Tableaus of Healing

Jan. 25, 2015 This morning we are going to listen for a word from God in a way that will challenge some, spark some, and, I hope, inspire and enlighten at least a bit. I spent a full day last week at a liturgy and improv workshop, and it prompted me to try something different with the scripture this morning. So, a couple of quick notes and then one straight up reading to get us started. Improv sometimes uses “tableaus” – kind of “freeze” moments when the “actors” take a pose or position designed to help themselves and an audience feel the emotion of a scene or story better. It’s a variation on the game we’ve all played as or with kids: make a monster face; make a sad face. So, if I said, for example, make a “happy face” what would you look like? How about a “scared face”? How about a “pious face”? OK. With those faces in mind, I’m going to read you a very short story from Mark:

When he returned to Capernaum after some days, it was reported that he was at home. So many gathered around that there was no longer room for them, not even in front of the door; and he was speaking the word to them. Then some people came, bringing to him a paralyzed man, carried by four of them. And when they could not bring him to Jesus because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him; and after having dug through it, they let down the mat on which the paralytic lay. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven. ”Now some of the scribes were sitting there, questioning in their hearts, “Why does this fellow speak in this way? It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” At once Jesus perceived in his spirit that they were discussing these questions among themselves; and he said to them, “Why do you raise such questions in your hearts? Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and take your mat and walk’? But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins” —he said to the paralytic— “I say to you, stand up, take your mat and go to your home.” And he stood up, and immediately took the mat and went out before all of them; so that they were all amazed and glorified God, saying, “We have never seen anything like this!”

This story is set in the midst of a crowd – a big crowd in a small space. So I’m going to invite you all to join me up in the chancel to listen, a bit differently, for a word from God.

It’s always both tempting and risky to assume to role or perspective of Jesus when reading or interpreting gospel stories, but for this morning, with every possible caveat, I’m going to take us through this story from Mark’s gospel from the point of view of Jesus, pausing throughout for conversation with the various other “actors” in the scene.

When he returned to Capernaum after some days, it was reported that he was at home. So many gathered around that there was no longer room for them, not even in front of the door; and he was speaking the word to them. 

Put yourself in the crowd. Jesus is before you teaching. What pose do you take? What are you feeling? Why did you come? What did you expect?

Then some people came, bringing to him a paralyzed man, carried by four of them. And when they could not bring him to Jesus because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him; and after having dug through it, they let down the mat on which the paralytic lay. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”

So, if you’re in the room and the roof starts getting pulled up, what do you do? What pose do you take? What are you thinking? What are you feeling? How about if you’re on the mat? How about if you’re among the four friends? Why did you come? What did you hope for?

Now some of the scribes were sitting there, questioning in their hearts, “Why does this fellow speak in this way? It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” At once Jesus perceived in his spirit that they were discussing these questions among themselves; and he said to them, “Why do you raise such questions in your hearts? 

Now imagine yourself as one of the scribes. What do they look like? What pose are they in? What are you feeling? Why did you come? What are you expecting?

Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and take your mat and walk’? But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins” —he said to the paralytic— “I say to you, stand up, take your mat and go to your home.” And he stood up, and immediately took the mat and went out before all of them;

You’re in the crowd again: take a pose. What are you feeling?

(Return to pews.)

so that they were all amazed and glorified God, saying, “We have never seen anything like this!”

What would you say? If nothing else, perhaps you’ll at least say, “we have never seen anything like this.”

But, more seriously, as you leave here this morning, ask yourself what have I seen of the miracles of God? And how have I shared my experience with the world?

I know what I’ve seen here over these many years: I’ve seen the hungry filled with good things to eat; I’ve seen those blinded to so much have their eyes opened to a new way of seeing the world around them; I’ve seen the outcast brought into the center of the circle. This is good news! The world needs good news! Go out and share it. Amen.

Here I Am

1 Samuel 3:1-20; John 1:43-51

January 18, 2015

“Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”

Perhaps that should be a call to worship every Sunday. Perhaps that should be our call to living every day. “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”

I’d like to say that’s how I begin the average day, or the average week, or, heck, even the average year. “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” I’d like to say it, but I’d be lying. Oh, sure, sometimes I offer up some variation on that theme: “yo, God, what am I supposed to do now?”

But most of the time, that’s just not what’s at the front of my mind. I could claim that I’m just too busy, that family and work obligations get in the way. Or, I could say, “oh, sure, I’ve got that all figured out already so God doesn’t have anything new to say to me.”

But sitting in traffic the other day an old Eagles song came on that cut a lot closer to the truth. It’s that one called “Wasted Time.” It made me stop and ask myself, “how often do I miss the moment when God is speaking because I am simply wasting the time that I’ve been given?”

