Jonah 1:3, 4:10; Ephesians 4: 26, 27, 31

Getting in our own way

You and I have a tendency to sabotage ourselves.   We do things over and over again that are not good for us:  it may manifest itself in anger or in procrastination or in our eating habits or in the way we avoid certain situations or the way we hold on to things.  These things have become comfortable and comforting in some way.  They are part of the fabric of our lives, but they keep us from flourishing.  The Dutch have an expression which translates roughly: “She or he sits in her or his own way.”  

We have just talked about the characters in comedies.  I have sampled just enough mysteries over the decades to know what a good one is and what a bad one is.  The not-so good ones can be very entertaining, but tend to have a lead character who seems to have very little flaws, like Miss Marple or Father Brown or Miss Marple or the Murder she wrote lady, but may be a bit too nosy or as in the case of Poirot spent too much time waxing their mustache. But as a result their stories are also less stressful to read or view. The best mysteries have an emotionally wounded protagonist. Wallander (PBS masteroiece mystery), a Swedish cop who has experienced too much and is haunted by his years of experience, hates guns and is constantly at risk of failing relationships.  But somehow his instinct and intuition lead to successful outcomes in his crime case. Sidney Chambers, a creation of J. Runcie (PBS masterpiece mystery), is an Anglican priest who is being pursued by a wound of guilt.  In an episode of Inspector Endeavour Morse of the Oxford police (PBS masterpiece mystery), his superior Fred Thursday stands on the roof of a college overlooking the city.  It is the mid-fifties. They have just caught a heinous and brilliant criminal who was also very knowledgeable about Opera. That’s the Oxford crime novel scene. But it is clear that he too has nightmares of his days as a British soldier in Italy in World War II.   Michael Cain plays a British journalist in Viet Nam in the 1950’s and has the closing sentences in the film “The Quiet American (Miramax),” based on the novel by Graham Greene. He says:” They say every house here has a ghost and if you can make peace with it, it will leave you alone.”  Perhaps he is saying something similar as Inspector Thursday said on that roof in Oxford. In a sense we all live with ghosts inside us, not a literal sense of course.  Sometimes we call them demons, but of course they are not demons either.  In Ephesians we are told not to let the “devil” in.  In the 1956 movie The Searchers (American Technicolor Vista Vision) John Wayne is Ethan Edwards. He is a confederate soldier who returns to Texas to find that his niece has been kidnapped by the Comanches. He searches for her for five years and then finds out she has become one of them.  He faces his own hatred and his own twisted views about race, but doesn’t know what to do with it. The text in Ephesians again rings true.  The new Hawaii Five O (CBS) has picked up on this idea of the flawed hero. The principled detective who is a veteran ignores police rules to reach his goal time and time again.  He too has demons or is chased by a “devil.”   But he doesn’t get in his own way. People mostly get in his way. As a result he is not that interesting and believable a character.  Friends, in the book of Jonah we run head-long into a person who gets in his own way.   He doesn’t want to complete the mission God gives him and even after he does what he is supposed to against his will, he sits and sulks under a tree, instead of celebrating the act of kindness which has been brought to completion.   Jonah is getting in His own way and in the way of God as a result. You see, friends, in some ways that’s us.

Friends, there is a tragedy we all share.  We know and we can see what other people do to get in their own way, what others do to sabotage themselves and keep themselves from reaching their full potential.  We care about those people, but only they can make the change.  At the same time others can see what gets in our way: resentment, fear, fatalism, guilt, shame, depression etc., but only we can do something about it.  We have to start getting out of our own way. So what’s the point for us, friends?  The point is that we must embrace the truth about ourselves. We must accept that we get in our own way much of the time, and that we can never get the wounds out completely on our own.  We must appeal to God’s grace and God’s love.  The more we remind ourselves of God’s love, the more it is likely to make us sit back and relax.  If we accept that we may never quite get rid of the ghosts or the darkness on our own, we must turn to God and when we turn to God fully aware of the bad in us, we are liberated. Then we can make friends with our ghosts and hold off the darkness.  God knows who we are with all our flaws can God still loves us; all we have to do is accept the truth about ourselves and about others and let God’s goodness rub off on us, one touch at a time.  Finally, friends,  perhaps getting in our own way is a lot like getting in the way of God.  When we allow God’s grace to illumine our lives, we may be able to let go of the things that get in our way.  Friends, what is that do you do to sabotage yourself? Where are you getting in your own way?  May God give us wisdom.