Transfiguration: Knowing the Extraordinary within the Ordinary

 Last Epiphany B      February 19, 2012

1 Kg 19:9-18      Psalm 50:1-6

2 Corinthians 4:3-6 Mark 9:2-9

Lectionary Link

  If we were arguing about the best home run hitter in the history of baseball, whose opinion do you think would carry the most weight?  What if Babe Ruth suddenly did a reappearance and did an interview and stated, “Well there’s no question about it; Barry Bonds is the best home run hitter in baseball.”  And what if Roger Maris appeared too and said, “That’s right, Babe, there has been no better home run hitter in baseball than Barry Bonds?”  If such a thing could occur, certainly Barry Bonds would be happy and the weight of opinion of Babe Ruth and Roger Maris would have to be respected.

  The opinions of what departed Hebrew heroes would be most respected by people who lived in the first half of the first century is Judaic Palestine?  Probably the two most revered figures in first century Judaism were Moses and Elijah, and King David, the Messiah would have been a third.  But Moses and Elijah were different from David; David had a recorded death but Moses and Elijah had very interesting ending disappearances in their lives and so there was a belief that they like Enoch, did not really die natural deaths; rather they were assumed into heaven.  Since Moses and Elijah had interesting Assumptions into the afterlife, there were Jews who believed that they would be important in reestablishing God’s will and order for God’s people in their futures.  There was a book written called the Assumption of Moses.  It is even written in the book of Jude that Michael the Archangel argued with the devil over the body of Moses.  A book entitled The Apocalypse of Elijah was also known in religious communities in the first century, indicating how important Moses and Elijah were as figures who could intervene and influence the opinions of those who lived many years later.

  So the two who were assumed into the afterlife were like space travelers.  They would return to be present in that visionary event that happened on the Mount of the Transfiguration where Jesus and his disciples, Peter, James and John had climbed.

  For you and me, to be honest,  this event of the Transfiguration is a literary event.  Why?  Because we only read about it in the text book of our Christian faith.  And the text book of our Christian faith in the Gospel section is about the identity of Jesus and the significance of his life.  The author of the Gospel is very interested in the association of Elijah and Moses with Jesus.  If Moses and Elijah have come to give their full endorsement of Jesus, then surely no self-respecting Jewish person could sit on the fence about Jesus of Nazareth.  But there was even a higher witness than Moses or Elijah; there was the divine voice that declared, “This is my beloved Son; listen to him.”  This was like the proclamation in the Psalms when the writer wrote about the Messiah: “The Lord said to my Lord, You are my son, today I have begotten you.”   When Moses received the Law on Mount Sinai, his face shone from his encounter with God and the people of Israel were asked to listen to the voice of God through the Law.  Elijah’s fiery departure was proof that the prophetic flame had passed on to Elisha.  But now on the Mount of the Transfiguration Jesus was seen as the one who surpassed Moses and the witness of the law and also Elijah and the prophetic word.

  For the Gentiles readers of this Gospel, they knew about becoming a son of a god.  When the Caesar became Augustus, a title of divinity conferred by the Roman Senate, then the son of Caesar Augustus was a divi filius or a son of a god.  For the Gentile reader of the Gospel of Mark, they could know that there were higher conferring authorities than the Roman Senate when it came to conferring divinity; Moses, Elijah and the voice of God were more reputable than the Roman Senate when it came to recognizing the surpassing divine excellence of Jesus.

  We have read about the Mount of the Transfiguration as a literary event today.  And so what does it have to do with you and me?  We are not that engaged by Elijah or Moses anymore except through Bible stories.  We probably haven’t heard the voice of God lately, or we wouldn’t admit to it if we did, since we would be declared “crazy.”  So what are we to make of this literary report of the event of the transfiguration today?

  We can say, “I have never experienced anything like this, so this lets me off the hook regarding my faith and my commitment to God and Jesus.  Because, if I had such an encounter, certainly I would be more devout.”  Are you and I letting ourselves off the hook because we’ve not had such poignant encounters.  Probably.

  It is convenient for the church to enshrine experience within the lives of the 12 disciples and the saints and put them on a pedestal, because then we are excused from having a God-experience validated or recognized in our lives that could actually change our lives.

