Glimpses of Light

February 22, 2009
2 Kings 2:1-12; Psalm 50; 2 Corinthians 4:3-6; Mark 9:2-9
What does it mean to belong to a community that is faithful?
What does it mean to belong to a community?
What does it mean for a community to be faithful?
What does it mean to belong to a community that is faithful?
The disciples, confronted by these fundamental questions, could not see the answer when it was right there in front of them in “dazzling white such as no one on earth could bleach it.”
I find that profoundly comforting!
Let’s unpack the questions and the disciples’ response as suggested in the extremely strange, disquieting, decentering, unsettling, disturbing story of the Transfiguration of Jesus.
As I suggested last week, stories illuminate stories, and, as Calvin taught, scripture interprets scripture. The lectionary doesn’t always serve that teaching, but this week it surely does in holding together the apotheosis of Elijah with Jesus’ transfiguration.
If nothing else, these are two equally strange stories.
As Elijah prepares to depart this earthly plane, his disciple, Elisha, seeks understanding, as one imagines Jesus’ disciples seek as he hints at the cross that awaits him. The company of prophets keeps telling Elisha that he is about to be left behind, on his own; powerless and bereft they seem to believe. But while the disciples, as exemplified by Peter, want to pitch a tent on the mountaintop and hold on tight to the present moment, Elisha, on the other hand, says to Elijah, “I’m ready to be on my own, all I ask is for a double share of the spirit that I see alive in you.”
In other words, “I am ready to go down off this mountaintop experience that I have had as your disciple and take that spirit I’ve experienced into the world.”
That, it seems to me, is the word of the Lord for the church today. Go down from the mountaintop into the world; take what you experience in the intimacy of this gathering and carry it into the world.
So, if that is, indeed, the word of the Lord for the church, then what does it mean to belong to a community that is faithful, that listens to the word of the Lord, discerns the movement of the Spirit, and seeks to follow Christ into the world?
I’m not going to venture a guess or propose anything like a comprehensive answer to that incredibly complex, rich and fundamentally important question that presses in upon the church today with life or death urgency, but I am going to suggest a way forward.
As many of you know, I spent three days at Stony Point Center in New York last week in a gathering of people called together by Rick and Kitty Ufford-Chase to consider together one question: what must we do to lay the foundation for a Christian community that supports its members to lead faithful lives, deepen their spiritual practices and support justice and non-violence in the world?
My concerns with that question are both deeply personal and vocationally corporate. That is to say, engaging that question matters to me, deeply, and, I believe, it matters to us. As we were sharing what brought the fifty or sixty of us to the conversation at Stony Point, I thought back to the first time I read Martin Luther King’s “Letter from the Birmingham City Jail,” when I was in high school or early in college. That letter is holy scripture for many people, and it is packed with passages that have become justifiably famous around the world. But the first time I read it, one rather less widely attended passage reached out and grabbed me and has never let me go. King wrote, “the judgment of God is on the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.”
King wrote that letter almost 50 years ago. The church has not only forfeited the loyalty of millions in the United States during those five decades, but disappoint moved quickly past disgust to dismissal for the bigger part of an entire generation.
We pitched tents on the mountainside when we were called into the valley, and we never even really attempted to scale the heights of the mountain from which to look around and see an authentic image of the beloved community, the promised land of righteousness, justice and love.
And now here we are, a much smaller collection of folks stretched in the tension between fear and faith, perched on the side of the mountain like climbers in a hanging bivouac, huddled together as the winds of change that have been blowing through our tradition for more than a half century continue to rage and we don’t know whether to try to keep on climbing or find a way back down.
Sisters and brothers, I wish I could tell you that I have been to the mountaintop, looked over and seen the other side. I wish I could promise you that I have seen the way and assure you that we’ll get there soon and very soon. But I’ve been in that same tent.
What I can tell you is what I believe Elisha was trying to say to the company of prophets: I trust the vision of the prophet and I intend to follow his way.
As for me, I trust the vision of Jesus the Christ, and I intend to follow his way.
I really do not care a whit about the questions of orthodox Christology. Was Jesus God’s only son? What does that mean, really? How would one know? Would there be a DNA test for paternity?
