Do we want to be made well?

 Acts 16:9-15; Revelation 21:22-22:5; John 5:1-9

Yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling in West Virginia v. EPA was a prime example of putting lesser interests before the urgent task of doing all we can to mitigate the existential threat of climate change, a threat that looms ahead so large that it already shades our daily lives. As I worked in my garden weeding and watering and worrying about what lies ahead for our nation and our planet, I remembered this question from John 5:1-9: Do you want to be made well?

The parish where I serve, Church of the Resurrection in Omaha, worshiped outdoors on Rogation Sunday, May 22. I preached, using the texts for the Sixth Sunday in Easter (Year C) and focusing on that passage where Jesus asks the question that we might ask ourselves anew in light of yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling. Do we want to be made well?

This question lingers in my mind not only because of yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling, but perhaps even more so because of the reaction to it even by people who question the ruling. This SCOTUS decision, while affecting everyone, was spoken of as a political loss or a bad precedent apart from, and often with no mention of, its heartbreaking effect on all living things. It seems that we simultaneously don’t understand the magnitude of what is unfolding as the planet warms and also lack the imagination or initiative to make large-scale changes that would mitigate climate change. Like depressed medical patients, we know something is wrong, but don’t want to hear the diagnosis or do anything to feel better. (And maybe everything else going on from the pandemic to gun violence to the erosion of our democracy has us collectively in this mental state.)

Rogation Sunday comes to us in the Episcopal Church from the English tradition of processing around the boundaries of a village’s fields and pastures, marking the boundaries — a useful practice in a time when few people could read — and blessing the land while praying for a good growing season. Here’s the body of this reflection on boundaries and being open to Jesus’s offer of healing. 

When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, [Jesus] said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” (John 5:6)

Our Scripture readings this morning are those for the Sixth Sunday in Easter, but happily for our Rogation Sunday observance, they contain images that resonate with being outdoors. 

There’s a place of prayer by the river outside the city gates in today’s reading from Acts.

In Revelation, we heard about the light-filled holy city, not up in the clouds, but right here on earth. The river of the water of life flows right down the main street, with fruit trees growing together along the riverbanks. Scientists have in recent years begun to understand that trees thrive in community, communicating with and supporting one another through fungi along their root systems. it’s a lovely image to contemplate as we sit here under our own beautiful trees!

Our Gospel lesson also provides an image of water, but this one works differently. The pool by the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem was supposed to contain healing water that became effective when the waters were stirred up or troubled. The belief was that the first person to get in the pool when the water was stirred up would be healed. That’s why the man who has spent his days lying by the pool for 38 years hasn’t been healed yet. With no one to help him get into the pool and an inability to move quickly, he never got in the pool at just the right time. But our Gospel lesson in the end isn’t a story about inaccessible healing water — about what doesn’t work — but about Jesus’s power to heal. 

Jesus comes along and asks an important question, “Do you want to be made well?” It’s always best to ask, to find out if the man truly wants to be healed but has never been able to access healing, or if the explanation he gives Jesus is closer to an excuse for not leaving what may have become a comfortable routine after 38 years. A key moment in this story is when, after acknowledging the bleak reality of his situation, the man affirms his desire to be healed by trusting Jesus when Jesus tells him to get up, pick up his mat, and walk. The inaccessible water cure wasn’t working for him. Jesus offers a real choice, a choice between drifting along accepting the only daily routine the man could imagine after all those years and accepting instead a new way that offered hope and true healing.

“Do you want to be made well?” is a good question for all of us to consider on Rogation Sunday as we tap into the tradition of marking boundaries and asking for God’s blessing. Alongside our Scripture texts this morning, what theologians sometimes label the text of the natural world  — our observations and reason — science — can help us think about boundaries and our desire to be made well.