These two disparate texts – the story of the call of Samuel and John’s story of the call of the first disciples – demand that we confront the crucial question of how we choose to spend our time, and whether or not we are attentive to the movement of the spirit in our midst because of how we use our time.

“The boy Samuel was ministering …” the story of his call begins. He was, by dent of how he was raised and prepared, dedicating his life to the service of God even though he was unsure of what that meant and how it would play out. “The word of the Lord was rare in those days,” the story continues. In other words, Samuel was laboring in an unlikely vineyard. It’s not like the culture was particularly attuned to the concerns of God. The reign of the house of Eli was coming to a close precisely because the people were no longer concerned with justice and righteousness. Nevertheless, Samuel was listening. He was paying attention.

Similarly, in John’s gospel Philip can say to Nathanael, “We have found him about whom the prophets wrote, Jesus from Nazareth,” because Nathanael is paying enough attention to understand what that means. Nathanael is living a life in expectation of God’s action in the world such that when God does act, even in a way that surprises Nathanael completely and upsets his own expectations – “can anything good come out of Nazareth?” – even then, Nathanael is intentionally open to hearing God speak.

In both of these stories, the faithful, practiced attention opens individuals to the spirit moving in their lives, and both individual and social transformation flow forth from that attention. Samuel hears the word of the Lord, and then he speaks truth to power, telling the elderly Eli that the reign of his house must end. Nathanael hears the word of the Lord, and becomes part of the inner circle of the Jesus movement that profoundly shakes the structures of power in first-century Palestine and beyond.

It’s easy to read scripture as being the stories of particularly holy, special, not-quite-real human beings – giants and heroes of the faith. It’s easy to read these stories and imagine that they happened to people not at all like us, and that they happened in a time when the culture itself was particularly “godly” and “pious.”

But the truth is, that while the time was certainly different and the understanding also different, these are stories about ordinary people with ordinary concerns – food, clothing, shelter, family life, work.

The problem with “hero stories” is that when we hear them we tend to imbue the heroes with supernatural powers, and in doing so we let ourselves completely off the hook.

It’s the Sunday of the Martin Luther King Day holiday. Talk about an American hero! It’s so easy today to think of King in literally monumental terms – a figure carved in granite towering over history leading a transformative movement by virtue of powers beyond our grasp. If that’s our narrative of change, however, we let ourselves completely off the hook.

My friend David LaMotte’s got a new book out – Worldchanging 101 – in which he challenges such hero narratives. He does so, in part, by way of the story of Rosa Parks, which, as I read it again last week, connected powerfully in my mind with today’s readings from 1 Samuel and John. Without Rosa Parks the story of Martin Luther King likely never gets told.

Now the story of Dr. King has been reduced for many to a single speech – I have a dream – but the story of Rosa Parks has been compressed even tighter. Most of us know about a single day in her life: December 1, 1955, when she sat still on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. Even that moment in her life is often lost in the haze of hagiography.

Quick history pop quiz:

How old do you suppose Rosa Parks was when she was arrested? She was 42, hardly a “little old African-American woman,” though she’s often thought of as such when her story is cited as the starting place of the modern Civil Rights Movement.

Second quiz question: What was Rosa Parks arrested for? Her story is often summed up as “arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man,” but the truth is, she was arrested for refusing to stand up and move back so that a white man could have an entirely empty row of seats between himself and the black folks at the rear of the bus. The Jim Crow rules of the system were such that the white section expanded as white people got on the bus, and often an entire row of black passengers would have to stand up and move back so that a single white passenger could be seated without having to share a row with a black person.

That was the Alabama that I was born into almost exactly four years later. Well, actually, not quite. By 1959, Alabama was already changing.

The pivot in the texts today – and the point at which they connect powerfully to King’s story and to ours lies here: the moment of call and response. God calls us – all of us – to live faithfully in the time we have been given. God calls us, in the words of Micah, “to do justice, to love kindness, to walk humbly with God.”

Do that – do justice, love with a kindness the leans us always toward righteousness, live faithfully with God – do that and the world will change.

Now the hero narrative of world-changing suggests that change happens when extraordinary people confront moments of crisis and fix the problem. But most deep and lasting change in the world happens when folks like Rosa Parks live faithfully day to day.

You see, by the time Ms. Parks sat immovably on that Montgomery bus she had already been working for the NAACP for more than a decade. She had already attended countless community meetings. She had already trained in nonviolent social change at the Highlander School. She was already an activist.

She was already Samuel, living faithfully, listening for God to speak, and responding, day by day, with a simple declaration, “here I am, Lord.” She was already Nathanael, aware of the social situation of her people, attentive to what God was already doing in their lives, anticipating God’s call to her.

