Take Up Your Mat, and Walk

Sermon at St. John's Episcopal Church

Corbin, KY

Acts 16:9-15 | Psalm 67 | Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5 | John 5:1-9

“Take Up Your Mat, and Walk”

Sermons about This morning's Gospel often focus on themes of belief, faith, and the Sabbath. Like other healing stories, the man at Bethzatha seems to be healed by his faith in Jesus. After a short exchange with Jesus, he is healed not by the waters of the pool, but because Jesus says to him, “Take up your mat and walk.” Jesus heals on the Sabbath – a big no no in the legalistic view of the Pharisees, for whom working on the Sabbath was anathema, a sin.

Yet this morning, I want to call your attention to some new themes in this morning's Gospel. To pull your attention away from Jesus and instead to pull your attention to the man at the pool. And not his belief, not the idea that his faith made him whole. I want to call your attention to his excuses. To his fear. We will read the story with different inflection.

The man has been ill for 38 years. He has presumably lost his family, his livelihood. His existence has boiled down to a game of chance, of “maybe tomorrow.” He sits by the pool and he waits. He waits for the opportune moment to inch closer to the healing waters, but he is defeated, time and again. But perhaps it is not an external defeat – not that others beating him to the waters, day after day. After all, it has been 38 years. He's had a lot of time to make it to that pool. I wonder if, rather, this is an internal defeat. That he has given up. He's given up on being healed, given up on himself. He's resigned to this lot. Perhaps he believes that he's not worthy of anything more.

Jesus approaches, and knows that the man has been “there a long time.” And I wonder if we could read Jesus' question slightly differently. Not, “Do you want to be made well?” but “Do you want to be made well?” And the sick man says, “There's no one to help me. And when I am making my own way down there, someone else always gets ahead of me.”

Now, either this is a stroke of some chronic bad luck or some chronic “giving up” on himself.

I don't think he is prevented from being healed because external factors are rendering it impossible. I think – I wonder – what if he doesn't want to be healed? What if being healed means that everything he's clinged so closely to and held so tightly would go away? Everything would change, his world would be turned upside down. That's some scary stuff. Everything would be different. What would it even mean if he could walk again?

So he tells Jesus- “someone always steps in before me.”

But, I think that Jesus is a rather mischievous fellow sometimes and I wonder if he didn't have any patience for the man. “Do you want to be made well?” He pauses and listens. I imagine Jesus having a mischievous grin, listening kindly and patiently to the fear and the reticence for anything to change. And then looking down at the man and gently saying, “Take up your mat and walk.”

Take it up and WALK.

It made me think about what excuses we might make for ourselves, what excuses I make for myself.

A dear friend recently introduced me to the author Cheryl Strayed. Cheryl is a novelist and essayist and several years ago she became the author of a column called “Dear Sugar,” which is an advice column on the website The Rumpus. She remained anonymous for a while before she went with her identity, and eventually publishing a collection of pieces in this book, called “tiny beautiful things.”

Now, I've never been much of a fan of advice columns and I thought that when my friend recommended this book to me that she had kind of missed the mark of who I was. I didn't think this book would appeal to me. But, I trusted her, so I started reading.

My mind was changed. This book contains some of the most poignant, sad, hopeful, joyful stories I have ever read. And every response that Cheryl gives kind of rips my heart open. It shocks me every time I read it. I think of this book in some ways as a modern Gospel, with the letters being written by modern day lepers and tax collectors, prostitutes and Pharisees. People who are struggling with some really tough stuff. And Cheryl responds with such compassion and such gentleness, but that doesn't mean that the answers are always very easy to hear. They are very often the hardest answers. The answers no one wants to hear.

To a man struggling with drug addiction:

“Your convergence of physical pain, drug addiction, financial woe, no health insurance, and an unhappy marriage is truly daunting. But you don't have the luxury of despair. You can find a way to overcome these difficulties, and you must. There aren't three options. There is only one. As Rilke says, 'You must change your life.'”

To a young man convinced he will never be loved due to severe body deformities, Cheryl tells the story of her friend, Ian, who was burned horribly in a gas fire. Although his life was happy and complete in most ways, Cheryl says, Ian never had another romantic relationship after his accident. She writes to an advice seeker, the man with the body deformities: “And your question to me – the very core of it – is circling around the same thing [that Ian struggled with]. It's not Will I ever find someone who will love me romantically – but rather Am I capable of letting someone [love me]?”

Are you capable of letting someone love you?

Take up your mat – your pain, your anger, your envy, your arrogance, your shame – and walk.

You don't have the luxury of despair.

I think that is what Jesus is saying to us when he visits the ill man at the pool of Bethzatha.