 But what if the purpose of the Gospel is actually to help us locate and validate our own experience of God, then we would have to understand a fuller intent of the Gospel writings.

  The face of Jesus was transfigured; it had undergone a metamorphosis.  The Greek word that is translated, "transfigured" is also more directly translated, “metamorphosis.”  Jesus was ordinary enough to be recognized as a human being; but he was extraordinary enough to be recognized as God’s Son.  So the meaning of the metamorphosis of faith is to discover the extraordinary presence of God within the very ordinary occasions of human experience.

  Jesus is a revelation of the incarnation of God within what is human.  So the meaning of the life of Jesus is that human experience is elevated and validated as being the only way that you and I can come to know God.   God has always, already been extraordinary within the ordinary, only we have not always recognized it or validated it as God’s presence to us.

  Faith includes the attitude of being on watch for the appearances of God.  It happens in the awe of sunrise and sunset; the lovely green on the hill side, the love of spouse, children and friends, the touching chord of a piece of music, the tear provoking story in a movie or book, the pain and sacrifice that is redeemed because they contribute to the betterment of someone else’s life.  You and I are not let off the hook when it comes to God touching our lives.  Where have you and I failed to recognize God?

  Just because everything does not occur in our lives with accompanying Jesus subtitles, it does not mean that God has been absent from your life and from mine.

  The meaning of the transfiguration is that God has appeared to us in the ordinary course of human experience.  And with the practice of faith, we take time to smell the roses of God’s presence to us.

  God has enveloped your life and mine providing the occasions for the divine presence to be known to us.  That is the meaning of the Mount of Transfiguration for us today, and the heavenly voice is saying to us to us within our very ordinary human experience, “You, too, like Jesus, are my child, a beloved son and daughter.”  Amen. 

Christian Wellness as Salvation

6 Epiphany B  February 12, 2012

2 Kings 5:1-15ab   Psalm 42:1-7     

1 Corinthians 9:24-27 Mark 1:40-45

Lectionary Link 

  I was at a clergy conference this week for three days at the Franciscan retreat center.  On the first day we had presentations from representative of the Episcopal Medical Trust.  The presentation was on Clergy Wellness.  The Medical Trust is interested in our wellness, so they send to us a fitness coach who went from almost 300 pounds to a svelte 160 pounds.  And they had a health statistics guru giving us the bad news; boomers have started to retire at an overwhelming rate and the health costs are going to be over the top.  The subtext: it is more cost effective to promote preventative programs now than to wait for all of the diabetes, hypertension and by-pass surgeries.  They gave a free six week program and promised to be our wellness police and help us figure out our Body Mass Index (not really flattering to use Mass and body together), count calories, exercise and keep sugar out of our diets. And I was feeling very guilty; we were asked to bring snacks for the evening social time and I took from my house some killer chocolate brownies and cookies.  I did not have a bag to hide them in so I left them in the car.  But on the second day, when the calorie police had left the building, I put the brownies and cookies into a bag and put them on the table.  And the next day, they were mostly eaten.  So there is a confession about clergy wellness.

  But this preventive trend in health is very important.  It may not be fun to break from habits of the kinds of comfort food and drink that we often avail ourselves of, but preventive health is important. 

  St. Paul was about preventive health.  He spoke about spiritual life as exercise: “I punish my body and enslave it.”   Preventative health at first seems like punishing the body in order to get it to obey and simulate tougher conditions so that when tough conditions arise, we are prepared.

  In a sense what we are about in the church is preventative health; living longer with strategies of health. 

  Why do I say that?  You and I understand the word health better than the word salvation.  Salvation is heavily coded religious term and yet salvation means health and preservation of our total lives.  And we are more or less concern about the preservation of our lives depending upon the preventative steps we take regarding our health.  The Gospel notion of salvation is a total notion of health since salvation is a concern about all kinds of well-being: preventative health, response to our diseases, social health, spiritual health and our health after we die, both for the departed and for those who continue to live.  Gospel health is concerned about life from cradle to the grave and after the grave.

  Let us consider some insights about health that are found in our biblical readings for today:  Health is a universal issue; an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure;  health is about access to treatment; health most often is about doing lots of little easy thing; health is about honesty about weakness and disease;  health is about joyful recovery.

