A Fourth Church Sermon by Sarah A. Johnson

May 9, 2010 | 4:00 p.m.

Stand Up and Walk

Sarah A. Johnson
Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church

John 5:1–9

Most all pastors agree that the seven deadliest words in the church have nothing to do with reciting creeds or Bible verses but with stagnation.

If you want to stop a pastor dead in their tracks, crush their enthusiasm and send them trembling, all you have to do is raise your hand and say, “But Pastor, we have always done it that way.”

One of my colleagues, who is a pastor at a church in Brooklyn, New York, once told me that thanks to those seven words, it took him no fewer than two years to move the piano from one side of the sanctuary to the other.

It can be hard to pattern our lives differently from the way that we have always done so or lived. Keeping things the same provides security, familiarity, and stability.

And thanks to conditions in the economy, we Americans are literally moving around less. The Pew Research Foundation reported in a recent article that according to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, the number of people who moved between 2007 and 2008, 34 million, was the lowest since 1959–60, when the population of the U.S. was 41 percent smaller than it is now. In part, people are moving around less because jobs are often a reason to move and there are fewer jobs to move for these days. But people are also staying put because in times of instability, we want to remain in places that are familiar, places that we know and feel we belong in ways we always have (http://pewsocialtrends.org/pubs/721/movers-and-stayers ).

In our Gospel lesson for this afternoon, we find Jesus speaking with a man who has been stuck in the same place for a long time.

Jesus has made his way to Jerusalem and to the pools at Bethesda. Located in the northern corner of Jerusalem in what is now the Muslim Quarter north of the Temple Mount, the pools collected waters fed by an underground spring believed to have healing powers. Members of the community—anyone and everyone with some sort of sickness, but especially those who were blind, lame, paralyzed—would gather around these pools of water in hopes that they might be beneficiaries of the pools’ healing mercies.

It is here that Jesus encounters a man who we are told has been stuck waiting by one of these healing pools for thirty-eight years. The text doesn’t tell us exactly how Jesus knows that he has been there for thirty-eight years, just that somehow Jesus knows he has been there for a long, long time. Perhaps the man looked wearier or more worn down than others around him, the suntanned wrinkles in his face a little deeper than others. Perhaps his eyes reflected a little more deeply the stale and stagnant pools that fill his daily routine.

We cannot say for sure. What we can say is that somehow Jesus knows this man has been stuck, paralyzed in the same place, next to this same pool of water, for quite sometime.

And so Jesus calls out to him, “Do you want to be made well?” It seems like an odd question, doesn’t it? Why wouldn’t he want to be made well? We’ve just established that he’s been sitting there for thirty-eight years trying to get into the pool. “Come on, Jesus. Get a clue. What kind of question is that?”

It seems to me that it’s the kind of question that we ask someone if they are on the verge of making a decision with significant consequences. “Are you sure?” we ask them. Do you really want to do this? “If you do this, you know that there is no turning back. Are you sure?” We ask others and ourselves this kind of question when we are about to take a risk.

I think that often you and I can get paralyzed beside the pool—whether in the church or in our own lives. We keep on doing things the way we have always done them because it is safer, easier, more comfortable. And to risk saying “Yes” to Jesus’ call means to open ourselves to the possibility of going somewhere we would really rather not; to be response-able—able to respond to God’s call, able to respond to the word and love of Jesus that draws us into new places of living and being.

I think that like this man, we know that to get up and follow Jesus will involve us in people’s lives in ways we’re not sure we want to be, because to be made well means to be re-membered, re-connected with God and with God’s people and God’s creation.

No more isolation. No more living my own private life where no one bothers me. To be made well means to get off of the couch and get involved. It means to work our tails off, often doing behind-the-scenes work that is tedious and overlooked.

We know that to get up from beside that pool is to say, “Here am I, Jesus! I want to be made well! Send me!” It is an invitation to maybe getting crucified like Jesus. As Dan Berrigan has said, “If you’re going to follow Jesus, you had better look good on wood, because that is where you’ll end up.” We know all of that, so maybe our couches and our mats beside the pool don’t look so bad.

