by Sherry Cothran | Mar 3, 2014 | faith, religion, spirituality
Official website: www.sherrycothran.com
Walking the dog this morning in a neighborhood frosted by snow. My highly attuned yellow lab/squirrel dog is always a little freaked out by the change of pace, the stark quiet. Last night’s threatening ice has brought the school buses, harried drivers late for work and noise pollution from the interstate to a hush. Robins, cardinals, blue jays, mockingbirds, finches, crows and blackbirds pierce the air with song as they have all come out from their hiding places to find today’s crumbs of bread.
We all yearn for spring, for the thaw, with its fluorescent green and goldenrod. In the doldrums of the long winter, we are oblivious to spring’s surprises, her thunderstorms and her turbulent tornadoes. We are not ready for what we love. We’re living in a new normal. More ice, more snow, more fire, more wind, less rain and more rain than ever before. More heat will come with summer, more than we think we can bear.
The world is a beautiful and terrifying place all the time and it is where I belong. I belong to the earth, to the rivers, lakes and oceans, to the wind and the air, to the fires that rage, they are all me and I am them. In this biosphere, space ship earth that we are living on, we all get recycled. We are reminded of this on Ash Wednesday, how very recyclable we are. I will say, as I take my finger and smudge it in some dust, push back the hair of those who have come from their precious brows and make the sign of a cross, “from ashes you came and to ashes you shall return.” It’s a sobering reminder that we are all connected through our very birth and death to one another, to creation, that all things capable of life are in fact, in one form or another, still living.
This comforts me.
I overheard two older men in a coffee shop this morning talking about “little deaths.” One of them was a Wise Old Man, 
I could tell, he was the one giving the advice to the man who was facing cancer. He talked about the “little deaths” in the form of all the things we lose, the car keys, the wallet, the life we once had, a loved one, our mobility, our freedom. He then said something about attunement. I became aware that I was eavesdropping and then stopped listening, though I could not help but smile. Attunement is simply the act of bringing all things into harmony. This WOM was trying to help the other find harmony in the act of living and dying. It was a beautiful thing to experience, the exchange of loving and caring in the act of comforting through truthfulness and wisdom.
Each day, we have something to give to someone along the way; a smile, a word of encouragement, an expression of hope. Think of all the things the world gives you without ever asking for anything in return. The sun shines, as does the moon, creating day and night, we love the contrast of light and dark and the beautiful moments as it changes. The earth brings food, creation brings rain and all the things that are needed for the conditions of life are provided for us for free. How much more we can offer the earth and one another when we live each day in the mindfulness that we belong to an order much greater than ourselves, and yet we have been invited to experience it, to become attuned to its natural rhythm, to rescue creation, each in our own small way, from the damages done.
This week, to those of us who receive the mark of the cross and follow the Christ on that journey of life and death and resurrection, let us meditate on that phrase, “From ashes you came and to ashes you shall return.” Let it be a reminder that though our bodies belong to the earth, our spirits were meant to soar and we belong to a greater gift than we could ever give, made real to us in so many ways, every day. The gift of life unending, the gift of the ashes.
by Sherry Cothran | Feb 12, 2014 | Sherry blogs
A Sermon by Rev. Sherry Cothran Feb. 9th, 2014 – Fifth Sunday After Epiphany
1 Cor 2:1-16 : When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.
Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to perish. But we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But, as it is written,
‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
nor the human heart conceived,
what God has prepared for those who love him’—
these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For what human being knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within? So also no one comprehends what is truly God’s except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. And we speak of these things in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual. Those who are unspiritual do not receive the gifts of God’s Spirit, for they are foolishness to them, and they are unable to understand them because they are discerned spiritually. Those who are spiritual discern all things, and they are themselves subject to no one else’s scrutiny. ‘For who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?’ But we have the mind of Christ.
There is an ongoing debate in our religious culture today about what it means to be “Christian” vs. what it means to be “Spiritual.” In an effort to discover why people have fled the religious institution, much survey time has been spent reporting on a large group of people in our society who prefer the term Spiritual to Christian to define their value system. The apostle Paul, interestingly enough, never uses the word, Christian in his letters. What we moderns would call Christian, Paul simply calls a spiritual person, and he meant by that one who had received the Holy Spirit.
While our primary definition of a believer in our day and age, in our religious culture, might be more defined by what church you belong to or don’t belong to, how much you go to that church or whatever kinds of identity markers we associate with doing Christianity in our time, Paul’s primary definition of the believer lies in a sense of being, by means of the spirit. “It is the reception of the spirit that is the hallmark of entry into the community.” (from NIB Commentary on the text) This Spirit is the conveyer of all wisdom, of God’s very self, the root of all being.
