Pouring On Oil and Wine: Healing the Male Soul
Call to Worship (from Psalm 103, NRSV)
Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name.
Bless the Lord, O my soul, and do not forget all his benefits.
Who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases.
Who redeems your life from the Pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and
mercy.
Who satisfies you with good as long as you live, so that your strength is renewed like the
eagle’s.
The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
He will not always accuse, nor will he keep his anger forever.
He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our
iniquities.
For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those
who fear him.
As far as the east is from the west, so far he removes our transgressions from us.
As a father has compassion for his children, so the Lord has compassion for those who
fear him.
Bless the Lord, all his hosts, his ministers that do his will.
Bless the Lord, all his works, in all places of his dominion. Bless the Lord, O my
soul.
Thy Word # 178
Exodus 32:1-14
Acts 20:35 It is more blessed to give than to receive.
Gracious Lord, may the gifts of this local church be combined in harmony with the gifts of other churches for the glory of Jesus Christ.
Children's Sermon Waiting is never easy. Gather the children in the front of the sanctuary. After they have gathered, tell them that you need to do something important, but will be back real soon. You may even leave one of the kids in charge. Leave them by themselves while you continue on with the service. Although you might want to have a ringer in the crowd that stimulates the children to do something they know they shouldn't, it might really be interesting to see how the kids react to being left alone. After some time has passed, rejoin the kids to hear about their experience. Of course, you may have to rejoin them sooner than you expected. Tell them the story of how Moses left the people of Israel by themselves when he went up the mountain to get the Law from God. It will be interesting to see how the kids' behavior is similar to or varies from that of the children of Israel.
Prayer for the Day Abba, Father. Thank you, O God, for bringing us together again. We are fearfully and wonderfully made in your image. You have created us in this place and time to continue your earthly ministry. Thank you for the incredible, humbling honor it is to be considered your ambassadors. We especially give thanks this day for the men and boys you have blessed us with. Fathers, grandfathers, sons and grandsons, uncles and nephews in the Family of God. Young men and boys full of promise and potential; grown men and sages with wisdom and patience. Today again we affirm the Image of God stamped on each one of us. O Lord, when we consider the vastness of your creation, the complexity of your plan, the work you are about that transcends time and space, how it makes us even more grateful that you would craft each one of us individually, give your Son Jesus to cover our sins, and fill us with your
Holy Spirit. Our prayer today is for courage to delve deeply into your heart, O God. May we continually
subtract ourselves and our ambitions to make way for your will and your presence. For in emptying ourselves and being filled with you, we discover who we are made to be. In the name of our Savior, Amen.
I’d Rather Have Jesus # 294
Sermon Pouring On Oil and Wine: Healing the Male Soul
Text: Luke 10:34
Theme: Mentoring is one way to address the wounds men and boys experience
Note: This year’s ABMen Sunday sermon is graciously contributed by the Rev. Steve Hudder, pastor of Christ Congregational United Church of Christ in Miami, Florida. We use Rev. Hudder’s sermon in a spirit of ecumenical cooperation.
“He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him.”—Luke 10:34
The room was quiet save for the whisper of waves along the shore of the retreat center on Long Island Sound. Henri Nouwen had just returned from Holland, where he had shared with his beloved mother her last painful weeks with cancer. Emotionally and physically spent, Henri hunched intently over a sheaf of blank white paper, pen in hand. He was beginning the story of his mother’s final struggle, later published under the title “In Memoriam.” With his mother’s death he had lost his emotional sea anchor—the stabilizing force in his energetic, far-flung life.
A friend asked him why he was writing this manuscript. “Because,” he responded, “I always try to turn my personal struggles into something helpful for others.” The spiritual journey of men has much in common with the story of the Good Samaritan. What it means to be a man is to be on a journey and to be wounded on that journey. Henri Nouwen helps us begin to understand the process of healing our wounds. In truth, to be human is to be wounded. There is so much within us that needs to be healed. We need healing of negative memories and negative self-images. We need healing of dysfunctional images of God. Sometimes we need healing of mistaken perceptions that cause pain. We need healing of anger, relationships, a sense of purpose, our bodies, and our social systems and environment. We need healing of expectations and we need to learn to better balance work and family and play.
