Radical Acceptance and the Path the Freedom
Acts 16: 16 - 34
16 One day, when we were on the way to the place for prayer, we met a slave woman. She had a spirit that enabled her to predict the future. She made a lot of money for her owners through fortune-telling. 17 She began following Paul and us, shouting, “These people are servants of the Most High God! They are proclaiming a way of salvation to you!” 18 She did this for many days. This annoyed Paul so much that he finally turned and said to the spirit, “In the name of Jesus Christ, I command you to leave her!” It left her at that very moment.
19 Her owners realized that their hope for making money was gone. They grabbed Paul and Silas and dragged them before the officials in the city center. 20 When her owners approached the legal authorities, they said, “These people are causing an uproar in our city. They are Jews 21 who promote customs that we Romans can’t accept or practice.” 22 The crowd joined in the attacks against Paul and Silas, so the authorities ordered that they be stripped of their clothes and beaten with a rod. 23 When Paul and Silas had been severely beaten, the authorities threw them into prison and ordered the jailer to secure them with great care. 24 When he received these instructions, he threw them into the innermost cell and secured their feet in stocks.
25 Around midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners were listening to them. 26 All at once there was such a violent earthquake that it shook the prison’s foundations. The doors flew open and everyone’s chains came loose. 27 When the jailer awoke and saw the open doors of the prison, he thought the prisoners had escaped, so he drew his sword and was about to kill himself. 28 But Paul shouted loudly, “Don’t harm yourself! We’re all here!”
29 The jailer called for some lights, rushed in, and fell trembling before Paul and Silas. 30 He led them outside and asked, “Honorable masters, what must I do to be rescued?”31 They replied, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved—you and your entire household.” 32 They spoke the Lord’s word to him and everyone else in his house. 33 Right then, in the middle of the night, the jailer welcomed them and washed their wounds. He and everyone in his household were immediately baptized. 34 He brought them into his home and gave them a meal. He was overjoyed because he and everyone in his household had come to believe in God.
Preached Sunday, May 29, 2022 at Decatur First United Methodist Church
From the cowardice that dares not face new truth,
From the laziness that is contented with half truth,
From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth, good Lord, deliver us. Amen.
When it comes to preaching, I value authenticity. I try never to preach from someone else’s experiences. It’s unusual for me to share stories that aren’t from my own life. So, in order to remain authentic, I need you to know that I’ve never been in jail. Yet.
In fact, there’s very little of this story from the New Testament book of Acts that mirrors any of my life experience. I’ve never been able to get evil to obey my commands, as Paul does here, although I’ve often wished that I could. I’ve never been attacked by an angry mob. I’ve never been accused of fake charges, seasoned with racism. I’ve never been part of an escape that originated with an earthquake. And I’ve never brought an entire household to faith in God overnight.
In spite of all of this, when I read this text, I see myself in it. I’ve never been in jail, but I’ve felt irreversibly stuck. I’ve never had my feet bound in stocks, but I’ve felt unable to move, unable to make a good decision, unable to change. I’ve never spent midnight in the innermost prison cell. But, I have been awake in the night, unable to sleep, feeling utterly powerless and defeated. I have never been trapped in a literal way by walls and locked doors, but I’ve been trapped by systems and structures that are too powerful for me to change, and even more often I’ve been trapped by myself - my own ego, my inability to stay present, and my unwillingness to learn and grow.
I thought for several days last week about what story to tell in this sermon. As I said before, I try to tell my own stories, and there are a lot of them about being stuck. There’s the one where I got stuck trying to navigate my career within our church’s systems and structure. There’s the one where I got stuck trying to navigate my family’s inability to succeed at virtual learning. There’s a lot of them. None of them are especially flattering. Trapped people do undignified things.
