Rev. Elizabeth Knott is a retired Presbyterian minister. In July of 1992 she participated in a seminar to Palestine-Israel which was co-sponsored by the Presbyterian Global Ministrie and Peacemaking agencies. The seminar became an unexpected transformative venture sending her back 32 times to the Holy Land. In 1993 se founded the volunteer ministry of PalCraftAid whose purpose has become to provide support, healing, and hope to Palestinian individuals and families. Through the importing and selling of Palestinian sculpted olivewhood and counted cross strich needle work to congregations, over $500,000 has been raised to various Palestinian organizations who offer critical life-sustaining sustaining ministrie to those in desperate need.

More information about Pal Craftaid and the Lenten Devotional can be found here.

Many thanks to Al and Carol for helping lead us with instruments, guidance, and hot cocoa!

We’ll jam again in a few weeks so keep looking for songs that you’d like for us to learn.

Getting married changes a relationship. Being married is different from living together. If you are married, you know this. And if you are a person of faith, it makes a difference whether your wedding is in a church or performed by clergy. It makes a difference to make your promises before God. Sometimes I’ll tell the couple that God is the third cord in the three-fold cord that Ecclesiastes 4 says is not quickly broken. It makes a difference to feel that God is a part of the relationship.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declared last week, “Proposition 8 serves no purpose and has no effect other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their family relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples” (http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/general/2012/02/07/1016696com.pdf ). The Court concluded that the Constitution doesn’t allow that. I had the court’s opinion in mind last Saturday, when the Presbytery of the Redwoods voted to send two overtures dealing with same-gender marriage to our denomination’s General Assembly (an overture is something like a bill before Congress). One overture would allow Presbyterian clergy to officiate at the weddings of same-sex couples. The other would change the definition of marriage in our Book of Order so that it says “two people” instead of “a man and a woman.” Now, these changes in Presbyterian policy and practice would not involve “reclassifying” family relationships, as ours is not a situation in which rights have been stripped away from people who once had them, as was the case with Proposition 8. Nevertheless, the Presbyterian Church’s current policy communicates that the marriages of same-gender couples do not have equal dignity to opposite-gender marriages; that they are not equally sacred and are not equally blessed. To the rest of the world, it looks as though we intend to demean the status and dignity of this group of people, their relationships, and their families.

We know the consequences of communicating that people are “less than.” This past week each of my daughters, separately, sent me a Rolling Stone article about how the anti-gay climate in one Minnesota town has led to a rash of teen suicides (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/one-towns-war-on-gay-teens-20120202). It is not far-fetched to say that depriving couples of the right to marry contributes to the treatment of gays and lesbians as second class, or worse.

The truth is that I have never, ever understood how gay marriage undermines straight marriage. I just don’t get it. I’m fairly certain that the only threats to my marriage are my pride and my anger and my laziness about commitment (and my husband’s but he isn’t here to defend himself so I’ll leave him out of this). Some of the best, most enduring, most monogamous relationships I’ve ever known are between two people of the same gender. But that isn’t why I supported these two overtures. I supported them because gay and lesbian people are equally human, equally children of God, should be treated with equal dignity and should have an equal opportunity to have their relationships blessed by the church, even if their relationships are no more ideal than the straight couples we marry – or no more ideal than our own.

We all need – and deserve – that third cord.

Last month when I was back home in Pittsburgh for Christmas, I was invited by my aunt to attend a worship service at a congregation which she has been recently attending. Attending my aunt’s church was a good experience for me because not only did I get to see my aunt and her family, but as a Presbyterian, I got to worship in a style that is different than how I normally worship. In this particular case, I was worshiping in a non-denominational contemporary church setting.

But while I had been to contemporary, non-denominational worship services before and wasn’t too surprised by some of the differences this church had from my Presbyterian traditions (especially their lack of liturgical robes, and printed church bulletins), I did have a problem when it came time to pass the peace. Because when I went to turn around and offered my firm, yet soft handshake to a woman who was sitting behind me, she looked at me with a puzzled look on her face as I stood there with my hand sticking out.

“A handshake?” she asked me as she grabbed me and started hugging me as if we were long lost friends who hadn’t seen each others in years “What are you,” she asked. “A Presbyterian?”

