ST MATTHEW-IN-THE-CITY
ANGLICAN CHURCH AUCKLAND NEW ZEALAND
The Line between Despair and Hope
February 5, 2012
Clay Nelson
Epiphany 5 Mark 1:29-39
Video available on YouTube, Facebook
One of my lasting memories of the Rugby World Cup was a one-minute time-lapse video trained on the faces of the crowd at Queen’s Wharf during the final game. For the first half the crowd was confident, boisterous and in a mood to begin the victory party. After all, we had defeated the French handily two games earlier. When a different French team returned in the second half to relive the last time they snatched victory from the All Blacks in a World Cup, the faces became anxious and anguished, painfully so in the final minutes. When the crowd realised that time had run out and the All Blacks’ defence had held off the determined French to win the World Cup the look of relief and joy at the narrow escape from despair was palpable.
I was reminded of this graphic depiction of how close the line is between hope and despair a week ago Friday as I walked through the empty venue in the Long White Cloud on Queens’s Wharf where that crowd was filmed. I carried with me some sprigs of rosemary, a bottle of water and a bottle of baptismal oil as I made my way to end of the wharf.
Four people who manage the wharf for the public’s use attended me. They had asked me to come bless and purify the wharf.
One night, a week earlier, a young man had gotten past security and raced to the end of the wharf, jumping off into the dark waters below before they could reach him. As he swam in circles beyond their reach they tried to convince him to return. Before a police boat could arrive he vanished underneath the wharf. The next morning divers recovered his body.
The manager of the wharf had since learned the man was only 21 and had made an earlier attempt to take his life the week before. His parents told police he was mentally ill. That’s all they knew. They didn’t even know his name. But they did know that the wharf, in its latest incarnation was intended for life and celebration, and now it felt his demons of despair and hopelessness were still there. The manager had attended our Christmas Eve Carols Service and felt St Matthew’s could and would help her. After gaining Ngati Whatua’s permission, she called to ask me, in essence, to cast out demons. I was struck and impressed by the manager’s concern for the spiritual health of the space for which she is responsible, although she claimed not to be religious and only went to church on Christmas. Still she went to heaps of trouble to heal the wharf even though only a handful would ever know what had transpired there. Even fewer would know of the brief ceremony she arranged to be held there in the rain and wind of what has been a typical Auckland summer’s day. That didn’t matter. She felt strongly that it was right and necessary to do. So I did my best. I prayed for the young man and his family, commended him to God and tried to do the extraordinary with ordinary oil and water.
Being asked to cast out demons is unusual enough in my life experience that it has induced considerable reflection about the fragility of hope, what it means to heal and the nature of demons.
This episode coloured how I engaged with today’s gospel account of Jesus’ healing of Peter’s mother-in-law. While a brief account it engenders many questions and provides considerable grist for our theological imagination. For instance, how many remember Peter was or had been married? It says something about the role of women in the day that his wife is not mentioned and his mother-in-law has no name. But that is for a different sermon.
The story also indicates that while Jesus was from Nazareth, Capernaum was where he was living prior to his ministry. It was in Capernaum he went to synagogue. It was in Capernaum he called his first disciples. It was in Capernaum he began his healing ministry by restoring a young man much like the one who jumped off the wharf, just before healing Peter’s mother-in-law of her fever. Shortly after, he healed a leper whom he asked not to broadcast what he had done for him. The grateful man couldn’t contain himself and soon Jesus couldn’t get out Peter’s front door due to the numbers asking for healing. It was enough to drive him to seek an isolated spot to pray. With such a successful healing practice why didn’t he just nail his shingle to the mother-in-law’s house and stay in Capernaum? Clearly there was plenty of work there to keep him busy?
This and other healing stories is a challenge to our 21st century understanding of disease, mental illness and what it takes to heal. I know my reading of these accounts is biased by faith-healers like Oral Roberts and Benny Hinn who victimise the vulnerable by claiming to cure them of their physical impairments and life threatening ailments. It conjures up visions of the pile of crutches near the pool at Lourdes. But my scepticism is tempered when I consider the numerous healing stories about Jesus. I don’t know what the facts of the case were behind these stories. I just don’t believe he was a fraud. So I search the stories for clues to understanding.
