Becoming Water For Others

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Sixth Sunday of Easter by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean & Rector.

I noticed last week at daily mass–a usually spirited dialogue on the scriptures of the day–that things were rather muted. Everybody looked worn out. I felt worn out. Worn out by over two years of life in a pandemic and the loss of over 1,000,000 lives in this country alone. Worn about by the division and strife of our political situation. Worn out by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and daily horrors visited upon the least of these by a well-oiled military machine. Worn out by the grim specter of climate change. Worn out by the intractability of the virus of white supremacy, anti-semitism, fear, hate, and violence that’s infected this country and erupted in live-streamed bloodshed Buffalo last weekend. It’s a dark time. A heavy time. And the temptation to hopelessness is real. Maybe our situation right now is not too dissimilar from that of the man on the steps of the Beth-zatha Pool sick for thirty-eight years. Stuck. Woebegone. Prone to complaint. Locked in a spectatorial helplessness that only makes things worse.

It’s into this rather bleak scene that Jesus walks. Right on the heels of the story of the Samaritan Woman at the Well, we get another instance of Jesus as the living water. Like the Samaritan Woman, the man at the Beth-zatha Pool is tempted to identify wholeness and freedom with a particular place and a particular state of mind and body. Lugging her empty bucket in the heat of the day to the well all by herself, the cast-out excluded Samaritan Woman is the picture of shame-induced isolation. But gradually, the truth of God’s love as revealed in the person of Jesus, starts to fill her from within. She comes to know in her own experience that the circumstances of her life don’t have to define who and how she is. “Those who drink of the water I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life,” Jesus says. “Sir,” she replies, “give me this water!” Gradually, she wakes up the deep spring of belovedness that is the ground of her being and she sets down her water jug and sets off as that water to the very people who sent her lugging an empty bucket all by her lonesome at high noon. 

The man on the steps is in the same boat. He’s been passed by, stepped over, ignored for close to four decades. The line-cutters get the better of him every time. Now, we have to acknowledge that the people around this poor fellow are guilty of not facilitating his entry into the healing waters. So consumed are they by their own desire to get into those waters when they stir that they can’t attend to the one who needs help navigating the steps. It’s not just that this man can’t ask for help, but that no one has asked him if even needs help. No one, seeing the waters stir, says, “Hey, bud, let’s get you in the pool. I’ll go next time around.” Perhaps for these folks, wholeness, healing, salvation consists of actually seeing the other in their need, and offering a hand, rather than getting theirs and going on their merry way. Perhaps salvation is to be found in the very one they’ve previously seen as an obstacle. Perhaps the excluded other is actually their doorway to grace.

But the man on the steps has his part to play in this as well. Jesus asks him point blank, “Do you want to be made well?” Interestingly, he doesn’t really answer the question. He launches into a well-rehearsed litany of complaint–a tape-loop of a story he’s likely told himself for thirty-eight years. If only… if only… if only… We’ve all got them. We make the mistake of thinking that the outward circumstances of our life determine our peace, happiness, and capacity for joy. We think that if we can arrange things just so then, then, we’ll finally be happy. What we miss is that the gift of waters rising up to eternal life is already given. Those waters are gushing in the depths of our being, and we scurry about parched and frantic looking for what we already have. Our incessant search for happiness on our own terms–in substances, relationships, possessions, precisely the right outward circumstances–is exactly the thing that prevents us from opening to, receiving, and living from the happiness we always already are.

But it takes some doing–or perhaps undoing is the better word. We have to let ourselves come undone in love and see all the little ways our shoulds, our requirements and demands, set us against our life as it is. Strangely, and completely counter to how we normally approach our life, it is by going towards what we don’t like that a newfound wholeness begins to burble unexpectedly up. Moving towards our life as it is, dropping the story of how things should be and accepting it in all its cactus-like prickliness, is the doorway to the peace that passes understanding and acting compassionately to fix what clearly needs fixing.

I remember last summer when I took a month off to get a handle on my long-haul COVID-19 symptoms I had a very firm idea of how things would be at the end of the fourth week: The constant headaches would be gone; I’d have my taste and smell back; the body aches would disappear; my memory would return; and the leaden x-ray vest of fatigue would vanish. Well guess what? It didn’t! And how did I react? I was angry. Just plain old angry. Mad at myself. Mad at the illness… you name it. But slowly over time, I’ve come to accept it. This is just the way things are for now. I’ll trot through the doctors’ tests, the scans, the pokes, the prods, and hopefully it’ll get better. But there’s a part of me that’s ok with it all. The stranglehold of how things should be, is a little less tight. Instead of thinking that my life will be ok when I get in that pool, I’ve realized that it’s pretty ok (and by ok I mean an absolute gifted miracle) just as it is. I’ve realized that whether I happen to like it or not, this is my path to ever deeper union and communion with God. Illness has shifted from being my enemy to being my teacher. A teacher I never wanted, in a class I never signed up for, and resist mightily oftentimes, but my teacher nonetheless pointing me unwaveringly to God.

St. John, in a tiny little detail at the end of story appended almost as an afterthought, ends this encounter with the words–”Now that day was a sabbath.” Of course, it sets the scene for Jesus’ ongoing conflict with the religious authorities on account of his nasty habit of being healing love, presence, and welcome regardless of what day of the week it happened to be. But sabbath rest has a deeper implication and one that’s intimately tied to the man’s healing. There’s a way, again, that the sabbath here is a resting from requirements, demands, and expectations and drinking of the living water of just this. A softening into life on those steps. A gentle release of the need for life to be other than it is, the stale old stories we so often live by, and the recognition that here, even here, is the gate of heaven.

Ever wonder why there’s no temple in the New Jerusalem? Seems odd, no? Shouldn’t they be in church 24/7, plinking away on their harps and singing alleluias with voices that never go hoarse? There’s no temple, because everything is revealed as the temple. The sacramental universe into which we are woven is unveiled (that’s all apocalypse means). We get an inkling not just of the final consummation of all things at some time in the future, but that in some strange way we are also already immersed in this reality. While I don’t doubt that women with issues of blood are healed and paralytics walk in the presence of Jesus, it’s also the case that being healed and being made whole routinely take place despite the illness persisting. There are plenty of well people who aren’t whole, and plenty of people who remain sick who are whole. “Stand up, take your mat and walk,” Jesus says. This is as much about our relationship to illness, or the circumstances of our life, as it is the circumstances themselves. You can stand up and walk in this sense and still be paralyzed. You can wade in the waters of God’s indestructible, fear-casting out love, lying on the steps. 

How else would Etty Hillesum, imprisoned in Auschwitz and executed at the tender age of twenty-nine write these words in her diary, “There is a really deep well inside me. And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there too. But more often stones and grit block the well, and God is buried beneath.” She continues, 

Sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths, or the turning inwards in prayer for five short minutes…. Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.

That rest we take between two breaths. The unblocking of the well. Taking a little sabbath from our stories and requirements reclaiming the peace that is our birthright as beloved children of God. A peace not just for our personal enjoyment–an avoidant episode of self-care. A peace encountered and enjoyed so that it can be reflected to others and shared prodigally like Etty Hillesum who became water for her fellow prisoners in the barbaric desert of Auschwitz. It’s from that unshakeable ground that we discover our lives, just as they are, touched and transfigured by the power of God’s love. It’s from that unshakable ground beyond sickness or health that we discover the resources to be water for others right in the midst of our daily routines. May we, doused in God’s healing waters, stand up and walk as the peace we so yearn to see in this crazy, mixed up world. That’s my prayer on this worn out day.