright says, “There is no room for spiritual laziness…If something is going lame, don’t shrug your shoulders and say, ‘Oh well, I can’t do anything about it.’ Make sure you find healing” (Hebrews for Everyone, pg. 158). In other words: actively pursue!

In medicine, there is a whole specialization called “sports medicine,” which is aimed at helping athletes heal properly and quickly. I don’t know of any specialty called “church medicine,” but maybe it’s time someone invent that. Injuries in the area of faith seem to take longer to heal and don’t always heal properly. One of the most popular podcasts of the last year was “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill.” Over 12 episodes (and some bonus episodes as well), the podcast told the story of how a megachurch in Seattle rose quickly and fell apart overnight. But the real story being told in the podcast is the damage that had been done to untold number of people who had given so much to a movement they believed in. And then, suddenly, it was all over. Now, years later, they are still trying to heal from the experience. Spiritual wounds run deep and last long, largely because we don’t pay proper attention to them (cf. Mains 2004 sermon, “Recover from Injuries”). If there were to be specialists in “church medicine,” Hebrews 12 would be a good place to start, and the first thing this passage advises is “strengthen your feeble arms” (12:12). “Strengthen” means to elevate or, in this case, “to build anew.” Hebrews calls us to a new start and a new heart (Stedman, Hebrews, pg. 141). Sometimes, when we’ve been hurt, the hurt comsumes all our attention and all our energy Another translation says our hands “droop,” which is a good image, because when we’re in the middle of the situation, we’re often focused “down.” Our face droops, our shoulders droop, our whole body droops. We’re unable to do anything except obsess about our hurt or anger or bitterness or unforgiveness. But Hebrews calls us instead to “build anew.”

That’s not easy to do, especially when all we can see is the darkness, the pain that we’re going through. I remember a particularly difficult time in my life several years ago. I was sitting in my office, working away and trying to forget all the bad. At that time, my desk was right beside a window, and I will never forget somewhere around noon looking out the window and realizing the sun was out. Of course it had been out all morning, but my world was so dark that I couldn’t see it. Sometimes we need to find a way to change our perspective. “Don’t sit around on your hands,” The Message puts it. Lift your drooping hands. Strengthen your feeble arms, even though it’s hard.

Then, the writer says, “strengthen your…weak knees” (12:12). The image is to stand up and move around. When a person has a knee replaced, the doctors get them up as soon as possible, to strengthen the weak knees, to begin the road toward healing. Sometimes the patients don’t want to get up that quickly, but to stay down too long is disastrous. When we’ve been hurt, the best way to find healing for our own hurt is to “get up” and find a way to serve someone else. God has designed life that somehow service brings life. Andrea Mosconi knew this. For decades, he did the same thing every morning, six days a week. He would put on a coat and tie and go to the violin museum in Cremona, Italy. There he stood in front of cases of some of the most valuable musical instruments on the planet. One of them had been built by the master himself, Antonio Stradivari. All of them were over three hundred years old, and each day, Mosconi would gingerly and reverently remove each instrument from the case, play it for six or seven minutes, and then return it to the case. All day long, he would play music on these valuable relics because Mosconi and the museum curators knew that left untouched, untuned and unplayed, the instruments would begin to decay. Wood that is used and handled shows little wear, but as soon as it is discarded, it begins to fall apart. It was Mosconi’s job to make sure that didn’t happen (Lucado, How Happiness Happens, pg. 151).

A life withdrawn from service to others loses its meaning. Strengthen your weak knees; find a place of service and healing. If we stay focused only on our own need or pain, we will find ourselves hurt even more, maybe paralyzed. If we become content with just sitting around in our own version of a display case, hoping to avoid any pain, we will not survive. And I know it hurts to move around again. Believe me, after my heart surgery, I didn’t want to do much of anything. But as those athletes in Beijing know, gain only comes with pain. It’s a cliche because it’s true. Healing only comes when we move forward, when look beyond our own injury so that we can find a place where we can heal. When we seek someone else to serve, our own wounds begin to heal. Strengthen your weak knees.

