Mark 5:21-43 "Finding Healing in a Risky World"

You are welcome to use parts of this sermon, but if you do, please attribute them properly!

         Grammatical errors bring out the English teacher (or E.B. White) in me – and that includes misspelled words, too much or too little punctuation, inappropriate paragraph divisions, and incorrect word choices.  I suppose it comes from diagramming a lot of sentences in 7^th and 8^th grade.  Diagramming is a lost art really, and those of you who managed to get through school without encountering that particular teaching fad need only find someone at coffee hour with a few gray hairs, and you can learn all about it.

         We spent a lot of time on grammar back then in school.  However, for all those English classes, I have never heard of a formal name for a grammatical structure such as we find in this passage from the Gospel of Mark.  That being said, I will just call it as I see it. 

         What we just finished reading, then, is a “sandwich story.”  It is two tales about Jesus healing highly unlikely (and unlikeable) people all mixed up together.  It is one story nestled in between the beginning and the ending of a second story.

         It is the story of a woman with no name who had bled uncontrollably (and impurely) for twelve years embedded smack in the middle of a story about a man with a name (That would be Jairus) and his young daughter who was dying. 

         Both Jairus and the nameless woman sought out the new and exceedingly popular healer who had recently blown into town (That would be Jesus.) because they were at their wits’ end.  They were desperate and would do just about anything (which they did) to catch Jesus’ eye and feel the touch of his healing hands. 

         In these stores, one tale unceremoniously breaks in and gets in the way of the other story - as our readers this morning so aptly dramatized.  These stories are ones where interruptions abound, and boundaries are crossed, and, in the interrupting and the crossing, healing and wholeness are found.

         Jesus had been surrounded by loads of people since he healed that first madman in the synagogue.  Word had rapidly spread, and he and his disciples had shuttled themselves back and forth across the Galilean Lake several times trying to move forward and cover more territory, but they were constantly being interrupted. Each time the shoreline came into view there were more crowds impeding their progress – more of the sick, the blind, the deaf, the lame, more of the just plain curious.  This time was certainly no different. 

         As Jesus disembarked and felt the first of hundreds of hands reaching out to him, as he was jostled by folks who were being nudged by others who were pushing and pulling their friends and colleagues and mothers and brothers, most of whom were on crutches or walked with canes or were carried on litters, all jockeying for position, all awaiting a medical miracle, amidst grunting and groaning, “tsk tsk’ing” and noises of disapproval, Jairus, who was an official at the synagogue, not particularly well-liked because of his status as one of the religious hierarchy, but a man of some consequence nonetheless, budged his way through the peasant crowd and elbowed himself right up to Jesus, the masses melting away until he had room enough to kneel and set forth his plea:  “My dear daughter is at death’s door. Come and lay hands on her so she will get well and live.”

        And Jesus began to follow Jairus, and the crowd merrily came along because, well, because Jesus was the newest thing in town, and, besides, they really had nothing better to do, and, OK, they did want to know if this healer was all he had been cracked up to be. 

         Now, if we were filming this scenario, we would see Jesus and Jairus walking off into the sunset – Casablanca style - their budding friendship setting off an explosion of questions.  What is this Jairus up to?  What gives with a religious uppity-up approaching the itinerant and illiterate rabbi?  Would Jesus save the little girl?   

         The camera would then pan the crowds and linger on a particularly pale and haggard-looking peasant, a desperate woman, just beginning to push her own way forward.  Who was she?  And what was she up to? 

         And then the screen would go black, and the credits would roll.  Like at the end of Downton Abbey where we are left wondering if Mary will find out in the next episode that Marigold is Edith’s child, and who will run the estate now that Branson has returned from America.

        The next scene opens with the nameless woman inching her way through the huddled masses.  No one is preparing the way for her though.  Not that anyone wanted to be in close contact with her if they recognized her for who she was – the village pariah who had been bleeding for over a decade now.  She had seen doctors galore, but all they had done was prescribe useless tinctures and exercise regimens and run up her copays until she was destitute.  She was the height of Jewish impurity – and now wandering around in broad daylight. – an untouchable just a notch or two up from the lepers.  No one was going to make way for the likes of her. 

