B Epiphany 5 BFC
2018
Mark 1:29-31
February 4, 2018
They are out there…and they
are in every church. I’ve seen ‘em. I can tell by the whites of their eyes. In Wichita, Kansas, it was Bill and Dorothy
Keckler. In North Hampton, New Hampshire
it was Jan Livas or Mary Ann Ensinger.
In Champaign, Illinois, it was definitely Elizabeth Easley. In Byron, Illinois, know there are more, but
one of them is definitely Kay King. Here
in Billings, Montana, we have a bunch of them, but I know some of them are
Myrle Theimer, Sue Betts, Steve Plaggemeyer, Karen Stainton. That’s the short list. They always seem to make visits to a shut-in,
arrive long before I do, and call me every time someone they know needs a
visit, a phone call, or a good word.
They actively pray for others, come over for a visit, or provide
transportation for someone who would not otherwise be able to make it to a
church service, regular event, or special function.
We have many people like
that in our church. They are the
healers. For they restore people who
somehow might be unable to participate in community life to a place where those
people are able to continue their ministries among us. These people carry the balm of Gilead with
them, for they make the wounded whole.
Such a healing takes place
in our gospel lesson today. We are in
the first chapter of gospel of Mark, and already we know quite a bit about the
context of Jesus’s ministry. Jesus is
associated with the wild-eyed prophet, John the Baptist, who was ritually freeing
people from their Roman bondage by dunking them in the Jordan
River. The jig is up, and
things are dangerous, for John has already been arrested. In the Scripture passage read for us today,
in Mark, chapter 1, verses 33 through 34, we hear that the whole city is at Jesus’s
door. And this is how the whole city is
characterized: Jesus “cured many who
were sick with various diseases and cast out many demons.” In other words, the city is not well. As New Testament scholar, Warren Carter
writes, “Imperial power is bad for your health.” Too often, Carter claims, we focus on Jesus,
when the gospels are always trying to share the matrix in which Jesus lives and
moves. The city is not well. Primarily, Carter writes, that sickness was
created through lack of control and access to food and nutrition and not
because of some moral failure. Jesus’s
healings and exorcisms and sharing of food expose the lie of imperial
propaganda.
Jesus walks among the poor,
dispossessed, and people who live on the edge of society, because he is found
walking among the fisherfolk and calling them as disciples. Fisherfolk, just by their smell and
appearance, were considered by Roman philosophers to be some of the most vile
and contemptible people. And Jesus
recognizes the reality of the Roman occupation as he encounters sick people
everywhere and demons to the left and right of him. In Mark, Jesus is a healer and an exorcist, seeking
to transform the maladies created by imperial power and colonialism, throwing
the Roman occupation into the sea, and proclaiming liberty for his people.
His ministry begins in
Capernaum, a politically strategic seacoast city. For on the other side of the Sea of Galilee, is the beautifully ornate tribute city
built by King Herod Antipas, for Roman Emperor Tiberius. So what do you name a city to show your
obedience to Emperor Tiberius? You name
it Tiberias. No brainer.
Fisherfolk and peasants in Capernaum can look across Lake Galilee
and see the reality--who is in charge and what their values are. Wealth, opulence, and power dominate the
Tiberian landscape. As I heard in a
recent telephone conference, stigma is used to take one act or characteristic
or past event or feature of a person and impute it to the whole person. Rome routinely stigmatized conquered peoples
to suggest that Rome’s wealth and opulence conveyed the ruling class’s and
elite’s favor before the gods and their high moral character; the poverty,
illness, and death found among the Jews in rural Galilee conveyed the gods’
disfavor and their low moral standing.
Jesus will have none of it. God’s
healing is being effected through him.
For if healing can be effected and accessible through Jesus and later
through his disciples, it means that something is not necessarily wrong with
the conquered populace found within the city but the systems and structures
found within the city itself. The root
cause of the ill health is not the moral standing of those who have been
wounded by the wider world.
In Mark, Jesus builds his
movement on the Sea of Galilee, in Capernaum. In Mark, chapter one, Jesus goes into the
synagogue to teach and is immediately confronted by a demon. The people are astounded that he has this
kind of power over the Romans. What kind
of teaching is this that he might have this power over the Roman
occupation?
Jesus leaves the synagogue
and walks into the home of Simon Peter.
There, Simon Peter’s mother lay sick.
Probably another sign of the toll on the community, her sickness is probably
a result of the lack of food and water necessary to sustain her. Sickness, deformity, and disease are
prevalent in the gospels. They are
probably symptoms of larger societal illness.
The question might be asked, “If God is in heaven, and in charge, what
great sin must have I committed to inherit such evil?” By tending to the sick, the deformed, and the
diseased, Jesus does not assume their sinfulness. Rather, he assumes God’s will to heal them,
that God wishes them healed and restored to community.
Simon Peter’s mother-in-law
is ill. Jesus’ first action, when
entering the house, is to go against the convention of his time. He touches not only a woman, but also an ill
woman, making himself unclean and marginalized.
He restores her to community, so that she might be able to serve. The gospel says that she begins “to minister”
to Jesus and the disciples.
