Pick up that mat: May 25, 2025

 Year C, Easter 6                                John 5:1-9                                                                                                   Thirty-eight years is a long time to be ill.  One of the most sacred and profound parts of my job is visiting people when they are sick. Sometimes it’s a temporary illness that they will get through.  Sometimes it is an illness which will inevitably end in death, either imminently, or years later.  Often people don’t know where this illness will lead them.  When I visited people in hospitals and their homes, I never fully appreciated what they were going through. I was sympathetic, but I didn’t actually understand.  I was always amazed at how positive some people seemed to be and I thought, surely I would be just like that if I was hospitalized.  I would certainly find the humor in it…somehow. 

When I was in the ICU for a week and then the regular hospital for 3 more weeks, I was a wreck. At one point a chaplain came by and I started crying. She said, “It’s good to cry.” I said, “Well, I hope so, because I do it daily.”  She responded, “Well, that’s not good. You might be depressed.” I wanted to say, “Do you think? Do you think almost dying and then being stuck in a bed, unable to walk might make someone depressed?” I didn’t say that, because the truth was, I just didn’t care.  What that experience taught me was that I was not nearly as strong or hearty as I thought I was.   I was only sick for a few months.  38 years…that’s a terrifying prospect.

            The first several hours I worked on this sermon, I found myself regretting choosing this text to preach on. Because this nameless man who was the recipient of Jesus’ healing and love is one of the least sympathetic characters in the Bible. Usually when Jesus healed someone, they asked for the healing and displayed some measure of faith or worthiness. Then when they were healed, they showed gratitude or joy.  Some even became evangelists telling everyone what Jesus did for them. Yet we see none of that from this man. He doesn’t even ask for the healing nor does he know who Jesus is.   In other healing stories, people scrambled to get Jesus’s attention.  They begged him.   This guy doesn’t know who he is.

            Today, we only heard half of the story. The last line was, “Now the day was a Sabbath.”  Because of that, the man who was healed got in a little trouble.  Jesus told him to “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” That is what he did, but you are not supposed to work on the Sabbath. You are not supposed to carry something…like a mat.  A few people questioned the healed man and he immediately blamed it on Jesus. He said, “The man who made me well said to me, ‘Take up your mat and walk.’” 

When those questioning him asked who had healed him, he said he didn’t know his name.  How do you not find out the name of the person who just miraculously healed you? Why would you then throw that person under the bus? It gets worse. Later Jesus found the healed man in the temple and told him to sin no more. Then this healed man found those who had questioned him and told them Jesus’ name.

Some might say, well all he did was tell them Jesus’ name. He could not have known this would have gotten Jesus into trouble.  Of course he knew. He knew that people weren’t supposed to work on the Sabbath.  He knew they were questioning him so they could find the source of the healing. If you are not supposed to carry a mat on the Sabbath, you are definitely not supposed to heal on the Sabbath. He had to know this would have gotten Jesus into trouble and it did. Afterwards, it says Jesus was persecuted. 

          Why of all the sick and desperate people lying around that pool, why did Jesus choose this man?  The only explanation the text gives is that Jesus saw him and knew how long he had been there.  When Jesus asked, “Do you want to be made well?”—the man didn’t say, “Yes!” He just gave an excuse. 

The pool that he was lying next to was supposed to have healing properties.  It was believed that when the water was stirred up, it meant that an angel was present. Whoever was first to get into the water would be healed.   When Jesus asked if he wanted to be made well, he said that he could not get to the water and there was no one to help him. Yet, despite the man’s inability to express a desire to be healed… Despite the man giving no indication he believed Jesus could help him….Despite all of that, Jesus healed him anyways. He told him to stand up, take his mat and walk. 

          Here is the amazing thing, the man did it.  He did exactly as Jesus asked.  Remember, there is no indication that he knows anything about Jesus.  Why didn’t he just ignore him?  If someone told me when I was hospitalized just to get up and walk out, I would have told them to get out of my room.   We don’t know what this man’s ailment was but moving was clearly difficult.  If it has not been, he would have found a way to get in that pool before everyone else, even without help. 

