There are two memories of my first Sunday from eight years ago that I want to share with you today. The first is from the line that forms after worship. A stately gentleman named Joe Clark shook my hand and said, “I can see you standing in that pulpit 10 years from now.” The second is from the reception after church, in which I was surprised to be greeted by a framed picture of my children at the Louisiana welcome center on I-10.
The first memory is bittersweet, as many of you know that Joe died a little over a year ago. It was a greater compliment than I realized at the time, and I lament that he will not be here to see that in person. The memory also stands to remind me that we must always have a vision that is beyond our own capacity, and it reminds me of the fear I experienced in hearing his vision for me. I was afraid because the thought of standing in this pulpit for ten years sounded like an expectation that I would keep things running just the way they were (or had been). I wasn’t sure that I knew how to do that – whatever that was – and I was pretty sure that doing that would not help us move forward as a church. So, I just smiled and said, “We’ll see!”
The second memory was a stark confirmation of two things. I had already been embraced by a community that loved me and my family, and I really do need to be careful about what I post online!
This community has grown and changed over the years and my family with it, and I thank God for that every day. This is a community of grace and mercy, openness and inclusivity, generosity of spirit and resources, and one in which there is no shortness in our supply of eagerness to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ!
While it is a place of refuge from the trials of the week, it is also a people with whom we can work out the questions that come from living through the brokenness of our days. I’m not saying that we need to wallow in it, but each of us carries around a certain amount of brokenness. Each of us has to find a way to cope and get by, but what I love about the Christian faith is that it tells us that we don’t have to just “get by.”
We don’t have to put on airs – spiritually or any other – that we are perfect, or that we have it all together. We do not have to be afraid of a vision that God has laid out for us, through the church, that is bigger than we think that we can manage. We don’t have to be afraid of the corruption of leaders that manipulate and threaten what we hold dear.
Look at David as an example. Saul tried to kill him and set David on the run. David ended up in the service of his enemy as the personal guard of the King of the Philistines, and finally, he ended up in a city of refuge as the Philistines attacked Saul’s forces. In the midst of all that, David had the chance to kill Saul twice but didn’t. He didn’t do it, because he believed that God had anointed Saul and would see to it that Saul answered for his selfishness and lack of faith.
That’s not to say that God anointed our leaders, but it is to say that God inspired the hearts and minds of those that framed our constitution and gave us our system of governance.
It is, therefore, a part of our Christian witness that we engage in that system. We will not all agree on how to do that, and I will not tell you how to do that. Yet as we move toward the celebration of our nation’s independence we must recognize that those who fought as brothers and sisters in arms – bonded in joy and lament like David and Johnathan – did so in the hope that we would live justly and peaceably and without fear.
So here we are, just as we have been, acting like an anchor for the faith of those that need a calm in the storm. We come to the one who calms the seas, casts out demons, and offers healing and wholeness with these words, “Do not fear. Only believe.”
So much of our public and personal lives are manipulated by fear, or as one article states, we are being “kept in a constant state of impotent rage”. I won’t go through their list of reasons, but one of them is that we are being groomed more and more to attack one another instead of dealing with actual problems. As an example, I recently had someone respond to a comment by saying, “Let’s not debate perspectives (aka facts), let’s debate ideologies.” Meanwhile, we post about the event du jour and the only profit comes from ads the argument generates.
Friends, that pervasive, petty, log-jam of fear is exactly why we have to do and be more as a church. We have to match our eagerness with our actions, and we have to be grounded in compassion. That’s what Paul told the church in Corinth, and it’s what we’ve been telling each other as followers of Jesus ever since. I’m pretty sure you guys get that.
I mean, that’s why a small church like ours is still able to provide meals for the elderly in our community. That’s why we are bold enough to consider a project like clean water in Cuba that will require us to reach out beyond our walls to get it done. That’s why we have been willing to host volunteers for flood recovery longer than anyone else in town.
That’s why we’ve stood by one another when life becomes more precious at births and baptisms, and even in hospitals and gravesides. There is, unfortunately, only so much that we can do about the big-ticket issues in the world. There is also a line where some will feel called to greater activism, and some will be resigned to prayer.
Yet all of us are called to seek a greater balance between our abundance and our poverty. All of us are claimed and named and called beloved by the one who invites us into wholeness and healing at the table that has been prepared for us.
At this table, strangers become friends. At this table, we recognize our connectedness with those who share citizenship in the Kingdom of God – not just in the hereafter, but in the here and now. A sense of belonging is as much a part of the healing that Jesus offers – to the woman in our reading, to us, to the stranger in our midst – as the healing of physical symptoms.
You see, when Jesus heals this woman it’s the result of a terrible interruption. He was on his way to heal an important person’s daughter. Some may have thought that the interruption could put the daughter’s life at risk, yet Jesus calls her “Daughter” and tells her that her faith has made her well.
Then he turns to the leader of the synagogue – who’s been told his daughter is dead – and says, “Do not fear, only believe.” Then to the others, he says, “She’s only sleeping.” Then after he tells her to get up, he tells them to tell no one.
Maybe she really was only sleeping. Maybe walking around is testimony enough. Maybe what matters in this story is that even while on our way to do the obvious good deed, God’s agenda includes the one that must fight through the crowd and claim the intimacy that no one seems to want her to have.
You see, the healing and wholeness that God offers does not just make you or me more self-sufficient. It makes us more “God-sufficient”. It makes us more aware of the presence of God in and through interruptions by the strangest of people in the strangest of places. There is something sacramental in that realization. There is something “sacred making” in the recognition of God at the breaking of bread, in the breaking of lives, in the brokenness that we carry around as we move toward wholeness together.
As we continue to grow together in faith, I pray that we can be more and more honest with one another about our brokenness and the hope that it inspires within us. There is so much more that God has in mind for us than we can even imagine. As long as we can remain grounded in our love for God, our love for one another, and our expectation that God’s love moves us toward wholeness through interruptions from those least expected, then we will have no reason to fear, and all shall be well. And to God be the glory. Amen.
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