We don’t have village boundaries here where we’re gathered today, but we do have property boundaries and personal boundaries and, less well known but of primary importance, planetary boundaries. Johan Rockstrom and other scientists have looked at what it takes to maintain a “safe operating space” for humankind, a planet where humans — and the diverse network of other living things on which our lives depend — can thrive. They came up with a set of planetary boundaries in nine different categories. The idea is that in each of these nine categories, there is a safe zone — a stable place where we can thrive, a danger zone — a place of instability, and, beyond that, a point of no return — a place where we have marched right on through the danger zone boundary and done irrevocable harm to the systems on which we depend. 

There’s a Netflix film called Breaking Boundaries about their work. It’s sobering because we are far into the danger zone in some areas, but it’s also hopeful. As David Attenborough notes toward the beginning of the film, knowledge of the boundaries “gives us hope because they show us how we can fix things.” 

Several of us are old enough to remember when our knowledge about the dangers we faced from destruction of Earth’s ozone layer resulted in global policy changes about the use of ozone-depleting chemicals. That global cooperation pulled us back into the safe zone of that boundary before we barreled all the way through the danger zone.

But we aren’t doing so well in other areas, such as climate change and loss of biodiversity. The possibility of our national and global  political leaders cooperating on pulling us back into the safety zone in these areas seems less possible — though not impossible — than it did back in the 1980’s when we did the right thing about the ozone layer. 

Do we want to flourish on a healthy planet? Do we want to be healed? Then we must acknowledge collectively, in our political institutions, our churches, and our economic lives that there is something that needs healing. A look at the top news stories each day and a listen in to our conversations with one another reveal a big hole where acknowledgment of the danger of environmental collapse should be heard.

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The man by the pool had his hopes so focused on the water in the pool that he nearly missed Jesus, the source of real healing. Later in this chapter of John’s Gospel, when the man is walking around carrying his mat on the Sabbath, the religious authorities ask him why he is carrying something on the Sabbath, and he says the man who healed him told him to do it. They ask who healed him, and the man doesn’t know who it was. The man hadn’t been looking for any source of healing other than the pool and hadn’t paid much attention to anything else.

This man had drifted along for 38 years doing the same thing day after day even though it wasn’t working. It was all he could imagine. We are doing the same thing with our planetary sickness, as it were. We say we want to be healed, but we don’t change anything. We passively accept the story we’ve been told about where we should focus our hopes, and we nearly miss Jesus and the life-giving alternative that his way offers us.

If you listen to our national conversation, our parallel to the pool by the Sheep’s Gate, our idea of where our hopes lie, has to do with The Economy (with a capital E), a longing to return to a near mythical business as usual. If we could just get the system running a little better, we think, everything would be fine. And so year after year we chase after the same thing: the same systems of profit and loss, wealth for a few and, increasingly, poverty or near-poverty for way too many, winners and losers,

and ever increasing emissions of greenhouse gases. 

“The Economy” in the sense of business as usual tends to sort us into groups. This is contrary to God’s kingdom, where there are no barriers between Us and Them. An economy, on the other hand, a more just economy that emphasizes the common good rather than wealth and power for a few, one that provides renewable energy,  accessible healthcare, and robust public transportation, can bring us together rather than tearing us apart.

We aren’t making the immediate and full-scale change from fossil fuels to renewable energy because we cling to the old Economy. Too many decisions around Covid have placed the Economy ahead of the welfare of the groups of people — based on income, age, ability, and race — no surprises there — who then become more vulnerable to the disease. The Economy was a big piece of the Confederacy’s rationale for slavery. Now it’s the rationale for an unlivable minimum wage and a lack of benefits, including medical care, for many workers.

Business as usual isn’t working for us, just as the pool wasn’t working for the man lying on his mat. And this misplaced faith is worse than useless, because it keeps us from fixing things, from doing very doable things, to prevent environmental collapse and a whole host of other problems.

We as the Church as well as individual followers of Jesus must decide whether we continue to trust and enable the powers that be — business as usual — or follow Jesus in a more focused way than we have in the past. This is, I think, the root of the tension in the Episcopal Church as we continue to navigate and, I hope, find our way out of these turbulent years in our nation. Our ability to thrive, to have abundant life, depends on our marking and choosing to stay within our planetary boundaries, and that’s incompatible with choosing business as usual instead of Jesus’s vision of God’s kingdom.  The Episcopal Church’s historic deference to wealth and privilege while Jesus waits for us to follow the healing ways of God’s kingdom is as useless to us as the Sheep’s Gate pool was to the people languishing beside it.

