First United Methodist Church, Birmingham, Michigan
Scripture: John 5:1-9
Most intelligent people, upon reading the New Testament, seem able to agree (in principle) that Jesus healed people. What these same people seem unable to agree upon is how (in practice) he did it. That's because his healings followed no consistent script and, more often than not, violated commonly-held expectations.
Keeping that in mind, let your imagination wander long enough to consider a conversation involving three men, each healed by Jesus of blindness. Quite by chance, they encounter each other in a video store. As people who have had marvelous experiences are apt to do, they begin to share their good news. The first man says: "I used to be blind, but Jesus healed me." The second responds: "The exact same thing happened to me." And the third man chimes in: "Small world, isn't it?" Then they begin to analyze their experiences more carefully.
The first man says: "I know how he does it. When he reaches out to touch your eyes, a power surge from his fingers fuses your optic nerve." The second man says: "What are you talking about? Jesus doesn't touch your eyes. He just speaks. He says the magic words, 'Be healed,' and that's when it happens." The first man counters: "Yes, he may say some magic words, but he has to be touching your eyes when he says them." The second retorts: "Nonsense! Jesus isn't into all that touchy-feely stuff. He just speaks." Which leads the first man to shout: "Well, I was there. I ought to know."
Finally the third man enters the debate, saying: "You guys have both got it wrong. What Jesus really does is spit on the ground. Then he makes little mud pies and presses the goo on your eyeballs." The first man glares back: 'That's disgusting. Jesus would never do that. He just touches you with a clean hand." "No," screams the second. "He just speaks. No touching. No spitting. No goo. No nothing."
So they all go off in separate directions and form their own churches. The first man's church holds hands and touches a lot. The second man's church has long sermons and relies heavily on the spoken word. I'm afraid to try the third man's church. Their sacraments might be a little weird.
But the point should be clear. When you spend all of your time arguing about method, you tend to lose sight of the miracle. And although you are no longer technically blind, you still don't see things very clearly. No.... not very clearly at all.
Having said that, I invite you to move to another healing of Jesus which similarly divided the house when he first performed it. This is my all-time favorite healing story. It is very nearly my all-time favorite gospel story. Understanding it, however, requires that we switch diseases. No longer are we dealing with a blind guy, but a lame guy. And not just any lame guy. We're dealing with a guy who has made a career out of lameness. Thirty eight years he's been lying there on his mat, adjacent to the infamous pool at Bethzatha. I'd call thirty eight years a career, wouldn't you? Two more years and he can retire. Maybe he'll even earn a gold watch from the towel attendant. Think of it. Thirty eight years living the invalid life. Thirty eight years living the in-valid life. Thirty eight years on the verge of wholeness....well-ness....greatness. And don't tell me I'm being hard on him. I've got good authority for being hard on him. Jesus is hard on him. But I'm getting ahead of my story. More on that, momentarily.
Let's put things in context. What is our thirty-eight- year sufferer doing by the pool? Well, let me tell you. This pool comes equipped with a legend. A healing legend. 'Tis said that once a day, every day, the waters get turbulent. They bubble right up. Could be an underground spring. Probably is. But people hereabouts prefer a different explanation. They say that the waters wouldn't behave like that, were it not for an angel of healing suddenly entering them. And then, because one unprovable theory deserves another, they say that whoever enters the waters first (following the onset of the turbulence) will be healed of whatever ails them. But you have to be first. One healing per troubling. No more. No less. Every time I think of it, the beauty of the picture is ruined when I consider the pushing and shoving that must take place among those vying to be first. Which is why someone has to help the more un-able of the dis-abled. After all, isn't this the complaint of the lame man? Listen to what he says to Jesus: "You want to know the crux of my problem? I have no one to put me in the pool when the waters are troubled. And while I am still on the way, someone gets there before me." What the lame man appears to want from Jesus is help with a transportation problem. But Jesus doesn't fall into that trap. And neither should we. Before we get caught up in the mechanics of how to get the patient to the pool more quickly, perhaps we should question the underlying assumption that the pool is necessarily the best, or only, place to find healing.