It is interesting to note
that some Bibles translate the same Greek word found in Mark 1:13 when angels
are involved as “to minister, to take care of, or to wait on.” When the same Greek word is used for Simon
Peter’s mother, a woman, in our passage today, that same word is translated,
“to serve.” So just a note in the
translation patriarchy, “Men minister.
Women serve.” The Greek word used
in both passages is diakoneia. The English cognate for diakoneia is Deacon or what a deacon
does. Literally translated, a “deacon”
is a table server.
And, in the passage before
us today, what we see is that a deacon is one who has been healed to minister
to and serve the whole community. Those
whom Jesus heals, are restored to community, then end up ministering to the
whole community. They know what it means
to be wounded. They serve the whole
community out of that woundedness.
Henri Nouwen, spiritual
teacher and Roman Catholic theologian wrote that we are all but wounded
healers. We are all but people who have
experienced the ravages of the world, know what it means to be left on the
margins or outside of community. We are
wounded. When we are healed, we are
restored to community life, ministry, and service. After the healing has taken place, we then,
in return, extend the circle to others.
As we try to model when we take on new members—we let down our joined
hands so that others who have been excluded by illness, death, cultural norms,
may join hands with us. We are all
wounded healers.
Every month we celebrate
holy communion at the Billings First Congregational Church. When I remember, I talk about how this is not
our table but Christ’s table. So all are
welcome at this table. Our communion
stewards, representing the historical Deacons, our table servers, come forward
to distribute the bread and grape to all of you. These communion stewards are and represent
the really good people in our church. For table servers are to be people who lead
out in mission, write kind notes, teach, do things for others, are involved in
our community in significant ways.
But anybody who is anyone in
this church, who provides significant leadership, could also tell you stories
of deep woundedness in their lives, places that have been hard and rough and
where they have been leveled to their cores.
Church does not begin with the assumption that we are looking for people
who are hiding our pain to be unblemished, perfect, and seem to have that
unearthly glow. Church begins with the
assumption that like people who distributed the bread and grape today we have
come together to say we may have been deeply wounded by life but we still seek
to offer goodness and life and healing.
Our communion stewards today and every Sunday represent wounded healers
who have been levelled by life themselves and in the messiness and imperfection
and pain of life, they want you to know that God intends good for you. We see the stigma. We know the stigma. We want you to know God wants the stigma to
end. We have huge doubts. Sometimes what we hear God saying is that we
are unworthy or that our halo fits rather awkwardly. But as wounded healers, we don’t take the
shade or stigma cast at us as a sure sign that this is what God wants. Rather, we believe others need to hear tender
words, be mentored by gentle and kind ways into leadership, and that their
rough and tumble leadership will be required to demand justice by systems and
structures who continue to throw shade and stigma at others. I
think we all try to do that here because we think that’s what Jesus and the
deep well of his tradition were all about.
There are a select few in
this church who have taken on leadership in this community of faith, I hope and
pray, they take on that leadership because they experienced the love and grace
at this church and want to extend it to others. This is not a church that represents itself as
perfect, or having made it, or that we have this Christian thing down.
So when we received
communion today, many of us were only able to just receive the elements
intended for you. That is great. We are all at different places on the
journey. This “table service” was meant
to say, “You are worthy to receive God’s healing no matter where you are on the
journey. God wills that for you.”
As you passed the peace
after communion, I hope you had a sense that the people who passed it with you
and to you wanted your healing from whatever wounds and trauma have been a part
of your life. In the future, I hope you can look directly
into the eyes of the person passing the communion elements to you or passing
the peace with you and know that not only does God and God in Christ want your
healing, but that there are people in this place who want that too. Because they have been wounded and know how
tough it is.
Think of that place where
you are most deeply wounded. Know that
God wants and wills your healing.
There is that amazing scene
in one of my favorite movies, “Places in the Heart.” It is about the rag-tag loving community that
forms across racial lines when Edna Spaulding realizes she will have to raise
her two kids on her own and pay all the bills in rural Texas. She takes on a blind boarder, Mr. Will, and
an African-American man, Moze, who after she offers grace, sticks around to
teach her how to raise and harvest cotton.
Her husband, the local law enforcement, was accidentally shot by a young
African-American man who is then tortured and killed by the Klan. In her woundedness, Edna charts a different
path, even as the big business owners represented by the Klan try to take her
homestead.
The final scene of the movie
has I Corinthians, the love chapter, being read in a small church. As the communion trays are passed along the
pews, Moze, who left town because of the Klan, is now back and passing the tray
and the peace along the pew. The blind
Mr. Will is helped by Edna’s children to take the cup. Edna takes the cup from her children, and
then, shockingly, she passes the tray to her husband who is now very alive
sitting next to her in the pew. And he,
he passes the tray to the young African-American man who shot him and then was
tortured and killed by the Klan. And
some of those Klan folk sit out in the congregation as well
There are deep, deep wounds
we all experience, deaths and griefs, suffering and pain, addictions and
terrible acts we have done that must seem unsurmountable. We are called, not to be without wounds or
blemish, sometimes even destroyed and scarred by life, but to be wounded healers.
You are all wounded healers,
sharing in Christ’s table service.
God wants and wishes for
your healing. Christ’s peace to
you. The good news to you through
Scripture and sacrament. May you be
healed so that you may offer Christ’s peace, bread, and grape to others. Thanks be to God. Amen.
