Acts 16:9-15
During the night Paul had a vision: there stood a man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” When he had seen the vision, we immediately tried to cross over to Macedonia, being convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them.
We set sail from Troas and took a straight course to Samothrace, the following day to Neapolis, and from there to Philippi, which is a leading city of the district of Macedonia and a Roman colony. We remained in this city for some days. On the sabbath day we went outside the gate by the river, where we supposed there was a place of prayer; and we sat down and spoke to the women who had gathered there. A certain woman named Lydia, a worshiper of God, was listening to us; she was from the city of Thyatira and a dealer in purple cloth. The Lord opened her heart to listen eagerly to what was said by Paul. When she and her household were baptized, she urged us, saying, “If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come and stay at my home.” And she prevailed upon us.
Psalm 67
May God be merciful to us and bless us; may the light of God’s face shine upon us. Let your way be known upon earth, your saving health among all nations. Let the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you. Let the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you judge the peoples with equity and guide all the nations on earth. Let the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you. The earth has brought forth its increase; God, our own God, has blessed us. May God give us blessing, and may all the ends of the earth stand in awe.
Revelation 21:10,22-22:5
And in the spirit one of the angels carried me away to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God.
I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never be shut by day - and there will be no night there. People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. But nothing unclean will enter it, nor anyone who practices abomination or falsehood, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life.
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit in each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.
John 5:1-9
After this there was a festival of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes. In these lay many invalids - blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.” Jesus said to him, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk.
Now that day was a sabbath.
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Thirty-eight years. The man had been ill longer than I have been alive. Thirty eight years is a lifetime, more than a lifetime in some places, and two years shy of forty, which is an oft-used biblical number for a very long time. We don’t know how long he had been lying at the Sheep Gate waiting for his miracle, we don’t know how many others there had been lying there for how long, but this particular man gets singled out for some reason, and thanks to Jesus his life is completely ruined.
We don’t get the rest of his story in today’s reading from John 5, but what follows is just a mess. Sick for thirty-eight years, without any help to get into the pool, finally able to walk again, and what’s the first thing the church says to him now that they see him again? Well, let’s read on, beginning with verse 8: Jesus said to him, “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.” And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked. Now that day was the Sabbath. So the Jews said to the man who had been healed, “It is the Sabbath, and it is not lawful for you to take up your bed.” - Yep, that’s right, the first thing the church says to him after ignoring him for thirty-eight years was that he wasn’t living righteously. I wonder if he was ever able to reintegrate into his synagogue after that.
But the lectionary didn’t give us that part of the story today, not officially. So what we’ve got is everything leading up to the congregation of major disappointments. What we’ve got is simply the encounter between Jesus and this man, which is really the point, the main thing, the most important part anyway.
Even as far as that goes, though, did anyone else notice that the man didn’t actually answer Jesus’ question? Jesus asks if he wants to be made well, and instead he tells a story he has probably been telling for ages, since he’s probably by now only identified by his illness. I wonder if he had any hope of healing left at all, or only fear of it by this point. Thirty eight years is a long habit to break, and even habits that are destructive, once they become habits, are incredibly hard to let go of. Thirty eight years of being sick, maybe even sitting by that pool of miracles for the whole time, I wonder if he remembered any more what it was like to live any other kind of life, if he had ever imagined something different, really, or if by now he was so resigned to his position he couldn’t imagine anything else. Then again, he does say that he tries, that he makes his way to the pool when the waters are stirred up, and we have no way of knowing how strong his heart is by this point, if he still has the energy to even hope he can make it there after missing the miracle time after time with no one - no one - bothering to offer him help.
Then I look around and I wonder how many of us even know we are sick, let alone want to be made well? I know I get easily caught up in the snippet of story that follows, in the way the church welcomes people or doesn’t, in the way we build community, but the lectionary points us to the main theme that isn’t how the community lives, the main theme that is, much as the language has some sketchy connotations in society today, the man’s personal relationship with Jesus.