I don’t know what exactly gave my secret away!

Our scripture today is all about the power of one’s touch that goes well beyond a Presbyterian handshake. While Mark tells us a story about a man who is healed of leprosy with a simple touch, the truth is, it’s a story that goes much deeper than a man being cured of a disease.

For most of us, leprosy is something that is not as common in today’s world, at least in the United States. However, leprosy, which is often referred to today as Hansen’s disease, still exists in many parts of the world. In essence, leprosy is a painful disease of the skin which causes a person to have lesions all over their self and if left untreated, leprosy can cause damage to skin, nerves, limbs and even damage to one’s eyesight. But while having this disease was painful and caused disfigurement to ones skin, the social and psychological pains experienced by those who had leprosy was sometimes even worse than how one looked on the outside.

In Jesus’s time, people were absolutely terrified of catching leprosy from others. So much so, that if you had leprosy yourself, you were forced to be exiled from your family and from being in public places. The reason behind a lot of the social stigma that existed towards those who had this disease came from Jewish law. If you look in Leviticus 13, not only were the Israelites told how to identify a person with leprosy, it also told the Israelites how to deal with a person if they also had the disease. To them, those who had leprosy were just not individuals who were sick, but they were considered individuals who were ‘un-clean.’

In fact, verse 45 reads, “As for the leper who has the infection, his clothes shall be torn, and the hair of his head shall be uncovered, and he shall cover his mustache and cry, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ He shall remain unclean all the days during which he has the infection. He shall live alone; his dwelling shall be outside the camp.

For most of us, it’s hard to imagine what it would be like to have such a illness. An illness that not only brought you a lot of physical pain, but an illness that made you physically disfigured causing people to fear you and a law that required you to be exiled from your family and friends. But while our society has come far in the past 2,000 years in how we treat others who are suffering, the reality still exists that we still have a longer way to go.

When I was served in AmeriCorps as an undergraduate in college, I once was asked to lead a group of college students including myself to Atlanta, Georgia to work with the city’s homeless and AIDS population during our spring break. While I had led projects before, this project happened to be more difficult because while we had a great number of college students who wanted to spend the week doing volunteer work, we did not have a lot of students interested in going to Atlanta with us. And the truth is, I could understand why. Because despite the education we have today and all the campaigns to educate individuals about the issues of AIDS and homelessness, there were still a lot of stereotypes and fears people had of those who suffering with both of these.

Despite only having a small group of six students, the time we spent working with a small faith based non profit agency in Atlanta called the AIDS Interfaith Network, not only helped ourselves see beyond the social stereotypes we had of those living with HIV and AIDS, but it also put a human face and a human touch on those who are living with this disease.

One such moment happened when the six of us were eating lunch at the agency with a group of men who happened to be living with HIV. One of the men, a gentleman named James, took a moment to talk about his life and how being not only homeless, but being HIV positive, changed how people treated him.

“People have a lot of fear of us who have this disease,” he said. “And while people have compassion for what you are going through, I can still sense the fear they have of me. Fear they have that is so strong, they simply aren’t able to reach out and shake my hand when they greet me.”

The man on the street corner struggling with homelessness in San Francisco. The woman next door who has a physical disability. The man in San Quieten who is incarcerated for life. The orphan child is Kenya who is living with AIDS and hasn’t been able to find a loving home. The mother of four who is in rehab for the second time, trying to overcome her addiction to drugs. These are the ones, who just like the man with leprosy 2,000 years ago, are ignored, forgotten, and alienated by our society. And while we teach our children to have compassion for those who are struggling with these things, the reality exists that we ourselves are the ones who have this sense of fear and lack of understanding of the suffering that others experience.

It has been said before that one of the most powerful ways of sharing our love with one another is simply through the human touch. Whether it be through a hug, a pat on the shoulder, or even a Presbyterian handshake, we not only are able to send a message of comfort, but we are able to send a message of compassion merely by touching others.

