Big Feelings - Honoring and Understanding Our Emotions as Gifts from God

Transcript of a sermon given by Rev. Shawn Coons on February 26, 2023

We're beginning this morning a new sermon and worship series called Big Feelings. And it's about honoring and understanding our emotions, all of them, as gifts from God. Sometimes, maybe too often in our life, as busy Americans, and sometimes especially as mainline Protestant Christians, we don't value our emotions enough, we don't value our inner life enough. We're very much about doing, we're very much about producing, we're very much about working, keeping busy, but we're not always good on slowing down on just sitting, just being introspective and reflecting on what's going on around us, but maybe, more importantly, what's going around and on in inside of us. But that's not how we were created. Brad just read from Psalm 139, where God says we were intricately made, wonderfully made, and we are made as physical and spiritual and mental and emotional beings. All of those parts. We have emotions, we have lots of emotions, and every emotion has a story to tell us. I [inaudible 00:01:39] to think this morning as every emotion, each and every one of your emotions as a storyteller.

We're going to read this morning, in our second lesson, from Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, and that's a familiar passage to many. But I want you to think about it in terms of emotions, and think about in terms of the variety of emotions, and when they come, bidden or not.

Ecclesiastes 3:1, "For everything there is a season, a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance; a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away; a time to tear, and a time to sow; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace." This is the word of the Lord, thanks be to God.

Ecclesiastes is a familiar verse to a lot of people, even outside of the faith from a few kind of key sections. We hear this, "A time to be born, a time to die," we may think of that song Turn! Turn! Turn! by The Byrds. We also get from Ecclesiastes, the phrase, "There's nothing new under the sun." But if you read Ecclesiastes, if you dig deep into it, it is a unique book of the Bible. It is a different book of the Bible. You get this message in the beginning of Ecclesiastes, all is vanity, that nothing really matters, that whatever you do in life, life is going to happen, bidden or not, and there's nothing we can do. We often hear these verses and we think, well, there's certain seasons where God has ordained certain things to happen, and if you just wait long enough, it'll turn around. That's not quite what this is saying. Oftentimes, if you read Ecclesiastes and you look at it, you think it's a depressing message. Well, life just happens and there's, there's nothing you can do about it.

Good things happen and bad things happen, and who knows when they're going to happen. But if we read it alongside the Book of Proverbs, you get a balance between two ways of looking at the world. The Book of Proverbs is all about if you follow God, if you honor wisdom, if you raise your children right, if you do X, Y, and Z, then all of these good things are going to happen to you. If you do certain things, your life is going to be wonderful. Ecclesiastes is kind of no matter what you do, sometimes good things happen and sometimes bad things happen, and who knows when and why. So if we take this balance between the two, we get, I would say, a more holistic view and realistic view of life. So when we read this from Ecclesiastes here, and it says, "There's a time to be born, a time to die, time to love, a time to hate." This is not God has ordained these seasons, that right now is a time to love, and guess what? Pretty soon is the time to hate. It's not like summer follows spring.

It's more descriptive than prescriptive, if you will. If you live long enough, there's going to be a time for love, if you live long enough, there's going to be a time for hate. If you live long enough, if you experience enough things, there's a time to seek and there's a time to lose. We don't know precisely when Ecclesiastes was written, we don't know exactly where it was written, but based on some detective work and looking at the language and its influences, we can say it was after the fall of Israel to the Babylonians, where they took a lot of their folks and removed them into exile, after this time of turmoil and upheaval. And then there was a lot of new influences coming in. So we know it was during a time of change, and good things happened and bad things happened.

And so the writer is basically saying, "I've lived long enough. I've seen that all things happen, and you know what? I can't always make sense. Sometimes I do the right things, and things don't work out. Sometimes I don't, and good things happen." I want to think about this in terms of emotions. Emotions happen. We don't get to control when we're happy and when we're sad, and when we're angry and when we're scared. Certainly there are things we can do that either seek to avoid certain emotions or seek after, but emotions happen to us, they come, and you live long enough, you're going to be sad and you're going to be angry and you're going to be happy and you're going to be fearful, sometimes all in the same day, sometimes all in the same hour. We are created as emotional beings, we have all of these emotions within us.

So the question is, what do we do with them? The question is, do we allow ourselves to feel them? Do we listen to the messages they are giving us? Do we listen to the stories each of our emotions is telling us? I want to start just with a definition of what an emotion is. Dr. Paul Ekman is one of the premier research, made the pioneer and scientific research into emotions. He started with facial expressions. And when you were happy, what facial expression did you make? And when you were sad? And he says that emotions are a process, a particular automatic appraisal influenced by our evolutionary and personal past in which we sense that something important to our welfare is occurring. And a set of psychological changes and emotional behaviors begins to deal with the situation. I want to highlight three important parts of this, and we're going to touch on each one of these. The first one we already kind of touched on, emotions are automatic.