Because I can read all sorts of books about church growth and community building, study after study about outreach and evangelism, but when it comes down to it, what’s really central is Jesus. Our relationship with the one we call God with skin on. The one who comes to us and disrupts our habits, who skips over stirring the waters and re-writing even our healing narratives, and in a strangely unpredictable way is still forever reliable and faithful even when we don’t receive him in ways we expect.
Have you ever known this in your own life? In so many ways we have expectations for what a faith life is supposed to look like, what life as a mother or father is supposed to look like, and when we find the thing that makes us tick, if it doesn’t fit that narrative we stifle ourselves and stick with the status quo just to keep from stirring up the waters. But this is what Jesus did. All. The. Time. All the time.
Think about it: who makes a habit out of talking with the street beggars and keeping company with them? Who offers healing to the faithful servant of a sworn enemy? Who talks openly to a woman who is not only treated like an alien but who is also breaking every expectation about marriage under the sun by living with a fifth man after being married four times? Who picks up the high school dropouts and the IRS agents and the betrayers as his closest companions for an intimate religious community?
Jesus does.
And it’s a good thing, too, because we are so often those dropouts and hidden ones. And when we aren’t in the gutter, we have gotten really good at keeping other people there. Our faith tradition has a long history of behaving just like those leaders who yelled at the man for carrying his mat on the Sabbath. We are known publicly most often for the ways we deny access, the ways we encourage shame, the ways we shun and fear people who don’t look or speak or act like us. Look at the press coverage, and the ones most loudly claiming our Christian faith are the ones demonizing the differences between us. We could be using our power and privilege for advocating for unity and healing and supporting diverse and wholistic community, but that doesn’t sell media coverage. And yet as much as we disagree with and misunderstand and fear one another, Jesus still somehow loves me just as much as Jesus loves Ted Cruz and Hilary Clinton, even though Cruz would probably take away my right to use a public bathroom.
There are so many ways we need healing, and so many ways healing would completely ruin our lives as we know them. Addicts returning from recovery programs need to completely restructure their social time and daily routines to put themselves in situations where they aren’t surrounded by alcohol or television or whatever else they might be recovering from. Can you imagine re-working your entire schedule to avoid the one thing your life used to revolve around?
Lots of new converts find themselves in this sort of struggle once they come to faith. A high school friend of mine gave up almost his entire DVD collection because some videos contained violence and strong language and he had to walk the pure and narrow road now that he’d found Jesus. And there are dozens upon dozens of stories of deathbed conversions where folks are questioned about the things they “got away with” in life before they dedicated themselves to Christ just before their last breath. But this isn’t the healing we’re talking about, either, not exactly.
Life isn’t that cut and dry, that black and white, that easy to sort out. We all need healing of one sort or another, all throughout our lives, again and again. What that healing looks like for us is hardly the same person to person, but it does lead us through some stuff maybe we would rather not deal with. It does take us to places we would maybe rather not go. Sometimes that’s the small stuff we’ve gotten used to, the little jabs we put up with at work and the racist jokes we tell offhanded like they’re not really a problem. Sometimes it’s the bigger stuff we know isn’t leading anyone to wholeness, like the body dysmorphia and control issues around eating disorders. Sometimes we don’t even know what we don’t even know and have to be uncomfortable when someone we love shares their pain at something we weren’t even aware we were doing.
It’s about the relationship behind the healing. It’s about the ongoing work Jesus is doing with us and for us and through us. It’s about God coming to us wherever we are, however we are stuck, and rather than waiting for us to decide the time is right, Jesus moves us, lifts us up, changes our perspective, brings us healing we may have even forgotten how to hope for.
Kindred in Christ, we are a diverse people, we are a complicated and beautiful people with a complicated and painful and long history, and we are a people to whom God has come in the person of Jesus Christ. Wherever God has found you, God will keep on following you and leading you and stirring you up to more complete wholeness for the sake of your own relationship with God and for the sake of the world. Wherever you might be. Whoever you might believe yourself to be. You don’t even have to have the strength to get up and greet him, Jesus will find you and love you and keep on loving you until the day every nation is healed and whole, until all the ends of the earth stand in awe of the love which created and claimed the cosmos. Even me. Even you. Thanks be to God.
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