Emotional Baggage (Personal Health Series - Week 4)

KNU International English Church
Josh Broward
October 18, 2009

Personal Health Series: Week 4 Emotional Baggage: What Are You Packing?
Genesis 16:1-16 & Luke 15:11-32

We’re starting today with something we haven’t done in a while: audience participation time. I’m tired of doing all the talking, so I want you folks to get more involved. Here’s your question: What did you pack when you came to Cheonan? (If you happen to be one of the few people here born in Cheonan, then maybe you can answer: “What did you pack on your last big trip?”) First, turn to someone nearby and tell them a few things you packed.
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OK. Now shout out some of your answers. What did you pack when you came to Cheonan?
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We all packed the normal stuff: clothes, shoes, books, a toothbrush, maybe a computer. But we may have been packing more than we realized.
• Did anyone pack along some bitterness?
• How about some old wounds that just haven’t healed?
• Has anyone discovered deep feelings of unworthiness hiding in your suitcase?
• You might be like me and have a strong hunger for approval in your carry-on.
• Maybe you take resentment with you everywhere you go.

Today is our fourth week in our series on personal health, and we’re talking about emotional baggage. Emotional baggage is all deep down hidden stuff that we rarely see but really affects our lives. It’s like an American Express card. We “don’t leave home without it.”

This may be a bit of a heavy sermon, so maybe we should start on a lighter note. I found a few cartoons about emotional baggage.


Can you imagine the questions at the check-in counter? “Have you left any of your bags unattended? Has anyone unknown to you given you anything to carry? Are you harboring any bitterness or resentment toward your parents? Do you secretly wonder if people really like you or if their just being nice and can’t wait for you to leave?”


Something tells me that’s not going to be a fun vacation.

In the TV drama House M.D., a young man named Carnell returns from a trip to Jamaica to celebrate his graduation from university, but when he gets back he starts having seizures, dizziness, and nausea. House’s team of expert doctors get to work trying to find out what the problem is. They test for all sorts of diseases and problems, but all of their theories are wrong, and Carnell gets sicker and sicker. They get a break when Carnell’s friend (who also went to Jamaica) starts showing similar symptoms. House finally solves the case when he discovers that Carnell had a piece of radioactive metal in his backpack. He and his friend had endured long-term radiation poisoning. It turns out that Carnell’s father had given him a unique piece of metal that he had found in his junk yard business. Junk from Carnell’s loving father was poisoning his life, and no one even knew it.
That’s kind of how it goes with emotional baggage. It’s radioactive. It can kill us from within, and often we don’t even know it’s there. It might be an inherited piece of junk from our parents. It might be a wound from a friend. It might be a voice from a disapproving teacher. It could be almost anything, but it’s there. We all have emotional baggage. It affects us all in different ways at different times, but we all have it.

When I was in university, I had a good friend named Mike. Mike was a pretty good guy. We had fun watching movies and playing all sorts of games together. But Mike was bitter. If I passed him on the way to class, he would usually just grunt. I learned not to say, “Good morning,” to Mike because he would say something like “Not possible. Good and morning don’t belong in the same sentence.”
It was like, everywhere he went, he kind of had this grey cloud hanging over his head. He kind of walked like he was carrying some heavy burden on his back. You know how they say, some people see the glass half-full and some people see the glass half-empty. Well, Mike seemed to see every glass as empty all the time.
I used to wonder why Mike was like that – until I met his Dad. That answered all my questions. Mike’s Dad didn’t have an affirmative bone in his body. No one and nothing were good enough for him. He always seemed to slap down his kids and his wife with his words. He was an authoritarian, and he tolerated no arguments with his opinions. Not a fun guy. 20 years of life with Mike’s Dad created a truck load of bitterness.
I met Mike again several years after college. He was in a new place with new friends, but he had the same old bitterness. He packed it with him wherever he went.

Our Old Testament Lesson tells another story of emotional baggage. Let’s read it now: Genesis 16:1-16.
Abram (Abraham) and Sarai (Sarah) did Hagar wrong. They used her and abused her – quite literally. Somehow, in that desert meeting with God, Hagar seemed to find healing for her emotional wounds. Life wasn’t fair, but at least she knew that God was with her in a special way.
But it seems that Ishmael was never able to find healing. He was treated wrongly at birth, and when Isaac came along, he was treated wrongly again. He carried that resentment with him deep in his heart. God predicted that Ishmael “will be a wild man, as untamed as a wild donkey! He will raise his fist against everyone, and everyone will be against him” (Genesis 16:12).
Ishmael, packed his bags with anger and resentment, and he carried that hostility with him wherever he went. He even passed it on as an inheritance to his children: “Ishmael’s descendants occupied the region from Havilah to Shur …. There they lived in open hostility toward all their relatives” (Genesis 25:18).

