Lent 2B Chesed and God's Beloved

Chesed and God’s Beloved

Poor Peter. After Jesus outlines what will happen in Jerusalem, that he will suffer, be rejected, be killed, and then rise again on the third day, Peter rebukes him [Mark 8:31-38. Talk about chutzpah! Telling off God’s anointed, God’s messiah. Making sure that the disciples see and hear what he is about to say, Jesus rebukes Peter, “Get behind me, satan! You are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

 

Jesus knows, misunderstanding what he is saying here as he sets out for Jerusalem can lead to tragic consequences. And it has. Even in the Church. So much so, that in the year 2000, Pope John Paul II apologized for some of the damage done: “From the altar of St Peter's Basilica in Rome he led Catholicism into unchartered territory by seeking forgiveness for sins committed against Jews, heretics, women, Gypsies and native peoples.” The Pope included such episodes as The Crusades, The Inquisition and The Holocaust. Twenty-one years ago, there were many in the Church who did not want to have that conversation. Today, it seems, as a nation we are still struggling to honestly enter into the same conversation. [13 March 2000 The Guardian]

 

Just what are these ‘divine things” Jesus speaks of? I have come to believe it all depends on an understanding of what it means to “deny” oneself, take up our cross and follow Jesus, and what it means to live one’s life for “the sake of the gospel.” On both of these it is easy to understand how Peter may have mis-heard all of this – and overlooked what is no doubt the key phrase, “…and after three days rise again.” What Jesus says is that the cross is not the end of the story, but the beginning! New life is just around the corner!

 

 Let’s begin with living for the “sake of the gospel.” We promise in our baptism that everything we say and do will proclaim the gospel, or good news, of Jesus. Just what is this Good News?  I have long relied upon L. William Countryman and his book, Good News of Jesus for clarity [Cowley Publications, 1993]. Countryman writes, “What God says in Jesus is this: You are forgiven. Nothing more. Nothing less. This is the message Jesus spoke and lived.” [Countryman, p.3] He goes on to say that there are other messages God in Christ could have delivered, but most of them are not truly good news. “If you are really really good, God will love you.” Or, “If you’re really really sorry you have not been really really good, God will love you.” Or, worst of all, “God loves you! Now get back in line before God changes God’s mind!” [Ibid, p.4]

 

God could have simply said, “You are loved. I love you.” But we might think it’s because of something we did to deserve to be God’s Beloved. Rather, God says, “I love you just the way you are, no matter what. I’m not trying to bribe or threaten you to change. It’s not because you are particularly good or repentant. I love you because I love you. No matter what!” We know that Jesus embodied this good news that he proclaimed. He lived it. He shared meals with outcasts and others who were considered sinners and unclean. He incorporated women and tax collectors into his circle of disciples. At least twice he gave away all the food he and the disciples had. All because God declared him to be, “My beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

 

This love of God’s for all of humanity and all of creation is expressed in one Hebrew word: chesed/hesed. When God is described, as in our collect today, as one whose glory “is always to have mercy,” or “abounding in steadfast love,” the word is chesed. When the prophet Micah says, “He has told you, humanity, what is good, and what God seeks from you – nothing but to do justice, and love chesed, and walk humbly with your God,” chesed is usually translated “loving kindness.” [Micah 6:8] But God’s love is not a feeling or an emotion. It means doing something for someone in need. Ellen Davis, with whom we are studying the book of Ruth at Noonday Prayer during the week, translates chesed as “good-faith,” or “act(s) of good-faith.” It is the ability to put the interests of another, weaker, party before one’s own: widows, orphans, the poor, strangers, and even resident aliens escaping foreign lands where life is dangerous. “From a biblical perspective, the moral ecology of the world functions properly when God and humanity are engaged in the perpetual exchange of chesed, good-faith and the acts that follow.” Chesed is meant to be the most basic characteristic of humanity, exercising chesed toward God and one another. [Ellen Davis, Who Are You, My Daughter, p xiii-xiv] Accepting that we are God’s Beloved is the very basis of being human, and the very essence of the good news, the gospel. The exchange of chesed with God and with others who are in need is what it means to live our lives “for the sake of the gospel.” This is the essence of those who are forgiven.

