|
Sermon June 24, 2007 |
A Sermon Preached at
She had just turned fifty, the relatively young wife of my favorite seminary professor, when she was stricken with MS. In her case, the disease moved swiftly and inexorably. We seminarians watched in horror as this vibrant, friendly administrator had to give up her job and then was confined to a wheelchair. Then the public appearances of her chair grew less frequent. Soon she would be confined to her bed and to an early grave. At this time, the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer—the only one some of you have ever known—was new and controversial and one of its most controversial features was a public service of laying on of hands for healing. The students begged the Dean to allow them to use this service in the Seminary chapel. The service was unusually well attended, and at the appropriate time many in the congregation came forward to ask for prayers for healing. Some came with the sniffles, many with depression and anxiety, but few had maladies as public as the seminary professor’s wife. The worshippers held their breaths as her husband wheeled her to the altar rail, and when the chaplain laid his hands on her and said, “I lay my hands on you in the name of our Lord…that you may know the healing power of his love,” many wept openly.
There was no dramatic recovery. The professor’s wife did not leap from her chair. In a few months she was bedridden. She never left her bed in this life. But strangely enough, everyone who was there that night insists that healing did happen. The professor’s wife often spoke of the strength that the prayers of the community had brought her. The seminarians and faculty members who were there said that they had encountered the mystery of the presence of the living God—healing and strengthening in ways no one could describe, but which were in their own way palpably real.
If the truth were known, many of us hunger for an encounter with God. We are understandably confused about where and how that encounter might happen. We tend to expect to encounter the divine in places of solidity and beauty and in the permanence of ancient institutions. In a minute we’ll baptize Molly Keegan in St. Stephen’s ancient baptismal font. The font is massive and stone and it takes two people to lift its carved wooden cover. It is a testimony to our sense that we meet God in solidity and beauty. The service we’ll use for the baptism is two thousand years old, a testimony to our belief that we’ll meet God in ancient permanence. And indeed, the centuries of people who have drawn strength and comfort and healing from this ancient institution the Church tell us that people do meet God here in beauty, solidity and permanence.
Our reading from the Hebrew Scripture reinforces our sense that we encounter God in solemnity. Elijah—on the run from a murderous king and hiding on the mountain—looks for God in a mighty wind, then an earthquake, and then a roaring fire. “But,” says the Bible, “the Lord was not in the wind…the earthquake…the fire.” Instead Elijah encounters God in “a sound of sheer silence.” It is a reminder that whenever we have the grace to be still and to listen in the silence of our hearts, we may encounter God. Thank heavens for institutions and solid old structures in which we can listen for the sound of silence in a rushed and chaotic world.
But it would be a mistake to think that God is only present in places
like this. Our Gospel reading this
morning is a scene of healing that takes place right in the middle of mess and
confusion. Jesus encounters a
mentally ill man who cries out in his madness and his pain.
Jesus enters with him into this confusion and heals him—in a scene of
further chaos. Then, to
everybody’s surprise, when the man wants to follow Jesus, Jesus sends him back
into his old life, asking him to bear witness to the presence of God in his
small town in
The key to this story of healing, it seems to me, is found in the question the crazy man asks when he encounters Jesus: “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?” It is the same question we also ask when our lives seem out of control: “What would God ever have to do with the likes of me in health crisis, in my broken relationships, in my guilt, or in my confusion of not knowing what to do next? The answer for the crazy man and for us is that God DOES want to be with us. Perhaps the key to our encounters with God is the realization that nothing we have done puts us beyond the presence of God. Perhaps the key is the realization that no matter how crazy our lives become, we are never off limits for God.
In a seminary chapel, a terminally ill woman encountered the presence of God, not in the earthquake, wind and fire of a miraculous healing, but in the deeper magic of the love of a community and in the still and silent center of her heart in which she knew she was loved and cared for even in the middle of her illness. Here in this baptism service Molly Keegan encounters God in an ancient ceremony, but also in the deeper magic of an extended family that cherishes her as a child of God.
What has God to do with the likes of us? Everything, it turns out. We don’t have to be especially holy or pious or even particularly presentable. God takes us as we are—infants and infirm, scruffy and even crazy. And that’s really good news.
AMEN