         However, she moved ever closer even as Jesus moved farther down the road.  Sometimes she pushed.  Sometimes she was pushed over, and then she crawled until she could stand upright again.  She mumbled over and over to herself all the while – like a mantra:  “If I can put a finger on his robe, I can get well…If I can put a finger on his robe, I can get well.” 

         Oh, was she ever persistent!  And finally she got close enough so that she could sneak up behind Jesus and touch the hem of his robe.  And it was like an electric jolt went straight through her. And the blood that had oozed out between her legs for twelve years stopped and that which had dribbled out already that morning got sticky and hardened.  And she was healed.

         And Jesus was shocked – because he knew she was healed too.  And he stopped, and Jairus gave him a funny look because the synagogue official did not understand why they should tarry with his daughter so sick and all. 

         And Jesus asked, “Who touched my robe?”  And there was silence until his disciples answered, “You have got to be kidding?  What are you talking about? With this crowd pushing and jostling you, you’re asking, ‘Who touched me?’ Dozens have touched you!”

         It was then that the woman stepped forward – in fear and trembling – and told her story.  And Jesus smiled because the woman got it, and he said, “Daughter, you took a risk, and now you’re healed and whole. Live well, live blessed!”  End of story:  “You engaged in the risky business of interruptions and crossing boundaries.  You’re healed and whole.  Live well.  Live blessed.”  Nice!  Cut!  Roll the credits.

        Oh, wait a minute!  Where did we leave Jairus, the man of consequence whose innocent daughter lay dying, where did we leave him before we were so rudely interrupted by the no name woman who had been bleeding for 12 years?  Oh yes, we were on our way to Jairus’ house with Jesus.

         But alas!  It seems that the two men are too late.  As Jesus is talking with the nameless woman, some folks from Jairus’ home interrupt him.  “She’s dead.  The little girl is dead.”

         But Jesus goes anyway, his arm about a now sobbing Jairus, consoling him by saying that the little girl is not dead but only sleeping.  The crowd snickers and whispers that he clearly does not know what he is talking about, and what sort of a healer does that make him anyway?

         Well, we all know that Jesus enters the house and takes only Peter, James, and John with him into the child’s room.  He sits by her bed and takes her lifeless hand in his and commands her.  “Talitha koum,” which means, “Little girl, get up.”  And she does. 

         And the Gospel writer includes an exquisite detail here, telling us that she runs off to the kitchen to get something to eat – because perhaps being sick and then dead works up an appetite.

         A sandwich narrative – one story budging into the middle of another story - neither story seeming to have much of anything in common:  a nameless and impoverished peasant woman, a named man of consequence; a man who perhaps had an iota of faith, enough to plead for a healing anyway; a woman who had neither the strength nor the faith to plead at all; a chronic sickness that had hung on for over a decade, a sudden virulent disease; an old woman with maybe a year or two of fertility left, a young girl with all her womanhood ahead of her. 

         “How could these stories be any different in circumstance and setting?” we ask.  But then, right at the end of the passage, the gospel writer includes another detail, almost as an afterthought:  “Oh, by the way, the little girl was twelve years old.”

         A twelve year old child.  A twelve year disease.  Twelve:  A number that had much significance in a first century Jewish community - what with the twelve tribes of Israel and all – significance enough to make any good Jew stand up and take notice. 

         Maybe then, we ought to take notice as well - because these two seemingly unrelated stories really have more in common than we might first surmise. 

Together they end up telling us a lot about the Good News of Jesus and about our role in ushering in the Kingdom of God. 

         First, these stories remind us that God’s healing grace is meant for all of us – from the nameless ones to those of consequence – though most of the time you would never know it if we are the ones dispensing that grace.  As Presbyterian pastor Lewis Galloway notes, “In Jesus, there is hope, life and community for all. Meanwhile, we tend to let the Gospel out in dribs and drabs. We are stingy with what God so lavishly gives. We worry about who deserves our help, our food, our time, our money and our attention. We carefully calculate the conditions under which we will stoop to forgive someone.” 

