Holy Vessels: Vitality
Matthew 9:18-26
March 14, 2021
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
Image by Tatiana Kanevskaya
A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/S8p0fFCkI_0
Jim and Memphis and I try to go for a walk most days. We alternate between two parks, depending on how icy or muddy each is likely to be. We are mask-wearers, but we don’t generally wear them when we walk in the open air and when we aren’t likely to come within 10 feet of another person. So, last week, I was a little ahead of Jim and Memphis on the path. A man was coming towards me with his mask firmly in place. As I got closer, I stepped off the side of the path so that I would be even further apart from him as we passed. When he reached me, he seemed to speed up and he turned his head away completely away so that there was no possibility that we might breathe any of the same air.
It left me wondering. I wondered about the new behaviors we have adopted in the last year. I wondered about what it might be like in a few months when things change again, when we reach herd immunity or when our public activity levels are more like February 2020. I wonder how hard if there are things that we used to do as a matter of course that we will have to make an effort to recover. I wonder, if after a year of keeping our distance from friends and strangers, we will have to remember how to make eye contact and greet each other? What other skills might we need to recover?
The woman in our story from Matthew had been suffering for 12 years. I wonder how her life had changed over that period of time. Maybe thirteen years earlier, she was healthy and energetic. Maybe thirteen years earlier, she had no idea how much her life would change. But then 12 years ago, she started bleeding, and her vitality started to slowly ebb away. With reduced oxygen and iron in her systems, her energy began to wane, so she had to quit doing some things. She probably saw a doctor and thought that it there would be a remedy. She would get back to normal soon. But she didn’t. In fact, it got worse. As the years went by, her range of activities narrowed, focused down to those which were strictly necessary.
The people around her may have forgotten the other things she used to do. She may have forgotten them herself as she dealt with what was right in front of her. Maybe she used to host dinner parties. Or teach folk dancing. Maybe she used to play with her grandchildren and take vegetables to market from her garden. Maybe there are a lot of things she used to do that she doesn’t any more.
People say that the pandemic has changed things, but also that is has revealed things. For those with eyes to see, it has shown resilience and persistence, as well as self-centeredness. We have witnessed people caring for their neighbors and delivering groceries and setting up car parades for birthday celebrations. We have also seen the ugliness of fear -- like fights over the last rolls of toilet paper on the shelves a year ago. The pandemic has shown us, more clearly than ever, the wide disparities between people of different races and classes when it comes to health and accessing health care.
During the last year, all across the country, thousands of churches like ours stepped up to learn new technology so that we could stay connected. The pandemic revealed the future which we’ve been anticipating for a while now.
The lockdown of pandemic has also provided time and space for reflection, for taking stock of where we are and how we got here. I wonder about this woman whose life has been shaped by her disease for all those years. I think about how that usually happens gradually. Except in years of world-wide pandemic, the shifts that we make from on year to the next are gradual, but over time, they add up. So, I’ve tried to remember the person I was 25 years ago, the newly minted pastor.
I wonder if I might recover some of my early zest and vitality by taking stock of where I have narrowed my focus, where I stopped engaging in certain activities.
Twenty-five years ago, I was a youth minister and a campus minister. I hung out with college students and got to be part of all their important struggles over decisions about vocation and identity and faith. I did lock-ins with teenagers. I took them on mission trips and even a ski trip when I was 6 months pregnant. I look at my bookshelves now and I see an entire shelf of books on preaching, another shelf of theology, but only 3 books on youth ministry. My focus narrowed. Preaching meant buying books on preaching, which led to more of them. Way led on to way. Gradually, I quit doing some things that I used to. I realize that I cannot be all things to all people, but I also wonder what liveliness, what vitality I lost with that shift of focus.
I think about churches who have given up many activities over the last year. We have definitely felt that loss. But I wonder if we can allow it to reveal other ways in which our focus narrowed long before 2020.
Protestant churches in our culture can be grouped into two major categories. In one category, we find churches whose primary activities center on personal piety. These are churches that stress individual sin and a personal relationship with Jesus. They focus on evangelism and saving the lost and daily acts of devotion. They spend a lot of time reading the words of Paul. They measure success in terms of the numbers of people baptized and attending worship and church programs.
In another category, we find churches whose primary activities center on acts of love and mercy. They are concerned with systemic sin, with social justice. They focus on understanding suffering and root causes, so that they can enter into solidarity with those who suffer. They engage in ministries of direct service and advocacy. They spend a lot of time with the Biblical prophets, including Jesus. They measure success in the numbers of people fed or housed or clothed or acts of legislation passed.
Over time, it seems to me, that churches become more and more established in one or the other of these camps. The older our churches get, the more narrow the focus. We forget that we used to engage in a much wider range of activities. Churches in each camp have lost vitality. Our spiritual muscles have atrophied as we gradually stopped engaging in the fullness of the good news of Jesus. Churches in both camps have become increasingly irrelevant to the wider world.
For twelve years, the woman suffered, and her vitality ebbed away. People around her may have forgotten what she used to be like, and maybe she even forgot sometimes herself. But she didn’t forget entirely. Matthew says that she thought to herself “If I only touch Jesus’ cloak, I will be made well.”
The story of her life was not over. Change and transformation were possible. A renewed liveliness and vitality could still be hers. So, she reached out for Jesus’ power. But before she did that, Matthew tells us what she was thinking.
For us as individuals, and for us as a church, this seems to be critical. For the last few years, we have been having internal conversations about who we are as a church. During the last year, as the Vision Committee has done its work, as the Exec Team has met, as we each have thought about what has been most important spiritually through the pandemic, we have taken stock, each in our own ways. We have told ourselves and each other some things.
What might be most important right now is the story we are telling. Sometimes we act as though our circumstances shape us, as though our past and our present determine the future. But this story suggests something else. It suggests that way we narrate our lives shapes what they become.
The stories that we tell ourselves, about how we are and who we have been -- the ways that we understand and describe our circumstances can be more powerful than the circumstances themselves. The ways we narrate our lives shapes what they become. “If we can change our stories, then we can change our lives. . . . If we can change our stories, then we can change our lives.” [1]
Telling the story of our former vitality, remembering the height and depth and breadth and width, all the fullness of the good news may be the key to our transformation and healing. It may be what empowers us to reach out to Jesus for healing and wholeness, for a waking from sleep.
She said to herself,
“If I only touch Jesus’ cloak, . . .
“If I stretch myself,
if I put myself within reach,
if I go where the crowd is,
if I am willing to take a chance again,
if I do what I thought I couldn’t do any more, . . .
I will be healed.
And Jesus said “Take heart, your faith has made you well.”
May it be so for you and for me. Amen.
[1] This idea is presented in more expansive fashion by therapist Lori Gottlieb in her TED Talk https://www.ted.com/talks/lori_gottlieb_how_changing_your_story_can_change_your_life?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare