Hi all,
Here is tomorrow's sermon, assuming it doesn't snow and we can get to church. The readings for the 1st Sunday in Lent are found here, although I will use only the Gospel reading: http://members.sundaysandseasons.com/planner_rcl_view.php?event_date_id=955.
Peace be with you,
Pr. J
3-1-2009, Lent 1B
Salem-Luther Memorial Parish - Parrottsville
Mark 1:9-15
Adagio for Christ
“And it happened in those days: he came, Jesus, from Nazareth of the Galileans, and baptized was he in the Jordan by John.”
The opening line from today’s Gospel reading taken word for word straight from the Greek text.
That’s the way it would have sounded to you had you been alive 2000 years ago, living words for living disciples of Christ. It sounds different from the more familiar phrasing we’ve grown up hearing, but it says the same thing: “In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.”
I personally like the reading straight from the Greek text better, because one can see in the simple wording of the text, in the very placement of the words in the sentence a much older, living, informal, come-as-you-are story underlying the more formal story about the baptism of Jesus.
Mark’s story goes on. “And at once, coming up from the water, he saw ripped asunder the heavens, and the spirit like a dove came down into him.”
Once again, straight from the Greek text, and it does sound a little different. Here the spirit of God does not just descend like a dove and alight on Jesus’ shoulder; rather it comes down from God and enters into Jesus.
I prefer this reading because the way we’re used to hearing it you kind of get the image of a pidgeon sitting on Jesus’ head while he’s standing there in the river dripping wet – kind of silly, don’t you think? What a sight that would have been! Here it’s clear that the spirit of God, a spirit like a dove, the spirit of peace so to speak, as well as a sign of salvation and deliverance – remember the story of Noah and the dove? - enters into Jesus, and this will shape his whole mission from this point onward.
What I especially like about this reading is the image of what happens to the heavens, a spiritual reality that you can not see with your eyes or touch with your hands as opposed to the literal sky and infinite space over our heads where we fly in our airplanes and where we send spaceships to the planets. Mark uses a dramatic Greek word to portray the heavens being absolutely and violently and permanently ripped asunder, as if it were a huge sheet and two huge hands somehow grabbed hold of it and ripped it in two and you can hear it going “schiiiiiiiiiidzk!”
This same image, in fact the same word Mark uses for this image comes back in the Gospel story much later at the crucifixion of Jesus (Mark 15:38), where we read that at the time of his death on a cross the curtain in the Temple, THE Curtain, the one separating the Holy of Holies from the Sanctuary in the Temple, the one that was supposed to hide the presence of God from the world, was violently ripped in two and torn its whole length from top to bottom. The significance of something like that is that there is no barrier between us and God. God’s presence can not be hidden from us, God will not allow it; Jesus will see to it that God is revealed to us.
Here, at the baptism of Jesus, the impenetrable heavens, the unbreachable spiritual walls between us and God, have been ripped apart, the spiritual barrier between us and God, a spiritual wall that I think has been put there more by us and our own prideful sin than by anything else, has been completely sundered and torn apart in such a way that it can never be restored so that nothing separates us from God, not even the heavens themselves.
And then, after the heavens are ripped apart and the spirit of God comes down into Jesus, we once again meet the mystery voice the Jews have called bat kol since before the time of Jesus.
The Gospel of Mark continues in its own unique voice: “And a voice was born from the heavens, 'You are my son, the beloved, in you I am very pleased.’”
I think if they were to make yet another Jesus movie this would be the perfect place to begin Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.” It could cut in a different places throughout the movie right up to the point where the curtain is torn in two in the Temple and we have come full circle back to the images of Jesus’ baptism.
Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” is a piece of music written for stringed instruments that can be played on the organ and was played on the organ throughout Lent at my intern church in Chicago back in 1990. It was a very somber change from the usual type of music that Paul Manz played during, before, and after worship. Paul was known to the ELCA at that time as the Dean of Lutheran church musicians, but to the people at St. Luke Paul was better known as Papa Smerf, and if you ever saw him you would know why - he looked like a smerf.
Old Papa Smerf had a habit of playing very energetic and rousing pieces as prelude and postlude music – Bach, Mozart, Handel, Vaughn Williams, Holst, Copeland, as well as show tunes and commercial tunes cleverly disguised as church music. Who says Lutherans don’t have a sense of humor?! But then in Lent he departed from his normal routine and began playing the “Adagio for Strings,” all 7½ minutes of it, not just once, not just twice, and not just as prelude and postlude music, but every time the church was open and he was playing the organ, which was quite often during Lent, before, during, and after worship. It seemed Papa Smerf was on a Samuel Barber binge.
Some people might get tired of that. But most people did not. For most of the people at the Church of St. Luke the music clearly defined the spiritual atmosphere of the season, Lent, and they thought that was very fitting. It’s music that just kind of grabs you and doesn’t exactly let you go, especially when it is played with as much depth and as much feeling as Old Papa Smerf could play it on the pipe organ -
and you just have to ride with it and experience it and feel it and it really takes you for an emotional ride that somehow leads you first through the depths of despair, an incredible well of pain and sadness which you suddenly realize is all your own and then takes you soaring high above all the world’s pain up to the heights of a heaven that is felt with the soul rather than seen with the eyes and which you suddenly realize is a gift of sheer undeserved compassion from God-
and in the process you have heard, as well as felt the kingdom of God come near to you, and you know in that moment at the height of the music that there are no barriers at all between you, just as you are, transparent before God with all your failings and imperfections, and an infinite cosmic God holding out overwhelming mercy and compassion for you for no other reason than that God can, and God does. It almost defies words. We needed Old Papa Smerf and his pipe organ.
And that is what Lent is about. I think maybe it finally hit me one Sunday, while I was assisting with communion at the Church of St. Luke way back in 1990 (but it took me years to figure out how to express it because it does almost defy words). I had witnessed the pain and hurt that went on behind the scenes, and knew the people’s pain, and watched all 500 of them coming down the long aisle of that modern cathedral church, some of them really crying as Old Papa Smerf played the Adagio for Strings and they let go of their sins and their pain and their despair before the altar and received the assurance of forgiveness in the bread and wine, the body of Christ given for them, blood of Christ shed for them. This is what Lent is like.
And that is what it should be like for us.
Lent, and the whole Christian life from beginning to end, should be like listening with our full attention to a piece of music like the Adagio for Strings, while the Holy Spirit leads us where it will, taking us from the dark depths of human despair, lifting us up and up and up, ever higher with Jesus as he rises from the waters of his own baptism and bringing us up to the very heights of heaven, rending open all the barriers between us and God so that nothing, nothing at all stands between us and God and there, at the height of the music, we see God revealed to us in the face of Jesus newly risen to meet us.
Thanks be to God.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Sermon for Ash Wednesday
Hi all,
Here is Deacon Leslie's sermon for Ash Wednesday. The readings for Ash Wednesday may be found here: http://members.sundaysandseasons.com/planner_rcl_view.php?event_date_id=954.
Peace be with you,
Pr. J
In 2007 the third in the three part movie series, “Pirates of the Caribbean” was released.
In it we meet the character Davy Jones, and we meet temptation.
“Do you fear death? Do you fear the dark abyss?”
It was a dark and stormy night at sea. Not a dry inch was to be found on deck or sailor. The seas pitched, the ocean roared, chill salt water ran down men’s faces and cascaded from their chins.
Below deck men’s bodies shook, not from cold, but dread fear. The storm was frightful to behold, true enough, but that was not what made these men quake. It was the terror which stood before them, holding their lives in his hands.
Davy Jones, approaching one of the ships survivors, asks: “Do you fear death? Do you fear the dark abyss?”
The man questioned nods and whimpers, his eyes glued to the floor planks.
“All your deeds laid bare. All your sins punished?”
More nods are made.
“I can offer you an escape.”
Another prisoner, holding a crucifix in his shaking hands calls out, “Don’t listen to him!”
Davy Jones approaches this new prisoner saying, “Do you not fear death?”
“I’ll take my chances, sir!” he responds.
Davy Jones turns to his crew and commands, “to the depths!”
At which point the man of faith has his throat cut and his body thrown overboard.
Yet another of the five prisoners cries out, “Cruel blackguard!”
“Life is cruel,” Davy Jones responds. “Why should the afterlife be any different? I offer you a choice, join my crew and postpone the judgment. One hundred years before the mast. Will ye serve?”
“I will serve,” tumbles from the first man’s terrified lips.
“There!” Jones proclaims with a satisfied smirk.
And another man is recruited to the Flying Dutchman by Davy Jones.
Davy Jones is a person of folklore and is the villain in the movie “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.” It seems he fell in love with a woman who caused him a great deal of pain; so much pain, in fact, in the words of the character Tia Dalma, “Him carve out him heart, lock it away in a chest and hide the chest from the world.” His own heart became his treasure, a heart he would give to no one, a heart that could no longer feel.
Be careful to what or to whom you give your heart. In a world constantly telling us to buy our happiness, to take everything we can, and give nothing back, the true treasure of life becomes obscured, our hearts become wooden. We are too easily seduced into thinking the filling of our desire to acquire is the answer to the pains of life. More food, more stuff, more money, more friends, more knowledge, more power. It is, of course, not so easy but our hearts are easily deceived. We then find that we are left with an emptiness, always with something missing. Life’s true treasure cannot be acquired or achieved or earned. It can only be gratefully accepted.
What is your treasure?
Where is your heart? Has it known terrible pain? Has it been bruised by the wrongs and injustices of this life? Has it been shared with others? Is it still? It is no easy thing to live this life without laying our hearts aside in a locked chest to keep them safe, to keep us safe. I might go so far as to say it is well nigh impossible. I have pulled mine out to face the storms of life for just so long before racing to lock it safely away again for a time. This is human reality. We cannot perfect our love. We will not submit our hearts to the constant onslaught of life’s pain. And so we are not able to keep our hearts constantly open to God’s love either. The heart of a mere mortal is not equal to the task. So God in his infinite mercy offers up his own for our treasure.
