It was a Sunday, just three weeks ago. The conference I had attended in San Antonio, Texas was over and I had driven north to Austin. Reaching my daughter's home, I parked and stepped out of the car. Two little girls playing down the street -- one six and one eight -- recognized me and rushed up with shouts of glee to greet me and give me a hug. One of life's very delightful moments.

Inside, the one-year-old took a little longer to warm up. But after a day I was another comforting presence, someone to waddle up to for a hug or a bottle or just to be given a smile.

Here with these granddaughters I am not a stranger. I am recognized. I am loved. I am connected.

Connection is the third of the four healing things all of us can offer each other. From the days of our infancy, to be a human is to want, to need, to risk connection with others, with community, and with God.

Humans are social animals. Connection with others is essential. In fact, to babies, it's a matter of life and death. I recall reading a study⁽²⁾ years ago which concluded that if babies are not touched, held, or loved, they literally shrivel up and die. Connection is as essential as food, water, and shelter. Part of growing up is developing a feeling of internal connection over time to people who care about us. When it happens, we feel deserving of life, love and attachment. Connection enables us to recognize, tolerate, modulate and integrate our own feelings.⁽³⁾ But when connection doesn't happen, and a child suffers childhood neglect, abandonment and abuse, the inner experience of the child is isolation and desolation, a feeling of being unloved and unprotected, and existentially alone and sad.

Connection requires empathy, where we imagine what the other person feels as we try to connect with them. It involves putting ourselves in the other's place and imagining how his or her situations would feel. It is about taking the other person's perspective. Empathy helps connect because it conveys respect and compassion.⁽⁴⁾

Connection is healing. A healing connection is a growth-fostering relationship that offers empathy and mutuality. When we connect we are touched emotionally by each other, we both grow in the relationship, we both gain something form each another, and we both risk something of themselves in the process -- in short, we both are affected, changed, part of an open system of feeling and learning.⁽⁵⁾ When we are engaged in a healing relationship, we listen carefully, understand with empathy, and respond sensitively.

Connection is risky. We can be disappointed. We can get hurt. Most of us remember the agony of being young teenagers thinking, "I like her, I wonder if she likes me. How humiliating it might be if she found out I liked her and I found out she didn't like me." We can be betrayed. Once connection develops, then we feel the risk through a fear of betrayal or abandonment.

Connection needs the protection of boundaries. The most familiar are those we have for husband and wife. From the very beginning, we understand that violating the sexual boundaries of a marriage is destructive to the marriage. These boundaries make marriages safe places. Other relationships have their own boundaries intended to give them the safety they need.

Connection values other people. When we connect with people they become important to us, and we are valued as well. We never fully know the impact we can have on people. Healing can take place through caring relationships that last only a few days or even hours.⁽⁶⁾

We need to connect to others and we need to connect to community. For many of us, church is our most important community. Communities - such as churches - are different from individuals because they are a social system. Think of a watch. A watch that works and tells time is a system made up of many parts, but the parts don't make up a watch unless they are organized in a certain way. If you have time for some foolishness some day, sit at your kitchen table and take your watch apart. Now what do you have? You don't have a watch any more -- you just have a heap of watch parts. You don't have a system unless all the parts work together harmoniously.

Often we behave certain ways in social systems not because we are good or bad, but because of what we think the rules are. Sports are a good example of this. When you look out and see that players are hitting a ball with a piece of wood, and seem to be moving around a diamond-shaped field, you know they are following the rules that define their social system as one called baseball. It may be the very same people, but they're going to behave differently if they follow a different set of rules which tell them to bounce a ball from one end of a court to the other and throw it through a hoop!

St. James Church is a social system. A human system will never function together as smoothly as my wristwatch, but there are things that make them function more or less smoothly. As Christians, our picture of the way our church is connected together in a social system is St. Paul's picture of the Body of Christ. Some of us are hands and others are hearts and lungs and feet, but we all have to work together for the benefit of all.

Essential to connection with community is social trust. Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist who works at the Boston VA Health System with Vietnam veterans who have complex post-traumatic stress disorder, points out that two individuals can offer each other connection, but it takes three to have a community. Why? Because social trust is the trust of one person that when he is not in the room, the other two will continue to look out for his interests.⁽⁷⁾

We experience an erosion of social trust in our country today. Remember the joke about the world's three greatest lies? The first is, "the check is in the mail," the second is "I'll still respect you in the morning," and in the joke the third is "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you." The first two reflect our cynicism in the area of personal trust, but the third is directed at social trust. Increasingly, we no longer believe that society, through the government, really intends to help us.

The psychologists who wrote the Risking Connection curriculum wrote,

Trauma does not occur in a vacuum; society and culture are part of the context and cause.... A healing community must be willing to consciously shape itself to counteract the destructive effects of the larger society's flaws....Thus, where society supports oppression, a therapeutic milieu must emphasize empowerment and mutuality. Where society condones silence, the therapeutic milieu must advocate open communication. Where the larger society practices denial, the therapeutic milieu must practice affirmation and validation. Where society delights in blaming victims, the therapeutic milieu must require accountability and offer a relational model of conflict negotiation."⁽⁸⁾

The writers were thinking about a therapist's office or treatment center, but shouldn't these words also describe the potential of a church?

These words recall the words of the old song, "Brighten the corner where you are" If we can't fix all the ills of the larger society, we can take a stand in support of social trust right in this room. The way we can do it is to personally make a commitment to the others in this sanctuary that it will in fact be a sanctuary--that we will look out for the interest of the others who are here -- even when they aren't here. It means when we are in a committee planning something we will ask, "who else is impacted by this?" "Who else needs to know about this?" "Which people who are not in this room are trusting us to take care of their interests?" "What do we need to do to make sure they are taken care of?"