         It is risky business indeed to throw away the scarcity factor and live our lives abundantly – to ignore everything from town lines when it comes to financial assistance to our own fears and prejudices when it comes to living compassionately.  It is risky business to unclench our fists and open our hands and offer a healing touch to those in need – especially when it means venturing into places and circumstances where we do not feel so safe and insulated.  But, as Galloway pointed out, “In Jesus, there is hope, life and community for all.”

         Second, these two tales tell us that the call of the Gospel – the call to peace-making and justice-seeking and compassion-giving - is perhaps most effectively done and experienced through interruptions.  Jesus was always interrupted, as our two stories today point out.  He was always on his way to doing something else when he was confronted with people in need – with opportunities to feed the hungry and heal the sick and touch the untouchable. 

         Methodist Bishop Bevel Jones noted that: “The late Henri Nouwen, great Catholic teacher, minister, said in the prime of his career that he became frustrated by the many interruptions to his work. He was teaching at Notre Dame. He had a heavy agenda each day and didn't like to be disturbed. Then one day it dawned on him that his interruptions were his work. Someone has said, ‘Life is what happens to you while you're making other plans!’ Often we find that the interruption, however, is of greater consequence than what we were doing.”  It is risky business to not live our lives on auto-pilot, to forego our best-laid plans and live as the servants Jesus called us to be.

      And finally, these stories exemplify that our calling to be a follower of Jesus is a calling to cross boundaries.  After all, Jesus did it.  He ignored religious barriers and embraced the impure and touched the untouchable.  He did not hang back, but rather thrust himself smack in the midst of those who were most in need of healing and wholeness, those who had been marginalized and cast aside, those who had been ignored and forgotten. 

         And it was not just Jesus who crossed the barriers.  Maybe if it was just Jesus, we could say, “Well, that was Jesus.  That was different.” 

         However, in our stories, both the nameless woman and Jairus crossed boundaries to reach Jesus – the woman throwing herself past all the purity laws of Judaism and Jairus defying the religious hierarchy that proclaimed Jesus to be just another nutcase. 

         It is risky business to say yes to the Way of Jesus when our culture and our politicians set forth other boundaries and barriers they tell us are designed to keep us safe and secure – a petroleum-based economy that harms our planet as well as the nameless ones who live in nameless places in its farthest reaches, a weapons-based safety net in our schools and bedside tables and the glove compartments of our cars. 

         Yes – being a follower of Jesus involves our being engaged in risky business.  It is risky business to embrace – really embrace - that there is enough of God’s grace to go around.  It is risky business to thrive on the interruptions and opportunities to follow Jesus that call us out of our ruts and comfort zones.  It is risky business to cross boundaries and break down barriers in the name of the Gospel message.  Where are you when it comes to taking risks?

 by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond VIllage Community Church U.C.C., Raymond, Maine

        

         

Mark 4:1-20 "Sacred Seeds"

You are welcome to use parts of this sermon, but if you do, please attribute them properly!

         It was a gorgeous autumn Saturday.  It was the kind where the air is crisp, and the sky is ever so blue, and the leaves have turned their brilliant shades of yellow, red, and orange.  When you have a day in the fall like that here in Maine, it is not rocket science to know intuitively that it is also deer season.

         On this particular day, three men – friends they were - were going hunting together.  One was a doctor, one was a lawyer, and one was a preacher. They had not ventured far into the woods when an enormous and well-fed 12-point buck came into view, looked directly at them, and seemed to position itself for a perfect shot – its side exposed, and its head held high and still. 

         Each of the hunters took aim and fired at the big buck at exactly the same time. The deer fell to the ground like a stone – instantly dead.  Within a few minutes, the men had surrounded the carcass and were in the midst of a heated debate about whose shot actually had killed the deer.

        It was not long before a game warden came by and asked what the three men were arguing about.  The game warden listened carefully, took a look at the buck, and confidently announced that he knew whose shot had killed the animal.