What of the heart of God?
Where is God’s heart? God’s heart is invested in each and every one of us- each bit of his creation. God has given us his heart that we might use it in love.
God has given us his son – that our failure to love might be forgiven.
We need not fear death, but we will. It is in the nature of being creature. As we watch and feel ourselves and our loved ones age and sicken, and die, we will know fear. But know that it is in the nature of the Creator to love, and to give and to forgive. We are held within the heart of God; there, in the end, nothing can harm us. Let us use this holy season then, and set aside sacred hours to rest in God’s grace, to serve in God’s love, to glory in the everlasting peace of God.
Amen.
Here is Deacon Leslie's sermon for Ash Wednesday. The readings for Ash Wednesday may be found here: http://members.sundaysandseasons.com/planner_rcl_view.php?event_date_id=954.
Peace be with you,
Pr. J
In 2007 the third in the three part movie series, “Pirates of the Caribbean” was released.
In it we meet the character Davy Jones, and we meet temptation.
“Do you fear death? Do you fear the dark abyss?”
It was a dark and stormy night at sea. Not a dry inch was to be found on deck or sailor. The seas pitched, the ocean roared, chill salt water ran down men’s faces and cascaded from their chins.
Below deck men’s bodies shook, not from cold, but dread fear. The storm was frightful to behold, true enough, but that was not what made these men quake. It was the terror which stood before them, holding their lives in his hands.
Davy Jones, approaching one of the ships survivors, asks: “Do you fear death? Do you fear the dark abyss?”
The man questioned nods and whimpers, his eyes glued to the floor planks.
“All your deeds laid bare. All your sins punished?”
More nods are made.
“I can offer you an escape.”
Another prisoner, holding a crucifix in his shaking hands calls out, “Don’t listen to him!”
Davy Jones approaches this new prisoner saying, “Do you not fear death?”
“I’ll take my chances, sir!” he responds.
Davy Jones turns to his crew and commands, “to the depths!”
At which point the man of faith has his throat cut and his body thrown overboard.
Yet another of the five prisoners cries out, “Cruel blackguard!”
“Life is cruel,” Davy Jones responds. “Why should the afterlife be any different? I offer you a choice, join my crew and postpone the judgment. One hundred years before the mast. Will ye serve?”
“I will serve,” tumbles from the first man’s terrified lips.
“There!” Jones proclaims with a satisfied smirk.
And another man is recruited to the Flying Dutchman by Davy Jones.
Davy Jones is a person of folklore and is the villain in the movie “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.” It seems he fell in love with a woman who caused him a great deal of pain; so much pain, in fact, in the words of the character Tia Dalma, “Him carve out him heart, lock it away in a chest and hide the chest from the world.” His own heart became his treasure, a heart he would give to no one, a heart that could no longer feel.
Be careful to what or to whom you give your heart. In a world constantly telling us to buy our happiness, to take everything we can, and give nothing back, the true treasure of life becomes obscured, our hearts become wooden. We are too easily seduced into thinking the filling of our desire to acquire is the answer to the pains of life. More food, more stuff, more money, more friends, more knowledge, more power. It is, of course, not so easy but our hearts are easily deceived. We then find that we are left with an emptiness, always with something missing. Life’s true treasure cannot be acquired or achieved or earned. It can only be gratefully accepted.
What is your treasure?
Where is your heart? Has it known terrible pain? Has it been bruised by the wrongs and injustices of this life? Has it been shared with others? Is it still? It is no easy thing to live this life without laying our hearts aside in a locked chest to keep them safe, to keep us safe. I might go so far as to say it is well nigh impossible. I have pulled mine out to face the storms of life for just so long before racing to lock it safely away again for a time. This is human reality. We cannot perfect our love. We will not submit our hearts to the constant onslaught of life’s pain. And so we are not able to keep our hearts constantly open to God’s love either. The heart of a mere mortal is not equal to the task. So God in his infinite mercy offers up his own for our treasure.
What of the heart of God?
Where is God’s heart? God’s heart is invested in each and every one of us- each bit of his creation. God has given us his heart that we might use it in love.
God has given us his son – that our failure to love might be forgiven.
We need not fear death, but we will. It is in the nature of being creature. As we watch and feel ourselves and our loved ones age and sicken, and die, we will know fear. But know that it is in the nature of the Creator to love, and to give and to forgive. We are held within the heart of God; there, in the end, nothing can harm us. Let us use this holy season then, and set aside sacred hours to rest in God’s grace, to serve in God’s love, to glory in the everlasting peace of God.
Amen.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Book of Faith Initiative coming this spring!
Hi all,
Plan ahead for the spring now! This spring I will lead a seven-session course called "Opening the Book of Faith." This course is the first step for those using the "Book of Faith" program in local congregations. "Opening the Book of Faith" is a invitation to experience the Bible as a book of faith. This course provides an introduction to the Bible and Lutheran perspectives that guide one's understanding of scripture. The user book explores four methods of Bible study, then applies each method to four scripture texts. Important communication tools, study principles, and discussion methods are unpacked for participants in a flexible, conversational format that encourages discussion, conversation, and sharing — setting a healthy foundation for a powerful Book of Faith experience.
We ask that participants contribute toward the cost of their user books. A $6.00 donation, or whatever you can afford, would go a long way toward covering the cost. Seven user books are on order now. Please let the Church Office know asap if you plan to participate so we can order enough books - call 623-8086 or email salemchurch@wildblue.net.
A course kit is on order and will arrive in early March. We will announce a date for starting sessions once course materials arrive. Evening is the most likely time for sessions.
Plan ahead and join us for opening the book of faith!
Peace be with you,
Pr. J
Plan ahead for the spring now! This spring I will lead a seven-session course called "Opening the Book of Faith." This course is the first step for those using the "Book of Faith" program in local congregations. "Opening the Book of Faith" is a invitation to experience the Bible as a book of faith. This course provides an introduction to the Bible and Lutheran perspectives that guide one's understanding of scripture. The user book explores four methods of Bible study, then applies each method to four scripture texts. Important communication tools, study principles, and discussion methods are unpacked for participants in a flexible, conversational format that encourages discussion, conversation, and sharing — setting a healthy foundation for a powerful Book of Faith experience.
We ask that participants contribute toward the cost of their user books. A $6.00 donation, or whatever you can afford, would go a long way toward covering the cost. Seven user books are on order now. Please let the Church Office know asap if you plan to participate so we can order enough books - call 623-8086 or email salemchurch@wildblue.net.
A course kit is on order and will arrive in early March. We will announce a date for starting sessions once course materials arrive. Evening is the most likely time for sessions.
Plan ahead and join us for opening the book of faith!
Peace be with you,
Pr. J
Saturday, February 21, 2009
ELCA Human Sexuality Issue
Hi all.
As you probably know by now, or will know soon, the Task Force for ELCA Studies on Sexuality has just this week released a proposed social statement and a document entitled "Report and Recommendation on Ministry Policies" with recommendations for implementing resolutions at the ELCA Church-wide Assembly.
From what I'm seeing so far at internet news sites the reaction to this from those who post comments on those news articles is not good. In fact, I'd say it is insulting. ELCA is trying to deal with a highly sensitive, and I would even say, emotionally explosive issue. And it is to some extent tangental to the issue of same gender marriage and rights that is being dealt with in the political arena. Up north I have seen tempers get very hot pretty fast on both sides of the issue, with all the accompanying dehumanization and vilification of one's opponent that one could want in any conflict coming from people on both sides of the problem. What ever happened to civility?
I am not going to address that issue tonight. (If you want to know what I'm up to that prevents me from speaking on the issue right now I'm in my church office playing mp3's - Frank Sinatra, The Carpenters, Abba, Vangelis, my daughter calls it all "old dead people music" - finishing my sermon, and trying to get things posted on this blog.)
I have downloaded both statements issued by the Task Force. They are in pdf format and they are available at this link if anyone wants to read them first hand: http://www.elca.org/What-We-Believe/Social-Issues/Social-Statements-in-Process/JTF-Human-Sexuality.aspx. The proposed social statement, "Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust", is over 1200 lines long, and the "Report and Recommendations on Ministry Policies" is over 800 lines long, and I haven't had time to read them through and analyze them. I will do that, but remember - I am a slow reader. (Its called dyslexia and ordination does not make it go away.)
So - BE PATIENT.
Meanwhile, all I will say is that I am maintaining my position of strict NEUTRALITY on the issue. I have kept this position for years, since I was in my last parish in New York. Do not forget that I am called to be a pastor to people on both sides of the issue.
I am willing to hear from the people of the parish about the issue if they have any thoughts on the matter. I know some do.
I may consider creating another blog for those members of the parish who wish to post their thoughts.
Meanwhile, hang in there while the church attempts to discern where the Holy Spirit is leading us.
Peace be with you,
Pr. J
As you probably know by now, or will know soon, the Task Force for ELCA Studies on Sexuality has just this week released a proposed social statement and a document entitled "Report and Recommendation on Ministry Policies" with recommendations for implementing resolutions at the ELCA Church-wide Assembly.
From what I'm seeing so far at internet news sites the reaction to this from those who post comments on those news articles is not good. In fact, I'd say it is insulting. ELCA is trying to deal with a highly sensitive, and I would even say, emotionally explosive issue. And it is to some extent tangental to the issue of same gender marriage and rights that is being dealt with in the political arena. Up north I have seen tempers get very hot pretty fast on both sides of the issue, with all the accompanying dehumanization and vilification of one's opponent that one could want in any conflict coming from people on both sides of the problem. What ever happened to civility?
I am not going to address that issue tonight. (If you want to know what I'm up to that prevents me from speaking on the issue right now I'm in my church office playing mp3's - Frank Sinatra, The Carpenters, Abba, Vangelis, my daughter calls it all "old dead people music" - finishing my sermon, and trying to get things posted on this blog.)
