“The Book of Ruth and Naomi” – by Marge Piercy

Jesus and his followers came into Jericho. As Jesus was leaving Jericho, together with his disciples and a sizable crowd, a blind beggar named Bartimaeus, Timaeus’ son, was sitting beside the road. When he heard that Jesus of Nazareth was there, he began to shout, “Jesus, Son of David, show me mercy!” Many scolded him, telling him to be quiet, but he shouted even louder, “Son of David, show me mercy!”

Jesus stopped and said, “Call him forward.”

They called the blind man, “Be encouraged! Get up! He’s calling you.”

Throwing his coat to the side, he jumped up and came to Jesus.

Jesus asked him, “What do you want me to do for you?”

The blind man said, “Teacher, I want to see.”

Jesus said, “Go, your faith has healed you.” At once he was able to see, and he began to follow Jesus on the way.

Hopefully you had a chance to hear Chris Stedman last week, as he shared with us a bit of his story and how he arrived at both his atheism and his eventual desire to find places of cooperation and understanding between theists and atheists. What I admire about Chris is that he is doing something rather different, something pretty unusual, in this day and age, and that is simple bridge building, attempting to find some way people of different opinions can actually have a conversation with each other – and see if that dialogue with each other will give rise to some common good beyond the dialogue. Reading his book, and thinking about the difficulties of being an open and active atheist in our culture, even now, it just reminds me that this is no easy thing. The reality is that Chris gets pilloried and mocked by some in his atheist community who believe that seeking any common ground with religious people is a fool’s errand – and who believe that the goal of atheism should be the elimination of religion. Chris tells a story of a cocktail party he attended right here in Chicago with a group of local atheists who were stunned to hear his views on the need to find points of cooperation with the religious – and how he was derisively labeled by a guest at the party as a “faitheist,” which is where the title of his book comes from. Some in his own community of non-believers are not just indifferent to religion, but campaign for its elimination – not violently or forcibly, but through an intellectual expose of religion’s follies – and sadly, there is a lot of material to work with on that account. But let’s not get too self-righteous on our part about this desire to eliminate religion by some atheists – there has been far more persecution of atheism and atheists by religious people of all stripes than there ever has been of atheists persecuting religious people. Christians, when in political power through the centuries, have had a tendency to outlaw anything that could be seen as anti-religious, and have sometimes tortured or killed those who expressed religious skepticism or outright atheism. And so Chris gets pilloried by some Christians for being an atheist and then gets pilloried by some atheists for being someone who wants to build bridges between atheists and Christians. And yet, he persists in this work, he continues to do this good work of trying to find common ground between theists and atheists, despite our differences. This takes a special kind of moxy, a fortitude that not easy to find, to stay in the game, to show up to the work, when its rarer and rarer to find those who think it is a good work that you are doing – especially the work of bridge building.

That persistence, that willingness to remain, to remain faithful, so to speak to this cause, to stay on-course, and to live out of a sense of core principles, it’s a testament to tenacity, to persistence on his part. And that persistence, that tenacity, is something that is present in the story we just heard a few minutes ago, and it is a story of persistence that I think we can learn from, or at least I can. Now, it’s interesting, that this is the last miracle story in the Gospel of Mark—this is it, at least when it comes to the flashy displays of divine healing power because the next thing that happens is Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, into that time of passion when Christ will teach in the temple, when the jealousy of the religious powers within the Temple come to a head, a time when the calculation is made that it is better for one man to die than to have a whole nation be destroyed, and the political machinery of death and crucifixion become greased with the blood of those who are understood to expendable in order to keep the peace.

Think about it: the very last story told by Mark, in this the earliest of the written Gospels, before the coming drama of Jesus’ crucifixion, is this story of blind Bartimaeus who comes to receive his sight back. Blindness is not something uncommon in the ancient world—the reality is a lot of people lost their ability to see in Jesus’ day – remember, Bartimaeus had lost his sight, meaning he once could see, and he wants it back again. In the ancient world, one of the most common reasons for losing one’s sight was a highly contagious disease that spread through flies, which would then cause an inflammation of the eyelids, causing the eyes and eyelids to enlarge and eventually cause permanent damage. And, of course, there are the other reasons that people became blind, including being born with it, and so if the person was lucky, so to speak, they would be given permission by the authorities to try to support themselves by begging for a living. Some people even think that the cloak Bartimaeus is wearing and which he throws off when he is called forward to meet Jesus, some think that cloak is a traditional garment meant to designate him as a blind man, thus giving him permission to beg for a living. But before that moment, our friend Bartimaeus is loud and persistent—he is not willing to be told “no.” So when the crowd following Jesus make a rustle as they go through the town, when he hears that Jesus, this miracle worker is passing by, Bartimaeus calls out to this Jesus, this Son of David—“have mercy on me!” Have mercy on me—the great kyrie eleison that has so resonated in the liturgy of the church that it has become a part of our worship, a part of the early Latin mass and even we Protestant use in some of our confessional liturgy. It’s interesting that here you find kyrie eleison being used not to confess sin, but as a way of attracting the attention of the Holy man who walks past, who possibly can give this man back his sight.

Nonetheless, Bartimaeus is loud, and his loudness, and its increasing persistence is not making him any friends, and they, the crowds around him, they want him to shut up, they want him to be quiet—they’ve got a celebrity in their midst and he shouldn’t be bothered by someone like Bartimaeus. The reality is that Bartimaeus is low on the totem pole of people that matter in that world, but even that stark reality won’t shut him up, and his cries for mercy grow louder and louder until his persistent cries and screams stop Jesus in his tracks – “he stopped” the texts says – something about the desperation and the volume made Jesus stop and listen to the cries of this man. Jesus asks his disciples to “call him here.” And now, instead of people telling blind Bart to be quiet, they tell him to take heart, to be encouraged, and to get up because “he’s calling you.” That’s the moment the cloak goes flying off his shoulders and the hands and fingers of the people who were moments ago trying to shut him up, those same hands and fingers are now guiding him to this Jesus.

And then the question comes, the already familiar question to the readers of Mark’s Gospel, “What do you want me to do for you?” And unlike James and John, who want to be the top dogs in the coming world order, as seen in verses right before this one, this man just wants to see: “let me see again!” And unlike the other miracles that Jesus tends to perform in Mark, this one does not even require a touch from Jesus—there will be no healing balm made from Jesus’ spit and placed on the eyes such as you find in others healing stories centered on vision. Faith is put front and center here, and that faith, embodied, incarnated in Bartimaeus, is persistent and persuasive even, though I suspect he has spent a life time crying out to a million would-be healers passing by him in the dusty streets of his town of Jericho. We sometimes forget that would-be prophets and would-be faith healers were all over the place in first century Roman occupied Palestine, stirring up trouble, making all sorts of claims, though obviously having little of the impact as Jesus finally had. I suspect Bartimaeus had cried out a million times, to anyone within earshot, words like the ones we heard today, have mercy on me, give me healing. And each time he uttered those words, shouted those words, he showed his persistent faith, in his belief that he was somehow going to be healed.

