SUNDAY SERMON

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jack E. Skiles

August 22, 2010

Stand Up and Be Healed

Luke 13:10-17; Jeremiah 1:4-10

After September 11, 2001, now just shy of a decade ago, I preached against going to war in Afghanistan and then Iraq. Preaching against war in general is not a reflection of my politics, it is a reflection of my spirituality and my asking the question, “Whom would Jesus bomb? Whose home and gathered family and guests would Jesus target with a drone and then destroy with a missle? Would Jesus stand by and hand over Saddam Hussein to a vengeful group to be hanged? My politics gets informed by my faith picture, my faith understanding, focused rather narrowly around this one man whom I dare call my Savior, Jesus of Nazareth.

Preaching against war is tough in the face of many folks who have military service backgrounds. Not being a war supporter is not easy when preaching to mothers and fathers, family members who have lost loved ones in military service. It is even tougher to be against war in the face of folks who make money off of war. It is no surprise to anyone in this sanctuary that war is big money and a huge employer. It is not easy to envision how to replace the spoils of war.

I have been called un-American and unpatriotic for not being a supporter of war. War in my lifetime alone has not been a successful agent of positive change and has left our world with multiple millions of dead, mainly young men in direct battles. The poorest of poor are often those who see their front yards and fields and playgrounds turned into battle fields. Women are raped by the millions in most conflicts as an act of unofficial violence. Children on all sides of the battle lines are left parentless, and everyone has been taught about violence, rather than the ways of reconciliation through compromise and peaceful resolution of serious conflicts.

I put out a sign a few years ago that says that “war is not the answer.” War is an answer, but I have yet to see in my lifetime that it has ever been an adequate answer. Our US combat troops left Iraq in the middle of the night this past week and I celebrate their homecoming but I remain sadly distressed by the mess—that far exceeds the mess we went in to theoretically fix— we are leaving. I lament my country's official response to the world situation after 2001 and realize sadly that the war still rages on.

This past week has seen nearly unbelievable rhetoric revolving rashly around the potential building of an Islamic Cultural Center in a former Burlington Coat Factory outlet store some two blocks from the site of the bombed out World Trade Center in New York City. You and I are part of two faith traditions that have valued the fundamental liberties enshrined in this concept called religious freedom.

It is not just in New York City that this is an issue. Across our country every community that has seen the proposed building of a mosque or Islamic Community center has found great opposition to the efforts of Muslim folks to build a place to worship and gather. The right to do so is, of course, enshrined in our constitution. We here who are Baptist and United Church of Christ have little trouble remembering that we have long not been part of faith majorities and realize that we would not exist or be able to speak freely or teach our children progressive principles, were it not for the rights of minorities protected in our country's basic structures.

In Luke's gospel story this morning, Jesus reaches out and touches and heals a woman who had a spirit of weakness or brokenness. This is not so much a physical healing story as it is a spiritual one. The original Greek clearly states that this woman's condition was either emotional or spiritual, if you will. She was being held down and oppressed by her situation in life.

She was a person in her community who had few rights. We all remember Rosa Parks, who sat not in the back of the bus as was the cultural norm of her day, but in the front, and she was jailed. This woman in Luke's Gospel story about the way of Jesus, this woman could not have walked up to the front of the synagogue and found Jesus. Women stayed in the back of the bus. Jesus went where men did not go. Jesus went to the back and he touched her and healed her without even an invitation. He simply did it because he could offer her a blessing that had been denied her for some eighteen years.

We will come to back to this in a few minutes. There are many of us here this morning who are withholding blessings, who are not giving what others need in order to stand up and be made whole. And then there are even more of us who need to understand that there is a world of folks that we need to be going out of our way to bless, to touch, so that we can be surprised by the healing and the joy that will come into the world because of the most simple affirmations and blessings that are ours to offer.

Let's take a quick jump even further back into a look at the call of the prophet Jeremiah.

Today's passages explore the realities of divine providence and inspiration related to the present moment and a person's lifetime. God presents us with many possibilities in each moment. God is moving in our lives, mostly quietly, sometimes dramatically, to enable us to discover the calling of the moment as well as our broader callings for our self-actualization and the well-being of those around us. Each moment has a vocation, a vision, and over a lifetime our long-term vocations emerge through moment-by-moment attentiveness.

As a parent I can so relate to God's word to Jeremiah. Both of my children were happy surprises. As any of you know, you can't help but be anxious about the fetal development of your children from the day that we learn that we are to be parents. Not only is it amazing how a child evolves from conception, but it is amazing, as well, how many things can go wrong as well as right. I remember following every word of our doctors. When Kali came out rather yellow, I remember how scary it was not knowing and feeling very anxious until I learned that livers don't always work in the beginning. I remember loving both my son and daughter from early on in the womb before we met, so to speak. The love has only grown with time and experience and parenting only gets more fun at the stage I am at.

Jeremiah receives that same promise from God: in the spirit of Psalm 139, God reassures the reluctant prophet that his life has been guided by divine inspiration and energy from the very beginning. God's spirit is everywhere in the young prophet's life. Jeremiah has made decisions that have shaped his life and prepared him for this moment in time. But, beneath it all, working through his unconscious mind and synchronous events, God has also been shaping Jeremiah's life with insights, inspirations, and intuitions. The call and response takes place in sighs too deep for words as well as in words we can articulate and share. Whether as a parent or as teacher or as one who simply cares about the people in your life, you know what it means to desire something for those you care about so deeply that the best we can do some days is groan our hopes, to pray in silent hope for what could be in the lives of those around us.

