You may watch this sermon as it was delivered at this link starting at 30:30
“He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.” May I speak in the name of the G-d who [+] Creates, Redeems and Sustains us? AMEN.
Today’s Gospel lesson offers us what I see as a compelling vision of how to be a healthy spiritual community following the Way of Jesus. It comes from an early group of Jesus followers seeking to preserve his memory four decades after his death. That community would produce the Gospel of Mark.
In today’s short passage from Mark, Jesus has just departed from a synagogue where he has been teaching. He has scandalized the defenders of the faith there by his powerful insights, these coming from a man with no religious credentials. Jesus is not bound by the understandings of his tradition or culture. From the very beginning Jesus rattled the cages of the guardians of the institutions of his day.
"Caring Hands" by Helgunn Bjerga Ravonsheed (2014)
He leaves the synagogue and goes immediately to the home of one of his disciples whose mother is very ill. Jesus stands at her bedside, takes her hand, helps her to rise and her fever vanishes. She is willing to trust Jesus and the G-d he reveals. As a result, she is healed. Quickly the word spreads around the village and by sunset, its residents would bring their sick and demon possessed to Jesus for healing.
Jesus will have a long night ahead of him.
Silence Alone – When
G_d Speaks
It’s instructive to
note what happens next. Jesus rises early, before the sun has come up, heading
out to an isolated place to pray. You see, Jesus has realized something
critical. If you want to hear what G-d has to say, you must stop talking,
isolate yourself to avoid distractions, and listen.
'Christ in the Wilderness', 1898, by Briton Riviere
While our approaches to religion often tend to be largely cognitive and verbal, marked by constant speaking and references to texts, much like the guardians of the synagogue he has just scandalized, Jesus is modeling a way of engaging the Holy that runs contrary to that. He doesn’t feel compelled to tell G-d what he needs or what G-d needs to do. He trusts G_d to figure that out. And he has also figured out that if you want to hear what G-d is saying to you, you have to stop talking. Silence is not only golden, it is essential if we are to hear the voice of G_d.
When Jesus’ followers finally locate him, they want him to return to the crowds looking for the next round of teaching and healings. But Jesus has other ideas. “Let’s go somewhere else, to the neighboring villages, so I can speak there, too. This is what I came for.” The Gospel writers were pretty clear that a major focus of Jesus’ mission was offering messages of hope to his listeners. But it was hardly the entire picture.
Jesus is Found Where
Suffering is Occurring
What we see in Mark’s gospel today speaks to me of the very character of Jesus. Richard Rohr often says that if you want to find Jesus in the Gospels, look for where the suffering is occurring. In our lesson today and in the passages that precede and follow it, Jesus is busy healing people of both physical as well as spiritual illnesses. If there is a overriding aspect to the character of Jesus, it is compassion.
Clearly Jesus is also anxious
to teach people, to offer them a vision of themselves and their relatedness to
G_d that runs counter to the dominant visions of the First CE Judea. The vision
of the Sadducees only permits access to G-d by virtue of worship in the Temple,
a practice that requires the money to buy the sacrifices which effectively excludes
the poor. The vision of the Pharisees requires living into their rule-driven
way of meeting the requirements of the Law. In both visions, one’s relationship
to G-d is conditioned upon something, controlled by the defenders of the
tradition.
But Jesus offers his listeners a different vision. He encourages them to see themselves as G_d sees them – You are the light of the world! You are the salt of the earth! He is willing to draw socially constructed statuses into question, eating with prostitutes and tax collectors, praising the widow who only has her last coin to offer to the Temple while critiquing the Pharisee on the street corner pronouncing his own righteousness. The good news that Jesus offers those around him is that everyone is valued by the G_d who created them - without exception and without conditions. One doesn’t have to do or believe anything for the G_d who created them to value them. And believing that one has value to their Creator permits many people to see themselves as valuable in a world where everything in their lives suggests just the opposite.
This is indeed good news. And it has the power to mend broken hearts.