How do we understand, in our modern religious culture, what it would mean to embody a daily way of practice that preferences the Holy Spirit as the root of our being, the very thing that communicates between our hearts and God with words that we cannot form upon our lips.
Paul says that our bodies are holy temples of the spirit. Our bodies are the vessels for the Holy Spirit and for God’s work in the world. (3:16,17) What would it feel like to practice being a vessel of the Spirit more intentionally?
Paul infers what we know in our modern time, to refuse the way of becoming a vessel for the spirit is to get very stuck in our adult lives and quite possibly, we are very stuck in our religious bodies as well.
None of the rulers of this age understood this, Gods wisdom, secret and hidden, declared before the ages of our glory, and because they did not understand it, they perished and if they had understood it, they would not have crucified the very embodiment of it standing before them.
Paul tells us that knowing the Spirit of God and becoming a vessel for that is to be unstuck, in other words free. But unstuck from what and free from what?
And this is the point in our modern society, isn’t it? To keep us stuck, in a loop of consumerism, distracted from knowing ourselves. If you watched any ads during the superbowl, while entertaining, there was an underlying message of making meaning out of consumerism. For example, if you own a jeep, then you must be one of those people who is a free spirit and owning a jeep confirms this identity for you, it makes a statement about who you are. And, then the message is simply if we can convince ourselves that our stuff has meaning and our material possessions, jobs, careers, status, etc., carry within them our true identity, then we can rationalize being wedded to a culture of consumerism as our identity, and certainly we have.
If we can stay stuck in this mentality, then a whole structure can be built and maintained – Because then we become better consumers, better workers, better automatons, programmed by the system to be dependant upon the system, if we feel that we are discontent and that we must have more to be content then we will invest our time, belief and energy in the market place, making the market more valuable rather than our very selves. It’s hard to unwind from such a state of being.
But Paul tells us of a different ethic, Paul defines this way of being as perishing, not the way of the Spirit, a different ethic, one in which humanity finds its identity primarily rooted in the Spirit, not the indomitable and stubborn will.
The way of the will, and we are taught this from a very young age, is to succeed at any cost, to produce to establish your own worth, to build your identity in the marketplace. And we have used our morality to bolster these principals.
We don’t realize that our souls have been starving for real intimacy until we hit bottom or frag out because we just can’t keep up the ruse and then we hit a wall and begin to pay attention to our spirit, our soul. When we start to put some of the pieces together, we see that we have been robbed of ourselves and the intimacy that is there because we bought into a lie that we were, in fact, worthless. We ultimately find that our loneliness finds its roots in our isolation from our very selves.
We have to unlearn so much just to find out what we are worth and the find the very thing that brings value to our lives, God’s spirit alive in our souls.
You have, no doubt, heard of the fight or flight instinct. It’s what we’re born with as a kind of survival mechanism. We tend to apply it to every aspect of our lives. We either stay and stick it out and end up fighting battles that we never feel like we can win, or don’t really even believe in, we produce at any cost, to our health and relationships; or we fly away from our commitments and promises and find refuge in something like a substance or someone like a co-dependent relationship that cannot contain all of our anxious compulsions. Fight or flight. Yet, God offers a third way, surrender. Because we all long to give ourselves to an ultimate something or someone and we finally find it only in God.
There is a merging that happens in the choice of surrender, between the human and God, in the moment when all barriers are down and we give up trusting our misguided instincts and in place of that trust God to re-route us, sustain us and conform us to the Divine strength and wisdom which will become to us, in time, living water. This is the receiving of the Spirit of God that Paul talks about here, made available through Christ.
The psychologist, Carl Jung, believed that we have a religious instinct that rises up from the soul, and in fact, our bodies are vessels for this soul. He says that the heart has to be dedicated to a dialogue between the self and God and this requires tremendous humility, honesty and willingness. He examined so many patients who had become hopelessly stuck or off track in their adult lives because they had refused to have this kind of honest dialogue and had failed to find a system of support in which to do it. And indeed, our culture does not encourage this kind of dialogue.
Jung says that when we turn toward this religious instinct, it actually assists us in this dialogue when we become committed to it. (a distinction between religious institution and religious instinct should be made. Paul never used the word Christian, but Spiritual.)
