Holy and Whole

Matthew 9:1-8

There are very few slow news days anymore. Every day, there are more than enough problems to fill columns of newsprint and hours of newscasts. The question is which story will rise to the top and get a piece of our attention. Recently, stories about mass shootings were among them. Last week in Boulder Colorado. Ten people, as innocent as any of us, dead. And we grieve it, as we have grieved so many other similar incidents. 

We had barely finished absorbing the details of another event in Atlanta the previous week, which cost eight human lives. 

When we hear about these violent incidents, one of the first thoughts we have is, why? What reason did this person have for committing such a terrible act? Why?

“Why” is a fundamental question of life. We often ask why things happen. When a loved one gets sick, we ask: why? When they die we ask: why? When we suffer great losses of any kind, we are likely to ask the same question: why?

Why, we ask God, are you letting this happen? Are you angry at us, Lord? How have we sinned against you, Lord, to deserve this pain?

In the gospel story today Jesus makes the connection between sickness and the brokenness of sin, and brings us into that uncomfortable space where we have to examine the connection for ourselves. Which is sometimes easy, and other times impossible.

There are times when we find it easy to play the role of diagnostician. Even those of us with no particular expertise are often eager to tell others what they have done to cause their particular ailment. There are times when we are ready and willing to say, “here, let me get that speck out of your eye. No, don’t worry about this log in my own eye – I can see around it quite well.”

This is nothing new in the history of the world. John’s gospel tells the story about Jesus’ encounter with a man who was born blind and his disciples are puzzled by this matter. For them, it’s a question of “why.” They ask Jesus, “Who sinned? Was it his parents, since he was born this way? That must be it. This young man must be paying the price of his parents’ sins, that could be the only explanation.” Cause and effect – it helps us make sense of the world. 

Still, I don’t think this paralytic man in Matthew’s story, nor his friends who carried him to Jesus, were thinking at the time about his parents, or their own, sins. They had heard about this Jesus, an amazing healer, and they just wanted to get close to him. So great was their desire for healing, their love for their friend, that they came together and picked up his bed with the man in it, and carried it to Jesus.

They came for healing – and yet words of forgiveness were the first thing Jesus said to them. Take heart, son; your sins are forgiven. The reader might feel a disconnect between their need and his response – but I wonder if these men did. Perhaps they never doubted that somehow their spiritual brokenness was all intertwined with their bodily brokenness. 

Jesus’ critics took exception, however. They would not have objected to a simple healing – but for Jesus to declare forgiveness of sins, that is blasphemy. Humans can perform acts of healing. But only God can forgive sins.

Yet, we see, Jesus is insisting that they are inseparable. 

And even while I say this, I am mindful of the fact that these are harsh words to our tender souls. In our hearts we harbor the fear that, like most everything else in this world, our relationship with God is transactional. We bear the suspicion that God, like so many people we know, will be nice to us if we are nice to God. But that, if we are not nice enough, God’s displeasure will show.

Yet the message of the gospel resists such notions. Through Jesus we have come to know a God of extravagant love, of boundless forgiveness. Jesus, in his acts of healing, never asked anyone to bow and scrape, to show themselves worthy of this gift. He gave it freely.

He gave so much, so freely: he gave everything – freely.

For God so loved the world, he gave his only son. Freely.

And still, we live each day in a world that is wracked with brokenness, suffering, and death. And we cannot help but wonder why.

Many years ago I knew a family whose son had cancer. His parents did everything in their power to beat the disease. His doctors did everything in their power to heal him. His church family prayed for him constantly. They loved this boy and his family very much. One member of that church, deeply troubled by their suffering, asked the pastor: Why would such an awful thing as this happen? 

It is always dangerous to try and answer these “why” questions. But this pastor did. He answered with one word: sin. 

And the member became angry. This young child is innocent. He has committed no sin that could possible justify such punishment, Pastor. What is wrong with you? How can you say such a thing? 

But the pastor said, no. I don’t mean any particular sin. I don’t mean he is responsible for his illness. I am referring to the state of the world in which we live. This is about the brokenness of everything. It is about the human condition.

It is always about the human condition. We are part of a fallen creation, with brokenness at every level; we are suffering in every way because of our brokenness, but with a dim memory of our original wholeness. Once, we remember, we were holy; once we were created in the image of our creator, holy and whole.

