When Jesus met a woman at a well in Samaria, it turned out that they both had something to offer to one another: Refreshment.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the fourth chapter of John’s Gospel (John 4:5-42): the conversation between Jesus and a woman he met at a well in Samaria.
The conversation started with Jesus’ simple request that she share some of the water she was drawing so that he could have a drink. It went from there to matters much deeper — deeper even than the well, if you like. It went to spiritual matters. It went even to the identity of the Messiah, the Deliverer, the one who was coming.
Unlike lots of other conversations, Jesus actually acknowledged to the woman that he was the Messiah.
The conversation was persuasive enough that she went back to the town and invited her neighbors to meet him. She said, “Come and meet a man who told me everything I’ve ever done. He couldn’t be the Messiah — or could he? Come and see.”
It occurs to me that this story is about refreshment. It started with Jesus asking to be refreshed with the literal water to be drawn from the well. It continued with the refreshment that Jesus offered to this woman and to her neighbors: refreshment of the spirit.
He offered and delivered not just an acceptance, but also real valuing for her and for those around her, despite the fact that she was a Samaritan, despite the fact that she was a woman, despite the fact that there were a number of things that should have kept them distant from one another.
Yet they refreshed one another.
I think refreshment is a central activity, a central calling, a central obligation, if you like, of the life of faith. We are not simply here to be ourselves. We are here to support one another, to be a community, to be a family, if you like. In that family we refresh one another. We provide refreshment such as water, food, shelter. We provide refreshment emotionally and relationally. And when and how we can, we offer refreshment for the spirit: that living water of which Jesus spoke that flows through our very souls and renews our lives.
Refreshment.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
As he sat down to write his letter to the church in Rome – or perhaps as he stood to dictate it to the scribe, Tertius, who offers greetings at the end of the letter – the Apostle Paul had an agenda. He planned a trip to Spain. He had travelled a lot in the years since the risen Jesus summoned him to proclaim this good news. He hoped to go even further, to the place Clement of Rome, writing at the end of the first century, called “the farthest west.”
Along the way, said Paul, he wanted to visit the Christian community in Rome.
Unlike his other letters in the New Testament, Paul wrote this letter to people he didn’t know. He hoped for their assistance, I’m sure: a place to stay during his visit. He said he looked forward to preaching the gospel, so I’m sure he planned to do the same things he’d done in cities and towns across modern Israel, Syria, Turkey, and Greece. He wanted to meet people he’d heard good things of, names that had reached his ears across the Mediterranean Sea.
The Letter to the Romans was Paul on his best behavior, writing to strangers, trying to make a good impression.
Paul knew, and the Romans knew, that their church had had problems. A major one was that there’d been fights in the streets. The Emperor Claudius had banished Jews from the city of Rome on because of “disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus,” which most scholars interpret as dissension between Jews and Jews leaning into the new understandings of Jesus. The chances are very good that most if not all of the members of the Roman church had been shut out of the city, though it’s unknown for how long.
That probably wasn’t the Roman church’s only problem. Romans has sixteen chapters. The last chapter is a long set of greetings. Chapters twelve through fifteen contain a typically Pauline set of advice including, “Let love be genuine,” and “Owe no one anything, except to love one another.” Except for his opening introduction, he gave the rest of the letter: his time, his consideration, and his considerable focused attention, to one question: What difference is there, if any, between God’s relationship with Christians of a Jewish background and God’s relationship with Christians of a Gentile background?
It was a knotty problem. As Dan Clendenin writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “In Romans 3:29 Paul asked a provocative question: is God the God of Jews only? Or is he not also the God of Gentiles? In contrast to every attempt to claim God as ours, and ours alone, Paul says that in Abraham God loves all people equally. In the famous words of this week’s gospel, God so loves all the world (John 3:16). Our tendency is to fear the other, to marginalize the strange, to dismiss all that is different from who and what we know.”
That’s true now, and it was true in the first century. Jews had long regarded their relationship with God as unique. God might have created the world, but had only entered into covenant with one group of people. On the other hand, Romans – especially those dwelling in the city of Rome – regarded themselves as the greatest people ever. Most people living in the Empire were not Roman citizens and lived under different laws. Roman citizens, for example, could be executed for treason but they could not be crucified.
The Roman church included both Jews and Romans. Some of the latter would have been citizens and some non-citizens, adding another layer of class distinction to an uncomfortable mix, with everyone wondering: How does God really feel about that person on the other side of the room?
