That Was the Best Time of Our Lives!

10-1-2017, Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

Lectionary Series on Barriers to Gratitude

Exodus 17:1-7

        By the time we had our second and third children, I was lucky enough to be be a stay-at-home mom.

        We wanted and were blessed with three children. Like the Israelites had prayed for their lives, we had prayed for healthy children, especially after we lost a child during pregnancy and conceiving again took longer than we had hoped.

       So here I was, surrounded by my three cherubs! I loved their baby days. I loved getting up in the middle of the night to feed them, while our house and the world around it was fast asleep and oh, so quiet; sitting with them for hours, cuddling; reading books on the sofa or lying in bed soaking in the love, their little arms and legs forming a cocoon around me. Those were the days!

       I loved the smell of my children; the sweet baby fragrance, later replaced by the fresh-air-and-earthy smell when they came in from playing outside. In fact, I loved those days so much, that even now, when I look through old pictures from that season of our lives, I want to weep for missing them. Truly, those were the days! <p>

       When my children were young and I was a stay-at-home Mom, I took up journaling. It was a way to preserve my sanity, though some may question how well it really worked.

Life with one school-aged child and two toddlers was a little crazy, often totally exhausting, and sometimes really frustrating. Most days, there was just not enough of me to go around.

       While I was cleaning up one mess, the “cherubs” were usually delightfully busy making two or three more. I was outnumbered.

       With three to run after, schedules to juggle, and living far from any of our family, with minimal support system, those days could be hard. Many of you have been there.

       Through the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia, I look back blissfully on the wonderful, sweet, utopian memories of those days, and think how perfect they were. The journals I kept are a great reality check.

       As I read through them, I read loving reflections on the blessing of motherhood, followed by the details of a day to day existence that was fraught with tension, exhaustion, frustration, loneliness, isolation, confusion, worry and fear. Some days as I wrote in my journal, I just skipped the “how blessed is motherhood” part and went right into the venting part.

When I pick up one of those journals now, I read about the days I thought I would lose my mind. I read about the relative lack of reward for so much hard work and heartache. I read words reflecting my worry that I might not be getting it right – could I be permanently scarring my children with my mothering choices? In the pages of those journals, I read of quite a different experience from the one of my nostalgia-addled memories. <p>

Not long before the events of our First Reading take place, the people who have been praying so hard for God to liberate them are freed from the cruel grip of slavery in Egypt. They who have suffered so long in misery as slaves under Pharaoh, were finally and quite dramatically led into freedom by Moses.

       God did the incredible, answering their prayers and giving them miraculous, safe passage not only away from the despot, Pharaoh, but away from the hard labor, heartache and demoralization of their slavery.

       Through Moses, God to lead the Israelites on a path to freedom, parting the waters of the Red Sea, and giving them safe passage away from the pursuing armies of the Pharaoh. The first response of the people after their liberation was a grand celebration. The women danced and Miriam sang, ‘Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.”

       But, not long after, within a few verses, in fact, the miracle has worn off and the people fall into a pattern of grumbling. They forget to trust God. They keep forgetting all that God has done – they forget about the Passover and the parting of the Red Sea; and the gift God gave them in this leader, Moses, whom God equipped to guide them through the rough places toward a promised land. They fail to look around and see God’s presence and provision for them each day.

       In our text today, we see it again. When they tested and stressed, rather than trust God, they grumble.

       Now, this truly has to be one of the signs you’ve really lost it: when you start to idealize your past, even though your past involves being a slave to the Egyptian Pharaoh: “Back in the good old days,” you enthuse, “when we spent all day in the hot sun, making bricks and doing the back-breaking work of building pyramids, when we had no rights, no freedom, when we could be beaten to death for not producing enough, for being too old or weak or sick or slow, and the Pharaoh occasionally killed all our male children - yeah, those were the good old days!”