When Jesus walked this earth, his every word, his every act, was a reminder of this truth. His very presence was a promise that our wholeness may be restored. 

There were many witnesses that day to the miracle of healing. When the paralytic man stood up and walked, they were all filled with awe. And they sang praises to God, who gave such power, such authority to human beings.

Human beings – Jesus … and through him, the church … you and me.

For he said: you who gather in my name are given authority to bind and to loose, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven; whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. All of us together, the community of faith, have this authority to begin to repair the brokenness.

It’s a heavy lift, no doubt. There were 20,000 deaths in our nation from gun violence last year – a year in which we had hundreds of thousands of additional deaths from COVID-19. The brokenness is on full display. Yet we are called to join in the effort, to lift up the broken, the hurting, the grieving and carry them to Jesus.

We are called to sing songs of God’s grace that rains down on all of creation. To sing our hosannas – save us, Lord; heal us, Lord!

We are called to lay a path for King Jesus to come today.

 

Different Pictures

Matthew 9:18-26

We are seeing a lot of remembrances right now from one year ago. As a nation, we are remembering together how this pandemic began a year ago. Remembering what we were doing last year at this time.

March 15 of last year was the last time we gathered in the sanctuary for worship. We knew then something big, something ominous was coming. Many of us had decided already to stay home. And for those of us who were here, we were introduced to new practices – social distancing. Hand sanitizing. No touching. 

No touching. This felt very strange. 

We knew something big was on the horizon, but we had no real understanding of what it would be. I listened to the news, I watched what was going on around me. And it seemed like every time I said to myself, “that can’t happen,” it did happen.

It just didn’t seem possible that we would shut down schools and expect families and teachers to deal with it. But we did.

It didn’t seem possible that hospitals and nursing homes would say no visitors allowed. But they did.

It didn’t seem possible to me that it could go on for so long. But it did.

I did not have the imaginative capacity to understand what was about to happen, but it happened anyway. We adjusted. We adapted. And we began waiting for the time when things could return to the way they were before.

Gradually it began to dawn on us, though, that things would not go back to what they were before. Not really.

It has been a year of letting go, and I mean really letting go. Sure, some things we just set down for a while, knowing that we would pick them back up later. But there are other things we have had to let go.

My daughter said to me last week, “Can we just talk about how truly disgusting it is to be bowling and eating at the same time? To pick up this bowling ball, stick your fingers in it, roll it down the floor, then go pick up a sandwich?” That kind of carelessness about where our hands have been? That’s gone. Although I won’t shed any tears about it.

Because there are much more serious things we have had to let go of. Our sense of invincibility – the thinking that we have dominance over anything and everything the world can throw at us. It turns out we don’t.

Or our sense of individualism, total self-reliance – this notion that I am free to do what I want and I am dependent on no one but myself. It turns out we are really much more interconnected than we might have thought.

And, of course, the loss of more than a million lives, and all that those lives might have been.

Through it all, our belief in the world as it is, without concern for what it might be – this also has been shattered.   

But hope is a very human characteristic. And as people of faith, our hope finds focus in the gospel of Jesus Christ, which shows us that, through loss, we find our way to new life.

The passage today combines two stories of healing together. Jesus has been sitting at table with some Pharisees who were questioning him about his practices, when he is suddenly interrupted by an official – a leader of the synagogue. His need is urgent. His daughter is dead. He wants Jesus to revive her.

We should pause a minute and realize how extraordinary it is that he would see this as possible. Has he seen Jesus bring life from death? Matthew give us no reason to believe so. Yet, through Jesus, this man has the ability to see something entirely new. Jesus responds by rising from his seat and following.

While they are walking, a woman who has been hemorrhaging for 12 years approaches him from behind. She kneels down to touch the hem of his cloak, believing this will heal her. Jesus turns and says, “Take heart, daughter, your faith has healed you.” And upon his words, the bleeding stops. 

Then we go back to the synagogue leader and his daughter at his house. The crowd gathered around the house laugh at Jesus because they cannot imagine anything other than death inside that house. But Jesus goes inside, touches the girl’s body, and she rises.

And in these short, sweet stories woven together the gospel reaffirms to us that Jesus brings new possibilities that shatter old assumptions about the world. The gospel shows us that Jesus touches us and, out of what was dead, gives new life.

