Sunday, October 16, 2016

Struggling with God



A Sermon preached on Pentecost XXII, 16th October 2016 at St. Augustine’s, Wiesbaden
Genesis 32: 22, 31, I Timothy 3:14–4: 5, Luke 18: 1–8

What a strange God we are introduced to in today’s readings. One who gets into fights, one who is compared to an unjust judge. I am reminded of a film/movie I saw earlier this year - the Brand New Testament (or in its original French: Le Tout Nouveau Testament). The film’s subtitle is “God exists, and lives in Brussels.” The God of this film, which is very funny by the way, is a bit of a slob who wears a dressing gown and slippers all day, and is a grumpy sadist who appears to have created humankind just to have something to play with and torment at times. 

In the parable from Luke, in which Jesus tells his disciples about the “need to pray always and not to lose heart,” (Luke 18:1) Jesus gives us the character of the equally grumpy “judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people.” (18:2) He only grants the widow’s plea for justice because he is fed up with her bothering him. So is God and God’s response to prayer like this judge? Does God only answer prayers when we get on God’s nerves long enough? No, of course not. Jesus is using a typical Jewish rabbinical from of argument called “from the lesser to the greater.” If, he says, even a slob like the judge grants justice to those who continually come and plea for help, how much more will God, Abba, Father who is love in person, grant justice to those who cry to him day and night. 

And yet, even with God there may be a period of waiting involved before we receive the justice we believe we deserve, or before God reveals how we can achieve justice in any given situation – we may well have a role to play in answering our own requests.
That is why, Jesus says, we need to pray always and not to lose heart. Prayer is a two-way communication; prayer is one means by which we open our hearts to God to show God where we need help, strength, confirmation, or reassurance. And we can use prayer for our complaints and questions too. When I pray, I often use the words “why” and “I don’t understand” and “help me!”  And that is nothing in comparison to what Mother Teresa, now Saint Teresa of Calcutta, said and felt at times. She went through long periods of doubt and suffering, her dark nights of the soul. She struggled with her faith and with her God. It seems to me that in this passage, Jesus is also preparing his disciples and followers, us, for those times when we do not receive the help, strength, confirmation, and reassurance we hope for. When instead we feel abandoned and alone, just as Jesus did for a moment on the cross when he cried out “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). 

Jacob’s mysterious encounter in Genesis describes a prolonged struggle too. Jacob’s life was one of never-ending struggles. Fleeing his father-in-law, he is about to meet his brother, Esau, who has vowed to kill him. This is the night before that encounter. Jacob is on his own, he has sent his family with everything he had on ahead of him and probably collapses into a deep, exhausted sleep. But not for long, for an unnamed man visits him during the night and wrestles with him until daybreak. Is this God? Jacob thinks so: “I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved” (Genesis 32:30) he says as he renames the place Peniel or “I have survived.” 

Well, I think Jacob struggled with many things that night. He fought with his own conscience, his failures, his weaknesses, his sins. He fought with his doubts, with what he felt were God’s unrealistic expectations for him: that he would inherit the land and that “all the families of the earth shall be blessed in him and in his offspring.” (Genesis 28:14) Him, Jacob the conman, Jacob who betrayed his brother, Jacob who was about to meet that brother in battle, come on God, pull the other one!  

But although injured, Jacob comes out of his struggle with God both strengthened and renewed. He receives a blessing from God, replacing the blessing he had obtained from his father by trickery. And he is given a new name. No longer is he Jacob the deceiver, but Israel, which means something like “who contends or struggles with God.” As the man tells him, “you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.”(Gen. 32:28) I think that means not just that Jacob has striven with other humans, like his father-in-law, his brother Esau, but also with Jacob’s own very human weaknesses, and prevailed. 

What we learn from this incident in the life of Jacob, from the story of the unjust judge, and from the example of Saint Teresa and many, many other saints is that it is OK to be impatient and persistent and to struggle with God. Struggling with God is in our Judeo-Christian heritage, it is in our DNA. We heard how the word Israel means something like struggle with God. Saint Paul teaches us that we are Israel: by adoption we are also Abraham’s children, we grafted on to the olive tree that is Israel (Romans 6), and we are members of the Israel of God. (Galatians 6:16) 

Jacob was afraid that he would die, not just for struggling with God, but simply for having seen him face to face. Throughout the Old Testament, we read of many occasions when people would hide or turn their backs rather than face God: Elijah wraps his face in a mantle (1 Kings 19:13), God puts Moses in a cleft of the rock to protect him. (Exodus 33:22) As Christians we do not have to fear death from struggling with God, nor from seeing God. God became human. In Jesus, God, whom according to John “no one has ever seen” is made known and visible to us. (John 1:18)  And through Jesus we learn to see God as a loving parent, not one who punishes, but one who wants us to grow to fulfill the promises given to us, both as individuals and as humanity.

But growth and development often involves struggle and even pain. We know that from our own children, they need a sparring partner, they need parents to rebel against and to struggle with. They need parents they can argue with. They need parents who will let them make their own choices and even mistakes. They need parents who will sometimes not do or give the children what they ask for, because we feel it is not in their interest, not good for them, or simply better if they do it themselves. These are struggles in love and out of love, and in most cases, because I don’t want to deny that not every parent/children relationship is good, the children still know and feel that they are loved simply because of who they are, and that all the struggles and fights and arguments will not change that relationship, on the contrary it is deepened and strengthened.

This is the God we are introduced to in today’s readings. The God who not only accepts doubts and complaints and struggles, but welcomes them. In Paul’s second letter to Timothy, he is told that all scripture, and at that time Scripture was only what we now call the Old Testament, so stories like Jacob’s, that “all scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.” That is the purpose of our lives in Christ, that through scripture, through worship, through our relationship with God, and especially through our struggles with God we will learn, change, grow, and improve to become fully proficient and properly equipped for every good work God has planned for us, and to live this and the eternal life we are promised to the full. For that we pray always and do not lose heart.
Amen.