          Obviously, we can’t know what was going through that man’s mind, but this is what I think. I think he saw something in Jesus’ face or heard something in his voice that gave him hope.  Or maybe, it was simply the first person who had bothered to talk to him in all those years of waiting by that pool.  In that moment, Jesus gave him the courage and strength to try something that he had been convinced he could never do.

          Did he deserve this opportunity? It doesn’t look like it to me.  Fortunately, it’s not up to me to determine who deserves healing or another chance.  It’s not up to any of us.  Jesus’ love and compassion does not depend on our worthiness to receive it. 

That is what grace is…it’s love that is in no way merited.  It’s love that comes with no strings.  It’s love that comes as a result of Jesus’s sacrificial love.  Did Jesus deserve to get in trouble for healing someone on the Sabbath? No, but he did it anyways.  Jesus knew the repercussions for his actions. He knew who did and didn’t deserve his love, but he gave it to all of us anyways.

          I was a horrible patient. I was nice to the people who came and helped me as well as the few who were allowed to visit.  My husband, he saw the worst of it all.  And he still washed my feet when they were covered in bacteria and gross hospital germs. He put my socks and shoes on when I was finally able to leave the hospital. He did that every day for months.  I couldn’t appreciate it because I could not see past my own pain.  Maybe this ungrateful man who was ill for 38 years was in the same place. Perhaps he could not see past his own pain to find the words to just say thank you.  Here is what he did, he got up and walked when Jesus told him to. He found whatever courage and strength he had left, to do something that he not have been able to do.

          Most of us are not dealing with an illness that lasts our whole lives.  Most of us are capable of getting up from these pews and walking.  Yet I would bet that there is something that each one of us longs for that we don’t think we deserve or we don’t have the courage to ask for, or try for.  We are stuck in a cycle of saying, “it’s just not worth it.” It might be something very small. It might be something big.  Whatever it is, I want you to know, it doesn’t matter whether you are worthy or strong or grateful.  What matters is that God loves you deeply and God is telling you to stand up, pick up whatever excuse you have been resting on, and walk.

Divorce and Healing: October 6 2024

     Mark 10:2-16                                                  October 6, 2024

 

                In the other churches where I served, we always had the animal blessing as part of our Sunday morning service that was closest to St Francis day.   On that day, we used different readings than those that were assigned, which means I have never had to preach these texts that come up every three years.  This week, I spent a fair amount of time thinking about how I could avoid this Gospel reading, but I realized that when we have texts like this read aloud, it’s best to preach on them.  I imagine that when some of you heard these words about marriage and divorce, your heart sank a little. Perhaps you thought, you know I have been through enough, do I really need to hear this kind of judgment on Sunday morning?  So I want to start by telling you that this sermon is not going to be explicitly about divorce or why divorce is bad.  The goal is that those who have already suffered through the heartbreak of divorce will find healing rather than judgment.

                Last week I talked about the fact that Jesus was always looking out for the least of these. He was passionate about protecting those who were vulnerable and unfairly treated. The reading we heard today was likely the same day that he warned people against hurting the little ones, the least of these.  For all we know, he’s still holding that child in his arms who he held as an example of the little ones.  My guess is that he wanted to continue talking about caring for the least of these, not the legal loopholes available to men who wanted to divorce. 

                The pharisees wanted to test Jesus. Given that the laws around divorce were a controversial topic and that King Herod had divorced his wife so he could marry another, they figured that they might be able to trick Jesus into saying something that would get him into trouble.  At the time, there were two interpretations of Deuteronomy 24, which says that a man could divorce his wife if he found something objectionable about her.  One of the interpretations allowed a man to divorce his wife for any reason…including bad cooking.  The other interpretation was that the man could only divorce his wife in cases of adultery.  Surely Jesus had an opinion on this important matter of legal loopholes available to men who wanted to divorce their wives. 

                Jesus refused to debate legalities.  He didn’t even want to debate divorce.  Instead he shifted the conversation from divorce to one about the importance of marriage.   Many of the pharisees got twisted up in legalese.  They wanted to know what they could get away with, rather than talk about the intent of marriage.  Jesus brought them away from the law to the intent of the creator—that people would create lifelong unions.  He ends by saying, “Therefore what God has joined together, let one separate.”  We actually quote that in our wedding ceremony and it is my favorite thing to say. 