         “It was the preacher who got the buck!” the game warden declared.

         “What? How do you know?!” the other two demanded.  

         The officer replied, “Easy. The bullet went in one ear and out the other.”

         “Listen!”  Jesus said.  “Those who have ears, let them hear.  Do not let what I am teaching you go ‘in one ear and out the other’.”

         That is how Jesus would often start his lesson.  “Listen!  Those who have ears, let them hear.” And then he would, as the Gospel writer tells us, speak to the crowds in parables – in those little stories that always had big points. 

         Now, the word, “parable,” comes from a Greek word meaning “to throw or cast alongside.”  As Episcopal pastor Steve Pankey writes, “Parables are helpful because they take a hard-to-understand concept like the Kingdom of God and lay down alongside it something that is easily relatable from real life.  

Sometimes a parable is simply a simile, “the Kingdom of God is like…” Other times they are long, drawn out metaphors.”

         In other words, the parables Jesus told were supposed to help his listeners – the disciples, the crowds, or even us today – get a better handle on what the Kingdom of God was all about and, as a result, what was in fact the nature of the Almighty.  Not that the parables were always straightforward and easy to understand at first glance, however. 

         It is like in the movie “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”.  Lutheran pastor Luke Bouman notes that “Whoopie Goldberg’s character must solve a riddle to help a spy to come in. In order to communicate with the spy, she has to figure out a ‘code key’ in the Rolling Stones song, which gives the title to the movie. The problem is that she doesn’t have an internet search engine to direct her to the lyrics of the song. She listens in vain to try to figure out the words. At one point, exasperated, she cries, “Mick, Mick, speak English!” But to no avail. Mick Jagger’s words elude her.” 

         How like Jesus’ parables! Sometimes we just want to cry out:  “Speak plainly, Jesus. Give us some indication of what the ‘ kingdom of God’ is about. Don’t keep speaking in circles.”

         However, those “circles” we accuse Jesus of speaking in were always grounded in ordinary, everyday pictures of life as his listeners would have experienced it.  For example, Jesus frequently used images from agriculture to describe the kingdom of God – wine grapes, mustard seeds, and, as in today’s parable, a sower – a farmer – scattering seed across the far reaches of his field.  Everyone would have understood the imagery.  That is a given. 

         You see, the peasants to whom he spoke – if they were not fishermen – were farmers.  After all, this was Galilee, and rising up from the shore of the Se of Galilee were fields stretching as far as the eye could take in.  The people who gathered about Jesus knew about productive land.  They knew about hard soil and rocky soil and weedy ground and the good earth.  They could all picture the farmer on the hillside, a heavy seed bag draped around his shoulder, walking up and down the length of the field, tossing handfuls of seed as he walked, ensuring that the entire acreage would be covered by the day’s end. 

         In this parable, Jesus tells us that there are four kinds of ground on which the farmer’s seed might fall.  There is hard ground – like the path circumnavigating the field – trampled on by countless feet over the ages.  Even the best of seeds could not possibly find a home there. Those seeds would go to the birds. 

         Then there was the rocky ground – like many a farmer’s field here in Maine.  In making our vegetable garden plot, we dug up more cobble – hen and goose egg sized rocks – wagon loads full that we hauled off – along with a couple of good-sized boulders as well.  Though seeds might sprout in rocky ground, in the long run, the soil is not deep enough to sustain them.  And with a dry start to the growing season, those seeds will soon shrivel up and die.

         And soil infested with weeds?  Do not tell me about weeds!  We have a constant battle with them!  They can overtake a garden row in no time flat.  They spread their leaves and dig in with their roots and seem to multiply overnight – depriving many a tiny beet or cucumber plant of needed sunlight and over time choking them out.

        What you need, Jesus teaches, is good soil, fertile soil – soil that is well-composted with lots of worms to break it down.  You need soil with the rocks removed, and the weeds overcome.  When you have that kind of soil, he says, your harvest will be thirty-fold, sixty-fold, a hundred-fold.

