March 22, 2009
(Fourth Sunday in Lent)

Look and Be Healed

Photo of The Rev. Joe Behen by The Rev. Joe Behen, Clergy Assistant

Ezekiel 2:1-7  -  Psalm 123  -  2 Corinthians 12:2-10  -  Mark 6:1-6
(From The Lectionary Page)

A few months ago, I came down here to the nave to get things ready for the service on New Years Eve, and I heard this great music sounding through the halls.  There was a young lady sitting here at this piano, singing and playing, and sounding as good to me as old Carole King music.  When she saw me, she stopped, and an apologetic look came over her face.  “I’ll put the cover back when I’m finished.  Can I still play?”  “Sure.  Sounds great,” I said.  I noticed that the book she was flipping pages in as she played wasn’t a music book.  “Is that a bible?” I asked.  “Yeah, I can’t read music.  I just play what I feel.  I usually sing the bible.  It lets me stay with God.”  Now, this experience was somewhat outside of my ability to find a category for.  This girl seemed happy for the moment to talk with me, but I needed to bring things back to familiar territory.  Our conversation needed to include information that I knew what to do with.  I knew that there was a religious convention of some kind going on over at the convention center.  “Where are you from?” I asked.  At this question, she looked back at her keyboard, flipped a page in her book, and before she began playing again, she said, “I’m from God.”

There’s something about the readings today that, like this brief conversation I described, are unexpected.  They tell us that God’s glory in the world is found precisely in what looks to us like failure, his power in what looks to us like weakness, like insignificance. And little in our society looks more like weakness than the image of the outsider, the outcast who doesn’t fit in anywhere.

In the episode recounted this morning from Numbers, those bitten have only to look at the serpent set up according to God’s instruction, and they live.  I’m guessing that it wasn’t easy for them to understand how it is that they could be saved by gazing at the very figure of their fear held up before them.  But what if that’s the point?  What if God simply wanted them to look beyond themselves and their own understanding of things, and simply to look at what they could only wonder at?  The very thing that had tortured them was now made by God into something that represented life.  And the action of simply looking at it, while seeming pointless and without value, becomes the vehicle of their healing.

Much of what Jesus said had a rather sharp bite to it.  Immediately before this monologue, Jesus had been talking with Nicodemus, who was in a kind of “between” place.  He did not reject Jesus outright, but neither could he find a lens through which to read Jesus.  Jesus’ words were difficult, outside of Nicodemus’s ability to domesticate, to put into a system that could be managed.  Jesus told Nicodemus that he had to start over, to learn a new way of seeing the world.  His methods and habits for measuring and organizing life have made him blind to the unexpected and unpredictable presence of God right before his eyes.

The author of John’s gospel is telling us something about what is affected by Jesus’ death on the cross.  He’s not talking about a doctrine of salvation, about a cause and effect description of some theory of atonement.  The writer of this gospel would have us understand something more subtle here.  He is preparing us to look at Jesus, hanging powerless from the cross.  The cross is always and forever outside of our ability to understand.  We have to leave our comfort zone to see it with new eyes.  This is who God is, and we have to see in it something unexpected.  God doesn’t look like we thought.

Judgment happens, John says, through our seeing Jesus, God’s wisdom and God’s light, dying, helpless, forsaken.  Judgment implies a decision.  But that decision, he tells us, is ours to make.  What we see on the cross turns entirely on the part that truth has played in our lives, on what part we’re willing to let it play now.  “Those who do what is true come to the light.”  Judgment, then, is about our willingness to look at the truth of who we are right now, to look into the face of our fears.

What is it that we most fear?  Sometimes, many of us simply fear change.  We have developed a way of being in the world that makes sense to us.  One place in which we find evidence of our resistance to change is in meeting strangers.  We often think of ourselves, for example, in terms of what work we do for a living.  Early on in conversations with new acquaintances we might ask, “So, what do you do?”  That information, then, carries a number of other useful measurements along with it.  What one does, for example, might determine to others what sort of comforts we enjoy in daily life.  It might determine the level of one’s education, and even the type of people that one associates with.  Normally, though, we ask such a question of a new acquaintance in order to find out how like us they are.  We need some comfortable entry point in order to engage someone.

We use such common points of interest like we use those big long cushions in the gutters when children attempt to bowl for the first few times.  They keep the ball going safely in the desired direction, and they lessen the likelihood and embarrassment of coming up empty.  This need for commonality betrays a fear – a fear of engaging someone on unfamiliar ground.  “This person may not live in the world that I like to think I live in, the world I can organize.”  They may suggest that my world is smaller than I thought.  As Rowan Williams once said, “It’s not that the outsider is by definition right, nice or superior, but simply that the outsider’s very presence, puts a question that reminds me that my account of things, my way of making the world all right and manageable, is not only an incomplete enterprise, but may be an enterprise that is keeping out God, because it lets in the subtle temptation to treat my perspective as if it were God’s.” [Williams, Rowan.  Christ On Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles Our Judgment (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2000) p. 65]  Jesus, then, is, in effect, showing us our tendency to construct things in a way that is convenient for us, that allows us to make sense of it.  It is not a malicious act, but simply one of self-preservation.  But it is an act that shrinks our world.  It shrinks our vision of who God is, and how God is in the world.  The nature of such constructions is that after living within them for a while, we forget that the world is not equal to what we see from within.  Jesus would have us look beyond.

The girl that I met here at the piano neglected to play by my rules of conversation.  Your being safe, she seemed to say, is keeping you from sharing life on a higher level.  But it is my choice to see in this brief interaction whatever I choose to see.  Is this girl a religious fanatic from a tradition whose beliefs are different from my own?  Is she just a kid, whose excitement about her faith would one day cool down to a practical level?  Either of these answers would let me categorize and dismiss this experience as an oddity.  Or would I see in her a challenge to myself?  Would I see in her a call from beyond the walls of my own construction, walls on which I hang my beliefs and understanding of things, but walls that unintentionally keep out those things that don’t fit neatly within?  The choice is mine.

And that seems to me to be what Jesus is saying to us as well.  Will we have the courage to look again at God on the cross, and see in this image a challenge to us?

The choice is ours to make.  And not choosing is a choice.  Choose to look, and be healed.