One very practical way that I think social trust is enhanced at St. James is the joint program meetings where all the program committees meet together, then break up into separate groups, then reconvene at the end of the meeting to trade notes. So much planning can get done right on the spot because the people you need to check with are right there, and there's less opportunity to forget to check with someone who is affected. It's a delight when concrete ways to help us really be the Body of Christ take place.

We need connection not only with others and community, but also with God. We have a capacity called spirituality. With this capacity we are aware of our connection to the nonmaterial aspects of existence. With this capacity we seek meaning for our lives. This capacity⁽⁹⁾ is the soil in which our connection with God can grow. St. Augustine recognized in our own capacity for spirituality a complement to God's desire for connection: "You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you."⁽¹⁰⁾

With others we may have questions about reciprocation - "I like her, does she like me?" - but our faith tells us, with God there is no doubt. God wants connection with us.

In our relationship with God, God is the one who risks connection. Think of it: we attribute to God the elemental force of the universe, the power of the sun and stars, the energy of a billion hydrogen bombs. If that force were directed at us, we would shrivel into a puff of gas in the briefest moment.

But our experience with God is that in order to achieve connection with us as free beings, God sets that power aside. God has set boundaries on God's exercise of power. God does not coerce humans. God will never take our souls by force. Only when God's power is restrained can we have the freedom and choice that permits us to connect with God in love.

The Jewish Scriptures that we call our Old Testament contain a series of stories that testify to God's vulnerability as God's love for humanity is subjected to risks and disappointments. Adam and Eve abuse their trust, lie, and lose the paradise God wished to give them. Cain violates his connection with his brother, commits murder, and in so doing, violates his connection with God. Noah falls into debauchery after God's faithfulness during the Flood. The prophet Hosea compares the relationship between God and the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah as being like the love of a man for two prostitutes; God is faithful to them and keeps seeking to restore his covenant with them although they betray him again and again.

The Christian story of salvation in our New Testament takes God's vulnerability in seeking connection with humanity to an even greater level. In the New Testament we see God doing the ultimate to try to achieve that connection with us: God becomes one of us, even as a little baby in a manger when there was no room at the inn. He becomes a young man preaching and healing in an attempt to get people to change their minds and their lives and return to connection with God. He is taken prisoner and then shares the ultimate with us, an unjust death, an incredibly painful death, a humiliating death upon a cross. God wants connection with us that much.

Several years ago, when I was Vice President of the Owen Brown Interfaith Center in Columbia, I visited Dar Al Taqwa, a Muslim congregation that meets Friday afternoon in the same room in which Christ United Methodist holds its worship services. This was the room in which my own wedding took place 11 years ago. Now the chairs were out and people knelt on the floor, facing east to Mecca. And then the imam began his message. And what he talked about was how much God wanted a connection with us and how God keeps trying for that connection until we say yes.

A God who risks connection with humanity: a message shared by all three faiths - Jewish, Christian, and Muslim - that Muslims call "the people of the Book."

This morning's Gospel lesson begins in the wilderness, and wildernesses are places of no connection. Into this wilderness comes John, the Baptizer, who tells us, in the wonderful words of Isaiah 40, that we are to be comforted, that our days in the wilderness are over, and that what we are to do now is to prepare the way of the Lord.

What God brings us on this highway is connection - with others, with community, with God, and with our innermost selves. So in this reflective, penitential time of Advent, let us prepare the way for all the connection God brings! Remove the obstacles, flatten the bumps, fill in the potholes. Bring light to those who are in darkness. Make straight a highway for our God.

1. Third of a series of four sermons on "The Healing Church", covering the RICH paradigm: Respect, Information, Connection, Hope.

2. Spitz

3. Karen W. Saakvitne, Sarah Gamble, Laurie Anne Pearlman, Beth Tabor Lev, Risking Connection: A Training Curriculum for Working with Survivors of Childhood Abuse, Lutherville: The Sidran Press, 2000, p. 60

4. Karen W. Saakvitne, Sarah Gamble, Laurie Anne Pearlman, Beth Tabor Lev, Risking Connection: A Training Curriculum for Working with Survivors of Childhood Abuse, Lutherville: The Sidran Press, 2000, p. 14

5. Karen W. Saakvitne, Sarah Gamble, Laurie Anne Pearlman, Beth Tabor Lev, Risking Connection: A Training Curriculum for Working with Survivors of Childhood Abuse, Lutherville: The Sidran Press, 2000, p. 14, Stone Center Model

6. Karen W. Saakvitne, Sarah Gamble, Laurie Anne Pearlman, Beth Tabor Lev, Risking Connection: A Training Curriculum for Working with Survivors of Childhood Abuse, Lutherville: The Sidran Press, 2000, p. 14

7. Jonathan Shay, remarks to Annual Meeting, National Conference of Viet Nam Veteran Ministers, October 11, 2000

8. Karen W. Saakvitne, Sarah Gamble, Laurie Anne Pearlman, Beth Tabor Lev, Risking Connection: A Training Curriculum for Working with Survivors of Childhood Abuse, Lutherville: The Sidran Press, 2000, p. 16

9. "Spirituality is the human capacity that promotes an awareness of our connection with the nonmaterial aspects of existence and strives to give meaning to life. It might involve a connection with God or a Higher Power, nature, community or humanity, or with some larger entity or force. (Saakvitne and Pearlman, 1992)

10. St. Augustine, Confessions