Two Sundays ago I mentioned four healing things anyone can give to another human being: Respect, Information, Connection and Hope. This morning I want to focus on the second of those four healing things: Information.

Sometimes even useless information can be healing. On my honeymoon 11 years ago, my new wife and I spent a month in India. Flying out of Dulles airport on a Sunday afternoon, I slipped an entire Sunday Washington Post into one of the suitcases. We were busy flying the next several days -- Frankfurt, New Delhi where we played tourist for a day, and finally on to Kashmir where we had booked a week on a houseboat on Lake Nageen. Friday arrived, the Moslem day of rest, and no activities were planned. It was a sunny day, I spent most of the day on the rooftop, surrounded by the lake and snow-capped mountains and read the Washington Post from beginning to end. What a treat! And since we were going to be in India another three weeks, there was nothing particularly useful about it. Just a rare luxury!

But this morning I want to talk about useful information, and the most useful information is information which heals.

I. Emotions.

Information heals when it helps us understand ourselves. We have to have truth for our sanity. Jesus once said, "you shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free.⁽²⁾ One of the most important sources of information that heals is within us-our emotions.

Our culture gives us other messages about feelings. We pick up the idea that emotions are mysterious and frightening and ought to be hidden and suppressed. We often fear that emotions equal danger.⁽³⁾ What our society fails to teach us is the rightful place of feelings as sources of useful information. Emotions can help us understand ourselves better and thereby deal with others better. I think of feelings like the indicator lights on the dashboard of my car. When an indicator light comes on, it tells me to pay attention, something is happening.

A week ago I received an email in connection with a national organization I belong to. The writer said that Jack Day was doing something that was inappropriate, and shouldn't he be told to stop. The writer intended to send this privately to some other board members, but you know how email is -- with a click of the mouse she sent it to the entire email list.

How do you think I felt? Well, I could feel all the lights on my emotional dashboard light up. The anger light went on. The hurt feelings light went on. The defensive, "I'm not in the wrong, you're in the wrong" light went on. The depressed, "what's the use, nobody ever appreciates me" light went on.

In my emotional dashboard there are some other buttons which are temptations. "Launch missiles and torpedoes!" "Destroy enemy." These are fist-sized buttons and pushing them would be so satisfying! Perhaps your emotional dashboard has the same buttons. Must of us have tried out these fist-sized buttons and discover we do indeed get the satisfaction, but it's short lived, and then, what remorse! We should have hit the brakes instead.

Emotions also give us information and that's what I sought when I received that email. The emotions alerted me that something was going on that I needed to pay attention to. Had I become emotionally attached to certain ideas which didn't yet have group support? Had divisiveness begun to creep in which didn't fit my commitment to the group's wellbeing? Was there misunderstanding which needed to be cleared up? Why was the sender of the email upset? There was now a breach in our relationship. What could be done to repair it?

The more I focused on these questions, the more my emotions were in control. I could still identify which lights were flashing on my dashboard, but the temptation to use the fist-sized buttons was now gone. My emotions had served their purpose, and now I could focus on what actions would help build the organization.

The Risking Connection text I've been reading⁽⁴⁾ summarizes some important things about emotions:

• •Feelings are not facts. Because I feel something doesn't make it true. It just means I feel something. Feelings are just feelings
• •Feelings do help me know what's going on. Feelings give me data about myself
• •Feelings pass. They show up and even though at the moment they feel like they are forever, we know from experience that they also go away. Whatever we feel, we know that sometime we'll not feel that way.

II. Androcles.

Information heals when it helps us ourselves -- and information heals when it helps us understand others. Perhaps some of you have heard the story of Androcles and the Lion. Androcles was a Roman soldier. He was called out to help a village being terrorized by a ferocious lion. When he got to the village he could see why people were terrified. Standing in the village he could hear the lion roaring in the woods.

Gathering together his courage, Androcles went into the woods. He crept closer and closer to the lion until he could see it. Finally he was close enough that he could see the lion had a large thorn stuck in its paw. Now adding the strength of compassion to courage, he approached the lion and pulled the thorn out of his paw.

The lion stopped roaring. The village was grateful.

Years later, Androcles had become a Christian. One day he was discovered by the authorities, arrested, brought before the crowds in the Colosseum. A gate in the stadium was opened and a ferocious, hungry lion bounded out ready to make a quick lunch of Androcles. The lion got to Androcles, stopped suddenly, sniffed, licked him once or twice, then lay down at his feet, purring. It was, of course, the same lion.