The problem with the hero version of Rosa Parks’ story is this:  when we consider her life, “we wonder if we would have the courage to be arrested on that bus, rather than wondering if we can clear the time to go to a meeting about an issue in our community.”[1]

You know that’s what Samuel and Nathanael and so many other Bible heroes were signing up for: lots of community gatherings to discern together how God was calling the people to respond to situations of injustice, to feed hungry people, to give voice to the concerns of the voiceless, to welcome into the center of the circle people consigned to the margins.

God is still speaking. God is still inviting us to set aside the busyness, look beyond the distractions, listen through the noise to discern the signal. God is still calling.

What will it take, in our own lives, to say, “speak Lord, for your servant is listening,” and then “here I am Lord. Send me.”

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[1] David LaMotte, Worldchanging 101 (Montreat, NC: Dryad Publishing, 2014) 68.

It Is Good

Genesis 1:1-5; Mark 1:4-11

January 11, 2015

At the beginning of a new year, it’s good to read about creation. In the depth and dark of winter tide, it is good to read about light. After the mad rush of the holiday season, it’s good to read about drawing order from chaos.

Yes, it is good to read the creation story from Genesis at the beginning of a new year.

I am struck each time I read this ancient creation myth by the attitude God repeats with regard to each step of creation: it is good. Creation is good. That’s a good place to begin.

You wouldn’t think it was any particular insight: creation is good. In the first place, personally speaking, it’s the greatest gift any of us have ever received! Biblically speaking, Genesis tells us just what God thought about God’s own handiwork.

Yet for eons the church has lived with some manner or other of a the doctrine of “original sin.” That doctrine, born of interpretations of the second creation myth set in the garden with Adam and Eve, tells us a couple of things, one obvious, the other not so much.

For starters, the story of “the fall” reminds us of the obvious: human beings are a broken lot prone to all kinds of broken behaviors. In Reformed theological history, we receive this ancient doctrine under the heading “total depravity.” There is both truth and utility to the idea that every human being is broken, and that the best of us is capable of acts that do great harm to others. As the apostle Paul put it, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

I don’t have to look any further than the mirror to understand this concept, and it’s a concept that explains a great deal of seemingly inexplicable behavior in the world.

The less obvious teaching that burdens this old doctrine, though, tells us that all we can see when we look in the mirror is brokenness. If that’s what we believe, it can become how we live. If you tell a child over and over and over again that he’s ugly or that she’s bad, then no one should be surprised when ugliness and evil is what you get.

But God doesn’t say that. God looks at creation, including the human creature, and says, “it is good.” Thus creation begins with the blessing of the Creator.

That original blessing doesn’t mean that we are incapable of behaving otherwise. That’s obvious everyday practically anywhere in the world.

The story of Jesus, though, is the story of a new creation, of another chance, of turning around or turning away and beginning anew. As Mark’s gospel starkly puts it, “John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”

That’s where the gospel begins: with the acknowledgement that we are broken and the proclamation that our lives can be turned around. The verb voice is crucial there. I used the passive on purpose: our lives can be turned. It’s not that we have no volition, that we don’t make decisions and act on them. We do. But the first move belongs to God, and it is symbolized in the gospel in the baptism of repentance that John proclaims and through which Jesus is initially recognized.

John the Baptist “announced that God was about to end the present evil age, marked by injustice, exploitation, violence, and death, and would complete the manifestation of the realm of God as a world of justice, mutual respect, sharing, and eternal life.”[1]

This is the invitation of God to enter into the work of God in the world. Consider that for a moment: the invitation of God to enter into the work of God in the world.

We’ve just come through the holidays. Many of us issued or received invitations to various holiday gatherings. Imagine, for a moment, an invitation from God.

What does that look like? What does it feel like?

***

We speak of baptism as “a sign and seal” of God’s promises and of the welcome the baptized receives into the household of God. Important invitations come with a sign and a seal. Baptism is an invitation from God to enter the work of God in the world.

We mostly think of baptism as sweetness and light in our tradition because we typically baptize infants and very young children. There’s nothing at all wrong with that, but it offers us an incomplete picture of baptism because the work of God in the world of children is certainly different than the work of God in the wider world.

We also tend to gather for baptisms in safe and controlled environments around the tamed water in a font. But listen again to these details from the baptism of Jesus: John was baptizing in the Jordan River. The Jordan is not the Colorado, but it’s still a fairly powerful river flowing rapidly down from the Dead Sea to the Sea of Galilee. It’s got stretches of whitewater than would be fun in a kayak. In John’s day it would have been far from tame and controlled.

We could use some of that in our baptisms – something wild and uncontrolled. For, if baptism is the invitation of God into the work of God in the world baptism calls us into a crazy ride in untamed waters.

Listen, again, to the details Mark gives us from the baptism of Jesus: “And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart.” 