       And then, what happens next? These Israelites get so lost in their grumbling that they end up going in circles for forty years! An entire generation passes away because they are lost in their nostalgia and nostalgia, candy-coated, much-improved rendering of what once was never leads you forward; it casts an impossible standard. .

I sure loved those baby days; Except when I didn’t. We sure were happier, more secure, more complete; except that we really weren’t.

      

The present can never match an idealized past, and being lost in that past keeps us from seeing the things that are all around us that are truly gifts from God for our present. Nostalgia leaves us stuck in the quicksand of our edited memories, perpetually ungrateful for the place we now find ourselves. Clinging to a season of our past, nostalgia quietly steals our joy and even, our hope; it makes us indifferent to the flowing streams of living water God is providing even now in our wilderness.

       Like the Israelites, when we are trapped in the rosy past, we are blinded to the constant provision of God - today. When we focus on the idealized past, we are numbed to the way that God is acting - now. When that happens, we, too, become trapped in the spiritual lands of Massa, meaning “test” and Meribah, meaning “find fault.”

       Nostalgia not only cripples us as individuals, but also as a community of faith. We recently held a series of Cottage Meetings. During those conversations, we named concerns about our life together today, and we got to name hopes and dreams for tomorrow. We also identified the ways we are blessed today, and gifts we see among and around us; we got to name ministries and activities we do really well.

       Here are some anecdotal observations about those conversations that  reveal some interesting patterns:

First, the greater the institutional memory of the group – that is, groups that were made up of a higher percentage of long the higher the percentage of the group was made up of long-time members, the lower their ability to name blessings. Conversely, groups with a greater percentage of new members present, having little to no institutional memory in this community, were more able to name blessings and gifts, and were more able to hope and dream for the future of the church.

Similarly, groups with longer-term members, had a greater number of concerns framed by comparison with the past. This is not surprising. Discontent of today was viewed through the rose-colored lens of yesteryears.

As a whole while the Christian church is struggling and declining, we are apt to frame our grief through the glorified visions of the churches of the past.

Yet, the church of the idealic past had problems of its own. Massive building projects often tore away at the unity of congregations, we saw the beginnings of white flight, churches divided, the stirring of the Civil Rights movement caused dissention within churches in many places, and the establishment of suburban communities drew thriving ministries away from the cities. This led the theologian Paul Tillich to call suburban Christianity, “one of the greatest dangers for Protestantism.”

All this led to the beginning of the unraveling of what many today would call the traditional church.

Back in our Cottage Meetings, newer members named more blessings, drew lists of things to be grateful for, recognized more places where God is working within the church, which led to more hopes and dreams being named, particularly in outward-looking ministries.

Nostalgia affects us all. It takes practice and intentionality to look around us and to recognize the blessings and gifts with which our world and our very lives are blessed on a daily basis.

My babies grew up and have all become fine young adults. I still miss those baby days sometime, and I cherish my memories of those days, but can appreciate and even look forward to the ways they will bless the world.

Grace is nearing it’s one hundredth anniversary. Ministries have come and gone and our culture during her lifetime. Our culture has vastly changed, but there is a rich community into which God is sending us to serve and to share his presence, gifts and love. I see God at work inspiring us to ever greater generosity in our feeding ministries, in providing school supplies for youth service projects, in the youth ministry we’ll kick-off this afternoon, in the quilting group that will meet on Wednesday and in the groups that use our building, every day of the week.

God is at work in our ecumenical relationships and work; in the faith discussions that take place each Sunday morning around the tables in Fellowship Hall. I see God in our ministry focused on the care of creation, in members reaching out in the past few weeks to so many who have been devastated by storms; God is present in the beautiful music we so enjoy. The best way I can see to stop being paralyzed by the past or kept from building up the future of this church, is by intentionally increasing our gratitude quotient.

       I invite you to practice seeing how God is present and active in your life each week. God is constantly reaching out and blessing us, growing us, stretching us, using us, and accompanying us in all we do. When we open our eyes, ears, and hearts, we will see God at work in everything.

