sermon, redux

I have a love-hate relationship with publishing sermons. (Namely, that I love reading other people's sermons and hate publishing my own.) Actually, the main problem is that sermons are so contextual, it's hard to float them out on the internet. Oh, and that writing to be delivered orally is quite different than writing to be read visually, so I'm not always sure that sermons read very well in print.

But. That aside, I had such a great time messing around with thoughts brought up by Choralgirl (she has a great blog! Read it!) that I thought I'd throw this out there as an addition to a discussion she's got going. I made some changes as I preached it, especially the second and third times around, but of course I can't remember those at the moment, so you'll have to take the original draft.


Dear friends in Christ, grace and peace to you from God our creator, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

There is an old story in the Jewish tradition about the creation of the world. There are several versions of this story, but they all say something like this: that long ago, long before the world was created, there was only a holy darkness. When the world came from that darkness, it was a great ray of light. And then there was an accident. And the glass vessels containing the light of the world, the wholeness of the world, broke. And the light of the world, the wholeness and truth, was scattered into a thousand, thousand fragments which fell into all events and all people. The story says that human beings were created as a response to this accident: that we were created to put together the pieces, and to restore the wholeness of the world. This task is called “tikkum olam” in Hebrew, restoring the world, which is the task of all people who have ever been born or ever will be born. Another version of the story says that when the world was created, the truth was a giant mirror, and it was what shattered in an accident. Now each person holds a piece of the mirror, a piece of the truth, and the more pieces we put together, the closer we are to seeing a larger truth than any of us can see on our own. (1)

But if you’ve ever broken a mirror, or a piece of glass, you know that this story has danger to it. Shattered mirrors have sharp edges. You can cut yourself easily; you could hurt someone else if you wanted to. Which is also something you can do, not only with a mirror, but with a piece of the truth.

This is a beautiful image, that each of us has a little shining glint of truth, a piece to contribute. It reminds us that truth and wholeness are things none of us can figure out entirely on our own – that we need each other, or we will not be able to see much of anything at all. But it is also an image with an edge. It is not a very safe image. Then again, when it comes to the truth we hear in the gospel, safety may be overrated.

Our reading from Matthew tells three stories of healing in only a short few verses. The first does not appear to be a healing story, but a calling story: Jesus is walking along and sees a man called Matthew sitting at his tax booth, and Jesus calls him to become a disciple – which Matthew does, without hesitation or a single question. That in itself sounds like a miracle: who would walk away from their life without even a backward glance, without asking any questions? It’s partly a testimony to God’s ability to create faith, of course. But it’s also a reminder that the life Matthew was so quick to leave behind wasn’t necessarily a very good one. No one liked tax collectors, after all. When Jesus stopped and talked to Matthew, it may have been the first time in weeks, months, years, that someone didn’t leave his tax booth hating him and everything he stood for. The religious authorities take note of this right away, when they object to the company Jesus is keeping: “why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” they ask of Jesus’ friends.

This was much more than the typical “nobody likes the IRS” sort of thing. At the time, tax collectors often preyed especially on the poor, demanding much more than they could pay. Their fellow Jews despised them for selling out their own people; and the Roman government didn’t think much of them either, though they did take the money. Perhaps Matthew followed Jesus because he felt his heart leap when Jesus called his name; and perhaps he followed because he was desperate to leave his miserable life.

Either way, the authorities object. The Pharisees get a bad rap much of the time, especially if we think they were all like the few who criticized Jesus in the gospels. But remember, the Pharisees were the churchgoing faithful of their time. They were the pastors, the altar guild members, the council committee chairs, the people who drive the van and weed the church property and know everyone’s name. They were, in other words, not so different from us, although we would like to think otherwise. They were serious about their faith, and so they studied the bible, and in the bible, they found passages like this one from Psalm 1: “Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked or take the path that sinners tread.” That’s in the bible! So what is Jesus doing walking around with a bunch of cheaters and sinners? Doesn’t he read the bible? Doesn’t he understand the truth?

As Jesus is in the midst of talking to the Pharisees about this, another desperate person finds him, but this time it’s not Jesus who starts the conversation: “my daughter has just died,” says the man, “please come and lay your hand on her, so she will live.” And it’s not the man who does the following this time: it’s Jesus who gets up and follows him, out into the streets and into his grieving. The only piece of truth this man cares about is that his daughter has died and with her, the future he had always imagined. Does he know anything about who Jesus really is? Or does he rely on a few rumors he’s heard that this guy might be able to help? When you’re desperate, who cares? Jesus never asks the man anything – doesn’t ask him to prove his faith, or answer a few questions about his worship attendance, or demonstrate his faithful giving to the synagogue budget. Jesus simply follows him through the streets.