Now, of course, it was a literal blindness, but rarely are the healing stories in the Gospels ONLY about the physical – they usually are also a metaphor for the spiritual, the emotional, the social and most profoundly, about the soul being healed, along with the body, with the soul actually being as important, if not more important, than the body. The man wants to see, literally see, and he wants something else – he wants to see the world as it really is, he wants to see the world that God sees, he wants to follow Jesus “on the way” the Gospel says, and to see what Jesus sees in the coming days ahead, and he will, of course, he will likely see so much in the beautiful and dreadful days ahead in that emotionally charged city of Jerusalem, where Jesus will spend his last days. But getting to that point, waiting on the side of the road, crying out to every would-be prophet that found its way to the city streets of Jericho, and finally finding one that could help him see, help him really SEE everything, it took persistence, so much dogged persistence, years and years of just showing up and waiting and shouting and hoping that one day someone would hear his cry, until, of course, one day someone did.

Think of the all the times you and I have just shown up, day after day, attempting to do right by our family, our work, our children, our friendships, our simple acts of kindness and even justice that didn’t seem to do much of anything, and yet we did them, because it was the right thing to do, even when the results weren’t obvious, when our cries on the side of road didn’t seem to be heard by anyone, anyone at all So much of our lives is just about showing up – as Parker Palmer has wisely said, I don’t ask myself how effective I’ve been but how faithful I have been. And that is true of faith as well, the simple showing up, being present, and being ready at the side of the road just in case the Savior should pass by on this particular day. Sometimes it’s coming to church on Sundays, and never quite getting anything from the sermon, or even from the people next to us, whomever and whatever, and then the Christ walks by, and the Spirit seems clearly present, at least to us, in that moment – some word is spoken from this pulpit, some act of generosity is accepted, some THING happens, and we have our own moment of throwing off the cloak and being getting it, of getting what we needed, if only for the next couple of hours or days, because that was what needed to get through and get beyond what we were going through. Some of us in this life, including me at times, we stop showing up, and we stop crying out for mercy, literally, figuratively, emotionally, we stop showing up for the ones we love, and we find ourselves struggling to love them, and we just stop showing up, no matter how many times God passes us by, despite all the hints that divinity was found in the rumble of that crowd that just passed us by, the crowd that the one with our Savior right in the middle of it. And we don’t cry out for mercy, and we ignored the rustle of the God passing by us, or we stop crying out simply because we’ve made our way to another place, a place where we were sure God would not find us, unwilling to be in relationship with a God who allowed us to be blind for too long.

The life of faith requires persistence, like all of life does – you and I don’t get where we are without showing up to class, to a marriage or relationship, to a friendship, to a job, to a child, day after day, moment after moment. I know we will live in a culture that demands everything right now, including spirituality, including even salvation – but the Bible over and over again seems to imply that salvation, which implies wholeness in the original Greek, salvation, wholeness takes a long time, and is a long journey, this slow turning to God, and the ability to see comes to those who cry out constantly for God to give them mercy, who show up at the side of the road, listening always for the rumble of the God passing them by. I think the persistence of Epiphany, with its Welcome Meal served every Wednesday for many, many years, with its many thousands of meals served, its many volunteers come and gone, and come again, as well as the many guests who have come and gone, and come again. And yet, hunger remains, and so does homelessness and yet we show up on Wednesday night and we serve a meal to some soul, and we do it again the next week, week after week, year after year – we are persistent. The ancient Greek poet Ovid said that “dripping water always eventually hollows out stone, not through force, but through persistence.” So, to follow after the way of Jesus, to go with him on the way, as the Gospel of Mark says, we must do as Bartimaeus did: we must show up, here, and there, and we must listen for the rustle of God passing by us in this world, and we must cry out until we are heard by the God who just passed us by, until she stops, and asks for us to come closer, and who says to us, that our faith, our persistent faith, our persistent trust, has helped to heal us, and helped to heal this world, a world so in need of people who will show up, and do the right and kind and just thing. “Jesus, Son of David, show me mercy!” Bartimaeus cries out until he is heard by the Master amidst the rumble and din of the crowd passing him by on those dusty streets of Jericho.

Humanist sharing his perspective on interfaith cooperation.

Some Pharisees came and, trying to test him, they asked, “Does the Law allow a man to divorce his wife?”

Jesus answered, “What did Moses command you?”

They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a divorce certificate and to divorce his wife.”

Jesus said to them, “He wrote this commandment for you because of your unyielding hearts. At the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. Because of this, a man should leave his father and mother and be joined together with his wife, and the two will be one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore, humans must not pull apart what God has put together.”

Inside the house, the disciples asked him again about this. He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if a wife divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”

During my senior year of high school, in the late 1980’s, I moved from rural East Texas to rural West Alabama along with my sister to live with my aunt and uncle during of particularly tumultuous time in my parent’s lives. At the time I was a Southern Baptist, as were my aunt and uncle, and so I went with them to Gilbertown Baptist Church to worship and I got involved with their youth group, which was about 15-25 kids. Youth group meetings always happened on Sunday night, and was usually led by a young, vibrant couple who were probably in their early thirties, at the oldest. I liked them, and I think all the youth liked them – they were easygoing, positive, and a good looking couple, the very picture of a young, promising Southern Baptist goodness. But one Sunday evening, after whatever activity or lesson we had for that time, the couple as well as one of the deacons of the church called us together into a circle to announce that this couple wouldn’t be leading the youth group anymore. There were looks of shock on the faces of the youth, and the couple had tears in their eyes, as the news was announced. No reason was given for their departure, though we hugged on them, and thanked them – but I do have to say that we never saw them again, or at least not during the time I was there – poof, they kind of disappeared from our lives, and seemingly from the life of the church. Eventually, the rumor mill explained why they had been “disappeared” from the youth group and perhaps the church – they were getting a divorce, and seemingly the thought was if they had “failed” at their marriage, they couldn’t possibly be in any kind of leadership in the church, and especially with the youth. After all, Jesus was really clear about divorce - it was right there in the Bible, right there – Jesus said that divorce was impermissible, and so the church, if it wanted to uphold godly standards, could not allow them to lead us youth because they did what Jesus told them not to do. I remember being surprised by it, and then saddened, and maybe, even then feeling as if their expulsion felt graceless, a particular cruelty exacted upon them, and perhaps a signal to us youth about what was to be expected if we too ended up having to make the decision to end a marriage. We too would likely be disappeared out of the church for good.

Certainly, things have changed some since those days, even among the Southern Baptists – divorce is actually more common among evangelicals than it is among those have no definitive religious beliefs – and so even they have had to adapt to this new reality. You sometimes see “divorce care” support groups in those same churches that would have disappeared a divorcing couple a generation ago and that change is a good thing. But Jesus’ words are still there, his almost fierce condemnation of divorce, and they are troublesome to many of us, because, frankly, there are times when it’s obvious that the best thing for a couple and their children would be a divorce. It’s not just us modern types that have struggled with Jesus words – even Paul struggles with them, because he both endorses Jesus’ words about divorce, but thinks it’s OK for a believer and non-believer to end their marriage, if the non-believer wishes to do so, all for the sake of peace between them. So, there are circumstances when even the earliest followers of Jesus left a little wiggle room around Jesus’ blanket condemnation of divorce. And interestingly, unlike the Gospel of Mark, the Gospel of Matthew has Jesus giving at least one reason why a divorce might be allowable – sex outside the marriage – which is something Jesus doesn’t say our Gospel reading today from Mark. Nonetheless, whatever the outs given in certain other texts, it’s clear that Jesus had a negative view of divorce, and, unlike his otherwise liberal interpretations of Jewish law, he actually is more stringent and conservative than even the people asking this question, the Pharisees.