That’s why Paul got so excited about a revolutionary idea: that a relationship with God could be established not by living in the right place, not by divine selection, not through ritual observance, but through faith. Anyone could make the decision to trust in God. Anyone. “For this reason the promise depends on faith, in order that it may rest on grace, so that it may be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (who is the father of all of us)…”
Not only for me. Also for them. Not only for us. Also for them. Not only for the select of Rome. Also for Spaniards. Not only for the Jews. Also for the Greeks. Not only for the men. Also for the women. Not only for today’s believers. Also for tomorrow’s believers. Not only for people of the “Christian” nations. Also for the people of the non-Christian nations. Not only for the rich. Also for the poor. Not only for the powerful. Also for the marginalized. Not only for the respectable. Also for the discounted. Not only for the Americans. Also for the Iranians. Not only for the Republicans. Also for the Democrats, and the Independents, and the Greens, and the Libertarians, and so on. Not only for the people who agree with me. Also for the ones who don’t.
Let’s face it. God gets along better, with more people, than I do.
As Lucy Lind Hogan writes at Working Preacher, “Paul had experienced God’s amazing, unbelievable, overflowing love and forgiveness. How could God, in Jesus Christ, have forgiven him for all the evil that he had done? How could God accept the one who had sought to murder the disciples of Jesus? Because that is who our God is. For Paul, justification by grace was a theological concept only after it had been a life changing, throw-you-to-the-ground, awe-filled experience. God had offered him new life, and he had believed.”
These are anxious days. Hold on to that core of trust and faith: God loves you just as much as Paul or anyone. God loves you.
God also loves us. And God loves them. No matter who “we” are. No matter who “they” are.
Not only for us. Also for everyone.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes from his prepared text while preaching, so the sermon prepared does not precisely match the sermon as delivered.
Who can receive grace? According to the Apostle Paul: anybody and everybody.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the fourth chapter of the Apostle Paul’s letter to the church in Rome (Romans 4:1-5, 13-17).
Paul faced a real challenge. It was a challenge of theology. It was a challenge of thought. It was a challenge of relationship. He firmly believed that the salvation that God had offered through Jesus was urgent and important. He firmly believed that it needed to be extended to the entire population of the world.
The relationship with God, however, have been understood for centuries as mediated by a couple of limiting factors. They believed that the relationship with God was primarily for the descendants of Abraham. Other people could be added, but it took time and effort. Further, they believed — Paul believed —that through the gift of the Law offered through Moses, God had codified that relationship. Therefore people who followed the Law were those who could expect to receive any kind of grace from God.
The apostle Paul believed that that grace needed to be offered and expanded and extended as far and wide as possible.
So he went back the God’s relationship with Abraham. He went back and he found a critical aspect of that relationship. When God said to Abraham, “I will make you an ancestor,” even though that seems incredibly unlikely at Abraham’s advanced age, Abraham believed God. Abraham trusted God. There, said Paul, was the seed. There, said Paul, was the key to open the door.
Not the keeping of the Law, because as we know about law, law defines not “keeping” so much as it defines breaking. Not even kinship, ancestors sharing from Abraham, that was not where that original relationship had begun. It had begun in trust.
Trust in God, said the Apostle Paul, and that relationship is yours. That offer of salvation can be accepted. That place next to Jesus can be yours.
Not only for Abraham, not only for the countless others who had followed Abraham, not only for them, but also for you.
As we continue our Lenten journey, it is worth remembering that it was the Apostle Paul who, for the vast majority of us, made it not only for them but also for us.
May it also be a part of our Lenten journey to see that we understand and share God’s grace as not only for us, but for everyone.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
It’s still Christmas. It really is twelve days long in the Church calendar, and we’re on day eleven, so you can thank your lucky stars that you’re not likely to receive eleven pipers piping or eleven missionaries today. On this eleventh day of Christmas, if we’re thinking about the Holy Family, we’re probably thinking about the mixed joy and fear of Jesus’ parents, still trying to figure out what their newborn would need next.
The Revised Common Lectionary wants us to turn our attention elsewhere. As Cody J. Sanders writes at Working Preacher, “The prologue of John’s Gospel cracks the lens with which we are tempted to engage in any too-small reading of the Gospel by directing our attention toward a cosmic space-time reality. Unlike the Lukan narrative that often shapes our imaginations in the Christmas season, the Second Sunday of Christmas plunges us into the deep time of the primordial Genesis creation narratives with John’s opening words: ‘In the beginning…’”
You’ve probably caught the reference John made to the beginning of Genesis, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…” (Genesis 1:1) You may not have caught the other parallels John made with other classic texts, particularly those from Jewish Wisdom literature like Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. As Jaime Clark-Soles writes at Working Preacher, “John brilliantly presents Jesus in the role of Lady Wisdom in a number of ways. As we read in numerous LXX texts, Lady Wisdom (hokhmah in Hebrew, Sophia in Greek) is God’s partner: she helps to create the world, she delights in the human race, she continually tries to help humans to get knowledge and flee from ignorance. She cries aloud incessantly. Unfortunately, the Old Testament tells us that she is often rejected because fools hate knowledge and humans would rather wallow in ignorance, for the most part.”
