God's work--our play

Jeremiah 1:4-10
Psalm 71:1-6
Hebrews 12:18-29
Luke 13:10-17

I think it had something to do with long hours behind the wheel on winding coastal roads, maybe in combination with sleeping on the ground, but about three days into our recent family camping trip I got a pain in the back.  The muscles along the left side of my rib cage and up under my shoulder blade just kind of tightened up into a knot, and the stiffness went all the way up into my neck so that I could hardly turn my head.  Fortunately, part of my wife’s vacation planning included back-to-back appointments for her and me with a massage therapist.  Meg’s mother and stepfather retired to Ashland, Oregon almost 20 years ago, which was where our trip ended up, and on our visits over the years we have been back a number of times to see this particular practitioner, who offers a very subtle but powerful kind of healing touch that unwinds muscular tension in the body from within.

When I got to my feet after an hour on her table, I had not received a miraculous cure.  The pain wasn’t entirely gone, but there was less of it, and I had regained much greater range of motion.   I could breathe more deeply, and my body felt lighter, more open and balanced than it had, not just since before the acute back pain began, but more than it had for quite a long time before that.  And as I was standing there, experiencing my relief, the massage therapist pointed out something, something I already knew.  She led into it by asking me if I spend a lot of time on the computer.  And I said that I did, and she said she thought so, because long hours at the computer can exacerbate a posture which is stooped, with the shoulders slumped forward, and the chin and neck kind of thrust out. 

She recommended that I do what I can to prevent this from getting worse, because over time that curvature in the cervical spine might start to impinge on the nerves and lead to numbness and tingling in my arms and hands.   She suggested taking frequent breaks from the computer, and getting up out of my chair to stand for a time in what she called the “Superman postures.”  [Demonstrates].   Anyway, over the last couple of weeks I have added doing my Superman to yoga practice, and sitting meditation, and surfing, and the other things I have already been doing to counteract my tendency to slump.  Because, as I said, it not like that massage therapist was telling me something I didn’t already know.

You see, I had this tendency long before I ever started working at a computer.  My father has it, too.  Maybe I inherited it in my DNA.  Then again, maybe it is not so much a matter of biology, but of mental and emotional posture and way of being in the world.  After all, these things that get passed down in families, too.  It is common nowadays to speak about our bodies in the language of mechanics and engineering.  But anyone who has ever lain down to sleep and had a dream knows that, left to itself, the natural language of the body is image and story.  So it has occurred to me over the years to think of my posture not simply in physical or medical terms, but also as a symbol.  Maybe I, like my father, have a tendency to take on too many burdens, to be overly conscientious and responsible, to carry, as it were, the weight of the world on my shoulders.

In any case, I’m not so much interested in talking to you about my own physical and mental problems, as in making a more general point, which is that the state of our souls affects, at least to some extent, the shape of our bodies.  And recent research in fields from neurobiology to cross-cultural anthropology to clinical psychology have shown the profound connection between mental and physical patterns.  But this is one of those things we don’t really need scientists to tell us is true.  I think for most of us it just makes intuitive sense, and our ancestors understood it perfectly.  So when the Gospel of Luke describes a woman in the synagogue who is bent over and cannot stand up to her full height, Jesus has no trouble seeing a spiritual cause for her condition.  He lays his hands on her and tells her she has been set free.  Which would be a strange choice of words if her stooped posture were a sign of a structural problem with her spine, or lack of core strength.  But for Jesus it is bondage inflicted on her by Satan, the Spirit who accuses and oppresses human beings and denies them the full, free flourishing of their lives.  After eighteen years of carrying that monkey on her back, Jesus drives it away in a moment, and this is what enables that women to stand up straight and tall.  

And I think this connection between body and spirit is the key to understanding the larger context of today’s Gospel story, and why acts of healing have such a central place in the ministry of Jesus.  Because this is not just a story about the miraculous healing of a woman who could not stand up straight.  It is also part of the larger arc of story in the Gospel of Luke about the intensifying controversy between Jesus and the Pharisees.  It is one of no fewer than three incidents in that larger story where Jesus gets into trouble for healing someone in the synagogue on the Sabbath day.  And it would be easy, and even traditional, to interpret these incidents as conflicts over the Jewish law, and how rigidly scrupulous to be in observing it.  But in my reading of today’s story, it is really not about that.  What it is about is what Jesus is really doing when he heals people, and what that has to do with the loving and redeeming purpose of God. 

