Put your hand to the plow and don't look back

Missionary journeys and the end of empire ...
Today's lessons made me ponder the end of the Anglican Communion, as I was reminded of the end of the British Empire. Ten years ago, you'll remember, this weekend, the British returned Hong Kong to China.
Twenty-seven years ago, and a few weeks, I was ordained, and the church into which I was ordained no longer exists.
But hasn't Jesus been telling us this all along, not to put our faith in empires, to put our hand to the plow and not look back?? To go with Jesus on a missionary journey is a scary thing. Some churches, with full pews and large pledged incomes, have the luxury of pretending that those scary missionary journeys, strict and spare, are not for them. They are. They are for all of us, if we want an Episcopal Church that reflects the gospel imperative -- if we want an Episcopal Church at all. Put your hand to the plow and don't look back.

Proper 8-C July 1, 2007 St. Paul’s
1 Kings 2:1, 6-14 Psalm 77 Galatians 5:1, 13-25 Luke 9:51-62

Ten years ago the United Kingdom handed over a bit of its empire. It returned Hong Kong to China. There was once a time when Christianity and empire went together, and for many many years, the sun never set on the British Empire – which included the Church of England. In commemoration of those years, let us sing two stanzas of Hymn 24 – stanzas 3 and 4.

As o'er each continent and island
the dawn leads on another day
the voice of prayer is never silent,
nor dies the strain of praise away.

So be it, Lord, thy throne shall never,
like earth's proud empires, pass away;
thy kingdom stands, and grows for ever,
till all thy creatures own thy sway.

Many of us are the products of that imperial church. Here in North America, of course, where we have recently celebrated 400 years since the founding of the English colony Jamestown, Virginia. Lillet in Jamaica, Joanne in Trinidad, Benjamin in Ghana, James in Kenya – many of us have experiences shaped by a church that was a big, powerful cultural institution, even if we did not belong that that particular church, we knew the power of its traditions, we recognized the cadence of its language, our hearts beat to the downbeat of its four-square – or waltz tune -- missionary hymns.

Well, as the residents of Hong Kong will tell you, times have changed. Things in that British Crown Colony are not quite the same as they used to be. If the Chinese are now in control of China, well lots of people are in control of North America, and not very many of them are Episcopalians any more. Instead of that downbeat, we wiggle to a strange, syncopated rhythm. To many Episcopalians, it doesn’t seem like our world anymore.

Look at what happened to poor Elisha. He was a dedicated follower of the prophet Elijah. “As long as you, yourself live, I will not leave you,” he said to Elijah. They travel a while, to the bank of the River Jordan, and in a whoosh of a chariot of fire, Elijah is taken up, leaving Elisha behind, wondering what would happen next. In the words of another old four-square missionary hymn, “Elijah’s mantle o’er Elisha cast.” Elisha now becomes Israel’s leading prophet, but we the reader are left with the sense that things have changed, and that things will never be the same again. We are uncertain as Elisha was uncertain as to what would happen next.

The Jesus we encounter in this week’s Gospel is serious, stern. We are not yet half way through the Gospel of Luke, but already Jesus’ face is set toward Jerusalem, toward his confrontation with the powers and principalities, toward his passion and death. Jesus is on a mission which is serious, and spare: he has no possessions, not even a place to call home. Whoever follows him is required to take up a similar strict regimen: “Let the dead bury their own dead” – the disciples are not even allowed the bare minimum of fealty to their families – “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” If Jesus’ face is set toward Jerusalem, so then are the faces of his disciples – and of all of us who even today consider ourselves followers of Jesus.

Signing up for the kingdom of God means we don’t know what will happen next. Elisha had no idea Elijah would be taken up in a dramatic whirl of fire, leaving him in charge. The disciples following Jesus wanted a better life, and they recognized in Jesus the One who could bring that Good News to them; those disciples just had no idea they had to make such a dramatic and permanent break with everything they had known and loved in the past. Those British missionaries thought they could just bring the Church of England with them wherever they went, but it seems that not even the glories of the Church of England can contain the kingdom of God as it breaks in – as it always has done – around us.