As I mentioned in this morning’s children’s time, wisdom and knowledge aren’t the same thing, but… acting in ignorance, deliberately choosing ignorance, is definitely not wise.
In contrast, wrote John, Jesus, God’s Messiah, embodied the ancient concept of Wisdom: knowledgeable, just, generous, righteous, thoughtful, faithful, peaceful.
These had been the virtues encouraged by Judaism: written in wisdom literature, declared by the prophets, required in the Law, and celebrated in the Psalms.
Those are the virtues exhibited by Jesus.
A little wisdom had become a lot of wisdom.
It’s a wisdom that’s not just of the intellect. “The Word became flesh and lived among us” – the word “lived” can be translated as “pitched a tent.” “Pitching tent,” writes Karyn Wiseman at Working Preacher, “means coming to be fully part of the world in which you live and minister. The Word in this text is doing just that — coming to ‘pitch tent’ with humanity. The Word made flesh comes to be in the world and to change the world.” Dr. Clark-Soles writes that John is “a very touchy-feely Gospel… John wants us to understand that the same intimacy shared by God and Jesus is shared with us and Jesus/God. Hence, the Incarnation.”
“Moreover,” writes Karoline Lewis at Working Preacher, “in the Word made flesh and dwelling among us, now God not only goes where God’s people go, but is who they are. That is, God now dwells with us by taking on our form, our humanity. This ‘different’ dwelling of God is God being where God’s people are, and now who God’s people are.”
A little bit of wisdom has become a whole lot of presence, God’s presence, with us, with everyone, with all the world.
The wisdom Jesus embodied is the wisdom Jesus lived. He brought compassion and forgiveness to people who’d been told they deserved no forgiveness and would receive no compassion. He rejected the options of servile acceptance of tyranny and of violent upheaval against tyranny. He encouraged rigorous personal ethics and a community ethic of mutual care and support. He refused to accept the casual practices that had enriched moneychangers around the Temple at the expense of faithful people. When they came to arrest him, he did not meet violence with violence.
Jesus set us the challenge of living that same wisdom, and it is a challenge. It’s a high bar. It’s a wisdom that may call us to put others’ interests over our own. It’s a wisdom that looks foolish when it leads to a cross.
It’s a wisdom that leads to resurrection.
The foolishness of the world leads to suffering, dissension, and death.
I really wish people wouldn’t hand me perfect sermon illustrations on Saturday, but some people have a talent for it. The headline of yesterday’s editorial from the New York Times Editorial Board was, “Donald Trump’s Attack on Venezuela Is Illegal and Unwise.” They concluded with these words:
“We will hold out hope that the current crisis will end less badly than we expect. We fear that the result of Mr. Trump’s adventurism is increased suffering for Venezuelans, rising regional instability and lasting damage for America’s interests around the world. We know that Mr. Trump’s warmongering violates the law.”
This is the kind of leadership that Jesus simply rejected. He wouldn’t do it himself. He wouldn’t bow to those who tried to govern him that way. Let’s be clear: it got him crucified. Nothing they did could force him to change his ways. Nothing they did could prevent his resurrection.
Fortunately there are examples of people following Jesus’ wisdom in the world.
Melissa Bane Sevier writes in her blog: “Yes, there are people who do really bad things in this world. But there are also moments when we can point to some person or act and think: There. There it is. That’s how we see eternity right here.
“Maybe it’s some random act of kindness. Or the face of your most precious loved one. Some deep goodness you see in a person you know or a stranger.
“We have each other. The Word is made flesh anew each day, right here among us.
“And we glimpse grace and truth.”
Glimpse grace and truth in those around you. Let others glimpse Christ in you.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes while he preaches. Sometimes they’re intentional. Sometimes they’re not.
The answer, of course, is yes. You can. You can turn water into wine. There’s a trick to it.
The secret is to add grapes.
I am not the first to make that joke. Augustine of Hippo wrote in the fifth century, “The miracle indeed of our Lord Jesus Christ, whereby He made the water into wine, is not marvellous to those who know that it was God’s doing. For He who made wine on that day at the marriage feast, in those six water-pots, which He commanded to be filled with water, the self-same does this every year in vines. For even as that which the servants put into the water-pots was turned into wine by the doing of the Lord, so in like manner also is what the clouds pour forth changed into wine by the doing of the same Lord. But we do not wonder at the latter, because it happens every year: it has lost its marvellousness by its constant recurrence.”
The world, Augustine observed, is full of God’s miracles, so full that we’ve ceased to recognize them as God’s handiwork.