When the Pharisees look at Jesus laying hands on someone and curing them, they see a person doing work.  He is like a masseur or a chiropractor providing therapeutic services to a client.  He may not be getting paid, but he’s receiving other benefits, such as gaining another follower and enhancing his reputation.  And he is doing this work in the synagogue, on the very day when it is forbidden to practice one’s trade or do anything to advance one’s personal interest in the world.    It’s a prohibition that is rooted, as you know, in the Jewish story of creation.  It is a way of honoring the creator God, who, after finishing the work of making the world, rested.  God gave us every seventh day to cease all striving to improve things, a day simply to be thankful for the life we already have, and to worship the one who gave it to us. 

But what the Pharisees fail to understand is that when Jesus helps that woman cast off her spiritual burden and stand up straight and tall, so she can breathe freely and be fully alive, he is not merely doing a job on behalf of a particular individual.  He is making a proclamation to the entire community gathered in that place, of what their Sabbath rest is really meant to be about.  It is a continuation of the same proclamation he made at the very beginning of his public ministry, when he stood up in the synagogue on the Sabbath day and read from the scroll of the prophet, “the Spirit has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor, freedom to the captive, liberation to the oppressed, to announce the year of the Lord’s favor.”  Jesus heals in the synagogue on the Sabbath to remind us, that the Sabbath God wants to share with us is perfect rest, perfect joy, perfect peace—and as long as there is even one person in our midst still burdened by oppression, want, loneliness, fear, or grief, God’s work is not done.   

Which is not to say that we should never stop to rest, to celebrate a Sabbath.  But it does give that rest a significantly different meaning.  The Sabbath that Jesus proclaims is not simply the enjoyment of work completed; it is also, and maybe more importantly, anticipation of work fulfilled.  The followers of Jesus gathers for worship on the first day of the week, not the last.  Here we rest and give thanks for the blessings we’ve received, but we also take in nourishment, in word and sacrament, to refresh us and renew our strength for another week of carrying on Jesus’ work.   Now, I say “work,” but if it’s really the work of Jesus, it’s more like play.  Because it’s not our personal responsibility to fix the world—that is a burden none of us can bear.  No, our work, like Jesus’, is neither more nor less than this—to tell stories, and create images, and act out symbols that proclaim what God is doing to complete the new creation of the world.        

    

See God play

Job 42:1-6, 10-17
Psalm 34:1-8, (19-22)
Hebrews 7:23-28
Mark 10:46-52

On Thursday morning about 3 a.m. I woke up from a dream.  The details of are not important except that it was about a man and his beautiful wife.  I was his brother, and I offered them some bread and cheese.  He did not take it, but she did, which led to a painful breach of trust.  I only mention this dream because I woke up with the sense that it was a gift that could help me see what I was supposed to preach about today.  Because what the people in the dream did to restore the trust that had been broken was to go outside and play.  They went into the woods and they played with each other—not a competitive game with a lot of rules and a winner or a loser, but the kind of open-ended, improvisation play that children do.  

Some of the things they did were pretty silly, but they kept their heads, as the saying goes, in the game.  They never stepped out to an ironic distance, but whole-heartedly kept running around in the woods holding pinecones on their heads like rabbit ears, or thrusting their arms into the stream bed up to the elbows and pulling them out, glistening wet and covered with tiny black pebbles.  There was no cathartic resolution, no single moment of truth, just a kind of faith in the game, to give them a deeper understanding, and put things right between them.     

We don’t often think of the Bible as play.   We know it is serious, because, like my dream, it is about broken trust.  It also begins with a man and his wife, and a meddlesome third party, with sharing food that leads to betrayal.  It goes on from there to tell how human beings break their trust with God again and again, but also how God acts to heal the damage.  There’s a lot in there about scary grown-up business like commandments, and punishment, and sacrifice. 

And this can cause us to overlook how much of it sounds inviting and even fun, like the verse in the psalm today that says “taste, and see that the Lord is good, happy are they that trust in him!”  Our reading of the Bible has been known to leave out the message that God wants more for us than just to feel ashamed and get back into line, and do a better job of obeying from now on.  God wants us to taste and to see, and to know deep-down how good God is.  And to get this message through our thick skulls, the Bible says, God does more than give orders and make threats—God plays. 