       Rather than the sugar-coated, rosy-lenses of nostalgia, let’s develop the practice of seeing God’s presence, activity and love in our world, and responding to it with deep gratitude.

       Liberation from our past will allow us to walk in faith toward God’s future, full of promise and blessing, casting a vision for generosity and gratefulness living. AMEN.

             

A Gut Feeling

Matthew 9:35-10:4

During the sermon on Holy Trinity Sunday last week, we heard through text and sermon about how God’s activity through the Holy Trinity is God’s living out the divine promise of “I’ve got you covered.” The Trinity’s ongoing presence and work as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit functions to show us who God is and how God operates throughout the universe. We acknowledge that though the Trinity is a mystery, and we don’t fully understand exactly how it is possible, it is through in Trinity that God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, has us uniquely covered – simultaneously creating, redeeming, and making us a holy people.

So, last week’s “I’ve got you covered” text and sermon addressed the how and what of God. This week’s gospel starts out by telling us the why of God. 

Today’s gospel text begins by telling us how Jesus went about the cities and villages – in other words, how he went to every type of people and every kind of community. Then, we come to verse 36 we read: “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”

Here we have it – this is the why of God. God has compassion.

In and through Jesus, God responds to our suffering out of compassion. Jesus brings God’s comforting Word, teaches people who need to hear that Word about the true nature of God, and heals their sicknesses out of compassion. But the thing is, this word as we read it here, compassion, is truly a watered-down version of what the word written in Greek really means.

So, for instance, when you hear the word, “compassion,” what do you think of? What does it mean? <accept responses> To feel for? To take pity on? To want to help?

Good answers. It’s a good start. Yet if you look at the etymology of the English word, compassion, it goes a little further; ‘compassion’ comes from the Latin cum, meaning ‘with’ and passio, meaning ‘suffering’. So, when we have compassion, we are suffering with another person, or feeling their suffering.

To go a step further,  we have the Greek word actually written into this text; splanknizo, or, in this case, splanknizomai, since it is in verb form, means to “feel in the viscera.” In plain English the closest way I can put that is, ‘to feel in the gut’ – to feel to your very core – to have a gut-wrenching reaction to something - to feel it so deeply in your insides, that you literally feel something within you move.

God sees the helplessness of God’s creation and God acts out of compassion. God doesn’t simply feel badly for the people who are suffering, God acts because God feels our pain and is moved to the very core by the plight of humankind. God knows how harassed – how out of sorts, beleaguered, and overwhelmed we are - how much we suffer from depression, oppression, and suppression; that is what affects God, moves God so much that God sends Jesus Christ to us as the Word incarnate, to heal our pain and brokenness, and save us from our sin.

That is the truest meaning of the word translated here, and it reason for God’s action; it is the reason that Jesus reaches out and heals and cures the people he encounters on his journey through the cities and towns and villages; through the city streets and along the country lanes through which he passes. Jesus doesn’t simply feel badly for the people, pity them or judge them as pitiable, rather, Jesus sees their humanity, and he is moved to ease their pain.

But Jesus cannot do this work alone, because he knows that one day, he will leave this earthly plane and will need workers to carry on the work he has begun. He will need apostles who will likewise speak the Word, teach, and heal.

So, in a touch of irony, Jesus summons these early disciples, and instructs them to ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into the harvest.

Now, when I was in seminary, a very wise professor told us, “when you pray, be sure that you do not pray for something, for which you are not willing to be the answer.”

In the very next verse of our text today, Jesus calls twelve of these disciples and gives them the authority – read this as marching orders – to do the same as he has done. So, on the one hand, Jesus says, ‘pray for workers to help with the harvest’ – on the other hand he says, ‘now, you are to be first among those workers.’

