Tag: coldwater

Your Faith Has Made You Whole

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Sermon for Proper 23, Year C

Click here for the biblical readings.

Navigating the diverse world of religious beliefs can be an enlightening, if tricky, experience, even when one is already an active participant in a particular faith community. Visiting another community for the first time can feel disorienting. Up until last week, I had been to Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox church services. I had visited a synagogue and even served as a guest preacher in Unitarian Universalist services, but until recently, I had never been to a mosque.

That changed a little over a week ago when I attended Friday prayer services at the American Muslim Society of Coldwater with my friend, Pastor Scott Marsh, of the Coldwater United Methodist Church. Pastor Scott and I meet regularly for mutual support and to discuss joint ministry opportunities in service to the wider Coldwater community.

One concern that we share is for our Muslim neighbors in our beautiful city, most of whom are also Yemeni immigrants. In spite of the fact that there are differences of skin color, religion, and language between these, our neighbors, and the predominantly light-skinned, Christian, and English-speaking population of Coldwater, Pastor Scott and I wanted to send a message of friendship and support from the Christian clergy of this town.

We were concerned that the negative and hostile rhetoric against immigrants and Muslims that seems to predominate in present-day news media was causing our neighbors to feel unsafe and unwelcome in our community. What we discovered instead surprised us greatly, but I will return to that in a moment.

What I want to emphasize right now is the sense of awkwardness that Pastor Scott and I felt as newcomers in a religious space, even though both he and I are trained professionals in the sphere of religion. For once, we did not stride into the room with the confidence of leaders, but with the tentativeness of visitors. We were unaccustomed to the practice of taking off our shoes at the door. We didn’t understand a word of the sermon or the liturgy, which was entirely in Arabic. We were vulnerable outsiders, cut off from the usual trappings of familiarity that make us feel comfortable in the religious spaces where we lead.

This experience of isolation and fragmentation is common in modern society. We, the people of the digital age, for whom the traditional structures of faith and family seem to be eroding away in the relentless stream of data that comes through the internet, are frequently left feeling like strangers in a strange land. We feel cut off from the sources of meaning that sustained our ancestors for generations. In the wake of constant change, this sense of alienation is understandable—and it relates directly to today’s gospel.

In the story that we read this morning, Jesus encounters a group of similarly alienated people. The text tells us that they were lepers, although that term is a bit of a misnomer. Leprosy, in the modern sense, refers to a condition known as Hansen’s disease, but in the ancient world it could refer to one of any number of infectious skin diseases that required those who suffered from them to be quarantined from the general population. Their isolation from the rest of society was not a matter of moral purity but of public health.

The Torah required that people suffering from skin disease keep their distance from everyone else and loudly announce their condition whenever an uninfected person drew near. This was the isolated state of the ten people whom Jesus encountered in today’s reading. Moreover, the reading particularly focuses on one person who was even more isolated than the rest because he was a Samaritan—and thus regarded as a heretic and a half-breed by his Jewish neighbors.

So this person, like many of us in the modern age, was cut off from all the familiar sources that gave life meaning in the ancient world. These ten people, and this one Samaritan in particular, cried out to Jesus for mercy from the depths of their isolation and despair.

Jesus, in turn, reconnected them to the roots of their tradition, where they might find meaning. He said, “Go, show yourselves to the priest.” And the text says that as they went, they were made clean. This was all well and good for most of them, but not for the Samaritan. For him, there was no option of showing himself to the priest because he was not Jewish but a Samaritan, and thus unable to enter the temple and complete the ritual of purification prescribed by the Torah.

So what was he to do? He did the only thing he could think of—he turned around, returned to the presence of Jesus, fell at his feet, and thanked him. Upon seeing this, Jesus asked a very interesting series of questions. He said, “Were not ten made clean? But the other nine—where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?”

I find those to be very interesting questions. Upon hearing them, many of us consider them to be rhetorical questions. The answer, we think, is obviously no. No, no one but this foreigner returned to give praise to God. But that doesn’t sit well with a careful reading of the text.

After all, Jesus had told the ten to go show themselves to the priests, hadn’t he? Presumably, they were doing exactly what Jesus had asked them to do—visiting the priests in the temple and giving thanks to God for their healing, as prescribed in the Torah that their ancestors had followed for generations. The only reason one of them came back to thank Jesus personally was because that person was legally unable to enter the temple under the traditional laws of the Torah.

What I wonder is whether Jesus’s question was not rhetorical but authentic. What if he actually wanted us to consider where the other nine had gone? What if Jesus wanted to show us that there is more than one way to give thanks to God when we are grateful for the good things that God has done for us? What if the diversity of praise is the very thing that Jesus wants to highlight for us in today’s gospel?

Kindred in Christ, I believe that is exactly what is happening in today’s reading. After asking these three poignant questions, Jesus turns to the Samaritan ex-leper and says, “Get up and go on your way. Your faith has made you well.”