The story of Job pushes us right up to brink of our worst fears about a God who is arbitrary and cruel, who plays with us the way a cat plays with a mouse, and tortures us just to see what we will do.  And for chapter after chapter of the book Job and his friends try to talk each other down from that ledge, try to salvage their image of a God who plays it straight, who is comprehensible and predictable and follows the rules. 

But when God finally speaks, God’s answer to Job is not a legal case, to justify Job’s punishment.  It is not a philosophical explanation of how a good God can allow the innocent to suffer.  What it is is a poem.  God invites Job’s imagination out to play, to journey through the orders of creation, from the “springs of the sea, and the recesses of the deep” to the “storehouses of the snow…and of the hail.”   God shows Job the animals of the mountains and the plains, the lions and wild oxen and ostriches, and the monsters that live in the sea.  And God’s description of these wonders is interspersed with questions that ask him to imagine the mind of God: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”  “Can you number the clouds?”  “Do you give the horse his might?”  “Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars?”

And so Job comes to the moment when he does see: he sees himself, not as the innocent victim of God’s injustice, but as a fool who’s been talking and talking about things he does not understand.  And Job sees God, no longer as a secondhand notion, but face to face.  Job sees God in the grandeur, and wisdom, and power, the dazzling diversity and wondrous unity of everything that is.  Job sees God at play all creation, and this revelation is not Job’s alone.   You and I can participate in this drama; you and I can share Job’s vision, you and I can be moved to Job’s repentance, because God plays in the literary art of this book, and the contemplation of  creation that it invites us to enjoy.      

The Gospel of Mark does something similar; it also invites us to see God at play.  Again, this play is serious—its purpose is the healing of a broken world.  But what it dramatizes is not the vastness of creation but the breadth of God at play in human experience, in the heights of human nobility and love, and the depths of human cruelty and suffering.   Like Job, Mark invites us to change our minds, to break through to a new way of seeing, and to do this he invents a new kind of story.  He writes a Gospel, to brings us face to face with God in the life and death of a human person.  And one way Mark talks about this breakthrough is to tell stories of Jesus giving sight to the blind.

The story of blind Bartimaeus is not a simple historical account of a physical healing that happened to someone else a long time ago.  It is an invitation to discipleship, a dramatization of what it means to see God at play in Jesus, and to follow him.  It is a deep story, because of the density of its connections with the whole sweep of the drama.  When Jesus asks Bartimaeus “What do you want me to do for you?” we remember that last week he asked the same question of James and John.  They wanted to sit at Jesus’ right hand and at his left in glory; Bartimaeus only wants to see.  When Bartimaeus casts aside his beggar’s cloak, and follows Jesus on the way, we remember a rich man Jesus also met along the road, who could not give up his many possessions and become a disciple, but went away grieving.

This story sums up what the Gospel has already said about discipleship, but it also marks the transition to what it is going to say.  Bartimaeus follows Jesus, but there is only one more stop on Jesus’ way; from Jericho it is only fifteen miles to Jerusalem.  He is the last disciple Jesus calls, and for him it is too late to eat his fill of bread and fish with the 5,000 in the wilderness, too late to see Jesus calm the stormy wind and sea by night, or see the glory of the transfigured Lord on the mountain.  Bartimaeus receives his sight, only just in time to be a witness to the way of the cross.

The Gospel story and the way it is told share the same purpose, which is to open the story of Jesus up, so we can enter.  So we can open our eyes in a world in which Christ walks, as the depth of God’s mercy and love, healing the blindness of broken trust.   It does not give us a vision of a different world, but of the true depth of this one—to see and know that we are players in the theatre of Christ’s passion.  One result of this is that we can never be simply happy.  We can know times of laughter and love and peace, but for us this will never cease to be the world that crucified its own true heart and soul. 

But we can also never be simply sorrowful or afraid, even in the worst of times, for Christ’s story does not end with death.  When the gospel has opened our eyes, and we have followed Jesus on the way, we see this as the world God so loved that he gave his only Son.   We suffer, and struggle, and grieve, but we know that our sufferings and those of all poor, afflicted humanity are the sufferings of Christ.  They are one with his sacrifice, which he offers continually to God, who repays it with life, and mercy and grace.  Our sufferings are his play, which is completely serious, but also absolutely free, full of perfect bliss and joy.