Mater and Anger: May 26, 2019

John 5:1-9
Psalm 66
Acts 16:9-15

Mater and Anger are friends.

Well, that’s not exactly right, though what is exactly right is about as improbable as a friendship between these two characters in two very different Disney-Pixar worlds. Mater is a beat up old tow-truck in the Cars franchise, a series of films, spin-offs, and products featuring anthropomorphized motor vehicles that is right in the wheelhouse of a six year old. Anger is one of the personified emotions inside of Riley, a young girl, in the film “Inside Out” with a focus on pre-teens. The actors who provide these voices are respected comedians, though I’m not sure respected is a word that is particularly accurate, nor do I think either comedian would want to be described as respectable, for Mater is voiced by the comedian Daniel Whitney, better known as Larry the Cable Guy, while Anger is voiced by Lewis Black, better known as Lewis Black.

Though they share a career, they are culturally and politically opposites. Black, the elder of the two, is a fiery liberal, a social critic, and has served as an ACLU “ambassador for voting rights.” Larry the Cable Guy? He’s part of the Jeff Foxworthy “You Might Be a Redneck” school of comedy. Let’s just say he’s more likely to show up at a Monster Truck jam than at an ACLU rally. Despite these differences, they remain close friends, something remarkable in the current climate where we are all deep inside our ideological and cultural bunkers.

While I am more aligned with Black’s world view, I grew up among white Southern working class men. This is my native culture, so I need no translator to understand Larry the Cable Guy’s humor. My late father, in the garage with a television above his workbench, would have fit perfectly in Larry-land, though Dad hated comedians that poked fun at his tribe, jokes that came a little too close to the truth, funnymen like that other Disney voice actor, Tim Allen, aka Buzz Lightyear. Though Dad might have disliked Larry’s stand-up, he’d have loved his catch phrase, “Git-R-Done!” My dad was all about getting it done.

Both of today’s readings are about getting it done. Neither text is particularly complex or mysterious, nor is there much in the way of complicated theology. I mean, there is theology, of course, it is the Bible after all, but the focus is on the narrative action. Man needs healing, no one helps him, Jesus skips the intermediary step of getting the man into the pool, instead declaring that the healing has already happened. “Stand up, take your mat, and walk,” says the healing rabbi, and the man does. Boom, mic drop…

Maybe I am more my father’s son than I want to admit, because this is one of my favorite healing stories in the gospel. No showmanship, no mud-in-the-eye, no long-winded discourse, just action.

Paul has a dream that he should go to Macedonia, so he does, and there he and his companions meet some women, share the good news of Jesus, and start the church at Philippi.

The only two things in the text that really seem worth pointing out are the fact that Lydia is a woman and she is a rich and successful one at that. The patriarchy has never been comfortable with Luke’s emphasis on the role of women in the gospel, on the actual fact, and it is a fact, of female leadership in the early church as reflected in Luke-Acts and in Paul’s letters. Over the centuries they’ve changed Mary Magdalene into the woman taken in adultery, a complete fabrication that is not in scripture, for they are two completely different women. But in the most remarkable of tricks, they’ve given Junia, mentioned in Paul’s letter to the Romans as a prominent apostle, gender reassignment, declaring that this feminine form name was that of a man, an ancient “boy named Sue.”

Of course, female leadership in the early church is not controversial here in our tradition, though there was quite a gap between the Apostolic Age and 1853, when Congregationalists boldly ordained a woman to Christian leadership. I would laugh at the denominations that still have an all male leadership, but patriarchal attempts to control the bodies and sexuality of women are unjust, cruel, and reflect poorly on Jesus, who very much defied the patriarchy of his age, as did Paul and his companions in today’s reading. Observant Jewish men speaking to women they were not related to in public was a scandal, a radical act, even more so entering the home of a woman of higher social class.

Lydia is of a higher social class. Paul is also someone with a trade, is a tentmaker, but Lydia is a dealer in purple cloth, a luxury good. If the ability to adapt is important to the success of Christianity as a growing religious movement in the Roman Empire, something we discussed last week, so too is the sponsorship of women of means, so Lydia in her affluence gets tugged into a debate that has been with us since the time of Jesus, a debate mocked in Umberto Eco’s classic novel “The Name of the Rose,” where medieval male clerics debate whether Jesus owned the robe he wore.

As in so many things, scripture gives us contradictory evidence, and two thousand years later, Christians are still debating our relationship with wealth and money. On the one hand, Jesus uses imagery and stories to suggest that it is difficult for the rich to get into heaven because remaining rich requires ignoring the needs of the poor, and he lets the rich but righteous young man walk away. In the early church, we have the classic text in Acts that describes the community as communitarian, selling off land and sharing assets together. Yet Jesus also associated with the rich. He tells us the story of the Good Samaritan, who uses his wealth in the service of another. Jesus is anointed with an oil that is a luxury good, and the early church depends on the hospitality and sponsorship of wealthy folks like Lydia.