I have downloaded both statements issued by the Task Force. They are in pdf format and they are available at this link if anyone wants to read them first hand: http://www.elca.org/What-We-Believe/Social-Issues/Social-Statements-in-Process/JTF-Human-Sexuality.aspx. The proposed social statement, "Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust", is over 1200 lines long, and the "Report and Recommendations on Ministry Policies" is over 800 lines long, and I haven't had time to read them through and analyze them. I will do that, but remember - I am a slow reader. (Its called dyslexia and ordination does not make it go away.)
So - BE PATIENT.
Meanwhile, all I will say is that I am maintaining my position of strict NEUTRALITY on the issue. I have kept this position for years, since I was in my last parish in New York. Do not forget that I am called to be a pastor to people on both sides of the issue.
I am willing to hear from the people of the parish about the issue if they have any thoughts on the matter. I know some do.
I may consider creating another blog for those members of the parish who wish to post their thoughts.
Meanwhile, hang in there while the church attempts to discern where the Holy Spirit is leading us.
Peace be with you,
Pr. J
Sermon for Transfiguration Sunday, Year B
OK, here is the sermon for tomorrow, 22 February, my St.-Mary-of-the-bathtubs sermon. I knew that sermon illustration would grab you.
If you find the comments about the vision of the disciples interesting and want to read more, I recommend Bruce J. Malina, Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels, 2nd edition (Fortress Press, 2003) for starters. Malina talks about what he calls "Altered States of Consciousness," and this really goes a long way in explaining a lot of things in the Gospels and the Book of Acts. His commentary on Mark 9:2-9 is on pages 183-184 of that book, and his discussioon of altered states of consciousness is on pages 327-329.
Also, if you want to begin to learn more about traditional Jewish prayer and how this comes into play in the Gospel stories I recommend for starters Bruce Chilton's book, Rabbi Jesus (Doubleday, 2000). I sat in a number of Dr. Chilton's seminars at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson in New York while I was at the St. John's-St. Thomas Parish and they were absolutely fascinating, even though I may disagree with a few of his consclusions. Overall, his work is very worth reading. Best of all, Rabbi Jesus is written like a novel and is easily read and you can get it pretty cheap at Amazon.com.
Peace be with you,
Pr. J
2-22-2009, Transfiguration Year B
Salem - Luther Memorial Parish - Parrottsville, TN
Mark 9:2-9
Transfiguration
Reading today’s Gospel reading I was reminded of something that I saw many times back around Syracuse, New York. I don’t know if you see this kind of thing in this area, but it’s what I call St. Mary of the Bath Tubs. If you have not yet seen St. Mary of the Bath Tubs then you need to get out and take a long drive to New York and look at people’s yards. It won’t be long before you’ll see St. Mary of the Bath Tubs, or something similar, like St. Joseph of the Inner Tubes.
Now this is about people taking statues of saints, usually Mary and Joseph, sometimes St. Francis, or an angel with wings, or even Jesus himself, and erecting a little shrine in their yard or their garden. Back when I lived in North Syracuse it seemed there were a lot of people taking old bath tubs and setting them into the ground in such a way as to form a little shelter, painted white, or turquoise, surrounded with white stones and flowers and, of course, housing the saint’s statue. One day I saw Mary’s statue standing in what was obviously an old bath tub in someone’s front yard and I pointed it out to Leslie and said, “Look, its St. Mary of the Bath Tubs,” and the name stuck. That’s not to put down someone’s spirituality, it just means I make these unusual associations, or perhaps the person who thought of turning a bath tub into a shrine makes unusual associations.
Somehow the Gospel reading reminds me of that kind of thing. And at first glance it might appear that Peter wants to build little shrines to Jesus, Moses, and Elijah, but something more is happening.
In the Gospel story we find that Jesus has gone hiking with his disciples Peter, James, and John, but this is not just a casual hike. There is some reason to believe that the time frame for the Gospel reading is sometime in early to mid-October, eight days after the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. It was a time of year for many people to go on a pilgrimage because after Yom Kippur another Jewish holy time began, the Festival of Sukkot, called the Feast of Booths. By tradition, those who kept this festival would not work for the first two days of the feast, but on the 3rd day, eight days after Yom Kippur, work would be allowed for those keeping the festival, & that meant pilgrims could travel. And many did. It appears that among the many who were traveling at that time were Jesus, Peter, James, & John.
They came to a mountain, identified by tradition today as Mt. Hermon in northern Israel. You have to picture this. This is a truly high mountain. The summit is usually snowcapped year-round. From high enough up the slope you can see the Mediterranean Sea. And – even in the time of Jesus, Peter, James, and John, - it was - you might say - special. Even then it was considered holy ground, a sacred place for Jew and Gentile alike. Gentiles built shrines and even temples to the gods of Greece and Rome on the slopes of this mountain; Jewish tradition said that servants of God came and went from heaven on this mountain; and everyone, Jew and Gentile alike claimed that strange things were to be seen on this mountain: the Pharisees taught that angels of God encountered people on and near the mountain, and the Gentiles claimed that, no, it was their gods instead that people saw: Apollo, Mercury, Minerva and others. Either way, if you journeyed up this mountain you expected something unusual; you expected to enter the presence of God.
Jesus took Peter, James, and John up the slopes of Mt. Hermon. Common sense alone says they all expected something. They had to. But what?
Treading the path up the slope they would pass the occasional shrine or memorial to a Greek or Roman deity; it must have looked a little like St. Mary of the Bath Tubs to them. They passed several large temples, all dedicated to gods foreign to them, gods of cold dead stone that they could not serve and honor. On up the slope they went, higher and higher, until they passed the tree line and there was nothing but scrub brush on the slopes. Perhaps they went even further up, the slope now almost barren, the ground rocky and rough, their breath now frozen in the air, the blue Mediterranean Sea now plainly visible in the west, the snow covered peak clear and very close. I have a hunch Jesus took them pretty far up the slope, perhaps close to the top, a barren and deserted place that only the most dauntless - or stubborn - pilgrims would seek out in their desire to get close to God.
There he stopped and said, “This is the place,” a place for them to spend some time in quiet solitude to pray, not as we pray in church today, but in the old way of the Jewish teachers, more like the meditation you might associate with a Buddhist monk rather than the petitions of a pastor leading prayers in the congregation. It was a very ancient, very traditional way for the Jewish teachers to wait for the presence of God to come to them. The same thing is done today in Christianity where the practice is called contemplative prayer. I’ve done that - its really neat, especially when you develop the discipline to do it on a regular basis. You ought to try it sometime; it’s different. That is what Jesus and his disciples were doing on the mountain. We can see them sitting around a camp fire at the end of a long day hiking up the mountain, sun going down on the Mediterranean horizon, frozen breath hanging in the air, and all is quiet. They are focused now, deep in the old traditional form of prayer, waiting for the presence of God. And you know what they say: you always get what you ask for.
This is when the unusual happened.
Sometime during their prayer session, while they were meditating, waiting for the presence of God, it was as if a window into God’s presence was opened up for them. The wording of this story in Matthew, Mark, and Luke together tells us they had a spiritual vision, not to be taken literally because it wasn’t a physical vision seen with physical eyes, but in the Gospel a spiritual reality is still something that is very real.
In this vision the disciples saw Jesus in another way, with a new appearance, one that shouted out loud and clear that Jesus has a connection to God. As the vision unfolded who else did they see but Moses and Elijah talking to Jesus; the two greatest authorities of the Hebrew tradition! Moses who by tradition represented all of the Law, and Elijah, who by tradition represented all of the prophets of the past. In this vision Moses, Elijah, and Jesus are talking about his mission and what he is going to accomplish at Jerusalem.
Now, following in the footsteps of many before him who built nearly two dozen temples on the side of the mountain, Peter decided that this vision was enough for him and perhaps he wanted to build some shrines of his own, what our reading calls dwellings. The Hebrew word was sukkot, and it was time for the festival of Sukkot. In this festival pilgrims would build small huts called sukkot in which to live for up to seven days, a way of remembering the wanderings of the Hebrew people in the wilderness. But here Peter seems to have something else in mind. He seems to want to enshrine Moses, Elijah, and even Jesus! Perhaps. Maybe, as some suggest, it was his way of trying to hold on to the presence of God as long as he could. Or maybe there something more going on, some connection to the festival at hand. (Leviticus 23:40-43) Anyway, this is where I am reminded of St. Mary of the Bath Tubs – I know, an unusual association, but whenever I see one of those Mary shrines in someone’s front yard it makes me think of this Gospel reading.
What if Peter had had a few bath tubs or inner tubes handy? He might have set up his three dwellings right then and there, three homemade shrines to Moses, Elijah, and Jesus – a testimony to the presence of God. But that was not to happen.
Peter and the other disciples are still in the midst of this vision which is still unfolding. As the vision continued as they heard a voice coming from the cloud, and this voice said to them that Jesus is God’s son, God’s chosen; “listen to him!” the voice commanded.
Then as suddenly as the vision began it was over with and they were back in what we would call the “real world.” There was no shining cloud, no Moses, no Elijah. Jesus looked as he always had, and so did the world around Peter, James, and John, but the world has been changed forever. God had acted. God had done a new thing. God was going to redeem this fallen world.
There was the Good News. God’s presence is made known in Jesus. Jesus has a mission to fulfill in Jerusalem. As the Gospel story plays out we will see Jesus fulfill his mission as he is crucified at Jerusalem and in that way he will accomplish the salvation of a fallen humanity.
In the church we are about to change seasons and enter Lent. We are now going to spend a whole season walking with Jesus as he leaves that mountain and journeys to Jerusalem where his mission will be completed. The important thing for us is to remember that what Jesus did when he reached Jerusalem was done for all of us, for all people of all times and all places. It was an act of compassion for all the fallen, broken down, imperfect, rejected, sinful people of the world; in some way or another, it was for every single human being who has ever lived or ever will live. God’s grace and compassion span all time past and present without boundaries, radiating outward from the cross across all eternity and throughout all space because God is a God of all places and all times.