Rob Bell tells the story of the woman who gives herself away. She gives herself away to someone who won’t give himself to her. She uses her body to get what she needs. She only knows how to relate to men by making a series of transactions. She wants to be wanted, and the man wants, well, the man wants what lots of men want. So they trade. Essentially, she strikes a deal with men, time and time again.
I have what you want, and you have what I want, so let’s make a deal. I need this, you need that.
She learned at an early age how to negotiate like this. She needs to be loved, to be validated, to be worth something, and she discovers that by giving a little of herself to a boy, she gets what she needs in return. It’s a cycle, a pattern that stays with her for her entire life.
Sex becomes a search. A search for something she is missing. A quest for the unconditional embrace. And so she goes from relationship to relationship, looking for a the solution to the problem she has packed in her bags. This search is about that need.

Jesus told a story about two men with some deep emotional baggage. Our Gospel Lesson for today is Luke 15:11-32.
Jesus doesn’t tell us why the younger brother left. We are left to guess at the emotional baggage that drove him away from home. Maybe he never felt as good or as smart or as responsible as his older brother. There is some dark part of his story that is untold. But he ran and he ran and he ran until he couldn’t run anymore. He tried to numb the pain with wine and women and adventure until he ran out of money to pay for the numbing.
Jesus doesn’t tell us why the older brother is resentful. Maybe he secretly envied the younger brother’s freedom. Maybe he resented being left on the farm to do more and more of the work of management as his father aged. But we know that even in his own home he didn’t feel at home. He viewed himself as a slave of his father with no rights to his own home. His baggage sent him on an inner journey far from his father’s love.
Rob Bell explains it like this:
This is always about that.
And so this guy has a girlfriend, and it has become a joke among his family and friends that the day he loses on girlfriend, he finds another – they actually use the phrase “trade her in” behind his back – which raises the question, Why does he need to have a girl? What is his real need, the one that drive him to need a girl? And if we could get at that, would he not need a girl so much?
And she’s got a coldness in her heart toward her husband, but it’s really about something that happened years before she even met him. …
And they keep having these arguments about things that are so trivial it’s embarrassing. Yesterday, they got into it over how the cars should be parked, and the day before that it had something to do with the phone bill, and before that it was about whose turn it was to take the dog out, and now it’s happening again – they’re in the kitchen debating how a tomato should be properly sliced.
They’ve been living together now for several years, and … they’re at this point in the relationship where issues like trust and commitment and future and kids and marriage are starting to linger in their mind and hearts, and underneath it all they both have this question: “Are you the one?” But neither of them has actually voiced it, and both of them experienced their parents’ divorce at a young age, so any time the subject of marriage comes up, things get confusing and tense very quickly, and so they’re just at this moment realizing that this argument really has nothing to do with how to slice a tomato.
Because this is really about that.
It’s always about something else.
Something deeper. Something behind it all. … To make sense of the one, we have to explore the other.

This is always about that. Mike’s bitterness … Ishmael’s anger … the woman’s giving herself away … the younger brother’s partying … the elder brother’s resentment … the couple’s arguing. This is about that. There is something deeper going on here. This is the emotional baggage talking. This is that radioactive pain poisoning our lives. This is about that deeper need that has never been met. There are wounds farther back, deeper down, driving us to act in ways that only bring on more pain and more wounds.

So what is the cure? How do we unpack our emotional bags? How do we find healing for those hurts that are so deep we hardly know they are there?
The first step is honesty. We cannot change or heal what we do not acknowledge. Usually, we can’t heal it if we can’t see it. The first step is seeing and naming the pain.
The second step is forgiveness. We need to forgive the people who have hurt us. Even if they are dead. Even if they don’t deserve it. Even if they don’t even know that they hurt us. We need to forgive so that we can move on. We also need to forgive ourselves. Even if we should have known better. Even if it wasn’t our fault. Even if it was our fault. We need to forgive so that we can move on.
The last and deepest step is love. Like the younger son and the elder brother, we need to come home. We need to come home to our Father’s loving embrace. We need to go to that deepest, darkest part of our hearts, where we hurt the most, and let the Father love us there – even there. This step is the hardest, and it takes the most work.
Really, we cycle back through all three steps, and each time, we dig out a little more old baggage and let God love us a little more deeply. For many of us, we will need the help of a counselor, a small group, and trusted friends to make this journey of healing. And it takes a constant discipline to stay connected to the deep love of the Father, so that we can live out his love instead of out of our baggage. But it is worth it. It is soooo worth it.

In the book of John, Jesus enters Jerusalem, and he meets a sick man sitting by a fountain. And Jesus asks him, “Do you want to get well?” I’ve always thought that was a strange question. Who is sick and doesn’t want to get well? But if we think about it, that really does happen – especially with emotional health. Sometimes, we would rather have our baggage than be free of it. Sometimes, we would rather have the pain than the healing. Sometimes, the idea of digging up all those past wounds sounds too scary and too painful, so we decide to just keep walking with the pain packed on our backs looking for someone to love us or to hate us, just so that we don’t have to change.
So Jesus’ question is for all of us: “Do you want to get well?” Do you want to get well?
In the story of the prodigal son and the elder brother, Jesus doesn’t tell us what happens next. He doesn’t tell us if the younger son finds healing for his inner wounds so that he can accept the Father’s love and become a responsible adult. Jesus doesn’t tell us if the older son gives up his resentment so that he can come inside and join the celebration and the healing of his family. Maybe Jesus doesn’t tell us because he wants us to choose. Do you want to get well?