The Rev. Dr. James Moiso, a retired Presbyterian pastor and mentor of mine, once told me a story about the power of the human touch which he learned about while serving in a congregation in Oregon. He said that for many years, it was accustom for his congregation to form a circle and hold hands after the benediction to pray. However, while this was a tradition in this particular congregation, he and the worship committee decided they were going to no longer do this tradition. However, one day a congregant, an older woman who was a widow and lived alone, found out about this possible change in the service and asked to speak with Rev. Moiso privately. In essence, she told him, “holding hands with people in the worship service is the only opportunity I have all week to have someone touch me,” she said.

For this woman, the suffering she experienced was the suffering of loneliness. And for her, that touch of someone’s hand every Sunday was a sense of healing for the pain which she must have felt.

In the book entitled “Lament for a Son” theologian and writer Nicholas Wolsteroff reflects through various writings his grieving process after the death of his 25-year-old son who died during a rock climbing accident. And during the series of reflections which captures his anger, pain, and his terrible sadness, he comes to the conclusion that not only was God with his son as he fell down that mountain, but that God shared in his suffering as he grieved the loss of his son. Especially since God also knew what it felt like to lose a child.

Wolsteroff writes:

“God is not the God of the suffers, but the God who suffers. The pain and fallness of humanity have entered into God’s heart. Through the prism of my tears, I have seen a suffering God.”

While the story of Jesus curing a man of leprosy seeks to teach us about the power of God and Jesus’s compassion on this man with the disease, the truth is, this story can be difficult for many of us. Not because the story is difficult to understand or is written in a context we can’t relate to in today’s society. But because like the man with leprosy, we too know what it’s like to desperately be seeking a cure for our suffering.

However, while all of us continue to find ourselves ‘in the waiting’ for a cure to the suffering we face in our lives, we also see an image of Jesus reaching out and touching this man in this story. And it’s through this image of Jesus that we see Jesus not only feeling this man’s suffering, but we see Jesus sharing his suffering. And it’s through that shared suffering that we see a healing presence brought into this man’s life.

Recently, a friend told me a story about growing up in a small rural Methodist congregation in her hometown and going to a weekly youth church club as a child. While looking back, she doesn’t have too many memories other than watching puppet shows, making crafts, and playing games with the other children, she said that her favorite part of the youth church club was when the pastor, a young woman they called Pastor Mary, would read bible stories to them while they ate their snacks. And even though the children would be so full of energy especially after eating so much sugary snacks, she recalled how Pastor Mary was never worn out and always had energy to embrace the children which she deeply loved.

However, as the weeks went by, the children started to see Pastor Mary less and less. Eventually the children learned that Pastor Mary was sick and needed their prayers. However, that is when the children, on their own, decided to go a little further. Finding a long roll of white paper, they dipped their hands in different colors of paint and placed them on this paper creating a banner with all their hand prints on it with their names listed underneath. The banner, which the church hung in its hallway read, “All Hands on You Pastor Mary.”

To this day my friend recalls the excitement the children had when Pastor Mary showed up to their youth church club to surprise the children. She also recalls how touched Pastor Mary was when she saw that banner with all the children’s hand prints on it. While this would be the last time my friend ever saw her pastor, she knew deep in her heart that Pastor Mary knew how much those hand prints of the children meant to her and how it was a healing touch in her life amidst her suffering. And even though the children may not have known how sick Pastor Mary was or what she was going through, Pastor Mary knew that she wasn’t going through her sickness alone.

The healing touch that comes from the hand of a friend as a man waits for the results of an important medical test. The healing touch that comes from that colleague at work who takes a moment and listens to a co-worker talk about her troubled marriage. The healing touch of the one who prays with a stranger. The healing touch of a warm smile of a woman that offers warm soup during a homeless shelter. The healing touch of holding hands with that person next to you during a prayer service. Even in the world which there is so much suffering, God is finding a way to bring healing into our lives.

Even just the few months I have been your intern, I have truly seen how the people in this church have reached out to those in need of a healing. From reaching out to those who are dealing with homelessness in Marin County and come to your church every week for food and shelter. To those you reach out to in your congregation dealing with health issues and personal struggles as you provide personal visits, phone calls, and prayer shawls, to reaching out through your support of social justice issues which aim to help those who are seeking to end oppression and discrimination, like Jesus, you are sharing the struggle of others. And its through this shared struggle you have with others, that God is working through you to bringing healing to those in need.