God’s grace and compassion are here today for one and all, you and me and everyone you can possibly think of and more. Let that compassion work for you today. Let your troubles, your failings, your anxieties, your imperfections, yours ills, your sins be taken up into the hands of Jesus, the son of God shining brightly on a mountain top. Let him take you by the hand to transfigure your life as he makes you into a new person with an eternal home in God’s new creation.
Peace be with you.
If you find the comments about the vision of the disciples interesting and want to read more, I recommend Bruce J. Malina, Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels, 2nd edition (Fortress Press, 2003) for starters. Malina talks about what he calls "Altered States of Consciousness," and this really goes a long way in explaining a lot of things in the Gospels and the Book of Acts. His commentary on Mark 9:2-9 is on pages 183-184 of that book, and his discussioon of altered states of consciousness is on pages 327-329.
Also, if you want to begin to learn more about traditional Jewish prayer and how this comes into play in the Gospel stories I recommend for starters Bruce Chilton's book, Rabbi Jesus (Doubleday, 2000). I sat in a number of Dr. Chilton's seminars at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson in New York while I was at the St. John's-St. Thomas Parish and they were absolutely fascinating, even though I may disagree with a few of his consclusions. Overall, his work is very worth reading. Best of all, Rabbi Jesus is written like a novel and is easily read and you can get it pretty cheap at Amazon.com.
Peace be with you,
Pr. J
2-22-2009, Transfiguration Year B
Salem - Luther Memorial Parish - Parrottsville, TN
Mark 9:2-9
Transfiguration
Reading today’s Gospel reading I was reminded of something that I saw many times back around Syracuse, New York. I don’t know if you see this kind of thing in this area, but it’s what I call St. Mary of the Bath Tubs. If you have not yet seen St. Mary of the Bath Tubs then you need to get out and take a long drive to New York and look at people’s yards. It won’t be long before you’ll see St. Mary of the Bath Tubs, or something similar, like St. Joseph of the Inner Tubes.
Now this is about people taking statues of saints, usually Mary and Joseph, sometimes St. Francis, or an angel with wings, or even Jesus himself, and erecting a little shrine in their yard or their garden. Back when I lived in North Syracuse it seemed there were a lot of people taking old bath tubs and setting them into the ground in such a way as to form a little shelter, painted white, or turquoise, surrounded with white stones and flowers and, of course, housing the saint’s statue. One day I saw Mary’s statue standing in what was obviously an old bath tub in someone’s front yard and I pointed it out to Leslie and said, “Look, its St. Mary of the Bath Tubs,” and the name stuck. That’s not to put down someone’s spirituality, it just means I make these unusual associations, or perhaps the person who thought of turning a bath tub into a shrine makes unusual associations.
Somehow the Gospel reading reminds me of that kind of thing. And at first glance it might appear that Peter wants to build little shrines to Jesus, Moses, and Elijah, but something more is happening.
In the Gospel story we find that Jesus has gone hiking with his disciples Peter, James, and John, but this is not just a casual hike. There is some reason to believe that the time frame for the Gospel reading is sometime in early to mid-October, eight days after the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. It was a time of year for many people to go on a pilgrimage because after Yom Kippur another Jewish holy time began, the Festival of Sukkot, called the Feast of Booths. By tradition, those who kept this festival would not work for the first two days of the feast, but on the 3rd day, eight days after Yom Kippur, work would be allowed for those keeping the festival, & that meant pilgrims could travel. And many did. It appears that among the many who were traveling at that time were Jesus, Peter, James, & John.
They came to a mountain, identified by tradition today as Mt. Hermon in northern Israel. You have to picture this. This is a truly high mountain. The summit is usually snowcapped year-round. From high enough up the slope you can see the Mediterranean Sea. And – even in the time of Jesus, Peter, James, and John, - it was - you might say - special. Even then it was considered holy ground, a sacred place for Jew and Gentile alike. Gentiles built shrines and even temples to the gods of Greece and Rome on the slopes of this mountain; Jewish tradition said that servants of God came and went from heaven on this mountain; and everyone, Jew and Gentile alike claimed that strange things were to be seen on this mountain: the Pharisees taught that angels of God encountered people on and near the mountain, and the Gentiles claimed that, no, it was their gods instead that people saw: Apollo, Mercury, Minerva and others. Either way, if you journeyed up this mountain you expected something unusual; you expected to enter the presence of God.
Jesus took Peter, James, and John up the slopes of Mt. Hermon. Common sense alone says they all expected something. They had to. But what?
Treading the path up the slope they would pass the occasional shrine or memorial to a Greek or Roman deity; it must have looked a little like St. Mary of the Bath Tubs to them. They passed several large temples, all dedicated to gods foreign to them, gods of cold dead stone that they could not serve and honor. On up the slope they went, higher and higher, until they passed the tree line and there was nothing but scrub brush on the slopes. Perhaps they went even further up, the slope now almost barren, the ground rocky and rough, their breath now frozen in the air, the blue Mediterranean Sea now plainly visible in the west, the snow covered peak clear and very close. I have a hunch Jesus took them pretty far up the slope, perhaps close to the top, a barren and deserted place that only the most dauntless - or stubborn - pilgrims would seek out in their desire to get close to God.
There he stopped and said, “This is the place,” a place for them to spend some time in quiet solitude to pray, not as we pray in church today, but in the old way of the Jewish teachers, more like the meditation you might associate with a Buddhist monk rather than the petitions of a pastor leading prayers in the congregation. It was a very ancient, very traditional way for the Jewish teachers to wait for the presence of God to come to them. The same thing is done today in Christianity where the practice is called contemplative prayer. I’ve done that - its really neat, especially when you develop the discipline to do it on a regular basis. You ought to try it sometime; it’s different. That is what Jesus and his disciples were doing on the mountain. We can see them sitting around a camp fire at the end of a long day hiking up the mountain, sun going down on the Mediterranean horizon, frozen breath hanging in the air, and all is quiet. They are focused now, deep in the old traditional form of prayer, waiting for the presence of God. And you know what they say: you always get what you ask for.
This is when the unusual happened.
Sometime during their prayer session, while they were meditating, waiting for the presence of God, it was as if a window into God’s presence was opened up for them. The wording of this story in Matthew, Mark, and Luke together tells us they had a spiritual vision, not to be taken literally because it wasn’t a physical vision seen with physical eyes, but in the Gospel a spiritual reality is still something that is very real.
In this vision the disciples saw Jesus in another way, with a new appearance, one that shouted out loud and clear that Jesus has a connection to God. As the vision unfolded who else did they see but Moses and Elijah talking to Jesus; the two greatest authorities of the Hebrew tradition! Moses who by tradition represented all of the Law, and Elijah, who by tradition represented all of the prophets of the past. In this vision Moses, Elijah, and Jesus are talking about his mission and what he is going to accomplish at Jerusalem.
Now, following in the footsteps of many before him who built nearly two dozen temples on the side of the mountain, Peter decided that this vision was enough for him and perhaps he wanted to build some shrines of his own, what our reading calls dwellings. The Hebrew word was sukkot, and it was time for the festival of Sukkot. In this festival pilgrims would build small huts called sukkot in which to live for up to seven days, a way of remembering the wanderings of the Hebrew people in the wilderness. But here Peter seems to have something else in mind. He seems to want to enshrine Moses, Elijah, and even Jesus! Perhaps. Maybe, as some suggest, it was his way of trying to hold on to the presence of God as long as he could. Or maybe there something more going on, some connection to the festival at hand. (Leviticus 23:40-43) Anyway, this is where I am reminded of St. Mary of the Bath Tubs – I know, an unusual association, but whenever I see one of those Mary shrines in someone’s front yard it makes me think of this Gospel reading.
What if Peter had had a few bath tubs or inner tubes handy? He might have set up his three dwellings right then and there, three homemade shrines to Moses, Elijah, and Jesus – a testimony to the presence of God. But that was not to happen.
Peter and the other disciples are still in the midst of this vision which is still unfolding. As the vision continued as they heard a voice coming from the cloud, and this voice said to them that Jesus is God’s son, God’s chosen; “listen to him!” the voice commanded.
Then as suddenly as the vision began it was over with and they were back in what we would call the “real world.” There was no shining cloud, no Moses, no Elijah. Jesus looked as he always had, and so did the world around Peter, James, and John, but the world has been changed forever. God had acted. God had done a new thing. God was going to redeem this fallen world.
There was the Good News. God’s presence is made known in Jesus. Jesus has a mission to fulfill in Jerusalem. As the Gospel story plays out we will see Jesus fulfill his mission as he is crucified at Jerusalem and in that way he will accomplish the salvation of a fallen humanity.
In the church we are about to change seasons and enter Lent. We are now going to spend a whole season walking with Jesus as he leaves that mountain and journeys to Jerusalem where his mission will be completed. The important thing for us is to remember that what Jesus did when he reached Jerusalem was done for all of us, for all people of all times and all places. It was an act of compassion for all the fallen, broken down, imperfect, rejected, sinful people of the world; in some way or another, it was for every single human being who has ever lived or ever will live. God’s grace and compassion span all time past and present without boundaries, radiating outward from the cross across all eternity and throughout all space because God is a God of all places and all times.
God’s grace and compassion are here today for one and all, you and me and everyone you can possibly think of and more. Let that compassion work for you today. Let your troubles, your failings, your anxieties, your imperfections, yours ills, your sins be taken up into the hands of Jesus, the son of God shining brightly on a mountain top. Let him take you by the hand to transfigure your life as he makes you into a new person with an eternal home in God’s new creation.
Peace be with you.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Ash Wednesday and Lent
Our Lenten schedule at the Salem-Luther Memorial Parish is as follows:
February 24, Shrove Tuesday:
Shrove Tuesday Pancake Supper at Salem Lutheran, 6-8 pm.