Jung provides a good description for the kind of thing Paul is talking about here, this dialogue between the self and the Spirit of God. But even more so for Paul, in referring to the Spirit that is from God that illuminates the holy and sacred in the world and in us. We would call this kind of ongoing conversation between the self and Spirit a kind of integration, this is what Paul is talking about when he talks about faith, the integration of the wisdom of God into the soul, but as he states so often, it does require a sacrifice of other ways of being and living. However, it is the pathway to peace, if you so desire it and to God.
There are so many things, as Jung states, that prevent us from ever finding this peace, listening to this religious instinct or hearing, really ingesting these words of Paul today. For Westerners, he says, there are so many blockages, Jung states, “Western man is held in thrall by ‘ten thousand things’ he sees only particulars, he is ego bound and thing bound and unaware of the deep root of all being.” (Collected Works Vol II 12:8)
We have to learn new ways of being, it is through intentional contact with God and God’s spirit in this way that we can learn, through surrender and humility, to let go of the ego driven lives we are so prone to live.
We even have to unlearn these ways of being in our religious culture, too. In the book “Invisible Church,” the author states:
“If we are to create a mature and healthy 21st Century spirituality for ourselves, we are called on to make consciousness and build soul by living the questions and suffering the paradoxes. Most people, however, are all too eager to abdicate this responsibility to someone or something outside ourselves, preferring to stay stuck at a level where the church, family, government or corporation will tell us exactly what to do in every situation.”
Awakening, as Wesley called it, or becoming conscious as this author states, is painful but necessary if we are to live as free people of God and be free to enact the kind of change that God’s love brings about in our lives and in our world. When we become stuck as adults in our lives, what we don’t realize is that our very ability to love is stuck, to love ourselves and love God and one another, the very essence and core of our faith.
The paradox that the apostle Paul calls us to, so infamously, as we know, is that paradox that in our greatest weakness is our strength. In our deepest ability to become dependant upon God and God alone is our very independence. We become powerful by first becoming powerless. Powerless over the addictions of our lives and our lives have become unmanageable.
The true spiritual Christian life calls us to examine whether or not we are spiritualists, are we first filled with the Holy Spirit, are our bodies vessels for the Spirit of God? This is the very root of the Christian journey, without which it withers.
The soul’s journey is what re-orients us toward a way of living that is purposeful, fulfilling, filled with real strength and courage.
Paul says that those who have this mind of Christ are able to discern all things and are subject to no one’s scrutiny. You’ve heard the phrase, “being your own person,” and yet we have a very skewed idea of what this means. We think we achieve this kind of independence by will power, by all or nothing thinking, by the ego’s drive to succeed and become all powerful, no, it’s actually achieved through surrendering to God’s power and ultimate design for your life. A dialogue between God and the self, asking God to remove your shortcomings, your faults, the things that make you feel distant from God, that’s what you’re after.
The fruits of the Spirit, as we know them, will show up in our lives and we will be changed. Peace, love, understanding, compassion, gentleness, kindness, mercy, strength, hope, endurance, longsuffering, patience. Amen.
by Sherry Cothran | Dec 14, 2013 | Sherry blogs
“A Frosty, White Morning”
Reflection on John 4
It was a frosty, white morning. I awoke, again, at 3 a.m. with the ever pressing need of the dog and could not get back to sleep. Also, the deep was calling, calling me somewhere into “the gospel of John around chapters four and five,” the deep said. So, before sunrise, I complied.
Presently, my church sign reads, “Let All Who Are Thirsty Come.” I don’t like changing it in the cold and quite frankly, I grow weary of inventing pithy statements in six words or less, cleverly created to inform the busy world that you are about another business, and so it’s been there a few weeks. After all, it is a timeless saying, what he said to her, the Samaritan woman, the lost woman, the woman going through the incurious motions of her day, the woman fetching water from the well, the foreigner, the forbidden one.
Though he knew full well that he could give her the kind of mysterious water called living, and one tall, long eternal drink from it and her insatiable spirit would be quenched, though he knew this full well, he withheld the offer. Rather, it was he who asked her for a drink.
The disciples had left him alone
with a woman who had come to a well as alone
as a lone gazelle in a kingdom of tigers.
His question, at first, made her indignant. “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a Samaritan?” With the heat of rivalry in her voice, a rivalry that flowed in her blood, a Bloods and Crips kind of loyalty of one to the hatred of the other. That is how she said it.
