The Jesus We Wish We Got

Scripture: Mark 6:1-13

Please pray with me: God of all glory and strength, you come to us in strange and unexpected ways. Open our eyes to the fruits of your spirit, open our hearts to the beauty of your word, open our lives to your healing touch. We pray in Jesus’ name, Amen.

I saw the latest Superman movie this week, and I wouldn’t normally bring that kind of thing up, except that that movie was chock full of Christological symbolism. In one of the opening scenes, Superman’s father speaks to him about how the Father and Son are one. It sounds like the prologue to the book of John. The Father, in a mysterious, solemn voice-over says, “You’ll see my life through your eyes, and I’ll see your life through my eyes.” Later the voice-over of “The Father” talks about why he has sent his only son to the people of Earth. When Lois Lane – who’s lost faith – explains why she doesn’t think the world needs Superman, she says in her best newspaper-woman voice, “We don’t need a Savior.”

Here’s the kicker: there’s one section toward the end – I hope this doesn’t spoil the movie for you – when Superman is pushing a huge Kryptonite rock out into space to get rid of it. Obviously, given his weakness, this is difficult for him. I don’t completely understand how he does it. But after the rock finally floats peacefully out of the Earth’s orbit, Superman falls back, exhausted, legs together, arms out, in a crucifix. That was the part of the movie where I got an elbow in the side for making a remark out loud.

You might think that this is an accident, or a coincidence, but I don’t. Because I think Superman is a symbol in our culture for the kind of Savior we wish we’d gotten—He’s the Jesus we wish we got. He’s strong, he’s handsome, he’s invulnerable to almost everything, he goes around doing obvious practical good things, he defeats villains, he hears everything going on in the world, and as a bonus he can fly, has x-ray vision, and can shoot lasers out of his eyes. It’s a pretty great package. If you wanted to sit around figuring out what we might expect the Son of God to look like, it’s not a bad start.

So what is this craziness that we read about in the book of Mark today? Not only is Jesus not shooting lasers out of his eyes to defeat his enemies, he’s in fact doing kind of a bad job at the healing miracles – the signs and wonders – that he usually excels at. And his excuse? Prophets never find a welcome in their hometown.

This might be kind of a surprising passage to some of us – especially if you hadn’t realized before that Jesus had brothers and sisters – but on the other hand, there’s a certain truth about human nature in Jesus’ words. I have to say that in my experience I almost always enjoy homecomings, but there sometimes is that note of condescension, or SOMETHING from the older relative who says, “I haven’t seen you since you were this tall.” Makes it hard to explain that you’ve got a master’s degree, are married, and are paying your own bills. And unfortunately, stomping on the ground and saying “I am TOO a grown-up” doesn’t really breed respect.

So for me anyway, it’s a little comforting to know that even Jesus got grief for being young, or forgetting where he came from, or for rising beyond the town’s expectations. But I also think there’s another lesson to be gleaned here. Throughout Mark Jesus’ power to heal comes not only from some kind of magic, super-power in Jesus, but from the belief of the person he was healing. Last week, when the woman touched Jesus’ cloak and was healed, Jesus told her, “Your faith has made you well.” So in today’s reading, when the people aren’t open to Jesus, when they can’t believe that he would be able to bring something more than the sum total of his life in Nazareth, they aren’t able to do their part in bringing about the healings and wonders that Jesus is capable of with their participation.

What does this tell us about God and about our salvation? Well, for one thing, it tells us that our salvation – our healing – is not something that is going to be forced upon us: we have to be open to accepting it and believing it. And believe it or not, I think this makes Jesus a better Savior than an imaginary superhero like Superman. Because while Superman flies around solving problems and setting a good example, but the recipients of his good works ultimately play only a passive role. Jesus, however, is much more demanding of us.