February 25, Ash Wednesday:
Service of Holy Communion and the Imposition of Ashes, 6:30 pm at Luther Memorial.
March 4, 11, 16, 25, April 1:
Lenten soup and sandwich supper at Salem Lutheran, 6:00 pm; Mid-week Lenten Service of Holy Communion at Salem Lutheran, 6:30 pm.
The mid-week lenten services will be like those we had during Advent: informal and brief, featuring a brief meditation instead of a sermon. Unlike the Advent services we will meet upstairs in the sanctuary at Salem for our mid-week lenten services.
All are invited! Come and join us as we begin our Lenten journey!
Pr. J.
February 24, Shrove Tuesday:
Shrove Tuesday Pancake Supper at Salem Lutheran, 6-8 pm.
February 25, Ash Wednesday:
Service of Holy Communion and the Imposition of Ashes, 6:30 pm at Luther Memorial.
March 4, 11, 16, 25, April 1:
Lenten soup and sandwich supper at Salem Lutheran, 6:00 pm; Mid-week Lenten Service of Holy Communion at Salem Lutheran, 6:30 pm.
The mid-week lenten services will be like those we had during Advent: informal and brief, featuring a brief meditation instead of a sermon. Unlike the Advent services we will meet upstairs in the sanctuary at Salem for our mid-week lenten services.
All are invited! Come and join us as we begin our Lenten journey!
Pr. J.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Welcome Jonathan!
We want to welcome Jonathan and Laura Weant to the Salem faith community. Jonathan is in his second year of seminary study and is currently doing his "Lutheran year" at Southern Seminary in order to complete his seminary education. (ELCA seminarians who attend non-Lutheran seminaries have to spend a year at one of our 8 seminaries in order to certify for ordination .) Jonathan and Laura spent their first year at Duke Divinity School in Durham, NC. Laura is also attending seminary with the intention of seeking ordination.
Salem is sponsoring Jonathan through the LTSS Seminarian Partnership Program. I just got an email from Jonathan and with his permission I will post it on our blog. We hope to hear more from Jonathan and Laura and to have some opportunity to visit with them and get to know them better. The sharing of experiences and support can be a really good experience for both our congregation and the seminarians.
pax,
Pr. J
Salem is sponsoring Jonathan through the LTSS Seminarian Partnership Program. I just got an email from Jonathan and with his permission I will post it on our blog. We hope to hear more from Jonathan and Laura and to have some opportunity to visit with them and get to know them better. The sharing of experiences and support can be a really good experience for both our congregation and the seminarians.
pax,
Pr. J
Sermon for the 6th Sunday after Epiphany
OK, here's the sermon for last Sunday, up a little late, but I had some odd problem creating posts this time, which seems to be worked out now. I did ad lib a little near the end, especially about reaching out to the community around us and bringing the community into the church, so this is not exactly what I said, but very close. I also thought it was interesting how one person who had been through the kind of CPE I went through focused on that part of the sermon.
Here is a link to the texts for the day at Sundays and Seasons:
http://members.sundaysandseasons.com/planner_rcl_view.php?event_date_id=952
pax Christi,
Pr. J
2-15-2009, Epiphany 6B
Salem-Luther Memorial - Parrottsville, Tennessee
Mark 1:40-45
No title
Back in the summer of 1989 I was doing a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education at Baptist Hospital in Columbia, South Carolina. That means my job that summer was to be a hospital chaplain and to sit through endless group sessions while a collection of judgmental rank amateur armchair psychologists, otherwise known as my peer group, tried to psychoanalyze every move and every sneeze I made, as if they didn‘t have their own log in their own eye. And I had a lot of sneezes for them. This is what they used to call “cut throat CPE.” I think it was a very unethical way of weeding out people during the seminary training process, but that‘s another story. Needless to say, I survived, and while the members of my peer group psychoanalyzed one another into oblivion they never did psychoanalyze me so I proudly remain an enigma to this day. Those peer group sessions were probably the hardest part of CPE, a complete waste of time, and I didn‘t learn anything from them.
What was easier, although it did not seem easy at the time, and what was the true learning experience of CPE, was to be out on the floors of the hospital answering calls from patients and staff, sometimes at 3 a.m. , what they used to call the “witching hour.”
I got one such call from a nurse who had a near hysterical patient on her hands, a young man. She would not elaborate on his illness. It took about ten minutes to get to the other side of the hospital. I found the room and there was a sign on the closed door: take necessary precautions, report to the nurses’ station. I went to the nurses’ station and told them who I was and where I was headed. They said I needed to wear a face mask; they weren’t sure, but they thought the guy in the room had AIDS. Back then AIDS was still a new disease. No one knew much about it. They gave me a face mask, “Wear this in the room,” they said. So I put the mask on and went in.
There was a young man in the bed, 22 or 24, scrawny and looking very stressed out, and his girlfriend was pacing the floor. They were obviously scared. That’s what you saw at first glance. A closer look and you could see that this man was covered, absolutely covered in tiny little black pimples, all over his arms, his neck, his face, his hands. The doctors told him he might have AIDS; they really didn’t know, and, in their exemplary bedside manner they told him AIDS was fatal - no cure, and that he should get his affairs in order, and so he was terrified. As he talked it turned out that he was a drug addict, had been shooting heroin and sharing dirty needles, and the doctors thought that was how he had gotten AIDS. They weren’t sure. They were doing tests to see if he had the HIV virus. Meanwhile this man was watching his life pass before his eyes, was acutely aware of every mistake he had ever made, especially getting into drugs. He had never been much for religion, but now he decided it would be a good time to pray. Would God really hear his prayer? He doubted it. I told him otherwise; God isn‘t so cheap. He wanted someone to hold his hands while I said a prayer for him. That meant his girlfriend and me, and he put his black pimple-covered hands out for both of us.
You are the chaplain on duty. Absolutely nothing in your training up to this point has prepared you for this; in fact, this is your training. What would you do? Let’s have your peer group in the pews psychoanalyze you.
This is similar to the situation Jesus faced in the gospel reading. A man said to be a leper came to Jesus. To be honest, any skin disorder, any skin disorder at all back then was called leprosy. You could have acne! - and you would be a lepros: one who has leprosy. That could be bad news indeed, and not just from a medical standpoint. Here’s what the Law had to say about that in Leviticus (13:45):
The person with the leprous disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head be disheveled; and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean!’ He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease. He shall live alone, his dwelling place shall be outside the community.
The Law went on to say that the unclean person would be banned from the temple, tradition banned him from the synagogue, and he would have to go through an elaborate and expensive series of rituals just to have authorities civil and religious recognize his healing when he did recover.
Did the man have leprosy as we know it today, or did he have some lesser illness? I tend to think he had something other than genuine leprosy. Modern medical leprosy, Hansen’s Disease, was very rare in Palestine in the first century, but who knows what he really suffered from. What really matters is that he has been banned from the community, he has been marked unclean - not from a medical standpoint at all but entirely from a religious standpoint, his humanity has been stolen from him, and he has been branded by a dysfunctional religion as one who is unacceptable to God simply because of an illness. Indeed, Deuteronomy itself (chapter 28) would go so far as to say that this man has been marked by God as punishment for his sin. And the smug and complacent righteous would point their fingers at him and say, “See the sinner in the hands of an angry God!”
And you didn’t think society could be so cruel, did you?
What does Jesus do? The man has come to him, out of sheer desperation, with nowhere else to turn, cut off from his home, his family, his friends and neighbors, shunned by his own faith community as a sinner under punishment from God, homeless, hungry, perhaps starving now, not able to understand why any of this is happening to him, at his wit’s end. He has come as close as he dare under the Law, he has thrown himself down on his knees to beg Jesus, the Holy One of God who now has a reputation for healing people in Capernaum. “If you choose, you can make me clean!”
What does Jesus do?
Now, if you were a first century Christian, and you were reading this text, or more likely if you were listening to this text read to you in Greek then verse 41 alone would be the kind of verse that would make you catch your breath at several places because it is very dramatic in Greek. Right away you would see that Jesus himself immediately had a gut wrenching emotional reaction to the leper. They make it all sound so holy in our cleaned up English version today: “moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him,…”
Actually, the very first word of verse 41 in the Greek text [splagchnistheis] sounds about as bad as it’s meaning and the basic image it conveys has to do with your stomach sort of lurching about and getting all twisted up and tangled up in knots and cramping and making you bend over in pain, really tough stuff here. A very strong emotional reaction is implied, and that one word has been rendered for us as: “moved with pity,” but a better reading is: “moved with compassion.” Jesus "suffered-with" the man. Jesus had no choice but to feel a deep emotional response to what he was confronted with. That‘s the first place where you would catch your breath as a first century Christian hearing the story.
The next place is where Jesus responds: he stretched out his hand, and you catch your breath again - is he going to do the unthinkable? Is he going to touch the untouchable? Surely not!
And then, our sanitized reading merely says he “touched” the man, but listen to the story like a first century Christian familiar with the ancient words and their nuances and layered meanings and you catch your breath again and maybe even jump in your seat because you see that Jesus not just "touched" the man, but he suddenly grabbed him in a clenching grip as one would apprehend a fleeing criminal, and, at the same time, he said a single, sharp word in the Greek text that means, “I choose!” [thelo].
Then he said another single word that has multiple, layered meanings, “Be clean!” “Be innocent!” “Be pure!” [katharistheti], and it is rendered as a command: this is the way it will be: you will be clean, you will be innocent, you will be pure, now! And so Jesus restored this man’s stolen humanity. And in response the man told everyone what Jesus had done, and the word spread - that’s gossip - and the story grew in the telling, and finally became part of the Gospel, the Good Gossip.
Have you figured out what you would have done for the man in the hospital yet? The clock is ticking and he is waiting for you to take his hand and your peers are waiting to psychoanalyze you no matter what you do.