Jesus calls his disciples – those who learn from him, not only to pray for the solution but to be part of the solution. And Jesus asks the same of us today, as community together with and for each other, and as harvest workers for the world around us. Jesus calls us to be moved to the very core of our being for the suffering ones – the harassed and helpless ones, the grieving and hurting ones, the hungry and homeless ones - and to respond; to reach out with compassion and heal those we encounter along our journey.

As the disciples go, they will proclaim the good news of the kingdom of heaven, and they will do this not for pay, nor for their own glory or benefit, but only for the sake the other, and the fullness of God’s kingdom.

I recently had a conversation with a woman who told me this story: she, along with her husband, had just joined a new church, but were not yet well known there, when an unbelievable tragedy befell their family. They were devastated, grieving, and suffering great pain and loss.

The incredible tragedy they had suffered was announced to the congregation in several forms of communication that went out, and members felt deeply sorry for anyone who would suffer such a loss, and they dutifully prayed for her family.

But what the woman told me was that not one person from that church called, sent a card, or reached out to her and her husband.

She and her husband had joined that church seeking to be part of a faith community. But perhaps because they weren’t all that well known yet, it seemed like the compassion of the members of the church was only skin-deep.

While prayer is very important, that family needed to know by the actions of their faith community that they were moved to the very core of their being by the pain and loss the family had suffered. Instead, the silence they experienced was deafening and only served to increase their pain; they felt betrayed and isolated by the community they thought would stand by them in their hour of need.

The result? The woman told me that though her faith in God was not shaken, her faith in the community of the church was shattered. They now felt it futile to belong to a church. What was the point? The community had failed them. The lesson for us all: our compassion needs to be more than skin-deep and it needs to be evident in our words and actions.

Whether the need comes from someone within the community itself or comes from one of our neighbors, Jesus calls us to know gut-wrenching compassion for those God places on our path and along our journey.

As a church, we’ve been doing a lot of talking about numbers. We talk about the numbers of people who come to worship. We talk about the numbers of people in the community around Easton whom we would like to bring into the body of Christ at Grace.

Jesus calls us to look past the numbers and see the people who are hurting, harassed and helpless. Jesus calls us to reach out to those in need of hearing the good news of God’s “I’ve got you covered” in a believable way – through our words and our actions. The best way to tell others about God is to show others about God, by modeling the love and compassion of God not only by what we say, but also by what we do.

The compassion of Jesus described in this text is a model for all of Christ’s disciples. Our text names those disciples whom Jesus sent out, even names some who failed him in some ways. Yet even in their failure, they have served the larger purposes of God.

In our baptism, we were each named as well. We were named children of God and workers in the new community to which we were joined, along with all the other laborers needed to serve the harvest of God.

The work is not easy. It is taxing. It is emotionally exhausting, it will not always be successful by our measures of success. But faithful service to God serves the larger purposes of God’s kingdom, to heal the hurts and feed the souls of those who most need to experience the love of God through the care and fellowship of the followers of Jesus.  It matters not whether we are able to discern “success” or not. We may never know the difference we have made in a person’s life – the reward is not ours to enjoy. But showing compassion through action in the name of Jesus Christ is our purpose in life and in this community for the ministry we share in God’s kingdom here on earth.  

Jesus sends us out in mission: to be the heart and guts of Christ for people. Jesus urges us to pray not only for our work but that more workers may join us, for the sake of the mission of God. Jesus models loving, compassionate caring that is more than skin-deep, but is demonstrated as well in faith through action.

Through the Holy Spirit, God grants us gifts of ministry for healing, and blesses us with the apostolic mission of the church. God grants us fellowship with all the workers who are sitting in the pews beside you here today, plus other workers who are sitting in pews in other churches hearing the good news of the compassion of Jesus and our commission to follow in his ways. This fellowship includes those who have yet to join us.

So today we go from “I’ve got you covered” to “Feeling it in the gut: the mission and ministry of Christ”. How does that work as a title for this message? It may not be very catchy, but it’s pointed. Christ’s love and presence are real, and he calls for ours to be, as well. May God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, grant that it may be so.

