|
Crash helmets. We should be handing out
crash helmets. At least that’s what author Annie Dillard
thinks. She thinks churches should be handing out crash
helmets instead of bulletins, and life preservers instead of
hymnals. She writes:
It is madness to wear
ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all
be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers
and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the
sleeping God may wake someday and draw us out to where we can
never return.
Crash helmets. Perhaps she’s onto
something. For ours is the God who spoke creation into being.
Ours is the God who told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Ours is
the God who told Jonah to go to the evil city of Nineveh. And
ours is the Son of God who said to one follower, “You lack
just one thing: go sell what you have and give it to the
poor.” So if this is the case, then maybe Annie Dillard isn’t
exaggerating…maybe we should be passing out crash
helmets.
“Why crash helmets,” you ask? “Well, you
know…in case Jesus shows up.” “But we want Jesus
to show up, don’t we? Could there be anything more worshipful,
more calming, more peaceful, than to have Jesus present with
us in church this morning? Why would we need a crash helmet?”
We’d need a crash helmet because every time
Jesus showed up at church there was trouble. Remember that day
he showed up at church and started throwing furniture around,
shouting at the top of his lungs, “It is written: ‘My house
shall be a house of prayer for all people.’” It might have
been helpful that day if the ushers had been passing out crash
helmets.
And there was that time that Jesus returned
home to preach his first sermon. It started off so nice. “The
spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to
proclaim good news to the poor!” The folks back home were so
proud that they were whispering, “Isn’t that Joseph’s boy?
Isn’t that Mary’s son? Why, my boy used to play with him.
Where did he learn to preach like that?”
But then it all changed. He started talking
about them. The outsiders – those godless gentiles. And
do you know what he dared to say about them? He
actually said that God’s Kingdom included them. Well,
the congregation became so furious that when it was over they
marched Jesus to the edge of the cliff to throw him off! (Now
my first sermon was bad – but no one tried to kill me.) That
was another day when crash helmets might have helped.
This is what seems to happen every time
Jesus shows up at church. Look at today’s text. This time when
Jesus shows up at church he calls forward someone with a
withered hand…and heals him. That’s right…somewhere between
the offering and the anthem a healing took place. A life
healed – transformed, changed forever because of something
that happened during a worship service – imagine that.
But notice the congregation. There is not a
single person who says, “Halleluiah! Praise Jesus…do it
again.” Not a single person. Instead many decided it was time
to kill him. (This is it. Right here…the first inkling that
Jesus is in real trouble. Want to know why Jesus was nailed to
the cross? Pay attention to this story. It might be different
than what we’ve been taught.) So when we are bold enough, or
crazy enough, to invite Jesus to worship, then crash helmets
might be in order.
But, why all the controversy and conflict?
Every single time Jesus shows up for worship, all the “nice,
well-behaved church folk” get so riled up, so agitated, so
upset that they would actually kick God’s Son out of God’s
House. What is going on here?
They get so exasperated because every time
Jesus showed up at church he took issue with the guest list
and every time he took issue with the guest list “the nice,
well-behaved church folk” took issue with Jesus for taking
issue with the guest list. But not only did Jesus take issue
with the guest list, he demanded that they expand it
immediately.
And this upsets the regulars. Upset isn’t
the right word here –it’s too kind. What happens in today’s
text is nothing short of church rage. Have you heard of church
rage before? The person who commits church rage is a
religious person – a religious person whose religion has
become their God. South African preacher and Prophet Alan
Storey describes it like this:
It’s the person who starts out by loving
Christianity more than the truth and continues by then loving
their church more than Christianity, only to end up loving
themselves more than everybody else. That is the danger for
religious people – they begin to worship their religion – to
pay homage to its ritual and rules. It is the particular
idolatry reserved for religious people.
Now don’t get me wrong. We need ritual and
we need rules. They give meaning to our lives as a community.
They hold and harness our faith. But what we must do is
constantly hold up our religion, our rituals and our rules to
the light and ask, “Does this bring life or does it bring
death?” and if it no longer brings life then let us lay it
aside for practices that do.
That is what Jesus is doing in this story.
He shows up on the Sabbath, and make no mistake about it,
Jesus knows the Sabbath. He knows all of its rules and
regulations. He knows that “nice, well-behaved church folks”
aren’t supposed to “work” on the Sabbath and so he knows that
performing a healing during a Sabbath gathering would have
been scandalous. And so he says to the congregation, “Is
keeping the rules of the Sabbath going to bring life or death
to this man?”