But I do know this: at his baptism, on the mountaintop, on the cross and at the empty tomb, God was saying, “this is my beloved, listen to him.” Listen to him. Follow his way.
That, to me, is the sum total of what it means to confess that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior.
The listening is not simple, nor the way easy, but the choice does lie clearly before us: choose this day whom you will serve.
As for me and my household, we will follow Jesus.
What does that mean?
I believe that as we live into the answer to that simple question, we also find the answers to the questions with which we began.
What does it mean to belong to a community that is faithful?
What does it mean to belong to a community?
What does it mean for a community to be faithful?
What does it mean to belong to a community that is faithful?
For those of us who live somehow under the sign of the cross, for those of us who are trying to follow Jesus, what it means to be faithful members of a faithful community is inextricably bound to that following, that discipleship.
So let me close with a couple of concrete invitations to discipleship.
Lent begins this Wednesday, a season of 40 days that is a gift to us. How will you use it?
Over the past 18 months or so at Clarendon, we have transformed our space remarkably, for which we all give thanks (especially to Karen Kimmel and Suzanne Fuller, but also to everyone who has faithfully stewarded money and time to this effort). We have a strong and beautiful foundation. Now it is time to take that deeper, and transform our spirits.
Beginning next Sunday afternoon, we will start a Lenten journey of transforming spirits. I invite each of you to participate. I’ll warn you right now: we’re going to be doing a whole lot of praying together, and that can be dangerous! Prayer changes things! Prayer changes people! Prayer changes churches! Just look what happened on that mountaintop with Jesus. Transfiguration happened!
I know that not everyone can be part of these gatherings, and that’s OK. But each and every one of you can pray for these prayerful gatherings. So please, for the 40 days of Lent, set aside a few minutes each day to hold the transforming spirit group in the light – and especially set aside a few minutes on Sunday afternoons to hold us in the light. We will include the names of participants in weekly e-mail blasts and Sunday bulletins as soon as we know exactly who is participating.
So there are two invitations: participate and pray.
Here is a third: if you have been coming to worship, participating in various activities of the community, putting your toes in the water – all of which is great – take another step this Lent and explore what it might mean for you to become a member of the congregation. Beginning next Wednesday – the one after Ash Wednesday – we will gather a group for three weeks to talk about what it means to be part of a faithful community at Clarendon, and what it means to join the congregation. Participating in these gatherings is not a final decision, but it is an important step. As Jesus said, “come and see.”
Here is a final invitation: Come here this Wednesday evening at 7:00, to worship and commit yourself to a Lenten discipline. Come each Sunday of Lent to worship and renew your spirits. Worship is our mountaintop.
We’ve been dangling on the side of the cliff for far too long. Visiting the mountaintop is lovely and vitally important. We need to catch glimpses of light. But you cannot live on the mountaintop, because we are called back into the valley and the long, faithful journey to Jerusalem.
Lent is a season for this journey. Come and see. Come and follow. Amen.

Liberating Touch

Mark 1:40-45; 2 Kings 5:1-14
February 15, 2009
Sometimes it takes stories to interpret and understand stories. That was my experience this week as I wrestled with the healing stories we’ve just heard from 2 Kings and Mark.
I came across two brief anecdotes this week – one in the Post sports page and the other from NPR’s “Story Corp” series. In the Post, a sports writer shared the story of boarding a train at Union Station this week coincidentally with Caps owner Ted Leonsis, one of the wealthiest people around town. As they made their way toward the Philadelphia-bound train, the writer, and most of the other passengers, passed an elderly homeless man sitting on the cold concrete concourse. Leonsis stopped, spoke with the man, noticed that he had no shoes, and gave him money to buy some.
The Story Corp bit featured a 90-something-year-old wedding ring salesman in New York, who began his career in Manhattan’s diamond district at the end of World War II. He told about how he used to come up to couples kissing on the sidewalk and hand them his business card, because, he said, “married people don’t kiss on the street.” It was a wonderfully charming little slice of life.
Hold on to those two brief narratives, because we’ll come back to them.