We know this is true in a real, physical way. Every time we gather together for the funeral of someone who has died, we call it a witness to the resurrection. This is so central to our faith, that just as Jesus overcame death in his own body, he also does it for us. We believe that through him, we will rise to new life, eternal life.

But that’s not all.

It is also true in another way, here and now. We know from his words and healing actions that Jesus brings us new life even in the midst of this old life. We know that he has ushered in the realm of God and shows us a whole different way, here and now, of seeing and living.

If we can just do it … let Jesus be our vision and see something different.

Together, as we mark this one-year anniversary of our COVID-19 pandemic, we are finding our way toward something different; we are healing.

And as we journey through healing, let us each ask ourselves: in what way is Jesus calling us to new life? How is Jesus awakening us, awakening our spirts and calling us into the holy work of creativity? What are we letting go of, and what are we taking from the old life and shaping into something new? 

What kinds of dreams is Jesus giving us?

We take our broken pieces and through Jesus imagine something new. We let go of old pictures of what the world is like, and together – through Jesus – we create some different pictures of the way the world can be.

Stories

 

Matthew 9:27-33

I have been wondering recently what we will say about our pandemic experience after it is all over. When we look back on this time, with the perspective of months or years, what will we say? What stories will we tell?

I listen sometimes to Richard Rohr, a Franciscan Friar, who writes and speaks a lot about spiritual things. I heard him say that there was surprisingly little written about the great flu pandemic of 1918. The reason, he gathered, was because people were ashamed of themselves. Some people abandoned their families. Many people acted in selfishness and fear. And after it was all over, they were too ashamed to speak of it. They only wanted to forget about it.

If we are honest with ourselves, each one of us can probably identify with that in some way. There have been times in our lives that we were not our best selves – far from it. There have been chapters in our lives that we have chosen to forget, somehow – by rewriting the story; by deciding it was unimportant; by literally blocking it from our conscious memory.

We tell a lot of stories that are untrue. We learn at a young age. Many families have unwritten codes about what sorts of things can be talked about, and what topics are off-limits. Some things are just too painful to say out loud. Sometimes we cannot admit the truth because it feels like the truth will break us – shatter us into a million pieces.

Pain frightens us; fear hurts us; and it becomes hard to get out of this cycle of dishonesty.

But all over the world, in all kinds of circumstances, people find that truthful storytelling has the power to heal; that truth will, indeed, set us free.

This was so in South Africa, in the years after apartheid was dismantled. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission provided a space for both victims and oppressors to tell their stories and be heard.

This is so in every 12-Step group, where addicts practice telling their story as an essential part of their recovery.

Telling our story is a healing art, drawing a thread through the events of our lives and shedding light on them. This is why the scriptures are full of stories, especially the gospels.

Matthew tells a lot of stories about healing in his gospel. In this one he tells about two blind men who are following Jesus. They are crying out, “Have mercy on us, Son of David.” And they follow Jesus into a house, where he turns and speaks to them. He asks them if they believe. They say they do. And then he heals them. Their eyes are opened, their sight is restored. He tells them to stay quiet about this, but they promptly go out and start telling everyone they see.

I don’t know why they did that. Nor do I really understand why Jesus seemed to be always ordering people to keep his healings secret. In reality, you cannot keep these kinds of things secret – they are too awesome to hide. Possibly, the men who had received their sight simply found it impossible to be obedient. And possibly, Jesus was only trying to control the chaos that will undoubtedly follow when people learn there is a really effective miracle worker in the vicinity.

But the question that ought to be asked is why did Matthew tell the story this way? Why are these particular elements of the story important?

One detail that is easy to overlook comes at the beginning of the story: Two blind men are following Jesus. They have already latched onto him as disciples before he even speaks to them. Before they have seen him, they know who he is – Son of David, they call out to him. The Messiah.

They enter a house with him, a place where there may be some privacy, and he speaks to them. Do they believe? He asks. Yes, Lord, they say. We do believe. They come out of that house with their eyes opened.

The story tells us that, even though they had a disability they were able to believe. That even though they lacked eyesight they had a different, more powerful, kind of vision which enabled them to see Jesus as the Son of David, the Lord. In fact, maybe it was because they were blind that they could see and have faith.

Much as we might hate it, it is true that hardship can be a powerful teacher. Challenge can become opportunity for growth. Knowing – confessing – our weakness can increase our faith. Knowing who we are, in all our frailties and brokenness and scars, can help us know God. And telling our stories can help others know God.

