Coming out of the Closet (of Prayer)

Ash Wednesday        February 22, 2012  

Is.58:1-12        Ps.103       

1 Cor. 5:20b-6:10    Matt. 6:1-6, 16-21

Lectionary Link

As a pastor and priest, I am very happy when my congregation gather to pray in our public gathering places on public street corners.  I want the people of St. John the Divine to be seen, as often as possible, praying on the street corner of Peak Avenue and Marcia Street.

There was a young man who suddenly stopped coming to church so when his pastor saw him in a store, he asked him why he had not been to church lately.   He said that he had read the Gospel and was convicted by the words of Christ to become a Tameion Christian.  The pastor asked, “What is a Tameion Christian”  The young man said, “Perhaps you have forgotten your New Testament Greek…but Tameion is the Greek word for closet.  And Jesus said we should pray in our closets and not on the street corners or in public places of worship.

Well that adds a new twist to our Gospel.  Did Jesus of Nazareth have a “Don’t ask, don’t tell policy about prayer?”  Did Jesus really want us to live in the closet about our prayer orientation?

Street corner public praying or closet praying?  Which is it?  Maybe I should be grateful for all of the people who are not coming to church to pray in public.  Maybe I really have lots of people who are praying in secret and that is well and good, but what does that do for my worship attendance record?

Should there really be a disjunction between private prayer and public prayer?

I would like for us today to consider the meaning of prayer.  Perhaps the season of Lent can be a time for us to learn about how prayer can be practiced in such a way that it brings us unity, congruence and authenticity in how we live our public and private lives of prayer.

What is prayer?  What is public prayer?  What is private prayer?  Perhaps if we can have some insights into prayer we can come to some insights on the Gospel words of Jesus.

What is prayer?  An answer to this question is found in the Catechism in the back of the Book of Common Prayer.   According to the catechism of the Book of Common Prayer, “Prayer is responding to God, with or without words.”

If our prayer orientation is primarily toward God, then we do not have to worry about the difference between public and private prayers.

Prayer is responding to God, with or without words.  Perhaps this definition is much too general for your taste.  The catechism also specifies the principal kinds of prayer: adoration, praise, thanksgiving, penitence, petition, intercession and oblation.

Using this definition of prayer, we can at any time stop and ask our self the question:  Is my life prayerful right now?  Can I see my life right now as responding to God, with or without words?

If we have a limited notion of prayer, we can reduce prayer to the public performance of religious obligations.  And we can find ourselves in the role of the “public actor of prayer” or to use the Greek word from the Gospel, “hyprocrite.  Public prayer simply out of peer pressure is a motive of prayer that Jesus criticized.

But how can I always walk around being prayerful or having the attitude of prayer?  Prayer could get in the way of my work, if I have to have a conscious attitude of prayer at all times.

Perhaps, you’ve heard the exhortation wrongly attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, “Preach the Gospel, and if necessary use words?”

The same can be said about prayer: Pray at all times and if necessary use words.  One of the principal kinds of prayers is called oblation.  What is oblationary prayer?  Oblation is when the deeds of our lives are performed in such a way as being a response to God.  Oblation is when our “body language” speaks louder than our words and prays the active prayer of love and kindness and moral and ethical behavior.  Body language, oblationary prayer is perhaps the most embracing form of prayer that we can practice.  It is much easier to schedule a time to practice meditative forms of contemplative prayer of praise and adoration, than it is to have the behavior of our bodies always be offering a prayer to God. 

Perhaps during the season of Lent we could open our selves to a haunting question:  Is what I am doing with my bodily action right now a suitable prayer to God?

The Isaian prophet was criticizing the separation of the vocal and public acts of devotion from the actual practice of kindness and justice.  And that is where our prayers of oblation are most important.  If my public acts and my vocal prayers are saying one thing but my actual deeds are saying something else then I am living a dishonest life of prayer.

That is the kind of dishonest prayer that both the Isaian prophet and Jesus were criticizing.

And the best way that we can begin to recover from dishonest prayer is to begin to look at the prayer of oblation or what might be called the doing prayer.  The doing prayer of oblation also needs to go with the “being prayer” of intercession.

One way in which we can begin to practice the prayer of oblation, is first to practice the prayer of intercession.  What if the first thing that we did when we experienced a headache, or an illness or a loss or misfortune, was to stop and say, “Wow, I am in solidarity with everyone else who has a headache, or an illness or a loss or misfortune and I offer my condition to God in prayer in solidarity with all who suffer the same condition.”  And instead of living in “woe is me” state of mind for not being exempt from certain things in life, we offer our particular condition to God with and for others.   And so with intercession one can begin to convert ones prayer into an expression of one’s life lived for and with others.

And from intercessory prayer we can then move to the prayer of oblation when we “do prayer actively with the deeds of our lives.”  And this doing prayer is what will make our vocal and public prayers honest and valid prayers.

I would invite all of us during the season of Lent to think about our lives as lives of prayer, “responding to God, with or without words.”

And because this world is full of people in need, the Lenten season provides for us plenty of opportunities for the prayer of oblation…doing prayers…the prayers of active generosity to those in need.

Let us commit ourselves to prayer during the season of Lent.  Committing ourselves to prayer is our way of expressing our connection to God and to each other.

Should be pray in our closets?  By all means!  When we are alone let us practice meditation, contemplation, adoration and praise and petition.  Should we pray in public?  By all means!  But let us make sure that our public prayers are coming from those who also offer intercessory prayers and oblationary prayers.

In intercessory prayer, we accept the conditions of our lives in solidarity with other people in need.  In oblationary prayers we use the deeds of our lives to practice being loving responses to the human needs in our world.

