6 Epiphany Yr B

If you choose, you can make me clean, the leper says to Jesus. Again, the writer of this gospel doesn't mince words, he gets right to the point. Jesus instructs the man to go to his priest, and make his offering. What Jesus is doing in this healing, as he did when he healed Simon's mother-in-law, and as he did when he cast the unclean spirit out of the man in the synagogue, is to restore this person to wholeness, essentially to give them new life. These stories of healing in which Mark does not mince words, are to show all who are in hearing, that Jesus, the Son of God, is bringing about God's kingdom right here, and right now.

The people who populate these healing stories are all out on the margins, because of their disease, they essentially have been cast away, they have no life, they are in effect dead. Jesus gives them their lives back. They are healed, and they get their lives back.

What do you need to be healed of to get your life back? What demon needs to be tossed out, so that you can be restored to wholeness? While that demon rules your life, while that affliction continues to keep you from others, you are not really living. You may think you are, really living, but real life is life that is healed, life that bears the scars of your woundedness, and life that witnesses to the power of love.

Namaan's lord went out from his palace, with plenty of money and his pedigree, to buy healing from the king of Israel. But money and pedigree can't buy healing. Elisha, the man of God, healed him, without show, without fanfare, without anyone watching, and Namaan's lord was mad. Namaan's lord doesn't get what he wants, but he does get healed.

This story from Kings and the accompanying story from Mark are also miracle stories whose characters are holy people. Their purpose is to show authority and power from God, who is the main character. As I was sorting through these stories this week I was imagining them as tv shows. Kings and servants, prophets, and a man with a horrible disease that is highly contagious. Hmmm, sounds just like the stuff of a crime scene investigation drama. Some of the characters even seem like the super doctors that we see in the doctor dramas on television.

But the point of these stories is quite the opposite. In the story from Kings, Naaman reminds us quite clearly that this power is nothing like super heroes or super doctors, this power is all about God. Even the commander of the army finally says “Now I know that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel.” But, it took him a while to get there. Naaman was a bit put off that the prophet Elisha did not himself come out to heal him. Naaman asks why Elisha did not put on a big show, make a big deal out of healing him of his leprosy, that Elisha didn't bow down to his money and pedigree. Maybe Naaman might have agreed to go see Elisha as much for the production it would cause as for the healing.

You see, these stories are about healing, but not just about the healing really, although that is a good thing, in this story about Naaman, or in the story in the gospel of Mark about the nameless leper. The stories are really about God. The stories are about God’s power and authority; the stories are about God’s amazing and abundant love. The stories are about the wholeness that comes only through Jesus. Mark wants everyone to know that God works in the world. That God is present with us, and that it is God and God alone who is worthy of our worship and praise.

You see, we are so tempted to worship other things, idols we call them. There is no God in all the earth, except the God of Israel, the God of all creation, the God who parted the sea so that Moses could lead the people through, the God who promised Noah always to be there, the God who loves us so much as to give up all power to be in our world as one of us, to be human. The God who heals, the God who offers wholeness.

And yet we are so tempted to worship other gods. The greed and consumer god. The I deserve that kind of return on my money god. The 15 minutes of fame god. The I have to be the very best at something god. The bigger, faster, cable, HDTV, iPhone, always connected god. The immediate information god. I’m not saying these things are bad, I am saying that when these things demand all of our time and attention, they become idols, and we cannot worship God and idols too.

But all of our attention needs to be on God. The leper in Mark’s story kneels before Jesus and says, “If you choose, you can make me clean.” And Jesus does. A leper in Jesus’ community is an outcast, unclean and thrown away. By healing him Jesus restores him to the community, and he goes to the priest to make that restoration obvious and clear to everyone else. He must participate in the ritual of cleansing so that everyone can see that he is no longer unclean, no longer impure. It is a testimony to God’s power and authority, compassion and love.

What do you need to be healed of to get your life back? What demon needs to be tossed out, so that you can be restored to wholeness? While that demon rules your life, while that affliction continues to keep you from others, you are not really living. You may think you are, really living, but real life is life that is healed, life that bears the scars of your woundedness, and life that witnesses to the power of love.

We long for that which we cannot have, and we obsess about those things, in effect, we spend our lives being seduced by idols, worshiping idols, and resisting the worship of idols. We spend our lives doing battle with our demons. We come here, to worship and pray and to be made into the body of christ, and we are reminded of who we are and whose we are. We remember that we belong to God.
And that it is in God and God alone that we are made whole, restored to right relationship with God
and with one another. We don’t have to give in to the seduction of the money, or fame, or the speed or the power, because ultimately it is our relationship with God and with others that holds meaning and purpose for our lives.

It is God’s power of love in Jesus Christ that creates us and restores us. It is Jesus’ compassionate touch conferred through you and this community of faith that can heal broken people in this fragmented world. Remember who you are. Remember that Love wins.

3 Easter Yr C

Myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands, singing with full voice, worthy is the lamb. Singing and worship are central to Revelation; a fact often overlooked by people who see the book only as a system of end time predictions. In Revelation we sing our way into God’s new vision for our world. We worship the God who gave us life. And wherever we go, to school, to work, or shopping, everywhere in the world, the lamb is with us, leading us into a new way of life. And that new way of life is forgiveness and reconciliation and is brought about by the power of vulnerable love to bring healing.

Chapters two and three are not in our lectionary to read, they are John’s vision for the seven churches that are in Asia. They show us that John’s Revelation is not a private ecstasy, just as the Gospel is not for private consumption. The Good News is personal, but it is never merely individual. The Good News is always revealed in a family, a tribe, a nation, a church. The gospel pulls us into community. Sin fragments us, separates us, and sentences us to solitary confinement. At the completion of each of John’s visions for the seven churches, are the words, Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.