 

This helps us to understand what it does and does not mean to “deny” ourselves. It does not mean adopting a severe kind of asceticism: starving oneself, being overly penitent, denying our own real needs. God’s love of us, no matter what, means God wants us to take care of ourselves and even love ourselves. We are to rejoice in the news that we are forgiven and loved by God no matter what. Self-love is a good thing which we are meant to accept as the gift it is, and which Paul proclaims, “The love of God has been poured into our hearts, through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us!” [Romans 5:5] Our Belovedness is our most precious gift.

 

Belovedness, however, God’s chesed, is not something we are meant to keep for ourselves. It needs to be exchanged, shared, given away, as gift to others – or, like the manna in the wilderness, if you store it up and keep it for yourself, it goes sour, it becomes rotten, it can even become evil. Herein lies the paradox of the Good News: you need to accept God’s love, God’s chesed. and the healthy self-love we are given, before we can embody God’s chesed and share it with others. Our Belovedness calls us to give it away to those in need, those without resources, even dissolute souls like the Prodigal Son, and total strangers from foreign lands and traditions like the Good Samaritan. Or, like the Moabite woman named Ruth: her chesed toward her mother-in-law results in her marriage to Boaz from which she becomes the great grandmother of David, the good shepherd boy who becomes king. The book of Ruth depicts an entire chain of faith-acts, acts of loving kindness among the characters of the story, which reflect the chesed and love of God for all humanity, all of creation, and our love for one another and our neighbor.

 

It is important to remind ourselves every day: We are God’s Beloved. God is well pleased with us. I am God’s Beloved. God is well pleased with me. We do nothing to earn or deserve this love, this chesed, of God’s. But our God is the God whose property is always to have mercy, whose glory is mercy, whose mercy is steadfast love, because God loves us, no matter what. Just as we are. Just as I am. Not to love God in return, not to share it with others, is tragically to deny ourselves any kind of authentic and honest, generous selfhood. Which we need to pick up our cross and follow Jesus. We need to accept God’s love, and then, like God, in whose image we are made, share it and give it away for no other reason than to love others – all others, no matter what. It won’t always be easy, as Jesus says and Peter will soon find out. But it will always result in new life – new life for others and for ourselves. “It’s gonna take a lot of love to change the way things are.” But one way or another, says Jesus, a change is gonna come! Amen. It is true.

Lent 1: Facts, Questions and Opinions

Facts, Questions and Opinions Re: Lent

Fact: It is Lent. Four days of Lent have passed. Sundays are of Lent, not in Lent: Lent consists of forty weekdays. We are already one-tenth of the way through Lent.

 

Question: Are we one-tenth of the way into Lent? Have we started our self-examination, repentance, prayer, fasting, and reading and meditating on God’s Word like we said on Ash Wednesday?

 

Opinion: Mark 1:9-15 gets the story of Christ in the wilderness just right: Two sentences. No indication of how many temptations there were. Jesus was in the wilderness forty days with Satan, wild beasts and angels. No recorded conversations. Just the bare facts. Seems far more intense somehow.

 

Question: Can we imagine what it must have be like to have angels “wait upon” you?      

 

Fact: That we are told he was there forty days recalls the forty-year wilderness sojourn, a time of testing and preparation for becoming a people of God. It was also a time and place of creation – the creation of a new people of God.

 

Question: Jesus has just learned one sentence earlier that he is God’s Beloved Son. What does that mean? Mark had already called him “Christos,” anointed, or in Hebrew messiah. What does this all this mean?

 

Fact: The Hebrew word for “wilderness” is midbar, which means something like “wordless.”

 

Question: Does this mean the “silence” of a true wilderness? Or, does midbar reveal that such areas are places to which God has not yet spoken a creative word to make them blossom and flourish and leap into life? What does a “wordless” place look like and feel like?