I was reading an article the other day about what leads to real happiness in life. I know you’ll be surprised to hear this in church, but the answer is not more money. Once you get to the point where your basic needs are covered, double your money does not equal double your happiness. What does bring happiness, according to the article, are long-lasting, rewarding relationships; a good balance of workflow – not too much, not too little; and a sense of control over your own life.

A Superman savior, as it turns out, can only give us salvation for a moment—a problem solved for us, a disaster averted. And don’t we all wish for that kind of salvation sometimes? To win the lottery, for the moving boxes to unpack themselves, for the miraculous cure. But God’s Spirit offers us eternal salvation – a chosen love, a healing through belief, a deep relationship that is ours to take, if we will.

God, in creating the world, and in giving us free will, did not want us to be puppets. We can choose for ourselves whether we will be open, whether we will be healed, whether we will love God. Clearly, belief and doubt are complex, and not a simple act of checking yes or no on a box, but God doesn’t come to us in superhuman form. God comes in human form.

This Jesus we meet in Mark, the one who can’t get his hometown to take him seriously, is real, is human. This may not always be the Jesus we wanted, but it is the Jesus we got—the Jesus who invites us, but never compels us, into a loving relationship with source and ground of life. The Jesus who heals with our active participation. The Jesus who offers us eternal life. Thanks be to God, Amen.

Peace and Chaos

Scriptures: 2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27, Mark 5:21-43

Friends, it is a delight and an honor to be here with you to preach today. A lot has happened to me since the last time I had the opportunity to worship here with you. I’ve started working for a new employer, refinished floors, painted, packed, drove a 16-foot truck, went camping twice, unpacked, made some significant progress in my ordination process with your collective help, and went to the UCC’s conference’s annual meeting in Newark, Delaware, but not necessarily in that order. It’s been a busy few weeks. So I hope that since it’s early July, and since school’s been out a couple weeks, and since Beth isn’t here, that you’ll allow me a little more relaxed pace of organization today. Perhaps we could call it a “concept” sermon, rather than the more standard, highly-organized, regimented “three-point” sermon that you’re used to. Oh never mind.

But before I begin, let’s pray together: Loving God, who sees into our hearts, who blesses our lives, who enjoys our days, dwell with us now. Give us your wisdom, give us your kindness, give us your Spirit of peace and joy. In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.

So, I love my new job. I’m working for an organization called the Lutheran Volunteer Corps as a staff support person for the volunteers living in Baltimore and Wilmington. These volunteers come to live in the city in group houses, to live in intentional community with each other, to work at non-profits in social justice areas, and to practice simplified living. We’re open and welcoming of GLBT people, and in the middle of a process of becoming anti-racist.

What I love about it is working with young adults who are working out the big questions in life: Why are we here? How can we best serve God? Whose turn was it to do the dishes? It is a spiritually formative experience, helping people both encounter God’s grace in a different understanding of time, rest, and relation, and to encounter God’s call in the choices we make every day about how we’ll spend our efforts and money. It’s wonderful. If you want to know more about our work, I’m happy to chat after the service. I even have sign-up sheets.

What’s also wonderful and exciting about this new work is that my home association in Massachusetts has recognized it as an ordainable call. For those of you not familiar with the manual on ministry and the ordination process in the United Church of Christ, I could explain this, but we only have so much time. The upshot is that I have only a very few steps left until I’ll be ordained. Hooray! And this church is going to be a part of that, too, as a calling body. Which I am so grateful for. Thank you.

