Bishop Margaret G. Payne

Sermon at Festive Eucharist

Friday, July 8, 2007

20^th Annual Assembly of the New England Synod

Trinity Lutheran Church, Worcester, Mass.

Isaiah 42:1-9, Psalm 27, II Corinthians 5:16-21, John 5:1b-9

Every year, three of my tasks at this annual Synod Assembly make me feel especially anxious. These three are, in ascending order of fearfulness:

# 3 – Remembering, after I have concluded the vote on a motion to

call the question, to vote on the main motion

# 2 – Remembering to keep my opinion to myself as the presiding

officer, and …

# 1 – Preaching at this festive service of Eucharist. It is liturgy that is rich

with multiple layers of what was, and what is, and what will be,

and I feel it is my job in this event to produce a pretty good sermon. It makes me feel anxious.

Every year as I prepare the sermon, this thought crosses my mind:

“the worship is already so long and rich – why not let ritual

and the reading of scripture and music carry the day?”

But don’t get your hopes up.

Although this responsibility is fearsome, it is also a treasured opportunity for me to preach to people who are the precious, Yankee, grace-filled, walking-together band of Lutherans who call themselves the ELCA in this part of the country where people still ask: What is a synod? What is a Lutheran?

And so – every year, I spend a lot of time preparing this sermon, but much of that time, however, is not spent at my computer. I spend time thinking and reading and praying and touching and smelling and feeling and sidling out onto the edge of the texts to try to catch a glimpse of new places to tell you about.

Those are some of the ways for a preacher to use the whole human tool-belt to build a framework for God’s Word that is bigger than just the hammer and nail of reason and intellect can build.

For example, a couple of weeks ago, you would have seen me working on my sermon as I rode my bike near the ocean early on a morning that was hazy and salty and punctuated by the screech of sea gulls. The texts were already in my head – marinating in the salt – when I stopped to walk through an outdoor market to buy a newspaper … and caught a whiff of the Holy Land.

The smell came from a rosemary plant, and it stopped me as suddenly as if I had hit a wall because it said to me – through the sight and smell of it –Shalom … Saleem … hello … peace … God grant you wholeness – greeting me in the two languages of the Holy Land.

So I bought that chatty, fragrant plant, and took it home with me, perching in the basket of my bicycle so that it could keep me company and say what it wanted to say, and help me with my sermon.

There are rosemary plants all over Israel and Palestine – borders in gardens, tufts in barren places, partnered with other plants.

In the spring of this year, when I traveled with those 23 other pilgrims on a trip to the Holy Land, we were looking for signs of hope, and most days the pickings were slim, but everywhere we went we got a whiff of rosemary.

It grew outside the museum, near a monastery, in gardens everywhere and even in a pot in a refugee camp. It lined walkways and stairways, and made periodic appearances along the path we walked by the Sea of Galilee.

Rosemary is a shrub that is an evergreen – that means that it is short and relentlessly hopeful … and so maybe you can guess why I developed an affinity with it. The next time you go into a supermarket, take time to smell the rosemary, and you’ll get a whiff of the Holy Land – it’s earthy and fragrant, and maybe it will speak to you, too, and call to you to visit the land where it lives and gives whiffs of hope.

It suggests that maybe there are reasons for hope after all – that the persistent longing for freedom and peace and new life that is in so many hearts, might be just that relentless – and if it is supported and magnified by enough ambassadors and pilgrims and prayers – that might be enough to give birth to a new season of healing and reconciliation.

In the Gospel story today, Jesus asked the man who had been disabled longer than Jesus had been alive: Do you want to be made well? Or, in another translation: Do you want to be healed?

It seemed like a silly question, and the situation seemed hopeless – the

man was only one of many invalids – there were five porches full of them.

They never knew when the angels would come to trouble the water, and the ones who had arm problems instead of leg problems, or who had friends right there to help them, were more likely to get to the water first.