The next thing Hebrews says is: “Make level paths for your feet” (12:13). Listen again to The Message: “Clear the path for long-distance runners so no one will trip and fall, so no one will step in a hole and sprain an ankle.” Runners can’t run on an uneven path. They need straight paths, cleared paths, in order to successfully run a race. If a runner chooses the wrong path, they could be seriously hurt, or, at the very least, end up in the wrong place. If we choose the wrong path for our spiritual lives, we’ll end up somewhere other than where we plan to be. Making straight paths is making sure the path is clear and that we’re on the right path. Sometimes that involves putting safeguards in place. Not every path is safe for every runner, and not every situation is safe for every Christian. I’ve known people who were abused, either by parents or by so-called friends, and in the midst of their healing, they’ve had to make a choice. Some people will tell them that they haven’t really forgiven if they don’t reconcile completely with that person, but unless there is genuine, Christ-centered change on both sides, it may not be safe for that person to be back in the same situation. Sometimes healing requires boundaries, clear markers as to what you will and will not do. It’s one thing to forgive someone; it’s another to let them keep abusing you. You see, for a physical injury to heal, doctors will give you limits: here is what you can do and here is what you can’t. For internal or spiritual injuries, boundaries are no less necessary, even though we have to set them ourselves. Make straight paths; make safe paths for your feet.

So if we’re going to recover from injuries, we need to (maybe force ourselves to) look beyond the injury itself. Not ignore it, but look beyond it. “Strengthen your feeble arms.” We also need to find a place, perhaps a place of service, where healing can take place. “Strengthen your…weak knees.” And we need to establish boundaries within which healing can take place. “Make level paths for your feet.” So what is the spiritual injury that keeps you on the sidelines, that keeps you out of the race? Can you identify the injury, put a name to it? Perhaps: anger, bitterness, lack of forgiveness, pride, grief, loneliness, self-abuse. Maybe we feel like God has failed us or the church has not been there for us. Whatever the hurt is, are you resisting any kind of healing because of pride? Sometimes we’re too proud to admit we’re hurt or too proud to admit we’ve hurt someone else by our words or actions. That can keep us from healing. Sometimes we even resist healing because we like the pain. It’s familiar. It’s a known. That sounds strange, but I remember one of my seminary professors, Dr. David Seamands, telling about a parishioner he had who refused to do what it took to get better. “If I give up my hurt and anger,” she said, “I won’t have anything left.” Think about what God told Isaiah about the people of Israel. God called Isaiah to preach, but told him in advance that no one would listen to him. God “said, ‘Go and tell this people: “Be ever hearing, but never understanding; be ever seeing, but never perceiving.’ Make the heart of this people calloused; make their ears dull and close their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed’” (Isaiah 6:9-10). The people liked their sin and their brokenness, and sometimes we do too. We like the pain, or at least we’ve become comfortable with it. We know what it looks like. We know how to be angry; it’s much harder to be forgiving. We know how to be adversaries; it’s much harder to be agents of healing. We know how to feel left out; it’s much harder to risk getting involved. So identify the injury.

Then decide on a path toward healing. I don’t want anyone to hear me saying this morning that this is easy. It’s not. Healing takes time, and very often healing requires help. So, what will it take to get beyond the injury, the hurt? How long will it take? Do you need to go to someone and talk things through? Do you need to find someone to serve? Do you need to set some healthy boundaries? Do you need a small group to help you get through? There are a lot of options, even right here in this place. This evening, there’s a new peer support group meeting that’s aimed at helping people through grief recovery. It’s not a counseling group; it’s a group of people who will listen to each other’s stories, ask questions and help each other through. Tiffany Scammihorn is facilitating it, and you don’t have to do anything but show up this evening, in room 215 downstairs, at 5:30 p.m. So if grief is your hurt, by all means, seek out this opportunity for help and to allow others to come alongside. There’s also Celebrate Recovery; you hear us talk often about their ministry to people who have hurts, hang-ups and habits—which, as they say, is pretty much all of us! For some of you, it might be an addiction that is your hurt, your wound, and if so, Celebrate is more than able to help you through the recovery process. But Celebrate is not just for addictions; there are lots of things that wound us, that trip us up, and those Biblical principles can help you through that too. Most of all, Celebrate provides a supporting and nurturing community to walk with you and help you find healing.