And that questioning of Jesus here needs to be noted, this attempt to get Jesus to say something controversial or heretical or even silly, something that would discredit him and tamp down on his popularity with the crowds. The Pharisees are often portrayed as his theological enemies, and so on this day they come to Jesus with a long-standing disagreement between different schools of Judaism around the issue of divorce. One side argued that a man – yes, only a man – could divorce his wife, issue her a certificate of divorce and he could do so for any reason, even for something so trivial as burning some food. The other view was the only reason a man could divorce his wife was for un-chastity, again, the sexual unfaithfulness of the wife. Now, note that there was no equivalent permission for a wife to divorce her husband for his un-chastity – in fact, in general, Jewish Law only allowed the husband to begin divorce proceeding, unlike the larger Roman world they lived in, which allowed both women and men to initiate a divorce. This is the background of this question, and Jesus lands squarely beyond even what Jesus Law allowed – unlike the Jewish Law, which allows for divorce, he declares divorce to not be an option for his followers. Jesus grants that the Jewish Law does indeed technically allow for divorce, but God allowed it be so because of our unyielding hearts, because we were stubborn, at least in Mark’s telling of this moment. And then Jesus goes into why he thinks divorce is impermissible, citing two verses from the book of Genesis about the union that happens when a couple marries, they become one flesh, and humans should not tear apart what God has put together. You sometimes hear the familiar wedding words in this texts, filled with beautiful imagery of becoming one with your mate – and then a word of warning in there, telling us that one should not tear apart what God has put together.

It has to be asked why Jesus went in this direction, with such a strict prohibition of divorce that far exceeds anything found in Jewish Law or interpretations of that Law, or at least he does in Mark’s telling of this moment? I don’t want to dismiss the theological reason he gives in this text, of this union between a married couple having importance, but it does seem almost over the top, and shows a kind of rough absolutism that Jesus rarely practiced. Now, to be frank, there has always been a rich symbolism of the Jewish people being God’s bride, and the church being the bride of Christ, so you can see why you wouldn’t want a central metaphor of this union between God and God’s people to be challenged by divorce – could God ever divorce God’s people? Still, though, it’s interesting that Jesus often said that the Sabbath, the holy Day of Rest, was made for humans and not humans made for the Sabbath (Mark 2:27), which hints that practical reasons may sometimes compel one to violate the letter of the law for the sake of compassion, justice or simple common sense – don’t let your animals lay stuck in a ditch on the Sabbath because technically you’re not supposed to be working on that day. And surely he knew of marriages that were toxic, for everyone involved, marriages that needed to end because of abuse, incompatibility, whatever – for goodness sake, probably most of the marriages he saw were arranged ones, where the couple really had no real choice of a mate. Some of those marriages were probably very happy ones, but others, well, surely, there were ones that were a simple misery for everyone involved, including the children. Does Jesus’ ideal of two becoming one ring true in those cases, when it becomes clear much later in a marriage that a couple shouldn’t have been put together by their families or by their own choice? In fact, often parents and match makers didn’t put people together for love, but for social and economic reasons – and sometimes love flowered in the marriage despite that and sometimes it didn’t. God didn’t necessarily put them together – their status in the community and their dowries made them seemingly compatible for each other, at least initially. Obviously, we’ve moved on from arranged marriages in the West, and though one can argue perhaps that when we marry for romantic reasons, we are not always ready for the hard work that comes after the romantic feelings lessen, I don’t think anyone wants to go back to the model of arranged marriages that Jesus and his peers experienced, or at least not giving persons the right to opt out of an arranged marriage, if they so wish.

But maybe, maybe that very model of couple hood and arranged marriage are the reason why Jesus seems to slam the door on divorce so forcefully. In that world, where women were especially vulnerable to the whims of men who were given the sole right to initiate a divorce, Jesus wanted to make sure that women were protected. You see, if a woman in the religious world he lived is was divorced, they were highly, highly vulnerable economically. Women were loved, surely, by their families, but they were also seen as property, transferred from one man to another, to the household of a father to the household of a husband. You can see vestiges of that idea in some of our marriage ceremonies, where a father walks down his daughter to greet her soon-to-be husband, and the preachers asks – “who gives this woman to this man?” And the father replies, “I do,” or sometimes, “her mother and I do.” In Jesus’ world, a father of a daughter pays a dowry to the man who will marry her or to the family of that man, and not the other way around. The would-be husband has to be paid for taking on this new economic burden into his household, so to speak. So, when a man divorces a woman during that time, there is no alimony for her or her kids, no house for them to stay in, and often divorced women were quite literally kicked to the curb to fend for themselves economically. They could not go back to their father’s household, since she would have disgraced the family by such a scandal, the scandal of her divorce. Often women turned to begging and prostitution in desperation. Again, another clue of how vulnerable women were when not in a man’s household is how often both in the New and Old Testaments God directs Her people to take care of the widows and orphans, ones without the patriarchal protections found within a male-led household. I have no doubt that Jesus really did feel that there was a spiritual union of sorts within a married couple, and certainly there is, for the ones who are happily married, but I think his primary reason for forbidding divorce was to protect women, and to not allow men, or at least his own followers from simply dumping their wives and sending them into extreme poverty. I’m not going to argue that I am 100% sure of it, but I can’t imagine that Jesus didn’t see couples that shouldn’t be married to each other, because of abuse, because of simple dislike of each other, because of incompatibility in so many ways. I do know that Jesus was always concerned about the poor, the vulnerable, the outsiders, and divorced women in his times were all those things. Jesus saw the unfairness of it, and interestingly, he assumes the Roman position on who can initiate a divorce in his words about adultery and divorce only a few verses after the ones we just heard this morning – in Jewish Law, only a man can initiate a divorce, while Jesus opts for the more egalitarian Roman assumption that women can also initiated divorce. Again, it’s a clue about how he understood women in far more egalitarian terms than most in his religious milieu.

Of course, Christians have divorced for thousands of years, when it was legally allowed, despite Jesus’ seemingly clear prohibition of it. The church assumed that the answer Jesus gave to the Pharisees and his disciples two thousand years ago, which was likely an attempt to protect women from social and economic disaster, was to be for all time, no exceptions. When divorce happened in the secular courts over those two thousand years, it still made women vulnerable, or at least more vulnerable than the man. My grandmother got divorced in her twenties from an abusive husband, and received no court ordered alimony from him, and so she worked three different jobs, almost seven days a week. Certainly things have gotten much better when it comes to spousal support, so Jesus words meant to protect women are not so pressing, so absolute anymore. And yet, the church sometimes treats the divorced so poorly, even now – I have clergy friends who lost their careers when they got divorced, and certainly you see how my former congregation in Alabama treated that young couple – it practically shunned them out of the church. Even now, some Christian traditions, including Catholic and some Protestants exclude divorcees from leadership, and exclude them most heartlessly from the Communion Table. Look, sometimes things end, and sometimes that ending is for the best, and sometimes it’s not, of course, but they do end, and I’ve counseled a few people in my time to end a marriage because it was really clear that the toxicity was so deep in the marrow of a marriage there would likely never be a cure, no matter how much one or both of the couple tried to find their way back to each other. Marriage is hard work, and it needs to be taken seriously and worked hard on – and hopefully that hard work is enough, but sometimes it just isn’t and couples find themselves more happy and whole when they decide to part ways. That is a reality – and I don’t think people should be shunned because a marriage ended, either in church or society. And that certainly goes for this Table, the Communion Table, this reminder of God’s goodness, God’s grace and God’s relentless mercy, a mercy that included Judas, when he too took from the bread and wine offered to him by the Christ, right before he headed deep into the night to sell out his Master for 30 coins. Worldwide Communion Sunday is a reminder to us that all of us are welcomed at this Table, and that we have a connection to Christians across the world, who are as imperfect, broken, sinful, strong, wise, and beautiful as we are. Even if one believed that divorce remains a sin in God’s eyes, the idea of excluding a sister or brother from this table because of that means all of us are not worthy to come to the Table – who is without sin that comes to this Table? I love Dorothy McRae-McMahon’s words from our Modern Lesson today, the pain she reflects in her words, and letting go of all those expectations she and other people had around her marriage, ones she and her ex-husband could simply not live up to. We know there are costs that come with divorce, emotional and spiritual, to the whole family, and I believe Christ knows that as well. But there are for some a chance to heal and become whole that comes with a parting of ways, and that must be noted and blessed as well. I believe that Christ sees what we see, and his words around divorce were meant for a time when women always paid the heaviest costs when it came to the whims of men, as they still do today, in many ways – and Jesus said what he said about divorce to mitigate that harm. And to exclude each other from this table of a divorce, well, I do not want to answer to Christ on Judgment Day for doing something like that, and so today, in a few minutes we’ll do what we think Christ is calling us to do at this church, which is to welcome all to the Table, wherever we are on life’s journey, and to be reminded that we worship a God who loves us all, includes us all, and welcomes us all.