Firstly, he lived in a world where demons were real to people, not metaphorical. Stories of casting them out were about spiritual warfare. They were about the power of good over evil; love over hate. Stories about his casting them out were a way for his followers to express that God was working through him.
Secondly, he lived in a world where illness wasn’t caused by bacteria or viruses. It was the direct result of God’s disfavour. It was deserved divine punishment.
Thirdly, he lived a world that was divided by purity laws. Those who were ill or diseased were consider impure by the powers that be and pushed to the margins of society. They were not only sick but left alone and hopeless as well. They were excluded, blamed and reviled.
What runs through all the healing stories is that Jesus out of compassion used his touch to restore people to the community who had been left hopeless on the margins. In today’s story he is said to have raised up Peter’s mother-in-law and her fever left her. It is the same word used to say Jesus was raised up on Easter morn from death to life.
What is more important than what Jesus did for her is the mother-in-law’s response to healing. She got up and did what any good Jewish homemaker would do in the day -- she served her son-in-law and honoured guests a meal — a reminder that feasting and the heavenly banquet are central images of a healed creation. It is her response that is at the crux of the story.
Not coincidentally, the phrase “to raise up” is also used to describe Jesus’ being lifted up on the cross. Taking up our cross to serve is the price of being healed: finding new life in a world that is too often savaged by the demon of “no hope.” Jesus’ ministry is a call to each of us who have been healed by his touch to lift up our fellow travellers in this world and to silence the demons.
The line between hope and despair is fragile and whether or not we like it, for many we meet, we may be it. I am haunted by the fear that I could have lifted up the young man who went off the wharf, but he was invisible to me. Not knowing why he felt suicide was his only option leaves my imagination filling in the vacuum. Even if our paths never crossed were the causes of his despair something I see but fail to address or choose to deny?
This fear was reinforced by a story in the latest issue of Rolling Stone. It tells of a school district in Minnesota where in less than two years nine children committed suicide and numerous others attempted it. Four of the dead were gay or lesbian or perceived to be. Some of the others may have been but not “out” or thought they might be. How could this happen? The schools are in the congressional district of Michelle Bachman, failed candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and outspoken critic of homosexuality. Her husband claims to be able to heal his homosexual clients of being gay. Her evangelical church and other anti-homosexual groups bullied the school district adopted a policy in the mid-1990s that homosexuality is not to be taught or addressed as a normal, valid lifestyle. This ultimately created an environment where gay and lesbian students or those perceived to be were brazenly and blatantly bullied even within the view of teachers without action being taken. Facebook pages of hate were created and directed at certain students. They were ignored by the administration. Anti-Gay events sponsored by evangelicals were permitted in the schools where T-shirts were handed out that said, “Be Happy, Not Gay.” GLBTQ students had no support or healthy models. [i]
Teachers, administrators and parents were silent and thus complicit in these deaths. They failed to be the line between hope and despair. I don’t want to be one of them. We in New Zealand cannot just write this off as another reason on top of the Republican primary that Americans should be institutionalized. In our own Anglican Communion the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, can say that he opposes gay marriage because it makes homosexuality look normal and it would be contrary to British tradition and history. [ii] Where is our outrage? It is no better in this country, where most denominations are actively anti-homosexual. While the Anglicans are a little more wishy-washy about it, people like Geno are still considered unacceptable for ordination. What does this climate say to a teen-ager like the one I met with last Saturday trying to come to terms with his conclusion he is gay? He is traumatized not by that reality, but by his mother’s belief, nurtured by her evangelical church, that he will burn in hell.
This is just one area of brokenness in our world to which we turn a blind eye. Jesus did not stay in his comfort zone. He left Capernaum to lift up the whole world to bring healing to the hungry and poor, possessed and persecuted, the meek and marginalised. He could not do that by closing his eyes. He could not do that without being vulnerable. He chose to be the line between despair and hope, life and death. It was his calling. Do we choose to follow or remain blind?
[i] http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/one-towns-war-on-gay-teens-20120202