Poolesville Presbyterian Church
09.30.12; Rev. David Williams
It’s Fall now, it is, as we stand at the doorstep of October. And at this time of year, as sure as the darkness clings deeper into the morning and the trees start to speckle with gold, the children return to school.
I can remember the first year both of my boys were in school. Well, it was school in the sense that it was preschool, and even though they were four and two, it still felt like to our newbie parent sensibilities like they were going off to college. Oh my gosh they’re growing up so fast, we said, while looking at children who barely came up to our midsections and had only recently managed to go to the bathroom by themselves. Most of the time.
We still have the picture of the both of them, seemingly impossibly tiny now, so small that they scarcely seem larger than their backpacks.
Of course, there’s no similarity between college and preschool. In preschool, they would learn things like how to use a hammer, how to read, how to appreciate the beauty of nature, and the importance of playing well with others. This is very different from college, where they take courses that explore the Semiotics of Gender in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
You know, the classics.
The preschool we sent them to was a cooperative, which meant that it was a nonprofit run entirely by parents. That meant that while we had teachers on staff, parents were the teacher-helpers. With both boys in school, that meant that once a week, I was in class with one or other of them. It was fun, generally, but there was one thing that came early in the school year that every parent dreaded.
It was that moment when you were scrambling around the classroom in the twos class. One of the boys would be sitting next to another little darling, sharing a container of delicious nutritious high-fiber lo-fat playdough, and that other little darling would cough. And then they’d cough again.
Being the good room parent, you’d go get a tissue, only to realize when you got there that one tissue wouldn’t cut it. The other child’s face would totally coated in mucus, to the point where they were like one of those bizarre undersea sluglike creatures that ooze around in it’s own protective layer of viscous organic slime.
Which we do too, by the way! Did you know that on average, human beings generate one liter of mucus every day? As a Teaching Elder, I recognize that this may well be the only fact that I can guarantee you’ll remember from this sermon, but hey, we take what we can get.
When you moved the little snotty one away, and realized that not only were they gooier than a slimed Ghostbuster but a little bit warmer and a little more lethargic than they should be, that moment would be the moment your child would cough. Then they’d cough again. As you applied a half-gallon of Purell to your hands, realizing that you were in for another one of those weeks of passing an exciting new virus around at home, you’d grumble about those parents who always send their kids to school sick.
They should keep them away from everyone else. They should be off in a hermetically sealed plastic bubble someplace, far away from those of us who want nothing to do with their illness. While this makes sense when you’re dealing with infectious diseases, it has a tendency to spread to other forms of brokenness. Isolating the ill and the broken is one of those things that social animals want to do, and because we’re social animals, it’s something that can get hardwired into our cultures.
That cultural tendency towards quarantine was strongly written into the societal dynamics of first century Judea. Isolating the sick and the infectious and the menstruating was a way of maintaining the integrity of the community. More often than not, illness and suffering was viewed as something that reflected the displeasure of God. But as much as that was written into the legal codes of their culture, it was something that Jesus had nothing to do with. Those who were “unclean,” ill and broken and isolated, were not turned away from Christ.
Of the books of the New Testament, James is one of the most grounded in the ethics and worldview of Judea. Having likely been written by the brother of Christ, and clearly informed by Hebrew wisdom literature, this is one of the most Jewish of the Christian Epistles. The focus James places on the implications of our actions is part of that. If we’re to obey the One Law, the law of God’s love, then our obedience needs to define every action we take in the world.
Confronted by the reality that we get broken and we become ill, James makes a point of explaining what appropriate practice is towards those who are experiencing physical or emotional or mental illness. Unlike the codes of purity or the theologies of punishment, which demand the physical and spiritual isolation of the individual, James tells us those dogs don’t hunt in a Christian fellowship.