I’ve been thinking lately with all this upheaval in the Anglican Communion, and here in the Episcopal Church, that the Church into which I was ordained 27 years ago no longer exists. It feels like it is crumbling around my ears. What happened to Anglican reasonableness, to our pride in being the middle way between Protestant and Catholic, to all those wonderful hymns, missionary or not? What happened to a sense of security in this institution, to this church as a place where we could all go to be baptized, married and buried, to its reliability as an employer, a deliverer of pastoral care? We’re all on the banks of the River Jordan, watching something go rising up in a blaze of fire, although we don’t know quite what we are seeing.

Welcome to the missionary life. Apparently, if we read the Gospel of Luke correctly, this uncertainty is the way it has always been. The chief cornerstone of our faith is not this building, or any building, or any institution or empire. It is Jesus Christ, and to mix our metaphors, Jesus is on the move, to Jerusalem, not to security and stability, but to danger and to change.

Today’s reading from Galatians is one of those lessons from Paul we preachers would rather do without – a list of sins we’d rather not read about in church, thank you very much. But at the very end of the lesson, Paul gives us the reason why we follow Jesus, one way to describe what discipleship is all about: The fruit of this Spirit, Paul says, is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Those are not the things empires can deliver, even empires based on the Church of England. But for we who live by the Spirit – who put our hands to the plow and do not look back – those are the fruits by which we will live.

Moving In -- Moving On

Moving: it's whacked. There is no way around it: it's hard, it's not fun. One wonders where all this STUFF came from.
Our family is mid-move to Brockton.
We have Bishop Gayle Harris coming to St. Paul's tonight. We need to close a building we don't need anymore, a building we are selling to use the assets to fund our new growth activities. The building used to be the Sunday school, with a chapel and classrooms.
Last Sunday's lessons were about God breaking in -- God making some really big noise with Elijah, and then revealing the divine self in the silence -- the still, small voice.
This parish had a huge, nasty, noisy split some years ago, over what are now the all too public issues of sexuality and authority in the Anglican Communion. It was earthquake, wind and fire all over the place.
Yet that conflict was not the whole cause of the diminution of this congregation. It was social change -- the city of Brockton changed, drastically. From its heyday in the 1920s as one of the nation's largest shoe-manufacturing cities -- well, it's followed the course of other North American factory towns. It is still an immigrant city -- it is a growing and young city -- but now the immigrants come from Cape Verde and Brazil, from Jamaica, the West Indies, from Latin America. What will it look like, a new Episcopal Church in this wild, multi-cultural community? This community of immigrants and children and hopeful people?
We are now like Elijah at the edge of the cave, listening for the still, small voice, the voice of God after the whirlwind. Listen.

Proper 7-C June 24, 2007 St. Paul’s 1 Kings 19:1-15a
Galatians 3:23-29 Luke 8:26-39

I heard on the radio the other day that Dr. Phil, the tv psychologist, is very popular in Iraq. The journalist told the story of a Dr. Phil fan “forced to stay inside almost all the time. The daily bombings, murders and kidnappings make it too dangerous to leave the house. But being a prisoner inside her own home, like so many other Baghdadis these days, her days often comprise of crushing boredom punctuated with fear.” What advice could Dr. Phil offer these people? In the words of one Iraqi woman, “I remember one day when I was surprised to find Dr. Phil discussing the problems of a mother and her estranged daughter-in-law. The next morning, we discussed it at work and wondered, can you imagine we have the same problems in America?” When asked about what else troubled her, the woman said, “Frankly, we suffer from the fact that because of the security situation we’re locked inside our homes for a long time, not able to go out. The family has no solace, no time for relaxation. This has really affected our psychology.” And what was Dr. Phil’s advice? He named the demon: “…that kind of claustrophobia can cause people to lash out at each other even at those they love. … avoid the non-directional frustrations, so you don’t just lash out aimlessly and talk very much about what’s going on because when you’re given a voice, it’s not so luminous.”[i]

Dr. Phil is no Jesus but both recognize the same thing: when you live in a crazy time, it can drive you crazy. When the society around you is crumbling, you can feel yourself coming apart. When there are conflicting voices and threats and challenges and fears, outside of you, you can feel them inside yourself, possessing yourself, almost taking your real self away from you. The world might be mad, but that madness is manifested one person at a time. As our friend in Iraq says, it can really affect your psychology.