It seems, however, that somebody goofed among the wedding planners in Cana. They ran out of wine. The hosts may not have been entirely at fault. As Lindsey S. Jodrey writes at Working Preacher, “We may read the story and wonder why the family of the bride and groom failed to provide enough wine. However, it was ancient custom for guests to bring wedding gifts in the form of food and drink to share the burden of providing for such a large group. Thus, the family’s lack of wine may indicate a lack of community support in addition to their own lack of resources. Jesus’ actions are that of a friend and faithful community member; the provision of wine is a sign of shared hospitality.”
When Mary came to her son to tell him there was no wine, his reply, “What concern is that to me and to you?” was a little discomforting. As a guest, he had some obligation to aid his host. Perhaps he had already contributed something to the feast. But perhaps – and John’s narrative of a short time period between Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan valley and his attendance at this wedding some miles away suggests this could have happened – perhaps Jesus and his new followers hadn’t brought anything, or hadn’t brought what his mother considered enough. Even if he had, it’s clear that she thought he could and should do more.
The other half of Jesus’ response, though, was more complicated. In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ “hour” (“My hour has not yet come”) was the time of his crucifixion. If it seems like a stretch to say that Jesus saw this moment as one that set him on the path to that terrible Friday, I’ll just say that the author didn’t see it that way. Jesus’ mother appears only twice in John’s Gospel: here, and at the foot of the cross; when the hour had not yet come, and when the hour had come.
There was a simple way to deal with the situation. Jesus might have turned to Peter, Andrew, Philip, and Nathanael, and said, “Come on, guys. Let’s pool our money and go to the wine shop. Between us we might get enough to last out the evening.” If he was concerned that five of them couldn’t carry enough, Mary was enlisting the servers to help. Jesus didn’t have to do what he actually did.
John called it the first of his signs. He meant something specific by that. It wasn’t enough that Jesus did something remarkable, or powerful, or miraculous. That act revealed something about Jesus. It said something about his purpose. It said something about his nature.
John wrote that turning water into wine in Cana, the first of his signs, Jesus “revealed his glory.”
But hardly anyone recognized it at the time.
The chief server didn’t know. Nobody told him where the good wine had come from. The hosts didn’t know. Nobody told them, either. The other guests didn’t know. The servants knew, but if they told anyone else, John left it out. Jesus’ mother knew. Jesus’ closest friends knew, because they were paying attention.
As far as I can see, Jesus revealed his glory to less than a dozen people.
That tells us a lot about Jesus’ glory, doesn’t it? It’s not a glory for show, to display or to impress. It’s not a glory that cries, “Look at me!” It’s not a glory about ego. It’s not a glory that demands worship. It’s a glory that can go unnoticed. It is, to go back to Augustine for a moment, a glory that can lose its marvellousness by its constant recurrence.
It was also a glory of profound compassion.
It’s not clear just how much the hosts would have suffered if they had, in fact, run out of wine at the feast. Some scholars suggest it would have been shameful, which is no small thing in a culture based on honor and shame. Others don’t think they would have experienced any long-term consequences. At the least, it would have been embarrassing. I’m pretty sure that years later, they’d have blushed when the story came up – again – “Remember when the wine ran out at the wedding? Good times!”
Mary thought that was worth avoiding. In the end, Jesus thought so, too.
I’m afraid that doesn’t mean that Jesus will always act to preserve us from simple embarrassment. I can tell you that Jesus might have done done that at various times in my life, but certainly not every time. I’ve been embarrassed more times than I care to count or remember. It does mean that Jesus cares more about the seemingly trivial parts of our lives than we might imagine. It’s not all about life and death, suffering and wholeness, damnation and salvation. It’s also about helping us through the other challenges of life.
Jesus’ compassion extends not just to our health, but to our joy. As Karoline Lewis writes at Working Preacher, “Turning water into wine is revealing of abundant grace in this season of Epiphany. And what does abundant grace taste like? Like the best wine when you are expecting the cheap stuff.” Jesus’ compassion delights.
Abundant grace is also easy to miss. How many people were at the wedding feast that day? I don’t know. How many received this grace without knowing it? Nearly all. Nearly all.
So can you turn water into wine?
It turns out you can. You and I just have to work harder to make it happen. As Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “Maybe we can be like Mary. Maybe we can notice, name, persist, and trust. No matter how profound the scarcity, no matter how impossible the situation, we can elbow our way in, pull Jesus aside, ask earnestly for help, and ready ourselves for action. We can tell God hard truths, even when we’re supposed to be celebrating. We can keep human need squarely before our eyes, even and especially when denial, apathy, or distraction are easier options. And finally, we can invite others to obey the miraculous wine-maker we have come to know and trust.”
We can turn water into wine.