And while all of us will continue to be ‘in the waiting’ for the day that we do find a cure to our suffering, God wants us to know that until this day comes, you need to know are are not alone for God hares with us in our suffering. And its through the hands of those filled with warmth and compassion, that we are able to share our sense of suffering, as God brings us a healing touch in our lives during our wait for the cure.

Whoever you are, where ever your story begins, or what ever you are going through that no one else may be able to see or understand, know this; our God hasn’t forgotten you. Our God hasn’t stopped loving you. And no matter what long the walk for you may be, our God will be there with you every step of the way, even until the very end of the age. This my friends, is the healing presence of our God.

May it be so for you, and also for me.

Lay-ups, hook shots, prayer. Certainly, one of these things is not like the others. But is it also true that it “just doesn’t belong”?

A controversy arose last month because the organizers of the CYO basketball league in Marin County have decided that each game will begin with an adult – preferably one of the coaches – leading the kids in prayer. This is a change from years past. The organizers hope that the prayer move the players away from what one of the league representatives called the “changing tone” of youth sports (http://www.marinij.com/westmarin/ci_19691785).

The organizers have told the coaches that they don’t have to be the ones leading the prayers. They can find another adult. They also insist, “If a player isn’t interested in standing at half court (for the prayer), he can stand quietly and respectfully, or sit on the bench and wait for his team to come back.” So no one is forced to pray and no one is forced to lead the prayer. And yet there is still some sense that the requirement that the kids be exposed to prayer is somehow unreasonable and even offensive. One trustee of a West Marin school district where some of the games are played told newspaper reporters, “I’m going to put up a sign in front of the gym: ‘If you don’t pray in my school, I won’t think in your church.’”

OK, well, now we know what offensive looks like. I am stumped about a response to this insult, beyond inviting him to worship with us so he can experience for himself whether or not there is any thinking going on here. Or maybe referring him to some of the great thinker/theologians – although if what he means is that anyone who believes in God is incapable of “thinking,” then, really, there isn’t any point in offering him these riches.

CYO stands for Catholic Youth Organization. Is there someone who doesn’t know that? My first thought is, “You’ve been put on notice.” The basketball league is sponsored by the Roman Catholic Church. It’s their party, so to speak. And your son or daughter does not have to play CYO ball. This is in contrast to public school, which is state-supported and which children must attend (unless their parents send them to private school). I am in agreement with those Supreme Court decisions banning required or official prayer from public school under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Although, as someone has pointed out, as long as there are exams, there will always be prayer in school.

The argument is that CYO basketball is the only game in town. This isn’t, in fact true. The Y (which used to be the YMCA – the Young Men’s Christian Association) also has a league. It’s smaller but they don’t pray.

But even if it were the only game in town, have we reached the point in our culture that mere exposure to the fact that some people believe in God and practice their beliefs is offensive? Does that harm young people? Does the Catholic Church need to be apologetic or accommodating to the culture when they are the ones organizing the league?

My son plays CYO basketball. He is probably one of the few kids standing at half court who finds a few seconds of prayer to be pretty routine. So far, his coaches have been willing to read the prayer the league offered as an option – a prayer asking for God’s blessing and that everyone involved will remember to be good sports. But if they ever choose not to lead the prayer, I’ll be volunteering.

A colleague once told me he hoped to write a book someday called, “It Isn’t in the Bible.”  It would cover those quotations and words of wisdom that people believe are Scripture – but they aren’t.  Like, “God helps those who help themselves.”  Not in the Bible.  “To thine own self be true.”  That’s Shakespeare, not the Bible.”  “This, too, shall pass.”  “Cleanliness is next to Godliness.”  Neither of those is in the Bible.

        I’ve heard people assure someone going through a really tough time, “When God closes a door, God opens a window.”  I think that’s from “The Sound of   Music.”  Or, “Everything happens for a reason.”  Not in the Bible.  And then there’s, “God will never give you more than you can handle.”  It isn’t in the Bible, and unfortunately, it isn’t true.

  The words from this morning’s passage in Isaiah were spoken at a time when the people of Israel have more than they can handle.  They even wonder whether God had abandoned them.  God promised to give them a homeland, but now they find themselves in exile. God promised to protect them from their enemies and instead they’ve been conquered and captured by the overwhelmingly powerful Babylonian Empire.  What happened to the covenant?  Why should they believe that Yahweh is more powerful than the Babylonian gods?  So much for being God’s chosen people!  The people are weary, and exhausted.  Their trust in God’s faithfulness is stretched to the breaking point.