I had no idea what I was getting into, but I took one hand and his girlfriend took the other hand and I said a prayer for him, and he had a very tight grip. He truly thought he was going to die. But in that moment, which he thought would be one of his last, he knew his humanity had been restored to him by Jesus who had compassion for him.
The test results finally came back. He did not have the HIV virus. He did not have AIDS. He had some other condition connected to his being a drug addict and sharing needles, or that‘s what he said. He would live, and his relief was beyond words. And who knows where he is now and what he’s doing, but at least he knew then that there is a God, and that this God of power and compassion is very much present in his life.
Fr. Timothy Crellin, the priest at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Boston, teaches that from the sense of healing and trust in God’s presence that we find in our lives, we move out to the community – to the world around us where we reach across the barriers of our modern world, putting aside fear and prejudice to reach out with courage and compassion to give a healing touch our sisters and brothers. We have to be Christ for each other, and not just for each other, but for the stranger, those we do not know, and the community around us. We have to be Christ for the community if we are to be true to our calling as disciples, and we have to let others be Christ for us.
Forgiveness, compassion, and love. It begins in our hearts, in our own lives, where Jesus has stretched out his own hand to touch us, and it moves out to the world around us. Jesus gives us power to do the work. He taught us what we need to know to be his disciples by giving us the example of his own unlimited compassion.
Thanks be to God that Jesus invites us to come forward and to show our true selves, heals us, and sends us out to our sisters and brothers with the power of his compassion. Peace be with you.
Here is a link to the texts for the day at Sundays and Seasons:
http://members.sundaysandseasons.com/planner_rcl_view.php?event_date_id=952
pax Christi,
Pr. J
2-15-2009, Epiphany 6B
Salem-Luther Memorial - Parrottsville, Tennessee
Mark 1:40-45
No title
Back in the summer of 1989 I was doing a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education at Baptist Hospital in Columbia, South Carolina. That means my job that summer was to be a hospital chaplain and to sit through endless group sessions while a collection of judgmental rank amateur armchair psychologists, otherwise known as my peer group, tried to psychoanalyze every move and every sneeze I made, as if they didn‘t have their own log in their own eye. And I had a lot of sneezes for them. This is what they used to call “cut throat CPE.” I think it was a very unethical way of weeding out people during the seminary training process, but that‘s another story. Needless to say, I survived, and while the members of my peer group psychoanalyzed one another into oblivion they never did psychoanalyze me so I proudly remain an enigma to this day. Those peer group sessions were probably the hardest part of CPE, a complete waste of time, and I didn‘t learn anything from them.
What was easier, although it did not seem easy at the time, and what was the true learning experience of CPE, was to be out on the floors of the hospital answering calls from patients and staff, sometimes at 3 a.m. , what they used to call the “witching hour.”
I got one such call from a nurse who had a near hysterical patient on her hands, a young man. She would not elaborate on his illness. It took about ten minutes to get to the other side of the hospital. I found the room and there was a sign on the closed door: take necessary precautions, report to the nurses’ station. I went to the nurses’ station and told them who I was and where I was headed. They said I needed to wear a face mask; they weren’t sure, but they thought the guy in the room had AIDS. Back then AIDS was still a new disease. No one knew much about it. They gave me a face mask, “Wear this in the room,” they said. So I put the mask on and went in.
There was a young man in the bed, 22 or 24, scrawny and looking very stressed out, and his girlfriend was pacing the floor. They were obviously scared. That’s what you saw at first glance. A closer look and you could see that this man was covered, absolutely covered in tiny little black pimples, all over his arms, his neck, his face, his hands. The doctors told him he might have AIDS; they really didn’t know, and, in their exemplary bedside manner they told him AIDS was fatal - no cure, and that he should get his affairs in order, and so he was terrified. As he talked it turned out that he was a drug addict, had been shooting heroin and sharing dirty needles, and the doctors thought that was how he had gotten AIDS. They weren’t sure. They were doing tests to see if he had the HIV virus. Meanwhile this man was watching his life pass before his eyes, was acutely aware of every mistake he had ever made, especially getting into drugs. He had never been much for religion, but now he decided it would be a good time to pray. Would God really hear his prayer? He doubted it. I told him otherwise; God isn‘t so cheap. He wanted someone to hold his hands while I said a prayer for him. That meant his girlfriend and me, and he put his black pimple-covered hands out for both of us.
You are the chaplain on duty. Absolutely nothing in your training up to this point has prepared you for this; in fact, this is your training. What would you do? Let’s have your peer group in the pews psychoanalyze you.
This is similar to the situation Jesus faced in the gospel reading. A man said to be a leper came to Jesus. To be honest, any skin disorder, any skin disorder at all back then was called leprosy. You could have acne! - and you would be a lepros: one who has leprosy. That could be bad news indeed, and not just from a medical standpoint. Here’s what the Law had to say about that in Leviticus (13:45):
The person with the leprous disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head be disheveled; and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean!’ He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease. He shall live alone, his dwelling place shall be outside the community.
The Law went on to say that the unclean person would be banned from the temple, tradition banned him from the synagogue, and he would have to go through an elaborate and expensive series of rituals just to have authorities civil and religious recognize his healing when he did recover.
Did the man have leprosy as we know it today, or did he have some lesser illness? I tend to think he had something other than genuine leprosy. Modern medical leprosy, Hansen’s Disease, was very rare in Palestine in the first century, but who knows what he really suffered from. What really matters is that he has been banned from the community, he has been marked unclean - not from a medical standpoint at all but entirely from a religious standpoint, his humanity has been stolen from him, and he has been branded by a dysfunctional religion as one who is unacceptable to God simply because of an illness. Indeed, Deuteronomy itself (chapter 28) would go so far as to say that this man has been marked by God as punishment for his sin. And the smug and complacent righteous would point their fingers at him and say, “See the sinner in the hands of an angry God!”
And you didn’t think society could be so cruel, did you?
What does Jesus do? The man has come to him, out of sheer desperation, with nowhere else to turn, cut off from his home, his family, his friends and neighbors, shunned by his own faith community as a sinner under punishment from God, homeless, hungry, perhaps starving now, not able to understand why any of this is happening to him, at his wit’s end. He has come as close as he dare under the Law, he has thrown himself down on his knees to beg Jesus, the Holy One of God who now has a reputation for healing people in Capernaum. “If you choose, you can make me clean!”
What does Jesus do?
Now, if you were a first century Christian, and you were reading this text, or more likely if you were listening to this text read to you in Greek then verse 41 alone would be the kind of verse that would make you catch your breath at several places because it is very dramatic in Greek. Right away you would see that Jesus himself immediately had a gut wrenching emotional reaction to the leper. They make it all sound so holy in our cleaned up English version today: “moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him,…”
Actually, the very first word of verse 41 in the Greek text [splagchnistheis] sounds about as bad as it’s meaning and the basic image it conveys has to do with your stomach sort of lurching about and getting all twisted up and tangled up in knots and cramping and making you bend over in pain, really tough stuff here. A very strong emotional reaction is implied, and that one word has been rendered for us as: “moved with pity,” but a better reading is: “moved with compassion.” Jesus "suffered-with" the man. Jesus had no choice but to feel a deep emotional response to what he was confronted with. That‘s the first place where you would catch your breath as a first century Christian hearing the story.
The next place is where Jesus responds: he stretched out his hand, and you catch your breath again - is he going to do the unthinkable? Is he going to touch the untouchable? Surely not!
And then, our sanitized reading merely says he “touched” the man, but listen to the story like a first century Christian familiar with the ancient words and their nuances and layered meanings and you catch your breath again and maybe even jump in your seat because you see that Jesus not just "touched" the man, but he suddenly grabbed him in a clenching grip as one would apprehend a fleeing criminal, and, at the same time, he said a single, sharp word in the Greek text that means, “I choose!” [thelo].
Then he said another single word that has multiple, layered meanings, “Be clean!” “Be innocent!” “Be pure!” [katharistheti], and it is rendered as a command: this is the way it will be: you will be clean, you will be innocent, you will be pure, now! And so Jesus restored this man’s stolen humanity. And in response the man told everyone what Jesus had done, and the word spread - that’s gossip - and the story grew in the telling, and finally became part of the Gospel, the Good Gossip.
Have you figured out what you would have done for the man in the hospital yet? The clock is ticking and he is waiting for you to take his hand and your peers are waiting to psychoanalyze you no matter what you do.
I had no idea what I was getting into, but I took one hand and his girlfriend took the other hand and I said a prayer for him, and he had a very tight grip. He truly thought he was going to die. But in that moment, which he thought would be one of his last, he knew his humanity had been restored to him by Jesus who had compassion for him.
The test results finally came back. He did not have the HIV virus. He did not have AIDS. He had some other condition connected to his being a drug addict and sharing needles, or that‘s what he said. He would live, and his relief was beyond words. And who knows where he is now and what he’s doing, but at least he knew then that there is a God, and that this God of power and compassion is very much present in his life.
Fr. Timothy Crellin, the priest at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Boston, teaches that from the sense of healing and trust in God’s presence that we find in our lives, we move out to the community – to the world around us where we reach across the barriers of our modern world, putting aside fear and prejudice to reach out with courage and compassion to give a healing touch our sisters and brothers. We have to be Christ for each other, and not just for each other, but for the stranger, those we do not know, and the community around us. We have to be Christ for the community if we are to be true to our calling as disciples, and we have to let others be Christ for us.
Forgiveness, compassion, and love. It begins in our hearts, in our own lives, where Jesus has stretched out his own hand to touch us, and it moves out to the world around us. Jesus gives us power to do the work. He taught us what we need to know to be his disciples by giving us the example of his own unlimited compassion.
Thanks be to God that Jesus invites us to come forward and to show our true selves, heals us, and sends us out to our sisters and brothers with the power of his compassion. Peace be with you.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
The state of the blog...