We have lessons today about naming the demons and confronting your fears. We have God taking a direct hand in the righting of some individuals. Elijah, caught up on a deadly conflict with King Ahab and his powerful wife, Jezebel, runs into the wilderness, prepared to die – willfully to die. But God intervenes, makes him eat and drink, sends him to a mountain cave. After all the noise of earthquake, wind and fire, it is in the sheer silence, the solitude, the absolute aloneness that Elijah hears the voice of God. God restores him to his right mind, to his mission, to his life. Now go back to Damascus, God says; right those wrongs.

In the story of the person filled with so many demons their name is “legion,” we hear great noise as well. The poor soul screams and hollers and breaks his bonds. When Jesus commands the demons to come out of him, they jump into a herd of squealing pigs and hurl themselves off a cliff. And here, too, as in the story of Elijah, all the drama is followed by silence and stillness: the man sitting clothed and in his right mind. He wants to follow Jesus, but Jesus sends him back to his home, to tell this story of God’s power.

That’s the thing about all these stories of healing in the bible. Yes, an individual is healed, but it is always an individual in a social context, in a setting, a person with a mission. The healing is to right a wrong, to get someone back on track, and then to get that person back into the community. There is not the sense that the person is at fault alone for his predicament. It’s the demons, it’s the persecution by the king – something from the outside is causing the trouble here. And when the person is healed, back he or she goes to work. The healing itself is proof that God is in charge of the world, not those demons who throw individuals out of whack, not power-hungry kings. There are no HIPA laws in the bible, no medical privacy acts. When God heals you, it is your job to get back out there, and tell the Good News.

There are a lot of stories of healing in the Gospel of Luke, so many that Luke gets nick-named “the physician.” These healings are signs, for this Luke who is telling this version of the story of Jesus, that the kingdom of God is breaking in all over. The reign of God is happening. God is in charge here, God is healing the world. God’s spirit and God’s goodness cannot be contained. They are specific incidents: Jesus healing that man in that place, and that man is living in a Jewish country occupied by a massive Roman military force – by the Roman military legions. The Gospels are pinpoint specific to that time and place.

And yet if we would but hear it, we can hear how these stories of healing apply to us, and to our time as well. God is breaking through in our lives, and in our time and place – God moves in to any situation where things have gotten out of whack, and if God has ever restored us to our rightful minds, then we should get out there and spread that Good News that the world is dying – literally dying – to hear.

Let’s remember this where we are, here in the heart of this city, that the treasure we have is the treasure of the Good News. Like the man healed, wouldn’t we love to get in to boat with Jesus and sail away, but Jesus speaks these words to us, too: "Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you." So let us then proclaim throughout this city how much Jesus has done for us.

---

[i] From “Dr. Phil finds an audience in Iraq,” heard on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday, June 23, 2007

Early Pentecost Update: two weeks, two sermons!

It has been a busy time -- it seems we are moving ahead with our new start plans in Brockton, which includes our family's move to a new home there. So, sitting amid moving boxes, two sermons for early Pentecost.
We have two stories this month of God's radical inclusion. Jesus used the plight of women on the outside edges of society to illustrate how clearly those "outsiders" heard the Good News and responded enthusiastically to the love of God.
These two weeks also saw two dramatic developments for us Episcopalians here in Massachusetts: the legislature reaffirmed the right of persons of the same sex to marry in this Commonwealth, and the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church answered the challenge of some bishops in the Anglican Communion. No, we're not going back on our constitution and canons, our democratic tradition. We're not going to abandon the bishops we've elected, nor the ones we will elect in the future (one more woman elected this weekend, too -- hooray!).
So two sermons, based on two episodes in the 7th chapter of Luke, two stories from fairly early in Jesus' ministry. Jesus is shocking, new, startling. Come, let us begin.

June 17, 2007, Proper 6-C, St. Paul’s

“For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.”

We are free. This is Paul writing from his letter to the Galatians, his freedom-loving, wildly egalitarian exuberant self, early in his ministry, thrilled to the bone. He has finally gotten this extraordinary truth: that a slavish devotion to the law, to lists of do’s and don’ts, to a definition of “sin” that makes a person a “sinner” because of the category in which he or she lives – all this is behind him, for now Paul has found true love, true grace, true life. Christ did not die for more rules, more strictures, more definitions that make people sinners. Christ died for us to be free of all that, free to be like him. It is no longer we who live, but Christ lives in us.