The Greek text says “no man” rather than “no one.”  I am inclined to think that this is one of those examples where Jesus really means men…because he was talking to men who made the rules about what men could do to get divorced.  At the time, men made the rules and in many places they still do.  There was only one case where a woman could request a divorce and even then, she would still suffer the consequences of the divorce. 

Remember who Jesus was talking about before the pharisees interrupted him, how we care for the vulnerable and the marginalized…the least of these.  Last week I talked about the fact that children had no rights at the time. Women also had few rights and were vulnerable. In most cases, women’s economic stability was dependent on a male relative.  If her husband divorced her, she had few options.  If she was lucky, she would have a male relative who could take care of her.  If she was very lucky and young enough to bare children, she might be able to find another husband. If she did not have those safety nets, she would be impoverished and forced to beg on the streets or prostitute herself. In Jesus discouraging divorce, he was once again protecting the most vulnerable. 

What does that mean for us today?  Divorce is rarely equitable, but it’s more equitable than it was in Jesus’ time.  Would Jesus be as vehemently against divorce now as he was then? I really don’t know.  I suspect if it came up now, he would once again return to the purpose of marriage.  No one goes into a marriage wanting it to end in divorce.  People enter marriages for the purposes of commitment.  And we should honor that commitment as best we can. But we have all seen marriages that needed to end and we have seen beautiful examples of remarriage.  If Jesus was alive today, I don’t think Jesus would be prohibiting people from getting married again.  If you read the text closely, he’s acknowledging that people will get divorced and remarried, but he’s also acknowledging that divorce hurts people.  And just because people are legally divorced, doesn’t mean the marriage never happened.  Jesus is acknowledging that there is brokenness…but there is also healing.

In the Gospel of John, there is a wonderful story of Jesus meeting a woman who had 5 husbands. The text doesn’t say why she had been married that many times, but it seems unlikely (or very unlucky) that 5 husbands died.  What is more likely is that she was divorced that many times because she was infertile.  It was a common reason that men divorced their wives. Jesus sat with this woman who had probably been ostracized and talked to her.  He never condemned her.  He never judged her. He had one of the longest conversations between him and another person in all of scripture.  She then went and told the whole town about him.  She became an evangelist.  Jesus saw past what had stigmatized her and treated her the way he treated his disciples, maybe even better.  That is an example of how Jesus treated people who divorce and remarry.

It is no random thing that right after the pharisees forced Jesus to address divorce he decided to bless the children.  It says that he laid his hands on them.  When Jesus lays his hands on people, that usually means that he is healing them.  Given the way children were often treated at that time, there is no doubt that they needed healing.  We all do.  I think the reason that the Gospel writer put this story of Jesus blessing the children right after Jesus’ words about divorce was to show the reader what really matters.

Jesus came and lived among us for many reasons.  The stories I find most powerful are stories where he sits and listens, when he heals people, not necessarily the external things, but those parts of us that are broken because of whatever has happened in the past or is happening now.  So whether you are existing in a challenging marriage (because let’s admit, all marriages have their challenges), or recovering from a broken one, or soaking in gratitude for your second or third marriage, know that Jesus came not to judge, but to bring love and wholeness to this broken world.   

A Story of a Woman: August 21, 2022

Year C, Pentecost 11                    Luke 13:10-17  & Isaiah 58:9-14           

(This is told from the perspective of the woman in the Gospel of Luke.)                  

          My back was worse than usual today.  It’s always bad. I cannot remember a time when it did not hurt.  But this morning as I attempted to get up off the floor, I felt a stabbing pain, worse than usual.  I confess that I considered lying back down and not coming to the synagogue.  It’s not as if anyone would know if I wasn’t there.  But God would. And so I slowly stood and dressed myself.  It’s hard to get dressed when you are bent over like I am, but I am accustomed to it. It’s been many years like this.  I can’t remember how it happened.   I wasn’t born like this.  It happened slowly. The pain came first.  Then one day I realized I could no longer stand straight.  I could not see the sunrise or the sunset.   The sky was a memory to me.

