“Meditating
the Life of Jesus”
Luke 4:14-21
First
Presbyterian
The
Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
January
21, 2007
There are a few members of the
clergy whose lives and careers I find so compelling that I have followed them
with great interest across the years. Those
who elicit my devotion either are superb writers or have extraordinary
ministries, or both. Heidi Neumark,
now the pastor of the
While
she was still at the
Because
so many people in her community were getting sick and dying from the disease,
Andrena feared the same for herself. She
fell into a “slough of despond” and sensed herself sinking into a black hole
from which she did not think she could emerge.
Andrena enrolled her youngest son in Transfiguration’s summer program
so that she could be miserable all day without her son having to watch her in
that condition.
It
was during this time that Andrena met Heidi Neumark.
Heidi invited Andrena to bring her son to Sunday School.
“I didn’t think God loved me because I had been away from
God for so long,” Andrena said. “I
feared being looked at by others and being judged by them.
But I went. I took my son to
Sunday School and started attending church.
None of the stuff happened that I thought would happen.
No one looked at me funny. Nobody
moved away from me in the pew. Everyone
hugged me. And I heard that Jesus
loved me.”
Andrena said that a particular
story from the gospel according to Luke that she heard one day in worship
changed her life. In the story, “there
appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years.
She was bent over and unable to stand up straight.
When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, ‘Woman, you are set
free from your ailment.’ When he
laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising
God.” “That was a story
about me,” Andrena said.
Heidi subsequently invited
Andrena to read the scripture lessons in worship and to teach in the Sunday
School. Whenever Andrena said she
could not do something, Heidi assured her that she could.
Andrena said that when Jesus announced to the woman in the story, “You
are set free from your ailment…” it was as if he was saying it to her.
It was not her physical ailment that had Andrena bent over, she said, but
an emotional ailment, a spiritual sickness.
“Slowly I began to look at myself and having the virus
differently,” she said. She
realized that the story of Jesus affirmed the love of God for her in whatever
condition she found herself. Hope
was raised from the dead in Andrena’s life or, perhaps more accurately, hope
raised Andrena from the dead. Eventually Heidi encouraged Andrena to go to
seminary and, while at first Andrena was hesitant, Heidi kept after her and
Andrena enrolled in the Lutheran Seminary at
Why am I telling you this story?
To get to this point: Addressing her
seminary community one day in chapel, Andrena said, “If one member of the
body of Christ has HIV and AIDS, then the whole body has HIV and AIDS.”
Remarked one member of that community who heard her, “Andrena
gave me a whole new way of thinking about the body of Christ.”
What I want to suggest this morning is that the body of Christ that Christians sometimes have regarded as being synonymous with the church is much bigger than that. The body of Christ includes everyone and Jesus is related to it not as a litmus test or as a gatekeeper but as an icon of God. What we see in this icon, what we see as we meditate the life of the one we call Jesus Christ, is that religion is not meant to be a belief structure that creates insiders and outsiders, saved and unsaved, clean and unclean but a wrecking ball that smashes every distinction we try to make to set ourselves over, above, against, or apart from others. “The church,” our Presbyterian Book of Order says, “is to be a provisional demonstration of what God intends for all humanity.” The church in its proclamation and actions and behavior is also, like Jesus, to be an icon of God, a high calling indeed. But the body of Christ is as wide as the world and includes people of every religion and no religion. Jesus made visible in his life the Christ of God not in order to found a new religion, but for the sake of the world, for love’s sake. And we are to do no less in our lives.
How else can we read the gospel?
When those whom society accounts as least among us are being cared for,
Jesus said, then the whole body is being cared for.
And when they are not being cared for, then the whole body is being
neglected, abused, despoiled. So,
for instance, if the people of
Jesus was clear that his
ministry was not limited to those who are a part of a synagogue or a church.
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” Jesus proclaimed at the
beginning of his public ministry, “because that Spirit has anointed me to
bring good news to the poor. The
Spirit of the Lord has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery
of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free…” whoever
they are.
One of the ways of bringing good
news to the poor, proclaiming release to captives, and helping oppressed people
find freedom is by identifying ourselves with them.
I love the apparently apocryphal but nevertheless stirring story coming
out of Denmark during the years of World War II when, in response to Jews being
ordered by the Nazis to wear yellow stars to distinguish themselves as such,
every Dane decided to wear a yellow star.
