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.

*******

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.

*******

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

"Do you want to be made well?"

A sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter 2016
John 5:1-9

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

It was lovely this rainy morning to step into our newly repaired and painted sanctuary — the sort of delightful new thing that is in keeping with the Easter season.

This Sixth Sunday of Easter is Camp Sunday in our diocese, and we should hear more about that at announcement time. There’s something about spending time in the outdoors with new friends from across the diocese that makes the camp experience a consistent catalyst for spiritual growth for our children and teen-agers. And in harmony with the outdoor theme, today is also Rogation Sunday, the beginning of the traditional Rogation Days when we pray for a successful growing season and, as a sort of American update to the old English customs of Rogation, think about and pray about environmental stewardship.

For most of Omaha outside of our walls, though, this weekend is known more for the big Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting that brings lots of visitors here. One of the visitors this year, Dr. James Hansen, was here to advocate for a shareholders’ resolution on climate change. Dr. Hansen, a former climate scientist for NASA who is now a full-time climate advocate, also lectured at Creighton University Friday evening on the topic “Energy and Climate Change: How Can Justice Be Achieved for Young People?”

I’m pretty sure most of the people gathered at that lecture were unaware of the exquisite timing of having a leading climate scientist in our midst as we Episcopalians begin our annual observance of the Rogation Days, but it delighted me. In my work in environmental stewardship and environmental justice, I’m well aware of the very critical and uniquely challenging situation we are in with regards to climate change caused by global warming. Things are much more dire than people might guess from the disproportionately small amount of attention the news media and political establishment give climate change, and it’s tempting to be discouraged.

But as a Christian, I’m also aware of the hope in which we live always, no matter what. Hearing Dr. Hansen talk about the problems we face and possible solutions, and being in the company of more than 700 people who were willing to spend their Friday evening thinking about these things, was both sobering and heartening.

One of the questions for Dr. Hansen at the end of his talk was from a woman who said that when she had told a couple of other people that she was planning to go to a lecture about climate change, their reaction had been one of what she described as “fatalism” — basically the idea that there’s nothing we can do about this big problem, so why bother? Her question for Dr. Hansen was focused on how we can combat this fatalism: how can we help people feel empowered rather than fatalistic. Being immersed in this morning’s Gospel lesson, I realized how this new question about climate change can be answered at least in part by this old story from John’s Gospel.

This story has a lot to say about why we so often fail to do the things that would make us — and our planet — well, that would make us healthy, whole, and holy. And this story also tells us something about hope, especially the kind of hope that empowers us to take on big challenges.

This story in John’s Gospel is unlike the other Gospel stories about Jesus healing people. In the other stories, someone seeks out Jesus. Think of the story that precedes this morning’s lesson in John’s Gospel: the healing of the son of the royal official. John tells us that when the official heard that Jesus had arrived in Galilee, “he went and begged him to come down and heal his son, for he was at the point of death.” Jesus says the word, and on his way home the royal official learns that his son’s fever has left him. Or think of the man whose friends lowered him through the roof of a house lying on his mat when they couldn’t get near the door to bring their friend to Jesus for healing. Or think of the woman whose years of hemorrhaging had made her such an outcast that she didn’t dare to think of speaking to Jesus. But even she approached Jesus, though not in his direct line of sight, sure that if she could just touch the cloak of his garment she would be made well. In today’s passage, though, the situation is reversed: Jesus approaches this man who had been ill in some way for 38 years and asks him, “Do you want to be made well?”

It may seem an odd question to ask someone who shows up every day at the place where people go in hope of being healed, but then the man gives an odd answer. Instead of a simple, “Yes, I want to be healed”, he gives an explanation of why he hasn’t been healed. Tradition said that an angel periodically stirred up or “troubled” the water in the pool. The belief was that at the moment when the water was stirred up, it had healing properties, and the first person in the pool when the water was stirred up would be healed. The man explains to Jesus that he has no one to put him into the pool when the water moves, and that by the time he can make his way to the pool on his own, someone else always steps down into the water ahead of him.

In offering an explanation rather than an answer, this man may be telling Jesus more about why he doesn’t expect to be healed than about whether he wants to be healed. Maybe he can’t even make sense of wanting something that seems unattainable.

The puzzling thing is that even though what this man has done for years hasn’t worked in the past and is unlikely to work in the future, he keeps on doing the same thing day after day after day.

Why does he do that? It could be that, inaccessible as the pool is to him, it’s still the most accessible means of healing he knows. Maybe he continues his vigil by the pool because it’s his only hope of any sort. Or maybe it isn’t hope at all that keeps him coming back for another day of the same thing; maybe the familiarity of even this discouraging routine holds some sort of comfort that keeps him from changing what he does. His answer to Jesus’s question does indeed sound like the answer of a fatalist as much as it does someone with hope. That may be because there isn’t that much difference between false hope and fatalism. False hope is simply the optimist’s way of being fatalistic. Both work on the assumption that nothing we can do or are doing will make any difference; both assume that our fate and our present choices are unrelated.

