take up your mat and walk!

Three of us from St. Paul's Church in Brockton just came back from the Start Up Start Over conference. We're in an Episcopal parish that is as good as dead -- some fabulous people, a compelling mission to the poor and forgotten. Truly St. Paul's is where the Gospel is. But what a gospel we have for May 13:

Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes. In these lay many invalids-- blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, "Do you want to be made well?" The sick man answered him, "Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me." Jesus said to him, "Stand up, take your mat and walk." At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk. Now that day was a sabbath. (John 5:2-9)

Here's my sermon on it: let me know what you think.

In some versions of this gospel text, an angel stirs the waters, signaling to the sick people that they should hustle over to the edge and jump in the pool. In our popular imagination this Angel of Bethesda is the great, large one in Central Park in New York City, gigantic and majestic, a lily of purity in her hand, standing on a pedestal held up the cherubic figures of peace, health, purity and temperance. This cascading, bubbling, stirred-up fountain of pure water did indeed symbolize healing to the people of New York. It celebrated the clean water flowing from a distant reservoir to a growing city.

This Bethesda angel is the angel who crashes through the ceiling in the play Angels in America. This is the angel that carried John to the vision of the holy Jerusalem, that brought him to the river that flows from the throne of God – an angel with powerful wings and shining sword and flashing eyes and flowing gown. An angel out of our imagination, an angel of our hopes and dreams. But if this angel is so glorious and powerful, why was that man laying by that pool, sick for years and years -- 38 years to be exact?

Jesus got in a lot of trouble for healing that man. Not for healing, exactly – the healing part was ok; just NOT on the Sabbath. If he’d been sick for 38 years, he could wait until sundown. He’d lain by that pool plenty of days; another afternoon wouldn’t kill him.

But an even bigger violation of the Sabbath was this command: “Take up your mat and walk.” Now, it’s not the walking; observant Jews can walk on the Sabbath, but they cannot carry anything. They cannot take up their mat, their bed, their tools, their trade – no work on the Sabbath. No giving orders. And here we have Jesus, giving an order, and the newly healed man, walking off, mat in hand, healed, whole, restored. If an angel stirred the waters for those other sick people, this Jesus was no angel.

We’re in the middle of the Easter season? Why are we reading this lesson?

I think it serves to remind us that Jesus was up to something new – something really new. What he was doing was so new that it had to burst through all the categories of the old. Nothing fit anymore. This is God working, you’re healed, take up your bed and walk now, THIS is the new Sabbath.

This kind of radical change does not go over so well with everyone. To borrow an illustration from another gospel, think of the parable of the wineskins. For some people, that old wine tastes just fine. If you drank it, you would think it was sour, or flat, or had turned to vinegar. Maybe it’s the wineskin, you’d say. Maybe if we just pour some of it out, change things a little bit, it will taste better. Hah! Pour that new wine into the old skins and they will burst. Take up your mat, take up your new wineskin, Jesus said, and walk. THIS is the new Sabbath.

I understand last week’s sermon was sort of harsh. Tim told me he was pretty direct with illustrating what was paralyzed here – what was described as dead. In the words of today’s gospel, you’ve been laying there by the pool, paralyzed, for some time now, and even if any angels came by to disturb the waters, you were too weak to wiggle over and jump in. That can be a pretty disturbing thing to hear.

Meanwhile, Lillet, Joanne and I went off to the “Start Up Start Over” conference, and heard some pretty disturbing things as well. We heard how hard it is to turn around a decline like this, how much new things are going to have to happen first, how much a commitment we will all have to make for the long haul. After the first day, hearing some pretty harsh statistics about the decline of membership across the Episcopal Church, and about how old Episcopalians are, and that half the congregations in the whole Episcopal Church are no bigger than 70 people on a Sunday morning, we were nearly paralyzed ourselves. Then we heard it. A little buzz of hope. An idea here, a suggestion there. Stand up, stand up; take your mat, and walk, Jesus said. It’s a new day.

We don’t know where that man went after he got healed. We don’t know where we’re going. We don’t know what this new Sabbath will look like.

But we do know we can’t stay here, paralyzed, waiting for some angel by the pool, for some other person, almost as sick as we are, to kick us in the water by accident. That’s not what Jesus said. If Jesus walked through that door, would we know what to do? Let’s practice.