The Good Samaritan, David Teniers the Younger (1610–1690)
While Jesus is depicted as being very selective in his citation of Hebrew Scriptures, the words of the Psalms are often placed on his lips by the gospel writers. Our psalm today provides a very good description of what Jesus is doing in today’s Gospel reading: “He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.”
As I see it, this well describes the ministry of Jesus and defines the Way of Jesus he modeled. I do not think that can be emphasized enough. And I offer you an example from my own life to illustrate that.
A Sanctuary for an
Unusual Kid
I grew up about an hour from here in a rural Sumter County long before it had been swallowed up by a sprawling tract housing project called The Villages. In Bushnell, the small town where I grew up, the church where the families of teachers like my Dad attended was the First Methodist Church. I was in junior high when it merged with the United Brethren to become the United Methodist Church. And in a sea of Southern Baptists and Churches of God, ready to tell everyone outside their doors that they were all headed to Hell, it was a real refuge for a nerdy kid like me who was not gifted in sports, who hated hunting, who was not a cattle rancher and who was headed to college. While I had only a dawning realization that my sexual orientation might be different from my classmates then, I knew that I was an unusual kid. I also knew that I had a safe place to be at First Methodist. It was a sanctuary in every sense of that word and I grew up strongly shaped by Wesleyan theology and social ethics.
While I would become an
Episcopalian in college, drawn by the liturgy and the willingness of its clergy
to involve themselves in the civil rights and anti-war movements, I always
cherished my time at First Methodist in Bushnell, Florida. Last week I read
that it was among the one/third of Florida Methodist congregations that had
voted to leave the United Methodist Church because they were unwilling to
accept people like me as their clergy or as first-class citizens among their
laity. Had I been that young boy seeking
sanctuary today, I would have been out of luck.
This was news but it was anything but good. And it absolutely broke my heart.
A Vocation to Bind Up
the Broken-Hearted
Being a community that would seek to bind up the broken-hearted is a very special calling. Presiding Bishop Michael Curry observed in his recent film A Case for Love that healthy spiritual communities can be absolutely life changing for both the members of the community and those whose lives they touch. And for Curry, this is not a mere theory, it is something he knows from his own life experience.
I do not know if we at St. Richards realize how important this vocation to the wounded and broken-hearted is to many people. Indeed, I doubt we are even aware of how many our open-hearted community with a soul deeply rooted in the Holy Spirit and parishioners deeply engaged in the world around us has reached. We tend to take for granted our place as a refuge in a diocese which turns its back on those who find themselves targeted by the dehumanizing ideologies that have become dominant in this state renowned for its culture wars. But for many people, just knowing such a place like this even exists in a church they have learned to distrust and hold at arm’s length, is, as Presiding Bishop Curry puts it, life giving.
As I see it, the Way of
Jesus is marked by awareness of and compassion for suffering. It is marked by
teaching and preaching that encourages all of us to see ourselves valued in the
eyes of the G-d who created us and thus valuable in our own eyes. It is marked
by intentional silence alone with our Creator who will speak to us when we give
the Holy One the chance to slip a word in edgewise. And it is marked by a
willingness to rise from our places of prayer and meditation to engage a world
in which there will never be a shortage of broken hearts. As I often say in my
posts online, the Way of Jesus reflects a G-d worth worshipping and a spiritual
path worth following.
If our parish would be a place that assists people in discovering G-d’s grace which in turn changes our lives and ultimately has the potential to change the whole world – beginning with our own diocese - we would do well to keep all these aspects which mark the Way of Jesus in mind. In the words of our patron St. Richard of Chichester, Brother Jesus, “May we see you more clearly, love you more dearly and follow you more nearly, day by day.” AMEN.
A sermon preached on February 04, 2024, Epiphany V, at St. Richard’s Episcopal Parish, Winter Park
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Harry Scott Coverston
Orlando, Florida
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an
unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.
Those who believe religion and politics aren't connected
don't understand either. – Mahatma Gandhi
For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to
love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? - Micah
6:8, Hebrew Scriptures
Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do
justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to
complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami
Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)
© Harry Coverston, 2024
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