“And all in the crowd were trying to touch
him, for power came out of him and healed all of them.” (Luke 6:19)
In my last year in seminary I took this
elective class on preaching controversial subjects*. This is not exactly the kind of
sermon some Lutherans are comfortable hearing, but I thought the class would be
interesting and, indeed, it proved to be so. Each of the students were assigned
two touchy subjects to preach about. The first one I was assigned was childhood
sexual abuse. I’ll confess, the topic made me pretty nervous, but I charged
ahead. I received some helpful criticisms from my classmates and the professor and (as I recall) I got a “B” on the assignment.**
When I preached my sermon, I could almost feel the congregation squirming as I related the gospel lesson to this very delicate subject; nevertheless, nobody said anything to me about it after the service. They just smiled politely and said how nice it was to see their old vicar back again.
The following week I received a letter from a lady in the congregation. She explained to me that she had been the victim of childhood sexual abuse. She thanked me for taking on the subject and told me that she had never heard a preacher breath a word about this topic from the pulpit before. Theology aside (and I don’t even remember exactly what I said in that sermon—it was a pretty long time ago!), it was meaningful for her just to have someone acknowledge her situation. It was the first time she had felt her pain had been recognized.
What strikes me about the gospel appointed for Epiphany 6, Year C (Luke 6:17-26) is Jesus’ acknowledgement of the poor, the depressed, and the marginalized. The text tells us that all kinds of folks were hanging around, waiting for Jesus to come down from his prayer retreat so they might be touched and healed. It’s pretty hard to touch someone without recognizing them and looking at them. Everyone needed a hand laid on them. Everyone yearend to have someone have a real encounter with them. The scripture tells us it was people from all walks of life—Jews and gentiles, rich and poor, men and women. Everyone was in need.
I heard it said on the radio last week that one of the saddest things elderly people in nursing homes experience is the absence of touch, the absence of substantial human interaction. Jesus not only touches, but blesses those whom the culture says are cursed.
The culture and Jesus never see eye-to-eye on the subject of blessings and curses. In the world of the gospel, any pious Jew would still believe if your life was crap it was because you somehow got on the wrong side of God. It staggers my already staggered brain when I think that two thousand years later we still clutch onto the same nonsense. We still live in a cult of enforced “happiness.” We’re like the twenty-eight-year-old who doesn’t want to go to his high school reunion because he hasn’t become the howling success his class yearbook predicted he’d be. We go on Facebook and eat up each other’s propaganda about how cool their lives are, and we somehow feel ashamed that we’re missing out and not living a good enough existence. If we’re not basking in bliss all the time we feel guilty.
We also try to rationalize away our “woes.” When disaster strikes, when we feel those devastating reversals of fortune, we try to explain them away by saying they’re God’s will or God is trying to teach us something. The reality is, we just don’t know. Sometimes crappy stuff just happens. And, as Jesus the apocalyptic prophet is telling us, it can—and will—happen to everyone at some time or other.
Money, security, and popularity are not in and of themselves bad things. But they don’t protect us from sickness, death, or other losses. The thing we hold onto is the knowledge that God has seen us and called us “blessed.” No reversal of fortune takes away our baptism. It’s okay to be and feel the way we do. The passage of scripture tells us that all who suffered from the unclean spirits—the Jews and gentiles, rich and poor, blessed or woebegone—were cured.
And it is no sin to be needy.
May Christ’s spirit reach out and touch you today. Thanks for reading, my friend.
*The fancy word for this is homiletics. Just thought you might be interested in
case it ever comes up on Jeopardy.
** I
think I got a “B” on all my sermons. Maybe I was never Lutheran enough for an “A.”
Ya think?
No comments:
Post a Comment