 

Opinion: The lack of detail in storyteller Mark’s account leaves much to the listener’s imagination. Yet, the spare number of details we are given have deep roots in Israel’s history.

 

Fact: we recall that John calls Jesus “the Word” – The Word that brings creation and order out of chaos, “In the beginning.” The Word is being sent, driven, blown into a Wordless place. A place in need of The Word.

 

Question: Is Satan tempting or testing?

 

Fact: Satan can be an adversary out to ambush and destroy Jesus. Or, as the tradition also suggests, satan is a tester, or Inspector General, testing all parts of creation to see if they are as solid and sound as they appear to make sure, on God’s behalf, that nothing shady slips by.

 

Question: Is this Satan destroyer? Or, is this the Inspector General making sure Jesus is up to the task of being God’s Beloved Son and Christos, messiah, all rolled into one?

 

Fact: The Spirit is pneuma in Greek, meaning wind, breath and spirit, like the Hebrew ruach which blew across the waters of creation, “In the beginning.”

 

Question: What does this spirit-wind-breath sound like as it drives Jesus into the wilderness? A soft hissing, sound? Or, a tempestuous hurricane-like wind?

 

Fact: The Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness. He did not choose to go there.

 

Opinion: If this is how God’s Spirit treats God’s Beloved with whom God is well pleased, perhaps we are meant to imagine where this same Spirit means to take us.

 

Fact: Some people suggest that Lent is a time for us to “go to” the wilderness ourselves.

 

Opinion: I think not. We promise to follow and obey Jesus in our baptism. He does not go there. He is sent.

 

Question: So, just where does Jesus go? What kinds of places does he go? What kinds of people does he seek out? Do we ever seek out those same kinds of people he does?

 

Fact: Jesus says, “I am the way …” (John 14:6)

 

Opinion: We typically limit this claim of his by thinking there is only one way among a thousand. Whoever follows the longing of the human heart, whoever is seeking to be with God, however, is on the way. Jesus takes us in many different ways, not just one way.

 

Fact: Mark says nothing about fasting at all. Only that he there to be tested as to his fitness to be Beloved, messiah and Christos.

 

Opinion: So being on “the way,” following Jesus, means letting one’s self be driven by or led by the Spirit. That is, we are not in control. That’s hard.  

 

Fact: Jesus says the Spirit blows where it wills. No one knows from whence it comes or where it goes. You cannot fit the Spirit into a flow chart!

 

Opinion: The wilderness can be said to be nowhere and everywhere.

 

Fact: Put a little space in the word “nowhere” and you get the words “now here.”

 

Opinion: So, the Wilderness, or Nowhere, is closer than we think! It is Now-here!

 

Fact: We have already created our own wilderness Now-here: Any place a child, a teenager, can access a semi-automatic weapon and commit the murder of seventeen other people is already a wilderness.

 

Opinion: Exile is another word for Wilderness in the Bible.   

 

Question: How much mass murder, guns, drugs, opioid overdoses, domestic violence, sexual harassment, millionaire sports-felons, starving people, caged children, authoritarian dictatorships, racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, LGBT-phobia, neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements do there have to be before a society finally admits that it is already in exile?

 

Opinion: So, to get to the wilderness, or exile, we do not have to go very far. Now-here is already a wilderness; an exile of sin and alienation.

 

Question: So, Lent is not about how to get ourselves into the wilderness. Rather, how do we get out? How do we withdraw from the wilderness? How do we come home from exile? How do we turn away from sin and alienation?

 

Fact: Jesus withdraws from the central power structures of Jerusalem, what John calls a “Den of Vipers!” He goes as far away from Jerusalem as one can get: Galilee. There he proclaims Good News he found in the wilderness: Repent, turn back. God’s reign is at hand. Now-here.

 

Question: If Jesus’s forty days is about withdrawal, from what do we need to withdraw?

