Sermon May 5, Redeemer Morristown

I told you last week that I belong to a school for leadership.  It focuses on helping people to manifest their dreams and passions.  It doesn’t teach techniques or qualities; their position is that leadership is not a characteristic of certain people, but can appear in groups and among people.  We know leadership is present when something new emerges, something that wouldn’t have happened in the current context, something that answers the needs and concerns of the people involved.
We spend a lot of time on our own internal barriers to leadership.  We look at the payoffs we get from not committing ourselves or from not changing.  We look there, because the inertia of the daily world and our own fears are the biggest obstacles to meaningful transformation.  Then we work on what we can do differently.
I’m thinking about the school because these readings call us to our responsibility for the futures we live.  They present very different responses to an invitation to wholeness.  We don’t know how either story ends, but the pictures they paint make clear the stakes and the choices we face every day.

Do you want to be healed?

Throughout the Gospels we read about people who came to Jesus for healing.  In most of them, the person asks for themselves or for another, and Jesus answers.  One time, shockingly, a woman comes and asks, and Jesus says no until she wins her argument with him and shows him a new way.  Another time, a woman doesn’t ask, just touches him, and that is enough.  Jesus is reported to be able to heal from a distance.

Now, things are a little different in the Gospel of John.  John wants to teach us that the healings are signs of something bigger.  The point for him is not that Jesus is a healer, but that Jesus is the Messiah, the chosen one of God.  Healing is just a sign.  So sometimes he tells stories where the individual does not ask for healing, where Jesus initiates healing to make a point.  A blind man is healed, in order to come to proclaim Jesus as Messiah.
But this Gospel story is different even from that.  Jesus has just healed an official’s son, when the official asked him to.  Now the action shifts to Jerusalem, to a pool by one of the gates in the city wall.  This pool evidently has healing properties, but only at certain times.  The early manuscripts disagree about how this happened, but it clearly isn’t automatic.  In fact, this poor guy has been sitting there for 38 years and never gets healed!
I don’t know about you, but I would have gone to another pool by now.

Jesus cuts right to the chase.  He asks him to commit to his own healing.
“Do you want to be healed?”

And, you know, it’s not clear that he does.

He doesn’t say yes.
He makes excuses.  I’m alone, I’m slow, I never get there.
OK, he can’t seem to walk, but where are his friends?  Can’t his relatives take him somewhere else?  Why is he so helpless?

In 38 years, he hasn’t made a friend.  He hasn’t made enough community for others to help him, or defer to him.  In 38 years lying around the pool, he hasn’t gained the attention of others enough for them to say, “We’d better get him into the water.”

I don’t know.  Maybe there was a time when he tried, and failed.  Maybe he committed before, but when it got hard he gave up.  Now he’s just lying by the pool, not really expecting anything to be better, afraid to give voice to his desire.

Do you want to be healed?

How much desire do we kill because the world has taught us it’s hopeless?
One way the consumer economy works is by teaching us to trade in our deep desires for connection and creativity for products and amusements.
But it also works by telling us that our deep desires are impossible to fulfill.
We can lie around the pool, but we can’t expect real transformation.  It’s no one’s fault.  Certainly it’s not my fault.

If this man were to name his desire to be healed, he would become vulnerable.  He would become responsible - response-able.  His disempowered innocence would end.

There are plenty of days when I want to live like that.  I want to tell you why I can’t change, why I can’t help, why you can’t count on me.  If I name my desire, I become responsible for whether it comes to pass or not.

In the story, Jesus cuts right through this guy’s resignation.  He heals him.  Just like that, the guy can walk.  But he doesn’t heal his heart.  When the man is confronted for carrying his mat on the sabbath, he makes excuses again.  “The guy who healed me told me to do this.”  Later he turns Jesus into the authorities.  His body is healed, but he’s still not responsible for his life.

Fortunately, we have choices.  Encountering God is not a one-time event.  God keeps showing up.

After Jesus’ death, after the disciples have become bearers of the Holy Spirit, Paul meets a woman by another body of water.  He’s come to Greece, to Philippi, and he goes to the river outside the gate in hopes of finding Jews to pray with.  He meets Lydia and other women.  Lydia gets it.  She asks for the water of transformation, for baptism, and then she asks Paul and his party to stay at her house.  That house becomes a center for the new community in Philippi.

I don’t know why the guy in Jerusalem couldn’t grab his desire and claim it.  I don’t know why Lydia could.  But I’d rather live like Lydia.

The water of healing awaits us.  God awaits us.  And sometimes God intervenes directly in our lives.  But even then, it’s up to us to decide whether to acknowledge it, whether to participate and claim our lives.

In the School for Leadership, we don’t talk about what we want to do.  We talk about what we plan to do.  Desire is good, but planning takes us even further into commitment, into vulnerability, into our own power.

Planning doesn’t push God out.  Part of planning is opening myself to God’s action, and going with the momentum.  We can plan to keep our eyes open to what God is offering.

Do you plan to be healed?

Is there a place in you that sits by the poolside, waiting for the world to come to you?
Is there a place so wounded that you don’t want to risk wanting anymore?

Listen to Mary Oliver:

What I want to say is
that the past is the past,
and the present is what your life is,
and you are capable
of choosing what that will be,
darling citizen.

So come to the pond,
or the river of your imagination,
or the harbor of your longing,

and put your lips to the world.
And live
your life.