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Our sign out here on 30th Street describes Church of the Resurrection as a “culturally diverse family united in God’s love”. As we live into that vision our parish lives into being a little piece of God’s kingdom. God’s kingdom brings us together instead of keeping us apart. 

I suspect more and more that the unity of God’s kingdom is not only God’s dream for humankind in all of our wonderful diversity, but for all living things. The old Man vs. Nature idea goes out the window when we consider our place in the web of life. When studies of animal behavior show planning, logical thinking, and, most of all, compassion among other animals that we used to think were so different in kind from ourselves, when we find evidence of trees living in complex forest communities, that’s reason to suppose that the kingdom of God would have us living not only as a human family but as a widely diverse community of living things united in God’s love. 

Do we want to be made well? Let’s mark our planetary boundaries well and thoughtfully, let’s pray for God’s blessings, and when we get discouraged, let’s remember the promises embedded in today’s Collect: God’s promises exceed all that we can desire, God has prepared for us such good things as surpass our understanding. 

When we focus on following Jesus instead of the things that aren’t working for us, we can thrive in ways we can’t even imagine. 

Preached by Archdeacon Betsy Blake Bennett at Church of the Resurrection, Omaha, Nebraska, May 22, 2022

Good Friday Grief

Our observance of Good Friday brings us into the reality of grief. Through the Good Friday liturgy, we deepen our sense of Jesus’s suffering and of the profound grief of his mother and his followers. Jesus’s trial and crucifixion happened long ago and far away, but because Jesus is for us a very real presence whom we name as both Lord and friend, the story touches us deeply.

Often as we allow ourselves to enter into the story and share in the grief of his followers who witnessed this event firsthand, we find ourselves connecting this deep, cosmic grief — our sorrow at the brutality that nailed God Incarnate to a cross — to our own personal experiences of loss and grief. Sometimes we experience a connection with a familiar grief around the death of a loved one, while other times we are surprised by what surfaces. Sometimes we find ourselves consciously grieving a loss we had kept at arm’s length, something we weren’t even conscious that we were grieving. 

Some of us are conscious of our grief around the losses of life and place connected to climate change. Psychologists are aware of a growing number of people experiencing grief connected to climate change. The combination of species extinction with the loss of human lives to climate-related floods, storms, and fires is layered in with all the other global concerns that are connected with grief: the pandemic, the loss of life and the lack of humanity in Russia’s gruesome attack on Ukraine, gun violence here in the United States. 

I know that few people I’ve talked to since the most recent UN IPCC working group report came out have heard anything about it, and I’ve noticed that the floods in South Africa — the result of the “deadliest storm on record” in South Africa — haven’t received much coverage in the United States. However, since the same global changes that contribute to the large-scale catastrophes being experienced now and forecast to occur in the future to some degree — depending on how well we respond to the warnings in the IPCC reports — also contribute to changes close to home, I expect there is some degree of awareness even if we ignore the bigger picture when the seasons seem “off” or the weather seems “really strange”. 

Good Friday focuses on Jesus’s death on the cross. The full meaning of the Easter message of hope, of love having the final word, depends on Jesus death being real. If we try to deny his death on the cross, the Easter message is diminished. Good Friday invites us to experience our grief so that we might fully live into the salvation story we proclaim at Easter.

Acceptance of the realities that bring grief near is a necessary part of healing. Certainly we will not begin to heal our biosphere until enough people feel the grief of what we are losing. For me, and I suspect for others who pay attention to climate change, the death of Jesus on the cross is connected with the unnecessary deaths resulting from catastrophic events related to floods, storms, drought, and melting ice, with the loss of entire species, and the loss of places and nuances of seasons that will never again be the same in our lifetimes. Good Friday teaches us that we can somehow bear the grief, that it’s okay to open our eyes and see the reality all around us.