 

Opinion: We need to withdraw from the wilderness of Sin and Alienation.

 

Facts: Sin is related to the word “asunder.” Sin tears asunder the wholeness in which all beings and all creation belong together. Alienation suggests uprootedness from one’s true self, from others, and from God.

 

Opinion: Jesus calls us to turn back from the wilderness of sin and alienation and look toward God. This is the essence of repentance.

 

Fact: Jesus says a world under the reign of God is right here, right now. Or, Now-here!

 

Opinion: The way out of Sin to Salvation is the way from alienation to belonging.

 

Fact: Belonging is the essence of life and being human.

 

Opinion: This highlights our need to withdraw from nowhere and Now-here where we feel alienated and allow the Spirit-wind to move us back to belonging. With God. With Jesus. With one another. Welcoming all others.

 

Fact: On Ash Wednesday Jesus commends three spiritual disciplines in this order: Almsgiving, Prayer and Fasting. [Matthew 6:1-6,16-21]

 

Question: Why do modern day Christians tend only to focus on the third, fasting, in Lent? And not the other two? How might our journey out of the wilderness be facilitated by focusing more on Almsgiving and Prayer?

 

Fact: We talk a lot about giving up certain foods, deserts, alcohol, TV, smoking, Facebook, Twitter, our addiction to “screens,” etc etc etc in Lent.

 

Question: Are we doing this to free ourselves for the Spirit to blow us somewhere new? Or, for reasons of personal perfection?

 

Opinion: The way out of nowhere and Now-here is not through taking control of our lives, but by giving up all control and allowing ourselves to be led by the Spirit. By letting go of all those things that keep us bound up in sin and alienation.

 

Fact: Such letting go is what it means to repent, to return, to come home to God. For God is at home, it is we who have gone out for a walk! It is we who have lost our way.

 

Question: Lent is already one-tenth gone. When are we going to begin to let go and let the Spirit-wind begin to drive us out of exile, sin and alienation into the Now-here way of following Jesus? Amen.     

Ash Wednesday 2021

 

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust

No doubt many, like myself, have noticed a disconnect between the Gospel for Ash Wednesday and the practice of tracing a sign of the cross on the forehead with ashes. The pertinent portion of the gospel from Matthew chapter 6 reads:

"And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”

 

As one’s seminary life ends, we take exams called The GOEs, or The General Ordination Exams. One section when I took them was a series of about “Ten Coffee Hour Questions.” You were given overnight to draft answers to these questions, type them and turn them in the next day where you would be assigned an essay question in another area of theological education, say, Theology, New Testament, Christian Ethics, etc.

 

One of the Coffee hour questions in 1983 was, “Why, if we read Matthew 6 on Ash Wednesday, do we mark a person’s forehead with ashes?” Why, indeed! Needless to say, one has to employ a pretzel of theological logic to attempt an explanation that might satisfy anyone asking this question looking for a concise and meaningful justification for what had suddenly become standard practice with the issue of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer while sipping on a Styrofoam cup of Church Joe.

 

Since most clergy marked the sign of the cross with the ashes, the standard answer was to link it to the cross traced on the forehead with oil at baptism, which for many was also a new practice with the 1979 prayerbook. Looking deeper into the Ash Wednesday liturgy, however, one notices that the words spoken with the imposition of ashes come from Genesis 3:19, the punishment and expulsion from the Garden of the first man and woman. These words are addressed to Adam, from the Hebrew, athama, which means earth, or soil:

“By the sweat of your face

    you shall eat bread

until you return to the ground,

    for out of it you were taken;

you are dust,

    and to dust you shall return.”