The first thing I notice about this sentence is the part where Jesus says, “Go on your way.” It reminds me of the Fleetwood Mac song from the 1970s: You Can Go Your Own Way. He doesn’t tell the Samaritan to convert to Judaism or to start following the laws of the Torah. He says, “You can go your own way.”

And immediately after this, I find it most fascinating that he refuses to take credit for his own miracle. He doesn’t say, “I have made you well.” He says, “Your faith has made you well.” He gives credit not to the giver of the gift but to the receiver. Isn’t that interesting?

To me, that says that Jesus isn’t interested in building a name for himself because Jesus doesn’t have an ego to bruise. I mean, come on—the guy works a miracle and then refuses to take credit for it. Who does that? Only the kind of person who is more interested in helping people than getting credit for it.

Jesus said to the man, “Your faith has made you well.” And there’s something else that’s interesting to me about that. Our translation, the New Revised Standard Version, renders that last phrase as “Your faith has made you well,” but other translations have rendered it differently. Some say, “Your faith has saved you,” or “Your faith has healed you.” But this is one of the very rare instances where I think the 17th-century King James Version actually renders it best. The King James Version says, “Thy faith hath made thee whole.”

And I really like that, because that’s what faith actually does for us. Whether or not faith can cure people of physical ailments or preserve their immortal souls for bliss in the afterlife, faith, we know, has the power to make us whole.

Humans are meaning-making machines. Evolution has hardwired us to look for patterns and connections in the world around us. When we see two unrelated events that seem to be related to one another, we instinctively look for some kind of causal connection between them. We can’t help it—it’s just the way we were made.

Our faith is not a system of beliefs that we cannot prove scientifically, but the means through which we are able to put together the fragmented pieces of our lives into one coherent whole. Like Jesus said to the man in today’s gospel, our faith makes us whole.

Kindred in Christ, that is the good news coming to us through today’s gospel. That is how we can take the fragmented parts of our life and the alienated people in our society and weave them together into one coherent unit—not because we look alike or talk alike or pray alike, but because we have been brought together into one family by the God who loves us all, regardless of our skin color, or ethnic background, or language, or even our religious beliefs. Our faith has made us whole.

When Pastor Scott and I went to the mosque on the Friday before last, we entered that building as strangers and outsiders. We didn’t speak the language. We didn’t share their specific beliefs. And these two white guys didn’t even look like anyone else in that room. But I want to tell you how we received a welcome of radical hospitality and joy and love. We got a tour of the beautiful new facility that they are building for the worship of God and for service to our community.

They spoke to us about members of their faith community who have been in Coldwater longer than either Pastor Scott or I have been on this earth. Kindred in Christ, I want to tell you today, with both embarrassment and joy, that Pastor Scott and I went to that mosque to extend hospitality, but instead we received it. We went there to offer welcome, but instead we were welcomed.

They surrounded us with the loving arms of Allah, which is simply the Arabic word for God. Friends, Pastor Scott and I learned something that day. We discovered, like the Samaritan in today’s gospel, that our faith has made us whole—not an Episcopal faith, or a Methodist faith, or a Muslim faith, but faith in that mystery which transcends all names and categories, including the categories of existence and nonexistence. Faith in God, or Allah, or love, or any other name that you may choose to give this mystery.

It was faith that brought us together. It was faith that united us across the boundaries of our many differences. It was our faith that made us whole.

Amen.

Fr. Barrett, Pastor Scott, Dr. Ali, and a longtime member of AMS Coldwater (also named Ali)

Touching Grass

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

Sermon for Proper 17, Year C

Click here for the biblical readings

When I was a kid, growing up in the 80s and 90s, Nintendo was a big part of my life. I spent a lot of time perfecting my fine motor skills with games like Super Mario Brothers and Street Fighter II. The only problem was that I developed a bad habit of losing my temper at the TV screen whenever things weren’t going my way in the game. When my poor mother would hear me screaming from the next room, she knew it was time to come in and tell me to turn off the game and go play outside.

Now that I have teenagers of my own, I’ve noticed that their generation has coined a new phrase to deal with this exact situation. When someone is showing signs of having become too wrapped up in drama on the internet, their friends will say to them, “Go touch grass.”

In previous generations, parents might have worried that the mention of “grass” indicated that their kids were engaging in, shall we say, a bit of “recreational chemistry.” But, in present day terms, “touch grass” means temporarily unplugging from the virtual world in order to get back in touch with actual reality. If you’ve been online too long, you need to go touch grass. It’s the same thing that my mother was trying to tell me, back in 1992.

In a way, “touch grass” is also the same point that Jesus is trying to make in today’s gospel. When people are getting too wrapped up in “playing the game” of social hierarchies, they sometimes need to turn it off, reengage with reality, and maybe even go outside and literally “touch grass.”

Whether or not we happen to be of the online generation, we all have a tendency to get wrapped up in silly games that sometimes stress us out. The technology is new, but human nature remains just the same as it ever was. At school, there is a pecking order that dictates who gets to sit at the “cool kids’ table.” At work, certain voices are more likely to be listened to in a meeting. In our neighborhoods, people scramble to “keep up with the Joneses,” while forgetting that everyone is a “Jones” to someone else. The game of social hierarchies is crazy-making. That’s why all of us need to periodically turn it off, go outside, and touch grass.