Maundy Thursday

 Love in a profit-driven system

We call today Maundy Thursday because we focus on Jesus’s last evening with his disciples when he washed their feet after supper and then gave them the commandment — the mandatum — to love one another.

Our Maundy Thursday Gospel (John 13:1-17, 31b-35) also tells us that before the Last Supper had begun, Judas had decided to betray Jesus. Matthew (Matthew 26:15) says that Judas had agreed to betray Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. 

Hearing the story of Judas’s betrayal alongside the biblical account of Jesus’s last evening with his disciples, including the commandment to love one another, makes me wonder how Judas could have valued Jesus’s life so little. How could Judas betray Jesus for thirty pieces of silver? How can any of us place a price on the life of another person? When we have a choice between loving one another or getting some money, why do we so often choose money? 

The most blatant examples in our modern world of selling out someone’s life for a profit aren’t a temptation for most of us. We would never think of trafficking another person for a handful of money or hiring ourselves out as hitmen. However, we are tempted to tolerate, and sometimes even advocate for, policies that put a price on human life.

Not very far into the Covid pandemic, as vaccinations were just becoming available, there was some discussion about whether older Americans should be willing to sacrifice our lives for the sake of the economy. This rested on the premise that the main reason for businesses shutting down and for workers and students being told to stay home was to protect the people most vulnerable to dying from Covid — the elderly and people with certain underlying medical conditions. Those advocating sacrificing us for the sake of the economy were engaged in a more sophisticated form of placing a price on the lives of other people. Even now, with vaccinations available to everyone age 5 and above, economic concerns are driving decisions that set aside practices that decrease the spread of Covid even though our youngest children remain unvaccinated and adults with certain medical conditions are similarly vulnerable. We are placing a price on the lives of our little ones, choosing money instead of love.

Similarly, our willingness to choose short-term profit over life itself underlies the political and economic policies that have brought us to such an urgent place in the work of keeping our planet habitable. (See UN climate report: It’s ‘now or never’ to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees.) A 2019 study found a shocking loss in bird populations in North America; we have lost 1 in 4 birds in the past fifty years. Climate change coupled with habitat loss and other environmental stressors has us in the midst of the Sixth Mass Extinction, with accelerated loss of both plant and animal species. Our lives, of course, are intertwined with the lives of all other living things. We are placing a price on the lives of all living things — ourselves included — choosing money instead of love.

In the Gospel account, Judas realizes too late the reality of what he has done. He had allowed the lure of an immediate profit to take his focus from what he knew deep down was the right and loving way to live. It was too late for Judas. While the distortion of our priorities has resulted in much permanent loss, it’s not too late for us to change course and give love priority over immediate profit. In the long run, societies that value the welfare of all living things will be better off than societies where some people make big profits while others, both human and non-human, suffer. 

We can create new systems that prioritize life over short-term economic gain. We can love one another.

Palm Sunday 2022: Silencing truth

Luke 19:28-40

Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”

According to Luke's Gospel, Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey and people shout, "Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!" But right away, some of those with religious power in Jesus’s day tried to silence the truth that Jesus lived and taught, the Living Truth that is the Christ. 

History shows us that those in power will go to great lengths to hide the truth if the truth might get in the way of what they want. Sometimes they silence the truth directly, by forbidding speech — “Teacher order your disciples to stop” — or censoring the written word. Often there will be active promotion of the opposite claim, the lie, in a way that makes people question the truth. Russia’s campaign at home to convince people that Russian soldiers are conducting a “military exercise”, not a war, combines the tactics of forbidding the truth to be published or spoken with an advertising campaign. 

In the United States, the truth can simply be buried when major media outlets ignore it. On Wednesday this week climate scientists around the world protested to being attention to the urgent message in the IPCC report that was released on Monday. You may not have heard about this, as it was covered by few major news outlets. I knew about it because I follow climate scientists on social media. Climate scientist Peter Kalmus wrote a moving piece for The Guardian about the frustration — the desperation — of trying over and over again to get us to pay attention to the facts about climate change that should be spurring us to immediate large-scale action. How do we counter indifference and purposeful silence?