We can bring more joy into the lives of our families, friends, and neighbors. We can act such that the needs we see get addressed, whether they’re urgent and important or seemingly trivial. We can gather the supports to get things done. We can name and proclaim the acts of grace, the deeds of mercy, the times of transformation, and we can declare, “This is glory, people. Ignore the prattle of the powerful and their pathetic posturing. Glory is compassion. Glory is humility. Glory is love. This is glory.”
Yes. We can say that. We can live that.
We can turn water into wine.
We can also turn wine into water, and for those who have addiction to alcohol, we might have to do that sometimes. There’s a trick there, too. Boil it. The alcohol evaporates first. The point is: Don’t let the metaphor get in the way.
Jesus displayed his glory with compassion, humility, and grace. Let us display our glory with compassion, humility, and grace.
Let us be like Mary. Let us be like Jesus.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric does depart from his prepared text from time to time. Sometimes he’s trying to improve it.
“There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.”
Isn’t that just how you were hoping to begin the Advent season?
I say this pretty much every first Sunday of Advent, because in the season in which we prepare for Christmas it seems odd to jump to the end of the book. Jesus spoke these words to his disciples in or near the Temple during what we know was the last week before his crucifixion. Why would we be here rather than somewhere in chapter one of Luke’s Gospel?
The answer, in brief, is that Advent is not about preparing for the birth of Jesus. That’s already happened. It’s not even really about preparing for the celebration of the birth of Jesus, though that closer. Advent is the time in which we prepare to celebrate the gift of Christ in the person of Jesus, a gift which was given us two millennia ago, a gift which remains given to us through history into the present, and a gift which will continue to be given to us to the end of time.
Which is why we’re in chapter 21, because here Jesus spoke about things that Christians have interpreted to take place at the end of time. Some of them, however, had already taken place. Earlier in the chapter Jesus spoke about the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. By the time Luke wrote his Gospel, according to scholars, the Temple had been destroyed. Jesus warned his disciples that there would be official persecution of his followers. By the time Luke wrote his Gospel, that had already taken place.
As for the signs and the distress and the roaring and the fainting, well, Catherine Healy writes in The Christian Century, “I am not a biblical literalist, yet the imagery in this passage gives me pause. As our planet gets hotter and tidal floods increase, aren’t we already seeing ‘signs in the sun [and] the moon’? And as rising waters drive more and more climate refugees from their homelands, it’s hard not to notice that ‘distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea’ is already upon us.”
It’s hard not to notice that, indeed.
Based on the way people keep trying to match signs and distress and roaring and fainting with historic events, it’s apparently hard to notice that… these things happen all the time.
I grant you that we’ve had an eventful few years here in Hilo, Hawai’i, but since I began serving as pastor here we’ve had earthquakes, a volcanic eruption that displaced two thousand people, a hurricane, at least a couple of tropical storms, a significant civil disruption, increasing political dissension in the United States rising to an actual insurrection event. Oh, and a global pandemic. I almost forgot that.
Come, Lord Jesus! If you want to return before Christmas, I’m fine with that!
The truth is that these “signs and times” aren’t useful to predict timing because they are so frequent. Karoline Lewis writes at Working Preacher, “Yes, Jesus speaks the truth, not about our future, but about our condition, the world’s condition, that never really changes. Perhaps this is the grief of this passage. That nothing ever changes. That God cannot prevent those who seek power from exercising power in the most inhumane of ways. That we still live have to prepare God’s way in spite of fear and foreboding.”
Come back before Christmas, Lord Jesus. I’m more than fine with that.
Except that… Jesus already has. That, I think, was the point he was making with his disciples two thousand years ago. You see, Jesus had already said something about when the reign of God was coming. He said it back in Luke’s chapter four, when he announced in the synagogue that the Isaiah’s promise of a year of God’s favor was fulfilled in their hearing. Or in other words: the Messiah was already present.
God’s promises were already present in front of the disciples who heard him say, “the kingdom of God is near.”
So near, disciples, that you’re part of it just sitting there.
“The season of Advent, as we reflect upon the coming of the Word made flesh and dwelling among us,” writes Cheryl Lindsay at UCC.org, “challenges us to make our love incarnate, our hope unmovable, our peace tangible, and our joy complete.”
That, after all, is what God did in the incarnate Jesus: rooted our hope, founded our peace, completed our joy, and embodied love.
I wish that Jesus’ presence meant that all the signs and times with their distress and roaring and fainting had been transformed into the vision of a Peaceable Realm described by some of the prophets. That, all too obviously, hasn’t happened. If a great outbreak of peace took place, it seems to me that that would be a much bigger and more visible sign of better times.
What we have instead is Jesus’ presence – all the time. As Audrey West writes at Working Preacher, “the apocalyptic vision shared by Jesus is assurance that even (especially) in the face of devastation—whether it is caused by nature’s fury or by human hubris—the reign of God will not be impeded. No matter how much it appears that the world is coming un-done, God’s way endures.” And: “Even during earth-rending moments, God is near.”