         Imagine a harvest like that!  What an unbelievable statement Jesus was making.  Surely it is the climax of the parable – the “Wow!” factor that would make everyone really listen up.  As the research of Church of Christ pastor John Marks Hicks indicates, “It is a bountiful, unexpected and wondrous harvest. Thirtyfold, sixtyfold and hundredfold yields are beyond the imagination of first century farmers. Yields of five or six were typical in Italy; Nile-irrigated fields in Egypt typically yielded seven. Yields of four or fivefold, however, were typical in Palestine; (in fact,) thirtyfold has only been achieved in modern Israel with good weather and improved technology.”

         Pretty impressive!  And, or course, following the logic that Jesus offers in his explanation of this parable, the hearts of people are like those different kinds of soil:  the hard hearts, the shallow hearts, the crowded hearts, and the good hearts. It sounds so neat and simple – little boxes – a place for everyone and everyone in his or her place. 

         And we generally put ourselves in the good soil category because it would be more than we could stomach to put ourselves anywhere else.  And other folks we divide between the other three boxes because there would be hardly room enough in the good soil box because we are already there.

         However, if we choose to interpret the parable only in that narrow way, we are selling both it and Jesus short.  In addition, we are making highly inappropriate and inaccurate assumptions about those farmers who first listened to Jesus telling this little story.  As Steve Pankey writes, “Any farmer worth his salt would know that you don’t turn on the seed spreader when you leave the barn and let it just fling seed all down the road, onto the shoulder, and into the drainage ditches.”  Surely Jesus knew more about farming than that.

         And I think he does – because I do not think he meant for this parable to be about the soil – or even about the seed.  If it was, then Jesus becomes the moral arbiter, expecting us to categorize ourselves as hard, rocky, weedy, or good soil. However, we cannot do that – and Jesus knows it too.  We cannot pigeon-hole ourselves as having hard, shallow, crowded, or good hearts – because none of us is one kind of soil.  None of us has exclusively one kind of heart.  Sometimes we are one, and sometimes another.

         So, you see, this parable is not about us.  It is not about dirt.  This parable is about the one who extravagantly throws the seed everywhere.  This parable is about the sower, and that is why it is titled such. 

         This parable is about a God who surely knows it is foolish to throw seeds on questionable soil but does it anyway.  There are no soil analysis tests done beforehand.  The Sower does not sit down ahead of time and figure out how to avoid the rocky places, how to tell where the soil is too hard for anything to take root, or how to anticipate where the weeds will be.  The Sower just flings the seed.

         I like to think that the Sower knows as well  that there is enough seed to go around – to fill all the nooks and crannies.  And if some is “wasted”?  Well, who is to say what waste is anyway? After all, even the birds feast off some of the seed.

         With reckless abandon, then, God throws the seeds of justice and peace and love on hearts that often refuse them or crowd them out - and only once in a while nurture them until glimmers of hope, glimpses of the kingdom, are revealed.  Just as Jesus throws seeds at the disciples time and time again in spite of their stubbornness and dim-wittedness, so God continues to work with us so we can see what the Almighty is up to in this jaded and cynical world we live in. 

         God is still speaking.  God is still recklessly spreading seeds.  As Steve Pankey notes, “The good news is: God continues to throw seed at us. (God) pours out (her) love upon us relentlessly. And when he finds even the smallest patch of good soil in our hearts, God nurtures the Kingdom within us, producing an abundant harvest: 30, 60, even 100 fold.”

         The story is not about dirt.  It is not about the soil.  It is not about us.  It is about the sower and the extravagant and generous way the seed is spread – over and over again, with reckless abandon, with no sense of what soil is worthy to receive it. 

        No matter who we are or where we are on our life journey, the seeds of justice and compassion have been sown – and will continue to be sown - in our less-than-perfect hearts.  But we have to nurture those seeds, be the soil they need to grow.Surely that is worth remembering as we become engaged in the risky business of being followers of Jesus, of doing our part to usher in God’s kingdom. 