            I remember the sky. I used to love to gaze at the stars at night and remember the promise that God made to Abraham.  And rainbows, I loved to see rainbows as they reminded me of the promise God made to Noah after the flood.  There are so many reminders of God goodness and mercy in the sky.  I miss seeing those reminders.  Now I see the dust as I walk through the village. I see small rodents and insects.  I see feet and the dirty hems of robes.   But sometimes I see beautiful things, like a stone with brilliant colors, or a cotton thistle with its spiky purple petals, a large puddle that reflects the clouds.  Sometimes, when God is especially good to me, I will see a baby crawling under me.  They look into my eyes and I try not to weep because it is the only time that someone looks into my eyes.  It is a lonely life, but I am never really alone. I know that deep down.  It’s just easy to forget sometimes.

            That is why I go to the synagogue week after week….so that I never forget that I am not alone.  Even if I cannot see reminders of God’s grandeur above me, I can still feel his presence.  I know that I make some people uncomfortable.  They assume that since I have this deformity, that I have sinned or my parents have sinned.  I have sinned, but no more than those who look down upon me, and there are many who do.  Didn’t the great prophet Isaiah tell God’s people to “satisfy the needs of the afflicted?”  I am afflicted, am I not?   I am not saying that all of the religious leaders are bad. Some are wonderful and caring and try to help as much as they can. But there are some who are more concerned about the rules.

            Recently I had heard about a man who was a leader, but also different.  He didn’t wear all the fancy robes.  He prayed at the temple, but he didn’t spend all of his time there.  He was even criticized for eating at the homes of sinners---prostitutes and tax collectors.   There were rumors that he had even healed people.  I knew I would never see more than his sandaled feet, but I hoped, I hoped that I would hear him sometime.  I can tell a lot about a person by their voice. I can tell a lot about a person if they merely bother to talk to me. 

            As I approach the synagogue, I hear a different voice.  It is a voice of someone with authority who is teaching the Holy Scriptures.   This is not unusual.  There are always learned men teaching at the synagogue.  But the way he talks, it’s different.  It is almost like he was talking to me.  Wait, he is talking to me.  I feel hands on my  back as they guide me to him.  I want to cry out in pain as it hurts as they steer me through the crowd, but I try not to.   Finally, I can sense someone leaning toward me, trying to get close to my face, trying to see me.  “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.”

 Those words, they are beautiful, but they can only be words.   Then he puts his hands on my head and slowly lifts my face.  I want to resist as I am afraid of the pain, but as his hands touch me, the pain begins to recede.  It starts with my head, then my neck, shoulders, and then my back and the rest of my body. It happens slowly, gradually, but eventually, I am standing.  And I am looking into his eyes and he is smiling at me.  I see compassion and love in those eyes.

            As I realize the pain is really gone I raise my hands high and throw my head back so I can see the sky, the beautiful sky. I praise God. I am surprised to hear pieces of the prayers that I have come to know by heart in my years worshipping here.  At the time they felt like empty words.  But right now I feel them in a new way.  I am almost embarrassed, but I cannot stop laughing.  I am so distracted I almost miss the synagogue leader reprimanding the crowd, telling us all there are six other days to be cured.  I know I should be worried about his judgment, but I can’t be, because I have been healed.

            Through my laughter and prayers, I hear Jesus respond, “And ought not this daughter of Abraham who Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from bondage on the Sabbath day.”  He calls me a daughter of Abraham.  He recognizes me not by my disability, but by my faith.  He has not merely healed my body, he has set me free from bondage.  He has lifted the burden from my tired back.  Just as Isaiah told the people so many years ago, remove the yolk from the people and satisfy the needs of the afflicted.

            I am healed, but the Hebrew people still carry the yoke of the Roman Empire.  We are not free, not in that way.  Some say this Jesus will free us, but I wonder if that is what he is really here for. I wonder if he heals us, so we can help the others who are oppressed—the outcasts, the forgotten. I know that now that I have been healed, I will do my best to serve those who cannot help themselves.  I know that is what Jesus wants of me. That is how I can use my freedom.