So, what’s up with these two leprosy stories? In the older story, from 2 Kings, we have a king who refuses to believe that healing can be so simple a thing as bathing in the waters. He’s ticked off because he believes there should be some high-toned to-do worthy of his exalted status. Why any old fool can go jump in the river! He’s a king, after all.
And then there’s Jesus, in these early Markan stories: He is going from town to town healing people, news is spreading, and he’s telling the healed to remain quiet about the experience.
What’s going on in these stories? What have they to do with us?
Calvin observed that scripture interprets scripture, and he was right, but it helps a great deal if we understand also a few of the cultural clues. In this case, the story from Kings provides the clues we need to understand Jesus and to let scripture interpret itself for our lives.
Why is the king upset about the simplicity of the healing?
Was it simply a case of misplaced pride? Of royal pomposity?
To be sure, there is some of that, and the humor of the tale lies in how the king’s aides puncture his pride by saying, “your most royal highness, if he asked you to do something difficult you’d surely comply, but when it’s simple you pitch a fit. Don’t be a dolt; be healed.” Of course, they put it more politely lest they be tossed into the river, but we get the point and the joke.
However, underlying the story, and also lying behind the reason that Jesus is moving from town to town, is the deeper story of the role that disease played in the ancient culture in which these stories unfold.
We all know that ancient people did not have access to modern medicine and the science that lies behind it. Too often, though, we miss in these stories the worldview through which disease itself was understood.
Why was Jesus moving so rapidly from town to town? Why was he insisting on a relative news blackout?
It cannot be that there was a general disdain for health care providers, or, closer to the mark, for healers. There were such folks in every community, as common as ring salesmen in New York, perhaps. If Jesus were merely the latest practitioner to come on the scene offering balms for wounds and concoctions for common ailments, he might have disturbed the competition a bit but he would not have drawn the threats and condemnation of the powerful – the social, religious, political, economic powers that be – of the nation. If he were simply another healer, one can imagine him setting up shop in Galilee and the townsfolk saying, “you got an ache, you gotta go see this Jesus; he’s got some healing potions and boy does he tell a good story, too.”
But he was more than that. His healing touch was laying bare fundamental contradictions and injustices at the heart of the social order.
In other words, the healings are not about miraculous power, and the silence is not about a “messianic secret.” The healings are about social liberation as much as they are about individual restoration, and the silence is strategic.
Ched Myers explains it this way:
We tend to assume that healing stories speak of the miraculous cure of physical pathologies, because in our modern worldview illness is equated with biological disorders (in medical anthropology this is called a bio-medical definition of illness). The ancient world, however, perceived illness primarily as a socially disvalued state (an ethno-medical definition) - that is, an aberrant condition that threatened communal integrity.
For example, what the biblical writers call leprosy cannot be identified with what we know (biomedically) as Hansen's Disease. Their concern, however, was not scientific diagnosis of symptoms but the determination of social abnormalities requiring quarantine. In the cultural system of Judaism, these were associated with impurity or sin. [The closest we can come to understanding this in our time may be to think of AIDS in the early 1980s.] From the ethnomedical perspective, then, healing was a matter first and foremost of resocializing the anomalous person. Hence the rituals associated with the cleansing of leprosy (see Leviticus 13-14) concerned not medical cure but symbolic re-entry into the community.
We will see that in every major healing episode in Mark, Jesus seeks to restore the personal and social wholeness denied to the sick by a sociocultural system which marginalizes them. His healing acts are symbolic actions directed as much at the system as the individual.
In the 2 Kings story, the king desired a ritual befitting his place in the social hierarchy. To be restored to his position of great power required a fittingly complex ritual. That he could be restored to that position with so simple a gesture is, in part, the prophet’s way of saying, “you are not as powerful as you believe yourself to be.”
Jesus’ healing gestures, likewise, are ways of saying, “you are not marginalized in the kingdom of God, and you should not be marginalized in this social order either, because if you are to be transformed, everything must change! Everything must be transformed. The social hierarchies by which we measure meaning and value must be transformed.”