And who is that Christ who lives in us? Today’s Gospel story is a good illustration. Let’s start with the setting: where is Jesus in this story? In the house of a Pharisee, someone very like Paul, the old Paul, when he was Saul and lived under the law. A good, righteous, law-abiding man who recognizes that Jesus is someone special. They are sitting down to eat, which in the first century meant a group of men kind of lying around a table, reclining on benches.

Then a woman comes in, and this is definitely surprising, and the text declares that she is a sinner. Now we do NOT know WHAT kind of sinner she is. Since she is from the city, maybe she is a prostitute. Maybe an adulterer. Maybe her sin is of that categorical kind – listen again to even the liberated Paul from Galatians: “We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners.” Whole groups of people were designated sinners according to the law. Even today, we consider all sorts of characteristics sinful. The outspoken woman is aggressive or pushy. The skater kid is a high school drop out. The graffiti artist is a hoodlum. The immigrant without papers is a criminal. Laws protect, but laws, and attitudes, also exclude. So suspend all judgment about this woman and her personal morality. Whatever her sin is, it’s between her and Jesus.

What did the other diners see when this woman came in? She knelt at Jesus’ feet, weeping, wiping his feet with her hair, anointing them with ointment. They probably would have seen two things: grieving women in those days did wear their hair down. They would have seen a woman weeping – that her sins have been forgiven by Jesus? That her sins weigh her down so much that she wants Jesus to forgive her? Were her sins something she did, or is she one of those “categorical” sinners, who has heard that Jesus accepts all kinds of people, that Jesus’ love and forgiveness extends to society as well as to individuals, that Jesus proclaims a gospel of love not only to those “inside the law” but to outsiders, to outlaws as well? Is she weeping because finally, finally someone saw her as she really was, and loved her despite of it? Loved her because of it?

The second thing those diners saw was an act of extraordinary hospitality and grace. To anoint the feet of a guest was a gesture of extravagant hospitality in those days – a welcoming above and beyond what custom, or law, would require. Here, too, she is an outlaw, an outlaw in love, guilty of the sin of extravagant kindness and devotion. This is the Gospel truth, and in Galatians, Paul demonstrates that he gets it: “I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

Two events in the news this week were signs to me of the radical welcome of Jesus’ love. It is likely that every pulpit in Massachusetts this morning is going to come down on one side or another of the vote in the legislature that affirmed the right of two people of the same sex to marry in this Commonwealth. Now every individual is a sinner; as Paul wrote elsewhere, we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. But sin, as we know, is not the result of the category we inhabit; straight people are not categorically sinners. Gay people receive the full benefits of the grace of God – and in Massachusetts, the grace of marriage.

The second was this sentence in the response of the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church to the demand by other bishops in the Anglican Communion that we abandon our practice of ordaining bishops elected by the people of their diocese: “We strongly affirm this church’s desire to be in the fullest possible relationship with our Anglican sisters and brothers, but in truth the only thing we really have to offer in that relationship is who we are.” I would be the first to admit that the Episcopal Church is flawed, and that we even have (a few) bad bishops. But by the grace of God those flaws of ours are not categorical; Jesus loves us for who we are.

What else do we have than this outrageous realization that Jesus loves us for who we are? Isn’t that what that weeping woman saw in Jesus when she knelt at his feet? That he loved her for who she was? What good, good news is this, that God knows us as we are? And that the best model of response to that love of God is the overflowing, abundant, wildly extravagant actions of a woman called a sinner?

June 10, 2007, St. Paul’s (Proper 5-C)

There is a bad word in today’s Gospel. Right in the middle. Luke 7:13.

The word is translated into English as “compassion” but that is an inadequate translation. In Greek it is splanchna, and it means bowels, guts, innards. It was used to describe the anatomy of that part of the body, but it was also used symbolically to mean the “bowels of mercy,” to indicate deep, gut-wrenching feeling, more physical than mere sympathy.

In this story no other word would do to describe what Jesus felt on seeing the funeral procession for this woman’s son. Was it her grief, her alone-ness, her courage that moved him to such gut-wrenching compassion? That moved him to act so powerfully?

We know in ancient times that women alone were as good as dead. In the stories of women alone, we have often glimpsed the divine, have often seen God at work, bringing these women out of their isolation and into social balance. God’s gut often wrenches when God sees poor women, marginalized women, grieving women, women without status, without men or fortune to protect them, women without children and hence without hope of a future.