G'day all,
I'm adding 4 new authors to the blog - welcome on board Whitney, Britney, Bill and Suzanne - so we can better cover the goings on at Salem. I'm also thinking about branching out and adding a couple of more related blogs, like one that deals with things Lutherans believe - like the faq page at the ELCA website, a dedicated youth blog, a sermons and/or Bible study blog, etc., I heard at our conference meeting on Tuesday that our new mission church in Jonesboro already beat me to it and did exactly that kind of thing - 1 website and 3 blogs! That's the way to go, Pr. Ed!
I expect to post something on the upcoming sermon by the weekend.
peace be with you,
Pr. J
I'm adding 4 new authors to the blog - welcome on board Whitney, Britney, Bill and Suzanne - so we can better cover the goings on at Salem. I'm also thinking about branching out and adding a couple of more related blogs, like one that deals with things Lutherans believe - like the faq page at the ELCA website, a dedicated youth blog, a sermons and/or Bible study blog, etc., I heard at our conference meeting on Tuesday that our new mission church in Jonesboro already beat me to it and did exactly that kind of thing - 1 website and 3 blogs! That's the way to go, Pr. Ed!
I expect to post something on the upcoming sermon by the weekend.
peace be with you,
Pr. J
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Hello all!!!
Hello everyone. My name is Whitney LaFollette and I am a youth member of Salem Lutheran Church. I am one of the two new authors representing the youth group at my church. I am the Conference 1 Representative and hope to not only bring you news from our own youth group but also news from SESLYO (South Eastern Synod Lutheran Youth Organization). I am very excited about joining this blog and hope that I can answer any questions that anyone has about our youth group. :D --Whitney LaFollette
Saturday, February 7, 2009
A little more on Capernaum and the house...
For those who may want to learn more about Capernaum and its early Christian house church here's a few tidbits to launch you off on your own voyages of discovery.
You can find a really good website about Kaphar Nahum and the house that may have been the one mentioned in Mark here. This was the first site I found about Capernaum a few years back and it remains one of the best:
http://198.62.75.1/www1/ofm/sites/TScpmenu.html
There are many (MANY) other websites dealing with Capernaum and the house, far too many to list here, and probably many that are a little lacking in the quality department. You might try looking at these sites:
http://www.allaboutarchaeology.org/house-of-peter-at-capernaum-faq.htm
http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/MFAArchive/2000_2009/2000/3/Capernaum-%20The%20Church%20of%20the%20House%20of%20Peter
http://www.biblewalks.com/Sites/capernaum.html
http://www.ffhl.org/2006/Capernaum.asp
http://www.facingthechallenge.org/peter.php
I distinctly remember reading in a newspaper article years ago before I started seminary (like the early 1980's or late 1970's) about the Franciscan excavation at Capernaum and how graffitti on some part of the house contained words that we know today as part of the Kyrie: "Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy." Of course, I didn't save that article after all this time and the best references I can come up with on the internet at short notice merely acknowledge that graffitti in Aramaic, Syriac, Latin, and Greek references "Jesus," "Peter," "Christ," and "Lord." So if anyone comes across an actual reference to the "kyrie-like" lines, let me know. I also understand there is now some dispute among the scholars as to the actual reading of some of the graffitti. I also find the reference to 1st century fish hooks in the house to be somewhat interesting (Early Christian symbols of the faith? Long forgotten tools of the trade left behind by a historical Simon Peter? Both?)
May you keep thinking, keep asking questions, keep searching, and keep using your historical and spiritual imagination.
Pr. J
You can find a really good website about Kaphar Nahum and the house that may have been the one mentioned in Mark here. This was the first site I found about Capernaum a few years back and it remains one of the best:
http://198.62.75.1/www1/ofm/sites/TScpmenu.html
There are many (MANY) other websites dealing with Capernaum and the house, far too many to list here, and probably many that are a little lacking in the quality department. You might try looking at these sites:
http://www.allaboutarchaeology.org/house-of-peter-at-capernaum-faq.htm
http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/MFAArchive/2000_2009/2000/3/Capernaum-%20The%20Church%20of%20the%20House%20of%20Peter
http://www.biblewalks.com/Sites/capernaum.html
http://www.ffhl.org/2006/Capernaum.asp
http://www.facingthechallenge.org/peter.php
I distinctly remember reading in a newspaper article years ago before I started seminary (like the early 1980's or late 1970's) about the Franciscan excavation at Capernaum and how graffitti on some part of the house contained words that we know today as part of the Kyrie: "Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy." Of course, I didn't save that article after all this time and the best references I can come up with on the internet at short notice merely acknowledge that graffitti in Aramaic, Syriac, Latin, and Greek references "Jesus," "Peter," "Christ," and "Lord." So if anyone comes across an actual reference to the "kyrie-like" lines, let me know. I also understand there is now some dispute among the scholars as to the actual reading of some of the graffitti. I also find the reference to 1st century fish hooks in the house to be somewhat interesting (Early Christian symbols of the faith? Long forgotten tools of the trade left behind by a historical Simon Peter? Both?)
May you keep thinking, keep asking questions, keep searching, and keep using your historical and spiritual imagination.
Pr. J
Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, Year B
OK, I spent four hours dealing with a flat tire today - a nail slowly working its insidious way into the depths of the tread. Good thing I didn't go to that continuing ed event in Atlanta this weekend. That flat tire would have cuaght me on the interstate, or worse - in downtown Atlanta! - and I would have had a bigger headache. And I thought I wasn't going to Atlanta because I couldn't justify the expense of the hotel bill! Must have been the movement of the Holy Spirit after all. Anyway, here is tomorrow's sermon. Its based on the reading from Mark and Isaiah. May someone find it helpful.
Here is a link to the texts for the day at Sundays and Seasons: http://members.sundaysandseasons.com/planner_rcl_view.php?event_date_id=951
pax Christi,
Pr. J
2-8-2009, Epiphany 5B
Salem-Luther Memorial Parish - Parrottsville, Tennessee
Isaiah 40:21-31; Mark 1:29-39
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
“Have you not known? Have you not heard?”
The reading from Isaiah opens with words filled with expectation and excitement. They remind me of the old style news boy on the street corner waving the latest edition of the newspaper and shouting, “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!” The opening words of the reading convey the sense that the bearer of the news knows something no one else knows and is bursting at the seams to tell everyone what is happening, but also they suggest a little bit of surprise on the part of the news bearer that other people do not know what the headlines are about.
This part of Isaiah was written during the Babylonian Captivity, when the people of Jerusalem had been taken captive into Babylon. Here Isaiah wants to let people know that God is about to do something powerful, grand, and compassionate: God is going to return the exiles to their lost home. In that way the people of God will know God’s grace at work in their lives. So the Book of Isaiah tells people that change is about to happen! Things new and different will happen soon for the nation of Israel.
But the things that are new and different, the things that will change, the acts that God is about to do could very well have to do with one’s own personal life. That was the case of Simon’s mother-in-law in the Gospel reading.
Last week the Gospel of Mark presented the story of Jesus healing the man with the unclean spirit. Basically Jesus made this man clean again and so made him acceptable to his community and gave him the assurance that he was acceptable to God. He also set the man straight about what the Holy One of God was there to do: that he came to heal people and not to destroy people.
After the scene at the synagogue we are told that Jesus went with his disciples to the home of Simon and Andrew. Their house, or what is thought by some to be their house, usually called the house of Peter, has been unearthed in the archeological dig at Capernaum only a few huundred feet from the synagogue. The house was used as a church from the first century of Christianity; in one room that appears to have served as a worship area parts of what we would call a liturgy were hand-written on the wall: Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy. Who knows? Maybe it was the same house mentioned in the Gospel reading.
There, we are told, Simon’s mother-in-law was in the bed with a fever. The story plays out in a very simple way: she did not ask for Jesus, they told Jesus about her; she did not reach for Jesus, he took her hand; she did not rise herself, he lifted her from her sick bed, and the fever left her. It doesn’t take too much imagination to see that house turned into a shrine a few years later and made into a place where early Christians remembered that Christ had mercy on a sick woman, and so the handwriting on the wall takes on extra meaning: Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy. Perhaps in those ancient hand-scrawled words on the wall of that house there is a hint as to just how Simon’s mother-in-law began to serve Jesus after her fever left her. Could she have been the leader, the pastor, of the very first house church, dedicated to serve the Messiah who healed her? I like to think she was.
Historically, we don’t know what really happened in that house or how it happened. But whatever it was, there was power behind it. And people sensed this. In the very next verse what do they say except that they brought to Jesus all who were sick. A large crowd was gathered at the door of the house. This was a big deal. This was news worthy. Not just anyone could command this attention. Everybody in Capernaum turned out for this: the wealthy and the poor, beggars and merchants, the sick and the doctors, slaves with their burdens, soldiers with their duty, children, women young and old, poets, thieves, pious people, people shunned as sinners, and fishermen. The Gospel of Mark gives us the impression that the whole city was crowding the narrow streets before the front doorstep of Simon's house to find this man who spoke and acted with authority.
And Jesus did not waste the opportunity.
He looked people in the eye.
He spoke directly to each person present.
He healed many at the door of the house, cast out their demons, that was the best way that they could make sense out of it.
I think people came to him with their problems. I think they came with the burdens that had been laid on them by Law and Tradition. They came to him branded as unclean, not well, broken, lame, sinner - many, if not most, just seeking forgiveness from God and acceptance because no one else would forgive them and accept them and he was their last hope for any compassion and humanity.
More than anything else I think he heard confessions as people told him what brought them to him, this Holy One of God who healed the man in the synagogue and healed Simon’s mother-in-law. He heard all the stories about people being rejected and shunned and cast out, and in turn he cast out the shame and guilt and mental pain that crippled so many in that time and place. He told them they were made clean again, they were forgiven, they were acceptable to God.
Surely God has come to them in this man Jesus. And as the people heard Jesus pronounce the blessing over them they were healed and their lives were made new again.