Jesus was going from town to town to share the good news of transformation, of repentance and restoration, to be sure. He was also going from town to town because if he stayed put he would die because he was upsetting the applecart.
He healed on the Sabbath and in the temple square because the time and the location underscored and reinforced the social order and the power arrangements. The choices were made in compassion with the marginalized individuals, absolutely; but they were also strategic and, in a fundamental sense, political. That is to say, they were designed both to the restore individuals to shalom, to wholeness, but also to undermine the arrangements of power that governed the city and that destroyed the social fabric, the shalom of the city, the right relationship of human being to human being in which mutuality and compassion are the mark and measure rather than domination and subjection.
So, how do we take these ancient stories and hear their word to us, in our context?
Well, what are the dominant world views that structure our social order? They are numerous, and, just as in Jesus’ time, they are so widely accepted and unquestioned as to go unnoticed and unremarked upon most of the time. That’s why the two little stories I shared in opening struck me this week.
We take almost for granted the story of American rugged individualism and self-reliance. Indeed, we define our very lives according to the values of that archetypal story, and we are quick to categorize as outsider, as fundamentally different, anyone who cannot make it on their own – or, more accurately, anyone who cannot achieve the appearance of having made it on their own merits and efforts. That’s why the gesture that Ted Leonsis made was, at its core, transgressive.
He recognized in the homeless man, a fellow human being. Now maybe he didn’t think of it this way, but his gesture underscores it nonetheless. He saw not a failure, an outsider, someone to dismiss as “mentally ill” or “drug addicted” or “alcoholic.” But rather, someone about whom it can be said, “there but for grace, go I; there but for family, connection, compassion, institutions that worked for me, faith, hope and love, go I.” And, therefore, I must stop and reach out a hand to share that compassion, that grace, that gift that I have been given.
None of that is to say that the homeless man wasn’t addicted or mentally ill, or that he would use the money wisely. Rather, it is to understand that we are all complicit in his condition because we are all connected in one great fabric of life. We are not individual actors, ruggedly independent of one another. When the social fabric is rent, we are all wounded by its ripping. We are not self-reliant; we are God-reliant.
Only love can stitch together what has been rent asunder, and only love can free us from the explanatory lies that we tell ourselves. Jesus understood this, and his every gesture of healing made clear that no one lies beyond the liberating touch of God’s love, and every story that suggests such fixed bounds is a lie.
Which brings me back to the jeweler. He understood the importance of the tactile touch of love and its concrete symbols. His life’s work celebrated that liberating touch, but as I listened to his story, the day after our marriage equality witness last week, I wondered what would have happened if he had gone beyond pressing his business card into the hands of young straight lovers, and gone into the places where respectable business people did not go in the 1950s and 60s and 70s and so on. What if he had reached out also to same-gender lovers and said, the liberating touch of love is for you as well?
Obviously, this is not about one old ring salesman. It is about each and every one of us. It is not only about public gestures, but also about personal behavior. At the same time, though this life and faith be intimately personal, it is also never private.
Because, it is not so much that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere – though that is true. It is more that any break in God’s shalom leaves each and every one of us less than whole.
Our task, our calling, as followers of Jesus, is to be attentive to the breaks and to be repairers of those breaches. To be attuned to the shattering of shalom, and engaged in its rebuilding. To be awake to the rending of the fabric, and alive to its reweaving. Go, therefore, into all the world – or, at least, into your own little corner of it, and reweave, rebuild and repair whatever your own hands can touch with liberating love. Amen.

Have You Not Heard?

Isaiah 40:21-31; Mark 1:29-39
Let’s begin with a shout out to Charles Darwin, whose 200th birthday will be this Thursday. I wonder how many churches have taken note of the day, but we should celebrate the birth of this man whose insights gave the world a much keener appreciation of the way creation works.
This month’s Smithsonian has a piece on Darwin that ends with this paragraph,
Asked about gaps in Darwin’s knowledge, Francisco Ayala, a biologist at the University of California at Irvine, laughs. “That’s easy,” he says, “Darwin didn’t know 99 percent of what we know.” Which may sound bad, Ayala goes on, but “the 1 percent he did know was the most important part.”
