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