  Certainly it is a no-brainer that health is a universal issue.  We as human being are given an alarm mechanism to establish health as a chief issue; we have the gift of pain to send us a signal that we need to deal with the issues that cause us pain.  And pain of all sorts is what causes us to seek out what we regard to be the normal condition of life, namely the condition of health.  Pain is a blessing in that it tells us that the condition of not having pain is the intended condition of life.  Pain is given to us in order to be honest about our condition.   Pain is no respecter of race, age or religion.  The conditions of pain come to everyone and one of the important roles of civilization is to be able to respond to the pain of the members of human society.

  In ancient society leprosy was a condition that marred the appearance of the body.  Biblical leprosy was not the disfiguring variety that we know today.  It could be cured; it referred to a variety of different kinds of skin disease.  Since it was a condition of appearance, those afflicted were quarantined from society until they could be verified as cured by the priests of Israel.  It was quite a double-bind; how does one get the care one needs if one is quarantined and kept from society.  In the case of Naaman the Assyrian, he had to go across the border to seek his cure.  In the case of another leper, he had to be bold to approach Jesus or any person, since he was breaking the rules by approaching any person with his disease.  Both the prophet Elisha and Jesus responded to the faith of the lepers.  The lepers had hope for healing and they acted upon that hope; this acting upon hope is what we call faith.  By faith we may not always get what we hope for, but living with faith is its own reward.  I suspect that why what is called the “placebo effect” works because faith is an essential attitude of health.

  An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  Sometimes we think that health is about all of the elaborate and expensive treatment responses.  Yet just as the Medical Trust has warned us clergy about the impending impossible health cost due to the large numbers of boomers who will be retirement age, part of the response to this involves the ounce of prevention: half hour of exercise a day, cut down on the sugar, count calories, eat in more healthy ways.  We can reduce health care costs with better prevention and prevention involves little and repetitive acts that become habits of health.  Naaman was offended to be told to wash in the dirty Jordan River; he wanted some mighty event of cure.  Preventative health involves little repetitive acts.  (Yes, preacher, heal thyself).  St. Paul spoke of buffeting his body as a way of building his spiritual life of faith.  Faith exercises of prayer routine, small life style changes and  physical exercise help us to maintain the optimal conditions of mind and body to be ready to respond to the variety of conditions that we often have to face.

  Finally, when do we discover the true importance and value of health?  The value of health is discovered in a very poignant way when we experience recovery.  Illness and pain can be so disruptive of life that when life returns to normal we feel like the psalmist: “O LORD my God,                              I cried out to you, and you restored me to health.  You brought me up, O LORD, from the dead; you restored my life as I was going down to the grave.”

  When we’ve recovered from being sick we often think, “I don’t want to experience that again.”  What recovery teaches us is to cherish health as the normal condition and to believe that is what God wants for us all.  God in Christ wants us to be a community of health, total health, often called salvation.  And this notion of health embraces realistically the conditions of pain and disease and it embraces even our death because we are given the hope that we will live in a new way beyond this life.

  Let us accept the fullness of salvation health; let us take steps in preventative health; let us be a caring community responding to those with health needs; and let us be thankful for joyful recovery.  The Gospel for us today is that we are invited to the Health of Christ, the Salvation of Christ, and it is an invitation to Abundant life.  Amen.

Salvation As Holistic Health

6 Epiphany B  February 12, 2012

2 Kings 5:1-15ab   Psalm 42:1-7     

1 Corinthians 9:24-27 Mark 1:40-45

 Lectionary Link

  The body does not exist in isolation from the mind and the soul and the spirit. And it does not exist in isolation from the social coding of society. Our society tells us what to think about our bodies. Our society has many agents who put their brand upon our bodies. A slight comment by someone about our size and weight; a young friend who has learned to call us fatty, skinny, or four eyes and we become marked forever. Some of the major branding agents of our bodies are the people who want to sell us something. We need diet programs; we need clothes and perfume and deodorant and hair styles. We are told in so many ways that we are “not with it” unless we run with the crowd or have the right car or have the right look. This social coding of our lives starts very early and perhaps one of the greatest events of spiritual healing is to be able to come to accept ourselves in the way that we find ourselves constituted at any given time. This quest we have for spiritual health is an on-going process.