 What is it that Jesus wants from you? How can you bring healing to this broken world and the people around you?  As Isaiah writes, how can we be “repairers of the breach?”

Possessed: January 28, 2018

Year B, Epiphany 4                                                     
Mark 1:21-29                                                 

 

            Recently my husband and I were talking about a yearly event that we attend.  It’s not my favorite event in the world, but it’s also not completely horrible, nor is it particularly memorable.  This year my husband reminded me of one almost 10 years ago.  “Do you remember how mad you were?  I had to take away your car keys.”  I looked at him like he was stark raving mad, because I had no memory of the incident he was referring to. He reminded me of what happened that made me so mad and it started coming back to me.  I remember being very annoyed, but I don’t remember being enraged.  I thought, “Why would that have made me so mad?  How stupid to be mad about something so trivial.”  In my defense, someone did something pretty rude and embarrassed me in a public setting and made me feel small and foolish.  I confess, the more I thought about the incident, the more I remembered the anger.  I could feel it 10 years later.  But to be so enraged my husband did not trust me to drive? That seems excessive.

            Anger is not necessarily a bad thing.  There are times when it is appropriate to be angry.  Jesus got angry, especially in the face on injustice and hypocrisy.  Anger becomes dangerous when it envelops you and clouds your very being…when it almost becomes part of who you are, your very essence.  We can say that about a lot of things. Fear, competition, confidence, success, desire… None of these things are bad…but they can take us over at times. They can possess us and change how we think and act.

            The Gospel of Mark does not start the same way that the other gospels do.  There is no dramatic story of Jesus’ birth like there is in Matthew and Luke.   There is no poetic prologue like there is in the Gospel of John.  The Gospel of Mark begins with John the Baptist and moves quickly to Jesus baptism, the temptation in the desert and the calling of his first disciples.  This is all in the first 20 verses of the first chapter.  Those first 20 verses are full of important events, events and people critical to the life of Jesus and to the Christian faith.  After reading those 20 verses, we would expect that the next event would be equally important.

            That brings us to today’s reading. Our story for today starts in a fairly typical fashion.  Jesus went to the synagogue and began to teach.  Everyone was impressed with his teaching.  Then the unexpected.  A man possessed by demons approached Jesus…no it’s more like he confronted Jesus.  The demon recognized Jesus immediately.  Everyone else saw Jesus as a teacher, perhaps even a prophet.  But the demon identified Jesus as the Holy One of God. 

            Of course Jesus did what we would expect him to do.  He freed the man from the demon. He exorcised him.  This was Jesus’s first miracle in the Gospel of Mark.  Exorcism.  In the Gospel of John, Jesus turned water into wine as his first miracle.  In Matthew,  he cured lots of people who were sick.  In Mark, one of the first things he does in his public ministry is exorcise a demon.  Surely Jesus could have picked something different.  He could have healed a small child or a wounded animal…but why get involved with a demon?

            The Gospel writer must have thought this was important if he put it in the very first chapter.  Now I know we all get a little antsy when we start talking about demons and evil spirits.  I don’t know what to tell you about the existence of demons, but I do believe that there is very real evil in the world.  Mark knew this.  Jesus knew this.  Thus one of his fist acts was to confront that evil and free a person of that evil. It wasn’t some abstract thing…it was there right in front of him, possessing a human, a child of God. 

We don’t hear much about the man who was possessed.  We know he was a man possessed.  That is it.  Part of me wants to know more about this man, how it happened, how he made it into the synagogue, what happened next? But the other part of me knows that none of that really matters. What matters is that this man was a child of God, a child of God who was being suffocated by something evil, something that controlled him.  Thus Jesus’ first act was not merely exorcising a demon. He was giving someone their freedom back.  He was giving this person back his identity as a beloved child of God.  If we look at it that way, then it makes sense that this would be one of his first acts.