The ministry of Reading Camp – which is a ministry of the whole diocese and its people including St. John's Corbin – works with 2nd-4^th grade children who are grade levels behind in their reading.

The children are all shapes and sizes, from all backgrounds and all walks of life.

This summer, we will host middle-class children whose parents are seeking every and all possible ways to help their children build skills and self-confidence.

We will host low-income children whose single mothers work two or more jobs to put food on the table.

We will host foster children, children who live in the mountains without running water, children from the inner-city who live with their grandmothers because their dad is in jail and their mother is on drugs.

We will host the poor and the comfortable, American-born children and refugee children whose families fled war and famine, children from two-parent and two-income homes and children who don't know their fathers.

And beneath all this diversity of class, color, nationality, location, language, and culture lies two common threads that show these children – and all of us – to be oh-so-similar and vulnerable, beautiful, growing children of God.

The first thing is the fact that they are struggling in school with reading, the basic skill that must be attained in order to succeed in school and in life. Before third grade, children are learning to read. After third grade, children must read in order to learn. And these children are behind, at risk of falling further and further behind. So we step in and help in the summer to make sure they retain and build skills.

The second common thread is the despairing and hopeless prospect that many of them carry with them – though they might not even know it – that they are unworthy. That they're not smart enough, not pretty enough, not good enough. Part of this might stem from their academic struggles. Part of it may stem from their environment -their families, their schools, their communities, their peers. A large part of it, I would argue, stems from our society and our media which applauds certain very narrow conceptions of beauty, intelligence, and strength and diminishes others.

So this is where we step in, this ministry of Reading Camp, of all of us, together. We are not only concerned with the children's reading skills, though that is our core mission. That is our foundation. Far more importantly, we are concerned with the children's self-perception, with their sense of worth. We are concerned with their spirits – and I don't mean in the religious sense, necessarily, though that's certainly a part of it. We are concerned with their emotional well-being – that they know they ARE capable, they are intelligent, they are beautiful, they are worthy, and they are loved.

In gentle, kind, loving ways, we let each child know that they are worthy, they are loved, and they do not have to be afraid or ashamed. We extend a patient hand holding a book, welcome the child to sit next to us, and welcome them into a story of their own of self-discovery, of self-confidence. We let them know that we believe so much in the gifts they have to offer to the world.

You do not have the luxury of despair. Take up your mat and walk.

I'll finish with a story that, when I read it, kind of ripped my heart out. Cheryl Strayed tells a story of a time she lived in Brooklyn with her husband, in an apartment building where they were the only tenants. However, they began to hear strange sounds coming from within the walls of their apartment.

She writes, “Something behind the walls, and then from the ceiling. Something close, then distant, then close again, the gone. I didn't know what it was. It sounded awful. Like a baby who was extremely discrete. ..

The sound kept coming and going, all through December, impossible to define or reach... On New Year's Day we woke at seven to a howling. We jumped out of bed. The sound was the same one we'd been hearing for three weeks, but it wasn't discrete anymore. It was coming very clearly from the ceiling of our closet. My husband immediately got a hammer and started pounding away at the plaster with the claw end, chipping it in great chalky chunks that fell over our clothes. Within ten minutes, he'd clawed almost the entire closet ceiling away. We didn't care that we were ruining the place. We knew only that we had to get to the source of the sound...

At first it seemed like there was nothing – that the horrible sound maker had again gone away, or perhaps we really had imagined it – but a moment later two emaciated kittens appeared, coming to peer down at us from the jagged edge of the hole. They were the strangest things I've ever seen. So skeletal they should have been dead, visibly shaking with fear, caked in soot and spiderwebs and globs of black grease, their eyes enormous and blazing.

My husband and I held up our palms and the kittens walked into them immediately. They were so light it was like holding air.

I never found a way to write about this until I realized it was a story you needed to hear. Not how the kittens suffered during those weeks they were wandering inside the dark building with no way out – but how they saved themselves. How frightened those kittens were, and yet how they persisted. How when two strangers offered up their palms, they stepped in.”

The Gospel this morning let me think a lot about what might be my own source of pain or hurt or sadness or sorrow. So I ask you, what might you be holding tightly to, sitting next to the side of a healing pool, resigned to never stepping in? “Someone always gets in ahead of me,” you think. It is too hard to change, that relationship is dead, he/she/they will never forgive me, I'm not worthy of love, my envy, anger, anxiety has taken over me. My life cannot change. “Whenever I try to lower myself into the pool, something else stops me.”

And Jesus looks at us with his warm and loving eyes, extends an outstretched hand, and says -

“Take your mat. Get up and walk.”

AMEN.