A few years ago when I was at my last church while on vacation I went to
church and then to a place called the Shwarma Queen for lunch. That's Middle Eastern food. When I got there to my surprise it was closed
on Sunday. I had to settle for Subway. How dare they ruin my Sunday after-church
eating plans? Hopefully you know I'm
joking. Actually, I suspected they were
Christian and likely from Lebanon.
Instead of cursing them I asked God to bless them for having the devotion
to close on Sunday.
I don't think I would be too far afield to say that we all are a bit
amazed anymore when we discover businesses that are closed on Sunday especially
restaurants. Sunday after church is
usually the third busiest meal in the restaurant business. Even though the church crowd is known for
being the worst complainers and stingiest tippers restaurants tolerate us for
our business. When I was a child only
the odd restaurant and gas station/convenience store were open. Now, it’s the odd business that’s closed (and
yes we view them as odd) and worse, Sunday mornings are now fair game for
children’s sporting events which only pits church in a losing bout.
Over the past fifty years this cultural change has come upon us and it’s
not that it wasn't protested. Sadly, those
who did protest were usually vilified as religious extremists – Pharisees, like
the man in our passage, or legalists and fundamentalists. In the big picture, the loss of a national
Sunday Sabbath is simply part of the fall of cultural Christianity in the
Western world signalling that Christianity is no longer the default religion of
North America.
This has been a source of great anxiety for the North American Church
particularly the mainline denominations. But it has not made us anxious enough to really
change our ways. An
interesting fact about human beings is that when we are told that our
lifestyle, our daily habits, are killing us and that death will be imminent
within a few years if we do not change our ways only 20% of us will make the
necessary changes. 80% either will not
or cannot change. The statistics get grossly
worse when it’s a group of people.
Statistically speaking, in a group of forty people 20% means only eight people
who are actually capable of making changes.
If the key leaders of the group are not among the eight, the likelihood
of change is nil.
I have been in ordained ministry for 19 years now and I have had
exposure to many different congregations either as their minister or as a
representative of Presbytery. I have
noticed in nearly every church I have worked with that though they realized the
need to change or face grave financial challenges and/or death they did little
more than try to find creative ways to continue on as they always had.
It makes me think of this woman here in Luke’s Gospel who was bent over
for 18 years. In the Greek Luke says
that she had a “spirit of sickness” or “spirit of weakness” that was bending
her over and making her unable to stand upright. I don’t think he meant a demon was doing this
to her. I think he meant she was sick in
her disposition, in her mental and emotional state, and this sickness was symptomatic in her body, causing her to bend over further and further and not be able to
straighten up. More over, what was going
on with her body was affecting her thinking.
Ask any doctor, there’s a huge connection between mental health and
physical health. A sick spirit can make
for a sick body and sick body for sick spirit.
And in the end, this sickness has drastic consequences for our
relationships.
Bent over as she was, how do you think this women felt? What do you think her thoughts were? She would have to be one rare blossom in the
Royal Botanical Gardens not to be depressed, bitter, and hopeless. Imagine not being able to see any more than the patch of ground right at your feet. The pain must have been unreal. No self-worth.
Imagine not being able to look someone in the face and it be painful
even just to turn your head so you can look up at somebody who is only looking
down at you and seeing first and foremost what’s wrong with you. Imagine people thinking you’re cursed for
having done some horrible hidden sin that you won’t confess.
As I said a moment ago, I’ve been ministering for just over 18 years now
and most of the churches I have worked with have been bent over with a spirit
of weakness. We are stuck in seeing our
declining situation and have grown sadder and weaker and more hopeless and
we’ve resigned ourselves to the fact that we will die and there’s nothing we
can do about. We try things but in all
honesty these things are only meant to keep us doing what we’ve always done. We are stuck in seeing ourselves and our
world and the role the church and Christians play in it in a particular way
that is skewed by Christianity having been the default religion in this culture
and now that we are not we are bent over with a spirit of weakness.
Tripp Fuller who hosts a podcast called Homebrewed Christianity said the
other day: “We are like fish swimming around in a dirty fishbowl. Everything we see is skewed by the fact that
we are swimming around in our own poop and pee.
And, it’s not that our scales are dirty.
It’s that the water needs to be changed so that we can see clearly.”[1] Sorry for the crude example, but my seven-year-old
daughter has a fish and I know exactly what he means. Apart from some pretty hefty parental
intervention that fish would have died a long time ago.
We are stuck in a fishbowl where the only way we can really imagine
doing church is the way we’ve always done it.
From our “fishbowl” we look out onto a world in which we seem to believe
that everybody out there is thinking about God and wants to please God. We seem to believe that they believe Sunday’s
are sacred and that they feel that participating in church is integral to a
meaning-filled, God-filled life. We seem
to believe that they are going to show at church and swim in the comfort-filled
fishbowl of our dirty water that needs to be changed. Though we
think about God and value church, the majority of people out there do not. Quite frankly, they are anti-God – at least,
anti the God we’ve been presenting. If
Sunday is sacred to them it is because it is their only day off. These folks just aren’t going to up and
decide to come back to church because they know church participation is
integral to a meaning-filled, God-filled life.