            In the Episcopal Church, we don’t talk about demons much, or being possessed.  Yet I believe that most of us know what it is to be shackled by something.  It might bad relationship or job. It might be an addiction or an emotion that has taken over.  It might be guilt or something from the past that continues to plague us.  It might be an illness or a pain that has made us feel less than whole.

It doesn’t have to be something that is bad in and of itself. It could be money and belongings.  They can possess us. We can be possessed by knowledge that makes us arrogant and closed minded.  We can be possessed by fears, fears that keep us from seeing others as beloved children of God. We can be possessed by anger, some of it righteous anger, some of it just plain foolish. 

            Jesus seeks to free us from those things.  Because I don’t know about you, but I don’t like being controlled by something like anger or jealousy. I don’t like it when fear keeps me from doing good things for other people.  Sometimes I wish that we could just stick with the demon language.  When my husband told me about that time I was enraged over something foolish, I could have said, well that was a demon. That would be so much easier. We know demons are bad.  In stories like today, they seem to be eliminated with expediency. It is not the same with these amorphous things and feelings that possess us. They are much harder to get rid of. Sometimes we do not even realize we are possessed. 

            One of the interesting things about the story of the exorcism is that we don’t know what happened to the demon.  What we know is that Jesus continued to exorcise people. It seemed that he never quite conquered evil; he freed people from whatever possessed them.  He healed one person at a time. But he never rid the world of all evil. He was only able to heal the people who came to him, who knew that they needed his saving grace. That is what Jesus continues to ask of all of us….that we come to him, that we admit that we need him.  We might have to keep coming back.  I am fairly certain we will.  Thankfully, Jesus doesn’t keep count—he’s just happy to see us.

Who are you calling a hypocrite? 8/21/2016

Year C, Pentecost 14                                                          
Luke 13:10-17                                                            

            If you were here last week and recall the Gospel reading, you will know that this is our 2^nd week in a row of Jesus calling the religious leaders hypocrites.  It is easy to villainize the Jewish religious leaders---the Pharisees.  That has been done for millennia and unfortunately has led to considerable anti-Jewish sentiment.  I am not sure that it is fair to beat up on the Pharisees.  I will admit that as a religious leader, I take it a tad personally.  I cringe a little every time I hear Jesus call someone out for being a hypocrite.  That is what he is doing…he is calling them out—in front of everyone. 

            This was the Jewish Sabbath at the local synagogue.  Everyone in the town was present.  While Jesus had no official standing in the community that we know of, he must have been fairly well respected as he was allowed to teach in the synagogue on the Sabbath.  While he had a certain amount of authority, he was still expected to follow the laws of the Jewish faith. These laws were essential to the faith. No matter how great a teacher, preacher or healer he was…he still had to follow the laws.  One of the really important laws was that you did not work on the Sabbath.  That wasn’t just any rule or law--that was a commandment.

            When we hear the word Sabbath, we think of going to church, relaxing a little, maybe having a lazy day at home. That does not mean that we do any of those things, but we assume that is the goal.  When God told us to rest on the 7^th day, surely that is what he had in mind…binge watching Netflix all day.  Not quite.

One of the reasons that the fourth commandment mandated that people keep the Sabbath was to recognize that the Hebrew people were no longer slaves and thus no longer forced to work every day.  Moses delivered the 10 Commandments after the exodus.  The Hebrew people were released from bondage and free to rest.  God was demanding not only that the people who were listening rest from their labor, but that they make sure that their servants don’t work.  It’s a justice issue.  The nice thing about the Blue laws (where businesses were closed on Sundays) was not just that church attendance was higher but that these forced closures allowed everyone to have a day off…everyone.  

That might explain why the Pharisee was a little upset.  He was not against someone being healed.  There were 6 other days that Jesus could have healed this woman.  Why did Jesus have to do it on the one day he was not supposed to?  Now you might think there should be some wiggle room in the commandments, especially given this particular situation. 

There was. That was why Jesus called the leader a hypocrite.  He was reminding the Pharisee that they already did work on the Sabbath when they untied their oxen and led them to the manger for water.  You would not deny your animal water just because that would cause some work.  Why then would you withhold healing from someone who so desperately needed it? The Pharisee was a hypocrite because he was making an exception for a purpose that made his life easier, but refusing to make an exception for another person whose life was exceptionally hard.