The age-old images of disaster and destruction will not, I’m afraid, tell us when history will end. They won’t tell us when Jesus will return. Partially that’s because they’re not much use as predictors, since they’re so common. Mostly it’s because Jesus promised to be with us always, and we trust in the promise.
Jesus has been with us through the earthquakes and storms and volcanic eruptions. Jesus has been with us through the political upheavals and pandemics. Jesus has been with us through the day-to-day blessings of our lives. Jesus has been with us at the birthday celebrations, at the achievements, and at the end of days when nothing much seemed to happen except the same-old, same-old. Jesus will be with us this Advent season and right on into Christmas.
Signs and times be what they may, Jesus is with us.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric frequently makes changes while preaching, accidentally and otherwise, so the sermon text will not precisely match the sermon as delivered.
The image is Jésus se promène dans le portique de Salomon (Jesus Walks in the Portico of Solomon) by James Tissot (between 1886 and 1894) – Online Collection of Brooklyn Museum; Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 2007, 00.159.177_PS2.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10957468.
Jesus had been teaching along the shores of Galilee. It probably provided about as convenient an open area as they were likely to find near Capernaum. At the end of the day, you might recall, he had directed his disciples to sail across the sea (or lake, however you want to think of it). Personally, I think Jesus was looking for a day off.
It didn’t go all that well. They ran into a storm which forced his disciples to wake him up, and he was cranky about that. They pulled to shore in a place where people shouldn’t have known him. It wasn’t thickly settled with Jews. A perfect place to relax.
That’s when a possessed man found him and called him by name. Apparently the demons – they described themselves as “Legion” – recognized Jesus for who he was. Jesus, of course, could not leave these demons in possession of the man, so they asked to be sent into a nearby herd of pigs. He sent them there, at which the pigs promptly rushed into the sea and drowned.
That didn’t sit well with the locals, especially the owner of the pigs, I’m sure, so they told Jesus to go away.
So much for a vacation.
When Jesus and his friends returned to the Galilee side, they found a crowd, including Jairus, leader of a local synagogue and desperate to obtain Jesus’ aid for his ailing daughter. Had they been waiting all day and all night? I wonder. They headed for the house, with the crowd still milling about and probably getting in the way more than they cleared the way. As they went, a woman reached out and touched Jesus’ cloak, and suddenly twelve years of bleeding ceased.
As Cheryl Lindsay writes at UCC.org, “Their journey is interrupted by the hemorrhaging woman. It’s interesting to note that she did not intend to disrupt their movement. Unlike Jairus, she does not need an audience with Jesus to present her petition. She believes his touch will be enough.”
As it was. But it also interrupted the journey. Jesus did not want the recipients of his healing to be anonymous, at least not to him. He wanted to praise her daring to reach out to him in faith.
That’s when the messengers arrived with the tragic news that Jairus’ daughter had died.
It’s funny. I’ve read this story for decades and I have always blamed the woman for slowing everything down, for delaying Jesus before he could reach the girl. When the real delay was caused first by Jesus leaving the area in the boat, and second by the streets filled with people.
That’s when somebody uttered these crucial words: “Why trouble the teacher any further?”
I suppose it’s nice that somebody had some regard for Jesus’ time and welfare. Up to this point in the story, that’s been hard to find. Jesus’ reputation, thus far in the Gospel of Mark, had summoned crowds that make it difficult to eat, had prompted his family to wonder if he was crazy, had brought examiners out from the Jerusalem to see what he was up to, had forced him to cross the lake to get a break (and we know how that went), and had now got him stuck in a crowd so dense that his friends can’t imagine how he distinguished one touch from all the others.
Jesus had not been having easy days.
D. Mark Davis writes at LeftBehindAndLovingIt, “I do want to note that when Jesus turns and addresses the crowd, he takes back the agency of his actions. He was met immediately by Jairus and regardless of whatever his intentions were it seems that the urgency of Jairus’ daughter suddenly scripted Jesus’ actions. Then, the woman grabs his garment and his healing power goes out of him, with no reference to Jesus’ will or intent at all. Others are determining his actions and even his location. Until now. Now, he stops – as urgent as Jairus may be – he stops and turns and inquires.”
Up to this point in our text, Jesus had been pretty passive. He’d been swept along by Jairus’ plea, and then by the movement of the crowd, and had even healed the woman without making the choice to do so. We don’t often think of Jesus as swept along by the crowd, but in this story, that’s what happened to him.
Until he stopped it all. He took a breath. He asked who touched him. He learned who touched him. He praised the courage of her faith that made her well.
Then: “Why trouble the teacher any further?”