God stepped in, in the person of the prophet Elijah to save the life of the son of the poor widow. Now this woman was not a woman of the covenant; she was a pagan, a Ba’al-worshipper, like the other Ba’al worshippers Elijah had denounced. But this woman was compassionate. She gave the prophet a meal out of the little she had. Her son then becomes sick, and is near death, and Elijah performs this wonderful and strange miracle. The son is brought back to life. The larder is full. Life in all its abundance is given to this poor woman.

It was the grief of the widow of Nain that caused Jesus to act. It was her plight that wrenched his gut. It almost doesn’t matter if the son was really, truly dead or not. Maybe he was just in a deep coma, just seemed to be dead – who knows. This was not an emergency room, a “code blue,” a get-out-crash-cart-stat kind of setting. He was not in the tomb, three days dead and stinking as Lazarus would be when Jesus raised him. But there, on that road outside of Nain, he was dead and his mother the widow was as good as dead, and the deep pathos of the scene stopped Jesus in his tracks. In his gut-wrenching compassion, he brought them both back to life.

We are all called to compassion. It’s not an easy calling. The Greek word for how much it hurts your gut is aptly descriptive. That is the depth of compassion to which we are called, as disciples of Christ, as followers of the one who brought the widow and her son back to life. In a book called, The Search for Compassion, the author says*1*, “The practice of compassion is the practice of ministry. Compassion means ministry. … [It] means getting involved in another’s life for healing and wholeness.”

We all might wonder where we as a community are going, wonder what will become of this church. Exploring gut-wrenching compassion could be one way to describe that journey of discipleship, that process of discerning our mission in this place. You may have heard of the Dutch priest Henri Nouwen who wrote frequently about ministry and healing and who wrote this about compassion:

Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human. … compassion means going directly to those people and places where suffering is most acute and building a home there. *2*

Jesus’ gut-wrenching compassion took him to those people and places, to people like us and to places like this. This is the place where Jesus has built a home, where Jesus has pitched his tent, where God dwells among us. If it is good enough for Jesus, it is good enough for us. Let us begin.

Some notes:
*1* Andrew Purves, The Search for Compassion: Spirituality and Ministry (1989)
It was in this book that I found the quote from Nouwen, et al., on compassion

*2* Donald P. McNeill, Douglas A. Morrison and Henri J.M. Nouwen, Compassion: A Reflection on the Christian Life (New York: Doubleday, 1982)

God LIKES a messy world

The readings for Pentecost include the story of the Tower of Babel, and two commentators convinced me that God INTENDS creation to be various, diverse, multi-lingual, cacophonous -- in short, messy. Both (Pastor) Debbie Blue, of the House of Mercy in St. Paul, Minnesota, and (Rabbi) Arthur Waskow, of the Shalom Center in Washington, D.C., pointed out that the story of NOAH and the Ark comes right before the story of the Tower of Babel. Debbie Blue writes this about Noah, in THEOLOG, the blog of the Christian Century (a rather adventurous undertaking, that blog is, for a stodgy old journal):

“Within the intimate but teeming space of the ark, Noah becomes, in the midrashic view, a new person. . . .The knowing of need is the highest measure of (the) curious tender concern” that makes for redemption (The Beginning of Desire). God’s plan for redemption (the cacophony of the ark—weasels, rats, snakes, camels, hissing, snorting, yelling) seems a little messier than what the people on the plain devise.

Arthur Waskow, whom I remember as an exciting theologian and political activist, from my college days in Washington, takes God's marvelous inclination toward wind-swept diversity even further. Yes, God tore down the Tower and scattered (freed?) the people who built it to the four ends of the earth. But look at this from his commentary on the text:

This diversity was not so much a punishment as a consequence of and a cure for their disease: Try to unify all humankind into a single empire, talking the same language so as to storm Heaven -- and the almost inevitable consequence, as well as the cure for this disease of arrogance, is that the top-heavy empire will dissolve into many many peoples, grass-roots communities of many tongues and cultures.

It's not a big leap from the dominance-yearnings of the builders of the Tower of Babel and the current dominance-yearning arrogance of invading the present-day land of Babylon, Iraq. Read Waskow to get his whole, wonderful argument.

