WRETCHED OR RESCUED?
A meditation by the Rev. Dr. James G. Kirk
Harundale Presbyterian Church
Text: “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24)
First
Second
Toni Meekins tells the delightful story about her mother’s phobia. “They say that phobias are either a result of bad experiences from a previous lifetime, or remnants of unsolved problems that need to be faced in one’s present life. Whatever the case, her mother has a phobia for birds, and as a result, she has had some unusual bird experiences that the average person would never encounter.
“There was the time a bird flew into the open door of the parked car she was in with several other people. She yelled and flung around until Toni’s aunt’s stockings got all ripped up. Then once they were at a social gathering when the pet parakeet flew out of its cage. The mother turned the place inside out trying to escape ‘the enormous wing span that filled the entire living room.’
“Toni’s mother doesn’t despise birds as you might assume. She enjoyed watching them from the kitchen window as they chattered and congregated on the trees and grass of the back yard. She marveled at their beauty – cardinals, robins, blue jays. But if mother had a debt to pay from a previous life experience, it was to the blue jay, and this is how she paid it.
“One spring day, their cat killed a baby blue jay. This brought the wrath of the entire community of blue jays who were determined to get retribution. They selected a week day morning after all except her mother had left for school or work. The blue jay population must have known that her mother let the cat in from the front porch right before she left for work. By the time the cat approached the porch, blue jays had filled all of the trees on either side of the street. They blocked the sun and covered all of the parked cars, sidewalks and lawns with their droppings.
“When she unknowingly opened the door to let the cat in, she saw blue jays taking turns swooping down on the cat from one side of the porch and exiting from the other side. The cat was running around frantically. There was mom with her deathly fear of birds trying to get the cat in the house before the birds got to him or to her. Not willing to accept defeat, she called the Humane Society for advice about a cat trapped on the porch by thousands of blue jays! When they finally stopped laughing, they told her that she had to get the cat in the house and keep him there for two weeks—until the blue jay memory fades. She finally got the cat in, and the neighborhood observed a gradually diminishing blue jay population as the birds slowly forgot why they had gathered on this particular street at this particular time in life. (Riverdale Presbyterian Church’s Sign of Jonah, July 2002.)
I tell you
that story for two reasons. One,
everyone can relate to it, since most of us have a phobia or two. And those phobias have probably caused us to
do some pretty funny things. One of you
told me how when the family drove across the bay bridge on the way to
He goes on at length, questioning himself about why he does things he knows he shouldn’t, but the very things he should do he seems unable to accomplish. There’s a war at work within him between his mind and his body. He’s unable to translate what his mind knows he should do to what his body keeps him from doing. Finally, in somewhat utter frustration he pleads, “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”
It’s the same with phobias. Rationally, we know that the phobia is nothing but a fear and that we should be able to get over it, but our body doesn’t react rationally; it reacts irrationally. So, we end up doing things or not doing things pretty much as Paul describes.
There’s a sequel though to Toni’s story. Her mother moved into a new apartment, and, as sort of a welcome a blue jay started building a nest outside her bedroom window. She got to witness the whole cycle of events, the building of the nest, the mother bird laying two eggs, and the father taking his turn at sitting on the nest and then feeding the chicks. Then one day they were gone, and the mother was alarmed until she saw the whole family on a limb above where the nest had been, the two parent birds proudly showing off their two babies. It was their welcome gift to her, a new life that helped erase the bad experience she’d had with her cat on the porch.
Paul’s
story also has a sequel. Immediately
following his outburst of how wretched he is he goes on to write, “Thanks be to
God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
That’s his answer to the dilemma.
We’re not wretched; we’re rescued.
We’re rescued once and for all from whatever phobia may render us
immobile. It’s our blue jay who comes to
nest outside our window and shows us there’s new life. Or, as Paul writes to the church in
Thanks be to God