The Pharisee seems unreasonable, but I bet we all have little rules in our life that we don’t break.  Some of them are really important rules that have important reasons.  Some of them were important once, but are no longer relevant.  Yet we follow them because it is habit.  Think about your rules.  It might be that you always make your bed, or you always wear a jacket and a tie to church, or you always wash your face at night.  You could skip a day and it would not kill you.  But what I always worry about is the slippery slope.  Once you break the rule once, there is a good chance you will break it again.  Then it is no longer a rule, it’s a recommendation and recommendations are very easy to ignore.

I believe this is what the Pharisee was worried about.  He was worried that we would start making so many exceptions that the commandment would no longer be relevant.  People would forget what the purpose of it was---that it was not just about rest, it was about justice.  That is exactly what happened. The Sabbath is now a quaint memory. 

That’s why I feel for the Pharisee.  I can see that slippery slope all over the place and it scares me.  I see Jesus’ point as well.  We have tons of rules in the church.  Most of them have really good reasons behind them. Some of them were originally based on practical needs but those needs changed and we kept the rules because they became tradition.  Do you know why some churches have rails around the altar?  Hundreds of years ago, there would be dogs that would wander through the church.  The rail kept out the dogs.  Now the rail gives us a place to kneel so that we can be in community around the altar. Having this rail has become a rule for us.  People would be in an uproar if we took it out.  The rail is one of our unwritten rules.

But we also have lots of written rules in the church.  We call them canon law.  We have rules in the Book of Common Prayer.  They are called rubrics.  Do you know why we finish the wine at the end of the service instead of pouring the dregs in the bushes? Page 409 of the prayer book tells us that the sacrament must be reverently consumed by the clergy and communicants.  That makes sense to me because it’s a sacrament.  It’s the body and blood of Christ. Yet there are some rules that do not make sense to me and sometimes I wonder why we keep doing them…why it all matters.  On the one hand I see that slippery slope that the Pharisee was worried about.  On the other I hear Jesus calling me a hypocrite.

Why does all this matter? Often times, rules (whether they are written or not) cause us to exclude people and things.  They give us excuses not to change, not to take risks.  They keep us isolated.  There was once a church rule that African Americans could not sit in the same pews as a white person.  That’s not in the Bible.  It was a rule created by people.  You might think, ok, well that seems like a good way to judge, we’ll follow the rules in the Bible.  There was a long standing church law that women could not be ordained.  That rule came from a Bible passage.  It’s tricky isn’t it?

However, I do believe that there are guides to help us interpret the laws of our church.  Holy Scripture provides an awesome guide.  If we read it literally, we will find a lot of rules.  If we read it in community with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, we will find the same rules but we will discover ways to determine what is and what is not truly critical to our faith. 

The most important guide is Jesus.  Some people like to portray Jesus as this big rule breaker who thumbed his nose at authority.  He didn’t break the rules; he reinterpreted them.  Thankfully he provided some divine guidance while he was still on earth.  When someone asked him what the most important commandment was, he responded, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’  This is the greatest and first commandment.  And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’  On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” He interpreted everything through a lens of love.  He healed the woman because he had compassion for her.  He could not let her go one more day in agony…not one more day.  That was what the Pharisee failed to see.  For him, the laws became more important than the people they were created for.

It is vital that we as a church look at our written and unwritten rules and traditions.  We look at them through a lens of love for God and our neighbor.  If we open ourselves up to that exercise of seeing things through a lens of love,  our church will become more open, loving, and authentic.  Because when Jesus calls out the hypocrites.  I don’t want to be the one he is looking at.      

