“YES” IN THE MIDDLE OF THE JOURNEY
“Our word to you has not been “yes and no…in Him it is always “yes.” 2 Cor. 1:18-19
Well,
here it is, fifty years, give or take a few weeks, since the strong hands of
Bishop Emrich pressed upon my head in that little wooden chapel with the sweet
smell of cedar around me: beloved warm place in the winter of Michigan (they
had a foot of snow again this week).
And in my heart, the fervent hope of the growth of God’s Kingdom around
me, as the first full-time priest in my first parish.
But that was
not the beginning. One of the earliest
memories I have is that of a little child, perhaps I was three or four years
old, hearing a cardinal sing. I can
still feel myself standing at that exact spot on Liberty Street, looking up
into the trees. It was a lovely day, I
think it was spring, and the cardinal trilled his joyful song. The whole world seemed by his outpouring to
be filled with hope, life and beauty:
“Yes!” The memory of that moment
has become a kind of a touchstone for my life, as if life, the very joy of it,
was calling personally to me on that spring morning at the beginning of my
life, and I have never forgotten it.
It took a while
for my vocation to coalesce. I grew up
in the Methodist Church, and I remember my Dad taking me once to the Episcopal
Church when the Bishop was visiting to show me “how things really should be
done.” His mother was an Anglican in
Australia. That kind of stuck with me.
Then I went
away to college, and a Japanese-American friend who had been brought up a
Buddhist took me to the Episcopal Church, and there in Christ Church, Oberlin,
on Pentecost 1949, I realized, “This is where I belong, and I want to become a
priest.”
It has been a
long journey. After my first parish, a
missionary tour in Brazil, then a detour, working in the field of family
planning, but coming back to the church more and more as my primary vocation,
having another parish, again in the cold country of New York this time, and
finally ending up here with you good people in my recent years of ministry, for
which I am very grateful.
St. Martin’s is
a crowded church in many ways, bigger than I have been in before: lots of folks, lots of programs, lots going
on. It reminds me of the scene in the
gospel today. One of my early memories
of Sunday School in the Methodist Church is a picture of that wonderful scene:
those four determined guys lowering their paralyzed friend practically into the
arms of Jesus, who is addressing that crowd that fills the room on every side.
Not a bad way to remember what our faith, and Jesus, is all about.
Today I want to
explore with you what this story may tell us about our common ministry in this
place.
Every time we
meet here we have intercessory prayer for others – the list that goes on with
some changes, week in and week out.
These prayers, especially for the sick, are reminders of how we are to
carry one another to the throne of grace.
It says, “When Jesus saw their faith,” he acted. Not the faith of the man lying there, but
their faith. How we are at times borne
up by the faith of others, even when we are too sick to say, “I believe.”
Also notice in
that picture they are letting him down in a horizontal position by ropes,
through a hole. What does that remind
you of? A graveside, right? A body is lowered into a grave. They are giving up their friend to
Jesus. They are not sure what will
happen. It is almost as if he will have
to die in order to be made well.
And then
something very interesting happens.
Jesus does not cure him. At
least not yet. He doesn’t even mention
the affliction that was so obvious to everyone else. Instead, he focuses on the disease at the core of the man’s
being: a broken, incomplete relationship with God. He offers healing through words of forgiveness, so this man may
find free access to the love of God that will carry him through all of life – a
wholeness that a dysfunctional body cannot deny him. Hark back to Mary’s great sermon last week: being healed versus
being cured.
The physical
cure, the “take your mat and go to your home” drama, occurs only at the very
end of this encounter. It seems almost
tacked on, an afterthought used as a teaching device. The crowds are awed, and the religious leaders are confounded,
but they have already been outraged because this rabbi presumes to speak words
of forgiveness as if he were God.
I have titled
this sermon “Yes! In the Middle of the Journey” because I think that is where
we are in the midst of this crowded room with Jesus. The great hopes of our beginnings, our call, however that may be
in your life and mine, have brought us a way, some of us a long way. Life is not over for any of us. Nor is it perfect. Someone has said, most of us are “mucking about in the messy
middle.” We are still grappling with
thorny issues and unresolved problems.
