Mark 7: 24-37
James 2:
1-10, 14-17
Be Opened
September
10, 2006 Rally Sunday
Rev.
Elizabeth Macaulay
Why are you here?
Here, in this place on a Sunday morning.
Why are you
here when you could be home in bed (I know, I know, I know it is hard to be
here an hour early). You could be
sipping overpriced coffee at Starbucks.
You could be out on a hike or at your cabin or you could be at the store
that was Daytons that was Marshall Fields that is Macy’s.
You could be all of those places.
But you are here.
Why?
There are as many reasons for why you are here as there are
people here.
But I hope,
under all the shoulds and ought tos we have been taught about going to church
on Sunday you are here for this reason.
You know
that your life is in need of something and that something just might be the
touch of Jesus.
You. Eighty or eighteen. Delighted with church or frustrated with
it. Rich or poor or new to this church
or as long here as the bricks in the building.
I hope that in some part of you, there is an awareness that
you are starved for the touch of Jesus.
Maybe you know
loneliness.
Maybe you
know what it’s like to live paycheck to paycheck.
Maybe you
know shame and frustration because an addiction has you and it feels like it
will never let go.
Maybe you
know the agony of living the pain of war or the march of cancer.
Maybe you
wonder if anyone will ever love you again.
Or maybe you are so full of gratitude that you cannot figure
out how to live into your thanks.
And so you come to church.
Seeking the touch, the presence, the holding of the Holy.
Well, I’m glad you are here.
You join the rest of us who believe that there is more to
life than emptiness and pain.
It’s a new
church year. We are busied and full of
activity in these parts and sometimes it is so very important in the midst of
it all to stop and ask ourselves: why
are we here? Who do we do church,
anyway?
We have
three lessons this morning to ground our answer to the question of “why church?“
The first
lesson is taught to us by an outsider. A
Greek gentile who did an outrageous thing by approaching Jesus. She is lesson to us because she believed in
the power of Jesus’ healing more than she believed in the social barriers that
might keep her from it. She INSISTED
that Jesus heal her daughter, even having to break through his prejudicial
attitude.
The fact of their differences mattered less than her
insistence that her daughter be healed.
There are
times, are there not, when we come before the Holy with such agony and we
demand to be heard because we know that there is more to life than pain.
Through
these doors on a weekly basis come people seeking healing. Some of them call this place home. Some of them know nothing about Jesus but
they know that the movement that bears his name is a movement for healing and
so they come.
And what they get is a listening ear. And what they get is compassion, I pray.
Last year a
woman came in while she was obviously in the last stages of treatment for
cancer. She was deaf. She was twenty-something years old. She was apologetic but she needed help
because her car needed tires in order for her to get to her chemo
treatments. And she needed to get to
chemo so that she could stay alive to spend precious days with her two
children.
She was
willing to do what it took - in this case, come into a church where she was
unknown - and ask that we do the healing work of Jesus. We couldn’t heal her, but we could make the
precious few months remaining her more gracious. We listened.
We gave her the money for the used tires she found at a junk yard. Perhaps we provided the healing grace of
compassion so that she could live better into her death.
So the first lesson to ground us as church in this new year?
Church is a
place to speak pain, to speak the need for healing, to encounter the Holy
because someone will listen.
We offer
Al-Anon groups, men’s and women’s groups, youth groups and children’s
ministries and elder ministries because we know that in order to heal, we need
to be able to ask for God’s help and know we are not alone. We are heard.
The second
lesson is taught to us by those who brought the man to Jesus for healing. That’s what being church is about. Being church is about noticing the pain of
others and hearing the pain of others and reminding them that God is present
and ready to use whatever is at hand - spit and mud and the Holy Spirit in
order to bring healing. Sometimes
literally we have to bring people to that place of healing because they are too
broken to remember it exists.
That’s what
church is.
A dear
friend of mine has struggled with mental health issues most of his life. He is vibrant and creative and beautiful and
he deals with periods of mania and periods of depression and he has fought so
hard to find balance, this father of fine babies.
Visiting
him one night in the mental health ward of the hospital in
He pointed. There, he
said, this is what gives me hope.
What he
pointed to was the lit structure of his church.
Perched on the crest of the
He was not alone. He
was carried to healing on the arms of community. That’s church.
And there is this third thing about being church that our
text today teaches us.
The writer
of James is so clear:
We cannot pretend that justice exists when it does not.
We cannot
condone the growing obesity rate in our country while bellies are distended in
other countries because of starvation.
We cannot
favor the easy challenges and give them the finest seat in the house of our
concern. In the same way that Jesus told the deaf man that he needed to be open
in order to receive the gift of healing, we must be open to the awareness that
the ways we choose to live our lives impacts those around us.
And we must
be open to using the power we have, the power of our privilege and the healing
power of Jesus, to bring about justice in this world torn by so much pain.
That’s what it means to be church.
In this we
have the witness of Ellie Wiesel, winner of the Nobel Peace prize and survivor
of the Holocaust who would have us to know in words ringing as they do in
James.
“No one is
as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night. We know that every moment is a moment of
grace, every hour an offering; not to
share them would mean to betray them.
Our lives no longer belong to us alone;
they belong to all those who need us desperately.
…And that
is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure
suffering and humiliation. We must
always take sides. Neutrality helps the
oppressor, never the victim. Silence
encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
There is a great debate going on in our nation about the
place of faith in the political realm.
Well, my friends, Jesus didn’t teach or preach or heal in a
vacuum, and neither do we.
He
ministered in a time when oppression was literally stomping on the soul of his
people and he was NOT silent about speaking against the powerful who trample on
the rights of the poor.
Sometimes there is a sense in our churches that we want to
forget that.
Kurt
Vonnegut in his book Man Without a Country says it this way:
“For some
reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes (the
teachings of Jesus about “blessed are the poor and the peace makers and so
on). But, often with tears in their
eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course, that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the
Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.” (Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country,
pg 98).
To be
church is to do our best to live by the teachings of the Beatitudes. And that means paying attention to issues of
justice. That’s the gospel.
So, church:
We allow
ourselves to speak pain.
We know it
to be our task to remind others of the healing grace of God.
And we work
to live in a world where our brothers live as well as we do.
That’s church.
Thanks be to God.
Amen