  Maybe you can relate to the profound abandonment that the people Israel experienced.  Maybe you’ve been through something you could call exile, just for a moment or maybe it was for a while; or maybe a long while.  A time where the plot lines that you’d imagined for your life have gone awry.  When life is interrupted by a dreadful turn of events, or when things just haven’t worked out the way you’d hoped.  Maybe exile is this moment in your life.  As your pastors, we witness some of these exile moments in your lives.  An exile moment might be a time when a mental or physical illness wreaks havoc in a family. An exile moment can be a marriage at a crossroads.  An exile moment can be that interminable waiting for a diagnosis, for a test result, for surgery day.  The challenges of aging and failing health; the loss of a loved one.  In those moments, we, too, cry out like the Israelite exiles, “Why have you abandoned me God?”

   Isaiah responds by asking, “Who are you to question God?  You have the perspective of a grasshopper.”  My first thought is, “Ouch!”  But stepping back – which is hard, very hard, in those exile moments – I remember that there are billions of galaxies beyond our own.  It’s not that I’m inconsequential – it’s that there is so much I don’t understand and can’t comprehend.  We measure God’s actions against our actions, or at least what we think our actions would be if we had the power to make things happen, or to stop things from happening.  I’d sort everything out just perfectly, right?  People would have all the money they needed. There would be an end to all strife and disease, and death would be banished from the earth.  Do we not all wonder from time to time, from funeral to funeral, from war to war, why God doesn’t fire up that omnipotence and straighten things out?[1]    

   Isaiah doesn’t deny that the people are weary.  He argues that their weariness does not deny God.[2]  Their God – our God – is the God who created everything, absolutely everything, and is still creating, and that means something new and different can happen, and that means there is hope.  God is creating us, and this world, in ways we cannot comprehend or foresee.  We are not abandoned.  We are in process.  And when we’re in the middle, we can’t see the end.

   Well, it’s nice to have perspective, I suppose.  But perspective, alone, is cold comfort.  Isaiah goes on, however, to offer more than perspective.  God, says Isaiah, “gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless. … those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”[3]  This points to two things: This God who knows all, and creates all also loves all.[4]  And somehow, that gives us power and strength to endure. 

   There is a story that’s been passed down from West Africa to the North Atlantic, passed from father to son and mother to daughter somewhere along the palmetto dunes of South Carolina.  It takes place in St. Johns Island, just off the coast of South Carolina, as Africans, forced from the land of their ancestors to work as slaves, are toiling in the hot sun. They are picking cotton, and it is hard work.  There is a young woman, and beside her is her small son, maybe six or seven.  She’s working in the fields and she has such incredible dexterity that she is able to pick cotton with her right hand and caress the forehead of her child with her left.  But eventually, it is too much.  Exhausted, she falls down from the weight and the pressure of being – in the words of W. E. B. DuBois – “problem and property.”  Her son quickly attempts to wake her, knowing that if the slave drivers were to see her, the punishment would be swift and hard.

   He tries to shake his mother, and as he does an old man comes over to him.  An old man that the Africans called Preacher and Prophet, but the slave drivers called Old Devil. The boy looks up at the old man and says, “Is it time? Is it time?”

   The old man smiles and looks at the boy and says, “Yes!”  And he bends down ands whispers into the ear of the woman who is now upon the ground and whispers a word in her language.

   And the woman gets up with incredible dignity.  She stands as a queen, and looks down at her son, grasps his hand and begins to look toward heaven.  All of a sudden they begin to fly.  The slave drivers rush over to the place where she stopped working and they see this act of human flight, and they are utterly mystified. They don’t know what to do!  And during their confusion, the old man rushes around to all the other Africans and begins to yell the West African word.

   When they hear the word, they all begin to fly.  Can you imagine this?  The dispossessed flying?  Can you imagine the disempowered flying?  The diseased?  The dislocated?  They are all taking flight!  And at that moment the slave drivers grab the old man, and beat him, saying, “Bring them back!”