Hold onto that thought; we’ll come back to it.
Have you ever been the bearer of news? Have you ever been the one to break the story for friends? Have you ever been a witness who gave an account?
I don’t have any great stories to tell. I can, however, recall a few times when I was the last to know. I was holed up working on my dissertation when the federal building in Oklahoma City was bombed. I was talking on the phone with my brother at least a day later when he said something about our father’s office of years ago being right across the street from the building that had been bombed, and I said, “what building are you talking about?”
Talk about feeling totally out of the loop, and a bit behind.
I heard from several old friends last week. It made me laugh; each of them sending me holiday greetings that hit the mailbox just after Groundhog Day. No, they were not “Groundhog Day Cards” – although I think there is a market for that.
The first note came from a dear friend who is more time impaired than I am. Let’s just say that it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if the card I just got was actually intended for Christmas 2007. Still, it was great to hear from her.
And, it’s not as if I’m one to beat the rush; in fact, last Christmas I gave up altogether and just put a Christmas post on my blog. Mind you, it was a darn fine post – with hyperlinks and pictures and all sorts of information that you don’t find in your ordinary, run-of-the-mill family holiday letter. It also did not require of me anything like copying, addressing or stuffing or stamping envelopes, or that final indignity – actually making it to the Post Office.
Perhaps e-mail is God’s gift to those of us who would otherwise be slower than the Pony Express.
Of course, not all news that travels so fast is good. I also got an e-mail last week from a high school classmate informing me of the death of another classmate. I do not recall knowing the woman who just died – in a class of 250 or so that happens. But the guy who sent the e-mail – the guy who sends all the e-mails that continue to bind together my class of ’78 – is the same guy who would have been voted “least likely to keep a current e-mail list and keep us connected” had anyone thought to imagine such an “award” 30-some years ago.
The last piece of correspondence came from a woman I’ve known since we were sixth graders together – a pair of smart kids who didn’t quite fit in, she because she’s Jewish in Chattanooga and me because I was forced to transfer into a new school in sixth grade due to desegregation realignments. Amy became my only close friend in that new school, and we’ve been friends ever since. I hadn’t heard from her in quite a while. Her second child is in college now, which is notable only because the spring before his senior year in high school he was diagnosed with a rare and serious cancer. He was on our prayer list for quite a while – Ethan Cohen – as his family struggled through the difficulty of his treatments for an entire year. It was truly good news to hear that he is doing so well now.
So, a trio of simple missives arriving in various forms over the course of several days. Nothing much in common among them, and nothing particularly unusual about them either, but they got me to thinking about news and connections and what we know and what we don’t know.
Have you not heard? Well, yes, I have, because a few folks took the time to tell me.
Have you not heard? Well, how would I if no one said anything?
Have you not heard? Well, what difference does it make that I did or didn’t?
Sharing news, speaking it, writing it, passing it along is essential to human life; it binds us together and creates communities.
Our communities are created by shared experience, by passing along the stories of life.
My friend Joe Nangle, writing in Sojourners some years back, said, “From time to time, we find ourselves called to form temporary communities. A stay in the hospital, the pilgrimage to an area of conflict, an occasional weekend reunion with one's extended family—these exceptional times present opportunities for true community, though we may miss seeing them as such. They surely require of us many of the same skills demanded by the more ordinary experiences of community.
In reflecting here on these occasional communities, we do not mean to include the brief exchanges of "I'm OK, you're OK." These are not the stuff of community. Rather, this meditation is about the intense life situations, which, though brief, draw us into true community. They are the building blocks of community just as surely as are the longer-term commitments to a stable and intentional group striving to achieve a purposeful communal life.”
The extent to which we create a community here can be measured by the extent to which we share the news of our lives, the stories that give shape, contour and context to our individual lives and our common life. That is surely true. But beyond that, the extent to which we create a purposeful community – that is to say, a community with a defining purpose – the extent to which we create such a purposeful community can be measured by the extent to which we share in the same news that Jesus shared – the extent to which we are, in some sense, comprehended by what Jesus comprehended.