Which is when desperate person number three shows up. A woman, this time, equally as unlucky as the despised tax collector and the grieving father. She is sick, and she has been sick for twelve years. She suffers from hemorrhages, and because of the purity laws – many of which are in the bible, by the way – she is not supposed to be in public around men as long as she is bleeding. She is not only suffering a physical illness, but a social one as well: she is an outcast, and there is nowhere for her to be. She is so desperate that she has convinced herself all she has to do is touch Jesus’ cloak to be made well.

You know what we would call that? Superstition. This is a desperate woman with bad theology. Jesus isn’t a magician, after all. He’s not a superhero with a super cloak that can confer miracles onto whoever touches it – we know that. Except that, if you have ever been really desperate, waiting for a diagnosis or looking for a cure, you will understand this woman’s mindset. That’s what desperation does to you: if someone tells you there is a man in Mexico who can cure you, there might come a day when you will get on a plane and go, against all your better judgments. When you will convince yourself that if you just reach out and touch this man, maybe, just maybe, you will be healed. Everything will be okay.

Jesus does heal this woman. And he does raise the little girl. And he does call Matthew, the tax collector nobody liked. If each of them has a little piece of the truth, the truth they have known so far is this: they are on the outside. They are the people no one wants to deal with, or sit next to, or talk to, or associate with. And if Jesus is the one going around gathering little pieces of that broken mirror, helping people put the truth back together, he seems to start with the most shattered, the most jagged and dangerous pieces he can find. He is going to save people. But his way of doing it is not particularly safe.

At the time, it was thought that the way to be saved was to keep yourself apart from dangerous things, or unclean things, or uncertain things. So there were rules about who could be in the holiest places and when they could be there, about how to spend your time on certain days of the week, about who belonged where and why.

This is really easy to criticize, until we realize how much we do the same thing. To keep ourselves safe, we stay away from people who aren’t safe themselves, or who don’t seem that way: we try to keep the homeless and the hungry out of our neighborhoods; we spend most of our time with people who are basically like us. More than we would like to admit, we still divide ourselves by race or ethnic background, by religion, by education level, by language, by economic status, even by gender or age. A little bit at a time, we keep ourselves apart from people and places and events that don’t feel safe. We have good reasons for this, we tell ourselves. Safety is important. We have kids who need protection. There are a lot of dangers in the world, people who would hurt us or hurt the people we love. If we stay away from them, keep ourselves apart, we will be safe. Or safer, at least.

But Jesus didn’t especially want people to be safe. He wanted them to be saved, which was a whole other thing. When we read in the gospel today the words “made well” – the woman was “made well,” for example – the Greek word is “sozo,” which is also the word, “salvation.” This bleeding woman, and the despised tax collector, and the grieving father – these people were not especially safe. They were sick, and hated, and maybe bad luck. They were not safe, but Jesus does not have much interest in safety. What he wanted for his people was not safety but salvation, and that’s what they receive. Not only healing, but wholeness: their piece of the truth restored to the rest, their isolation turned into reconciliation.

It’s a hard question to ask ourselves: safety or salvation? What is it we seek? Jesus spent his time with all the wrong people – the tax collectors, the sinners, the poor, the women, the children, the ill and the broken and even the dead. Over and over again, he put them together, one piece at a time. To us, he gives the task of continuing that healing work. For the church to be about healing does not necessarily mean that we need to tap people on the head and tell them to stand up from wheelchairs, or that if we all get together and pray really hard, everyone in our church will be cured from cancer. When it comes to healing, Jesus has a wider vision than this.

One way of being healed is to have your illness cured. For reasons we cannot always understand, that does not always happen on this side of the grave. But the gospel is that God heals us even when a cure does not come. God heals when we are brought in from being on the outside, when we are welcomed. God heals when we stop treating each other as dangerous and start looking for the pieces of the truth in each person. God heals when we have place to bring all our brokenness and be heard, and cared for, and loved. God heals when we, in all our differences, focus instead on our unity. And we, in turn, can help heal the world when we stop worrying about keeping safe and start instead to share the joy of salvation.

(1) Story told in December 2007 on NPR series Speaking of Faith, linked here. My thanks to Choralgirl for sending me the link.