 

One immediately notices several things. The text is indented in the RSV and NRSV translations, meaning this is Hebrew poetry. Second, it specifically makes note of our mortality – one day, one way or another, we will all return to the ground. For it is from the ground, in Genesis 2, that God takes a handful of dust and moisture and fashions the first man. This is also a reminder of the first time two of God’s people disobeyed a command. And of course, when we receive the ashes on Ash Wednesday, we hear some version of, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

 

Which in a cosmic sense is now an accepted truth of astro-physics – not only are we, but all of the created world and universe are made of the cosmic stardust of creation, whether or not one chooses to call it The Big Bang. It turns out Joni Mitchell was correct when she sang, “We are stardust/We are golden/We are billion-year-old carbon/And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” We come from dust and we return to dust.

 

In the Burial Office, at The Committal we read, “…earth is cast upon the coffin while the Celebrant says, (in part) ‘…we commit his/her body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust…’” The earliest accounts of what came to be known as Lent began with those who were penitent and those seeking to be baptized at the Great Vigil of Easter having ashes sprinkled on them – on the tops of their heads. Not until the tenth century in England did it become the custom to sprinkle the ashes the tops of the heads of all who were present, and later than that to do so on a day that became known as Ash Wednesday. As the 1979 prayerbook says, “Thereby, the whole congregation was put in mind of the message of pardon and absolution set forth in the Gospel of our Savior, and of the need which all Christians continually have to renew their repentance and faith.” It was in this period of sprinkling ashes on the head that the Gospel from Matthew chapter 6 was chosen for Ash Wednesday. Tracing the cross on the forehead was a more recent development, growing in part out of Vatican II.

 

In this time of The Coronavirus, we all are confronted with our inherent mortality as the invisible virus may attach to any one of us to be its host we know not when or where. More than ever, we are aware that we are dust and to dust we shall return, the most fundamental of Biblical truths. Therefore, it seems appropriate to return to the more ancient custom of sprinkling the ashes on the top of the head as one day earth may be sprinkled upon our casket or urn. As much as most of us miss human touch, it is both pastoral and appropriate during this time of a Pandemic that it is just not recommended or allowed at this time.

 

I once was distributing the ashes at an early morning service. A mother and her four-year-old daughter were among those at the communion rail. I marked the mother on her forehead. As I approached the young girl, she drew back and shook her head. She seemed to understand better than any one of us there what this all meant and was having none of it that year. I smiled at her and assured her that it was OK not to receive the ashes.

 

Whether or not one chooses to or not to receive the ashes, Ash Wednesday is that day on which we ponder where we come from and where we are going. It is also a time we are given to decide to do a full reset, a return to the garden if you will - to amend our ways one more time and try to become more consistent to live the way God in Christ Jesus calls us to follow him.

 

Ash Wednesday is also a day to be reminded that our God is the “Lord whose property is always to have mercy…” [BCP 337] That our God is “Merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.” [Psalm 103:8] And that our God “…pardons and absolves all those who truly repent…that the rest of our life hereafter may be pure and holy, so at the last we may come to his eternal joy…” [BCP 269]. That our God chooses to be with us in times like this.

 

I wish I had said some of this in that brief essay in 1983. I am grateful that this Ash Wednesday I have been granted the opportunity to stand in this historic 1805 church of ours and join with all of you, wherever you are right now, and hope that “our father who sees in secret” will indeed forgive and reward us all just for taking the time to be here today. Ashes to ashes; dust to dust. All of us are dust, and to dust we shall return. Amen. It is truth. It is so.

Last Epiphany: The Bat Qol

 

Daughter of Voice

Think for a moment, perhaps a quiet moment walking in the woods, or watching a sunrise or sunset on the beach at the ocean, or even in the midst of work or some other activity, that out of nowhere you have the sense of hearing a voice but there is no one there. And for whatever reason you have the sense that you have received divine communication. God is close enough to speak and be heard. Suddenly, it seems there is a thinness between the realms of God and humans.

 

In the Abrahamic religions, such a voice was known as a bat qol (or bat ḳōl ;Hebrew: בַּת⁠ קוֹל‎, literally "daughter of voice"). “The Daughter of Voice.” What a lovely way to describe this sense of divine presence! In Mark 9:2-9, we are almost at the mid-point of Mark’s narrative of the Good News, three of the disciples, Peter, James and John, hear a bat qol as they are overshadowed by a cloud on top of a mountain where they have witnessed Jesus, robed in “dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them,” while speaking to Moses and the prophet Elijah. Two figures who left this world with no account of where they went.

