Recent Sermon from Myers Park Baptist Church

On The Sixth Sunday in Epiphany

Jesus has left the synagogue in town where he has been teaching and gone to the mountain. Having prayed all night alone, he calls the disciples to him. With them he now comes down the mountain to be greeted by what Luke describes as a great crowd of followers and a multitude of people from Judea and Jerusalem, Tyre and Sidon. In that place and time, the whole world. People from Jerusalem temple and the Judean heartland but also from across the borders of Syria. Jews and Gentiles alike. They come because they are diseased and troubled with unclean spirits. All try to touch Jesus. All seek healing.

Imagine that crowd. The lame, the halt, the blind and everything in between. See in your mind’s eye as they limp and hobble. Smell their illness and sweat. A motley crew of the dregs. Unwanted and untended, dirty physically and contaminated both religiously and ritually, even unclean in spirit. They stand before Jesus on land Luke says is plane, a level playing field, no one higher up than another. Not like climbing up the temple mount in Jerusalem with steps going higher past cleansing baths leading behind high walls that separate and segregate the unsavory them from the healthy and sanitized us. If you are like me, you avoid big crowds whenever you can. But imagine being pushed and bumped and jostled, shoved and elbowed and reached over in this ragtag gathering of nothings and nobodies.

Someone asked this week if this is who was there, who was not there. Probably people like us. People who value propriety and privacy. People like you and I who prefer places like this where we can be close but not too close, reasonably assured that we will not be soiled or contaminated or infected or offended or annoyed or repulsed by each other. Most of us are pretty adept at hiding our dis-ease and covering up our illness. We like to keep our troubles and unclean spirits secret and to ourselves — between our doctor specialist or therapist and us. We may turn to Jesus for healing in this hour of sanctuary silence on Sunday morning. But not many of us are going to join a crowd or multitude where our disease and troubles become public or obvious as we reach out to touch Jesus and be healed. People like us would rather tough it out alone the way we are than go through that!

My guess is that those among us who have braved such a crowd seeking healing have experienced it in 12 step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous. People who join the crowds at AA, Alanon, and other 12 step meetings have finally given up the anonymity and uniqueness of their dis-ease and trouble, aware that the secrecy is part of the illness. They keep going back even daily and weekly where they can tell their truth as they live this story. As most of us do not, they or maybe you know that it is when we finally admit, not just to God but to one another, that we are broken down actors worn out with pretensions and pretending, that healing finally comes. It happens when we sacrifice being special and different and face up to being ordinary and human. It is the very antithesis of what most of us have been carefully taught and fashioned to believe about ourselves. Those who remain part of that desperate crowd trying to touch him do so because they know something about the high cost of being thought exceptional and how such isolation kills us.

Everyone in this room knows what it is like to be diseased in body or spirit — dis-eased with what we have made of relationships that promised so much, careers and jobs that might or should or could have been more, marriage hopes abandoned, talents and gifts squandered, commitments compromised, trusts broken, dreams betrayed. We all know about troubled and unclean spirits — disappointments and depression, sadness and sorrows, our losses and lamentations. We discreetly reach out for healing power by making more money and building bigger houses, raising hurried and harried children, earning degrees and winning awards and going on vacations and hitting balls and shooting birds and shopping and even giving lots of our time and dollars to make the world a better place. We also reach for the healing power through our addictions and angers and affairs. Most of us do our frantic searching for healing everywhere in the world except with one another. Which is where this crowd before Jesus ends up.

Luke tells us that power comes out of Jesus and heals them all. They try to touch him. Power comes out. The Greek dunamis can also be rendered "strength." It is akin to a Greek verb that is translated as "having the ability" or "being able." Healing, in this sense, is not always about getting well or being cured. It is about "being able" -- being able to live out our days with grace and truth — having the ability to live the we who we are and whose we are and what we know finally and ultimately matters.