So that is behind my sermon for Pentecost, where I am trying to put our "moving on" into starting a new church there in Brockton in a theological context of hope and of the mighty power of the Spirit of God. Tell me what you think about all this.

Sermon from St. Paul's, Brockton, May 27, 2007:

When we read Genesis, we are in the land of winds and waters. We’re only in the 11th chapter of the story of the beginning of the whole world. The Ruach ha’Olam, or the Breath of Life, the Breathing-Spirit of the Universe, the Wind of the World: the word means all those things in Hebrew. The Spirit – the Ruach ha’Olam – moved over the waters of the deep, and the whole creation got going. All the plants, animals, fish, birds, even we human creatures made in the image of God, in the image of this Spirit, this Breath of Life. The Spirit of God is a great, chaotic spirit, for God created a great, chaotic world.

The story right before today’s story of the Tower of Babel, is the story of Noah’s Ark. According to the rabbis, the whole experience of being in the ark changed Noah. All those animals he rescued, his family, too, all cooped up there upon the waters for 40 days: “Within the intimate but teeming space of the ark, Noah becomes a new person.” For 40 days and 40 nights Noah had to care for all those creatures, and the rabbis say that “the knowing of need,” the feeling of care and concern for others, is the beginning of redemption. Indeed, the rabbis say, this story of Noah and the ark reveal that God’s plan for redemption includes all the chaotic mess of the ark, the variety, the cacophony, the uncontrollability and never-ending change of life.

What a contrast then with the next story in Genesis, today’s story of the Tower of Babel. It’s Noah’s descendents who settle on the plain, and who pass down to us this story of imperial desire for unity and domination. It seems that God, Ruach ha’Olam, the Wind of the World, the Breathing-Spirit of the Universe, does not like that one-language aspect of these people. With that one language, they think they can conquer the world, that they can build a tower that is a Bav-el—the “gate of God,” in their own Babylonian language. This arrogance, this domination, this human-directed “new world order” is NOT what God has in mind for creation, so God comes down to mess things up. God comes down to “baffle” the Babylonians. If we could read this in Hebrew we would get the joke. God baffles the Babylonians with their own babble. As one translation says, “Let us go down and there let us baffle their language, so that no one will understand the language of his neighbor.” This let this be a lesson, the rabbis say this text tells us, against the arrogance of individuals or of empires. God orders the world; we do not. God seems to like variety, spice, diversity, even what appears to our ears to be chaotic cacophony.

One reading of the Pentecost story, from the Acts of the Apostles, is that for the followers of Christ, the Pentecost experience “undid” the “curse” of the Tower of Babel. But I think that is the way the world-dominating builders of the tower of Babel would put it. People like that cannot abide all this diversity and chaos and flux. One language, one system, one way of doing things: that will get us to heaven. Let us build some bricks and bake them hard so that ever-blowing and rather nosy Spirit of God can’t knock them over. Let us make this tower impervious to the Breath of Life, the Wind of the World, all those forces we cannot control, even if they do come from God.

I think the Pentecost story is not just for Christians, and especially not for those who long for a world-dominating Christian empire where we all conform to one way of doing things. The Pentecost story does take us back to Genesis, to the wild and multi-variant nature of God’s creation. It is a story of how God redeems the world, how God heals the world, how God pulls us back from the brink of destruction, of self-centered-ness and isolation, and throws us into the midst of a wild and wonderful creation.

Imagine the joy: we can all hear God speaking to us – in our own language, the language our mothers taught us: Parthians, Medes, Elamites, residents of Mesopotamia (that’s those tower-building Babylonians), Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia, Phrygia, Pamphilia, Egypt, Libya, Cyrene, Crete, Arabia. You don’t have to know Greek, you don’t have to read Latin, you don’t have to speak like Shakespeare or King James. God speaks to you: to sons and daughters, to young men and old men, to slaves, to men and women. Everyone, everyone, everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.

That’s the gift of Pentecost: we now have a choice. This rigid tower of hard-baked bricks won’t get us to God. But this, this community of young and old, of chaos and imperfection and change and dissent and diversity and newcomers and old-timers – in this messy and incomplete group, waiting as we are, waiting as the disciples did, for Jesus to come back – this is where God speaks to us, with the force of a mighty wind, and with words each of us can understand.

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.