This sermon was preached for Sunday, June 11 (Proper 5, Year A) at St. Mark's Episcopal Church. The sermon references our guests for this Sunday from the LGBT Asylum Task Force. The texts for this semron were: Genesis 12:1-9, Psalm 33:1-12, and Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26.
The icon behind me was written by Brother Robert Lentz, an American Franciscan friar. He called it “Christ of Maryknoll” in honor of the clergy, nuns, monks, and laity of Maryknoll, who have been imprisoned in China and other parts of the world for their work among the poor, the broken, and the oppressed. The icon shows Jesus standing up against a barbed wire fence, his wounded and bloodied hand pulling down one of the wires so that he can stare through, straight at the viewer with an unwavering gaze.
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| Christ of Maryknoll by Brother Robert Lentz, OFM |
Brother Lentz made it intentionally unclear as to which side of the fence Jesus is standing on. “Is he imprisoned or are we?” he writes.
Is Jesus on the outside looking in at us who are imprisoned, yearning to set us free? Or is Jesus on the inside looking out, challenging us to tear down the fences and barriers that hem in our neighbor? Either way, Jesus is there at the rift, at the very place of cruelty and pain, his hands wrapped around the structure that tears us apart from him and from one another.
We can find Jesus wherever there is pain. Alongside whomever is locked in or locked out.
The religious leaders in today’s Gospel ask Jesus’s followers why they keep finding Jesus in such unconventional places surrounded by such controversial people. “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
Jesus’ answer is simple. He is there to be with the ones who need healing.
In many of Jesus’ healing narratives, there are two layers of healing that Jesus accomplishes. The first is contending with the source of the ailment, whether it be demonic possession or illness or, as in Matthew’s case, harmful patterns of behavior, like exploiting your neighbor for profit as a tax collector. The second layer of healing is more subtle, but just as powerful and life-saving. Jesus heals the rift between the people and their community that has exiled them. Communal alienation bears its own wounds - Jesus lays his hands on them, too.
The woman suffering from twelve years of hemorrhages doesn’t have a name in the Gospels, but she deserves one. So I’ll call her Zara which means “God remembers” in Hebrew. Now Zara would not have just been suffering from more than a dozen years of unexplained bleeding. That would have been bad enough. In that time, in that society, Zara would probably also have been considered ritually impure - the way menstruating women in many cultures all over the world would have been considered unclean five to seven days every month or so. Only for Zara, that state of uncleanness lasted years. In that isolation, Zara would have been discouraged from any sort of physical affection with a husband - if she had one. Moreover, touching a religious leader while in such a state could contaminate him, could threaten his state of ritual purity. So when Zara reaches out to touch the fringe of Jesus’ cloak, she is reaching across barriers of social custom, strict rules about gender, and her own social isolation.
So when Jesus turns and sees her, when Jesus encourages her with the beautiful words, “Take heart, daughter,” he is healing years of isolation and invisibility, even before her bleeding stops. Jesus’ acknowledgment of her pain, her courage, her right to belong - they get to the heart of the social and communal wounds that had compounded her disease. All the ways she felt less than and unseen and undeserving of care and affection and love. She reaches out and Jesus reaches back.
The prayer book tells us that the mission of the church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ. In other words, our job is reconciliation. In the prophet Isaiah’s words, we are to be repairers of the breach.
When Jesus says, “Follow me,” he means join me here at the rift, he means walk right up to the fence. He means us to come with him to seek out wherever there is pain in the world and to join in the work of healing. Turns out that’s how we are healed, too.
Jesus is wherever there are wounds and barbed wire, wherever people are exiled and isolated and in pain. So we belong there, too.
Today we bear witness to a breach that is tearing apart so many precious lives here in our nation and all over the world. We are honored to be joined by guests from the LGBT Asylum Task Force. Our guests are folks who have been exiled from their homelands because of who they loved or how they expressed their gender. The asylum task force offers them support as they seek a new home here in the United States. They are here to tell their stories; they are not mine to tell. But I do know this: lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer folk don’t need the sort of first layer of healing Zara and Matthew did. There is nothing wrong with their bodies, there is nothing sinful about their identities. If the LGBTQ community is in need of healing at all, it is that second layer of healing: the healing of wounds inflicted by hatred, prejudice, and social isolation.
That healing is Jesus’ work, but it is ours as well, all of ours, no matter what side of the fence we find ourselves standing on. No matter if we are the one who is reaching out or the one who reaches back.
“Take heart, daughter,” Jesus says to Zara, “your faith has made you well." Lutheran theologian Matt Skinner points out that this faith that Jesus is referring to - it’s not a doctrinal declaration on Zara’s part. She doesn’t sign on the dotted line that Jesus is her Lord and Savior in order to receive his healing. Zara's faith is simply a desperate conviction that there can be, there should be, a better life for her. If she can just reach out her hand.
I do not believe Zara's hand was weak and trembling, the hand of a pitiful victim. Her hand was desperate, and it was full of strength and hope and resiliency and faith.
You don’t need to be a Christian to be served by the LGBT Asylum Task Force. The faith that drew our guests and other asylees here to Massachusetts of all places was simply the desperate conviction that there could be, there should be, a place where they could live and love freely. A home where their wounds could be healed. In many ways, their faith is a faith in us, in our country and our commonwealth, that we could be that place, that home. As we will hear, their stories are full of hope and resiliency and faith. A faith quite like the faith that Abram was given when God said to him, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house…and I will bless you…so you will be a blessing.”
Today, St. Mark’s has a chance to join Jesus in the work of healing. A chance to see and honor the faith of the ones who have dared to dream. It is our turn to say, "Take heart, dear one. You shall be well." You are a blessing.
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