Now the teacher troubled himself. Having praised the woman for reaching out despite her fears, he continued the journey to Jairus’ daughter despite her parents’ fears. Reaching the house, he took charge. He cleared it of everyone except the parents and three of his disciples. Maybe they hadn’t said, “How can you say, ‘Who touched me?’ which Jesus clearly hadn’t appreciated. As D. Mark Davis writes, “Regarding the disciples’ effrontery, it is a wise guiding principle, when speaking to someone who is not stupid, to act as though what s/he has said is not stupid.” So yes. Jesus didn’t need those guys in the house.
And then: a woman who had suffered twelve years had reached out to him and been healed. Jesus reached out to a twelve-year-old girl and said, “Talitha cum. Little girl, get up.” And she did.
This time, Jesus didn’t say, “Your faith has made you well.” Nobody in the room said it, but perhaps one or two thought what I’ve been thinking: “Jesus, your faith has made her well.”
We value faith in the Christian Church. A declaration of faith is a basic part of membership in the Church. We ask it of people who are baptized as adults, and when people are baptized as infants, we ask it of them later at confirmation. When people join a new church, we ask them to affirm their faith again.
It’s almost like the price of admission. You want to see the Jesus movie? Let’s see your faith.
That gets more complicated when we look at our lives in relation to illness and healing. We hear Jesus’ words in the back of our minds, don’t we? “…if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.” “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” And: “Have you still no faith?”
But what if Jesus – what if God – has faith in us?
What if faith isn’t the price of admission, but an ohi’a seed that struggles in rocky crevices to somehow, beyond expectation, produce a shoot and branches and flowers? What if Jesus extends his faith in us to us, so that we can receive it and rejoice in it, so that we can nurture it and bear fruit in it? What if God cared so much about the world to make no distinction between those with wholehearted belief and those who wonder if they could have faith? What if God loved the world and its people whether they’re faith-filled or fearful? What if God so loves the world?
It’s clear that faith makes things possible that won’t happen otherwise. On the most basic, human level, a person who believes they can’t do a thing won’t do the thing, and the thing won’t happen. A person who has lost faith in the justice system won’t contest a lawsuit, and that probably means that justice won’t happen. A person who has lost faith in their body’s capacity to recover from an illness won’t seek medical attention, putting their healing at risk.
What faith doesn’t do is open up the compassion of God. God’s love and care flows to everyone, whether they are aware of it or not, whether they believe in it or not, whether they want it or not. Faith makes it easier – not easy, but easier – to accept that love and care and to flourish in it.
So why trouble the teacher? Because that is a way to seek what is already there, and in seeking to accept what is given. Troubling the teacher opens up our hearts, minds, souls, and bodies to the grace of God. Troubling the teacher opens the door so that power may come in and raise us up.
Troubling the teacher might even leave those words echoing in our souls: “Your faith has made you well.”
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric does make changes from his prepared text as he preaches. Just watch. He’ll do it.
I think we would have to describe these events in the Gospel of Mark as a bad day for Jesus. That is, a day that would have been hard on him. He’d returned home from a teaching tour around Galilee, he’d appointed his inner circle of twelve disciples – and Mark helpfully reminded us that one of them betrayed him – and I’m pretty sure that he hoped to get a little bit of down time – Sabbath, now where have we heard that idea before? – in his own house. But no. The crowds assembled once again, and he and his friends couldn’t even get out of the building to find food to eat.
Not good.
Then Jesus’ family turned up. Why? They’d heard about his new activities. He’d clearly made a big shift from what he’d been doing, because they thought he was crazy. It’s something of an open secret that my grandmother didn’t want me to become a minister. She lived her life in a small town in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts, and the pastors of her small church were overburdened, poorly paid, and sometimes the targets of ill-defined anger. She didn’t want that for her grandson. Jesus’ family didn’t want it for their son, their brother. With the streets full of people, they couldn’t even get in to see him.
Not good.
And then we’ve got the Investigating Committee of scribes from the Temple in Jerusalem. Jesus must have developed a reputation pretty quickly to get Temple scholars interested in the goings-on of Galilee. They clearly arrived suspicious. I would guess they thought they’d find that the reports of healings and demon-banishings were exaggerated or erroneous. But no, they weren’t. So there must be another explanation. Satan vs. Satan, perhaps?
Not good.
David Schnasa Johnson writes at Working Preacher, “His family is up in arms and the authorities are raising questions about him. Jesus’ family is attempting to rein him in because they are worried about his eccentric ministry of healing, exorcism, and forgiveness in Galilee. Along come the authorities who wish to delegitimize Jesus with the damning diagnosis of Beelzebul-itus.”
Not good.
Do you recognize the impulse behind these two reactions, that of Jesus’ family and that of the scribes? It’s the one that drives conspiracy theories. Something has happened that you don’t like, and not only don’t like but don’t understand, or something so contrary to what you want that even if you do understand how it might have happened you can’t accept that explanation. So it’s got to be a conspiracy.