I did some of those undignified things this week. On Tuesday, when the reality of gun violence in America became too real to ignore, again. I did a quick scan of the news to find out the basics, and then I shut down. It is too painful for me to face head-on - our inability as a country to address this epidemic. It’s too scary for me to imagine it happening closer to home. And the empathy I feel toward those who experience it is almost unbearable. So I shift into a mode that my therapist would label as “distress tolerance.” In the absence of a solution to a problem that causes me pain, I learn how to tolerate the distress.
There are healthy ways to do this, and unhealthy ways to do this. I use a combination of both. I do some yoga stretches to keep from tensing all my muscles all the time, but I also eat my feelings in the form of pork rinds and pimento cheese. I go for a walk and try to practice breathing and mindfulness, but I also practice mindlessness, zoning out to Avengers movies that I’ve already seen several times. Distress tolerance gets me through days like Tuesday, but it doesn’t do anything to change days like Tuesday.
When I was in my 20’s I lived in the Twin Cities for a couple of years. I have a lot of love for Saint Paul and Minneapolis. While I lived there, I had the chance to go on a ride along with a Saint Paul Police Officer. I spent eight hours overnight riding with him, learning about his job and the extraordinary way he was trained to keep the peace. I remember every interaction we had that night, and one of them will probably never leave me. As we were driving, the officer noticed a car with expired tags and turned on his lights & siren. It was an older car, not in great shape. I didn’t notice who was driving it at first, but I have often wondered if the officer did, and if that had any impact on his decision to check the tags. Would he have checked my tags, if it was me, driving my minivan? I genuinely don’t know. Maybe he would have.
The car pulled over. We got out of our police car and stepped to the driver's window, and that's when I saw that the driver was a middle aged black woman, very thin, and quite agitated. She just kept saying “I didn’t do nothing wrong. I didn’t do nothing wrong.” She handed the officer her drivers license, which he then looked up using the computer in the police car. I didn’t see what he saw on the computer screen, but the next thing that happened was that he called for backup, and they searched her car. In the back seat, tucked between where the seat meets the back rest, they found the tiniest little wad of steel wool, and the tiniest little bag of white powder.
And that was it. She became increasingly distraught and agitated as she was handcuffed and put in the back of the police car, but as she weighed no more than 95 pounds, there was no question of the officer’s ability to restrain her. She was not a threat to us, and as we drove back to the station to process her arrest, I had to wonder if she was a threat to anyone, really. It seemed like her main crime was being an addict, which is a medical condition, but more importantly, she was extremely unlucky. If she had run into a social worker or a nurse, she might have gone to treatment. If she had run into a good friend she might have gone to an NA meeting. But she ran into us, and the rest of her life would be more difficult because of that.
That was in 1998. It was not until 2020 that I would begin to process it. When George Floyd was murdered by a police office in Minneapolis, I could not look away. It happened in a place that I know and love, I guess, and I can imagine being on a ride along on those streets as it unfolded. There have been a lot of unarmed black folks killed by police officers since 1998, but for all of those that I knew about, I could tolerate it. For every one that made headlines, I’d get a sick feeling in my stomach, and a foggy headed feeling of knowing that something is not right, it’s absolutely wrong, AND I have no power to change it, so I manage my discomfort. Every one of those deaths - Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Sandra Bland…. Too many times, I shifted into distress tolerance mode. It was painful for me, so I managed the pain, until it went away. But when George Floyd was murdered, I don’t know, distress tolerence didn’t work. Or maybe I just got tired of tolerating it.
So, I did what a lot of white women did - I started a book club. I know. I know. But, in all honesty, I didn’t know what else to do. I had to stop managing my distress and needed to understand what was going on. And while I have friends, neighbors, and coworkers who are black, it didn’t seem fair to say, “Can you please explain white supremacy to me.” Educating myself seemed like the only place to start. And because I’m a slow reader, and I was afraid I’d quit when it got difficult, I gathered some people to read with me.