If any of you are suffering, they should pray. If any of you are happy, they should sing. If any of you are sick, they should call for the elders of the church, and the elders should pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. Prayer that comes from faith will heal the sick, for the Lord will restore them to health. And if they have sinned, they will be forgiven. For this reason, confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of the righteous person is powerful in what it can achieve. Elijah was a person just like us. When he earnestly prayed that it wouldn’t rain, no rain fell for three and a half years. He prayed again, God sent rain, and the earth produced its fruit.

William Hoffman, who was a writer and a professor at Hampton-Sydney College, wrote a short story called The Question of Rain, one I’ve shared a couple of times in the past, because, well, it really is one of my favorite short stories. Hoffman tells of a town and a minister caught in a theological tussle about prayer and its meaning, and especially the appropriateness of its use in asking God for those things we need/want/desire. In this short story, we have a well-meaning minister who is beset by his congregation to hold a worship service specifically calling for rain for the drought stricken farming land of his congregants. But Wayland, the minister, is reluctant, in good Calvinistic fashion, he’s simply reluctant to specifically ask God for rain, since rain may not be in God’s will for the people of that county, at least not at the moment – you see, classic Calvinists, followers of the Protestant reformer John Calvin, hold fast to the idea that God is sovereign, that God will do what God will do, and that humans have little real sway over this divine King – the spiritual world is not a democracy, but a kingdom with God enthroned as the all-knowing, all powerful ruler of the universe.

So, when Wayland was first asked by some members of his congregation about this possible prayer service, the minister promises to pray personally for rain but declines the suggestion to lead a prayer service for rain. In response to a delegation from the church, he says, “Bess, to repeat my position, let me state that I’m strong in favor of prayer, but I feel what people really want is a medicine man and I never rattle bones, do a rain dance, or wear chicken feathers.” And to another person, Wayland says, in a classic Calvinist vein, “Caroline, we can’t twist God’s arm, and all we have has is given us by His grace, and we are undeserving of even that.” Nevertheless, the congregation persists, and again and again he is asked by yet more members for a prayer service, and even people outside the church begin to ask him about a possible prayer service to ask God for rain. Eventually these request becomes a crisis of faith of sorts for Wayland, one that is echoed by an older member of his church, though he gently challenges Wayland by using the collective we when he asks Pastor Wayland, “are we afraid to put our faith to the test? “And if we fail?” Pastor Wayland replies. “Then it’s us, not God, whose failed,” the member says in turn. Now, I must say that this wiser, older member may have been wrong when he says such a thing, because I don’t know if it’s possible to “fail” at prayer – and blaming ourselves when God says “no” to us, to our good prayers, is not fair to human beings, and assumes that God will only answer our prayers if certain prayers are said in a certain way. A parent praying for the health of a child does not fail in prayer because the child never gets better. Still, there are haunting themes in this story, questions of whether or not Pastor Wayland believes that God actually does or does no intervene in the world – and his fear that if no rain comes, what will that do to the faith of his church members, and, perhaps to his own faith as well. And underneath that is a question about what prayer is for – what does it do, to God, to us, to the nature of the lived world?

So, in the text from the letter of James, we have the writer inviting us to do the very thing Pastor Wayland is reluctant to do, to ask God to do a specific thing, in hope and expectation that God will do what we ask, and in this case, a prayer for healing for the sick. Again, note the specificity of the text from James – if someone in particular is sick, they are told to call upon the elders of the church, the leaders of the congregation, and to have them pray over this person and anoint them with oil. Anointing is all over the Bible, from its use in cosmetics and its use in hygiene, to its use in a ritual where the oil is placed on the forehead, marking that person as one destined for change, in terms of status or identity, especially as seen when it comes to anointing a king to service to Israel. Here James says to anoint the sick, something that Jesus asked his disciples to do when he sent them out to share his message and be instruments of diving healing (Mark 16:17-18). And again, the specificity is all over the text – if anyone is suffering, if you and I are suffering, the elders of the congregation should gather and pray for us, for me, for you, in particular – not just a general prayer, but a prayer for Kevin in particular. And James is very confident that if we pray for those who suffer, for those who are in need of healing, God will hear that prayer and God will heal the sick and alleviate her suffering. James has great trust that what is prayed for will be given. He even uses a story of Elijah and rain, rain, where Elijah prays that God will shut the heavens up so that the people will be forced to repent and acknowledge the power of God’s messenger, the one calling the people to faithfulness and justice. Elijah prayed for no rain, and no rain came, and when the time was up, when the people were ready to repent, he prayed again, and the rain fell.

But, of course, in all honesty, texts like these, ones of that are so often put forth to show the efficacy of prayer, that if only we will pray the sick will recover, and the sufferer will cease to suffer, they come with some baggage, some complexity, something you feel in Pastor Wayland’s reluctance to pray so specifically for something. There is the reality that each of us can share when we prayed fervently for someone to be healed and it didn’t come to pass, something that seems to challenge James’ certainty about the power of prayer. And then there is the linkage between sin and health that is certainly problematic, at least partially. James is pretty clear here – he links health and confession of sin, assuming that somehow and someway our sin has caused us to become unhealthy, that sin has caused our disease. Now, to be fair, James does say that IF they have sinned they will be forgiven during the act of healing, so the connections between sin and health is not clear, though a few words later he seems to imply that if only we will repent and confess our sin, we will be healed, as if our sin was getting in the way of our healing. That is troublesome because it seems to blame the sick for their own sickness, the disabled for their own disability. Again, maybe is there is a sometimes a connection between sin and sickness, but it is rare – and frankly, there are clear indications that Jesus consistently disconnects sin and sickness because he simply he doesn’t believe they are, in fact, connected at all. In the Gospel of John, in chapter 9 Jesus is asked whether or not the blind man before him has sinned or have his parent’s sinned – you see the bad assumptions Jesus’ own disciples share with the writer of James. Jesus replies that neither the man’s sin or his parent’s sin have anything to do with this man’s blindness. And in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 5, Jesus says that the rain falls on the just and unjust alike, indicating that challenges that happen to people have nothing to do with their goodness or badness. Bad ideas are hard to shake, as you can see from James’ bad assumption in our text, even decades after Jesus was among his disciples, though I understand why we believe bad theology like this. These untruths help us navigate the world, poorly of course, but they help us explain why some get sick and others don’t, why some get well and others don’t. The truth is that the rain, well, it falls on good and evil among us, the kind and cruel in our midst, the believers and the unbelievers beside us, the ones who have no doubts and those who have nothing but doubts. Maybe James didn’t know of Jesus’ words – remember, there were only oral traditions about Jesus when this letter was written, and thus no written Gospel for James to check his assumptions against what Jesus said and taught, including being able to check their bad theology against Jesus’ better theology.