Sunday, October 9, 2016

True Healing



A Sermon preached on Pentecost XXI, 9th October 2016 at St. Augustine’s, Wiesbaden
2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15c, 2 Timothy 2:8-15, Luke 17:11-19

Most Wednesday mornings we offer a healing service here at St. Augustine’s, in the context of a Eucharist. Anyone who feels the desire and need comes forward for the laying on of hands, for anointing, and for personal prayer for healing. It is not spectacular, I don’t send anyone over to the park to immerse themselves in the lake and wash seven times. No one faints and falls over when I touch them, thank God! And there have been no miraculous, physical healings that I know of.  But still, the very act of a healing service is already a form of healing.

The sickness described in both the OT and Gospel readings this morning, leprosy, was not just a physical condition. It was a social condition as well, as it resulted on the complete exclusion from society. According to the rules in Leviticus (13:45-46) “The person who has the leprous disease shall wear torn clothes and …cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean.’ He shall live alone; his dwelling shall be outside the camp.” Even the much less serious diseases or ailments, physical, emotional, or psychological, that we usually encounter can lead to exclusion. Too often, we fear sickness, sometimes because of the risk of infection, more often however irrationally. We worry that we will not know what to say or do, and we often just feel uncomfortable. 

But in our healing service, in any healing service, the sick are not excluded, on the contrary they are welcomed into the middle of the community. The central act of healing prayer is human contact, the laying on of hands. We pray that God working through us will “heal us and make us whole,” because we are only whole when we are together, not isolated and alone. And so, following the prayers for healing, we share first the Peace, and then Holy Communion. We are one. 

The readings from Kings and Luke are also about more than just physical healing. The main characters, Naaman and the anonymous Samaritan were doubly excluded, both because they suffered from leprosy, or some other skin disease, and because they were foreigners. In Naaman’s case not just a foreigner, but a representative of an enemy nation. That is why the king of Israel is so upset when he gets a letter from the king of Aram, or Syria as we call the country today. He thinks it is a trick: “Just look and see how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me." (2 Kings 5: 7) Healing Naaman and the Samaritan, not forgetting his nine forgetful companions, was not just an act of healing, but of forgiveness and inclusion.

But there is more. One thing I find fascinating about these two events, is how low-key the actual act of healing is. Naaman is almost insulted. He was expecting some great magic show, with the prophet standing in front of him, invoking God with a dramatic voice, while waving his hands over him melodramatically. It takes a servant to get him off his high horse: "Father, if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when all he said to you was, `Wash, and be clean'?" (2 Kings 5:13)

When the 10 lepers call out "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.” (Luke 17:11) all that happens is that he says "’Go and show yourselves to the priests.’ And as they went, they were made clean.” (17:14) A healing so subtle that nine of them do not even seem to notice, at least not until it is too late to come back and say thank you. 

And look what a vital role “normal” people play. Naaman would not have been healed if his wife’s maid, a young slave from Israel, had not pointed him to the prophet Elisha. And it took the courage of another servant, speaking up to an angry master, to persuade him to do what Elisha asks and wash himself in the Jordan river. Little acts of compassion by “little” people are also acts of healing.   
I believe that we all have healing power. Simple acts of inclusion, compassion, love and forgiveness are all both necessary for, and also the means of healing. They help make the sick whole again, they give strength, they take away fear, they encourage. In the Litany of Healing[1] we pray at our Wednesday service, we pray that God will grant the “lonely, anxious and despondent a knowledge of God’s will and an awareness of God’s presence.” We ask God to “mend broken relationships.” We plead with God to “restore to wholeness whatever is broken by human sin, in our lives, in our nation, and in the world.” 

These are all acts of healing that we can participate in and support. We can make people aware of God’s presence by showing how God is present in our lives and in our actions. We can mend those broken relationships we are part of and that we perhaps had a role in breaking. We can repent – that is acknowledge and change – our own sinful acts, whether as individuals, communities, or nations. The sin of racism is one that looms large right now on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. It needs a lot of healing, and a lot of prayer, and a lot of action by faithful people.    

The actual healing in today’s passages is clearly miraculous and reserved to God. Both stories highlight how healing and faith in God work together. Neither Naaman nor the lepers would have come to Elisha or called on Jesus if they did not have at least a little faith, and a little trust in God – even if just the size of a mustard seed as  we heard last week. Some faith was already required for the lepers to turn and go to the priests without having experienced the healing first. Only as they depart, are they are cleansed. 

Then, after they have been healed, Naaman and the Samaritan are strengthened in their faith. The commander of the army of Israel’s enemy is moved to say: "Now I know that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel." (2 Kings 5:15) 

The Samaritan returns to Jesus, praising God and thanking Jesus as God’s agent in his healing. That the other nine did not come back, and yet were still made physically well, is a reminder of God’s unlimited grace and mercy. Healing is not a reward for being particularly faithful. What the nine miss out on, is the direct encounter with God in Jesus. What they miss out on, is the healing that goes beyond the moment. What they miss out on, is the healing and wholeness only God can give, because it goes beyond this life, which is finite. What they miss out on, is the relationship that lasts and that sustains us through illness, and sickness, and death. Among the ten former lepers, only the Samaritan hears the comforting words "Your faith has made you well." (Luke 17:19)

God wants you all to be healers, and God wants you all to be healed through faith. True healing means becoming whole, and becoming whole means becoming one with God, which is the only healing that lasts, even beyond sickness and death.
Amen


[1] Taken from a Public Service of Healing, Book of Occasional Services (2003)