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-4th 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.