As the weight of injury settles upon us, our wounded heart becomes a furnace of resentment and
revenge, ready to inflict pain in return for what it has suffered. But there is another possibility. We can take our wounds and our pain and become what was a central theme in Nouwen's life: wounded healers. Our hearts, wounded by the boundlessness of human agony, can grow tender and alert to the wounds of others. Then our wounds can become portals of vulnerability through which the pain of others can enter our lives. This can awaken us to a more generous sense of our common humanity and we can discover in
turn refuge, consolation, and healing. And discovering it for ourselves, we can then turn around and offer it to others, becoming mentors to other men, young and old, and to boys, who so desperately need us.
Where do we find our healing? The story of the Good Samaritan teaches us that we find our healing in the most unlikely of sources. The first two people to pass the wounded man were those expected to be sources of healing: a priest and a Levite. Good men. Religious men. Pillars of the community. But they don’t help. They have no healing for the man. It is the third traveler, the Samaritan, who brings the healing, pouring oil and wine on the man’s wounds.
Now remember Jews and Samaritans had nothing to do with one another. As far as Jews were
concerned, Samaritans were always up to no good. You locked your doors when they passed on
the street. If you were walking on the street and one approached you, you crossed to the other side to avoid an encounter. It’s like telling the story to a group of Jordanians and saying, “A third man came down the road and he was a Israeli, a no-good, murderous Israeli.”
Jesus continues: “The Samaritan bandaged the man’s wounds, put him on his own donkey, and took him to an inn.” If we’re African-American, maybe it’s a white man who comes down the road and gathers us into his arms. If we’re white, maybe it’s somebody who is Cuban. If we’re an adult in a three-piece suit, maybe it’s a teenager with orange hair, a pierced tongue, and a skateboard under his arm who stops to ask, “Are you okay?” If we’re a teenager who has fallen off the board, maybe it’s an uptight adult who bends down to help us out. You get the idea.//When everyone we thought would help us walks on by, it’s the stranger, the unexpected person, the one we hate, who stops to care, to help, to save us.
And always the reason they can and they do is because they are in touch with their own wounds, their own outsider status, their own weakness. To be a mentor is to be a wounded healer. It is to allow the pattern of Christ's life, crucified and rising, to take shape in our lives. It is to surrender our own limping attempts to the mercy of God and to allow our surrendered experiences to create life-giving connections for others. It is to surrender to hope.
The goal of a mentor is not to be perfect. Rather, like Jacob or David, Peter or Paul, the genuine example is one who offers one’s sins of collusion, control, passivity, and even violence to be exposed to the light and used as a gift of the community. The mark of a genuine mentor is resiliency with love.
Kent Ira Groff, who wrote the book Journeymen, which is the inspiration for these sermons, shared a story which illustrates this point. He conducted some informal research with two electricians who came to his home to install a phone jack for a modem. Asking for associations with journeymen, they readily responded: Someone who has completed the training for a trade and is now a professional, ready to teach other apprentices. One spoke of Union standards and of having supervised a Job Corps training program. Then he added, “The biggest sign of a good journeyman is that he’s not afraid to ask questions. When
they’re apprentices they’re afraid to ask, so they act like they know it all.” The other added, “When we’re on a complicated project, we’re always gettin’ each other’s ideas on how to go about it, and it saves time, and then when we’re done, it wasn’t just one guy’s thing.”
The healing we seek as men is there, within us and within other men around us. It is as we look for mentors and as we offer our own experiences, our own wounds, our own healing, to others, that we will find the healing we need. Together we can help each other recall healing memories—what Frederick Buechner calls “moments of crazy, holy grace,” which can actually generate healing for painful memories.
We can help each other claim life-giving self-images to heal our negative self-images that we all too often developed as children or adolescents. Together we can help each other heal our anger, heal our capacity to experience and express our emotions. Together we can support each other as we seek to heal the painful and difficult relationships in our lives. We can help each other develop and claim healthy purpose and meaning for our lives. Together we can work to heal our social systems and the creation, the environment all around us.
We can do this because we are people, we are men who know that we have something to offer to each other. Not out of our strength, but out of our weakness. Not as people who have succeeded, but as those who have known failure and disappointment. Not as men who have it all together, but as those who know what it is to be desperate, who know what it is to receive, who know what it is to be saved. For we are people who have met God in the stranger, in the unexpected person, and have found healing for our wounds from the most unlikely of places—on a cross, in weakness, in seeming defeat, in an empty tomb, in the wild stories of women, in a powerful presence that transforms our lives.