In the end, those who suggest that wealth is always an obstacle to salvation stand on shaky ground, but so too do those who suggest earthly wealth is evidence of divine favor or blessing. Everything is what you make of it. The rich young man loved his wealth more than he loved the gospel. Lydia and the fictional Good Samaritan use their wealth in the service of others. If our relationship with money is driven by fear, insecurity, lust for power, it is a rotten tree that will bear only the most vile of fruit. But the same is true with our bodies, with our sexuality. The same thing that can be used in celebration and love can be used to defile and debase.

The healing of the cripple at the pool of Beth-zatha takes place on the sabbath, part of a major and on-going dispute between Jesus and legalistic Jews who insist that rules are more important than people. Sure, they say, go ahead and heal him, just not yet, not today, not now.

Jesus teaches, and the gospel authors have combined a bunch of teachings into long discourses, but it sure feels to me that these long discourses are artificial, that the real Jesus doesn’t sit around debating all day, that the real Jesus criticizes the scribes and Pharisees for exactly that sort of behavior, that the real Jesus makes his point, either with a direct reply or a short story, and then get’s on with things. People are hungry, feed them. Guy needs healing. No problem, dude.

The scribes and Pharisees are about religion. Jesus is about God, is about the kingdom, is about now.

The scribes and Pharisees talked and debated and talked and debated. Jesus did.

We are all painfully aware of the dangers of impulsive and reckless behavior, of storming out of meetings, of taking the common good hostage, the my-way-or-the-highway of our politics, but also of our social clubs, and even our congregations. It is no wonder that we are “Bowling Alone,” the title of a 2001 book that, like a canary in a coal mine, warned us of imminent disaster. We are networked up to our eyeballs, glued to social media, can teleconference the grandkids in California, but so many relationships feel superficial, for we are too busy or too scared to go deep. And like a tree with shallow roots, these relationships shrivel in the heat, topple in the storm.

The challenge, then, it to figure out how to “Git-R-Done” when the doing is being done by us, frail and fickle humans, not by a charismatic rabbi with direct access to divine knowledge, to divine will. For we do not know with any certainty the will of God, and when we see a charismatic leader who claims they do, we should run very far away.

How do we make sure we are more like Jesus, addressing the need right in front of us, more like Paul, listening to the Spirit and taking risks, and not like the scribes and Pharisees as portrayed in scripture? Can we be more vision and less navel-gazing? How do we make sure that we are about God, about the kingdom, that we aren’t talking to hear ourselves speak, that we aren’t weighing down the entire community with our insecurities and our need for control?

I’d like to suggest that the ability to act individually begins with spiritual practice and the intentional development of Christian character and discipleship. Churches are first and foremost schools of discipleship, and in our Reform tradition, the Word, reading and studying scripture, is at the center of that tradition, though neither scripture nor prayer are intended for only one hour a week. While the Bible is an ancient book written in a different time, there is much there that is eternal, and in many cases, we face the exact same issues today as the ancients faced in Ur, in Egypt, in Jerusalem.

Individual prayer is the brush that scrubs away the worst of our fear and hubris, especially when we enter contemplative prayer, not the begging for divine intervention but an openness to the divine, when our souls make real those words we speak, “thy will be done.”

Listening to God, knowing our two-thousand year-old story, grounding ourselves in that deep tradition, in the words of the prophets, in the hymns of praise and tearful laments of the psalms, in the acts and teaching of Jesus, these things prepare us for the life we live, a life where we find deep joy and fearful and painful circumstances. We might not be able to do exactly what Jesus would do, but we can help the man to the healing pool, give the parking space to someone who needs it more, can speak out for the alien in our land using the exact words used by the authors of Deuteronomy.

To act as a group, we must must be willing to have leaders, individuals called for their gifts as disciples, for their willingness to hear the comforting word and the challenging word, for their devotion to prayer and scripture. Paul was not in Philippi alone. He said God is calling, and they got up and went, following him in a new and daring enterprise, sharing the good news of Jesus with a rich Gentile woman, establishing a new church. No longer called from our nets by our Savior, we are instead left with imperfect and human leaders. It only works if we are willing to love, to lay aside our hubris, to walk away from the altar of self-worshiping individualism and autonomy and become part of something bigger, a covenant, a committed relationship in which Christ is the only true head, but in which we order ourselves as church.

All too often we do not act because we do not stand on the ground of scripture and prayer, because we refuse to be led, because we are convinced that only we know best, because the rich young man, or rich old man, is walking away, and we do not have enough faith, in God, in our community, in ourselves, to let him go.

A man who wants to be healed, who is doing his best to find healing. Boom. Get up and walk. Imagine, for a moment, what came next, this man who had the encounter, who was made whole. Maybe he got married, had kids… maybe he danced up dusty streets. Imagine the joy. Do you want to be made whole? Are you willing to bring wholeness to others?

Imagine Lydia and her friends, hungry for more than the capricious gods of Rome, already drawn to something that felt true and powerful in the God of the Jews, and then these men show up, strange men from away, who tell them about this man, this man who taught and healed, whose followers experienced him as a presence of God, who spoke of love and the kingdom. Imagine the excitement.

Get up and walk. Let’s go to Philippi. The Spirit is calling.

The Spirit is calling. Still you heart. Listen. This is the day. Let’s Git-R-Done.

Amen.