   You have heard me preach about the purity codes that the rabbi practiced within their communities. If one was regarded as unclean according to these codes, then they had to wait until they could be ritually purified before the unclean person could be declared clean and return to their society. The leper’s condition in ancient society was what one would call an obvious condition: One can see skin infections and rashes and so one’s appearance became a social marker. We can feel sorry for the rabbis and those who were responsible for “public health.” Sometimes in a preschool program, parents and teachers will disagreed about the health of a child. So the handbook specifies color of expectorate and nose discharge to determine whether a condition is a cold or an allergy. If it is a cold, it is deem infectious and a child should not be at school. Is that a purity code or just a practical health code?

   Certainly the ancient people could observe that infections happened and perhaps we should cut them some slack since they did not have the proper techniques to really know whether a specific condition was infectious and hence all appearance of illness was treated in the same way: it had to be quarantined. How do you take care of a growing class of people who have been socially quarantined?

   Over time we have developed our modern system of medicine, and hospitals are kind of quarantine. Skilled nursing homes are a kind of quarantine that reveals that we do not have the family and economic structures to keep our elderly within our homes. And we are raised to be such individualists that when we get older we really think that we “should not be a burden” to anyone.

   The point of my sermon is not to be overly critical of the health system in the time of Jesus or of our own health system. It hardly helps to be critical. What needs to be stated though is the condition of alienation that exists because of what we call disease. The physical, mental and social conditions that cause people to feel “ill at ease,” comprise our systems of health and our system of salvation.

   I believed that Jesus brought good news and his good news was salvation. Now salvation is a holistic notion of health. In this notion of health there is recognition of total connections and total relationships. These connections and relationship pertain to our relationship with God, our relationship to society, our relationship to our bodies, our relationship to religious authority, and our relationship to ourselves.

   The worst aspect of sickness and disease is when we ourselves are made to feel alienated from the significant group of care in our lives. When we are made to feel like we do not deserve the company of others because of some condition that we have then the branding of social alienation has effectively separated us from the community health that can tell us that we are okay, in spite of any acute or chronic issue of health that might face us.

   One thing that we know about illness; it is no respecter of person. The great military man of Assyrian, Naaman was not so great to exempt him from a skin condition. He had been mighty in war but a this skin condition left him humbled and as a man of strong will he was going to conquer it. One thing that we learn from the Naaman story is this; sometimes the remedy of our condition is found in something that is very simple to do. And if we are too proud to do some simple things for our health, then we may not really have the right attitude of health. To be healthy, we need to have the right attitude; maybe trying some things and changing some habits that we have been unwilling to change.

   There is another aspect of health that is found in the appointed writing of St. Paul. St. Paul uses a metaphor of the athlete training for the Olympic and forum sports of running and boxing. Health and salvation is a matter of being in constant training. If we ever just sit back and think that there is no struggle involved in our health, we will lose because we lose the attitude of health. Struggle, training, discipline of mind and the body is always needed to counter the forces of atrophy and entropy. If we know we have the genetic tendency towards death, health and salvation means that we set goals of excellence to make the very best possible response to the conditions over which we have no control as they pertain to our health.

  Until we finally run completely out of the energy of life itself, our health will always be the issue of life. Jesus came so that we might have abundant life and abundant health. By that, I don’t think that he meant that we should be exempt from illness and death.

   I believe that Jesus preached a profound wellness to our lives to release us from the burdens of life caused by ignorance, bias and prejudice. The challenges that face the body, mind and soul are great enough without the added burdens of ignorant and biased society. Jesus appealed to the higher society of God to proclaim us well, good, clean and acceptable in God’s sight. And with this proclamation of a bill of clean health from God, we are given the task to confront all of the ignorance and biases that causes illness to be more than it actually is.

  May God give each of us the ears to hear Jesus pronounce for us a clean bill of health. And may we use this good news to be wise about our own health. And may we spread the news of good health to others as we resist every form of ignorance and bias that would alienate people from the good news of God’s love, favor and acceptance. Amen.

Social Health, Holy Spirit Health, Christly Health

5 Epiphany B  February 5, 2012

Isaiah 40:21-31 Psalm 147:1-12, 21c
1 Corinthians 9:16-23 Mark 1:29-39

Lectionary Link

  I have a spray bottle of Windex here and I will be practicing the folk medicine art according to the Greco-American patriarch Gus Portakalos in the movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding.  Just come up and I will give you spray unction with this cure-all.