         The seeds are there.  We are in possession of them.  They have been sown in us.  And so it is up to us – and even more so up to the church – to nurture those seeds of justice and compassion and ensure that they sprout and grow.  That is the risky business we say we will engage in.  The Sower does not do it alone.  The Sower only sows the seeds.  We nurture them.  We take action.  We serve.  We bind up the broken-hearted, heal the sick, feed the hungry, welcome the stranger.  We grow the seeds of justice and compassion.

         And because that sort of business is risky, it is so worth remembering that, we are in partnership with the sower.  Like the Sower, we do do it alone. We cannot. And if you remember nothing else from this sermon and this worship service, remember that.  We are in partnership with the sower.  We depend on the Sower, and the Sower depends on us.  Not cause the Sower has to, but because the Sower has chosen to.  We cannot do it alone.

         The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, said this to her superiors as she began her first orphanage:  "I have three pennies and a dream from God to build an orphanage."

         A dream and three pennies – not much!

         And so it was that her superiors chided her gently. "Mother Teresa," they said.  “You cannot build an orphanage with three pennies...with three pennies you can't do a thing."

         "I know," Mother Theresa said, smiling, "but with God and three pennies, I can do anything."

         With God and those sacred seeds sown in our hearts, we can engage in the risky business of being followers of Jesus. With God and the seeds, we can do anything.   
by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village Community Church, U.C.C., Raymond, Maine    

         

Revelation 21:1-6 "Change!?"

You are welcome to use parts of this sermon, but if you do, please attribute them properly!

         I am not going to ask for a show of hands indicating which of those pieces of music that I just played you found most appealing, in the sense of being most worshipful.  There will not be a vote on which one helped you feel closer to God or which one expressed the gospel message to you more clearly or which one felt more authentically spiritual or religious to you.  That is not important.  What is important is the difference between them.

         The first one you heard was a Gregorian chant, which is a musical style sung that was the basis for the liturgy in medieval churches and cathedrals.  Even today, you will often hear the chanting of psalms in monasteries throughout the world – most of the time with no accompaniment – and certainly not with an organ. Unaccompanied chanting was church music until about 200 years ago when congregations began to sing hymns mostly composed for organ instead.  Until that time, chanting was the foundation of all that felt spiritual and real – and then that blasted organ came in!  Change!

         The second song you heard was a fusion of musical genres including rap that was composed as part of a project at More Than Twelve, a Pentecostal church in Vancouver, BC.  More Than Twelve is less than 10 years old and has way more than 12 at their weekly worship Sunday afternoons, which begins with a potluck supper in a coffee-house atmosphere followed by a decidedly non-traditional prayer and preaching service in the same setting. 

         The More Than Twelve congregation consists of a lot of the marginalized folks in Vancouver – the homeless, recovering addicts, people who had turned away from the church years ago but have found their spiritual home at More Than Twelve.  However, not only the down-and-out find their way there.  There are others as well, one of whom recently bought a building to house the burgeoning congregation. They all find the rap, the visual projection, and the charismatic nature of the service to be deeply spiritual and real. What?  No organ?  That’s not church!  Change!

         You see, what is worshipful to one person is dull, boring, loud, and even irreligious to another.  What is a song that one person thinks ”everyone” knows is a song that is far from the experience of someone else. I used to find it mildly amusing as your pastor when people would talk about the music in our hymn supplement as songs that we should sing often because “everyone” knew them. 

         However, for me, growing up in a staid New England congregational church set down in the New York suburbs, why, I cut my teeth on the Pilgrim Hymnal, and the only songs I knew from the hymn supplement were “Amazing Grace’ and “This Little Light of Mine,” the latter to a different tune – and not because I sang them in church.

         Now I have shared this personal anecdote with you – along with the chant and the fusion rap – to remind you that there is no one “right” way to do worship.  Jesus never set down standards for how to praise God.  In fact, in virtually all of the stories we have about Jesus in a religious setting - the synagogue or temple - someone’s nose is put out of joint because of what he says or does.

         Worship is “right” – not when it makes us feel good – but when it impels and motivates us to go forth in Christ’s name to serve and love one another.  Worship is “right” when it transforms us, when it – dare I say it - changes us.