False hope is magical thinking, wishing that the familiar thing we keep doing that isn’t helping us at all might magically produce the results we want.

I recall some students from my teaching days who wouldn’t read the books or engage in class discussions all semester yet hoped — in this false sense of hope, I assure you — that they might pull a good grade out of the course at the end of the semester.

That’s false hope. Real hope is something very different. The hope that Jesus offers is always real hope. In this story, we, the hearers of the story, begin to see hope the moment Jesus notices the man and speaks to him.

The startling beauty of the story lies in what Jesus does next. Having heard the non-answer to the question about whether this man wants to be healed, Jesus says, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” Jesus answers the explanation by cutting to an unimagined alternative. Jesus does just what we celebrate throughout the Easter season: he shows us something new and unexpected, creating a way where there was no way, creating hope where there was no real hope.

The sort of hope that Jesus brings isn’t a passive false hope that somehow everything will turn out well without our changing anything; Jesus brings genuine hope that calls us to act by embracing the new thing that Jesus offers. Real hope can feel risky because it calls us to abandon something familiar in favor of something we haven’t even fully imagined.

“Stand up, take your mat and walk” would be a cruel thing to say unless we somehow know, as Jesus seems to in this case, that the person really does have the capacity to get up and walk. Jesus simply calls us to do what we can do. When we do have the capacity to do something different – whether we had that capacity all along or have through an encounter with Jesus experienced the beginning of healing that we ourselves have the power to accept and complete – then being told to get up and walk is exactly what we may need. When we have the capacity to make different choices, to choose health over sickness, wholeness over brokenness, holiness over sin, then Jesus calls us to get up and do something.

Individuals, parishes, communities, and all of us on God’s good green Earth get stuck more often than we might like. Often when we get stuck in a bad place we put our energy into reciting to ourselves and to others our explanation of why we can’t do anything else instead of putting our energy into the disciplined work of getting up and doing something new. We might dodge the question “Do you want to be made well?”, or we might express a vague desire for our own lives and our common life to be better — maybe we even dream of the assurance of a stable climate that can continue to support human civilization and diverse forms of life on our planet — but our inaction and our sometimes contrary actions answer the question “Do you want to be made well?” with a resounding “No”.

Do we want to be made well? That’s a big question for all of us. Because if we want to become healthy, whole, and holy in our own lives, in our parishes and communities, and in the biosphere that sustains life on this planet, if we tell Jesus we want to be made well, we are also telling Jesus that we are ready to make some changes. We are telling Jesus we are willing to imagine with him a way to live that differs from what we are doing now, and we are saying we are willing to risk getting up and getting to work doing something new. Jesus invites us into his creativity; Jesus invites us to be empowered to engage our creativity and find a way for all of God’s children to have a chance at healthy, whole, and holy lives.

The words of this morning’s Collect remind us that God’s promises “exceed all that we can desire”. May we have the grace and imagination to believe God’s promises and accept the real hope Jesus offers us; may we have the grace to abandon false hope and fatalism in favor of the full life Jesus offers us all. Amen.

Preached on May 1, 2016 by Archdeacon Betsy Blake Bennett at Church of the Resurrection, Omaha, Nebraska 

3+ Gardens

Rogation Days

Gusty winds kept some of us in Nebraska from big home garden projects today, while others were out there somehow keeping everything anchored down and hoping for the best (e.g. no hail storms this evening) for plants being set out. All things being equal, today would be a big gardening day. Most obviously, it's Memorial Day, the third day of a long weekend at the beginning of the summer. Less known, but in some ways more relevant, because of the date for Easter this year – which determines the date of Ascension Day (June 2 this year) and all the other days from Easter through Pentecost – today is also the first of the three Rogation Days. Traditionally, Rogation Days are a time for prayers of petition, and particularly for prayers for the land and its newly planted crops and for special blessings for fields. Today, with our understanding of the way care for the environment affects our ability to grow crops, the Rogation Days invite our prayers not only for the fields closest to home, but for the entire planet.

At St. Stephen’s this Sunday we used the Rogation Day propers and observed Rogation Sunday. We talked about stewardship of creation in the homily and at a program afterwards launching our GreenFaith green certification work. We remembered the way this work is rooted in Scripture and in Anglican tradition, and also recognized the way our parish has always cared for the parish grounds.