Jesus in Luke’s version calls the people who have come to him "poor" and tells them they are blessed or fortunate anyway and even because they know they are poor. Matthew’s version has Jesus talk rather about "poor in spirit." Some say that Luke is addressing the dirt poor of the land, those disenfranchised and on the margin — the tax collectors, sinners, prostitutes with whom the Pharisees complain about him eating. Some say that Matthew tweaks the words just enough to make people like us in Myers Park happy — in contrast to as well as those Urban Crisis Ministry people downtown. One can argue that Matthew spiritualizes Jesus and helps create a religion that is congenial to people like us. That Luke speaks more likely to those living in the projects and wondering where the next meal is coming from. On the one hand, Luke and Matthew’s worlds seem totally different and at odds. On the other hand. Both have one thing in common. Being blessed, fortunate, and healed in both has to do with being poor. Poverty is what brings the poor or poor in spirit together in both stories and leads to their healing and wholeness — which I assume is what Jesus means by the kingdom of God now.

In the film "How to Make an American Quilt," Marianna shares words given her by a man in Paris years before. "Young lovers seek perfection," he writes to her. "Old lovers know the art of sewing shreds together, And of seeing beauty in the patches." The crowd gathered that day around Jesus has given up ideas and illusions of perfection and purity. They have stepped into a different kind of kingdom where the badge of entry is shreds and patches. Which may be true no matter where you live or how much money you’ve got or haven’t got.

The irony and agony is that poverty is ultimately what heals rather than riches. Luke names the woe. It is not that wealth is evil, but only that it cannot purchase the healing without which both rich and poor are dying. Ted Loder has written a prayer called "Pry Me Off Dead Center," a prayer for the broken and bruised by poverty of spirit or body or even bank account.

Deepen my hurt, [Lord God]
until I learn to share it
and myself
openly
and my needs honestly.
Sharpen my fears
until I name them
and release the power I have locked in them
and they in me.
Accentuate my confusion
until I shed those grandiose expectations
that divert me from the small, glad gifts
of the now and the here and the me.
Expose my shame where it shivers,
couched behind the curtains of propriety,
until I can laugh at last
through my common frailties and failures,
laugh my way towards becoming whole.
O persistent God,
let how much it all matters
pry me off dead center
so if I am moved inside
to tears
or sighs
or screams
they will be real
and I will be in touch with who I am
and who you are
and who my brothers and sisters are.

News this week of the death of Anne Morrow Lindbergh at age 94. Her death and our text recall the words she wrote in her journal soon after May 12, 1932 when the body of her kidnapped son, Charles Jr, was found buried nearby her Hopewell, New Jersey home. In "Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead," she writes:

"I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, and the willingness to remain vulnerable. All these, if the circumstances are right, can teach and lead to rebirth.

"But there is no simple formula," she adds, "or swift way out, no comfort or easy acceptance of suffering. 'There is no question,' as Katherine Mansfield wrote, 'of getting beyond it' -- 'The little boat enters the dark fearful gulf and our only cry is to escape -- put me on land again! But it is useless. Nobody listens. The shadowy figure rows on. One ought to sit still and uncover one's eyes.'"

Take the Bible text with you today. Read it again this afternoon or before you turn out the light tonight. Ponder and pray over it. Ask yourself sometime today how and where and in what ways you are dis-eased and troubled — uneasy in spirit, as we all have bodies that bruise and hearts that break. What is your suffering that waits, even longs, to teach you? How do you manage your poverty of spirit or health, deny, conceal and dissemble, keep private and secret what makes you anxious in the day and stalks you in the night? What does your hiddenness and silence do for you, for those around you, and for the ones who love you the most? What do you gain and what do you give up by holding onto and hoarding your deepest frustrations and fears, concealing them even from those who cherish you most and judge you the most gently? What might be the cost and promise of coming out of hiding and joining the human race -- if only with one or two who love you? What would be required of you to be seen and heard, recognized in the crowd reaching out? To come out, come out whoever and whatever you are? To run the risk of being seen, known, free, and healed!

Text: Luke 6:17-26; Matthew 5:1-12

* "How To Make An American Quilt" video by MCA Universal Home Video from the novel by the same title by Whitney Otto, Ballantine Books, 1991..

* Excerpted from Ted Loder, "Pry Me Off Dead Center" in "Guerillas of Grace: Prayers for the Battle," Innisfree Press, 1984.

* Anne Morrow Lindbergh, "Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead," Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973,
p. 214.

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