         You see, in the end, God is all about change.  In the end, the Gospel message is all about transformation – remaking the world through establishing peace with the earth as well as with those that inhabit the earth, transforming our relationships through forgiveness and reconciliation. 

         “Behold!  I make all things new,” God proclaims.  Now, that might sound awfully scary, but be assured that the only thing that does not change is God’s eternal willingness to share in this great adventure with us – “abide with me…O thou who changest not, abide with me.”

         A Lutheran pastor once responded to a blog post by writing:  “The church always exists first for those who haven’t found it yet. (Otherwise), it risks becoming what our bishop has called “a country club with a religious flavor.’  In other words, according to this blogger, the church – and worship – are first and foremost not about us who are already seated here this morning. 

         Worship is not about our comfort and our needs.  Worship is not about escaping the often fearful and always complicated world outside these four walls. And worship is certainly not about being transported back to the 1950’s for an hour when life seemed so much simpler – and then being disappointed when the preacher does not lead us down that particular rabbit hole.

         Worship is about challenging us – and anyone who might walk through our doors – challenging us to find the strength and the courage to allow God to transform us.  Worship is about equipping us – and anyone who might walk through our doors – equipping us to go forth into the world as really and truly and authentically Christ’s disciples.  Church is not like what it used to be in America.  Change!

         Scottish hymn writer John Bell talks about any experience working with a church in Glasgow.  Every Wednesday, he and his colleague “met with a group of twelve people who were committed to discovering relevant directions in worship for that parish. One night (he writes) we divided into two groups. Group A had a large piece of paper headed "Doctor's Surgery." Group B had a large piece of paper headed "The Kitchen." We gave the groups a half hour to write down all the changes that had taken place in their area in the past fifty years.

        The difficulty was getting people to stop. Anecdotes flew about how women used to get up at 4:30 in the morning to light a fire in an outhouse in order to do the week's washing; now they put it in the automatic. People joked about how coffee had once meant 50 percent chicory, 45 percent sugar, 5 percent coffee essence; now everybody used the 100 percent genuine filter variety. People mentioned the changes that have enabled a busy parent to rustle up a dinner of microwaved convenience foods in a matter of minutes.

         In the other corner, people were comparing old-fashioned medical remedies that often made the disease worse than better. They were extolling penicillin, heart bypass operations, and improved prenatal care.

         When the groups came together with their lists, we evaluated them. We went through the changes one by one and asked which had been resisted or were deemed unwelcome. There were only two or three on each chart.

         Then (Bell writes) I put up a third piece of paper headed "Church." And together we noted all the changes that had happened in the church in the past fifty years:

•   New translations of the Bible

•   New hymnbook

•   Use of instruments other than the organ

•   Family services

•   Ordination of women elders

•   Ordination of women ministers

•   Increased range of vestment colors ... and so on.

         And when I asked which of these changes had been resisted or resented, it was every one.

         The curious irony (Bell notes) is that when it comes to food for the body or medicine for the body, we are keen for the most recent development. We want our bodies well nourished and healthy. But when it comes to food for the soul, we want bread that might be stale and medicine that might be long past its sell-by date.”

         And yet, God is all about change.  “Behold, I make all things new.”  Bell goes on to say: “We need to grasp one salient and explicit truth, witnessed from Genesis to Revelation: No one comes in contact with the living God and remains the same.” 

         Look at Abraham and Sarah.  She becomes pregnant at the tender age of 90, and he is pulled out of retirement to birth a nation.  And Moses?  He goes from being a shepherd with a stammering speech impediment who happens to encounter God in a burning bush to courageously leading his people out of slavery in Egypt. 

         As Bell writes:  “This is the gospel of Jesus Christ—nothing, no one shall ever be the same. Christ will not molder in the grave. The irreversible sting of death will not destroy him. The shut tomb will not silence him. It's either change or die . . . so he moves through death, from being a corpse into being a body fully resurrected.