St. Stephen’s is downtown, right on Route 30, in Grand Island. Surrounded by blocks where the only trees are fairly young, recent additions, our corner has mature trees that have been cared for through years when other downtown trees were neglected or removed. While we lack the spacious grounds of some of our suburban churches, we have managed over the years to find space for three small gardens: a prayer garden in the courtyard between the main church building and the St. Stephen’s Community Center; a memorial garden created by the Webb family near our red doors; and a new (two weeks old!) community garden – with vegetables and flowers for whoever wants them -- behind our youth center across the street from the main building. Despite a steady drizzle Sunday morning, we processed outside for the prayers of the people, remembering the needs of the world at the community garden and blessing this newest of our three gardens. Then we walked back across the street and remembered the departed (including those who died in service to our country) at the memorial garden. Finally, we processed down the alley and through the back gate of the prayer garden to pray for our own needs and those of others dear to us.

Processing from one area to another for different categories of prayers helped us remember that our Sunday prayers and petitions aren’t just for ourselves and our ten closest friends and relations, but for the whole church and the world. Simply being outdoors in the three gardens gave us a spirit of thanksgiving that can be lacking in our standard prayers. The simplicity of our Rogation liturgy made it possible for us to be at once prayerful and refreshed.

Being in a garden, digging in the dirt, helps keep us connected to the Creator; it gives us true spiritual grounding, sometimes in a profound way. Parish gardens, whether designed for prayer and contemplation or to provide food for people, help the members of the parish remember that our lives as Christians aren’t contained within the walls of our church buildings, and they can remind people passing by of God’s gifts to us, especially the gift of new growth. Our community garden is a gift for the parish and for the wider community, a sign of the open doors and open hearts that bring new growth of all sorts to our parish.

**

As noted in a July 6, 2008 post , gardens are designed for a variety of purposes in a variety of settings, but all have some spiritual benefits in common.

The rain (and perhaps the prayerfulness of the liturgy) kept cameras tucked away Sunday morning. Here is a before picture of the community garden area, a place in obvious need of some beautification! (We were relieved that a soil test showed lead levels well within the acceptable range.)

And here (click here) are some lovely slides of the prayer garden at St. Augustine of Canterbury in Elkhorn, a parish in a suburban setting where there is plenty of room for gardens. This prayer garden is listed with The Quiet Garden Trust, a network of gardens set aside for prayer and reflection.

The Day After

The 40^th Earth Day is now over, though events centered around it continue. Here in Nebraska, an event called Earth Day Omaha  was held last Saturday, while Earth Day Lincoln  is scheduled for tomorrow at Antelope Park. In between, there have been events large and small around the state, along with lots of television specials, news stories, and commercial events aimed at the day. At its best, Earth Day reminds us to care for our environment and to think about stewardship; at its worst, Earth Day allows us to put a band-aid on environmental problems, encouraging us to continue in our collective denial of the actual state of our environment.

An oil spill off of the coast of Santa Barbara in 1969 is said to have inspired Sen. Gaylord Nelson to propose the first observance of Earth Day.  Forty years later, one of yesterday’s headlines was about an oil rig that had been burning sinking into the Gulf of Mexico. Today we have been learning about the size and nature of the resulting oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico and what effects it may have on living things in the Gulf and along the coast.  The good news the day after Earth Day is that there doesn’t seem to be a major oil spill, though there is an oil slick that at the last report I heard measured ten miles by ten miles.

The lack of progress in some areas can be discouraging. However, an article by Seth Borenstein for the Associated Press that was carried in several newspapers on Earth Day noted areas of progress as well. Entitled Earth Day: No more burning rivers, but new threats, the article begins with the good news that the Cuyahoga River no longer is flammable and smog levels are down significantly in several cities.  

The question now is whether we can continue to make progress and make it rapidly enough to limit the effects of climate change and pollution to levels that prevent significant loss of individual human lives and whole species of plants and animals. Any resolve any of us felt on Earth Day to be better stewards and do more to improve the environment needs to be put into action. If progress is not being made quickly enough, then we will have to act with even more energy to make up what we can for the time that has been lost.

Earth Day is not part of our liturgical calendar; we in the church are still in Easter. The Sixth Sunday of Easter is Rogation Sunday, another good time to think about our stewardship of the Earth’s resources and to pray for God’s blessings on our efforts to use them well. Throughout the Easter season, though, we might contemplate the miracle of the resurrection and God’s assurance that out of death can come abundant life. The day after Earth Day may be clouded by discouraging circumstances, but we are people who always live in hope. Seeing for one day yesterday that many people were willing to participate in some sort of Earth Day activity or discover some small changes they might make that will make a big difference in the long run indicates that people do care about the environment; the work to be done is to increase the level of that care and public understanding about the work ahead of us.