I don’t think we need to get out of the fishbowl, but we do need to get
our water changed so that we can see what’s going on out there more clearly. Unfortunately for us, what is needed in the
church today is that we do the hard work of changing the way we imagine the world
around us. It’s not simply for the
survival of our congregations that we need to be concerned. More so, we need to be concerned that the
Gospel of Jesus Christ and the love of God is not being proclaimed out there in
our communities now that people don’t and won’t come to church and frankly
couldn’t care less.
Instead of trying to imagine what it was like for this lady to see the
world from her bent over position lets try to imagine what it was like for her
to see standing straight up. That would
be seeing the world of faith. Chesley
and Southampton haven’t had the pleasure of tolerating me the last two
Sunday’s, but here in Dornoch and up in Chatsworth I have been talking about
what faith is. Faith is the sphere of
reality in which God is making his plans and purposes for his creation
actualize. God promises and it
happens. By his Word, Jesus Christ, in
the power of the Holy Spirit God causes us to become participants in this
sphere of reality that will ultimately become all of reality.
Faith is like a fishbowl that is growing ever bigger. When at the word of Jesus that spirit left the woman, she stood up straight, she stood up into the sphere of reality called faith. To speak of faith from our end is not to speak of things like subjective beliefs about God, about what I chose to trust and believe. Rather, it is to talk about faithfulness and living in the way that is proper to Jesus and the way of the cross; the way of the one who danced on the Sabbath and cured lame. In this woman’s case, she simply stood up straight and learned to live from that perspective.
Faith is like a fishbowl that is growing ever bigger. When at the word of Jesus that spirit left the woman, she stood up straight, she stood up into the sphere of reality called faith. To speak of faith from our end is not to speak of things like subjective beliefs about God, about what I chose to trust and believe. Rather, it is to talk about faithfulness and living in the way that is proper to Jesus and the way of the cross; the way of the one who danced on the Sabbath and cured lame. In this woman’s case, she simply stood up straight and learned to live from that perspective.
In all our churches since this Cooperative was formed we have had a sense of renewal, of Jesus saying "Stand up! You're weakness has left you." But, there's still some standing up that we need to do to see the world differently and actually change. We cannot let Jesus words fall on deaf ears. Jesus has freshens the water lets stand up and see what's different. We cannot let this just be a cheaper way of being and dong the things that we have always been and done.
How do we change the water? Well, the way we see the world is shaped by the questions we carry within us. We shape our lives around how we answer those questions. Think of a child. If a child spends her days wondering things like “where do bugs come from”, “what makes grass grow”, or “how do rockets work”, that child is going to go in a profoundly different direction than the child who is preoccupied by “what’s wrong with me that other kids won’t play with me” or “why do people make fun of me?”
How do we change the water? Well, the way we see the world is shaped by the questions we carry within us. We shape our lives around how we answer those questions. Think of a child. If a child spends her days wondering things like “where do bugs come from”, “what makes grass grow”, or “how do rockets work”, that child is going to go in a profoundly different direction than the child who is preoccupied by “what’s wrong with me that other kids won’t play with me” or “why do people make fun of me?”
Looking at the women in our story here from Luke, it is easier for us to
imagine how she saw the world in her bent over condition than it is for us to
imagine what it was like for her to see the world from the perspective of being
healed by Jesus and standing straight-up.
Healed and straightened doesn’t look as much like "our fishbowl" filled
with dirty water as bent over does.
As congregations we need to begin to imagine ourselves as “the church
sent into the world” rather than “the church to which world the world must come
if it wants to get sorted out”. The
questions we need to stop preoccupying ourselves with are ones like “how can we
make our churches more friendly and welcoming and hospitable to our guests when
they come?” “What can we do to make
church more attractive?” Those questions
are the church version of “What’s wrong with me that nobody wants to play with
me?” They inadvertently lead us not to
change but simply to finding ways to continue to do the things we’ve always
done.
Rather, being “the church sent” means we are not expecting people to
come in our doors to meet us and maybe Jesus but are rather focused on joining
with Jesus and working in his ministry of being sent into the world to save and
heal it. We need to begin to ask not “how
hospitable am I when people show up at my house”, but rather “how good of a
guest am I when I show up at other peoples’ houses?” We need to be walking around our
neighbourhoods and communities prayerfully asking, “Jesus, what are you doing
in the life of that family that I can give voice to and participate in?” He will give us a sense of it. Stand up straight and get in the game.
Seeing from the perspective of being healed and straightened means I’m
not so focused on me, but on others. It
means that when we are in conversations with others we are going to
intentionally focus on listening to them as they share what’s going on in their
lives. It means praying for our
neighbours and letting them know that we have been praying about the concerns
they have shared with us.
Changing the questions we ask will change the way we see our
place in the world. The way we do life
inside the fishbowl of church will clarify and look more like the fishbowl of
faith. If we ask the questions we need
to ask as “the church sent into the world” we will begin to be the church sent
into the world and we will thrive. Amen.
[1] Paraphrase from “God Has Left the Building: Alan Roxbourgh Gets
(Post) Missional”; https://homebrewedchristianity.com