   Bruised and bloodied, he smiles and says, “I can’t.”

   They say, “Why not?”

   He says, “Because the word is already in them, and since the word is already in them, it cannot be taken from them.”

   The word that the old man spoke was a word that means God.[5]

   There are times in most people’s lives when we hit the limits of our endurance.  God or life has given us too much – more than we can handle.  Times when a door has closed and there isn’t a window in sight.  Times when it seems that hope and all else has abandoned us. 

   But God has not.  God can and does give us the power and the strength to carry on.  Sometimes it’s hard to remember that or feel that in any concrete way.  And so it is the job of the gathered community, the church, to speak the word that offers hope – the word that means God.  Having faith does not mean never having doubts or questions.  The church is – or should be – the place to bring doubts and questions, and even anger and a sense of abandonment.  And the church can offer its collective memory and experience – that God is with us, that God has been our help in ages past, and is our hope for years to come. 

   We do that in many ways.  We do it through the deacons, who offer very concrete signs of God’s presence.  They take meals to families when someone is ill; they give people rides; they offer hospitality to the grieving; they take flowers and a word of cheer to people who are homebound or in the hospital; they even help people make their rent or pay an electric bill or buy books for college.  These are simple but profoundly hopeful actions that speak that word that is God.  We do it through the prayer shawls, as I told the children this morning.  We also speak that word through our ministries to those who are homeless, to those whose homes were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, to youth who are feeling disaffected and disconnected, to those who are hungry in Marin County and the world and so many other ministries.  And it is no small thing that we also speak that word that means God through the web of friendships that develop over a lifetime of connection with a congregation.  I cannot tell you how many times someone has said to me, “I don’t know how people make it through hard times if they aren’t part of a church.”

   The church’s task is to speak the word that means God.  The word revealed in Jesus that God’s will for all of us, for every human being, is health, wholeness, healing, life.  The word that nothing – nothing – in life or in even in death, can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.[6]  And these words can lift people, and carry people; they can help them find their way to their feet; and even, eventually, to fly.     

We didn’t fold the cranes with any belief that doing so would bring her good luck. Rather, we folded them as a prayer practice. It was during the very first Gulf War that I first learned that folding cranes can be a way to pray with your hands. It is physical, tactile, methodical, and you can put whatever intention into it that you choose. At Redwoods Presbyterian Church in Larkspur, we folded 1,000 paper cranes as a prayer for peace, drawing on the tradition of the story of Sadako Sasaki. Sasaki was a young girl who lived in Hiroshima at the time the atomic bomb was dropped. She began folding cranes as a wish for peace. One version of the story says she finished; another says she did not finish before she died of leukemia, presumably from radiation poisoning, in 1955, at the age of 12.

In the Presbyterian tradition we’ve steered away from beads, candles, touching holy water – all such practices have been dismissed (if not condemned) as superstitious, and maybe in some situations, they have been superstitious. If you believe that because you are touching a bead or lighting a candle something will happen that otherwise will not happen, that is a superstition. But a prayer is different from a superstition. Prayer lifts up our hopes and desires and concerns and places them honestly before God, understanding that God is not a divine jukebox – plug in your prayer, get what you want. Rather, in prayer, we place ourselves before God, aware that standing in the light of God’s love changes us, and even changes the world, in ways that are mysterious, beyond our knowing. And sometimes, it helps our prayer to touch something, do something. We are physical beings. God gave us 5 senses and I believe it is fine with God for us to use those 5 senses in prayer.

Our theme for Lent at First Presbyterian Church of San Anselmo this year is “Cross-wise.” We are taking a look at the cross as the symbol of our faith, and what it can mean for 21st century Christians who live in relative peace and privilege. As part of our theme, we are inviting people to participate in a hands-on, tactile prayer practice: Make a cross. Paint a cross. Build a cross. Draw a cross. Build it out of something that represents pain, struggle, an obstacle, or a victory over an obstacle. Paint it in a way that expresses your fear, your hope, your journey. You are limited only by your imagination. We will display the crosses of people who are willing to have them displayed, either with names or anonymously, over the course of Lent.