So, does prayer for healing make a difference? Does the anointing of the sick do anything for sufferer, the one in need of physical, spiritual and emotional healing? I think the writer of our Modern Lesson is trying to answer that question, the former Archbishop of the Anglican Communion, Rowan Williams. When we pray for others, often called intercessory prayer, we do something so obvious, so plain, that we often forget it – and that is we throw in our lot with the one we prayed for, we cast our lot in with humanity, in our prayer for them, we enter into their world of uncertainty and sickness. It is interesting that James calls for elders, plural, to gather around the sick one, plural – the leaders of a community gather around the one in need of God’s healing, and they, THEY pray for him or her. I’m very skeptical of the idea that somehow God responds more to twenty prayers for healing than one prayer for healing – this is not God won’t do a thing until a certain threshold is met and then finally God will relent because some sort of divine quota was met. But the gathering together, the praying that we do for each other, over the sick, during our times our joys and concerns every Sunday during worship, something about that we do it together, it seems to matter to us, and maybe to God as well. What Rowan Williams seems to be saying here in our Modern Lesson is that when we pray for others we create more and more space for empathy, for care, for concern – we become open to the crucifixions of others and somehow within us an empty space is cleared out where the world is not just not about me and my joy and my suffering, but a space within that can be filled with the Spirit of God that helps us recognizes that when you suffer, I suffer, than when a child is taken away from its parents at the borders, that is my child being taken from me. Somehow, when we throw in our lot with the crucified of the world, the hurting of the world, which includes all of us, at some point in our lives, somehow when we clear space in our lives to pray for others, the Spirit can change the world because we have been cracked open with our concern for this singular soul before us, this one who has asked for our prayers. We become God’s hands and God’s healing of others, when we allow our prayers for others to become embodied in our kindness and our passion for justice – and we do so as a people, as God’s people.

And, of course, we have to acknowledge that so often our prayers are actually answered the way we’d like them to be answered, more than we often recognize. It’s the ones that didn’t get answered that we remember so well, and which are so painful, so challenging and sometimes God just says no and sometimes the natural course of time and disease just take their course. Look, miracles are actually pretty rare – there is reason why people were so excited by Jesus’ ability to heal – it wasn’t something very common. Prayers for miracles do get answered sometimes, the anointing of the sick can have an effect, but remember that those prayers for others can change us, personally and as a people. You only have to look at how our story by William Hoffman concludes, because in the end the pastor says yes to their requests for a prayer service and so the community gathers and they pray together, together. And then, and then, well, let’s hear Hoffman end his short story.

[Wayland, the pastor,] would not anticipate. Rain wasn’t necessary. He and his congregation had acknowledged God’s fathership, which was the main thing. He turned his back to the window, so he wouldn’t be tempted to judge the quality of the afternoon sunlight edging the drawn shade.

Yet he felt a stillness, the absolute hush of the day. Even the locusts were silent. A distant rumble had to be a truck. He stood, went downstairs, and walked out onto the screened porch where [his wife] Mims sat. She wore her lavender church dress in case of visitors, but had pushed off her white pumps so that her heels were free.

The expression on her clean face was strange as she gazed upward. He looked at the sky and, tingling, saw the dazzling cloud growing, building rapidly into a thunderhead, the underside purplish, the crown of radiant whiteness seething as it mounted into a cathedral of a cloud. People came from their houses to stare. Then Wayland felt a coolness, a nudge of air, and knew rain must be close.

In wonder Mims watched the sky. Wayland’s amazement gave way to rapture as the majestic thunderhead conquered the heavens. He realized his mouth had opened as if to catch the rain on his lips. The pressure of gratitude brought him near to weeping.

During the slashing, luminous rain, he put on his shorts to walk in the yard. With his face uplifted, he gave thanks. Children, despite lightning, ran in the streets, and across glossy lawns. Adults too splashed through puddles. The artificial pond in his rock garden overflowed. The telephone rang so often that Mims, now wearing her pink bathing suit, took it off the hook.

Friends, I invite you to come forward if you are need of healing, any kind of healing, of any wound, emotional and physical, and receive the anointing from Pastor Megan and me. We will anoint your head with olive oil, but if you open your palm, we will anoint there instead. Come please come forward as you feel lead to.

Proverbs 31:10-17, 25-31

A competent wife, how does one find her?

Strength and honor are her clothing;

The one tasked with the preaching from the text of sacred Scripture every Sunday has a particular power, as you can imagine, and a lot of that has to do with her or his selection of what texts from the Bible they choose to preach on.  The reality is that everyone, and even preachers, have a personal set of texts from the Bible they value more than other texts, favorite passages, favorite stories, favorite themes they pick out consciously and unconsciously as they decide what word to bring to a particular congregation. That truth struck me this week, as I chose to take on a text that is both beautiful in a way but not without problems, not without its issues, so to speak.  Sometimes I like a challenge, one that invites me to engage a text I would normally avoid for fear of offending someone or not being able to contexualize it properly, or simply having to deal with the obvious harm it has caused believers and unbelievers over the centuries. For example, I have never dealt in the pulpit with the texts on genocide in the book of Joshua, which were often used to justify genocide later in history, including the genocide of Native Americans in this country. Yes, we’ve studied those horrible texts in Bible studies I’ve lead – but to speak of such things in detail from the pulpit…I don’t know if I have the courage, or maybe even the stomach to do so.

Now, to be clear the ancient lesson we heard today is really not like those Joshua texts I just mentioned but it is not without its own complications.  And yet, I just want to say that after reading it after a long time of not doing so – again, we preachers have our favorite texts, after all – I have to admit that I was surprised by its tone, its praise of this “competent wife” and its praise for what this woman does.  This text is probably the most familiar passage from Proverbs, a book that has beguiled scholars for a long time. The book itself is composed mostly of one-line wisdom sayings, pieces of good advice about honesty, integrity, and the best way to live one’s life. Interestingly though, the first 9 chapters are different from the rest of the book, and different from this last chapter from Proverbs we just heard a few minutes ago – you see, in those first 9 chapters, there is a call to live a wise life, to embrace what the writer calls Lady Wisdom, or Woman Wisdom, Wisdom being often personified here in the Bible as a Woman, sometimes to the point that Woman Wisdom is believed to be a co-creator of the world as you find in Proverbs 8.  Now, the writer does set up a duality for his readers – and it was likely a “he” who wrote this book, as with all the books of the Bible – because there is Woman Wisdom, on the one hand, and the Mysterious Woman, the temptress who leads people astray, inviting them to make bad choices, unwise choices. You can see the virgin or whore dichotomy that has been imposed on women throughout the centuries in these first nine chapters, though it is not the focal point of the text, just the lens with which the male author is trying to make his point about choosing the right path. Of course, there is no similar virgin/whore dynamic for males in the Bible or in our culture, a reminder that the Bible, however much we value and love it, is still a patriarchal text, one written by males with the assumption that its primary readers would be fellow men.