When we are fully on the other side of this pandemic, what stories will we tell? We might choose to never talk about it – put it behind us and shut the door on it. Or we might, in some way, remain stuck in it – never letting go of the fear and anger that has been such a big part of it. But I hope we will look back at it and speak of it truthfully: speak of the great suffering we endured, the fear we felt and possibly the shame of acting not as our best selves, because we were afraid or angry.

I hope we will speak of the ways we were so interconnected, knowing that whatever way we chose to act, this would have an impact on others. For better or for worse.

I hope we will speak, too, of the beauty, the courage, the compassion we witnessed all around us.

And I hope that – even in the midst of this – we will know how God’s love and healing strength is woven through it all. There is much evil in this world – I will not deny that. But there is just as much, and more, good.

I hope when we tell our stories we tell the truth, because the truth will make us whole.

Safe-Keeping

Matthew 8:5-13

Last weekend Kim and I took our dog, Chuy, to Ocean City to walk on the beach. We like going there now and then throughout the winter months. On that day it was pretty cold and windy, so there were very few people there. We let Chuy off the leash to give him the rare joy of running free while we walked near the shore.

I am always torn between wanting to look out at the beautiful vista of beach and sky and sea and wanting to keep my eyes to the ground lest I miss some treasure. Shells, bits of coral, sea glass. Sometimes, not often, I find some perfect little shell. But more often I find some broken, imperfect thing that is extraordinary in its own way, and I pick it up.

I think perhaps the most wonderful treasures I have are the imperfect things, because they are unique and interesting in the way they look and feel. I don’t think I am alone in this; just last week someone showed me the stone she has chosen to carry in her pocket as a reminder of the brokenness in her own life – something we talked about last week. Her stone has what looks like a growth coming out of it, which is strange, and … absolutely beautiful.

So often we are drawn to objects with some kind of imperfection, some flaw which we don’t even think of as a flaw – just as some special quality. We like these imperfect wonders of nature. I do wonder, though, why it seems so much harder when we are talking about people.

It’s true, isn’t it? We try to make ourselves perfect, and we try to make other people perfect. Too often, when we see difference we don’t say that’s beautiful; we say that’s wrong. We say that’s unacceptable.

But Jesus doesn’t do that, does he? Right after he reached out and healed that man with leprosy – leprosy, the most unacceptable affliction – he encounters a centurion asking for his healing grace. This man was, of course, a Gentile. An outsider. Another kind of outcast.

He doesn’t have any right to ask anything of Jesus – no more than the man with leprosy had a right to be touched by Jesus – but Jesus’ immediate response to him is, “I will come.” No hesitation. No apparent distaste for the job. Just, “I will come.”

Extraordinary. But even more extraordinary is the centurion’s response to Jesus: There is no need. I know your power and how far it extends. I know that you need only say the word and it will be done.

And we see this man’s faith is of a different order than what we have seen before. He knows that Jesus’ power to heal and to save extends beyond himself. Only say the word, Lord, and it shall be done.

Story after story in the gospel tells us that Jesus came for the most unlikely souls – the sick, the lame, the outcasts, the outsiders. And again and again, we see Jesus act in ways to bring them in. To restore them to the shelter of community. Again and again, he does this, and his actions and words are saying to us: This is what the kingdom of God is like. All those who have been cast out will be brought in. All who have been broken by the diseases of their body, mind, or spirit – broken by a society that shuns them or simply doesn’t understand them, doesn’t love them. Yes, Jesus says, they will all come – from the East and the West and sit at table together in the kingdom of God.

This good news is for us, all of us! We might feel his arm around our shoulders gathering us in, saying “I do choose you,” as he said to the man with leprosy. Saying, “I will come for you,” as he said to the centurion. In our frailties and imperfections, and all our vulnerability, we are chosen. Jesus has scooped us up from the beach and holds us in his hand.

And the challenge for us is this: to have the same kind of faith this centurion had and recognize the healing power of Jesus that extends beyond himself. Extends to us and through us to others.

Do we have the boldness to approach Jesus with our needs as this centurion did?

Do we believe that, by our faith, Jesus’ healing will reach and bless our community?

Can we see the people around us as Jesus does? No matter their imperfections, no matter their differences, as beloved children of God, to whom Jesus would say, “I will come for you.”

May it be so. Amen.