They're not voluntary. We don't say, "Oh, I'm starting to feel angry, I'm going to stop." "I'm starting to feel sad. No, I don't have time to feel sad, I'm going to stop." Actually, I skipped over a part I was going to do earlier, but it ties in here so well. One of my favorite eighties movies is Predator. I don't know if you remember Arnold Schwarzenegger, jungle action movie. Well, Jesse 'The Body' Ventura, former governor of Minnesota, former professional wrestler, is in there, and at one time after a fight, he's bleeding on his arm and one of the guys says next to him, "You're bleeding." And he looks at him, says, "I ain't got time to bleed." Sometimes I feel we say, "I ain't got time to feel." "I don't have time to be sad today, I don't have time to be angry today." Coming back to this, emotions are automatic. We don't get to choose the emotions we feel. Second part of Ekman's definition here, something important to our welfare is occurring. We get emotions because our body senses that something important is happening right now and we need to pay attention.

There's that story the emotion is telling. What is it telling? Something important. It's got an important story to tell us, and then changes happen that begin to deal with the situation. The emotion brings about changes within our body, within our brain, to deal with this something important that the body senses is going on. So we know our emotions are automatic, we know they just happen, but we still say there are good emotions and there are bad emotions. And we know which ones are good and which ones are bad. What are the good emotions? Shout them out. Happy, joy. love, delight. Now, what are the bad emotions? Anger, pain, sadness, jealousy, disgust, embarrassment.

We label our emotions. Some are good, some are bad. We need to stop that. We absolutely need to stop saying these emotions are good, these emotions are bad. Now, we can certainly say some emotions are comfortable and some are uncomfortable, some are more challenging than others, but they are all our emotions, and they all have a story to tell about something important that is happening. There are no bad emotions. But we do that, we say, "I don't like this emotion. I don't want it, and it's a bad one. And so I'm going to bottle up. I'm just not going to feel. I'm not going to not feel sad anymore. I'm tired of feeling sad, I'm just going to put it away. Ain't got time to be sad today." And we bottle that up. How does that work? It doesn't work very well. So when I was, I think it was just out of college 'cause I remember the apartment I was in, so in my early twenties, and I got this kit for making your own root beer. And some of you can see where this is going already, can't you?

This is fun, I like root beer, I've never done this. And so I don't remember the exact process, but you bottle it up and then you let it ferment for a while. I don't know if I followed the directions correctly or not. So I bottled it up and it said keep it out of the light. And I had a little apartment kitchen and it had no windows, so I put them in a box in there, and I'm in the other room a while later, a couple of days later I think, and I'm watching TV and all of a sudden I hear this bang. And I hear glass and I hear liquid dripping. And I go in there and yeah, one of the bottles couldn't be contained. I'd bottled up too much yeast, or however the fermentation worked, and it exploded.

I cleaned it up, I went back in to watch the TV, bang, cleaned that one up. I got wise at this point, I got a big heavy-duty trash bag, put the rest in there and I said, "Surely they're not all going to." Yeah, surely they did. We can't do that with our emotions, else that's what's going to happen. We bottle up or say, "I'm not going to feel you." It doesn't go away, our emotions don't go away. Surely we feel better, maybe temporarily, but if we're taking that sadness and we're just pushing it down, as I say, "I'm not going to feel sadness," it's still sending messages to our body. If we're taking that anger and we're pushing down, "I'm not really going to feel my anger today," it's putting your body in this state, a fight or flight state, sending signals to your body, and that takes its toll, physically takes its toll on us when we don't listen to the story our emotions are telling us.

It would be nice if Ecclesiastes said, "For everything there's a season, a time for every matter under heaven, there's a time to be born, and a time to be born; and a time to love, and a time to love; and a time to laugh, and a time to laugh." But all of our emotions happen, all of our emotions come to us. That is the way we were created, emotional beings. Our bodies send us this message, something important is happening. Every emotion has a story to tell. So once again, let's stop judging our emotions. Some good, some bad. Heidi Goehmann wrote a book called Emotions & the Gospel and she writes, "Is it possible that emotions like sadness and angers are still gifts of the Creator? How would we process a broken world without tears? How would we respond to injustice without anger? How would we keep ourselves safe from harm without fear?" Every emotion has a purpose, every emotion has a story to tell.