Jesus’ family adopted the most innocuous form: He was ill. He couldn’t make decisions properly. He wasn’t responsible for his actions. I can hear them telling themselves and others, “Calm down. Don’t wind him up. We’ll get him settled. We’ll take care of him. It will be all right.”
The scribes, however, went further down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole. Jesus was clearly doing extraordinary things. But they couldn’t accept that the source of his extraordinary power was God, because… well… “Give us a minute. There are reasons why a completely unauthorized self-appointed preacher with no training in the proper teachings shouldn’t go running around doing this. It’s got to be Satan.”
As is typical of conspiracy thinking, Jesus was able to demolish the flawed logic in a sentence. “If a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.” Satan vs. Satan makes a nice title for a sermon, but it’s a dreadful explanation for extraordinary things.
As Matt Skinner writes at Working Preacher, “Those scribes have dismissed the possibility of God’s restoration, for they write it off as a satanic deception. They show themselves devoid of hope and openly contemptuous of God’s work. Around them, people are being set free from their demons. People are experiencing wholeness and life. People’s dignity is acknowledged. Jesus promises that sins and ‘whatever blasphemies’ may occur will prove no obstacle to people’s renewal (Mark 3:28)! And yet the scribes scoff and denounce all of this as false or dangerous.”
Not good.
These bizarre accusations remind Dan Clendenin, writing at JourneyWithJesus.net, of an old saying by the 3rd century desert hermit St. Anthony the Great, who said, “A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, ‘You are mad, you are not like us.'”
Not to contradict St. Anthony, but it had already happened. To Jesus.
Not good.
It would have been nice if Mark’s telling of this story had made the followers of Jesus more resistant to conspiracy stories and theories. I suppose it might have, but certainly not enough. Contemporary Christians have created abundant ways to delude themselves that are no more logical and no more open-minded than those suspicious scribes two millennia ago. My personal favorite is the accusation that Christians are oppressed in contemporary Western societies. Well, it takes a particular definition of oppression to conclude that. You have to believe that oppression is the same thing as not exerting complete control over everybody in a society, forcing them to do the things you want them to do or not to do the things you don’t want them to do. If I’m not given the power to make you do exactly what I say, then I am oppressed.
Um. No. Not even close.
Not good.
Now our text returns to Jesus’ family. This was a favorite writing technique of the gospel writer Mark, by the way. He loved to embed one story within another, so that one would comment on the other, and the two combined would strengthen the message.
They told him his mother and brothers were calling him. He said something deeply unsettling: “Who are my mother and my brothers?” I mean, ouch. I grant you that I’d be prickly if my family was outside telling people I was crazy, even though I also grant you that we should all consider that possibility. Still, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” They’re the ones who were worried about you, Jesus. They’re the ones who cared enough to brave the crowds to see you.
But that wasn’t Jesus’ final word. “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother,” Jesus said. In a culture in which family was even more important than ‘ohana in Hawai’i – and that’s really important – Jesus extended his family. He opened it up and invited others in. He expanded it beyond what anyone might expect.
“Then here perhaps are we,” writes Meda Stamper at Working Preacher, “the crowd pressing in to see him and touch him, maybe urgently and desperately, but as the tale turns we find that our desperate desire has been more than met. We also are claimed by him as his sisters and brothers and mother, no longer outsiders at a distance, but holders of the secrets of the kingdom, drawn into the inner circle of the mystery and love of God.”
I think I’d have to call this one: Good.
We have the option to adopt the conspiracy theory mindset if we like. We can believe that the world is exactly what we want it to be and when it isn’t, then there’s an organized evil force working against what we want. We can decide that leaps in logic are perfectly acceptable if it confirms what we want.
Not so good.
Or – and this isn’t precisely an either-or choice, but let’s go with it for now – we can accept that we don’t know everything, that God has more light and truth to spring forth into the world, that the possibilities of grace are beyond what we’ve considered. As Sara Wilhelm Garbers has written in her blog, “When we are caught up in the limitations of our human conceptions of kingdom, it means that we will perpetually struggle to remember that the whole reason that we say ‘Jesus is Lord,’ is because by doing so it means Caesar is not. And if we forget this and forget that the gospel invitation is into a family then we will keep on ordering our lives in response to earthly powers and imaginations and will give away our power to the kings of this earth who promise to fortify our egos and keep us from having to awaken to the seashore kin-dom family. For God’s kingdom is a kin-dom where we’re invited to take up the responsibility to love and lay down our lives.”
Like Jesus did. Which I’d have to call good.
Let the conspiracies, let the distrust, let Satan vs. Satan go. It was never worth it.
Jesus has invited you into the ‘ohana. That is worth everything.