The news that spread out ahead of Jesus – the stories of healing and wholeness – drew entire towns to him. Good news has the power to attract. At the same time, Jesus clearly understood that the good news was not the private property of a few lucky ones, but rather it belonged to all. He was compelled to go into the next town and the town after that to share the message of hope and restoration.
“Let’s go on the next town, and the one after that. They need to know. They need to hear. I have to share this news with them, because that’s why I am here.”
It’s been some 2,000 years since then. Think about all that Jesus did not know that we know now. A bit like that quote about Darwin 200 years after his birth, but I’d guess that in Jesus’ case he didn’t know 999 things out of 1,000 that we know today – the origin of the species among them.
But the one thing that he did know was the most important thing of all.
He understood, he knew in the deepest part of his being, that in the deepest part of an evolving creation – no matter how it works – at the deepest part of creation beats a heart of love for each of us, and moreover, if we live out of that reality it makes all the difference in the world. If nothing in life or in death can separate us from that love, then we are liberated from fear, set free to love and to build loving communities.
All of the news, all of the stories that shape our lives – from the mundane to the profound – are given new meaning, real meaning, ultimate meaning to the extent that we understand them in light of that one simple truth, that one message of good news.
All of the news, whether it is the current bad economic news or the latest scientific breakthrough, whether it is the birth of a baby or the death of a classmate, whether it is a recovery of health or the onset of disease – all of the news is given its ultimate meaning to the extent that we understand it in light of that one simple truth, that one message of good news.
It does not matter if you are the first to hear or the last one in the loop, if you know that you are loved and you are living out of that love. It does not matter if you are the herald of the scoop of the day or the one who is always just finding out last week’s story, if you know that you are loved and you are living out of that love. It does not matter if you are cutting edge or still in the analog age, if you know that you are loved and you are living out of that love.
Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth who does not grow weary of loving creation.
So do not let the news of the day beat you down. You are beloved, and that love shall renew your strength so that you mount up with wings like eagles, your will run and not be weary, walk and not stumble or fall.
Have you not heard?
Amen.
c. 2009, David Ensign

Finding Your Voice

Deuteronomy 18:15-20; Mark 1:21-28
OK; here’s an oldie but a goodie: A priest and a taxi driver both died and went to heaven. St. Peter was at the Pearly gates waiting for them.
“Follow me,” said St. Peter to the taxi driver and led him to a huge mansion. “Wow, thanks,” said the taxi driver.
Then St. Peter led the priest to an old shack with no amenities.
“Wait, there must be some mistake,” said the priest. “Shouldn't I get the mansion? After all I gave my life to the church and preached God's word.”
“True,” said St. Peter. “But when you preached people slept. When he drove, people prayed.”
I wouldn’t put too much stock in that joke’s eschatology, but it does pretty much nail the question of vocation. Finding your voice is a tricky thing, and it is central to the challenge of discerning your calling in life. If, when you speak, no one listens, then either you are a parent or you are in vocational crisis.
I don’t mean the occasional frustrations that each of us encounters in life, but rather the feeling of utter isolation and viocelessness that comes when you are simply in the wrong place. I will remember with shame for the rest of my life that Halloween night when I was 17 years old and found myself in the back seat of a car with a group of teenagers when the driver said, “let’s go down to 9th Street and yell at the blacks” – only he didn’t say it so politely. And I sat silently wondering how I had wound up there and where my voice had gone to say, “no.” Thanks be to God, we never encountered a soul on the street, but I’ve lived with the shame of that silence ever since.
Voice and vocation share a linguistic connection, but they are far more intimately connected than a shared root word. That befits the idea that we are “zoon eschon logon,” or “animals that speak,” as Aristotle defined human beings. We can speak, and we are called to do so. Vocation and voice share more than a linguistic connection. At some level, they are about the same central concerns and questions. What is the word that you have been given to speak to the world?
Last week’s gospel story recalled Jesus calling his first disciples and promising to make them fishers for people. In other words, Jesus promised to give them a word – a message, good news – to share that would compel and invite followers.
