Sermon Blog
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Sermon Blog
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Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Proper 8, Year B June 27, 2021 I am forever grateful for a number of phrases we use in the south that speak far beyond the few words they utilize. “Bless your heart.” “She’s just not right.” “He’s a mess.” You can purchase signs, doormats, and dish towels that say: “In our family we do not hide crazy. We parade it on the front porch and give it some sweet tea.” Mostly, such things are said out of love or as a way not to dismiss the human behind questionable behavior. I appreciate these phrases as nuanced theological statements as well, not as excuse for outright cruelty or bigotry, but as acknowledgement that there is little bit of crazy in all of us. Life is messy. Yes, sir, there is a good bit of crazy mess out there these days. As we stumble out of this pandemic, lots and lots of things are opening up again. We can dine indoors at restaurants, go to parties, send kids to camp, and wander around mask free in the grocery store. At the same time, there has been a precipitous rise in gun violence, road rage, and seemingly random assaults in grocery stores, convenience stores, and gas stations. We may be reopening but the new normal includes free floating anxiety, volatility, and misplaced anger. It does not require deep psychological analysis to identify the source of this messed up behavior. We have endured a traumatic event. It may have been more like a slow drip than a sudden impact, but the effects are real and lasting. My friend, Kevin, is a psychiatrist who works with soldiers suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Through wartime stresses they have become ever aware of their mortality, deeply suspicious of others, hyper alert, and constantly on guard. His take is that living with a pandemic checks most all of those boxes in the volatile behaviors we are seeing. His patients become his patients because they have come home, just tried really hard to be normal, only to revert to their war-scarred brain unexpectedly. His work is focused on helping them tell their stories, write about what happened to them, and even, with the help of some Nashville song writers, to sing about it. We read from the relatively obscure book of Lamentations today, and this book was written when the Israelites were off in exile, in slavery in Babylon. It is all about trauma and grief. Even as they return to their homeland, they continued to tell their story, the whole story, to ask God the hard questions of why, and to find comfort together, again, in being and belonging together. The ancients knew that story telling was the best way to acknowledge grief, loss, and begin to rebuild their lives. We are not very good at remembering. The recent acrimony about telling the story of American slavery and its racist tentacles is white hot right now. My people participated in some of that regrettable story, and I suspect that some of you share in that truth too. There is confusion among many that telling the whole story is about blame or shame. It is not. Telling the story is about doing what the Israelites did: acknowledging grief, loss, and beginning to seek a better way forward. We are not good at this right now. Like my friend Kevin’s soldiers, it looks like, for all the world, that we are coping with regathering in trying really hard just to be normal again. Instead of whistling past the graveyard of so much loss, we need to remember and tell the story of those who died, and of missing out on vital experiences: funerals, weddings, school years, graduations, family and holiday gatherings. We did not skip eighteen months of living. We spent those months seeing and fearing our fragile mortality, suspicious of who has it and how it spreads, hyper alert to be safe, and constantly on guard. That is exhausting and we need to take a collective deep breath and speak those truths. This is one way church can help. This week’s gospel is a long one, which is completely atypical for Mark’s style of telling the story. He is a just the facts kind of guy, but this packet of stories must have been really important to his listeners for him to go into so much detail. And these stories are really messy. Jesus meets a rabbi, Jairus, whose daughter is deathly ill. As Jairus pleads for his help, we can hear his parental desperation. As he kneels before Jesus, he crosses a line rendering himself unclean according to strict Jewish purity laws. As Jesus heads off to help, he is interrupted as people are pushing in on him. And when the bleeding woman touches him, he, too, is rendered unclean. Instead of running off to take on cleansing ritual before going back to work, Jesus stays present in the chaos. He takes time to hear the woman’s story and tells her that her faith has made her well. By this time, word comes that Jairus’s daughter has died. Nevertheless, Jesus stays with it. He goes to the child, and takes her by the hand. The whole story is a hot mess of boundary crossing: touching an untouchable, touching a woman not your wife, and touching a dead body. He speaks to the dead little girl, telling her to arise, and she does. The text says that people were amazed. What it does not say is that they were appalled, but we find that our later. All of this speaks straight into where we may find ourselves in this time and place. Jesus makes no effort to whitewash pain and suffering. He does not encourage a “just get over” it kind of amnesia. He looks into the deep need to show what God does with grief and loss. God redeems it. God does not deny it or sweep the suffering under the rug. God gets down in the mess with us and helps us arise and be made new. In these instances, Jesus provides a cure. But as we know, all cure is temporary. The woman’s hemorrhage stopped. The little girl lived. Those things happened for a time, but not forever. But what Jesus shows is how healing happens. Healing happens in acknowledging the suffering, feeling the grief, living with the messy reality, and telling the whole story. I love nuanced southern sayings, but I am not a fan of dismissive or trite lines to explain away life’s messiness. “Everything happens for a reason.” “God will never give us anything we can’t handle.” “Thoughts and prayers, hashtag blessed.” Nope, we do not get back to normal and just get over grief. Ever. We can frame it, learn from it, and grow from it, but it is never neat and clean. God can be found in the love that surrounds us, the person who listens, and in the truth telling of loss, but grief does not go away. It becomes part of our story. There is one more detail Mark includes at the end. Instead of carrying Jesus off on their shoulders to celebrate his godly miraculous powers, Jesus turns the attention back to the child. He says “give her something to eat.” Eucharist. Share the feast of life here and now. Take care of her. Take care of each other. Life may be messy, but we gotta eat. And when we do that, we come together, we belong, we take our place at the table, we say our prayers, we tell our stories, and healing happens. Amen. Comments are closed.
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AuthorThe Rev. John Thomas is Rector of Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood Archives
October 2024
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