“Do you want to be healed?” Jesus asked – are you willing to give up your invalid status – the answer might not be as simple as we think. The man had several excuses – (don’t we all have at least one to explain why we cannot be healed?) – but Jesus brushed them aside, announced the man’s healing, and told him to stop taking up space and get moving. And so he did.

This is a story of layers of healings; and it calls to us to dive down beneath our own excuses and ask ourselves some hard questions. Do we really want to seek health and authentic human wholeness? Or are there some benefits to an invalid status that holds us back from the kind of wholeness that Jesus lived and taught?

By his healings, then and now, Jesus calls people beyond their excuses, beyond the identity of invalid or bystander or safely prosperous into a new life in which they are the walkers and movers and shakers.

There are so many places in our world that need the presence and energy and hope and wholeness of those who have been healed by Jesus. But, do we really want to be healed and give ourselves to him to be claimed and equipped and sent as his ambassadors? Do we want to be healed of our consumerism, or do we want to keep shopping? Do we want to be healed of our spirit-killing pace of life, or are we frightened of what Sabbath might mean to our lifestyles?

What we say we want to do and then what we actually get up and do are often different. But if we really do want to be healed by Jesus, then we will have to participate actively in the healing.

When I was growing up, we had a funny little custom in our family; it came to us from my father. His family name was Gatter – the custom became known in the life and legends of our family as “the Gatter Shuffle,’ and here is how it went.

The most common occurrence of the Gatter Shuffle happened right after a big dinner, when the extended family was sitting around the dining-room table in a food-induced lethargy that even the strong German coffee had not been able to dispel, and my mother would sigh and say: I’ve got to get started on the dishes.

At this cue, my father would heave an even bigger sigh and say: I’ll help – and I remember this next part well – then he would lean forward, place one hand on either side of his plate, and shuffle his feet with the apparent intent of standing up on them – at which point in this little charade, my mother would leap up saying, No, no – I’ll do the dishes – Margaret, come and help me.

I did not have to be a very precocious child to know what was going on.

By the age of four or five, I knew that my father had no intention whatsoever of getting up. He was just doing “The Gatter Shuffle” to avoid doing the dishes. My father was not sexist or lazy or unwilling to pull his weight in any other family chores, but he hated doing dishes, and he knew that some of the other relatives would get up and help.

And … he had no desire to be healed of his reluctance to do dishes but he thought he should at least offer. My mother played along, willingly, and I played along because I had to.

I think about “The Gatter Shuffle” these days as I watch countries and leaders and churches and many people doing the “The Global Shuffle”. There is a lot of shuffling going on – books and articles and protests about all that needs to be done about the genocide in Darfur and global warming and Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories and world hunger and suffering from HIV/AIDS.

There is a lot of sighing, and leaning forward purposefully, with the apparent intention to get up and do something along with the fervent hope that someone else will do it. Sometimes it seems impossible to find more than a handful of people who really want to be healed.

I believe that God is calling, and longing, for us to rise up, healed and whole and live as agents of peace, justice, love and reconciliation.

What are some people doing – people who have been healed of the temptation to do the Global Shuffle and have stood up and walked?

In our synod, people are reaching out to immigrants and to people in their neighborhoods; people are working hard to encourage us to give to World Hunger at a level that is more than a token response; people are committing to a spiritual process that tackles racism; people are traveling to the Holy Land to accompany our brothers and sisters there, not only to provide a source of hope, but also to learn about lives that witness to powerful faith.

When you travel to the Holy Land, you enter a greenhouse that not only grows rosemary, but grows disciples – but you also realize that it will require incredible determination, imagination and persistence to bring about reconciliation, justice and peace for both Palestinians and Israelis.

Those disciples in that place are people who are gifted and courageous and imaginative – living rosemary shoots – planted with determination and still living despite the withering heat and cruel hardships. When we were there, we smelled the fragrance of them everywhere.