Amen.

Two for the Price of One

Mark 5:21-43

        Who doesn’t love a good bargain? I know I certainly do. When I see the advertisement, “Buy One, Get One Free” I just have to stop and take a second look. And if one item is 50% off, I figure that means if I buy two at 50% off each, I’ve just saved myself some money, right? – Well, only if I need two, I guess.

        Today’s gospel delivers two healing stories – two miracles of Jesus, within this one text of Mark’s. I was going to post “Two for the Price of One” as the title for my sermon today. But advertising a sermon with a  title like that on a church website might be a little counterintuitive.

        While we could all probably use a double-dose of God’s grace most days, what you probably don’t want is a 90 minute sermon.

Healing of a Bleeding Woman,
Peter Marcellinus Catacomb

        All kidding aside, our God is a gracious and generous God whose love is transforming and healing, whose grace, freely flowing through Jesus, brings us new life.

        Today’s gospel texts contain stories of that grace demonstrated in Jesus performing miraculous healing, taking power from death and giving new life and transformation to those who suffer.

        Most of us have some personal experience with healing, be it physical, emotional, spiritual, or relational. Some of us may even have stories of miraculous healing – healing that we ourselves experienced or healing that has occurred to others we know.

        Maybe there was a restoration to health that could not be explained any other way than, “miracle”; healing that took place which was out of proportion to anything that was expected, or a cure that took place where none was expected at all.

        I think that most of us probably know that there are times when healing comes with a cure, and times when a person is cured of a disease but still consumed by demons of another kind.      

        All of us could probably tell the other kind of stories as well – the stories of those who prayed, or for whom we have prayed, where there was no cure, and no apparent healing.

        We admit that the ways of God are both mysterious and challenging.

        This truth, however, often makes healing stories like those in Mark’s gospel this morning difficult for us to comprehend, and difficult for us to hear, reminding us of those other stories from our own experience as they do.

        We don’t fully understand why some people are healed or cured and others are not. There are those who laugh us to scorn for faith in the power of God to heal, especially when healing doesn’t happen the way we want it to.   

        Today we have these two-for-one healing stories in our gospel narrative. Each of these stories presents healing a little differently, each includes a miracle, each exhibits the twin forces of fear and faith which often seem to go hand in hand.

        What these stories do NOT teach us, is that if we simply have enough faith, miracles will happen, healing will automatically occur, and we will get whatever we ask.

        This gospel does not say that illness is a test of faith or that with the right kind of faith we automatically get our wish and receive a cure when we pray.

        Instead, what these stories testify to is the transformational presence and power of God, working through Jesus Christ. These stories invite us to take all the fear, sadness, grief and pain we feel in the face of our brokenness, our illness and even death itself and turn them over to God. And God, who promises to accompany us through the chaos and turmoil of our human finitude will transform our fear, giving us faith, strength, and yes, healing.

        In our text today, Jesus has once again crossed the sea, returning from the Gentile side where he has just cast out demons from a Gerosene man. The sea, figuring prominently in the gospel, reminds us of the powers of chaos and darkness, a boundary Jesus not only crosses but ultimately overcomes.

        We remember last week’s gospel story of the calming of the storm at sea which illustrated for us how Jesus brings calm to the turmoil and chaos of our world and our lives.

        As Jesus reaches the shore in today’s text, a huge crowd assembles around him and follows him, pressing him in on all sides. There is something symbolic in the way that Jesus stands between the people and the depths and chaos of the sea.

        What follows is this two-for-one story.

        First, we have Jairus – well connected, Jewish, but vulnerable to losing the daughter who is so dear to him. He may be used to getting what he wants – he is a man of power and prestige, after all. He may not really know what to think of Jesus but he’ll try anything to save his daughter. He calls out to him, revealing for all to see, his deep vulnerability and need.

        Then, we have the unnamed woman – she has lost all status and whatever money she may have had during the twelve long years of her affliction. She doesn’t have a thing going for her except for her faith.