Special Thanksgiving Sermon

Giving Thanks and Asking for Healing

Song of Simeon and Song of Mary                                                             Nov. 26, 2014

          Like any holiday, the history of Thanksgiving has many different versions.  Historians cannot agree on where the first Thanksgiving occurred, or even when it occurred.  However, what I find most interesting about the history of the holiday was when and how it was nationalized.  There are references to various thanksgivings in the 1600’s but they are far different from what we celebrate today and they were not annual celebrations.  However, on Nov. 1^st of 1782, the Continental Congress issued a Thanksgiving Proclamation in which they declared the last Thursday of November to be a “solemn day of Thanksgiving to God, for all his mercies: and they do further recommend to all ranks to testify to their gratitude to God for his goodness…”[1]  If you know your American history, you will realize that this declaration comes right at the end of the American Revolution.  The Americans felt that they had much to be thankful for, but they were also very aware of the challenges that faced them. 

While this proclamation was presented, Thanksgiving did not become a national holiday until 1863.  Abraham Lincoln declared it to be such in the midst of the civil war.  In Lincoln’s speech, he asked the nation to set aside a day to thank God for the blessings he has given us, and also ask God to heal our nation.[2]  Thanksgiving was revisited once again in the midst of WWII by Franklin Roosevelt.

          I find it remarkable that the national holiday of Thanksgiving was created and maintained in times of national crisis.  It was in those times that our national leaders realized that we needed to thank God for what we had been given.  Even after the nation had nearly been torn in two, Lincoln called on the American people to find God’s blessings in the rubble.  Today, our nation is in the middle of a great deal of strife outside our borders, within our borders and even on our borders.   The economy while improving has still left many without jobs and with dwindled savings-of any at all.  Some might find it very difficult to be thankful this year.  However, it would seem that this holiday was meant for times just like these.  It was meant for times when people were having trouble seeing the blessings in life, having trouble finding God in the midst of job losses, racial turmoil, injustice and war. 

          If you look at both The Song of Mary and the Song of Simeon you will see a similar theme, thanksgiving in the midst of fear and grief.  Mary isn’t just thanking God for what he has done for her, the blessing that he has given her, she is thanking God for the changes that Jesus will bring for her people- her people who are essentially enslaved by a foreign government.  For her Jesus is an answer to a prayer, a prayer for an oppressed people…people who are beaten, battered, lonely, angry, poor, hungry…a prayer for all of us. 

          The second reading is only a chapter later in the Gospel of Luke, but a lot has happened in that chapter.  Jesus has been born.  Shepherd and angels greeted him.  It was a time of joy and hope.  Soon after he was born, like all Jewish boys at the time, Jesus was presented at the temple.  There were two people there who immediately recognized him as more than just an infant in the arms of a peasant.  They saw this child for who he really was.  Simeon began his song with great joy.  He could die now.  His life was complete because he had seen this child, this prophesy fulfilled.  But after he said all of this, he turned to Mary and said, “This child is destined for the falling and rising of many in Israel and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed- and a sword will pierce your own soul too.”            Hey now, where did that come from?  All is well.  Prophesy is fulfilled and by the way a sword will pierce you.  Can you imagine how Mary felt?  It has always seemed like such a bizarre way to end something that we call a song- the Song of Simeon.  But he was right.  It would not be an easy road for Mary.  It would be a road that would end with a cross, nails, and even a sword.  While it was Jesus who was pierced, we all can imagine Mary feeling that.  It wasn’t just a momentary sharp pain. It was a pain that lingered because she had lost her son. 

          Grief and joy often come together.  It’s messy and I would much prefer some plain old joy, but that is not what God has promised us.  From the beginning God has promised to love us and care for us, but he never said it would be easy.  He never said it would be painless.  He did ask for our thanks and our songs of praise.  So that is why we gather here tonight.  We thank God even when we do not feel like thanking God.  We thank God in a divided nation and a divided world.  We thank God when we feel divided because we know that God can bring us wholeness.  Abraham Lincoln asked the nation to set aside this day to ask for God to heal us.  We still need that, don’t we?  While the need is still here, we can be thankful that we have a God who has the power to heal if we can only find the strength to ask.    

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[1] Thanksgiving Proclamation from  the Continental Congress on Nov. 1, 1782.  www.history.com/minisite.do?content_type=Minisite_Generic&content_type_id=875&display_order=8&mini_id=1083

[2]President Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Day Proclamation, Oct. 3, 1863.

http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/source/sb2/sb2w.htm