I have long contended that the pool is important to the story, not for what it does, but for where it is. And where is it? Over there.... that's where it is. It is somewhere else. Somewhere where I am not. I am here. The pool is there. If only I could get to where the pool is. Then things would be better. But I can't "be better" here. And I can't get from here to there. And every time I try, somebody beats me out.
My profession is full of clergy who are convinced that somewhere there are great churches.... significant churches.... good paying churches, filled with responsive people.... churches where ministry is a joy to perform and every sermon is critically acclaimed.... churches where every invitation produces dramatic conversions and every prophetic suggestion produces behavioral changes.... churches where finance campaigns are supported by tithers and where surrounding neighborhoods swell with potential shakers and movers, just begging to be shaken and moved.
These churches represent "the pool" in my business. And all kinds of clergy quietly pull their district superintendents aside, or attempt to catch the bishop's ear, just long enough to say:
You want to see what I can do? Put me in the pool. Send me to that church. Nobody can do ministry in this place where I've been stuck. Sure I'm limping now, but this is a lame church. What's more, this church cripples everybody who comes to it. You want valid ministry? Put me over there. I can only be in-valid here.
In fact, a lot of my colleagues are convinced that Birmingham First is one of the "pool churches." Others include Midland, Nardin Park and Rochester St. Pauls. But they can't get to the "pool." Because someone else beat them to it.... with help, they figure. Somebody is already there and shows no sign of leaving. So whenever clergy get together, they talk about the likelihood of such "pools" becoming "vacant" again.
Everybody waits for the troubling of the waters to produce an opening. And that's all right, assuming that it represents nothing more than an exercise in parlor room politics. But when it is offered as an excuse for ineffective ministry, it represents a sickness that no change in pools can cure.
There is a fundamental danger in assuming that health can't happen where I am.... that happiness can't come where I am.... that a life of significance can't be lived where I am.... that joy can't bubble up where I am.... that I am stuck here, while the pool of "good stuff" is over there, with a different job or a different mob, in a different house with a different spouse.
A teenager sits with a group of her friends in a Big Boy, absentmindedly dipping french fries into a pool of ketchup. She is only half tuned into the Friday night conversation of her friends because she is convinced that somewhere else, in a very similar restaurant, eating some very similar french fries, is the "in crowd" of girls. These are the girls who lead the cheers and date the players. These are the girls around whom it all swirls and for whom it all happens. The "pool" is that other restaurant. This is just "me and my friends" hanging out at Big Boy's.
A wife and mother, still young and attractive, but much less confident about it than she used to be, fights off drowsiness in an upstairs bedroom on a Monday night. Her goal is to stay awake long enough to finish one more chapter in her Danielle Steele novel, the chapter where it appears that the hero will (at long last) crush the heroine into his arms and set her body afire with searching and passionate kisses. Meanwhile, her husband sits one floor below in the family room, shouting: "Go 49ers! Go 49ers!" The "pool" is wherever it is that Danielle Steele is taking her. Downstairs is just "my husband" and Monday night football.
Notice the common thread that runs through both of these laments. I am here. Health is over there. I can't get from here to there. And even if I can, somebody will probably beat me to it. All of which is strangely reminiscent of Baudelaire's great line: "Most of us see life as a hospital and mistakenly assume that our condition would dramatically improve if someone would move us to a different bed."
Many of you already know of my affection for the Traverse City region of our state. In fact, many of you share it. One day I was talking about that with the minister who preaches at Central United Methodist Church in Traverse City. (They actually pay him for that.) But he was telling me that the job is not entirely what I would imagine it to be. Apparently the counseling load gets pretty heavy. That's because people come up there, thinking that they are plunging head first into paradise. Except (for many of them) it's not. Not because the bay isn't beautiful. It is. Not because the people aren't friendly. They are. But because no place can make you happy if you don't bring the basic ingredients for happiness with you, from wherever it was you came. And when people, dragging the wrong kind of baggage, find they can't even get it together in Traverse City, they feel that either paradise has failed.... or they have.... with either realization being equally depressing.