Sometimes relationships remain stuck in destructive patterns. Bodies fail us, physical wholeness eludes
us. Whether you personally are
experiencing this today, this is the human condition. We talk about depreciation of used cars. The older you get, the more you realize you
are a “used person” and you are depreciating and there ain’t no way to stop
it. No cream or miracle drug or botox
treatment is going to make that much difference.
In acceptance
of the paralytic you learn that he isn’t so different from you. You learn that you are a paralytic
yourself. I think this was part of why
the scribes and Pharisees hated Jesus.
Because he was so affirming of and intimate with those who they would
prefer to lock up in a room where they could not see them – lepers, paralytics,
sinners of all kinds.
If you have
been raised, as many of us were, to be righteous, it is a long road to take to
be able to accept and love SOB’s. I
have a priest friend who has traveled that road to the point of admitting he is
an alcoholic. And in AA meetings he
says he has finally found out “we are all alike.” The stories people tell, the awful lives they have been leading,
the crazy places they have found themselves in – for the first time, he says,
he is able to see “that is me.” That is
who I have been, too. I am one with these
brothers and sisters. They aren’t
somebody else separate from me.
The human
condition. Dante begins his Inferno,
that famous journey of a soul through hell and back, with the famous verse:
I
came to myself in a dark wood
Where the
straight way was lost.”
Not just individually, but as a society, as a people, as a
world, I have had the increasing sense over the past few years that the black
and white tableaux of them and us that we paint, especially in war, but in so
many ways in the conflicts of life, just is not true, and the straight way is
lost. We are groping. How do we grope? Do we lash out at real or perceived enemies? Or to we reach out to see if there is the
hand of a fellow human being there in the darkness?
In the dark
woods of the messy middle, the pallet of our life, our world, is suspended in
mid-air. The crowd is watching. What will happen?
We are not
ready to fold up the mat, and confidently walk, run, skip or dance home. Not yet.
But it is OK to
be in the unresolved middle of the story.
We are that way in our world so often.
Iraq, yes, the current example.
And sometimes in our personal lives.
And then,
through the prayers and support of others, God has a word for us: “You are
forgiven.” There is another way of
saying that: “You are better than your works.”
“You are God’s child.” “You are
precious.” Even without being free of
physical disease or indeed free of difficult relationships, and breaks in
relationships, we are offered God’s transforming gift of love, in the midst of
all the craziness, that opens the wellspring of a deeper health: God loves you, right in the middle of it
all.
Luther said
that Christ is in, with and under the broken bread of the Communion – and that
goes for our life that we offer here at this altar together with his life
offered for us again today.
Christ is
present here with us in the middle of the story. He loves used people like you and me who are bent and broken in
many ways, unsure of ourselves, stubborn, blind, too often unforgiving. And we may have glimpses of him when even in
this situation a hand is extended to help, a child is cradled and given needed
medicine, a woman is fed, a young man is given hope so his life will not turn
to hate. Even in our crowded room at St
Martin’s this reaching out happens.
As Paul tells
the Corinthian Church, everyone of God’s promises is a “yes.” Sometimes the “no” we hear from elsewhere,
the death that confronts us, opens the door to hear a divine “yes” with fresh
clarity and profound gratitude.
In the opening
part of his Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius of Loyola helps reframe our spiritual
priorities:
“In everyday
life…we must hold ourselves in balance before all created gifts…We should not
fix our desires on health or sickness, wealth or poverty, success or failure, a
long life or a short one. For
everything has the potential of calling forth in us a deeper response to our
life in God. Our only desire and our one choice should be this: I want and I
choose what better leads to the deepening of God’s life in me.”
Jesus’ words of
forgiveness to the paralyzed man turn out to be God’s most transforming “yes,”
thanks to his friends. And we are
invited to be the friends who carry others to the feet of Christ, even though
it be through the shadow and gate of death, so they too can hear the good news
that even in the messy middle God has not given up on us, but loves us,
forgives us, and is trying to work through us.
That is my word
to you in this 50th year that still feels to me like I am in the
middle. And I hope God gives me a few
more.
Derwent A. Suthers
Parts from David R. Loving
Christian Century, Feb
2-9 2000, p.117