Nonetheless, despite the obvious patriarchal lens through which today’s text is written, there are some real surprises in terms of what this ideal wife or woman is praised for.  But first, know this: the Hebrew word for “competent” can also be translated as “strong,” and the Hebrew word for “wife” can also be translated as “woman” though I think the translators simply go with the way that those words are usually translated in other parts of the Bible. Still, though, the possibility of that translation, a “strong woman” adds a different tone to the hearing of these words, especially as it relates to what this woman is being praised for.  Not only is this woman given accolades for doing those things associated with her expected household duties, she is said to have surveyed a field and acquired it with her resources, her own funds. In a generally patriarchal system, you wouldn’t expect a woman to both make the decision to buy a piece of land AND does so with her own financial resources. Not only does she work joyfully with her own hands with wool and flax, she trades successfully with those goods, bringing in income through the sale of those items.  And yes, it should also be clear to us that this woman being praised is clearly a woman of means – she has female servants after all, but she acts kindly to these other women, making sure they have food while they are employed with her – she is about generosity and mercy. She is kind with her tongue, this King Lemuel proclaims, this king of who we have no record of, either of him or his kingdom, and yet her arms, her arms are powerful – it reminds me of those Rosie Riveter posters from World War 2, with Rosie flexing her biceps!

Obviously, though, the writer, whomever he may be, still makes the assumptions of his time and place, which we all do, of course – we are all creatures of a time and place. He praises her for excellence within her “appropriate” domain, the household, and though, in another passage I didn’t include in today’s reading, he will praise this strong woman for running her household so well that the husband can join the other men at the city gates to adjudicate the conflicts of his day, the assumption being of course, that she will not or should not join him there in the practice of this civic duty – this is men’s work. Of course, there is Deborah in the book of judges who leads her people well but she is indeed a rare female leader in the Scriptures. The patriarchy dictates the rules and the duties of both men and women, this male dominance decides where and how men and women can function in a society, limiting women, certainly, but also limiting men and what they can be and how they should function in the society. The patriarchy, the assumption that men should dominate all strata of personal and public life, it has cost women so much over thousands of years in terms of dreams, hopes, and talent – so much has been lost to the evil of patriarchy, and women have paid a horrible price for men’s inability to see that these assigned roles for women and men have squashed so much talent, intelligence and leadership. Think of all that we could have accomplished if both men AND women had been able to equally tackle medicine and engineering and architecture and parenting and religion through the centuries.  Sadly, our Bible has been a weapon used in patriarchy, either as perpetrator of it, or, perhaps, more realistically, a reflection of the worst of ancient cultures, and of human character, this need to control, dominate, and limit others for personal, economic and social reasons.

Not only does this description of a strong woman both surprise us in its historical context and yet also assumes the rightness of the patriarchy, it also puts an impossible burden on women. Even if one wishes to embrace the patriarchal world of the text with its assumptions of what a competent wife looks like, it just seems like an impossible list to actually do – and once again women are burdened with expectations that rarely can be met by anyone. I remember my lovely and wonderful and strong Baptist Aunt Linda, whose husband Jim would praise her using the words of Proverbs 31, our text – and she’d accepted the praise, though knowing Aunt Linda, she did with a raised eyebrow – you’ve got some pretty high and somewhat unrealistic expectations of what any woman, much less any person can possibly be. The haunting thing about this list of almost impossible traits to fulfill is there is no equivalent text in Scripture that names what a competent or strong husband or man looks like, no listing out of what is expected of a man – the list of expectations is largely a one-way street, sadly, falling most heavily on women. Again, though that doesn’t mean that men haven’t paid a price for the assumptions that the ancient Biblical writers wrote into texts that one day would be named as holy – the patriarchy destroys so much possibility in men, as Betty Strong wrote in words from our Modern Lesson, words she crafted for the World Council of Churches. “There is a woman tired of being called ‘an emotional female,’ and a there is a man who is denied the right to be weak and to be gentle, and “there is a woman who is tired of being a sex object and there is a man worried about his potency.” And then there is the unintended, unexpected victims of the patriarchy. Some have argued that the root of homophobia is actually to be found in sexism, since gay men have often been reviled for being like women, for denigrating themselves by acting like a woman in public, or even in the bedroom – the dismissal and sometimes hostility towards woman become transferred onto gay men, who are not fulfilling the gender role that the patriarchy has assigned them from birth.  Lesbian women too have felt the effect of the patriarchy – to be non-stereotypically female, to carry traces of the stereotypical male within a female body, as with a male carrying traces of the stereotypical female within the male body, it causes such rage in some men that it sometimes comes out in violence. The horrific death toll that trans women have paid for trying to live their authentic selves is a testimony to the wreckage caused by the patriarchy.

Still, the burden almost always most acutely falls upon women’s lives and bodies, as we can see in the recent Supreme Court controversy with Judge Kavanaugh and Professor Blasey Ford. It all reminded me of an incident that happened in the small town in Michigan I once pastored in, where a teenage girl accused one of the more popular boys, a star athlete, of raping her. It really divided the town in two, but it was so damning that the most concern voiced was for the young man who was being accused – what would these charges do to his future, his life, to be accused of this heinous deed by this young woman? There were rumors, of course, of her sexual prowess, which is almost always the typical way of trying to discredit women’s stories in these matters, hinting somehow, even if it was true, that for a woman to embrace and desire sex, getting raped is getting what she deserves. Not surprisingly, there was not much talk of his sexual past – it was the old virgin/whore dynamic coming into play once again. Whether or not you believe Professor Blasey Ford account about what happened so long ago, know that it will almost always be the female accuser of men that will pay the heavier costs – that’s what the patriarchy does, the patriarchy re-victimizes women, prioritizing men’s reputation over the witness and testimony of women who have often experienced sexual trauma at the hands of these very men.   

So, what are we followers of Jesus, this One, who though steeped in a time and place where equality was far from the norm, followers of this One, who acknowledged his female disciples and seemed to embrace them in such surprising ways for his time – what are we followers of this Jesus to do with this text, the good of it, the bad of it, and the fact that so often our sacred texts seemingly support the patriarchy?  We know that women dominated the pews of the early church, as they do now – remember that patriarchal slur hurled at the church by some of its earliest enemies, that Christianity was a women’s religion, centered around a man who challenged the patriarchy and the ancient assumptions of what a man should be and say, challenging it so often through his words, and his simple gentleness, his compassion, his love. And remember this, as I said a few weeks ago – when the church won’t listen to the still-speaking God, the Spirit of God will go outside the church to do a work of justice, and then that same Spirit will reach back inside the church to change the church from the outside in. God’s Spirit will not be thwarted, will not be denied, and though we so often get in the Spirit’s way, God wins, and God will do whatever it takes to get the Church, Christ’s own body, to do the right thing. If the church won’t listen, God’s spirit will speak elsewhere, until the church catches up – thank God for the women’s movement – and I mean it, thank God for the women’s movement. At the recent installation of the Rev. Kim Shelton of the Good News Community Church this past weekend, a speaker mentioned that she was once in a group of men, one of who told her that he didn’t believe in women preachers – and I kept thinking, well, I guess you don’t believe what’s clearly in front of you? I mean, why believe your lying eyes, because here she is, just being a woman preacher, and she’s doing a really good job at it, better than most men I know. What I’m grateful for is this: God is relentless, and though we humans resist, God eventually overcomes that resistance – and justice comes, eventually. I wish the justice was faster and more complete, but I also wish we weren’t so resistance to what God is doing in the world, I wish we humans didn’t resist God’s Spirit so much. I suppose that is the cost of having free will, the ability to say no to God’s yes’s, but this free will also puts such importance on us saying yes to God’s yes, choosing to stand with our sisters, honoring their stories, celebrating their truths, and for us men, resisting the patriarchy, the lies we’ve been fed with our own mother’s milk, to play off a line from an Audre Lorde poem. God’s doing a new thing, through the #Metoo movement, and even in the #churchtoo movement, a church version of the #metoo movement, and thankfully less of us are being resistant to those difficult truths about some men’s behavior. But men, myself included, need to do our work, which means unmasking our assumptions, challenging our sometimes warped instincts and biases, and opening ourselves up to voices that tell of women’s often very different experiences in the world, of struggles we’ve not known or have barely begun to acknowledge. What are we to do as followers of Jesus?  We’re not to resist God’s movement in the world, and instead we are to embrace the difficult and yet liberating truth we have been forced to confront in ourselves and within the patriarchy that we all inhabit. I am grateful to women, and to men, and to all of us in-between, for listening to the still-speaking God, who loves us, and who will not let us stay in our sin and who asks us to listen to the still speaking God, and to voices we have denied for too long – voices that likely carry the words of the Still speaking God. Amen.

