Rev. Kevin Pleas

Psalm 139:1-12

August 19, 2007

O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely. You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it. Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast. If I say, "Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night," even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.

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I've been leading Adventure Camps for a long time now, and I've managed to collect a good number stories about them. One year when I was serving my church in Illinois I took 20 people in two vans out to the Colorado Rockies for ten days. We did the same kinds of things I've done with my groups here; rock climbing, back packing and so on. Our hike up Mount Harvard that year still stands as my own personal elevation record: somewhere around 13,500 feet. It was a fantastic trip. As much as I love the Presidential Range in New Hampshire, exploring the Collegiate Peaks region north of Salida was one of the all-time great experiences of my life. Given a chance, I'd go back in a heartbeat.

This particular trip though, almost ran aground before it began. The whole group had gathered at my church in Geneseo. We planned to get a good night's sleep there before leaving early in the morning for what was to be a nineteen hour drive to Denver. Good night's sleep. Fat chance. By the time midnight rolled around, everyone was still wide awake. A couple of the kids pulled me aside and asked why we couldn't just get on the road. We decided we might as well, loaded up the vans and took off.

We hadn't gone more than about thirty miles when the van in front of me began smoking around the wheels. I pulled up beside them, signaled them to stop, and we both pulled off in a rest area. We soon discovered that the driver, my co-leader, had forgotten to release the parking break. By then, the brakes had become so overheated that they had locked onto the rear wheels and wouldn't let go. Fortunately, there were a couple of mechanically inclined older boys in our group. They climbed under the van, banged around awhile and managed to fix the problem, which put us right back on the road to Adventure.

What didn't occur to me until much later is that the whole notion of driving with the brakes on is a wonderful image for something we see in people all the time: resistance. Brakes are designed to offer resistance to a car's forward or backward motion. Parking brakes are designed to prevent motion altogether. But clearly, they don't always work the way they're supposed to. On that first night of our Colorado trip, even with the parking break set we managed to get all the way from Geneseo to the other side of Davenport, Iowa. I'm not sure we would have gotten much further, but the point is we shouldn't have been able to go anywhere at all. Not the case. In my experience, most vehicles can be driven with the brakes on. It's not a good idea. It slows you down, wastes gas, creates heat and wears out the brakes. Nonetheless, it is possible, which is what makes it such a good metaphor. People can be said to be "driving with the brakes on" anytime we have two things in our lives pulling in opposite directions that are working against each other. Resistance, humanly speaking, slows us down, wastes energy, creates friction, and if we let it go on long enough, it will wear us out.

Those of you who are old Star Trek fans will probably remember the Borg. The Borg were an alien race of machines introduced in the Next Generation series. They were enemies of the Universe. Their whole mission was to seek out new life new races and life forms and assimilate them. Every species they encountered became part of the "Borg Collective," and whenever one of the Borg appeared on screen it would say "You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile." Of course, with Jean-Luc Picard at the helm and the crew of the Starship Enterprise always riding to the rescue they proved over and over again that resisting the Borg was not futile at all. There are times though, when resistance is futile. It all depends on what we're resisting.

For instance, lots of people get into resistance at the idea of losing weight. On the one hand we may want to look good in a swimsuit and we may know that a few pounds off is always good for the heart. On the other hand, we don't really like to exercise and going without French Fries and Ice Cream is cruel and unusual. Obviously, there's a good side and a bad side to dieting. And just like those old cartoon characters with the good angel on one shoulder and the bad angel on the other, we get caught in the middle of the arguments in our heads between what we "should" do and what we "want" to do. The more we try to force ourselves to do "the right thing," the more resistance and friction we bring into our lives. We're driving with the brakes on.

Maybe you have a project that you've been meaning to get to for a long time. I've been trying to talk myself into cleaning out the woods around our house practically ever since I moved here. Those of you who've been to the house know we have woods 360 degrees around the house and before we moved in I don't think anyone had touched them for about fifteen years. There is a lot of dead and down wood around our house. Now, I know this is a project I ought to get after, but I don't really want to do it. I've taken a couple of half hearted stabs at it, but getting the whole project done just feels overwhelming. So I let it go. But then again, I don't really let it go. I look out at the woods, several times a day. And practically every time I do I start thinking all over again about how I really out to get my lazy backside out there. The more I think about it the more I don't want to, and the more I don't want to the more I think about it. And bouncing back and forth begins to get in the way of other things, like a good night's sleep. What do you know? I'm driving with the brakes on. But, don't let it bother you. Earlier this summer Pam and I finally hired someone else to do it. Thank goodness. Now I can go back to obsessing about the rest of my life.

If you're familiar with Alcoholics Anonymous you may know they have a saying that they uses for times such as these. It's a nice, short little saying that says so much. "That which we resist, persists." Does any of this sound familiar? It ought to. Most everyone I know has got some kind of resistance feedback loop going on in their lives. We get bound up it all kinds of "shoulds" and "oughts" and "I don't want tos." This inner conflict is where much of our tension and stress and frustration and ultimately ill-health comes from. Resistance may be futile, but we do it anyway.

There's a great little book by Byron Katie that Pam has been sharing with me lately. It's called "Loving What Is." The book is about learning to make peace with ourselves, and learning to make peace with reality, with "the things we can't change," in the words of the old serenity prayer. Katie talks about waking up to reality in Barstow, California.