 

This is the second appearance of the bat qol, the “daughter of voice,” in Mark. In the very beginning of the gospel, Jesus of Nazareth comes up out of the water having been baptized by a man named John, recognizably attired as the prophet Elijah in animal skins. Jesus, and only Jesus, hears a voice from the parted heavens, a bat qol, proclaim, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Jesus spends the next 40 days pondering just what this means.

 

Now, after time spent healing, feeding and helping people of all stations of life, Elijah himself actually appears with the now-dazzling Jesus, along with Moses who was last seen on a mountain top with God showing him “the land of which I swore to Abraham” [Deut 34:4]. After this he is whisked out of the narrative and buried in “the land of Moab…but no one knows his burial place to this day.” [Deut 34:6]. Moses, who used to meet with the Lord God YHWH on top of Mt Sinai, shrouded in a cloud, to receive Commandments and even to argue with God.

 

Once again, a cloud shrouds a mountaintop, and the bat qol returns to announce, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” This time, the voice is heard by others: Peter, James and John. Just before this, in Chapter 8, Jesus had asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” And then asked the central question of this gospel, “Who do you say that I am?”

 

Up to this point in the Mark’s story, only demons have immediately recognized just who Jesus is. Whereas the disciples always are portrayed like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid asking one another, “Who is this guy?” Indeed, in chapter eight they say some think he is Elijah. This now has been settled: he is not. They suggest he may be Jeremiah or another of the prophets, but the bat qol dispels that answer: He is the Son of Voice from the cloud. And yet, as the gospel unfolds, the disciples continue to appear baffled as to who he really is to the very end.

 

First, the bat qol speaks only to Jesus at the outset of the gospel, then to the three disciples on the mountaintop in the middle of the gospel. Finally, an echo of the bat qol shows up one final time, near the end of the story. Mark tells us the voice of God speaks through, of all people, a gentile Roman Centurion at the foot of the cross: “Now when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, ‘Truly this man was God’s Son!’” [Mark 15:39] Anyone listening to an oral recitation of this story will recognize this outsider echoes the Divine voice, the Daughter of Voice, first heard by Jesus at his baptism, and again atop the mountain!

 

While I was in seminary, one New Testament final exam question was: Mark - a masterpiece or a mess? I argued a masterpiece, in part based on how the gospel is structured. The opening scene of Mark’s story, Jesus’s baptism, we hear the bat qol announces, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Mid-gospel the voice from the cloud reasserts that Jesus is the Son of God to the three disciples present at this remarkable mystical moment. Finally, at the foot of the cross a Centurion declares, “Truly, this man was God’s son!” The last words of the bat qol.

 

But that is not the very end of the story. The next morning after the crucifixion, three women go to the tomb to anoint his body. When they get there, they find the stone rolled away, the tomb is empty, except for a young man in a white robe who tells them Jesus has risen and they are to tell the disciples that he is going before them to Galilee where you will see him. “So, they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” [Mark 16:8] End of story. There are no accounts of people encountering the risen Christ in the Gospel of Mark. No account of what happens in Galilee. Just an empty tomb, some frightened women, and the promise that they will see him again. The Centurion gets the last word. The story has no end. Mark opens his story: “The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ the son of God. It continues to this day.

 

Brilliant, I wrote. The listener to the story is left to decide for his or herself who Jesus is. Just as Jesus asks the disciples, who always serve as stand-ins for us and all who would follow Jesus.  The two instances of the bat qol and its echo through the Centurion at the foot of the cross are three pillars upon which Mark’s story of Jesus stands. And in a literary tour de force, Mark’s story leaves us with nothing but an empty tomb, three frightened women, the echo of the bat qol from a gentile enemy hanging in the air, and the promise that the story has just begun. The thinness has been dissolved. Storyteller Mark leaves it so that each of us must one day answer the central question of this story of Good News for ourselves: Who do you say that I am?