  Every family has members with hypochondria tendencies.  “I may not be sick but that doesn’t mean that those germs are not out to get me.”  And so every family probably has a history of its own folk medical practice.  And I’m glad the regular practice of high colonics died out in a previous generation.

  Whether folk medicine or modern clinical medicine, health is a major issue of people of all times and all places.  Whether ancient or modern, folk or primitive, health is a universal human issue.  It is a truly catholic issue.  It should not surprise us that the Prayer for the Sick is one of the Sacraments of the church and it follows from the healing ministry of Jesus who is often called the great physician.

  When we think about the history of human health, we might cite the persons responsible for some great breakthroughs in the history of disease.  In the time of Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister, they had moved from blaming things on spirits but the microscopic world responsible for infection was given the name, miasma or bad air.  The discovery of the microscopic world and the development of antiseptic practices was a great development in the history of medicine.  So too was the discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming.  And in my time, Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine.  My father had polio before the vaccine was developed and in the 1950’s I was able to take the vaccine.  How many of you remember the polio vaccine?  After Salk’s discovery, he was asked about a patent for the vaccine.  And he said he could not take a patent on the vaccine; that would be like claiming a patent on the sun.  Would that pharmaceutical companies today were a bit more generous with their products for promoting health.  (Yes, I know they have R & D expenses but universal accessibility to health solutions should be the Christian goal).

  The Gospel today is about Jesus Christ as a folk healer.  And the type of healing that was promoted by Jesus was free and it was manifold.  One might say that religion itself is all about health.  And religious health has lost out to the scientific health of modern medicine whereby the body is detached from the soul to study it like one would analyze a machine.  It has parts and we can oil it with the right chemicals to make it work better.  The human sciences of psychology and sociology have help to re-attach the inner life with the outer body and fortunately many have recovered the holistic notions of health which include faith and spirituality.

  Jesus Christ is call the Savior or in Greek, soter.   Another meaning is the preserver.   Savior is derived from the Latin root, salus.  Salus was the goddess of health and prosperity, perhaps the equivalent of the Greek goddess, Hygeia.  The message of Christ is about health, salvation and preservation.  And Jesus had a special message about health and healthiness.  And he wasn’t waiting to write a book and sell his intellectual property.  What did he say? He said, "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."   Jesus was saying, my kind of health is like the sun, and you cannot have patent on the sun.  So let’s get this message out as far and wide as we can.

  Let us look more closely at the Christly notions of health.  The words “save” or “preserve” have built into them the main issue of the human dilemma.  As soon as we are born into this world, adults have secret for us that they do not tell us; they wait for us to find out in a more appropriate way.  And what is the adult secret?  “We’re all going to die!”  And if we going to die then part of the human vocation is to save and preserve life as long as we can with as much effort as possible.  Preservation is a basic instinct because we know in some way we are all swimming against the current of death.

  Jesus recognized in his time that methods of preservation were not working for lots of people.  One sign of failure was the lack of socialized medicine of his time.  Now that might sound like an anachronistic political comment but what I mean is that the social medicine of the time of Jesus ostracized lots of people.  They were left outside of the health coverage.  They were not given access to human community because they were declared unclean.  Dead bodies were declared to be impure and people with all manner of sickness were also declared unclean.  Some of those states of uncleanness seem quite trivial to us today.  Such people had no access to the community of care; they had to live quarantined lives.  This lack of socialized medicine has plagued human history for a long.  When any person or group of people are declared unfit for human society based  upon a condition for which they had no choice, then there cannot be fullness of health for those who are oppressed and also for those who do the oppressing.  The health of Jesus was social health, because he restored people to community.  When I worked as an orderly at a VA hospital, I immediately noted that the veterans who had friends and family who visited them had much shorter stays in the hospital.  The saving and preserving health of Jesus is social health.