Another way to pursue healing is through our prayer groups. There are two of them currently meeting, and they not only pray for our church and our world, they pray for the needs of the group and the needs of our church family. They meet over Zoom on Thursday evenings, especially for those who don’t yet feel like they want to be in a group setting, and they meet down the hall here in the prayer chapel on Saturday mornings. As I’ve said several times this year, prayer is not the only thing we do as Christians, but it ought to be the first thing. Jesus prayed for people to be healed from their hurts and their wounds, and so can we.

One other thing: I know the pandemic has made gathering together in larger groups difficult. I also know we’re at the point in all of this where some people are ready to just be done with all the virus talk and others are still very cautious about it. Can we at least recognize where each other is and have patience with each other? Even though large groups have been a challenge, we’ve been able to gather in smaller home groups for fellowship, support and connections, and in many of those settings, whether that’s in a LifeGroup or some other group, we find healing just because we have people who love us no matter what. I know that’s been true in our group, and it’s also even been true in some of the newer groups that started during Advent. And do you know what? It’s not too late to become part of a group. I know it’s hard to feel connected to people in a church this size; I get it. You can’t possibly know everyone, but you can get connected to a small group of people who do life together. If you’re not currently in a small group of some sort but would like to be, it’s easy to do so. You can go to our website, mtpchurch.net, click on “Small Groups” there at the top and then on that next page there is a button that says “Small Group Interest Form.” Fill that out and an email goes directly to our small group coordinator. She will get back with you soon after that. It’s simple, right? Honestly, we’ve tried to take every excuse away from anyone who says they want to find connection, but you still have to make the first move. Maybe, for you, healing will come through a group that does life together.

The question I want you to ask yourself is this one: do I want to be healed? I think about the man who was laying by the pool of Bethesda in John 5. He’s been there, we’re told, waiting for healing for 38 years, and then Jesus shows up. Jesus asks him this question: “Do you want to get well?” And then the man begins to make all sorts of excuses for why he can’t be healed. What he’s really saying is, “No, Jesus, I don’t want to get well. I’m too comfortable griping about being sick to take time to get well.” But Jesus won’t put up with that. He commands the man, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk” (cf. John 5:1-9). So the question comes to us: do you want to get well? Because that’s the goal. Hebrews says we do these things “so that the lame may not be disabled, but rather healed” (12:13). For a while, we may have to play hurt, like some of those athletes in Beijing have had to do, even as we pursue healing. But even if we play hurt, the goal is to stay in the game, stay in the race. Healing comes as we continue to pursue the goal.

Hebrews 12 is really talking about one thing: becoming more like Christ. That is the goal. Everything in this race is about our growth in his grace, our transformation into his likeness. You read the Gospels and it’s easy to see how Jesus was always being talked about, being lied about, being abused verbally, being wrongly accused, and yet he never let that distract him from his mission. Even (and maybe especially) at the end, he was clear and focused on one thing: bringing glory to his Father. He played hurt. He ran the race. And so must we. When the pain is great, remember Jesus, who (we’re told) humbled himself and was obedient, even when it meant death on a cross—and because of that, God the Father exalted him above everything else. Remember Jesus; he will give us the strength to endure whatever comes. Fix your eyes on Jesus (cf. 12:2), for he is our focus, our goal, our guide, our calling. He is the gold we’re pursuing, and he is the one from whom all true healing comes. Let’s pray.