03. Seeing Reality - Consultation Sources

Mike describes how we see Jesus in the marginalized when we go to them as he did. He restores our vision so that we can see reality clearly.

Transcript

This document is a direct transcript of an audio recording, and may contain transcription errors and other minor edits for the sake of clarity.

MIKE: . . . All right; I’d like to transition to talk 3 with a couple more news items:

“Groundbreaking Pew Research Study Finds Pews are Uncomfortable.” [Laughter.]

And, “Scholars Say ‘A Day Is Like a Thousand Years’ Actually a Reference to Church Staff Meetings.” [Laughter]. And some that I’ve led. [Mike and all laugh.]

All right. This is a talk about seeing reality. And I wanna start by showing you a painting that helped me see Christ in a new way.

So, you’ll find—on your tables, there are pictures of this painting; if you want, you can have one to keep. Or you can look at the painting up on the projector.

This is a painting by Aimé Morot, a French painter. He painted it in 1880, and it’s of “The Good Samaritan.”

At first, I liked this painting because it brought home to me what it took for the Good Samaritan to care for the man that he found by the side of the road. It’s gritty. Physical. Flesh on flesh.

I had always imagined the Good Samaritan taking the man and laying him across the donkey, like you see in those old western movies, with the dead body across the horse. And then he’d be free to just walk in the front, no problem. But here, he has to support his weight every step of the road.

Take a look at the Samaritan’s posture, the man standing there. Does it remind you of anything? [Pause; indiscernible response from audience.] Yeah, it’s the classic pose of Jesus carrying the cross.

Christ is the Good Samaritan. He comes upon us, beaten and left for dead, and he rescues us. He’s our savior.

And, Morot depicts him as a poor man. He has no sandals for his feet, no extra cloak to share. So he has to use his own. Jesus came as a poor man, to help a poor man. The gulf between him and us is not so very great!

[Pause]

Now, take a look at the man who was beaten and left for dead. What does his posture remind you of? [Indiscernible response from audience.] Yeah. Jesus, coming down from the cross!

That man, who was beaten, left naked by the side of the road? That man is Christ!

He made himself so low that we could help him. He takes the place of suffering and misery and humiliation, so as to draw out the best in us: our mercy and compassion and love. So that, despite our own pitiable state, there’s something that we can do for him. He ennobles us.

What a humble God!

That’s all for the painting.

The title of this talk is “Seeing Christ”—“Seeing Reality.” Seeing Christ.

And one major obstacle to seeing . . . is indifference. In the book Let Us Dream, Pope Francis describes a photo he saw that’s called just that: “Indifference.” It’s a picture of a lady leaving a restaurant in winter, well wrapped up against the cold: leather coat, hat, gloves, all the apparel of the well-to-do. And at the door of the restaurant is a woman . . . seated on a crate, poorly dressed, shivering in the street, holding out her hand to the lady, who looks away.

And, that’s what indifference does: it looks elsewhere. Other things to do, other people to help. It’s not my problem.

Jesus tells a powerful parable about indifference. It’s the story of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus at his door.

Lazarus was poor, hungry, covered in sores. Perhaps the rich man had helped Lazarus for a time. Long enough to learn his name at least. But how long should he be expected to continue? Month after month? Year after year? “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

And the rich man grows indifferent.

And, indifference hardens the heart over time into a bulletproof vest. We can open our vest to the concerns that we want to attend to. And the rich man chose to be concerned for his family and friends, perhaps even some of his servants, even his dogs. But he closed the bulletproof vest to everyone else, including Lazarus.

And over time, we develop “tunnel vision.” We only see what we decide to look at, and not anything on the peripheries. At some point, the rich man didn’t need the vest to protect his heart from Lazarus’ appeal, because he no longer even noticed him there. Lazarus had become one more of the gargoyles watching over his steps.

We need a great shock to overcome—to become aware of our blind hard-heartedness. And the rich man knew this, which is why he asked Abraham to send Lazarus back from the dead to warn his family. And, amazingly, Abraham said that even wouldn’t be enough . . . to convince them.

The COVID crisis is a shock to the system. It’s a “Noah” moment: God intervening on such a scale that the whole world stopped. But will it be enough of a shock? Will we take heed?

This crisis is an occasion for seeing, a time that lays bare the myth of self-sufficiency: “I have everything I need, enough laid up for many years.”

And, tunnel vision and self-sufficiency can affect us not just individually, but as a people. Perhaps we had the illusion that we could be a healthy community in a world that was sick. Perhaps we have neglected the Lazaruses that the Lord is placing at our doorstep.

Jesus rebukes everyone who conforms to the world, saying:

This people’s heart has grown callous; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise, they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, turn, and I would heal them.

So, how shall we respond?

We could follow the example of our blind brothers in the gospel who turn to Jesus for healing. Of one of them, it says,

Jesus spit on the ground, made some mud, and applied it to the man’s eyes. Then he told him, “Go, and wash in the Pool of Siloam” (which means “Sent”). So the man went, and washed, and came back seeing.

So, while the man was still blind, Jesus sent him. And going in obedience, he was healed.