What came next makes entirely no sense, still, he said it, “If you knew the gift, you would have known that you could ask me for anything and I would give it. You would know the art of the question, that what I am asking from you is what I am willing to give, only more so…..if only you knew the gift”
It was a new kind of merging he was offering, this gift. Different than all the other gifts she had sought with her five husbands plus one lover. She had craved a gift and all she could find were takers. His words undid her there, this would be a good trade, a different trade, she knew it in her core wherein a life-long ache had, like a river of tears, sculpted a deep crevasse of emptiness. Still, she had nurtured there, somehow scraped together enough tenderness to keep alive, a rare jewel of intuition and now she would spend it on this man. For he had, in one word, unlocked the chamber within which she had stored this rare strain of intuition in one word, a magic key was inserted, the word was “gift.”
A slew of questions proceeded from her mouth when the lock gave way, it was only natural, it was all such a new experience, love. Why? How? With what tools? Where do you come from? Who are you, anyway? The one question she did not ask was, “What do you want from me?” She was willing to give whatever it took, though she had not yet played her hand.
In that moment of awareness, when time stood still, when she took a drink of the living water, which was not done with any utensil known to humankind but in the loop of strangeness between two souls, she drank. In this moment the disciples returned. Sensing the intimacy of the moment, and since time was in fact, standing still, they did not say a word and the woman, filled with her new life, fled the scene, clutching in her soul her gift.
As this new life is wont to do, it began to spread like wildfire into the village. She testified to what had happened to her and others came and drank this living water freely.
You see, the invitation is not to think about it or pray about it but to come and see.
After the event, as the crowds were beginning to press in, his disciples tried to get him to eat some food but he was not quite empty yet. He kept saying, over and over, “Lift up your eyes and see that the fields are white for harvest.”
Today, it was a frosty, white morning.
by Sherry Cothran | Jun 4, 2013 | Sherry blogs
I recently heard a quote and of course I can’t remember who it is attributed to, but it rings true for me,
I am careful when I go around corners for I never know when I might meet Messiah.
Today, a man in his mid to late 50’s walked around the corner and into the door of the church along with the shuffle of homeless making their way into the weekly meal. He asked to see the pastor, I said, “I’m the pastor.” He looked at me for a moment and said meekly, “I’ve never seen a female pastor before.” I was in a chompy mood and so I said, “Have you been living under a rock?” To which he earnestly replied, “Yes, yes I am here from Iraq!” I said, a bit more slowly and deliberately “no, I asked you if you had been living under a rock.” His face was blank.
If I had suffered from the desensitizing that comes with the office, he certainly brought me back to my senses. “Did you know they just killed 52 Christians in Iraq?” He exclaimed. “My church was bombed, we had to get out.” “You’ve heard of the war, right?” He kept reminding me that he had been a professor in Baghdad, teaching civil engineering and had maintained a comfortable life for his family. It was his mantra.
Fortunately, in the basement of my church, a wonderful organization exists (www.nationsministrycenter.org/) that aids refugees when government subsidies have ceased, sometime around the eight month mark. His eighth month was coming and he was freaking out all over again. It was all still so fresh.
I asked him to sit down and tell me his story. He picked up a piece of paper and ghost wrote the terms of the “criminal government” – that’s what he called them. He said, “they give you three options: 1. Give them one of your daughters 2. Pay them off 3. Vacate your home and let them have it. The alternative is death.” They got the heck out of dodge by way of a connection with the U.S. Army which led to a connection which led to a connection. Two weeks after, they were on a plane, all of their belongings sold for cheap. Flying out of hell.
I think I began tearing up when he said, “they force you to give away your daughters.” We know what happens to the daughters, it’s a terror I cannot fathom.
Today, he was the Messiah that greeted me around the corner. Fresh from the bloody cross, asking me to touch his scars. I’m so glad I did. 
The scars carry in them all the daughters and the persecuted and the bombed out country that once resembled home. I understand that his scars are also mine, we are connected, here is my brother in shock, in pain, in disbelief.
I have a role to play and I must play it. I keep a church going that keeps a community of agencies going by offering space and support and radical hospitality. Within these agencies specialized people reach out to communities of refugees, hungry, poor, imprisoned, homeless, sick and needy. I can’t do all of these things but I can play my part as pastor, though some days I may be a bit bedraggled, chompy and insensitive, I am at least wise enough to know when it’s time sit at the feet of a stranger who is my teacher and listen.
We have a role to play as Christians on behalf of the disposable daughters and the dispossessed world. That role has to do with reclaiming unity, realizing that we are connected to those we may consider enemy through the command to love them. Our only real hope lies in our ability to embrace love at any cost.
I am careful when I go around corners, for I never know when I may meet Messiah.