 

This episode we call The Transfiguration is quite possibly the most mystical moment in the three gospels: Mark, Matthew and Luke. The appearances of the bat qol tells the listener that the story of Jesus is about the closeness, not the remoteness, of God. The thinness of the divide between human and divine has been revealed to four humans, three disciples and a Centurion, not just to Jesus, suggesting that the bat qol is now available everywhere at all times to everyone. The closeness of the divine is available for all to sense and to hear in everyday human life, just as it is disclosed in the sacraments of the church. We will sometimes find ourselves with Jesus on the mountaintop, but most days we are with him in the valleys, at home, at work, at the super market, by the ocean, in a forest, wherever the sound of the bat qol lingers in the air.

 

Whatever we feel at any particular moment, whatever life confronts us with, we are truly never far from the One who is the source of life, light, promise and hope. This is the heart of the story Mark calls “The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” A young man from Nazareth dissolves even the thinness so there is no longer any barrier between human and divine. The bat qol, the “daughter of voice,” still speaks. It says, He is here. In our hearing. Here, now, and forever. Amen. It is truth. It is so.

Healing in the Time of Corona Virus - Epiphany 5B

 

Healing in the Time of the Coronavirus: Part 2

“your homecoming will be my homecoming-”  - e. e. cummings

 

Dianne Connelly, in her book, All Sickness is Homesickness, reminds us of Saint Augustine’s conversion, his moment of awareness which he described with language of God, of Lord, of beauty and awakening to creation. “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee,” he wrote in his Confessions. Connelly herself, as she pondered his assertion, writes, “I opened to my own homecoming, a collective human homecoming. If all sickness is homesickness, then all healing is coming home, and like Augustine, I can bring forth into life whatever has been missing. I can call into being an opening for which there are no words. I can begin to dwell in the poetry of existence.” [ All Sickness is Homesickness, p xvi] “A collective human homecoming” as Connelly describes it echoes the poet e.e. cummings, “your homecoming will be my homecoming.” The healed and the healer are both made whole and free once again.   

 

We find Jesus literally going home with Simon and Andrew, with James and John tagging along, where they find Simon’s mother-in-law in bed with fever. [Mark 1:29-39] As we carefully make our way through a Pandemic, if and when we venture out at all, we either find our temperature being taken, or as I checkout at Safeway, all the employees have badges stating what time that day their temperature was taken. Any sign of fever means I cannot enter the doctor’s office, or the employee gets sent home. In this story it all happens after the five of them left the synagogue where already he had healed a man possessed by and unclean spirit. Seemingly with out hesitation, Jesus “took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her and she began to serve them.”

 

In the synagogue, Jesus had simply issued orders, telling the unclean spirit to leave, and bringing the man back to himself, back home, and back to the synagogue community. Now it is touch. Jesus lifts this unnamed woman up, and suddenly she is brought home to herself to do what she does – which is to serve others. Is it reading too much into this little three sentence vignette to suggest that this serves as a metaphor that embodies the message, the Good News, he was sent to deliver: come home to God’s Kingdom which is ‘at hand,’ it is near enough to touch, here let me touch you, lift you up so you can embody just what living in my father’s kingdom means – serving one another, serving all others.

 

And by all others, oh my! At sunset, we are told, all who were “sick or possessed by demons” were brought to the door of the house. All the people of Capernaum were there. The whole city! “And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.” Right there. All night long people were being brought home to themselves, to their true self. Evidently there was a lot of homesickness in Capernaum. Think of all those homecomings! All those people of the city once again living in the “poetry of existence.” Now we are left to imagine, did he touch them all?

 

In this Time of the Corona Virus, when we are not to touch anyone outside the household, not even relatives, can we even remember what being touched is like? Let alone imagine him touching all those people of the city outside the door of Simon and Andrew’s house! Homesickness was great in Capernaum. Do these stories in the synagogue and outside the house of Simon and Andrew help us to feel our own homesickness? Our own yearning to be whole once again?