And that brings us to Revelation four and five, these chapters that point us to worship. In chapter four we hear about the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all around and inside. Day and night without ceasing they sing, Holy, holy, holy, the Lord God the Almighty, who was and is and is to come. And continuing, You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created. Words you may be familiar with from hearing each Sunday worship service in our Eucharistic Prayer. Chapters four and five are all about worshipping the God who sits on the throne and the Lamb.

Christians worship with a conviction that they are in the presence of God. Worship is an act of attention to the living God who rules, speaks and reveals, creates and redeems, orders and blesses. According to Eugene Peterson, author of Reversed Thunder, The Revelation of John and the Praying Imagination, outsiders, observing these acts of worship, see nothing like that. They see a few people singing unpopular songs, sometimes off-key, someone reading from an old book and making remarks that may or may not interest the listeners, and then eating and drinking small portions of bread and wine that are supposed to give nourishment to their eternal souls in the same way that beef and potatoes sustain their mortal flesh. The question Peterson asks is, who is right? Is worship an actual meeting called to order at God’s initiative in which persons of faith are blessed by his presence and respond to his salvation? Or is it a pathetic and sometimes desperate charade in which people attempt to get God to pay attention to them and do something for them? Jesus stands at the door and knocks. What happens when we open the door? Peterson goes on to write, In worship God gathers God’s people to himself as center. Worship is a meeting at the center so that our lives are centered in God and not lived eccentrically. We worship so that we live in response to and from this center, the living God. Failure to worship consigns us to a life of spasms and jerks, at the mercy of every advertisement, every seduction, every siren. Without worship we live manipulated and manipulating lives.

Revelation calls us to worship God, and to respond to God’s presence. Many have legitimately asked the question, why go to church? Why worship God? Some people will say, I believe in God, I’m just not religious, or I’m spiritual, I just don’t believe in organized religion, or, I worship alone, by myself, out in nature. But I agree with Peterson, worship is a meeting called to order at God’s initiative and we are all blessed by God’s presence and respond to God’s salvation. Revelation shows us the way. And here’s a spoiler alert, near the end of the story, in Revelation 21, we hear that the home of God is among mortals, God will dwell with us, we will be God’s people, and God will wipe every tear from our eyes, death will be no more, and the one who was seated on the throne says, see, I am making all things new. This is why I find Revelation so exciting. God is doing these things now. Not at some future date, God is making all things new now, that is what happens in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. This is why we are Easter people, because God is making all things new, God is making you and I new, God is renewing the face of the earth. And the fulfillment that God promises is that God dwells with us. I believe this is what heaven is, God dwelling with us.

This exciting and Good News calls us to worship, calls us to be blessed by God’s presence and to respond to God. It also means that we have agency in the new creation. We have the power to be co-creators with God and with Jesus in this new creation; we have the power to do something significant as citizens of God’s kingdom. Our Presiding Bishop has been quoted, “We claim a faith that has a vision of what civilization ought to look like, called the reign of God, or the kingdom of God. When current reality is dramatically divergent from that vision, most of us feel it's our responsibility to advocate for a different vision.” What is our vision of this kingdom on earth? What is it that our worship creates in us, in our church, in our world?

Our worship forms a vision of hospitality. We recognize the risen Christ in our midst by the offer of “come and eat,” we recognize our true selves in the meal Christ offers. In Jesus’ life, all were welcome, even if that wasn’t so true in the culture in which he lived. At Jesus’ table, all were welcome. The impetuous Peter, naked in the boat who dressed before he jumped into the water, who denied Jesus three times before the cock crowed, and who repeated three times “Yes Lord, you know that I love you.” Thomas, not the doubter, but the one who needs to ask the questions. John, who always refers to himself as the one Jesus loved best. Matthew, the tax collector. Judas, the betrayer. Mary, who loved Jesus enough to sit at his feet and be still, Martha, who loved Jesus so much she would leave her kitchen to come and be with him. Zaccheus, the one who had to climb the tree to see Jesus, who was also a tax collector. Saul the persecutor, who became Paul, the bold and courageous. All whose lives, whose relationships, were broken, all who were welcome to come and eat. All who recognized Jesus and were loved, and fed, and who were restored to wholeness.

We are invited to come and eat. In the midst of the mess of this world, in the midst of tragedy we are called to the hope of transformation. We are invited to the meal, and no one is left behind or left out. We are invited to worship God who is the center of our lives, personally and collectively. We are invited to forget about ourselves, our problems, our needs, and are to be concerned about the other. We are invited to feed each other. And in the feeding, we become who we are created to be.

The vision of the new kingdom, the kingdom that we are active in creating is a vision of hospitality. At God’s table, all have enough to eat. All are healed of brokenness, of alienation, of separation. Everyone sits down at the picnic table together to feast on fish and bread. The lives that are changed by this meal are our lives. We are invited to eat, and in the eating God seeps into our very being. We offer our brokenness, we offer our true selves, and we are accepted and loved and empowered. Jesus’ hospitality empowers us to respond in worship in feeding others as we have been fed. We are empowered to offer dignity where there is none.

And this vision of hospitality is about the now and the not yet. The charcoal is laid, and we are invited to eat. Now, this very moment. It is also a vision of what will be. Revelation calls us to wake up and change, Revelation calls us to transformation, Revelation calls us to the supper of the Lamb. The vision in Revelation is invitation to the supper it is of new and transformed life and it is about being in the world as an empowered and nourished agent of change.

Alleluia, The Lord is risen: Come let us adore him. Alleluia!