I remember how moved I was as a
young boy when on television I saw President Kennedy standing before and with
the embattled citizens of West Berlin after
In
the last decade or so, religious groups and peacemaking organizations in the
United States, including the Presbyterian Church, have developed “ministries
of accompaniment” in which members of our churches travel to other countries
to accompany people whose work on behalf of human rights and the bettering of
their peoples’ lives have made them mortal targets of their governments who do
not want the present arrangement of things disturbed.
The theory is that the privileged status of Americans offer the people
they accompany a cloak of security because their governments do not want to
hazard a confrontation with ours if harm were to befall one of our citizens.
A
couple of weeks ago I introduced you to a theologian from Syracuse University
named John Caputo whose writing is short-circuiting some of my theological
wiring. Good, because just as the
wiring in our homes needs from time to time to be updated, so does our spiritual
wiring. You might remember if you
were here that Caputo suggests we stop thinking of God as an all-powerful,
all-knowing sovereign Being who runs the world and intervenes in earthly
affairs. Rather, Caputo suggested,
we take the name of God as a call and not a causality.
In other words, God is not sitting in a celestial throne room somewhere
“causing” specific things to happen, or not.
God is not a “super power” bending the course of history irrespective
of our involvement in it. Rather,
God is the call within every event and every experience in life to live justly,
compassionately, lovingly, courageously, generously, mercifully, hospitably,
sacrificially, gratefully. Here
is a little more from Caputo and now I quote him directly:
“…the
transcendence of ‘God’ does not mean (as is often supposed) that God towers
above being as a hyper-(or a super)being. Rather,
God pitches God’s tent among beings by identifying with everything the world
casts out and leaves behind. Indeed,
rather than speaking of God’s transcendence at all, it might be better to
speak of God’s in-scendence or ‘insistence’ in the world.
The essence of God’s transcendence lies in God’s insistence.
In God, essence and insistence are the same.
By this I mean that God withdraws from the world’s order of presence,
prestige, and sovereignty in order to settle into those pockets of protest and
contradiction to the world. God
belongs to the air, to the call, to the spirit that inspires and aspires, that
breathes justice. God settles into
the recesses formed in the world by the little ones, the nothings and nobodies
of the world, what Paul in First Corinthians calls ‘ta me onta.’
I am trying to displace thinking about God as the highest and best thing
that is there by starting to think that God is the call that provokes
what is there, the specter that haunts what is there, the spirit that breathes
over what is there.”
(Caputo, The Weakness of God: A
Theology of the Event, p. 45.)
That
resonates with me so much. Rather
than picturing God as a cosmic wizard standing behind a curtain madly directing
the affairs of humanity (and, I might say, doing a pretty poor job of it);
rather than picturing God as a celestial judge weighing the evidence of our
lives before doling out reward or punishment, imagine God as the call in
every event and decision of our lives, provoking, inviting us to do what
is good: to do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly.
Rereading the gospels in light of Caputo, I am convinced that Jesus
experienced God not as some ponderous deity needing to be satisfied or else, but
as the spirit that inspires and aspires, as a call to do in every
situation, event, or circumstance of life what love requires.
And so he says, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because that
Spirit has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.
The Spirit of the Lord has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free.”
When
the church has gone wrong across the years is when it has tried to set itself up
to be a strong power in the world. It
wants to sit at the tables of power brokers, it wants its share of the pie of
prosperity, it wants political influence and moral authority, it wants to be the
arbiter of who is right and who is wrong, who is up and who is down, who is
inside and who is outside and it has done almost anything in order to get these
things. This church fashions itself
after its image of a God who is strong and powerful, invincible and in charge.
This church seeks mostly to serve itself and to increase its stature.
But
the gospels, through the icon of Jesus, give an image of God and thus also of
the church that gathers in God’s name, whose strength, in St. Paul’s words,
is made perfect in the weakness and vulnerability of love whose symbol is a
cross.
Andrena
Ingram was untouched by the church that seeks to be strong.
But she was utterly transformed by the church that heard the call of God
telling it that if even one member of Christ’s body has HIV or AIDS, we all
do, and so took her in and loved her and helped to set her free.
I
am so grateful that this congregation presses on toward the second way of being
church.
Amen.
*My
reference source for the story about Andrena Ingram is the online edition
(December, 2006) of The Lutheran, a publication of the
Return to the Sermons and Articles Page
Return to the Sermon Archives Page