 

Getting in touch with our own homesickness, we remember that nearly that 26.7 million fellow citizens of the United States have been positively infected, and of those, 456,000 have died of the Corona Virus. Rendering literally millions upon millions of others, friends, family and co-workers, who have experienced unimagined loss and new kinds of homesickness themselves.

 

With numbers like these, standing at the door, is it any wonder that we are told that, “In the morning, while it was still very dark, Jesus got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.” Yesterday had been the longest day of his life up to that moment. It is no stretch to imagine him thinking, praying, “Is this what it means to be God’s Beloved?” His four amigos hunt him down. “Everyone is looking for you! What are you doing out here?” How can he tell them? What words are there to describe that will make sense to them that he needs time-out to go home himself. To his Father’s household – the household of graciousness, mercy and abounding steadfast Love. After last night, he thinks, I needed a homecoming myself. I need to recharge, refocus. How does one describe what it is like to go home to God? What words are there?

 

Instead, like Simon’s mother-in-law, he knows after some time alone that he has been lifted up, and he sets out for the next town to continue to serve others. “Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.” Where, if we were to keep reading the rest of chapter one, he stretches out his hand and brings home one more person – a man with a skin disorder whom no one else would dare to touch. Jesus touches him. That is what he came to do. To touch others and bring them home, to themselves, and typically he tells them “you can go home now,” isolated as they have been from others. The  word spreads about him. He can no longer enter a town. He stays out in the country. Still,  people come from “every quarter” to see him, to be with him, to be touched by him. He touches them and sends them home.

 

And here we are, so many of us untouched, millions of us, at the door, or out in the countryside, fearful of touching, fearful of being touched, until it has become to seem almost normal. We forget. We forget that we are homesick for life as it was just ten or so months ago. When we could gather together week by week for corporate worship. Corporate, from the Latin 'corporatus', which is the past participle of 'corporare,': 'to form into a body,’ from 'corpus' which means 'body'. We gather week by week to hear Jesus say, “This is my body….” “Do this in remembrance of me….” He forms us into his body. Ave, verum corpus: Hail, true Body!

 

We just want to be with him. Together, his true Body. Really, we just want to be touched by him. Touched by anyone from his “Body.” We are homesick. And the beginning of healing, of coming home, is to speak it, to say it: we are homesick. When we say it, “I am homesick.” “We are homesick,” our collective human homecoming begins.  We know more about him than we think. We know he is the Risen One. We know that he is with us and in us night and day. We know that his kingdom is at hand, so near that we can reach out and touch him. Like he goes out early in the morning to pray, prayer is how we touch him and he touches us.

 

We need to remember. We are the Body of Christ. Ave, verum corpus! We are those people who allow him to lift us up so we, like Simon’s mother-in-law, can get back on our feet and find ways to touch others, serve others, bring others home once again. We remember, we are those people who vow to sustain the virtue of hope in a world that often provides scant evidence that such hope is justified. But we are those people, the Body of Christ, who believe that the falseness of this world is ultimately bounded by a greater truth – that the one who sent us here will return for us at last to bring us home – all of us, every last one of us – to the household of God’s eternal Love. Your homecoming will be my homecoming, he seems to say. Healing means to return us to the poetry of existence.

 

Still, we ask ourselves: did he really touch all those people? And when we gather like this, even in this virtual Live Stream world, we remember, yes. He did. And we know this because we can remember a time when Jesus touched us. This story is meant to help us to remember that time that Jesus touched us and lifted us up and brought us home once again. He reached out, took your hand, lifted you up, and suddenly you were free, you were whole, you were loved, and you were home once again. Remembering this makes all the difference as we make our way as a body of his people through the relentless fear and loneliness of this Pandemic. We are not alone. For he is always here. And if he is here, we are at home. Now. In His Body. Now. And forever. Amen.