Saul also was cured of his blindness by being sent. And he was sent to the very poor, marginalized community that he himself was persecuting. And it’s through their hands that God removed the scales from his eyes.

Jesus went to the poor and the marginalized, to places of sin and misery, of exclusion and suffering, illness and solitude, because they were places full of possibility. “Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.”

We have to trust our Lord’s strategy. “It’s not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” So he goes to the sick, the marginalized. And those who turn to him for healing from their blindness, he sends them there too.

And there, among the lonely and suffering, the cast off and forgotten, we get our sight! We see Christ!

Here are a few examples.

About 13 years ago, I joined Nick Holovaty and Rus Lyons on a hitch-hiking mission trip. And on day 10, we were taking a break in a McDonald’s, when a man, whom I’ll call Don, came up to us and started a conversation. He was Christian, and overjoyed to hear what we were doing. So he invited us home to stay the night with him.

He brought us to his trailer home, and he gave us what I think was the last of the food he had, to eat for our dinner. He made us feel right at home. He was a cement-truck driver, but work was very slow. There was—and, he was joyful, had a lot of faith; but he had suffered a lot.

Don was married, but his wife left him to live with another man. He told us that after several years, he became friends with a woman at his church, and they went out together one night. And then he put a stop to it. And he told himself, “The Bible says you can’t divorce. And if my wife ever decides to return, I wanna be able to welcome her.”

I see Christ in Don: Christ suffering and humiliated, waiting patiently. He’s a living example of Ephesians 5:

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to sanctify her, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word.

The next story is about a woman I’ll call Betty.

Several years ago, I became acquainted with a receptionist at a building that I visited regularly. We would talk for a minute or so whenever I signed in. She was in her sixties, always cheerful and kind. One day she told me that she couldn’t afford her apartment and so she was moving into one that was subsidized, and asked if I knew anyone who could help with the move.

So, one of the men’s groups in the area where she was agreed to come help on a weeknight, even though they’d never met her. And—you learn a lot when you move someone, and I learned that Betty was married; she had a husband who was from another country; it was his second marriage; he had adult kids; and he was very preoccupied trying to get them into America. So, he wasn’t around very much. He stopped in in the middle of the move, but he didn’t help, and left again.

I never once heard Betty say anything negative about him. In fact, she made excuses, covered over his offenses. From my brief interactions with her over the years, I never would have guessed that behind her smile and kindness there was so much suffering.

I see Christ in Betty: Christ suffering, humiliated, waiting patiently. She is a living witness to I Peter 3:

Wives, in the same way, submit yourselves to your husbands, so that even if they refuse to believe the word, they will be won over without words by the behavior of their wives, when they see your pure and reverent demeanor.

My next story is about Celina Tragesser.

She’s in the Servant Branch, and when she was a student going to the University of Minnesota, she would take the light rail from St. Paul to class. And it’s not always a safe place, so she took to wearing earbuds and keeping her eyes down, to not invite unwanted attention.

And one day while waiting at the train station, a woman with a very disheveled appearance, and her arm in a sling, came over to Celina. And rather than turn away, she took her earbuds out and greeted her. The woman wanted a favor. She asked, “Could you put my hair up in a ponytail? I’m going to court this morning, and I can’t put my hair up because of the sling.” Celina willingly obliged, and received a huge smile of gratitude.

Celina encountered Christ on that platform: disheveled, about to appear before the authorities. She helped him and comforted him in his hour of need.

As my last example, I want to show a four-minute clip from a talk: the commencement address by Jordan Peterson to Hillsdale College last Saturday. So if you can turn your chairs to see the screen. . . .

[Video clip begins playing.]

JORDAN PETERSON: . . . She was as damaged a person as you could hope to—

[Video clip resumes from beginning.]

I met a woman once in my clinical practice. Man, this was somethin’. She was as damaged a person as you could hope to contemplate. So, she looked like a street person; she’d come to this behavior therapy clinic that I worked in as a student, and. . . .

She was dressed like a street person, you know: she had had this old, ratty winter jacket on that was really dirty, and she stooped over. She wasn’t very tall to begin with. She stooped over, hunched over, and she approached everyone like this. [In the video clip, Peterson stoops, while shielding his eyes with his hand.] Which made people shy away from her, because it’s an odd method of approach.

But the reason she did that, was, she was really so timid and so humble, that it was if—as if anybody that she approached had a light that was emanating them—from them, too unbearable for her to behold!

So it wasn’t so much an oddity (although it was), as a—well, a preternatural humility. And, I thought she had come to the behavior clinic because she wanted help. She was an outpatient at a psychiatric hospital that I worked at. And she couldn’t communicate very well, partly from—because of her shyness, partly ‘cause her first language was French. Maybe she could communicate perfectly well in French, but I doubt it. She was not an intelligent person, technically speaking, you know. She was intellectually impaired, and probably in the bottom tenth percentile of the population. That’s a pretty rough place to exist, cognitively, you know. You’re barely literate at that point.