In this moment Jesus makes it plain – our
religion, our rituals and rules are always subservient to
relationships. Every time Jesus shows up at church he does
something to remind people that God is not all that interested
in religion. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find a
single instance in all of scripture where God asks someone to
start a religion. God says to Abraham, “Live in a special
relationship with me.” God doesn’t ask Moses to start a
religion. He says, “Moses, listen. You’ll hear people
crying…go and set them free.” And God doesn’t ask Jesus to
start a religion. God says to Jesus, “Go and love them like I
love them so that they may enjoy life in all its fullness.”
Christianity is first and foremost a relationship with the
living God long before it is ever a religion.
Remember that in Jesus’ day most synagogues
had a section of space partitioned off by a metal rail. This
area was for the outcasts, the widows, the orphans, the sick,
the lepers – the people with withered hands. To enter this
area you would have to go through a small, narrow gate. They
weren’t allowed into the main sanctuary because they were
considered to be defiled.
The man with the withered hand was
considered defiled because in the ancient Near East people
used their left hands for unclean tasks (sanitary and lavatory
functions) and they used their right hands for eating. So, if
your hand was withered, and it didn’t matter which one, you
had to use the same hand for both sanitation and eating – an
act that would have made one ritually unclean and thus barred
for worship. Imagine this man’s predicament. He is born with a
condition that will always make him an outsider to the
community of faith. There is nothing he will ever be able to
do to be welcomed in the community. He is born with, and will
always carry with him, outsider status.
Furthermore, it was believed that if you
even touched such a person, you yourself would become defiled
and then you too would be subsequently barred for worship –
from a relationship with God. So you can understand the risk
Jesus is about to take –in touching this man Jesus himself
will become “untouchable.” And if that wasn’t enough, “nice,
well-behaved religious folks” believed that a person with such
deformities had them because God was punishing them for some
sin they must have committed.
So if you follow the logic of the
first-century religious person, if God saw fit to punish
someone with such a physical malformation then they certainly
shouldn’t be welcome in God’s House. So they kept these folks
apart, behind the iron railing with its single narrow door. I
wonder if that isn’t what Jesus meant when he said, “If we
want to enter God’s Kingdom, we’ll have to go through the
narrow door.” I wonder if he’s saying we have to enter God’s
presence through the places of the outcasts and the
suffering.
So when Jesus calls this man to enter into
the worship space it would have been absolutely shocking. All
the “nice, well-behaved church folk” would have frantically
scattered to the nearest wall so not to risk being touched by
this “defiled” young man. And then Jesus does the
unbelievable – he tells the man to stretch out his hand – the
very thing that caused his exclusion from the community – and
he reaches out to touch the man.
But before he touches him, he turns to the
congregation and asks, “Is it lawful to do good or to do evil
on the Sabbath, to save this man’s life or to kill him
rendering him invisible?” Silence. A silence so loud it was
deafening. Nobody says a word. At this point the scripture
tells us that Jesus becomes mad. He is livid, ticked, beside
himself with anger. Did you know that the only time we read
that Jesus gets angry is when people are excluded from the
community of faith? You can tell a lot about a person by what
makes them angry.
It is at this moment that some of these
“nice, well-behaved church folk” begin their plot to kill
Jesus. But that’s what happens when we reduce God to the size
of our religion. When religious folks desperately try to
contain God within the propositions and proofs of their
religion, it too often results in the dismissing, abandoning,
marginalizing, ignoring and eventually the killing of those
who don’t fit within their religious boxes and formulas. This
story makes something pretty clear – religion couldn’t heal
this man – but Jesus could.
And that is the promise of this text – no
matter what withered hands we have, in the presence of Jesus
Christ, the risen Lord, we can be healed. And let’s not kid
ourselves. We’ve all got withered places in need of healing.
Some withered places are the result of what
others have done to us, and they fester with bitterness and
resentment. Sometimes the withered places are the result of
what we have done to others, and they ache with guilt and
regret. Some don’t know what has caused the withering. They
just feel it throb, playing itself out in addictions to
alcohol, drugs, eating, shopping, pornography or gambling. For
some it’s a withered self image and for others a withered
sense of purpose or meaning. So let me ask, “What is your
withered hand?” Where do you need healing this morning? Where
do you long for the love God to enter and transform your life?
Whatever it is, Jesus asks us to stretch it out so that it
might be touched and healed. Jesus
longed for the church to be a place where people, all people,
could come and stretch out the withered places of their lives
in the presence of mercy and forgiveness. And when we can
stretch out the broken, wounded and withered places of our
lives, then healing is not only possible – it is inevitable.
I know what
you’re saying. “That’s some good preaching up there preacher.
They sure taught you to say some nice things in that seminary
of yours, didn’t they? But you don’t really believe all this
stuff, do you?” Listen to this story and you tell me:
It is the early nineties. It has not
even been a decade since a virus that would be called AIDS
showed up on the scene. It was still a time when the church
feared to mention the disease, let alone find ways to speak
prophetically or pastorally about what is now known as the
global AIDS crisis. The church is silent. Many wondered if
this was God’s punishment for “sin.”