Jesus said that if his followers who were calling out “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” were silenced, all of creation down to the stones, the earth itself, would cry out. Nature has been crying out close to home for Americans this week, with another round of violent storms in the southeastern United States and dangerously high winds and wildfires in the Plains. 

Many people affected by these storms won’t connect them to climate change, and it’s not possible to connect any particular weather event to climate change. What we do know is that overall, warmer global temperatures result in the sort of instability that products violent storms and high winds. And what I’ve discovered in talking with people who aren’t particularly attuned to climate change is that they do know that something is different, something is “off”. Older people are eager to tell you what they have observed about changes in storm patterns and planting seasons and bird migrations in their own lifetimes. The people I talk with might not say the words “climate change”, but because they observe what happens outdoors, they are aware of climate change on some level. 

The hymn “My song is love unknown” (#458, The Hymnal 1982) breaks my heart open every year as I listen to music during Holy Week. The words, written by Puritan minister Samuel Crossman in the 1600’s, name the mix of grief and love in the Passion Gospel that is typically read after the Liturgy of the Palms in Episcopal Churches. The third verse of the hymn says:

Sometimes they strew His way,

  and His sweet praises sing;

resounding all the day

   hosannas to their King.

Then 'Crucify!'

    is all their breath,

 and for His death

    they thirst and cry.

We often act irrationally when we are grieving. We deny the grief, even the truth of the cause of the grief, at the same time that our knowledge of the grief and loss we are denying runs deep. 

As Holy Week progresses, we turn liturgically from the hosannas of Palm Sunday to the demands for Jesus’s crucifixion, and to his trial, the mocking and torment, the carrying of the cross, and the crucifixion of Jesus, the Christ, the incarnation of truth and love. As the story continues, the truth is not completely lost. One of the men crucified beside Jesus, the centurion keeping guard, and the women who had followed him from Galilee and stayed where they could stand in witness all see and acknowledge the truth. The story we tell during Holy Week can help us see more clearly what is happening now in the world around us and discern how to serve in the name of Christ at this weighty moment in history.

Looking Toward Holy Week 2022

 Monday of this week, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published the conclusions of Working Group 3, the group of scientists looking at what humankind needs to do to reduce the effects of climate change. 

From one perspective, the report was hopeful, as the group did indeed list specific actions we can take and a timetable of when we need to have these actions in place in order to escape the worst consequences of climate change. From another perspective, the report was disheartening, emphasizing the urgency of making big policy changes and the nearly unthinkable consequences of failing to act quickly. 

The UN News published this article — UN climate report: It’s ‘now or never’ to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees — summarizing some of the key points and the comments of UN leaders.

The next three years are critical, and we know the world is occupied with other matters — matters both significant and trivial — that make it hard to imagine that the world’s governments and corporations will make the large-scale changes that the challenge demands. And yet, we also know that even if it is unimaginable, it is still possible.

The timing of this report in relation to the church calendar called me to reflect on places where the elements of both our hope and our despair about climate change intersect with some of the themes of the texts and liturgy we will be meeting during Holy Week. Climate change is one of several big, serious issues that make this point in history more challenging than most, and all of these issues are intertwined with one another. We come into this Holy Week different people in a different church than we knew in years past, a church coming to grips with an ongoing pandemic, national and global political instability, a new awareness and admission of racism, and, underlying it all, a knowledge that seasonable weather as we knew it when the 1979 Book of Common Prayer first appeared is becoming rarer even as destructive storms, droughts, and fires increase. 

Even people who never read or hear the often buried news stories about the IPCC reports know on some level that something is different, something is off. There is unacknowledged, often unconscious grief; there is anxiety; there is a yearning for hope, for a feeling that we can do something meaningful to meet this crisis. 