During the season of Lent we are invited to learn intercessory prayer for others and we are invited to learn oblationary prayer of active generosity in responding to the needs in our world.  If we can beef up our intercessory prayers and oblationary prayers during the season of Lent, we will be able to be more honest in our public prayer lives and when we do, the Father who sees us in secret will show us the reward of living honest prayer lives.  Amen.

Transfiguration: Landscape and Inscape

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

   What if we for the purposes of this sermon were to call life in the external world, the life of our landscape.  And the life inside of us our inscape.  How is our landscape related to our inscape?  We really cannot ever see inside of us; only surgeons get the most literal physical view of our inside.  We can now put mini-cameras everywhere including inside of our bodies.  But there is a non-physical inside; the places of feelings and emotions and thoughts that we cannot see.  So we inherit from our cultures, religions, societies and families ways of talking about our inscape.   We use feeling words and we try to locate seats of feeling and thinking: The head for thinking and the heart for feeling.

   In religious language one can find the use of terms from geography, climate and physics to characterize spiritual insights or happenings that occur in our inscape.  A mountain top, clouds, light, and space travel are all metaphors that we can find in biblical literature to relate interior events.

  In common parlance one might say, “I had a mountain top experience” to characterize an exhilarating moment of the sublime.  A view from higher elevation gives one a greater panorama and a different perspective than what one sees in the valley.  When one speaks about the experience of mystery and not knowing or not seeing, one uses the metaphor of clouds.  The experience of being in the midst of fog or clouds on a mountain is the experience of a loss of perspective because of the loss of visibility.    Though we moderns think we invented space travel, space travel of other sorts has been a metaphor for crossing over into the afterlife.  Elijah’s chariot of fire ride to heaven stands as the most dramatic way in which a person was Assumed or raised into the afterlife and unlike Jesus, he did not even have to experience a death.

  Let us look at the metaphors from our biblical lessons that were appointed for our reading today.

  What do we fear when one someone very important leaves this world?  We fear the loss of some irreplaceable goodness, genius or excellence.  Don McClean’s  American Pie song laments about the “day that music died,”  referring of course to the plane crash in Clear Lake, Iowa that took the lives of Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper and Richie Valens.  And more recently, can we say that music has died with the passing of Whitney Houston?  Did it die when Mozart or Beethoven or Bach died many years ago?  Indeed we fear the death of genius.   Will there is an iphone 16, now that Steve Jobs is gone?  Do any of us doubt it?

  Elisha was the prophetic protégé of Elijah and he was not sure that there would be prophetic excellence after his mentor was gone.  Elijah assured Elisha that the prophetic spirit would remain and be passed on to him and he said as a proof of this Elisha would be able to see his departure from this earth.  And after Elijah was gone Elisha began with confidence to exercise his prophetic gifts to prove that the prophetic gifts, like all really good things, cannot die out of this world.

  The post-resurrection appearances of Jesus were related to the event upon the Mount of Transfiguration.  How does the Gospel reading end?  “As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.” 

  The event of the transfiguration of Jesus was before his death and resurrection, but it could only be understood by the Gospel writer in hindsight.  And of course, all of the Gospels are about  understanding Jesus and his life in hindsight.

  What did the Gospel writers understand about Jesus?   They understood that he had a type of human genius that surpassed their great heroes of Moses and Elijah.  Moses went up a mountain to receive the law from God.  His experience on Mount Sinai made his face shine.  The prophet Elijah did mighty things upon mountains.  The Mount of the Transfiguration is about the disciples trying to sort out their understanding of Jesus.  Their encounter with Jesus represents the summit of their life experience.  It is an experience of clouds and fog; they are baffled by the mystery of this man Jesus.  Peter stammers with perhaps an uncomfortable ignorance.  And then there is light:  Light on Jesus and light that shines from Jesus.  Jesus is an experience of revelation of things hitherto unknown.

  But there is also a voice from heaven that says, “"This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”  And when that happened, Moses and Elijah had departed.  If the disciples had any doubt as to whether Moses and Elijah and their Judaic tradition should keep them from following Jesus, this event was to dispel them of any doubts.  And also in this heavenly voice is a message for Gentiles and it would also prove to be a serious political statement as well.  God the Father said about Jesus, “This is my Son, the beloved.”  People in the time of Jesus knew that Emperor’s son was called a son of a god, divi filius.  If people believed that Jesus was the Son of God, this title and belief would be a challenge and an affront to the emperor-worship cult of the time and so it would be a dangerous political confession as well.  The resulting persecution of Christians attests to the politics of believing that Jesus was the supreme Son of God.

  Beyond the context of the time of Jesus and the times when the Gospels were written, we have to deal with our own time.  The trouble in the world threatens us with doubt about the loss of a type of genius that can save and preserve our world, both on the global level and on the personal level.  We certainly don’t doubt the loss of genius; what we doubt is how the genius in the gifts of humanity are being used.

  How do the gifts of the world get transfigured so that they bless us and the life of the world?  How do our gifts get discovered and developed so that we can receive insight to live our lives with wisdom and use our gifts to bless this world?

  The lesson for us is to seek transfiguration and walk upon the path of metamorphosis.  Repentance is metamorphosis; always seeking to surpass our self in excellence.   How can we progressively change ourselves to be more Christ-like and realize more fully what was proclaimed about Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration?  How can you and I listen well enough to hear the voice of highest insight tell us, “You are my beloved child.”  And isn’t that the purpose of the Gospel, to know ourselves to be sons and daughters of God and go forth and act in a way that shows that we are a member of God’s family with Jesus as our most illustrious sibling?  Amen.

A Phil-aphorism

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.

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.