After I woke up to reality in 1986, people often referred to me as the woman who made friends with the wind. Barstow is a desert town where the wind blows a lot of the time, and everyone hated it; people even moved from there because they couldn't stand the wind. The reason I made friends with the wind - with reality - is that I discovered I didn't have a choice. I realized that it's quite insane to oppose it. When I argue with reality, I lose - but only 100 percent of the time. How do I know that the wind should blow? It's blowing!

This, my friends, is a brilliant insight. You know what? Truthfully, we don't like reality all that much. Give any one of us half a dozen minutes and we could think of a hundred ways that reality could be improved upon. We would change the weather, the government, injustice, disease, global warming, the people we're related to and the shape of our bodies. We would heal the hearts and minds of the wounded, we would pay back all the people who offended us or cut us off in traffic or refused to accept our personal checks. We would finally get the job, or the car or the person of our dreams. Any one of us could come up with a long list of ways to improve upon reality without a moment's hesitation.

Why do you think that is? Well, I think it's because we spend so much time thinking about it already. We know the way the world ought to be because we've spent years running all these various improvements through our minds. But while we're off living in our fantasies about how the world ought to be, the world as it is just keeps chugging along in blissful ignorance. And that can be very frustrating. One day last spring, as I was once again thinking about how I ought to clean out the woods around our house, all of a sudden it hit me. In the last five years, I had spent a very significant amount of time and energy thinking about this, and I had nothing to show for it, apart from a cramp in my brain. All that energy spent thinking and worrying, all that time urging and arguing, begging, bargaining and criticizing myself had somehow failed to pull one single dead branch out of the woods. I had spent a good part of the last five years driving with the brakes on. And this is only one of many possible examples. When all that dawned on me, that's when I decided to hire someone else to do it.

Amazing isn't it? The truth is, we don't like reality all that much. We much prefer our imagined version of reality. What we really want is to impose our improvements on the world and on those around us who don't do things the way we think they ought to. But if all we ever do is ruminate about it, nothing in the real world ever actually changes apart from the gradual disintegration of our peace of mind. We so often don't want things to be the way they are, and so we resist, and become frustrated and carry our frustration around in our bodies until we make ourselves sick.

I've always liked the psalm I asked Nancy to read to you this morning. Personally, I like the notion that God is everywhere, in all things, in all circumstances. Thinking about God that way, what we realize is that God is another name for reality. God is the way things really are. God is both the universe and our own lives as they truly exist. And as the psalmist rightly pointed out, if this is the true nature of God, then God is inescapable "in reality," which means that if we are intent on escaping from God, the only way to do it is to go off into "un-reality." We can only escape God by running off into our illusions and fantasies of how things ought to be. Byron Katie is absolutely right when she says that it is quite literally insane to oppose reality. Losing touch with reality is insanity by definition. It is the ultimate in futile resistance, but we do it all the time.

So what's the solution? The solution is to face reality. The solution is to learn to accept and appreciate reality for what it is and not for what we would have it be. When we face reality we are facing God. The two terms might as well be interchangeable. When we rise up in awareness, out of the thoughts we have that endlessly circulate through our minds into an awareness of what is actually going on around us, we are facing God. And facing God is the same thing as facing in the direction of our healing. Facing God is always the direction our healing lies in. For the sake of our souls, we need to find ways to discharge the pointless energy of resistance that builds up in our minds. I find that for me what works best is prayer and meditation. But however you do it, facing God, being with God in reality, is a wonderful way to draw ourselves out of the un-realities that cause us to drive with the brakes on.

I'd like to close with a wonderful little story I came across this week. It seems that a man hired a carpenter to help him restore an old farmhouse. The carpenter had just finished a rough first day on the job. A flat tire made him lose an hour of work, his electric saw quit and now his ancient pickup truck refused to start. While his employer drove him home, he sat in stony silence. On arriving home, he invited his new boss in to meet his family. As they walked toward the front door, the carpenter paused briefly at a small tree, touching the tips of the branches with both hands. When opening the door he underwent an amazing transformation. His tanned face was wreathed in smiles and he hugged his two small children and gave his wife a kiss. Afterward, he walked his employer back out to the car. They passed the tree and curiosity got the better of his boss. He asked the carpenter about what he had seen him do earlier. "Oh," the carpenter replied, "that's my trouble tree. I know I can't help having troubles on the job, but one thing for sure, troubles don't belong in the house with my wife and children. So I just hang them up on the tree every night when I come home. Then in the morning I pick them up again. Funny thing is though," he smiled, "when I come out in the morning to pick 'em up, there aren't nearly as many as I remember hanging up the night before."

Isn't that a beautiful story? What a great way to face reality, by recognizing that the troubles and frustrations we carry around have an impact on our lives, and that we need to be aware of and careful about how we deal with them. Maybe we need to find a trouble tree of our own. Maybe we could lay all our trials and tribulations before the altar of God, and realize that we don't have to carry them all by ourselves. Maybe we could learn to recognize when we're driving with the brakes on, so that all that friction and heat and wear and tear doesn't keep us from living in the beauty, and the glory, and the grace, of the reality of God.

Amen.