So we go on living the way we always have. “No thanks,” we say. “I think I’ll just stay here on my mat and wait for my chance to get in the water. I’ve been here thirty-eight years and I know what to expect and I know all of the other people nearby. True, I’m probably not going to get better, things aren’t going to change, but, you know, I’ve gotten used to being here, to things as they are. So thanks all the same, Jesus, but I’ll just lie here.”

In twentieth-century American playwright Thornton Wilder’s production Our Town, central character Emily Webb dies in the process of childbirth. After her death, she travels back in time to visit the events of her life now come and gone. In conversation with the stage manager, who is often hypothesized by many critics to represent God, Emily becomes painfully aware of the beauty and significance of everyday life and how much of that life passed her by while she was living.

“Do any human beings realize life while they live it?” she asks the stage manager. “No,” he replies. “Saints and poets maybe. They do some.”

In favor of safer, more comfortable, more familiar places, we remain on our mats.

But the man in John’s Gospel decides to risk it. “Yes, Jesus, I want to be whole, healed and well. I know it will take time Jesus. Not a day, maybe not even a year, but likely a whole lifetime of saying yes again and again to risk where God is calling me. I know it is not going to be easy, but yes, Jesus, make me a whole person.”

And as soon as the man says yes, with no questions, no stipulations, no checking to see if he is truly deserving, Jesus says, “Stand up, take your mat, and walk.” Some translations record it as, “Rise, take your mat, and walk.” The command that Jesus gives the man “to stand” or “to rise” is from the Greek word Eγειρε, which means “to arouse from sleep” and is frequently used in the New Testament to describe resurrection. The paralyzed man is in effect raised from his thirty-eight-year-long dead state to a new life of wholeness and worth. Jesus’ call gives this man not just new legs but new life.

In his book Let Your Life Speak, theologian and teacher Parker Palmer asks, “Is the life I am living the same life that wants to live in me?”

Jesus’ invitation is to live as our whole, fully healed, authentic selves; to realize all of life; to discover who we are—each of us uniquely—and to live boldly in response, response-able-to God’s call to “rise, take our mats, and walk.”

In 1989, theologian and professor Henri Nouwen published a book entitled In the Name of Jesus, in which he reflected on his decision to move from a tenured job as a Harvard professor of pastoral psychology, pastoral theology, and Christian spirituality to living and working at the L’Arche community for people with mental handicaps.

In the opening pages he writes, “I asked myself, ‘What decisions have you been making lately and how are they a reflection of the way that you sense the future?’ . . . After twenty-five years of priesthood I found myself praying poorly, living somewhat isolated from other people, and very much preoccupied with burning issues,” he wrote. “Everyone was saying I was doing well but something inside me was telling me that my success was putting my soul in danger. . . . In the midst of this I began to ask, ‘Lord show me where you want me to go and I will follow you’” (In the Name of Jesus, pp. 21–22).

Nouwen would later go on to write, “So I moved from Harvard to L’Arche, from the best and the brightest, wanting to rule the world, to men and women who had few or no words and were considered, at best, marginal to the needs of our society. It was a very hard and painful move and I am still in the process of making it.”

As a part of Fourth Church’s ten-year visioning done at the start of last year, defined as “Refreshing the Vision,” members and clergy alike all articulated a desire for a deeper spirituality and a deeper sense of connectedness to one another. Both of those things can be hard in a church a large as this one. But they can be done if we open ourselves to the possibility of new ways of being church together. If we want to grow, we will have to be open to change, open to all the ways that God is calling us to “stand up and walk.”

Maybe for some of you that means getting involved at the church in new ways for the first time, daring to ask that question, “What is it that God is calling me to do with my life, my gifts?” “How is God calling me to live fully and completely in response to God’s calling?” For others of you that may mean recommitting yourself to the church community you have been a part of for many years. Maybe it means asking yourself, Are there new places or things that God is calling me to be open to? Where and how is God calling me to change and to grow?

In his memoir Longing for Home, Frederick Buechner writes, “Perhaps it is by what he brings that we know best the Jesus Who Is. To the blinded he brings vision. To the deafened the sound of a voice unlike all other voices. To the deadened the breath of life.”

Do you want to be made well?

All thanks be to God. Amen.