  The health of Jesus is expressed in others Gospels as the experience of abundant life.  In the healing stories of the Gospel, we find that the interior lives of many people are so wracked that their spirits were called unclean.  Fear and anxiety, panic, lack of self-control, envy, greed, hate, anger, wrath are just some of the names of the torturous interior states that people experience because of traumatic events in their lives or because their own genetic inheritance.  In addition to the social health of being welcome to community, Jesus offered people to experience their inner life as the life of the Holy Spirit.  This is the experience of a higher power, a force that is the great lion tamer of the interior life.  This is the abundant life; this is to know our deepest life force as an engine of bliss and peace that helps our bodies swim upstream against death.  The Holy Spirit is the evidence of abundant and eternal life in us now, even while our bodies are wasting away.

  Jesus Christ has become known as the manifestation of God as our Health, our Savior and our preserver.  Why?  Because he sought to repair human community by inviting all to community.  Our communion is a continuing witness of the invitation of Christ for all to come to the family meal of God.  Jesus Christ is also a manifestation of God as Health because he introduced us to a way to know our interior life as Holy Spirit abundant life.  And this is our ultimate preservation in the midst of things that are passing away.

  Once again today, we want to get this message of the health of Christ out to all.  It does not have a patent.  It is free to all.  Amen.

  

Jesus, the People Whisperer: A Youth Dialog Sermon

 A Youth Dialog Sermon

4 Epiphany B  January 29, 2012

Deut. 18:15-20  Ps. 111

1 Corinthians 8:1-13   Mark 1:21-28

Lectionary Link

Katie: In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit Amen.

          Please be seated.

(Kalum tries to whisper something into Katie’s ear….Katie pushes him away)

Katie: Kalum, what are you doing?

Kalum: I am just trying to do a set up for learning something from the Gospel today.

Katie:  What kind of set up?  Hot air in my ear is not much of a Gospel set up, in my humble opinion.  Besides, it was my ear that you were blowing into.

Kalum:  I wasn’t blowing into your ear, I was whispering into your ear.  You’ve heard about the famous horse whisperer.  He had a gift of taming wild and spirited horses and that is what is called horse whispering.  And I thought that I would be a Katie whisperer.

Katie:  Hold it right there; don’t go any further with that metaphor.  Why would you think that I need to be whispered by you or anyone?  I’ve got a fist here that could be called a Kalum shouter!  Sometimes shouting and not whispering is called for.

Kalum: Well, I was trying to make a Gospel point about Jesus.

Katie:  Why don’t you get to the point?  Your detours may keep us at church until noon.

Kalum: Well, you know that we have not always had modern medicine.  And we’ve not always had modern psychology.

Katie:  And the entire world does not yet have modern medicine or modern psychology.  There are still many traditions of folk medicine in the world today.

Kalum:  You mean like medicine men and shaman and faith healers and gurus?

Katie:  There have been many traditions of health and healing in the history of humanity.

Kalum:  During the time of Jesus there were health and healing practices.  Just like our times people suffered with diseases of the mind and the body.  And every community has a way to deal with issues of poor health.  And even though we might think that they are primitive, rather than give into despair and defeat each community tries to find a way to treat situations of suffering.

Katie:  So are you suggesting that Jesus was more like a medicine man in his healing?

Kalum:  Maybe I am suggesting that Jesus is what we would call the ultimate people whisperer.  So now do you get my attempt to whisper into your ear?

Katie:  So you think that Jesus was the ultimate people whisperer.  He had a special way with people and that special way with people helped to calm their lives and bring them to good mental health.

Kalum:  Yes, I think that Jesus was quite a medicine man even though the health and healing of his time was understood in a different way than we do today.  The Jewish religion of which he was a part used to classify things into two categories:  things were either clean or unclean, pure or impure, permitted or restricted.

Katie:  So this man in synagogue was classified as one who had an unclean spirit.  This was a way of saying that his inner life was so troubled that it was known to the people of his community.

Kalum: How would you like to be classified by your community as a person with an “unclean spirit?”  People were probably saying, “Stay away from John; he has a real unclean spirit….he a bit temperamental…he a bit spirited….maybe a bit out of control.  I am frightened to be around him.”

Katie:  Being shunned and neglected by the community did not help his mental health one bit.

Kalum:  Unclean was a category of classification for lots of things by the rabbis…For example if you liked pork or shrimp or any shell fish, you could not eat them because they were declared as unclean and whatever was declared unclean had to be avoided.

Katie:  Why do you think the religious leaders declared shrimp and pepperoni as “unclean?”

