Called to Praise
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost by the Rev. Holly Huff.
Many of the accounts of Jesus’s healing miracles start with the approach of the person to be healed, or else the request made by their loved ones. The centurion pleads for his beloved servant, Jairus intercedes for his daughter, and Jesus responds. Both are made well and commended for their faith. The woman with an issue of blood makes her huddled way through the crowd, unnoticed by all but Jesus as she reaches out to touch his cloak. “Daughter,” he says, “your faith has made you well; go in peace.” Some are brought to Jesus by great human initiative—think of the paralyzed man whose devoted friends were so determined to get him to Jesus through the crowd that they went up onto the roof of the house where he was staying and started pulling aside the tiles until they had room to lower their hurting friend’s bed down at Jesus’ feet. Sort of a wilderness search & rescue helicopter move in reverse. Seeing their great faith, Jesus heals this man, stands him up and forgives his sins to boot.
Sometimes healing—in all its forms, not only or even primarily physical dealing from disease—sometimes healing, wholeness and vitality come after a long search, after intercessions made by dear ones on our behalf, after we’ve learned to place our whole trust in our faithful Savior Jesus Christ, who is our only comfort in life and death, as the Heidelberg Catechism puts it. I had a Lutheran friend in my class in divinity school who had a tattoo of that first question on his forearm: “What is Thy only comfort in life and death?” The answer begins like this: “That I with body and soul, both in life and death, am not my own, but belong unto my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.”
These stories of the many who in desperate humility ask Jesus to heal them show us something important. It is good to ask in faith for what we need. “Seek and ye shall find, knock and the door will be opened.” As children of God we are to take everything to God, especially our needs, our woundedness and illness and vulnerability and grief. But it is true also that “Your Father knows what you need before you ask.” True also that Jesus is the One who stands at the door and knocks. It’s easy, given the ego’s sleight of hand, to wind up thinking we can control God through our prayer, that we can leverage “faith” as a crowbar against the world, against our life, until we get what we want.
Enter today’s Gospel, a reminder I think that life and healing is always God’s initiative. This woman in the synagogue does not so much as look at Jesus. I wonder if she could look up at him, bent over and crippled as she was. She doesn’t approach him, doesn’t ask to be healed. She is just there. She “appears,” as the text puts it. After 18 years, I wonder whether she even imagines it’s possible to be healed, having lived with the fact of her disability so long. But Jesus sees her and calls her over. Remember, Jesus is love embodied, God in human form, the one through whom the world was created and all things were called into being. He longs to set us free, to stand us upright, to burn away all that burdens and disfigures us and restore creation to the reflection of God’s glory it was meant to be. Seeing this woman appear, he calls her over, says “Woman, you are set free from your ailment,” and lays his hands on her.
Grace comes unexpected. Prepare the way of the Lord! At his touch the valleys are exalted and the crooked made straight, and she sets her shoulders back for the first time in 18 years, finally at ease. “Immediately she stood up straight and began praising God”. Glory to God in the highest! This daughter of Abraham, God’s beloved child, is set free into praise. Praise is the common human vocation. Each of us are called to know our creator; better, to know ourselves to be known, and known in love, and in each moment shepherded by that Love, and then, from that assurance, we lend our voices to the chorus of praise that rings through eternity. This is the calling of a human being, to be fully alive, beholding and praising God, glorifying God. “Therefore we praise you.”
Praise is not the task of a human being, but the calling. A calling comes to us as a specific Voice calls to us, and calls us to respond, to the Voice heralding each person’s belovedness at baptism, and to the Voice of God in creation, calling us to be ourselves, and calling that good. “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.” The tender intimacy with which the Lord speaks to Jeremiah covers each one of us. We are called by name and called to praise. Jesus sees us while we are still far off, still hunched over, not daring even to think we could be healed, and he calls to us and lays his hands on us. “You are set free”—no more servants but friends, children, members of the household of God. And leaning on that trust, we can lift our voice to sing praises, even when the outward circumstances of our life remain pinched as they so often do. Yet since God in Christ has gone to the depths of hell to join us in our captivity to sin and death and every evil and to set us free, we are “free to worship without fear,” free to sing praises in reverence and awe, and to tell others about the goodness of the Lord, the life we have found in the midst of death.
It's ironic (if all too predictable) that the religious authorities can’t see how fitting it is that this healing which liberates this woman into praise should take place on the Sabbath. The Sabbath celebrates God’s pleasure in creation and invites God’s children to rest in grace, in total reliance and repose, responding to the God of creation in grateful praise and works of justice. It’s an invitation to live from a new and restored creation. What could be more appropriate, Jesus says, not a little frustrated by this bullheaded fixation on outward signals of virtue, than to see this woman freed from bondage? “Why don’t you know how to interpret the present time?” Can’t you see how love, calling one and all into freedom, fulfills the law? The kingdom of God has come near! Repent, and believe the good news. Better to hear these words directed to us, good religious people ourselves, than to vilify the leader of the synagogue. Idolatry is the besetting sin; where have we gone off track trying to lock down the living God? Where does the letter of the law kill the spirit? Which rigidities of righteousness do we get fixated on, at the expense of our neighbor, wonderfully made in the image of God? How might we open to the untamed love of God which flows out generously, without respect for propriety or expectation? If we are willing, this love will purify everything in us that needs to be cleansed. Indeed our God is a consuming fire, consuming what can be consumed, shaking what can be shaken, in order to fix us on the only firm foundation, the love of God made known in Jesus through the Spirit. “In you, O Lord, have I taken refuge.” “Be my strong rock, a castle to keep me safe. You are my crag and my stronghold.”
Jesus follows the dispute about the Sabbath with a quick parable about the kingdom of God. The crowd rejoices at the all the wonderful things he was doing, and the immediate next words are: “He said therefore, ‘What is the kingdom of God like? And to what should I compare it? It is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in the garden; it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches.’” This is a strange comparison. A mustard plant was no noble oak or cedar of Lebanon. It’s more of a trash tree, one you would hardly plant one on purpose. The tiny mustard-seed-that-is-like-the-kingdom-of-God hidden in the garden becomes manifest as a great and bushy weed of a tree, disrupting neat garden rows, winding through and overtaking the other plants, weaving your erstwhile plans into its own strange pattern until it’s large enough and hairy enough to play host to all sorts of strange-feathered friends. It’s the plant equivalent of breaking the Sabbath in order to keep the Sabbath, and a reminder that there is room for all of us in the kingdom of God. Among these unexpected branches, we discover ourselves beloved and called to praise, and we discover each other as neighbors, since each person we meet is also God’s beloved.
“The entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.” God wants us to be made whole. It is God’s good pleasure to give us the kingdom. And it’s our privilege to join that community of praise, to be a part of that rejoicing crowd. We love because God first loved us. Receiving that love, we ask in faith for what we need, trusting that God will give it to us, just as God has continually been reaching out to us since the Spirit first hovered over the water.
May we join in the Psalmist’s prayer: “I have been sustained by you ever since I was born; from my mother’s womb you have been my strength; my praise shall be always of you.”
Amen.