Over the years, I have heard countless pastors -- both new and experienced -- confess their sense of inadequacy about sharing God's message from the pulpit. "Who am I to tell these people what God wants of them? What gives me the right to interpret God's word to this community?" They are all correct in their humility. I have felt this same Jeremiah-like humility as a preacher, teacher, and author. But, despite his (and my) sense of inadequacy and his confession that he is the least experienced person in his cohort, God challenges Jeremiah to be bold in his proclamation of God's vision for this time. "Listen deeply to my inspiration," God counsels the prophet, "and speak the words you intuit that I am saying."

Now, I believe Jeremiah had mystical experiences in which he perceived God's guidance in his life; yet, even these experiences were routed through Jeremiah's conscious awareness and reflected his social location and life-experiences. As H. Richard Niebuhr and today's post-modern theologians assert, revelation always requires a receiver, who shapes and colors even divine revelation. This is good news, for it invites us to be part of the revelation story and to hear God's word, albeit imperfectly and humbly, in our time and place. It invites us to share our good news, knowing it reveals both God's vision and our personal perspective and life-history.

You have had God loving you, believing in you, calling to you silently and not so silently, seeking to lure you toward many golden opportunities of growth and development. You and I have made some choices to follow, perhaps many to hold back and wait and see. But, God is faithful to call from whatever point and position in life we are in, to bring our lives into those of leading and luring our world into a reality of shalom, of peace and wholeness and fairness and mercy as God envisions for it to be. The call to you, to me, this morning is every bit as bold and believeable and challenging as it was to Jeremiah, as it was to Jesus.

Now let's go back to Luke's story about Jesus. It was the Sabbath. It was the day that was to be devoted to study and learning about God. The Pharisees, you might remember, were rule followers. They were not bad people. They were supremely good and faithful folks who believed that in good order there God was to be found. They were folks of true religious discipline and Jesus was probably more one of them than not. Jesus was a spiritually disciplined person. He also knew that discipline can oftentimes get abused and keep folks from flowing with the spirit of the moment, the demands of being loving, meaningfully responsive in the moment. God's ultimate discipline is love. Discipline is not faith and certainty is no substitute for grace.

I grew up with a firm-handed Sabbath tradition. We went to church twice a day on Sunday. We could do our chores for the animals, feed them, milk them, put them out to pasture. But, we were not to do anything else. We could play cards on Saturday, but not on Sunday. We were not even supposed to have fun between church services. The day was to be devoted to the study of Scripture and the thoughtful reflection on the elimination of sin from our lives the other six days. Most of our Sabbath day activities when I was a kid were based around not getting caught doing the things we weren't supposed to be doing.

Faith and spirituality must have a lot discipline built in, but folks, you know that discipline needs to be regularly overshadowed and overwhelmed and reminded of the meaning of life, which is love as Jesus lived it (he died in the midst of its absence). Military and social dominance killed Jesus.

Who is in your midst that needs you to reach out and heal them? This is the pressure of the story. Jesus quite simply sees a person in need and he calls her forward and says, “Woman, you are set free from your spirit of weakness.” He calls her up to the front where the men are. He calls her up to the position of power and authority and he certainly does not tell her to go back to the rear of the bus. He does not say, let's get back now to life, to business as usual. When we act with God there is never again business as usual.

God help us from going back to school, back to our jobs, back to homes, back to our lives “business as usual.” God has looked around and motioned us forward. God has been proactive and lifted each of us up and affirmed us. We are free from worries about our end. We are loved and affirmed and called by God. You can take that to your soul's bank and count on it.

Now the issue is what we do with it…..how we give it to others. Who in your world is walking around with a spirit of weakness, defeat, fear, alienation?

I have had the priviledge many times of being an instrument of God in helping set others free. I've tried many times and not been successful, but the successes outweigh the times that haven't worked, and there is a host of folks who need your gift of encouragement, your gift of blessing their lives and listening to them and watching them grow and accomplish.

Caela and I both have couple after couple come into our offices with their heads hung low and fearful of church and God as they are searching for a church and clergy to bless their relationship. They have been abused by ten other churches who will not love them as they are. They are bent over and expecting to be abused yet one more time as they hunt for blessing from God.

I have had the pleasure time after time of closeted men and women who in the quietness of my office finally found the courage to say to a clergyperson that they are gay, confused, scared and hurt by many. There is no joy greater than to be able to say on behalf of God and this faith community, “you are loved and valued here just as you are and we will stand with you as you discover what it means to be safe here and loved by God and us.”

Folks I'm talking tears of joy. I've had my arm squeezed and held onto out of love and a need for security so long that I thought I might lose feeling in it permanently; but I long ago decided it was worth it to share in the sacredness and the pain of isolation that so many feel in relationship with God and the church.

It is our job. God has been loving us since we were conceived, moving in us when all we could feel were deep longings and movements in us that were too deep and confusing for words. You, my friends, you are called to be the very presence of Christ in your world of people. Go out and notice and give a hand, give a word, give a hug, and give words when necessary. Jesus loved that woman to discover that she could stand tall and be whole and be a full participating member of her faith and her community. Jesus invited her. Go, friends and invite others to discover the joy of being affirmed by the God who is living in you.