What I get from this story is, "When you hear the lion roar, look for the thorn." The information totally changed Androcles' view of the problem and how to solve it. The story has changed the way I understand others. When you hear the lion roar, look for the thorn. If all we can hear is the lion's roar, we want to do something destructive and hurtful. When we can focus on the thorn that is causing the pain, we're in a better position to do something helpful and healing. That's been healing information for me, and I share it with you.

III Connection.

Information heals when it helps us understand ourselves, understand others, and connect with others.

Last spring I read an article by a woman in the Midwest. She was a professor of physiology at a medical school and an active member of her United Methodist congregation. Then her son developed schizophrenia and she felt lost, alone and abandoned by her congregation, despite the efforts of her pastor and congregation to pray, express sympathy, and continue to include the family in church activities.

Curious, I sent her an email asking if she could share more about why she felt abandoned when her congregation obviously wanted to help and was trying several ways to do so.

"They just didn't understand," she said. " You could tell they didn't understand anything about schizophrenia."

"Let me see if I understand what you're saying," I said. Our Bishop has just had bypass surgery. Now, I'll never come close to being a cardiologist, but I understand we all have hearts, and hearts connect to arteries, and over time our arteries can get clogged up and when that happens we may need surgery, and usually the outcome of surgery is pretty good, so even though this is major surgery, I'm pretty comfortable that things will work out well. But when it comes to schizophrenia, I don't really understand how we get it, what it does to us inside, or what we can do about it. So if someone has schizophrenia, I'm not as comfortable about how things can work out, so I'm more likely to act edgy or nervous. Is that what you mean?"

"Yes," she said, "that's it."

Information that heals is sometimes information that we have to acquire. Mental illness affects one family out of four in America. We need to become more familiar with information about the various forms of mental illness, because it's almost certain that sooner or later we will need to provide information that heals. Do we have people in our congregation that we can't be as helpful to, or as understanding or supportive of, because we haven't taken the trouble to get some background information on the kinds of things that are bothering them? It would have made a difference to this woman in this mid-western United Methodist church if someone had done that.

If we learn that someone in our congregation has a problem, one of the things we can do is learn more about that problem ourselves. Key healing information can include ⁽⁵⁾:

• •community support resources, especially those led by others who have experienced the problem
• •readings on issues relevant to the problem
• •common manifestations of the problem and strategies for managing symptoms
• •community resources for solving the problem and managing the day to day stresses which come from having it.

There are organized programs that help us acquire information that heals. I know there's someone here who cares about mental illness ministries because I see the announcement on the bulletin board about the Family to Family program of NAMI, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill.

Another important program is Stephen Ministries in which congregation members visit and develop special relationships with people who may be shut in or are facing other problems. Stephen Ministries involves a significant training program that people go through. It involves both receiving and giving information that heals. It's something to talk about with your next pastor after the turn of the year.

IV. Widow's Mite

Information heals when it helps us understand ourselves and others, when it helps us form connections and when it deepens our spirituality as individuals and as a church. That's what Jesus does in this morning's Gospel Lesson, the story we know as "the Widow's Mite." Here Jesus gives us the information that in the Kingdom of God, the size of the heart is more important than the size of the results.

Now, that's a difficult lesson, because in our world results matter. When our church has a financial campaign, it seeks to raise a specific dollar amount because that's what the budget needs. It seems just like realistic thinking, but focus on financial results immediately makes us start thinking that a large gift is more important than a tiny one, and from there to thinking that people who give large gifts matter more than people who give tiny ones. But you see, the next step down this slippery slope is to start thinking that people matter only for their gifts, and once you take that step the financial campaign dries up, because nobody really wants to believe they only matter for their gifts.

And so Jesus gives us healing information in the Gospel - if you want to be the kind of church that can successfully meet its financial objectives, you've got to be the kind of church where the widow with two pennies to give matters as much as the wealthy philanthropist. And if you're that kind of church, where people matter just for who they are and not for the size of their gifts, then important spiritual things are probably happening, and other people in the community are probably starting to think that this is a good place to be, because it's a nurturing and healing place. And when that happens, you'll soon need a building campaign and attract the resources to go with it.

Information heals when it helps us understand ourselves. Information heals when it helps us understand others. Information heals when it helps us connect with others. And information heals when it deepens our spirituality. Thanks be to God who is the source of all information, and all healing.

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

2. John 8:32

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. 64

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. 64

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