Word got around, you know, it’s the power of common gossip used for once for good and constructive means: Jesus heals us, and he is changing the way we live; he is changing the way we relate to others; he is changing the way we even think and feel about ourselves. No longer are we scum-of-the-earth-sinners because of illness, errors in judgment, mistakes, human imperfection, circumstances beyond our control, and just plain birth. Now we are sinners made into saints!; sinners who are the children of God, sinners who are the true heirs of the Kingdom that has been kept from us for so long by Law and Tradition. We are sinners who are taken by the hand and lifted up out of our sin and brought into the Kingdom by Jesus.
He makes us acceptable to God when no one else cared, or was willing or was able to do that. And in everything he did the words of the prophet Isaiah began to be fulfilled, not in the sense that Jesus was blindly acting out some so-called psychic’s predictions made long ago; let’s not be so silly as to confuse the prophet of God Isaiah with the likes of Nostradamus. Old Testament prophets were not prophets in the pagan sense that they foretold the future. That’s what the lady with the crystal ball does at the county fair. Isaiah did not use a crystal ball. His job as a prophet of God was to speak forth for God. And he did. There’s a difference between that and forecasting the future. Jesus fulfilled the words of Isaiah by making the word of God a real, living presence and benevolent power for the people who needed it the most: the sick, the lost, the suffering. He brought the kingdom of God near to them and opened its gates for them. And they were absolutely amazed to find that when they least expected it, because of Jesus they had all been made children of the God of compassion who had come down to them in the midst of all their pain and trouble.
And the ancient words of Isaiah may well have whispered to people on the breeze as the wind swept over the crowded Capernaum streets while Jesus healed people at the door of the house:
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?...
Yahweh is the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth…
He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless…
They shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not fall.
Throughout this section of Mark Jesus has been speaking with authority so that when Jesus speaks, it has an effect on people. Lives are transformed. People are changed for the better.
In the language of the New Testament, people are healed.
They are forgiven.
Their sins are forgotten; the personal demons which haunt them are dispelled.
They become children of God with new inner strength, and with their lives lifted up as if they had risen on eagles' wings.
That is something we remember in communion, where we hear God's promise of new life given to us through Jesus who was crucified and died to bring that promise to us. We remember it today as we share the bread and cup.
We remember it anywhere and every time the people of Jesus gather around him to be healed and lifted up, and in that gathering we find that Jesus still speaks to us, giving us a new teaching with authority.
Have your not known? Have you not heard?
Has the Gospel not been preached here before?
We can listen to Jesus when he speaks to us in the midst of our busy, noisy, crowded lives.
We can open our ears to him as we shoulder our burdens and do our duties.
We can meet him on the front door step of our house, let him heal us, dispel our fever, and cast out our personal demons.
He will speak with authority, which many people do not like these days.
But if we let him speak to us and let him reach into our lives to heal us then he will remake our lives for the better, and everyday we will become more and more the children of God.
Thanks be to God
Here is a link to the texts for the day at Sundays and Seasons: http://members.sundaysandseasons.com/planner_rcl_view.php?event_date_id=951
pax Christi,
Pr. J
2-8-2009, Epiphany 5B
Salem-Luther Memorial Parish - Parrottsville, Tennessee
Isaiah 40:21-31; Mark 1:29-39
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The reading from Isaiah opens with words filled with expectation and excitement. They remind me of the old style news boy on the street corner waving the latest edition of the newspaper and shouting, “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!” The opening words of the reading convey the sense that the bearer of the news knows something no one else knows and is bursting at the seams to tell everyone what is happening, but also they suggest a little bit of surprise on the part of the news bearer that other people do not know what the headlines are about.
This part of Isaiah was written during the Babylonian Captivity, when the people of Jerusalem had been taken captive into Babylon. Here Isaiah wants to let people know that God is about to do something powerful, grand, and compassionate: God is going to return the exiles to their lost home. In that way the people of God will know God’s grace at work in their lives. So the Book of Isaiah tells people that change is about to happen! Things new and different will happen soon for the nation of Israel.
But the things that are new and different, the things that will change, the acts that God is about to do could very well have to do with one’s own personal life. That was the case of Simon’s mother-in-law in the Gospel reading.
Last week the Gospel of Mark presented the story of Jesus healing the man with the unclean spirit. Basically Jesus made this man clean again and so made him acceptable to his community and gave him the assurance that he was acceptable to God. He also set the man straight about what the Holy One of God was there to do: that he came to heal people and not to destroy people.
After the scene at the synagogue we are told that Jesus went with his disciples to the home of Simon and Andrew. Their house, or what is thought by some to be their house, usually called the house of Peter, has been unearthed in the archeological dig at Capernaum only a few huundred feet from the synagogue. The house was used as a church from the first century of Christianity; in one room that appears to have served as a worship area parts of what we would call a liturgy were hand-written on the wall: Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy. Who knows? Maybe it was the same house mentioned in the Gospel reading.
There, we are told, Simon’s mother-in-law was in the bed with a fever. The story plays out in a very simple way: she did not ask for Jesus, they told Jesus about her; she did not reach for Jesus, he took her hand; she did not rise herself, he lifted her from her sick bed, and the fever left her. It doesn’t take too much imagination to see that house turned into a shrine a few years later and made into a place where early Christians remembered that Christ had mercy on a sick woman, and so the handwriting on the wall takes on extra meaning: Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy. Perhaps in those ancient hand-scrawled words on the wall of that house there is a hint as to just how Simon’s mother-in-law began to serve Jesus after her fever left her. Could she have been the leader, the pastor, of the very first house church, dedicated to serve the Messiah who healed her? I like to think she was.
Historically, we don’t know what really happened in that house or how it happened. But whatever it was, there was power behind it. And people sensed this. In the very next verse what do they say except that they brought to Jesus all who were sick. A large crowd was gathered at the door of the house. This was a big deal. This was news worthy. Not just anyone could command this attention. Everybody in Capernaum turned out for this: the wealthy and the poor, beggars and merchants, the sick and the doctors, slaves with their burdens, soldiers with their duty, children, women young and old, poets, thieves, pious people, people shunned as sinners, and fishermen. The Gospel of Mark gives us the impression that the whole city was crowding the narrow streets before the front doorstep of Simon's house to find this man who spoke and acted with authority.
And Jesus did not waste the opportunity.
He looked people in the eye.
He spoke directly to each person present.
He healed many at the door of the house, cast out their demons, that was the best way that they could make sense out of it.
I think people came to him with their problems. I think they came with the burdens that had been laid on them by Law and Tradition. They came to him branded as unclean, not well, broken, lame, sinner - many, if not most, just seeking forgiveness from God and acceptance because no one else would forgive them and accept them and he was their last hope for any compassion and humanity.
More than anything else I think he heard confessions as people told him what brought them to him, this Holy One of God who healed the man in the synagogue and healed Simon’s mother-in-law. He heard all the stories about people being rejected and shunned and cast out, and in turn he cast out the shame and guilt and mental pain that crippled so many in that time and place. He told them they were made clean again, they were forgiven, they were acceptable to God.
Surely God has come to them in this man Jesus. And as the people heard Jesus pronounce the blessing over them they were healed and their lives were made new again.
Word got around, you know, it’s the power of common gossip used for once for good and constructive means: Jesus heals us, and he is changing the way we live; he is changing the way we relate to others; he is changing the way we even think and feel about ourselves. No longer are we scum-of-the-earth-sinners because of illness, errors in judgment, mistakes, human imperfection, circumstances beyond our control, and just plain birth. Now we are sinners made into saints!; sinners who are the children of God, sinners who are the true heirs of the Kingdom that has been kept from us for so long by Law and Tradition. We are sinners who are taken by the hand and lifted up out of our sin and brought into the Kingdom by Jesus.
He makes us acceptable to God when no one else cared, or was willing or was able to do that. And in everything he did the words of the prophet Isaiah began to be fulfilled, not in the sense that Jesus was blindly acting out some so-called psychic’s predictions made long ago; let’s not be so silly as to confuse the prophet of God Isaiah with the likes of Nostradamus. Old Testament prophets were not prophets in the pagan sense that they foretold the future. That’s what the lady with the crystal ball does at the county fair. Isaiah did not use a crystal ball. His job as a prophet of God was to speak forth for God. And he did. There’s a difference between that and forecasting the future. Jesus fulfilled the words of Isaiah by making the word of God a real, living presence and benevolent power for the people who needed it the most: the sick, the lost, the suffering. He brought the kingdom of God near to them and opened its gates for them. And they were absolutely amazed to find that when they least expected it, because of Jesus they had all been made children of the God of compassion who had come down to them in the midst of all their pain and trouble.
And the ancient words of Isaiah may well have whispered to people on the breeze as the wind swept over the crowded Capernaum streets while Jesus healed people at the door of the house:
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?...
Yahweh is the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth…
He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless…
They shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not fall.
Throughout this section of Mark Jesus has been speaking with authority so that when Jesus speaks, it has an effect on people. Lives are transformed. People are changed for the better.
In the language of the New Testament, people are healed.
They are forgiven.
Their sins are forgotten; the personal demons which haunt them are dispelled.
They become children of God with new inner strength, and with their lives lifted up as if they had risen on eagles' wings.
That is something we remember in communion, where we hear God's promise of new life given to us through Jesus who was crucified and died to bring that promise to us. We remember it today as we share the bread and cup.
We remember it anywhere and every time the people of Jesus gather around him to be healed and lifted up, and in that gathering we find that Jesus still speaks to us, giving us a new teaching with authority.
Have your not known? Have you not heard?
Has the Gospel not been preached here before?
We can listen to Jesus when he speaks to us in the midst of our busy, noisy, crowded lives.
We can open our ears to him as we shoulder our burdens and do our duties.
We can meet him on the front door step of our house, let him heal us, dispel our fever, and cast out our personal demons.
He will speak with authority, which many people do not like these days.
But if we let him speak to us and let him reach into our lives to heal us then he will remake our lives for the better, and everyday we will become more and more the children of God.
Thanks be to God
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