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Focus: To celebrate that Jesus became Flesh! Function: to inspire deeper response to the incarnation. Let the words of our mouths, and the meditation of
What we share in this sanctuary tonight brings us into Dr. Gabor Maté’s definition of healing: “a natural movement toward wholeness.” In a toxic culture of greed that fragments and separates us, these sacred and ancient rituals bind us together in God’s love again. This is sacred and revolutionary ground we stand on where authenticity and agency and truthfulness and acceptance and compassion heal the wounds deep within our minds, bodies, and souls, so that we can become conduits of God’s healing and loving and liberating presence to others.
We know that Jesus wants us to follow in his example. We may not be able to miraculously restore sight to the blind, but we can restore communities! We can bring good news of liberation to people who are poor in money and those who are poor in love and acceptance. We can recognize the places we are poor in compassion and generosity and learn from those who would teach us a better way.
Maria Stewart never let being told NO keep her from getting to YES. CAN’T did not seem a part of her vocabulary. She knew she was a servant of the Lord with a story to tell, with a contribution to make, and would allow nothing to stand in her way. Imagine the physical, emotional, and mental toll she endured during those dark and lonely times. I wonder how the stress manifested in her body and mind. I’m sure prayer was her constant companion.
Like a gracious host offering gifts and hospitality, the plants we encounter daily, often without our noticing, are offering up food and medicine and beauty for any who have need. It is quite humbling if you think about it, enough to bring you to your knees in gratitude, both metaphorically, or literally by the side of the road in the moss, between the fir trees.
So many things come as compete surprises in our personal and collective lives: Covid, 9/11, the almost-daily shootings; the pervasiveness and depth of racism; sexism and homophobia; but also fabulous fall weather; a magical dinner with friends; recovery, dogs. We live in the tyranny and grace of the unexpected.
If Womanist and Liberationist theology does anything, it points to the liberating message Jesus lived and preached, the very radical message and life that got him hung on the cross in the first place. Jesus lived so that, as his mother sang, the power structures of this world might be inverted, the hungry might be filled with good things and the rich and powerful dethroned and sent away empty.
To connect deeply with one another in communion with God’s Word and Sacraments, to go deep within our bodies to do the hard quiet spiritual work of somatic healing so that we can continue to be Christ’s agents of hope and healing, courage and compassion as we serve others through today’s apocalypse. The word apocalypse or revelation names the fact that we are seeing with new eyes painful truths that have always been there, and now all of us are seeing these devastating truths for the first time. As we face hard truths which can set us all free, Jesus says to us in today’s Gospel “do not be terrified; for these things must take place first.”
What’s more, like Mother Theresa or Martin Luther King, we can see in the lives of the saints, how their capacity to love is a real possibility, not remote or out of touch among the angels, but here, now, in our real lives amidst real struggle. We too can love like they did. Their love, like that of Jesus, does not exalt itself, but, rather, descends down further into the need and pain of the world.
A forewarning before I begin. This morning’s sermon discusses the issue of abortion. Because I know this difficult topic can raise intense feelings and trigger memories of past experiences and pain, I felt it was important to name it at the outset.
We don’t pray to ourselves or to some unknown other. We pray to a God, experienced in the person of Jesus, who desires among other things, that we not lose heart. We pray to a God who can be known and experienced, a God with whom we can wrestle and against whom we can rage. We pray to a God with whom we can have a deep and intimate relationship, who seeks to be known and one with us.
Just as the Prophet Elisha instructs Naaman to immerse himself seven times in the River Jordan, we too might feel as angry as Naaman when we realize that healing actually requires us to go to inconvenient places to participate in sacred rituals we might not feel like practicing. And yet, when we immerse ourselves, sometimes seven times, in healing work, we not only find ourselves becoming well, we also become agents of God’s healing for others and for our world.
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