I know that for me, any attempt to skate through Holy Week and Easter without engaging this crisis at least in my own reflections as I prepare, if not also in my preaching and conversations during the week, would result in a failure to share the Good News with a world more in need of good news than ever. In the days ahead, I hope to share some of those reflections as we prepare to tell each other again the story that has formed us into a people of hope in the face of despair, of love in the face of hate. 

Candlemas 2022: Shedding Some Light and Finding Some Hope

Call it Candlemas or the Presentation of Our Lord (as we do in The Book of Common Prayer 1979) or even, as most people in the United States do, Groundhog Day, this day forty days after Christmas and midway between the Winter Solstice  and Spring Equinox marks a subtle turning of the seasons. Even this year, when February 2 finds most of Nebraska in frigid temperatures and other parts of the Midwest and Plains under winter storm watches and warnings, there is a noticeable difference in the slant of the sunlight and the length of days that helps us know in our bones that spring is on its way. 

This day on the church calendar offers rich stories and prayers for reflection. Even though the church’s texts for the day have no immediate connection to concerns for caring for the planet or its people and other creatures, a subtle connection is there. I wonder whether these texts with images of fire and light connect so easily yet indirectly to caring for the earth because some old European calendars considered this the beginning of spring.

Today’s Eucharistic reading for the Presentation of Our Lord (Luke 2:22-40) tells the story of Mary and Joseph taking the infant Jesus to the temple. Simeon recognizes Jesus as “a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel” and blesses him, and Anna, an elderly woman who is a prophet living in the temple, begins to praise God and talk about the child.

Denise Levertov wrote a short poem called Candlemas. (Read the poem here, or find it in Levertov’s collection The Stream & Sapphire: Selected Poems on Religious Themes.) Speaking of Simeon, Denise Levertov wrote:

What depth 

of faith he drew on,

turning illumined

towards deep night.

Simeon’s turn towards the deep night brings us beyond his joyful declaration that he has seen the Lord’s salvation to his words to Mary: “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed…and a sword will pierce your own soul too.” It takes a certain depth of faith, a firm foundation, for Simeon toilet himself look beyond the wonder of the moment with this blessed infant to the difficult times Simeon sees in Jesus’s future.

Deep faith like Simeon’s offers a place to ground ourselves in times like ours. This week HBCU’s have endured threats of violence, we heard about books being banned from school libraries and classrooms, and even though the number of Covid-19 cases is finally heading downward again, deaths from the omicron surge continue. And, of course, we face the effects of climate change, which are both unfolding around us in ever more apparent ways and yet, because of their magnitude, exist nearly beyond our imagination. Awareness of the reality of what is happening as our world warms can result in feelings of hopelessness. This hopelessness slides easily into cynicism, a feeling that there is nothing to be done and no reason to do anything significant to try to change things. On the other hand, some people handle the situation by embracing false hope, either denying that anything significant is happening at all or supposing that a few changes here and there — but nothing that changes our way of life very much — will be sufficient to magically return our climate to stability. (False hope is the coinage of greenwashing and of political crumbs thrown to environmentalists.)

Deep faith offers an alternative to both cynicism and false hope. Deep faith turns to the darkness, the “deep night”; deep faith sees the reality of the loss of species and climate stability and acknowledges it. But instead of turning away or being swallowed by the darkness, deep faith allows us to be illumined and reflect some of that light into the reality of the world around us. 

Deep faith tells us that our prayers and our actions will have some profound meaning, that our efforts are worth something even if we don’t get the results for which we fervently pray. Deep faith assures us that God is good and all will be well even when we can’t envision what “all will be well” could mean in a rapidly warming world. 

Deep faith sustained Mary after Simeon told her, “a sword will pierce your own soul too” and in her future when she experienced the pain of seeing her son suffer.  It can be our sustenance in 2022 and in the years ahead. Being intentional about tending to our souls, to growing our faith deeper, is essential to the church’s response to environmental degradation and to all the other challenges that we cannot ignore if we follow Jesus’s commandment to love our neighbors.

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This post is updated from one published on February 2, 2015.