It is into this context that in Abilene,
Texas, a desperate mother brings her son home to die. The
problem: no hospital will take him. Through some connections
she is able to get him a bed at a nursing home. It is then an
Episcopal priest enters the scene and decides that over this
man’s last weeks and months he will be visited. The priest’s
colleagues warn him, “Make sure to keep your distance. Don’t
get too close.” The nursing home staff counsels him, “Don’t
touch him, but if you do, by all means wear gloves!” For
several weeks the priest arrives at the nursing home, walks
into the room, pulls a chair up next to the bed and listens to
the young man. He prays with him. He reads scripture with him.
He administers the sacraments to him. But most importantly he
touches him…no gloves…just human-to-human contact. The
young man dies…but he dies in the presence of love.
When I asked this priest why he decided to
do what he did he said, “I just imagined if Jesus had gotten
the call, what would he have done? And after that everything
became clear.” If you want to know if today’s scripture is
true, then ask Rod Quainton. He’ll tell you because he was
that priest.
If we were to
boil down today’s story into two simple, but profound words,
those two words would be: Love Wins. In fact, if
I were to boil down the entire essence of the Jesus story I
would do it using those same two words: Love Wins.
Jesus touched the man with the withered hand to show that
Love Wins. He fed the 5,000 with five loaves and
two fish to prove that Love Wins. He calmed the
storm, the one on the sea as well as the one within the
disciples’ hearts, to make it clear that Love Wins.
He ate with tax collectors and sinners because Love
Wins. He healed the blind, the deaf, the lame and the
leper because Love Wins. He said “Whoever is
without sin may cast the first stone…” because Love Wins.
He said “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute
you” because Loves Wins. He said, “If someone
strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also”
because Loves Wins. He ate his last meal with
the one who would betray him and the one who would deny him
because Love Wins. He stood before his accusers,
who insulted, cursed, mocked, spit, whipped, beat and nailed
him to a cross while never once returning a word of hatred
because Love Wins.
From the cross,
the place of humiliation, suffering, agony and death he
uttered the strangest, most unbelievable, utterly ridiculous
words ever said in human history, “Forgive them,” because
Love Wins.
And on the
first Easter morning some 2,000 years ago, the stone from the
tomb was rolled away and Jesus had been raised from the dead
to pronounce once and for all the central truth that lies at
the center of all life – Love Wins.
There you have
it. Nothing more. Nothing less. Believe it. Trust it.
Experience it. But most importantly I implore you to live it.
Love Wins! And with that my friends, let’s strap
on a crash helmet and get out of here and do the same.
Notes:
I am grateful for
a sermon called When Jesus Comes to Church
preached by the Reverend Alan Storey at Duke Chapel this last
spring. I subscribe to Duke Chapel’s sermon podcast which
gives me their weekly message. It was from this sermon, which
dealt with the same text, that I became inspired to craft
this message. Storey
is a minister in the Methodist
Church of Southern Africa, and senior
pastor of Calvary Methodist Church,
Midland, where the cities of
Johannesburg and Pretoria meet. While discerning his call to
ordination, Storey refused conscription into the apartheid
regime’s army, and was arrested. His trial was the last in a
long line, and the regime finally abandoned the case,
effectively ending conscription in South Africa. During his
present ministry, Calvary
Methodist Church has grown from
100 white persons to a multi-racial community of around 800.
The Annie
Dillard quote that started the sermon comes from her book,
Teaching a Stone to Talk. I believe
that Dillard is one of the most important writers of our time.
If you want to read any of her works, I would recommend
A Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek as a good place to start.
In the
first draft, and delivery at the 8:15 service, there was a
story about an AIDS patient and a pastor that came from one of
America’s most prominent and quoted preachers, Fred Craddock.
After the 8:15 service, my good friend and pastoral colleague,
Rod Quainton, approached me in the hallway and said, “You
know that story? Well something like that happened to me.” and
he went on to tell me of the story that now appears in the
final draft of this sermon. I am so appreciative of Rod’s
friendship. This past year in particular we have collaborated
in some truly spirit-filled and surprising ways.
Finally the
tag line “Love Wins” that summed up this sermon
is a phrase that I was introduced to by the writings and
preaching of Rob Bell. Rob, not much older than I am, is the
pastor of Mars Hill
Church in Grand Rapids, a church that
has grown to over 10,000 members and is having an incredible
impact on the Grand Rapids area. I believe Rob is one of the
most important voices in the Emerging Movement and his book
Velvet Elvis has been received very favorably by
many in my generation and the one coming after. I recommend
it to you for your consideration.
|
