February 8, 2009

Clay Nelson

Epiphany 5     1 Corinthians 9:16-23     Mark 1:29-39

Glynn’s sermon last week inspired by a couple of minutes of being judged and damned by an itinerant archangel, got me thinking about how people, many of whom we do not know by name, pass through our lives making a difference for good or for ill on a daily basis. They may do so on the phone, in an email, on a website, in a letter, on the street, in an office, and maybe even here at church. It is always an unexpected encounter and we notice it because it brings us up short.

I had one of those moments last Wednesday at the gym. Because of its convenience and their reduced rate for clergy, I go to The Atrium across the street. It is not like one of those flash gyms with the latest equipment and full of beautiful people to shame you. It’s a boys’ club. No girls allowed. Ladies don’t be disappointed by your exclusion. It is filled with old white men with bellies that make me feel svelte. It is the kind of place that makes you worry about God’s health if these male specimens are in the image of God.

The Atrium is an institution in Auckland in spite of its grubbiness and lack of equipment. Exercise is not why these men go. It is the temple many of Auckland’s movers and shakers attend to network and make deals. Being neither a mover nor a shaker, it is not a place in which I feel particularly comfortable worshipping. I go row for 30 minutes, do some weights and get out as quickly and inconspicuously as possible. But Wednesday it wasn’t fast enough. While towelling off another naked fat white guy started to ask me my name and then said, “Oh, you’re the priest.” (Since I don’t wear my collar in the shower, I’m not sure what gave me away.) And then without asking my name or sharing his began to rant, “I went to your service once. Why do you have so much Maori in it? There can’t be more than two Maori in the congregation. I don’t go to church to have more Maori crap crammed down my throat.” Nonplussed, not by the fact that there are people — even prominent people--who think this way but by his lack of shame in saying it aloud naked, I mumbled something about our being proud to honour our bi-cultural heritage. This got a “Hmmmph!” as he stomped off to the sauna.

It’s one of those moments where afterwards you think of what you wish you’d said, such as, “Piss off bigot!” Or “If it spares us the likes of you coming, it serves a useful purpose.” Or my favourite, said in a voice dripping with irony, “Enjoy your Waitangi holiday.” I know such thoughts are not very “Christian” of me, but they made me feel better.

In truth what I should’ve said is, “Thank you for giving me some new insights into the Gospel I have to preach on this Sunday.”

Last week and this week Mark’s Gospel tells the story of Jesus’ public inauguration of his ministry. It is full of symbolic action to set the tone of his future work, much like Obama’s signing an executive order to close Guantanamo and giving his first interview as President to Arabic TV were clear signs that the Bush years are over. Jesus is announcing it is new day in Palestine by his exorcism in the synagogue last week and his healing of Peter’s mother-in-law this week. The old corrupt order will no longer go unchallenged. Hope is now in the air. The rules are changing.

This would have been the very clear understanding of these actions in Jesus’ day, but for us we get hung up in the miraculous and supernatural aspects of the story. We listen to the stories as if they are reports in a medical journal. We hear it is as a story of Jesus curing disease in some unfathomable way. In first century Palestine Mark’s readers would have heard a story of Jesus healing illness. What’s the difference?

We have a bio-medical view of disease. Disease happens to individuals with symptoms. Treatment is to unclog the arteries, poison the cancer; medicate the delusions. The goal is to cure. Oral Roberts and modern faith healers have this same view, curing is personal, just as they believe the Gospel is about personal salvation obtained by telepathically communicating to Jesus that one accepts and submits to his authority in order to save one’s own behind.

Jesus, having never gone to medical school or a bible college, sees healing in socio-economic terms. These are symbolic acts of civil disobedience to confront the illnesses the established order perpetuates. Last week he goes into the sacred place of civic order, the synagogue, and teaches with personal authority. He doesn’t suck up to the scribes who are invested in a dysfunctional society. Theirs is a society based on who is pure and who is not. Those who are not are cast out to the bottom rungs of society. The demoniac who confronts him is speaking for the scribes. He first tries to control Jesus by naming him and then challenges his right to meddle in the scribes’ affairs. He names their fears by asking if Jesus is here to destroy them? Jesus answers by casting the scribes speaking through him out of the man, healing him. Jesus sees healing as restoration, as a return to wholeness not only for the man but for all of society. A modern example of the demoniac would be a gay Republican. Jesus would cast the Republican thinking out of him as they do not honour and respect his personhood, but would deprive him of his basic human rights. When the human rights of one are trampled, so are the human rights of all.

The symbolic action this week is a continuation of confronting the social order. In Jesus day sickness was viewed as being out of favour with God. We might call this the Pat Robertson Affect. HIV/AIDS is God’s punishment of homosexuals. Jesus confronts this by healing a woman living in poverty and restoring her to community. He gave her and all who witnessed it hope as an act of liberation.

During this time of global recession many who live paycheque to paycheque worry about being laid-off. Yet those living in poverty worry about how to live day to day. This was equally true in Jesus’ day. Economic and political deterioration under Roman occupation had dispossessed a sizeable portion of the population especially in densely populated rural areas like Galilee. For a day-labourer becoming ill meant unemployment and instant impoverishment, which meant being seen as in a state of sin, cut off from full status in society, as if they were the cancer. Jesus symbolic action restoring Peter’s mother-in-law and all those brought to him to full status was a blatant attack on the established social order. That he healed her on the Sabbath (although in private) made even clearer his disdain for the world the scribes maintained.

These inaugural actions were powerful not because they challenged the laws of nature, but because they challenged the very structures of social existence. If those structures dehumanised life, Jesus challenged them and defied their strictures. The scribes weren’t stupid. They had every reason to fear him. Giving hope to the marginalised is a powerful thing. It could even bring about a just society--not exactly a goal of the rich and powerful. They could not have been pleased that he was planning to visit the synagogues in the surrounding area to make his point clearer. Jesus wasn’t about curing a demoniac here and sick mother-in-law there, he was about healing the whole world.

Such thoughts bring me back to the locker room at the Atrium. As the hostile remarks about the Maori and the attack on the prime minister on the Marae at Waitangi this week indicate, healing society is an ongoing task for those of us who take Jesus seriously. Symbolic actions are still required to give hope and to liberate. That a congregation made up predominantly of Pakeha says the Lord’s Prayer in Maori is just such an act. It is more than a prayer. It is a call for wholeness in the face of dysfunction. It is an act of humility and contrition. It is sign of respect for the mana of all peoples everywhere. It is a force for healing. It is an exorcism of that which divides us. And of course, best of all, it annoys bigots.