Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Small Town Life
Sabbath
Monday, February 13, 2012
Clean Us - Mark 1: 40-45
There are many different names and titles that we use to identify characteristics of Jesus. Counselor. Prince of Peace. Mighty God. Lord of Lords. Messiah. Teacher. Preacher. Son of God and Son of Man. Christ. Rabbi. The Great I Am. Most High. Emmanuel. The Almighty. The Great Lamb. Our Shepherd. The Way. The Vine. The Living Bread of Life. The Rose of Sharon. The Light. The Bright Morning Star. The Living Stone. The Chief Cornerstone. The Advocate. The Cup of Life. The list goes on and on. But in today’s scripture passage Jesus is most notably the Healer.
In fact, Jesus has been the Great Healer for most of the first chapter of Mark’s gospel. This is the third healing story within 45 verses. What is Mark trying to tell us through these narratives and what makes this healing story different then the others the gospel writer told?
Two weeks ago we looked at the first healing story in the gospel of Mark about the man with the evil spirits. That man was healed within the synagogue, amongst his neighbors and friends. He did not ask to be healed, yet Jesus cast out the evil spirits anyway. The second healing story we haven’t discussed as part of a sermon. It was of Simon’s mother-in-law who was at death’s door with a high fever. Others asked Jesus to go and heal her and she was simply healed. But in today’s story, a man had the faith and gumption to approach Jesus and ask for healing.
Why was it such a bold act for this man to approach Jesus? Haven’t we all asked Jesus for healing at one point or another in our lives? This man was a leper, a social outcast. By law he wasn’t allowed to approach Jesus or any other person. Because his disease was so contagious, those with lepersay were banished from the community and had to go and live by themselves or in a colony with others suffering from lepresey. They were marginalized by a social illness brought on by their physical disease. They were viewed as impure, unclean, and a source of dangerous contamination. So under Levitical law, once the priest became aware of someone contracting lepresey, they were were no longer allowed to pray in the temple or go to the synagogue. They were completely expelled from society.
Yet, this leper came to Jesus. He knew that he shouldn’t according to the law. He knew that he was putting Jesus at risk of contracting his isolating disease. But he was at his wits end. He had to try something. So he went to Jesus and knelt before him, begging to be healed. He obviously had some sort of faith to come and see Jesus in this way; he had to believe that Jesus could truly heal him. Further he tells Jesus, “if you choose you can make me clean.” And Jesus did choose.
We live in a culture where many preachers ave used and abused this story and others like it to condemn people who are ill. Telling people that if they just had enough faith they would be healed. But what these preachers and those following their teachings miss is who Jesus was really healing in this passage. On the surface it looks like Jesus healed the man who had faith. And this may be true. But the story doesn’t end there. Some translations, including the one that we are using today state that Jesus was moved with compassion to heal this man, but an equal number say that Jesus was moved with anger. What did Jesus have to be angry about? And can pity and anger be mixed together?
Jesus was angry at the societal norms that made this beloved man of God an outcast from society. Jesus’ healing of this man disrupted the social order and turned around all of the laws that Jesus was supposed to be abiding by concerning people who were deemed unclean. Unfit to interact with the rest of society. He was breaking down boundaries. Jesus was so angry by how the religious and civil society were treating this man, and others with his disease, that he was moved with pity, and with this pity he reached out and did something that he did not have to do - he touched the man. Jesus is powerful enough to heal people without touching them. He had already shown that when he cast out the unclean spirits from the man in the temple simply by the command of his voice. But he knew that this man needed human touch, so he reached out and caressed him, breaking the rules that had prevented the man from not having any human contact for so long. Jesus said with both his actions and his voice that he did choose to heal the man. And isn’t this truly the message of the gospel - that Jesus has come to liberate those who have been deemed unclean. Those who have been marginalized and outcasted from society. Those who are in need of the caress of hope.
This past week I was in New York City at the General Board of Global Missions, one of the parts of the United Methodist Church that serves people who are in need of hope and healing around the world through our shares of ministry. I was so impressed to see how the United Methodist Church was present in over 136 countries around the wold. Working with the poor to change systems and societal norms. Teaching native women how to share the gospel with societies where reading is not the norm. Training chiefs, preachers, and emams about malaria and other preventable diseases and helping them be agents of change through the Nothing But Nets and Imagine No Malaria campaigns. GBGM is helping pastors reach out to those in their congregations suffering from addictions and related violence. They are training young people to be peer counselors concerning abusive relationships and addictions. And these are just a few examples of how we are reaching out and partnering with people to bring hope and healing and wholeness around the world.
The seminar was two jam packed days and on the day in between our learnings we traveled to three United Methodist ministries and churches in New York City who are truly offering the caress of hope to those whom others have turned away. While there another young clergy made the following comment to me: “I love ministry that evolves from the simple questions: ‘what is God calling us to do about this?’ There is an aids epidemic? Maybe we should make it possible for people to get tested twice a week. People can’t find work? We have a kitchen to feed them and a chef who comes in to teach them how to cook so they can find work. People haven’t paid their taxes in a few years? We have a basement where some accountants came come. Let’s put two and two together.”
What I loved about these ministries we visited and the work that GBGM is doing is that it is truly the intersection between compassion for people and anger at society. Brothers and sisters we have moved well beyond the time when we can simply respond to people with compassion while allowing the same oppressive systems to be untouched and unchanged. This is neither love nor justice. Our United Methodist heritage calls for us to change systems while reaching out to people. And honestly, that can be scary work. It seems a lot easier to give people some money then to ask the hard question of what has prevented them from having a job or money to take care of their family in the first place and striving to help the individual while charing the system.It means that we need to be asking questions that do not have easy answers. It also means acknowledging our own guilt.
I have to wonder if Jesus was also angry at himself when we he saw this man. Surly it was not the first leper he had seen. Yet it was the first one that we were told that he reached out and healed. For 30 years Jesus had been part of the system, implicitly or explicitly, that ostracized this man and others like him, and now he was face to face with a human being not a set of rules or boundaries. But in that moment, Jesus set aside concern from himself, or following the rules, and took this man’s uncleanliness upon himself. Even though this man was healed by Jesus touch, under Levitical law, Jesus was now supposed to be banished even if he never contracted lepresey himself, because he intentionally put himself in harms way. And that scares us. We don’t want to be putting ourselves in situations where we may be at risk or may break rules. But Jesus felt compelled to do so in that moment, and he changed a mans life because of that, and started to change a society.
My parents are with us today, and I’m sure they can tell us about plenty of times that they have felt that I have put myself at risk for others. Times I have traveled to bad neighborhoods or have worked with people that made them feel a bit uncomfortable at first. But even with all of the risks, I felt compelled to do so because I had a vision. We are not all called to go to dangerous places, that is why GBGM represents us as a denominational church, sending missionaries to over 60 countries. And we are not called as this church to necessarily be doing the same ministries as the churches I visited in NYC - those are their missions that stem from their vision and the prayer that God has answered for them when they asked, “what are you asking us to do about this God? What are you calling us to do?” But we called to be agents of change, hope, and healing here. We are to be asking the question what is God asking us to do in this place, here and now, to bring healing. And the answer may surprise us. It may make us feel uncomfortable and ask us to put ourselves aside for others. But we have to ask. Because Jesus, the one who has all of those names and titles, has been healer in our lives so we are to be healers in the lives of others. No matter what the cost. No matter what.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Bing Single
Priscilla Queen of the Desert
Vision
Have You Not Heard - Is 40: 21-31
One of the core beliefs of Israel that is present throughout the scriptures is the assumption that faith begins with memory. Have you ever taken a moment to consider how memory defines us. Our memories sometimes aren’t the most accurate - we may not recall an event in full detail - but it is what we remember that is important, not if it is fully factual.
We, as human beings, have selective memories in this fashion. We remember things how we want to remember them. And we remember the things we want to recall. And that goes on to define who we are. For example, if we are pessimistic, we may only recall the bad things, even though good things have happened in our lives as well. And if we are optimistic, we are more prone to remember things in a positive way.
In today’s scripture passage the Israelites are facing the possibility of forgetting - forgetting who their God is and who they are as a people. For many many years they have been in captivity in Babylon after being taken from Jerusalem. They have been gone so many years that the keepers of the memories have passed on. Perhaps the people of Israel still shared these memories of who they are as the chosen people of God late at night, but the truth behind the words is starting to fade. The memories seem more like distant fantasies in the face of their captivity.
But in this passage, God cries out through the prophet for them to remember. Remember what they know. Remember what they’ve heard and what has been told to them. Remember who God is. God is preparing them for a journey back to Jerusalem to face the seemingly impossible task to rebuild the city and the temple. But it cannot be done if the people’s faith in God is not intact, if their memory has ceased to exist.