We caught a whiff of justice – in the Israeli group that opposes the demolition of Palestinian homes, and the Christian Peace-maker Teams that stand with Palestinian people against harassment.

We heard whispers of reconciliation. Bishop Younan works tirelessly for reconciliation – you heard his passionate words today – championing the Lutheran congregations and schools and projects and by his constant conversation with people of other faiths. They are whispers of reconciliation amidst the shouts of war.

We caught glimpses of restoration. As we stood on the Mount of Olives where 84 houses will be built for Palestinians who desperately need them, we had a glimpse of a vision of restoration – homes given back to people whose homes had been taken away.

Your offerings will help to make that restoration possible – to turn a glimpse into a reality.

We saw signs of transformation – the International Center in Bethlehem – a center for the arts and a tangible invitation to: Come and See what transformation is possible when the Global Shuffle ceases, and the real work of healing and reconciliation begins.

Whiffs and whispers and glimpses and signs – it is so important to notice them, especially since they are in the shadow of a wall that creates division instead of reconciliation.

We are called to look and listen closely for them, and we are called to find ways to do them ourselves, because one of the best-kept secrets of our faith is that the more we give of what we cling to, the more we will find the peace that comes from a deeper participation in the life of our giving God.

This church of Jesus Christ is a place where we gather to learn about how to live this Christian life, how to become those signs of hope and reconciliation and healing and how to be strengthened for the journey.

In this work that we do together, we need leaders, and, lucky for us, God keeps raising them up to guide us faithfully toward healing and new life.

This evening, we are blessed to be able to welcome some of those new leaders into the ELCA – Andrew, Derek, Callista, Katherine, Carolyn, Jessica. In the vows that you will make before us this evening – you will be bound to the promise to seek wholeness, to practice reconciling love, and to guide the baptized toward the healing that will enable them to get up and walk – to work for the vision of God’s kingdom.

In the book of Isaiah, we read poetic accounts of God’s call to wholeness for people and nations, and a few suggestions for how to get the job done. Two things are really clear – God prefers servant leadership to other models and God longs for justice for all people. Servant leadership is the way that we are called to lead in the church; it is a way to lead from the humble and serving spirit that Jesus modeled for us – although please note: servant leadership is different from both workaholism and neediness – Jesus took time for rest and prayer – and so should you, ate good food at friends’ homes – and so should you, and delegated LOTS of tasks to the disciples.

God longs deeply and eternally for healing and justice to be done, and we can never forget that our work in the church is unfaithful if it only preserves and protects the institution.

The biblical understanding of justice is a re-ordering of society – and so at the same time that you will be figuring out how to bring order to a ministry to which you are called …

You will be expected to witness to the values of a re-ordered society – where wealth is more available to more people; where power rights wrongs instead of institutionalizing them; and where the things needed for life and health are available to all.

You will be expected to preach and live the gospel paradox that lies behind this call to servanthood – that we find our deepest self and calling when we give ourselves away.

It is not a popular message, especially in this culture – but it is profoundly true – and you need to believe its truth deep in your own hearts so that when you preach and teach, and model it, your hearers will get a whiff and a glimpse of it, and will be led into a curiosity to know more about this paradox.

In this communal journey of paradox and signs and healing, we are fed and we are strengthened by bread and wine – by the body and blood of Jesus Christ. It is our sign that we are never alone and never lack power. Jesus is present with enough forgiveness, with new starts and never-ending grace to assure us that the hindrances and reluctance and weakness and evil that we do encounter, and will continue to encounter, everywhere – will never be the last word.

Being ordained or commissioned is not about serving God with perfect success and unflagging energy – it is about serving God so faithfully and so visibly that you become a glimpse of the kingdom and a sign of hope.

May God’s Holy Spirit touch and fill you so completely today with the power and wisdom of God that you are sustained through all the disappointments and the hardships that life in this call will bring, that you may catch a whiff and a glimpse of eternal joy regularly, and that you live fully in God’s amazing grace – and that you not only love justice but do it. Amen.