Kalum:  I don’t know, it could be that at a religious convention they served some rancid pork and shrimp and so in the throes of food poisoning, they declared pork and shrimp as “unclean.”  Who knows the ancient roots of lots of practices in any culture?

Katie:  I guess Jesus was concerned most about restoring this shunned man back into community.  Jesus had a way of making a once described unclean man into a man who was clean and fit for the community.

Kalum: Being a Christians does not mean that we are exempt from any potential unpleasant human condition; being a Christian means that Christ and Christians welcome all into human fellowship.

Katie:  In receiving the shunned and troubled man in the middle of the synagogue, Jesus was saying “This is what true people of faith do, they welcome all into their communion and fellowship.  There is no one who is unclean to God.”

Kalum: And so the medical and psychiatric practice of Jesus might be called “People whispering.”

Katie:  A horse whisperer is able to help a troubled horse make friends with people and not be left alone without the care and interaction with others.

Kalum: So Christ calls us to be “folk medical doctors.”  Christ calls us to be people whisperers.

Katie:  But that does not mean indiscriminate whispering into people’s ears.

Kalum:  That’s true, but God gives us a gift of being with people and God gives us people whom we are to give a special welcome into our community.  And we need to ask God to help us do good people whispering.

Kalum and Katie together whispering to the congregation: “God loves you and welcomes you and so do we in the name of Christ.”  Amen.

Gospel Puppet Show: Animal Conference

Puppet Show for January 29, 2012

4th Sunday after the Epiphany

Animal Puppets:

Too-key the toucan, Big Guy, the elephant, Rocky the Racoon, Octie, the Octopus and Harry the horse.

Too-key, the toucan:  Are you looking at me?   Why are you looking at me?  Are you laughing at my big nose?  Do you think that I’m funny?  Do you know who I am?  I am Too-key the toucan.  And I want to introduce to my friends.  First, Big Guy, the Elephant.

Big Guy: Hi, boys and and girls. Do you have some peanuts for me to eat?

Too-key: And next is Rocky the Racoon.

Rocky:  Hi boys and girls, can you show me where the garbage cans; I’m hungry.

Too-Key: And from the ocean we have Octie, the Octopus.

Octie: Hi, boys and girls.  You get to count to ten on your fingers and thumbs; I only get to count to eight.

Tou-key:  And now let us clap our hands for Harry the Horse.

Harry:  Hay, hay, hay, hay….I love to eat hay!

Too-key:  Boys and girls, you see that we are all different in how we look.  I have a big nose for eating fruit and lizards.

Big Guy:  I have a big hose trunk, so I can give myself a shower.

Rocky:  I have really good eyes so I can see at night.

Octie:  I have pads on all of my legs so I can stick to rocks in the ocean.

Harry:  I have strong legs so I can run fast in the meadow.

Too-key:  So all of are different, but we are also all the same.

Big Guy:  Tou-key, I don’t look at all like you.  How are we all the same?

Too-Key: We are all the same because God created us all.  God created us different because 

God wanted more beauty in the world.  If we were all the same then that would be like having to eat broccoli at every meal.  How many of you would only want to eat broccoli? 

Rocky: That would be boring and I like lots of food in the garbage cans.

Harry:  Hay, hay, hay, I like to eat hay, but I also like oats, apples and carrots.

Tou-key:  God made us all different and all of us have different problems.  Sometimes we are sad or sometimes we are sick.

Big Guy:  Catherine read a story today about a man who was really sad.  He was really sad and fearful.

Octie:  But this man found help from Jesus.  Jesus helped to make this sick man healthy and happy.

Harry:  When I am sad, my mom comes and rubs her nose on my nose.  And she whispers nice things in my ear and I feel better.

Rocky:  And even though we are all different, we can still help each other.

Tou-key:  Jesus taught us to be like doctors.  Because if we treat each other with kindness it will help us feel better.

Big Guy:  I am going ask my friends a question and I want them to raise their hands.  How many of you will be kind and help each other to feel really good?

Harry:  Is everyone raising their hands?

Tou-key:  Yes, they are and just like Jesus made a sick man feel better, we too can help each feel better with kindness.  Do you agree?    If you agree say, Amen!

Harry:  Hay, hay, hay, Father Phil can you get this show moving….why don’t you start the children’s creed.