And her mother was a—was very ill, and was bedridden. And her mother had a boyfriend who was a violent alcoholic schizophrenic, who was always haranguing her about Satan and. . . . Like, man, she had a rough life. It was—she just didn’t have anything going for her. She wasn’t an attractive person physically, you know, and people shied away from her.

She just was the “downtrodden of the earth,” you know, in the realest sense. And that . . . bloody woman, you know! She actually came to that behavior therapy clinic. . . . [Peterson pauses to hold back tears.] She’d been an inpatient—and this was a rough place, man, ‘cause it was a hospital after deinstitutionalization. And there were tunnels connecting some of the wards to other wards because it was so cold—this was in Montreal—it was so cold in the winter, they’d built the hospital on these tunnels.

And—I took my brother there one day [Peterson chuckles ruefully], and it was like walking through Dante’s Inferno. I mean, if you were so psychiatrically impaired that you weren’t released in the 1980s, when deinstitutionalization was maybe at its peak, you were so damaged that there was just no possibility that you could function in the outside world. So, the people that were left were sort of the “most demolished of the most demolished.” And so just walking through there for my brother, who had no experience in such things, was traumatizing, you know.

And she had been in the inpatient ward for some time, and then was released. And she wanted to talk to the hospital administration, ‘cause she’d got out and she got this dog that she took care of and went for a walk [sic]. And she really liked this dog, and she took care of it, you know, and she walked with it. And she wanted to see if she could go find one of those un— inpatients who was worse off than her, . . . and take them for a walk every day with her dog.

You know, . . . it’s so funny, eh? You meet someone like that and they just have nothing. [In video, Peterson has tears in his eyes]. They have nothing in the world that you would recognize as any marker of success, or status, or ability, or—they’re outcast, and tortured. And then, nonetheless, you know, a woman in that . . . dismal state was able to rise above her own catastrophe, which was, like, manifold, and find someone worse off to try to serve.

You know, you don’t need many experiences like that to convince you that there’s things about the world that you truly don’t understand on the ethical front, you know?

[Video clip of Jordan Peterson ends here.]

MIKE: Jordan Peterson saw that, he experienced that, years and years ago! And he didn’t put it this way, but he saw the light of Christ shining in that humble woman. Suffering there.

The poor and the marginalized suffer a lot. And Christ is there, with them, suffering, crucified. And he sends us to be there too. Not riding in on a big white horse to fix things, but to share their cross . . . and come to our senses.

One of my hopes for the worldwide crisis that we’re living through is that we give up our tunnel vision and self-sufficiency, and come back into contact with reality.

There are so many real, flesh-and-blood brothers and sisters, people with names and faces, even in our community, who are deprived in ways that we have not been able to see, or listen to, or recognize, because we’ve been so focused on ourselves.

I hope we can recognize and be moved by the single brother waiting for an invitation to Lord’s Day. Or the widow wishing someone would say, “Come, sit with me,” when she walks into the community meeting.

Thanks to the crisis, some of these blindfolds are falling away, and we have a chance to see with new eyes, to let ourselves be moved, and to obey our Lord’s repeated command: “Feed my sheep. Feed my sheep. Feed my sheep.”

One of the most sinister parts of the last two years has been the isolation that many have endured. And this isolation has been going on for many years, but COVID made it worse, and revealed what a problem it’s been all along.

The isolation isn’t just physical; it’s spiritual, too. “No one has seen me. Are they even thinking of me? Out of sight, out of mind?”

And that’s why, when we make an effort to see one another, to see the marginalized, we also have to communicate to them that they’re seen.

And that’s why gestures are so important. Like Jesus, we need to draw close to one another. We need to embrace the marginalized. Give him a hug!

I heard a story of a woman who went up to a priest after a Catholic Mass and thanked him for that time when everyone shook hands, “ ‘cause it was the first time in a month that anyone has touched me.”

There are a lot of gestures that communicate to someone that they’re seen. Sometimes it’s as simple as looking someone in the eye when we’re talking to them. Sending a card, making a phone call. Both of those communicate, “I see you. I’m thinking of you.”

I want to end with one more story. I read it in a report that Jack Lynch wrote about the Shreveport branch, about his wife Teresa, and Teresa gave me permission to share it with you all.

Teresa was just at the women’s retreat, which the—they had with the southern branches. And she was in a hallway talking to some of the sisters from the New Orleans branch, when another sister from New Orleans passed her in the hall. This sister had cancer, and it had returned, and the prognosis was not good. As she passed Teresa in the middle of her conversation, she came over and gave Teresa a kiss. And continued out the door.

When Teresa stopped to think about what had happened, she realized that Kathy was probably—perhaps kissing her goodbye. And Teresa received a phrase from Scripture, “the weight of glory,” which comes from 2 Corinthians 4, verses 16–18, which says:

Therefore, we are not discouraged; rather, although our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this momentary light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to what is seen but to what is unseen; for what is seen is transitory, but what is unseen is eternal.

So, when we look at those who are poor, suffering, marginalized, we see the momentary affliction, the outer self wasting away. But that’s transitory! We have to learn to see the reality: Christ in them, the eternal weight of glory.

Amen.