This week’s reading from Deuteronomy contains a revealing and challenging promise from God: “I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their own people; I will put my words in the mouth of the prophet, who shall speak to them everything that I command.”
So, what is your word? And, perhaps more to the point, are you living in the right place to speak it? Is your life shaped in such a way that you can speak the word that you have been given for the world?
Mark describes Jesus speaking as “one with authority,” and we might rightly ask about the nature of that authority? Was it tied up in his messiahship, or was it something else? In other words, did his prophetic voice come from within his human being – his existence as a rational animal, a being with speech – or did it derive from a unique relationship with God?
It’s impossible to answer that Christological question on the basis of the text, because it simply doesn’t tell us. What is does tell us, however, is simple: when Jesus spoke things happened that brought the community around him closer to the kingdom of God. In the passage we just read, Jesus speaks and healing happens. Throughout the gospels this pattern is repeated: Jesus speaks and people are healed; Jesus speaks and people are liberated; Jesus speaks and people are fed.
Jesus was given a healing, freeing, sustaining word to speak and he spoke it with authority no matter what the risk. Moreover, he shaped his life such that he would be always in the places where such words were most desperately needed: among the poor, the imprisoned and the sick, the marginalized and the powerless.
He also seems to have shaped the community around his in such a way that the people could not only listen, but could also learn to find their own voices and speak their own words of healing, liberation, and sustenance.
That was and remains the test of vocation. When John sent his disciples to inquire whether or not Jesus was the messiah, Jesus says, “well, I don’t know about that; but tell John this: wherever I go the blind get new sight, the deaf get new hearing, the poor hear good news.”
The word is spoken and things happen – good news brings good results.
So, where in your life would good news be welcome? Where might a good word open the way to new hope, new promise, new life?
Can you speak a word of comfort to those who mourn?
Can you speak a word of welcome to those who feel left out?
Can you speak a word of encouragement to those who are distressed or depressed?
A word of uplift to those who are oppressed?
A word of healing to those who are sick?
A word of peace to those whose lives are broken by violence?
We all know such people and such situations. They don’t have to be the ones on the front page of the Post to gain our attention. They go to our schools. We work with them. They are in our own families and right here in the pews. What word needs to be spoken? What actions need to follow upon our words? What keeps us from speaking and acting?
Truth be told, each of us, from time to time, find ourselves standing in the need of a good word. That is, in part, why we gather here each week: to hear the good news of the gospel that God so loves the world and each and every one of us in it.
As a friend of mine sometimes says, “God loves you and there’s nothing you can do about it!”
That is the good word, the final word, that Jesus speaks again and again and again in the gospels.
He spoke as one with authority. Good words led to healing and wholeness, to salvation. Good words also compelled into the world an everlasting word that resounds again and again whenever the followers of Jesus speak a word of love into the world.
Speak that word with the authority that comes by virtue of being a beloved child of a loving God. That status doesn’t qualify you to be a messiah, but it does qualify you to be a servant. The servant’s word is the word of hope that the world needs just now.
Servants, as Jesus showed over and over again, speak up on behalf of those who have been silenced. Servants, in the mode of Jesus, do not remain silent.
If we remain silent, we cede the field to those who are willing to speak, no matter what they have to say. This is true no matter what field of endeavor is at stake. If, in the political arena for example, we refuse to speak up about the inherent equality of all people in the eyes of God, then those who see it differently and are willing to speak can and will create laws that, for example, restrict the right to marry to straight couples. If, in the family arena for example, we refuse to speak up about the God-given right to safety of all people when a woman is being abused then violence remains unchecked and those who abuse are given the last word. If, in boardroom, we refuse to speak up about the Biblical injunction to treat the poor fairly, then those whose god is the dollar give us subprime mortgages and a financial crisis of incalculable dimension that will count its victims first and foremost among the poor. If, within the church, we remain silent in the face of clergy misconduct we are passive participants in the breaking of God’s shalom, and we give the last word to those who have broken their word. If we remain silent, in whatever field we may find ourselves in, then we cede that field to those who are willing to speak, no matter what they have to say.
This is our calling, our vocation: find your voice – the servant’s voice – and speak a word of love.
Amen.