Father Phil:  Okay, Harry, hold your horses……the Children’s Creed starts on page 3. 

Jesus, Ultimate People Whisperer?

4 Epiphany B  January 29, 2012

Deut. 18:15-20  Ps. 111

1 Corinthians 8:1-13   Mark 1:21-28

Lectionary Link

   In the Gospel of Mark, the first act of public ministry by Jesus is when he commands an “unclean spirit” to come out of man who was at the synagogue in Capernaum.  As we attempt to evoke some meaning for us today from this text required as lectionary reading, we come with many pre-conceptions about unclean spirits, many of which are perpetuated through film and television.   Part of modern entertainment includes ghost whisperers and ghost busters and the ancient religious psychiatry of exorcism gets portrayed in extreme forms in the cinema.  One wonders if our fascination with such things is a protest against the certitude of modern science in purporting to explain everything, even while in the lives of most people, the unexplainable dynamics of the invisible interior world seems to influence what happens in our external world.

  For the purposes of a sermon we can but selectively offer some cursory reflections knowing that limitation of time requires that we exit this sermon with the relevant good news for our lives today.

  We begin like archaeologists who have collected shards of knowledge about the topic of the Gospel texts.  Such knowledge comes from many historical contexts and so we set a surface taxonomical grid into which we place the shards of knowledge.  And then we analyze and move to formation of cogent meaning.

  In one box we have unclean spirit, the unclean being particularly Judaic since Judaism had a classification system designating what was pure and impure.  This system was meant to keep them pure from “outsiders” since they had a vocation to be a “holy” or “pure” people because God is a Holy God.  States of disease were designated as impure and people who had such diseases had to be quarantined from society until they attained ritual purification.   In another box, we have the ancient Greek notion of the demon or “daimon.”  In the Greek culture such a daimon was neutral or could be used to refer to a spirit guide or even a god or demi-god.  But as a foreign concept to Judaism, the word demon became synonymous with “unclean” spirit and the Gospels seem to use, demon, unclean spirit and evil spirit in interchangeable ways.  In another box we have the knowledge of the holistic approach to the understanding of health.  Spirits were involved in being unhealthy; spirit/body causal connections were believed to exist.  Often physical disease was given spiritual causal explanation.  So healing and the expulsion of an unclean spirit were co-extensive events.  Another box on our taxonomical grid: In early Christian baptismal practice, exorcisms were normative practices as each convert from a “pagan” religion had to make sure that residue spirits of other religions were expelled before baptism.  Finally, another prominent grid of Christian knowledge is the Christian designation for one of the persons of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit.  What is more contrasting with unclean spirit than the Holy Spirit?

  Now where do we go for Gospel meanings for our lives?  When we are ill what do we do?  We look for a physician.  We want someone who has knowledge that can effect a powerful intervention over the force of our disease.  In our own experience with disease we settle for a gradual process of a return to health; rarely is the cure instantaneous.   In our lives we also know that we can have disturbed interior states.  We can feel helpless to addictive impulses that dominate and disrupt the quality of our lives.  We can also be socially stigmatized by our weakness, disability, disease or addiction.  And if any portion of society defines our existence as “impure” or “unacceptable” to full inclusion, we can feel our life is devalued because of who we are.

  What I would like for us to take from the Gospel reading today is this:  Jesus was able to reintegrate a man who was known as the one with the unclean spirit into the synagogue community.  Let us embrace the holistic health of Jesus that is also community health.  The worst sickness of all is to be alone and without the possibility of community.  We can bear all sorts of conditions in life if we can do it within a caring community.  Jesus was not a ghost whisperer, he was a people whisperer.  He was able to make the man presentable to the community and he was able to change the community’s designation of the man to be one who was included, and therefore worthy of care and support.

  Any physical or mental health condition includes the social threat of being feared or excluded by the community.  And we need to proclaim Gospel health.  We need to preach release to the captives and preach health to the quarantined.  This is the holistic Gospel health of Jesus Christ, a people whisperer who introduces us to the Holy Spirit as the higher power within us to integrate us within a community of health and be a part of a community that proclaims salvation or health to all. 

  May God lead us to the people who can whisper each of us to optimal health and may God use each of us to be people who whisper others to their optimal health, for the sake of Christ, the ultimate people whisperer.  Amen.