That’s how we remember that the essence of the good life is not about competition, but communion. It’s not about beating each other, but being together.

In today’s gospel, Jesus is enjoying a meal at someone’s house on the Sabbath day. This is an important detail. In the gospel according to St. Luke, the Jewish concept of Sabbath, the day of rest, comes up repeatedly. For Jesus, the day of rest was not a day of religion, rules, and rituals, but a weekly reminder of the way life is meant to be. Many of Jesus’ healing miracles took place on the Sabbath. People were restored on this day, not only to physical health, but also to their rightful place as equal partners in their community.

A significant part of the Sabbath, for our Jewish neighbors today as well as back then, is the common meal. In Jesus’ time, the seating chart at these meals was very important. The right kind of people had to have the right seat at the right supper in the right house. The whole thing was a game about reinforcing social hierarchies (much like the “cool kids’ table” in every school cafeteria).

At first glance, it seems like Jesus is teaching strategic etiquette for getting the right place at the right table, but what he’s actually doing is subverting the social order by encouraging people not to play the game of social hierarchies. For Jesus, the big Sabbath meal is a symbol of reality, as seen from a spiritual point of view. The most honorable guests, in God’s eyes, are those who willingly take a lower position in order to make space for others at the table.

From the point of view of the Christian spiritual tradition, this parallels nicely with the mystery of the Incarnation, where the Divine Source of all Being “became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14) in the person of Jesus the Christ.

In Christ, according to the Christian tradition, God’s own self took the lowest place by being born to an impoverished refugee couple, in an occupied country, in the feeding trough of a stable outside of an overfull inn. In today’s terms, it would happen in the parking lot of a run-down motel, somewhere in the West Bank of Palestine.

From the point-of-view of the powers-that-be, such a baby would be nothing more than another mouth to feed, a nameless statistic in the latest news about the latest airstrikes, and a drain on national resources. But, from the Divine point of view, such a birth marks the coming of salvation and liberation into the world. This is the truth that Christians proclaim every time we celebrate Christmas.

Kindred in Christ, this is what it means to “take the lowest place.” It means becoming vulnerable and standing with the most disenfranchised people on earth. In Christian terms, this is what it means to save the world. Jesus the Christ didn’t do it by climbing the social ladder, but by intentionally taking the “lowest place” among humanity. We who claim to be the people of Jesus must follow suit, as the Scriptures say in 1 John 2:6, “whoever says, ‘I abide in him,’ ought to walk just as he walked.”

Dear kindred in Christ, our Lord invites us to “touch grass” because that is exactly what God did in the mystery of the Incarnation. Jesus the Christ took the lowest place among humanity in order to exalt humanity to the “right hand” of God, “in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come” (Ephesians 1:20-21).

Friends, our Lord asks this of us because he knows that real life is not about beating each other, but being together.

When I think about this way of being together, what comes to mind is Crescent Comics and Games, which sits just a few yards from our church’s front door, on Chicago Street. This establishment is a prime example of a “third place,” as described by Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book, The Great Good Place.

A “third place,” according to Oldenburg, is different from a “first place” (the home), and a “second place” (the workplace), because it is a place where people can come and be human, without the expectation of monetary participation. Third places are important because they provide space for people to hang out, converse, and figure out who they are, without having to make a purchase or prove their monetary worth.

Other examples of third places include places of worship, public libraries, community centers, and internet chat rooms. They are absolutely essential for functional democracies, but they are becoming increasingly rare in our consumer-oriented society.

Crescent Comics and Games is a for-profit business, but it also functions as a third place because people come there to play games, even if they don’t buy anything from the shop. Logan and Colleen, the owners of this shop, have intentionally made their business a place of welcome for everyone in Coldwater. Those who play games in their store are welcome to make a purchase, but it is not required for participation in the games that take place there. That is why I ultimately consider their shop to be a third place in our beautiful town.

The kinds of games that people play there are manifold. Most significant to me are the role-playing games, one of which is run by our own parishioner and cameraman, Chris Russell.

Here’s the thing to understand about role-playing games: They aren’t about winning or losing. In role-playing games, the players work together to overcome a common challenge and tell a story that is greater than any one of the individual players present. The story is the thing that matters most, and the players either succeed or fail together. I can think of no greater parallel to the Church than this. We, the people of faith, are called together by Christ, not to compete with one another, but to work together in service to a Grand Story that is greater than any one of us.

Kindred in Christ, I believe that the Church is called to be a third place, like Crescent Games and Comics, in our community today. We ought to be a place where people from every walk of life can come and know that they will find a friendly face and a safe shelter from the storms of life.

This is what Jesus the Christ meant when he encouraged his followers to “take the lowest place” in the social hierarchy of Sabbath suppers in his day.

I pray that our church might be a “third place” where every person in our city can come to touch grass, find safety, hospitality, and love in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, who taught his followers that real life is not about beating each other, but being together.

Amen.