“The heavens torn apart” – there’s nothing tame, safe, and controlled in that image. The invitation from God to the work of God in the world tears apart the heavens.

As Diane Roth wrote recently in Christian Century:

The heavens torn open mean that God is somehow with us in a new way. Not that God wasn’t with us before, but that something new is being born – a different kind of relationship, both dangerous and comforting. The wildness of the river is not tamed by the font or by the order of the liturgy. God’s words – “You are … my child. With you I am well pleased” – promise us a wild ride into the current of God’s justice, passion, and mercy.[2]

Baptism recapitulates the creation myth in this moment as the baptized – be he Jesus, or any one of us – as the baptized is claimed by God and called “good.” Claimed by God we are thus invited by God into the work of God in the world.

This is, always and again and again, a new thing. With this new year upon us, what is God re-creating in you? What work is God inviting you to join? Where will the waters of baptism carry you this year? Amen.

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[1] E.F. Bruce, New Testament History, 154, cited in Preaching God’s Transforming Justice, Year B (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 2011) p. 64.

[2] “Living by the Word,” Diane Roth, Christian Century, Jan. 7, 2015, 20.

Come Out

Luke 2:22-40

December 28, 2014

This passage from Luke, and the one that comes immediately after it, are often taken together and called the “coming of age” story. It functions that way if for no other reason than these are the only canonical stories about Jesus’ life between the infancy narratives in Luke and Matthew and the bulk of the gospel stories of Jesus’ ministry. This is all we have, then, of “Jesus: the lost years.”

The young child, Jesus, is brought to Jerusalem as a babe in arms for a rite that establishes the religious cred of his parents. Mary and Joseph are faithful and pious, and presenting Jesus at the temple underscores this point – whether or not it actually happened. This, like so much in these stories from early in Jesus’ life, gives us truth whether or not it gives us history.

Thus it is with Simeon – the righteous and devout man who proclaims Jesus as messiah without any evidence beyond a young child in his arms. Likewise, the prophet Anna, who similarly praises God on account of this child.

These stories pronounce the significance of Jesus – nations will rise and fall on his account. The only narrative we have to establish this prior to Jesus’ adult ministry comes next in Luke. It’s the famous story of the 12-year-old running away from his parents in order to wow the religious authorities with the depth of his understanding of the stories of his people.

Through these two brief stories in the second chapter of Luke – the same chapter that opens with “In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus …” – we get all that we’re going to of Jesus coming of age.

These brief tales also combine to give us the story of Jesus’ coming out, as it were. His identify is established – by others and by his own actions – and the titles begin to swirl around him: messiah, redeemer, savior.

Coming out stories are always significant, and they always operate on multiple levels. They certainly have personal significance as we establish our identities. They clearly have family significance, as well, for all kinds of more or less obvious reasons. They also have social significance, as we establish our identities for the broader network of friends and relationships in our communities.

The late Harvey Milk, for example, constantly encouraged his gay and lesbian friends to come out in public. He noted always the political significance, reminding people of the consequences in elections: “if they know they know one of us they vote with us,” he regularly said.

It matters how others view us. Our public identities influence so much around us, often without us understanding it much at all. From time to time, for example, I’ll be out and about while wearing clerical garb. It rarely fails to amaze me the responses I get, especially when I get off my motorcycle wearing the collar.

Not a single thing is different about me. I am the same smart-ass with our without this collar. I know, at a deep, deep level, that, as my homiletics professor was fond of reminding us, “reverend is a noun naming a position not an adjective describing the person who holds it.”

Yet, when I am “out” in public, as it were, it influences social circles and shapes social relationships – not always in pleasant or comfortable ways, to be sure.

The point is, though, to be “out.” To claim the essential parts of one’s identity, and to live lives of integrity, of wholeness, such that your various “comings out” seldom shock and rarely even surprise those who know you well.

In other words, I hope that no one who knows me well is surprised to find out that I am a follower of Jesus. I hope my life reflects my faith. I hope that is true in the big and public parts of my life, as well as in the private moments.

To be sure, I know this is a vain hope. I know it is not always true. I also know that the deepest part of my faith is that which rests on the assurance that God so loved the world, that God bent low to become one with us not in the life of a powerful, beautiful, successful, meritorious one, but rather in the life of a baby, born in a stable, to an unwed mother in a backwater town.

Such a God makes room in the divine heart for such a one as me. Thus I’ll come out as a follower of the one whose life, death, and resurrection point me in the direction of the divine in this world.

Further than that, I’ll quote Harvey Milk again, and say simply, “come out, come out, wherever you are!”

Try it. For New Years. Come out as a follower of Jesus, and invite others to join us here as seekers of God’s amazing, inclusive grace and love. As Simeon understood, so much is riding on such acts as these. Amen.