Jesus and his disciples went into the villages near Caesarea Philippi. On the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?”

They told him, “Some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, and still others one of the prophets.”

He asked them, “And what about you? Who do you say that I am?”

Peter answered, “You are the Christ.” Jesus ordered them not to tell anyone about him.

Then Jesus began to teach his disciples: “The Human One must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and the legal experts, and be killed, and then, after three days, rise from the dead. ”He said this plainly. But Peter took hold of Jesus and, scolding him, began to correct him. Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, then sternly corrected Peter: “Get behind me, Satan. You are not thinking God’s thoughts but human thoughts.”

I have to confess that this past year has been an unusual one, not only because of the sabbatical, but also because of a wave of deaths of people I’ve known and pastored and worked closely with. It all seem to begin with my friend Michael Swift, the former choir director, who was roughly my age, who passed away from a cancer in Hawaii, after a wonderful career as a nurse.  He was fun to be around, a lovely man, and so smart, and the kind of nurse who you simply trusted within seconds of meeting him. And then recently Joyce from my former congregation in Michigan died of cancer, only a month or so ago – again, a kind and gentle woman whose smile could light up a room. I have two German/English language prayer books from her childhood she gave me before I left the church to pastor here in Chicago – they are on a shelf in my office right now. Amazingly, she and her twin sister died within 2 weeks of each other. Douglas and I lit a candle for her at the Protestant Cathedral in Berlin. Karen, another member of my former congregation in Michigan, died a few weeks – again, a backbone of the church, always handing out the bulletins on Sunday, and sending out her homemade cards she made on her computer, for every occasion, including get well cards for a simple cold.  And then there is Laverne, the church secretary for many years at First Congregational in Houston, who was charter member of that church, and who could tell stories of growing up in Houston before air conditioning become affordable for the masses – Houston without air conditioning is my idea of hell! And Sylvia, who reinvented herself as a mental health counselor after her marriage fell apart and spent decades providing psychological services in an office tucked away in the tower of the Houston church. Both Sylvia and Laverne also passed away within a few weeks of each other. The passing of every one of those souls was a shock to me and it’s not as if they were all unexpected deaths – but when I got the news about each of them, a flood of memories about them would overwhelm my soul, and then the grief and sadness came, even as I have hope and believe to the core of who I am that they are with their Creator, who is love itself, according to Jesus.    

Almost all of us in this room have experienced grief at the death of a beloved, human and sometimes not human, and sometimes the force of it can be overwhelming, almost a surprise in its intensity, even if we’ve had a sometimes ambiguous relationship with them. The experts often try to mark out the stages of grief, or they hand us a model for what to expect – but grief is so particular to each person, and ultimately there are no right ways to express grief or even not express it. I watch too much of the television show Dateline, where true-life murders are unraveled, and there is always that detective who states that so-and-so is just not grieving in the right way for the victim, which was their first clue that this person may be guilty of the murder. As someone who has walked beside a lot people in their grief, and have known my own so acutely, I just roll my eyes when officers say stuff like that – there are no ordinary and right ways to grieve – there is just grief, and it comes out in sometimes surprising ways. We can’t judge people’s ways of getting through grief, not really, though certainly there are healthy and unhealthy ways to deal with loss, sorrow and anguish. We can’t know another’s experiences, the complexity of their experience, the ways they’ve been taught and not taught about how to deal with loss.  

And yet, it’s not healthy when we decide not to sit with our grief, or when we try to run away from our own sorrow, or even the grief of others, the deep suffering within and without. It’s the very challenge that the disciples in our story are surely struggling with in today’s text, in their denials of the reality that Jesus has set before them – that difficult things, heart rending things will greet them in the coming weeks and they will know grief in ways they have never known before. But first, he asks them a question, a pivotal question, in a pivotal place like Caesarea Philippi, and in a pivotal moment in the story that writer of the Gospel of Mark is telling. Jesus asks them who the people say he is, who do they think he is?  They reply that some think of Jesus as being the resurrection of dead prophets, ones who have died recently, like John the Baptist, and others who have long since gone, Elijah and the prophets of old. “Fine,” he seems to say, “but who do you say that I am” – and the disciples, well, they say he is the Messiah, God’s promised Savior to the people of Israel. When they say Messiah, they imagine with so many of their fellow countrymen that this Messiah would defeat God’s enemies and bring with him a new golden era of Israel, one not even matched by Kings David and Solomon. “Quiet, then, don’t tell a soul what you believe about me,” he tells them. But then Jesus immediately begins to challenge the ideas they have about what a Messiah should be – he tells them that instead of winning he will lose, that instead of defeating his enemies and the enemies of Israel, they will defeat him – they will kill him, though he will rise, he will rise again only three days later. What’s interesting about this moment is two things: first, you should know that Mark says that this took place in Caesarea Philippi, while Matthew and Luke have the story taking place in another town.  Why? Well, scholars think that Mark wants to make some connections to the time Mark and his listeners were living through, years after Jesus’ life and resurrection, but during the Jewish Civil War fought against the Romans some forty years later. At the time this Gospel was likely written, Caesar Philippi had being used by the Romans as Prisoner of War camp, holding the Jewish revolutionaries who had rebelled against Rome – and in Caesarea Philippi they tortured and killed them in a public manner, as a signal to the population that if you do what these men did, this will be your fate as well– the Romans were always about public displays of state cruelty so as to send a message to the conquered populace. With this horrific scene in our mind, the writer of Mark, in words following today’s verses, but not printed in your bulletin, the writer has Jesus telling his disciples that they must deny themselves, take up their cross, and possibly lose their life for the sake of the Gospel. All of this is said in a city whose streets have only recently run crimson with the blood of Jewish martyrs, men who had laid down their lives in an effort to throw off the shackles of Rome.  