I read about the contemporary experience of a black woman, in Austin Channing Brown’s I’m still Here. I read about the life experience of a black man weaved together with the history of civil rights in Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Anti-Racist. I read about the history of white supremacy in the church in Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise. And I read White Fragility, where a white woman trained in Anti-racism work articulated exactly how my own guilt and fear had kept me stuck, paralyzed really, from doing any kind of anti-racist work myself.
And as I read, I was set free. It turns out that I wasn’t so much overwhelmed, as I was afraid of being overwhelmed. I wasn’t so much guilty and embarrassed, as I was afraid of being found guilty and feeling embarrassed. And the more I read, the less afraid I was of being afraid. The systemic issues of white supremacy are still bigger than I am, but the racism that happens right in front of me, and inside of me, is not. I know it when I see it, and I am not afraid of being uncomfortable in order to stand up to it.
No one I know wants to be racist. And I wanted SO MUCH not to be racist, that I couldn’t face the reality of racism at all. And if I could not face it, I could not change it. Through these gifted writers I was able to accept the reality of America’s history of white supremacy. I accept that I benefit from it, and that it continues to harm black Americans today. In therapy we call this Radical Acceptance. To deny reality is to invite suffering, and through radical acceptance I found freedom. Feels good, ya’ll.
The Apostle Paul probably didn’t have a therapist. He needed one, to be sure. Even without therapy, Paul was pretty good at radical acceptance. Here’s an example of what I mean, this is from 2nd Corinthians, Paul Says, “I was given a thorn in my body… I pleaded with the Lord three times for it to leave me alone. He said to me, “My grace is enough for you, because power is made perfect in weakness.” So I’ll gladly spend my time bragging about my weaknesses so that Christ’s power can rest on me. Therefore, I’m all right with weaknesses, insults, disasters, harassments, and stressful situations for the sake of Christ, because when I’m weak, then I’m strong.”
Radical Acceptance. Sometimes it comes instantly, but more often it’s a journey like this - I have this problem. Wishing and hoping has not made it go away. Praying has not made it go away. Ignoring has not made it go away. God, help me change the way I feel about it. Help me do the work, to experience this pain in a way that is redemptive and leads to transformation.
I’d like to be more like Paul and Silas. They are bound, but they aren’t stuck. They were praying and singing, and I think I know why. They were already free, even before the earthquake broke their bonds. Paul had already embraced his weakness and the reality that life is deeply and unpredictably painful. He doesn't need protecting from what’s real, so he’s free to be real and to live into whatever is next with God, so he prays and he sings, in jail.
I have realized this week that I am as stuck about gun violence as I was about racism, and I’m ready to not be stuck any more. I hear things that make sense to me, like, “It’s not just about guns, it’s about mental illness.” And I also hear, “This doesn’t happen in countries with gun restrictions.” I hear “the powerful gun lobby is unstoppable” and I also hear “there’s bipartisan background check legislation in the senate right now.” That’s about all I hear before I start scrolling the target app on my phone, making a shopping list for vacation - distress tolerance. I’m good at it.
But I’m ready to be good for something else now, so, as is my custom, I’ve ordered some books*. You’re invited to read with me, if you’d like. I’ll need accountability and support. This one is going to be harder. I said earlier, “no one I know wants to be racist.” It’s not that clear cut when it comes to guns. And it’s harder not to wade into partisan politics, which I do not enjoy at all. But I’m ready to change the way I feel about it. I’m ready to pray and sing, even in prison.
What about you? Where are you stuck? What’s the part of your life that is too painful to look at, so you’ve been managing the discomfort? And what would it take for you to radically accept the reality of that situation? Even if you cannot fix it, you can change the way you feel about it, and there is freedom in that. I like what theologian Kate Bowler shared on instagram this week - Blessed are we when we let reality in, though our bodies shutter. I assume I’ve got some shuttering coming my way, but I’d rather be blessed than afraid. Amen.
* I ended up reading and discussing with a group The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic. I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s brutally informative and practically empowering, both for individuals and as a society.