The other news is the new house. Heather and I moved into a rowhouse in southwest Baltimore this Wednesday. There are still some stall stacks of boxes in the office. And the bedroom. And the basement. The living room looks pretty good, though. And the kitchen is mostly done. Okay, I admit it, moving is crazy. It’s basically impossible to do alone. This time around, we hired Mike Elder and a couple of his Recovery Workers. They did a great job, and Mike was so cheerful. Even at 9:00 in the morning. Plus, one of them carried our 150lb dining room table top single-handedly. That was just stunning. It was about as good a move as you could expect. My favorite part, though, was at the end of the day. One of the guys says, “Do you ladies believe in God?” We said yes. He said, “Well, let’s have a prayer, then.” We stood in a circle in the new house, and this person who’s making his way out of a much rougher life than I can imagine, prayed for us, for the house, for our new life together. It was a tremendous blessing, and the prayer in my heart was simply, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

So what, you might ask, does all of this have to do with our scriptures for today? Good question. Let’s see if I get around to answering it. For one thing, both David and the woman with the hemorrhage come to the end of a long difficult struggle in the stories for today. Which brings a certain amount of upheaval. A little bit of chaos, if you will.

For David, the death of Saul is an ambiguous blessing. Since he was very young, David had been both Saul’s favorite and his nemesis. David was handsome and talented, and he had tremendous military skill. So Saul gave him his daughter to marry, but then later hunted after him to try to kill him. Plus, Saul had seizures of some kind that suggest to us now a mental disorder that might lead to paranoia. But David respected Saul, not only as someone he admired, but as the one God had anointed to be king.

In the passage before our reading today, David learns about Saul’s death from a foreign soldier. The soldier came upon Saul, mortally wounded on the field of battle, and killed him at Saul’s own. The soldier probably thinks that David will reward him for dispatching a dangerous enemy and a rival, but instead David kills him for killing “the Lord’s anointed.” What we hear next is David’s lament for Saul. “Oh how the mighty have fallen,” he sings.

Here’s something odd you might want to notice about this song: it’s all about how great a warrior Saul was. I know that we’re a peace-loving church here, and I think that’s a great thing, but this passage is not exactly a hymn to pacifism. What are we supposed to do with that? Especially on a 4th of July weekend when we’ll remember our independence with fireworks to remind us of cannons going off.
Especially when we’re still in the middle of a disastrous war in Iraq, one that, to be done properly would have taken far more troops than we sent. Especially when we’re a nation that seems to have a new foreign conflict to go into every 15 or 20 years: The Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Grenada, the Persian Gulf War, the War in Iraq, and for 50 years a Cold War that pumped us full of fear and suspicion toward an enemy that seems ragged and pitiful now. Oh how the mighty have fallen indeed. They have fallen and fallen and fallen.

The woman with the hemorrhage comes to Jesus with a different recurring problem. She’s got a gynecological problem that not only drains her energy and causes her physical pain, but that also makes her continually ritually unclean. She comes to Jesus after 12 years – Craig pointed out to me that this is the number of completeness – complete suffering – and believes that by touching him she’ll be made well. After all those doctors couldn’t do a thing, Jesus will be the one who heals her.

My question is: why on earth does she believe that? Why does she think that Jesus can heal her after all those others failed. Twelve years is a long time and a lot of doctors, and probably a lot of invasive, painful procedures. Why should Jesus be any different?

But she was right after all. She touches his garment, she’s healed, and he stops so she can tell her story: “I was outside society, I was sick and hurt, but now I’m with you again, not alone, but among you. And Jesus was the one who did it.” She is brought back to life, just as much as Jairus’ daughter. “Your faith,” Jesus says, “has made you well.”

I’ll be honest with you. I don’t think these things tie together as well as I would like them to. But there is a theme here about new circumstances and the end to old problems and dilemmas: David is on the verge of a different life. He’ll become king over all of Israel, but will it mean a change in his character? He will continue to be the charismatic military leader, only without Saul as his obstacle, rival, and object of admiration.

The woman with the hemorrhage will begin a different life. She is clean again and no longer owned by her disease. But will she begin a new life, inspired by the faith that made her well through Jesus? Or will she go back to her old ways, unchanged? Taking no lessons from her journey of suffering and healing?
And will each of us, when we begin a different life, find ways to grow deeper in our faith, to see where God is touching us, to give thanks for our many gifts? Will we allow our faith to make us well?

May it be so, Amen.