Instead, we hear from James some clear teaching about how both the afflicted and those around them should approach their connection to God and one another. Those struggling with affliction are told to pray, meaning they are reminded that their connection with God has not been broken in their time of suffering. They are also told that they should reach out to and ask for the presence of the church to bring about...well...what?
We hear about the application of oil, and the bringing of prayers. But what is particularly interesting about how James approaches the response of the church is twofold.
First, those who are afflicted and suffering are not separated or cast out. Instead, they are empowered to ask for the presence of the community. This flips the ethic of purity and punishment on it’s head. To authentically live into the life the Jesus intended for those who follow his Way, the community is called to be sure that none are outside of the boundaries. This action mirrors Christ’s willingness to be with lepers and the unclean and those suffering from affliction of mind and spirit.
This is important. Because as shattering as illness is on a body, the social and spiritual isolation of those afflicted can act as a force magnifier, tearing the one in need from the community that could offer up sustaining grace and reassuring presence at the moment when it was needed most. Again, James will have none of that. He makes it clear that those connections cannot be severed, that walls and boundaries based on shame have to fall, and that a community grounded in grace can never step away from that grace.
Second, James seems to blur the difference between soul and flesh. This isn’t a surprise, as Judaism never really makes much of a distinction between the two. But here, this usually very simple and straightforward text starts to play around with meanings. In James 5:15, read from the New Revised Standard Version, we heard that the prayer of faith can “save” those sick, but our English translations don’t all agree. In the New International Version, that prayer “heals” the sick. That’s because the word used by James means both salvation...being reconnected and made whole in God...and the return to physical wellbeing.
James talks about healing again, in verse 16, but also talks about a release from sin and spiritual brokenness both before and after. He’s melding the two concepts, making it clear that the distinction between wholeness of soul and wholeness of body is not as total as we might make.
Taken together, this passage is a potent reminder of the first and most important healing. Whatever the affliction, it is that sense of being embraced by both the love of God and the love of community that must be made whole.
This was a vital reminder to the Judean Christians who likely were the audience for James message, and it is doubly vital for us today. Ours is a fragmented, distracted, shattered culture.
We are fragmented because in 21st century America our sense of place and spatial connection to community is compromised by the endless churning of our society, as we move and move from place to place, uprooting ourselves, planting ourselves, and uprooting again. And with physical distance can come spiritual distance and disengagement, as others can become abstractions, just one of our fourteen hundred Facebook friends.
We are distracted because in our consumerist hunger for immediate satisfaction, we are given the opportunity to look at whatever we want, whenever we want. Our pleasure is just one click and our credit card information away. We don’t like being reminded that the world does not exist solely to please us. We don’t like being reminded that we are all mortal. And if we so choose, we can choose not to encounter the reality of pain. We can simply look back down into that little touchscreen, and let the reality of those who would be comforted by our presence disappear.
We are shattered because we have been separated from one another, and those who experience brokenness in life are too often warehoused or separated or squirreled away from the community. We don’t encounter age, because the old-old are inconvenient. We don’t encounter those with broken minds, because having their group homes in our community might reduce our property values. And although death and dying are an inescapable part of life, it’s hidden from view.
So as much as we might feel the urge to separate ourselves from those who are broken, because they make us feel mortal and distract us from our Facebooking, James reminds us that we are all called to be agents of God’s wholeness in creation.
Those who are suffering and broken are to be no more separate from us than our own children would be if they were the tiny snotty ones. When you bring that little one home sick, you don’t think for a moment about isolating them or keeping away. You brush their hot little foreheads with your lips to test their fever. You hold them tight, even as they cough right into your face. You stay by their side, gently pressing that cold compress to their forehead. You do this because you love them. The love God asks us to bear for those who suffer around us is no less deep.
As much as we might want to separate ourselves from things that remind us that we are creatures of dust, and as hard as it can be sometimes to cast ourselves free of the bonds of distance and distraction, that’s what both James and Jesus challenge us to do.
Seek those places where healing of body and spirit are yearned for, and be present there.
Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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