Greg Norman intimidates most other professional golfers with his ice-cold stoicism. He learned his hard-nosed tactics from his father. “I used to see my father, getting off a plane or something, and I’d want to hug him,” he recalled once. “But he’d only shake my hand.” Commenting on his aloofness going into the 1996 Masters golf tournament, Norman snorted, “Nobody really knows me out here.” After leading golf”s most prestigious event from the start, Norman blew a six-shot lead in the last round, losing to rival Nick Faldo. Rick Reilley wrote in Sports Illustrated, “Now, as Faldo made one last thrust into Norman’s
heart with a 15-foot birdie putt on the 72nd hole, the two of them came toward each other, Norman trying to smile, looking for a handshake and finding himself in the warmest embrace instead. As they held that hug, held it even as both of them cried, Norman changed just a little. ‘I wasn’t crying because I’d lost,’ Norman said the next day. ‘I’ve lost a lot of golf tournaments before. I’ll lose a lot more. I cried because I’d never felt that from another man before. I’ve never had a hug like that in my life.’”
The healing for our souls comes from the most unexpected places—it comes from inside us and from the other men in our lives, as we humbly serve as mentors and wounded healers for one another.
Just a Closer Walk With Thee # 394
What is American Baptist Men’s Sunday?
American Baptist Men’s Sunday is one way of emphasizing the need to reach men and boys for
Christ. Formerly known as “Laymen’s Sunday,” this special day celebrates our ministry to men
and boys. Through National Ministries’ ABMen, clergy join with laymen, teens and boys in
American Baptist churches for mission work, evangelism and nurturing year round. ABMen’s
Sunday is a time to honor this relationship.
The national theme of ABMen throughout 2003 is “Masculine Spirituality With A Mission”
based on the Scripture text of 2 Timothy 2:1-2, “You then, my child, be strong in the grace that
is in Christ Jesus; and what you have heard from me through many witnesses entrust to faithful
people who will be able to teach others as well.” (NRSV) In recent years, ABMen’s exciting and
challenging new ministries have fostered new, and even closer relationships, with Christ:
ABMen Disaster Relief and the ABBoys &YoungMen mentoring ministry have been catalysts
for new growth in men’s ministries.
Websites to Visit:
Gender and spirituality constitute a fascinating field of study that will lead us all to a deeper
understanding of who we are in Christ. There are many helpful books and resources available for
your personal and corporate use. ABMen recommends the following books for study and use in
your ministry.
A Different Kind of Man by Richard P. Olson (Valley Forge: Judson, 1998). By far the best
“introduction” to men’s issues from a Christian perspective. American Baptist leader Richard
Olson—keynote speaker at a Baptist men’s conference several years ago—teaches at Central
Baptist Theological Seminary.
What Are They Saying About Masculine Spirituality? by David C. James (NY: Paulist Press,
1996). This is a great primer on the concepts of understanding how men relate to God. The
book, which covers the field in simple terms, is an excellent place to learn. Chapter four—
“The Integration of Masculine Spirituality”—has plenty of good material for a weekend
retreat.
Wildmen, Warriors, and Kings: Masculine Spirituality and the Bible by Patrick Arnold (NY:
Crossroad, 1991/1995). For the last decade, this was considered the required text for
Christians studying male spirituality. The first section is theoretical and academic, building
up to chapter four, “The Crisis of Men and the Church.” The second section looks at eight
biblical characters and their masculine archetypes.
The Wildman’s Journey: Reflections on Male Spirituality by Richard Rohr and Joseph
Martos (Cincinnati: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 1996). This one is great! Twenty-nine
short chapters, each standing alone, address a different topic in the realm of male spirituality.
Healing the Masculine Soul by Gordon Dalbey (Waco: Word, 1988/1991). Dalbey’s book
was years ahead of its time. It is the best book on the question of male spiritual development
in relation to one’s father and mother. Dalbey is the leading evangelical authority on “the
father wound” and proposes specific rites of passage.
We should add that ABMen does not necessarily endorse every concept in each of these books.
At the same time, we encourage the spiritual development of men and boys; we want to help you
grow in Christ and in your daily walk.