Can you identify with the amnesia of the Israelites? Are their times in your life when you have forgotten who God is? Forgotten who you are? Our type of amnesia today causes us to quickly forget God’s power and might when we enter into stressful situations. It is what causes us to ask ourselves if God has abandoned us during difficult times.
Israel is facing a real problem in today’s scripture passage because they are on the verge of corporately forgetting who they are. When a few people struggle the unit will not falter because others are in their lives to remind them who they are and that God is in control. But when the entire body has forgotten, when no one is there to testify to who they are as a people, an identity crisis begins to take root. Sometimes I wonder if we are in such a place as the Church of Jesus Christ today. If we no long remember who we are, what we believe, and why we believe it. Are we just as lost as the Israelites in captivity?
An old adage states that you cannot know where you are going unless you know where you came from. So many churches today are struggling to do the next popular thing or to offer the next program so they can draw people in, but this flurry of activity isn’t reflective of who they are as the people of God. It is more about entertaining then evangelism. More about profit then the Kingdom of God. I truly believe such activity shows that we are in a time of identify crisis, where we are desperately in need of someone to remind us who God is and who we are.
Today’s scripture passage tells us over and over again that God is powerful and in control. That other rulers will come to pass but that God remains the same. No one compares to God. Everyone and everything else is simply a creation of God. Yet, we are running around acting as if we are God. As if we are the ones in control instead of the ones following the vision that God has laid before us. We particularly forget who is who and what is what when times are going well. When we feel powerful. But today’s scripture reminds us of our unqualified powerlessness. And we don’t like that. We want to be the powerful ones being praised. Or we may even be willing to praise God’s powerfulness when things are going our way, but that’s not who today’s scripture passage is written to. It is written for the powerless. The ones who are so weighed down upon by life that they have forgotten everything that matters.
God is gracious enough to give us each moments when we are reminded who God is. Moments that remind us how big God is, yet how intimate our relationship is to the Holy. These moments are different for everyone, but they help us remember who God is. For me these moments have taken place in nature. If you enter my house, you will find pictures everywhere. Most are of people, friendly face smiling, but some are of moments. Moments that I remember every time I look at them.
As I write this sermon I see a picture of the sun setting over a bay of water. Orange and full as it disappears in its brilliance through clouds scattered across the sky. I can tell you the exact spot where that picture was taken and that it reminds me of the conversation I was having with a dear friend shortly before it was taken about who God is and why we need God in our lives. That picture and the conversation surrounding it are intricately linked and remind me of just how beautiful, grand, powerful, and creative God is.
And as I write this sermon the picture of my computer is one that simply takes my breath away. It is of a sunrise on a farm. The entire sky is yellow and deep orange. I can tell you that when that picture was taken, I had barely slept in days. It was taken on the morning I was camping. When I woke up before everyone else to be in a time of prayer, but instead the only prayer I could utter was Thank you, God. In that moment I felt enveloped by God’s peace and presence. Which I am reminded of every time I look at this picture.
But looking at these photos I also am reminded of how vulnerable I was when they were taken, and I can praise God for that now. For when we are vulnerable we are open to experience God’s power and grace. These photos and many others are like my rear view mirrors in my car as I travel through life. Rear view mirrors are important, because they help us see what is behind us so we can safely travel forward. Our memories stand as testaments to who God is and how far we have come by faith and grace. That God is everlasting. And this is good news to us when we feel faith, weary, and powerless. In our memories we can be reminded that God has renewed our strength in the past and will surely renew our strength in the future.
We will never fully understand who God is or how God works in the world. We will always have questions about Gods power and why God intervenes in some situations and not in others. I believe the Israelites had the same sorts of questions when they were in captivity. But like the Israelites we have a choice as to whether we will remember who God has been in the past so we can trust God now, or if we are going to try to live by our own power alone.
My hope and prayer for us today is that we will begin to remember who we are and who God is, and not confuse the two. I pray that we will have a way to remember those powerful moments when God unmistakably interved into our lives. I hope that we cling to those moments both when times are good and times are not so good, as a reminder that God has not forgotten or forsaken us. For just as remembering is selective, so is forgetting. So may we remember who we are so we can step out in faith. Remember our communal and personal story, God’s story, so we can live into God’s love for us. For even if our hope cannot be sustained, it can be remembered and renewed.