But only moments before this call to follow after Jesus, to take up a cross and follow him, we see Peter literally taking hold of Jesus, grabbing him, so distraught was he about Jesus’ words about dying and rising, that Peter tries to correct him – “don’t be a fool, Jesus, Messiahs don’t die, they live, they win, they defeat the enemies of God.” But Jesus won’t be dismissed, won’t be corrected by someone who doesn’t know what he is talking about – and he literally calls Peter Satan, and says that he is thinking human thoughts rather than divine thoughts – thinking like people who crave revenge and victory rather this new thing he is doing that will defeat the sting of death in the act of resurrection, for all of humankind. What’s interesting here is that Peter, and certainly some of the other disciples, is that they don’t want Jesus to be like them, they don’t want him to be human, to live and die as humans must, and always will – to them, a Messiah who can die is a pretty useless Messiah. Jesus shouldn’t be like us, hostage to the sting and the horror of death, the fear that knocks at the door of even the bravest and most faithful of us. Messiah’s don’t know death – and there shouldn’t be any need for a Messiah to rise after three days because he shouldn’t be dead in the first place! But it’s the beautiful taut tension that runs throughout the Jesus story, this belief that Jesus was as a human as we are, that he felt love and knew joy, felt desire, and knew grief, knew it as deeply as we did. And yet, Jesus was somehow also something altogether different than human – not a different creature, but somehow, mysteriously was divinity itself walking through the streets of Caesarea Philippi, healing the sick, stilling the storms and simply showing us the face of God in ways we had humans had never seen it before. Jesus was not simply God disguised as one of us, but God was actually one of us, one of us humans.

But to be human, to do what God has done in Christ means that God now knows not only the joy and love and laughter and family and friendship that comes with being human.  It also means God knows pain, knows loneliness, knows despair, and knows human grief, knows that it means to lose a beloved to death, to life on the other side of life. We Christians call this idea of God being both fully human and fully God the doctrine of the incarnation, this crazy idea that God came to humankind thousands of years ago in the form of a peasant from a backwater town, and was immersed in the world as deeply as we are, completely awash in the human experience as we all are here in this room. Since the very beginning we Christians have tried to make sense of the meaning of Jesus’ death and resurrection – the debate is all over our New Testament and continues even today. One of the ways some Christians have explained what God did in Christ, what God brought to humankind in the Christ, the possibility of wholeness, salvation, is that God entered into the human experience through this Jesus and that has made all the different – it changed God and it changed us. Gregory of Naznanius, one of the great theologians of the 4th century, said this: “that which he has not assumed he has not healed.”  “That which God has not assumed, that God has not entered into, God has not healed, maybe cannot heal.”  God cannot heal us or the world if God has not entered into the world. Listen to the story of the shaman we heard in our modern lesson, the one that heals through the experience of “feeling with” the patient: “I feel for the sores, the aches and the pains. When I put my hand over the body I can feel every little muscle and every little vein. I can feel the soreness. It hurts me. If they have heart trouble, my heart just beats. Any place they are hurting, I hurt. I become a part of their body.  There is something about entering into the human experience that changes the healer and healed, the Creator and the creation, and many Christians, including myself, believe that God’s choice to do such a thing, to enter into the joy and into the hurt of the world, it somehow gave us the possibility of wholeness. The God who created us, the God who walks beside us in the Christ, and the God who is within us through the Spirit, this God knows our pain, our joy, our grief, our love, our hurt, our fear, our strength and now even our death, and somehow this choice by God to do so has changed God, and can change us, if we will only allow it to. Wholeness is possible, perhaps not completely on this side of the veil, but wholeness in particular moments, that wholeness really is possible because of what God has done in Christ.  

But, like God, we, you and I have a choice about whether or not to enter into the world of others, of the life of the greater world, to listen to what is difficult to hear, to what is difficult to understand, the choice to listen to the stories of others, to their truths, their sorrows, to their joys. I talked last week about the need for us Christians to listen to others, to each other, and to God – to echo Matt Smucker’s summary of my sermon, “my pastor said we should shut up and listen!” Part of the reason why I think that is good advice is that it’s exactly what God did through Jesus – God listened to us, and though certainly God spoke to us through Jesus, God also listened to us, and I think the listening made all the difference. And because God listened to us, we should listen to each other, and in listening to each other, we’re sometimes going to hear God speaking through others.  But we humans don’t have to, do we, we don’t have to listen to each other, and to listen to the pain and suffering of the world. Some of us spend a lot of time avoiding having to listen to anything that hurts, that feels what the shaman feels, the hurt of the world and others, and we are like Peter, wishing not to look at the reality, the difficult reality of it that is before him. Some of us only want to surround ourselves with joy, laughter, goodness, and I am tempted by impulse, and sometimes seek out only the light – and there is nothing wrong with that, of seeking to laugh sometimes or even most of the time – and sometimes you just need to watch a bunch YouTube videos showcasing puppies to get through the day! But it’s funny, I think, that even then sorrow can creep into our joy, something I was reminded of this summer during my sabbatical. To get away from the heat in Zurich, Douglas and I went to see Mamma Mia 2 in a nice cool theater, and though the films are nothing but cotton candy, they do have Abba songs, which was the music of my childhood – and usually I just find myself smiling throughout the movie, just smiling with quiet joy.  But this particular time, right there, in this joyous, fun movie, I just started crying because memories just flooded into my mind, memories of my deceased mother and I dancing to Abba when I was seven years old in the 1970’s, dancing with the kind of abandon I don’t think I’ve ever replicated as an adult. Joy and sadness, all mixed up, surely, as it with so much of life, so connected to each other and so impossible they are to sometimes disentangle from each other.

But moments like the one I experienced in that theater are what we are asked to experience, to do what God has done, to take a chance on this world, to choose what God has chosen, to not always look away. Look, I know there are times when it is impossible to not listen, to not look – the cross is before you and me and there is no going back – it just must be gotten through, just gotten through so we can get to our third day, the day of our resurrection. But so often we won’t listen and we won’t look because we fear that what awaits us in our personal Jerusalems will somehow consume us, or destroy us. Sometimes we do have to look away, just to survive – emotional denial is a real and sometimes needed human coping mechanism. But, in the end, we can’t change what we can’t look at, what we can’t listen to, within us, or within the world – that truth is what God seemed to have discovered in the Christ, and what Gregory of Nazianus was trying to say when he said “that which he has not assumed, he has not healed.” It seems that God decided to change the world from the inside out, in and through the Christ, and I think that’s the only way, changing ourselves and the world from the inside out, is the only way we’re going to be able to do the same. So, we have a God who knows joy, who knows pain, and, for me, a God who knows grief, my grief, my human grief, our human grief. And for me that is a God worth journeying towards Jerusalem with, a God who we can trust to meet us in our crucifixion and who knows that resurrection can and will meet on the other side, on that great and surprising and amazing third day.  Amen.

James 2:1.10,14-17

My brothers and sisters, when you show favoritism you deny the faithfulness of our

One of the great gifts, and maybe the primary gift this church gave to me this past

Within a few minutes my suspicion was quickly confirmed when the group starting

And then it struck me, as I was watching this young man flay, that most of these

Now, let me leave that moment in the Alexanderplatz for right now, and I want to invite you to enter into another more ancient story, one that we have hints of in this morning’s text, where the focus is not a proclamation, the speaking of and out of the

Now, as someone who personally moved out of a conservative evangelical tradition

Now, we liberal, progressive mainline Christians didn’t give up on the sharing of the

Now, I want to invite you back into Alexanderplatz in Berlin, and to my time gazing at

So, if neither words nor deeds impress anyone in our perhaps rightfully skeptical

By: Bob Feeny

Modern Lesson: Fear and Trembling By Kierkegaard

Acient Lesson: Gensis 22:1-14