         And if we live in the light of the resurrection, we should not demonize or despise change either. We need to embrace it. Otherwise . . . otherwise ... we become like Lot's wife.  She stands out in the Bible as one of the people who resisted God's call to move, to change. She was so connected to, so tied to the past, to the way things used to be, to the place where she felt comfortable,” that, well that she was left behind as a pillar of salt.”

         John Forbes, pastor of Riverside Church in New York, coined the 75% rule.  A church is vital, he said, if people like what is going on 75% of the time.  The other 25% that they do not like is what the person sitting in the next pew needs even as you abhor it.

         You see, that is the other thing about worship.  It is not a solitary experience but rather an expression of a faith community – in our particular case, a very diverse faith community.  We come from a huge variety of spiritual backgrounds and experiences.  We span a wide spectrum politically and theologically. 

         We are like the weather in Maine.  What is it they say?  If you don’t like the weather now, come back in an hour?  If you don’t like worship this week, remember that someone who is as much a part of this church family as you are did, so come back next week.

         We have been blessed this year to have an opportunity through our Vital Worship Grant to try some new ways of worshipping, to explore the deeper and richer meaning of worship, and to talk about what makes worship a vital experience not only for us as individuals, but for us as a community – as well as for those folks who have yet to walk through our doors. 

         Oh, I know that some of you do not like the painting on the shutters.  Some of you did not want to come to the St. Lucia service because, well, because you really did not know what it would be like. 

And I know some of you will choose not to support our Wisdom of the Elders Service and will not like other upcoming programs and events.  But, hey, some of you do not like the fabric that is often on the altar either and the black birds in the trees during Lent. 

         And that is fine.  Your opinions are respected here because I know they are deeply held.  However, your dissatisfaction is only really fine if you have reflected on and struggled with just why those black birds or those shutters make your skin crawl. 

         Is it because all of these things are different?  Is it because these changes do not fit your mold of what worship should be, of what you think this sanctuary ought to look like?  Or - are you trying to figure out – as we all are – how ritual and tradition fit in with God’s declaration that all things are made new?

         I want to conclude with another quote by John Bell, whom I am excited to say will be visiting with us for a weekend in May as part of our Vital Worship Grant.  John writes, “What is true is that for (Jesus) worship was a transforming experience. Wherever he was in a synagogue or the temple, some people were blessed and others were livid. This is a simple statement of gospel truth, borne out from the time he preached in his home synagogue, through the instances where he healed in holy precincts on the sabbath, to his pardoning of an adulteress which happened in the temple precincts.

         When people say they want to keep their traditions, I have to ask whether that is the same as the liberated Hebrew slaves wanting to avoid entering the Promised Land. There is a Back-to-Egypt Brigade in every congregation which cannot seemingly cope with the fact that we are no longer illiterate 17th century worshippers who need to be spoon fed by the only educated man in the parish; nor can they appreciate that the only constant about tradition is that it changes. God calls us to be signs of the coming kingdom, not a theme park dedicated to an ecclesiastical past….We all have to ask what has to die that God might bring other things to life. That is the question for those who believe in the resurrection. It did not happen without a death.”

         The Bible begins and ends with change.  In the beginning, God’s Spirit rolled over the deep, sparking creation – something emerging from a void.  God started with zero – nothing – and ended up with everything.  As theologian Frederick Buechner wrote, “Perhaps more than for anything else, God is famous for calling something precious out of something that doesn't even exist until God calls it.” Change! 

         And in the end, God proclaims, “Behold!  I make all things new.”  And Buechner continues, “In other words, there is zero again, and out of it God brought a new heaven and a new earth.” Change! 

         And in between, there is us, struggling to make sense of it all.  As your pastor and as project director for our Vital Worship Grant, I am not bent on change for change sake but rather am committed to change for the sake of enriching and deepening the spiritual life of this faith community – and anyone who might walk through our doors – enriching and deepening our spiritual life through our worship together.  My prayer is that, through worship, each one of us will become a more engaged follower of Jesus and that over time we will embrace the notion that, as John Bell noted, no one comes in contact with the Living God and remains the same – and that needs to extend to worship as well.

by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village Community Church U.C.C., Raymond, Maine