Which is why (to all you would-be pool and paradise seekers) Jesus bristles: "Do you want to be healed?" One supposes that question probably angered the lame man, leading him to snap back in frustration: "Why in the world do you think I've been lying here for 38 years?" To which the only conceivable comeback would have been: "Well, why have you been lying here for 38 years?"
My friends, do you want to be well? Healing begins with the answer to that question. Healing does not begin with the troubling of the waters and the rush to the pool. The dramatic movement of the story does not move from question to pool. The dramatic movement of the story moves from question ("Do you want to be healed?") to command (iThen take up your bed and walk"). The implication is that any place can be a healing place, any time can be a healing time, and that a crucial component of any healing experience is that movement when the invalids of the world cultivate a desire to be valid where they are. The grass is not always greener on the other side of the fence. The grass is greener where it is watered.
Now I realize that this sounds dangerously like a gospel of self- improvement. ("Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again.") And if that's all it is, who needs Jesus? Well, for starters, the man in the story needed Jesus. He thought he needed Jesus to throw him in the pool. What he really needed was for Jesus to frame the right question, suggest a new possibility, and then challenge him to accept it. I sometimes wonder if we haven't overpreached Jesus the rescuer and underpreached Jesus the midwife. What's the difference between rescuer and midwife? Think of it this way. The rescuer pulls us out of something. The midwife pulls something out of us.
Robert Fulghum reports a conversation with a colleague who was complaining that he had the same dam stuff in his lunch bag, day after boring day. "So who packs your lunch?" Bob asked. "I do," replied his friend. How do you save such a man? Surely not by taking him to a restaurant.
There is a lot of health within us that literally begs for someone to call it out of us. And surely one of the roles of Jesus is to say to some of us (all of the time) and to all of us (some of the time), that this is a good time and here is a good place, therefore, why not get up and get on with it.
In rare moments of spiritual sobriety this summer, I have occasionally found myself worrying about this church. I worry that we will get too lazy lying on our mat, and forget how to walk. I worry that it will become tempting to assume that our moment was yesterday.... or tomorrow. I worry that we will get sucked into believing that greatness will only come to us.... or come back to us.... once the long-range plan is activated.... once the building is enlarged.... once the air conditioning is fixed.... once the staff is made larger.... smaller.... better....or is reconfigured (take your pick).... once the times are more conducive.... the tax laws more favorable.... or a couple of benevolent millionaires suddenly show up in our midst. My friends, eleven weeks here haven't taught me a lot. But eleven weeks have been enough to teach me that there is no place better than ours.... there is no moment riper than this....and there are no people more valid than we.
Recall, as we close, the parable about the football game between the little animals and the big animals. The big animals were winning by a large margin. This should come as no surprise, given the fact that football is a game in which big animals have a decided advantage. After the halftime break, the big animals took the field again. On the first play they sent the elephant up the middle. Surprise of surprises, he was tackled at the line of scrimmage. So they sent the rhinoceros around the right end. He, too, was tackled at the line of scrimmage. Finally they called a power sweep to the left, giving the ball to the hippopotamus. When the dust settled, he was lying at the bottom of the pile at the line of scrimmage. For the first time in the game, the big animals were forced to punt and the little animals had the ball.
The quarterback, a squirrel, said in the huddle: "Before I call the first play, I want to know who was able to tackle the elephant coming up the middle." The centipede raised his hand and said: "I got the elephant" Then the quarterback asked: "And who got the rhinoceros coming around right end?" The centipede said: "I got the rhino." So the squirrel asked: "Well, who was it that stopped the power sweep by tripping the hippo coming around the left side?" And again the centipede raised a hand. "Well," said the squirrel, "All I want to know is, where were you during the first half?" To which the centipede replied: "I was tying my shoes."
Moral of story: There is a time to prepare and a time to get in the game. Jesus never asked us to flatten a rhino. He did (however) command us to get out of bed.