        She is desperate too. Like Jairus, she may not know exactly who this Jesus is or how he works, but she has heard the healing and teaching stories and believes that there is something about him, some way that God is working through him. And so, she presses through the crowd.

Can you feel the bodies pressing against her from all sides? Can you see her stretch out her hand, reaching, reaching, and then finally touching just the fringe of Jesus’ clothing – the only thing she dares touch, and even that in secret.

She likely fears that if she calls out to Jesus and asks him to help her, the crowd, thinking she is out of her mind, will laugh her to scorn, will chase her away – or worse. Her bleeding has left her ritually, sexually and religiously unclean.

        Finally, there is the little girl, Jairus’ precious daughter, standing at the gate to adulthood, soon to reach what would have been an age of marriagability. On her own she has no status, no wealth, and no power, as she hovers in the threshold between life and death.

     As Jesus and the others reach her home, they are told that it is too late. She has died.

Resisting the people’s call to turn back however, Jesus proceeds to enter the home, allowing only the girl’s parents and his most trusted companions to come with him. The people in the crowd laugh. They think he is out of his mind.

     They laugh him to scorn at the suggestion that he can do anything to help her now. They laugh him to scorn at the suggestion that there is any power greater than death.

     As we move with these characters through this narrative, we see the power of God moving people from death to life, transforming fear into thanksgiving through faith, turning vulnerability to vindication through the power of Jesus’ touch.

     Jairus may not have been a believer when he first caught Jesus’ attention; hope was all he had, but the restoration of his little girl to life moved him to faith, made him a believer.

        The woman experiences immediate healing and more – she who was once nameless and without status is given a name by Jesus – “Daughter,” he calls her – and then lifts her up as the epitome of faith. “Your faith has saved you.” She is not only healed, but restored to community.

 The Raising of Jairus' Daughter
George Percy Jacomb-Hood, 1895

        And the little girl? Her role foreshadows Jesus’ own resurrection, revealing God’s power over even the darkness of death.

        Experiencing God’s power is overwhelming. It is easier to believe that the trusting, hopeful, believing ones are “out of their minds”.

        These days, fear, turmoil, chaos and death are evident every way we turn. So many people in the sphere of our lives are touched by cancer, other incurable illnesses, addiction and brokenness beyond belief. Terrorism, mass killings, systemic conflict and ills infect every corner of the earth. Perhaps you or someone close to you can identify with one of the characters in this Gospel account – desperate, vulnerable, hopeful, or feeling hopeless.

     Maybe you are the person who has it all together but then, through illness, job loss, a broken relationship, or some other storm suddenly finds himself vulnerable and desperate?

Or perhaps you’re the one who has endured so much challenge or adversity over time that, like the bleeding woman you haven’t much else to lose. Perhaps you are ready to dare to reach out, wondering if just maybe Jesus might be able to heal you.

     Maybe you find yourself the helpless one like Jairus’ daughter, utterly dependent on others to pray for you, to lift you up, to fight for you?

      Whichever you are, whoever you are, this gospel message is for you. God’s abundant love displayed on the cross will show you power that is stronger than death, and love that is stronger than any brokenness or ill.

     We believe in a God who heals, and keeps right on healing because our human nature leaves us vulnerable to illness and pain and loss. Through the power of the Holy Spirit and the Word of God, we can learn to trust God’s “I love you,” and to hear God’s “I know you,” claims made manifest in Jesus Christ.

     It is in community that we ourselves can begin to become God’s vehicles of compassion, comfort and healing for others. Perhaps the two-for-one good news of this gospel is that whether you have a strong faith or whether you struggle to believe, or fall somewhere in the middle, God walks alongside you as Jesus walked along the sea, holding back the chaos, and through Jesus overcoming the powers of evil and sin. This gracious and generous God is transforming doubt into hope, hope into faith, and bringing healing to all. Thanks be to God.