Now, it is possible, and it happens more than we would like, that the stories our emotions tell us and their purpose get altered. If there's a significant trauma in our life where the emotions come and something is happening, and it says, "This is dangerous, you need to protect yourself," you need to whatever, and that emotion has that message, if that trauma is not dealt with or if that trauma is significant enough, you know what? That message stays with us. You have to protect yourself, you have to protect yourself, you have to beware, you have to be fearful. And sometimes that message gets altered, but still we need to listen, maybe more in those situations. We need to listen to the story that emotion is telling us, even if it's a story from years ago. One of the most loving things we can do is attend to ourselves. One of the most loving things in this world we can do is attend to our own wellbeing.

In the Book of Job, Job is afflicted with horrible things in his life, and he is grieving, and his friends come to be with Job. And I want to listen here to how Job's friends initially greet him. Now, when Job's three friends heard all of these troubles had come upon him, each of them set out from his home and they met together to go console and confront him, comfort him. And when they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him, and they raised their voices and they wept aloud and they tore their robes, threw dust in the air upon their heads. They sat with him on the ground for seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him. For they saw that his suffering was very great. They saw that his suffering was great, so they sat with him for seven days in silence and solidarity. We need friends like that, and we need to be a friend like that to ourselves, to sit with ourselves, to sit with our emotions. That's what God calls us to do, to attend to our inner life.

Peter Scazzero wrote a book on a emotional leadership in the church, and he says that John Baptist went away from people and paid attention to his inner life, Jesus spent time in the desert, paid attention to his inner life, Paul took time away before his public ministry and paid attention to his inner life. We can't ignore inner life, it's a vital part of our faith. Loving God with all our soul, with all our heart, with all our mind, all of ourselves, it's the most loving thing we can do, for ourselves, for God, and for others. Pay attention to our inner life, make space and time just for being. This is going to be the theme of our series, listening to our emotions and the stories that they tell us. What does that mean?

Sometimes it just means simply naming the emotion, pausing for a moment and saying, "I'm feeling something. I'm feeling fear right now," "I'm feeling happiness," and if you want to take it a step further, "How does this make my body feel?" "I'm feeling sadness right now and it feels like there's just this rock in my chest," "I'm feeling anger right now, and whoa, my jaw is clenched and my fists are clenched." Naming the emotion, thinking about what it's feeling physically in your body, just doing these two things, science has shown is good for you, is healthy for you, helps us process. Every emotion has a story to tell, every emotion is sending a message to us. I want to close today just by reading a section of the book that we're doing a book discussion on in the next two weeks at 10 o'clock, I'd love to have you join us, This Here flesh. And I just want to read a story just from near the beginning of it. This is by Cole Arthur Riley, a younger African American woman.

When I was eight years old, before I could make sense of why I fled the other children on the playground, my hair began to turn gray. Coarse, white strands shriveled up on the crown of my head without an invitation, politely wrapping themselves around their black peers and strangling them in the night. It was an invasion, and the attention was agonizing. Every day, I'd sit squirming and rocking in my desk, head bowed like a monk, praying for my own invisibility. The gaze of Alex DeMarco at my back, he'd only pointed out a hair once, but the moment stuck to me. I asked my teacher if I could switch to the empty desk in the back row, knowing there I could exhale, she said no. By the time I turned 11, I would spend ages in front of the mirror parting my hair just right, so as little white as possible was visible. One night we were all going out and my family was waiting downstairs for me to finish parting. Eventually, my dad sent everyone to wait in the car, and came to the bottom of the stairs and called for me.

And when he asked how much longer I'd be, all of the shame that had crusted over my muscles from years of parting my hair combusted, and I threw a fit. I don't remember the details surrounding it, apart from a comb thrown against my brother's door. I mainly recall the episode by the memory of my father's face, which had a calm blankness, that only made my own body flailing and loud more of a spectacle. When my crying softened, I finally said, feeling more embarrassed than before, "I can't do this anymore," and then, with certainty, "I have to dye my hair." And my father's response, his face still lives in me, he calmly asked me to come down from the stairs and the low sound waves from his voice slid under my feet and flew me from the top stair to where he stood. And he tucked my head into his chest, he sewed a kiss into my hair, and just said, "Okay, honey, we can dye your hair."

I was so addled that my tears dried up and I didn't say another word, and he summoned my hair into a bun and we walked to the car together. The strange thing is we never did buy the hair dye, and in fact, I never asked about it again. And by the time I was in high school, the white began to go away all on its own.

Her father could have judged her anger as bad, could have said, "That's a bad emotion you are feeling," but he didn't. Could have judged her sadness as bad, "Oh, you don't need to be sad. It's just a little thing." But he didn't, he listened to the story that her emotions were telling, and that made all the difference. He loved her and so he listened. Friends, love yourselves and listen to the stories your emotions are telling you.