I will make some crosses out of origami paper. Thanks to Theresa Cho, the associate pastor at St. John’s Presbyterian Church in San Francisco, I have learned how to make a box-like cross out of 26 (yes, 26!) sheets of origami paper. That is a lot of praying. With each crease, I will hold in prayer a person in our congregation, a situation in the world, a concern on my heart.

As we say in worship each Sunday, “Please pray with me.”

Many people are excited that next week is Super Bowl Sunday.  Others of us know that what’s really exciting about next week is it’ll be only two more months until Opening Day of the Major League Baseball season.  In one of my favorite baseball movies, Bull Durham, Crash Davis, who’s been a catcher in the minor leagues for twelve years, is sent down from a triple-A team to an A-team to help train a very talented but very young, very green pitcher nicknamed “Nuke.”  Part of a catcher’s job is to know the batting records of the players on the other team.  The catcher then signals the pitcher what to pitch – a fast ball, a curve ball – whatever that batter is least likely to be able to hit.  In one of Nuke’s first games, Crash gives him the sign to throw a curve call.  Nuke shakes him off, which is what it’s called when a pitcher doesn’t want to do what the catcher signals.  Crash walks to the pitcher’s mound and asks Nuke why he’s shaking him off.  Nuke says he wants to bring the “heat” – throw a fastball.  He says he wants to announce his presence with authority.  Crash knows that the man at bat is a “first ball, fast ball hitter.”  But Nuke says this batter hasn’t seen his fast ball.  Crash goes back behind home plate and tells the batter to expect a fast ball.  The batter, knowing what’s coming, smacks the ball over the fence – a homerun.  And we figure out who has the authority on the team.[1]

It is a challenge for someone at the start of his career to announce his presence with authority – especially when he’s surrounded by authorities.  In this morning’s passage in the very first chapter of Mark’s gospel, Jesus has just taken the first steps in his new career, including gathering some disciples.  He goes to the synagogue on the Sabbath, and even though that’s the very place where he’ll be surrounded by authorities, he starts to teach.

But there is something different in this teaching.  Something new.  Something his listeners describe as astonishing.  Oddly enough, whatever he said that so astonished people was not written down for us to hear.  Our best guess is to look back a few verses, at verses 14 and 15, as he sets out on this career: “Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’”  That morning in the synagogue, Jesus probably taught about the kingdom – about what the world would be like if we allowed God to rule our hearts and minds; about how this is good news for everyone; about how it is as close to us as our willingness to accept and live in God’s love.

But it seems that it was how he taught – “as one who had authority, and not as the scribes” – that grabbed people’s attention.  That, too, is odd, because the scribes were the Crash Davises in this scene.  The scribes had the authority to teach, an authority passed down through their tradition and an authority grounded in experience.  It’s so easy for us to dismiss the scribes and Pharisees in all the stories about Jesus because they are so often shown in a negative light compared to Jesus, but the scribes knew what they were doing.  They knew their stuff.  And yet, somehow this new kid on the block, this Jesus taught with authority that somehow was more compelling. What sort of authority was this?

And then Jesus is interrupted.  One Sunday during worship at the church I served in San Francisco, a man in the pews started shouting unintelligibly.  I wasn’t preaching but I was on the chancel, helping to lead worship.  The ushers, with the help of our business manager, a burly Texan, escorted the man into the narthex, where he either calmed down or left.  Later that week, when we had a chance to talk about it, we discovered that the thought, the fear that the man might have a gun had flitted through the minds of all of us sitting on the chancel that morning.  It is frightening to be confronted with madness.

But it doesn’t seem as though Jesus is scanning the crowd for the ushers or wondering who let this man in, even as the man drowns him out, shouting, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”  Us.  There is only one man shouting.  We don’t know what’s wrong with this man; we might guess he’s schizophrenic, or has multiple-personality disorder.  The people of Mark’s time believed he had an “unclean spirit.”  The pre-scientific world into which Jesus came was a demon-haunted world.  To Mark, evil spirits were real.[2]  The significance of an “unclean” spirit is that it would have made this man ritually unclean – that is, he couldn’t go to the temple or participate in religious festivals.  Someone who was ritually unclean was separated from God, family and neighbors.  Usually being “unclean” was temporary, but where it involved what these ancient people called an evil spirit, being unclean meant exclusion, indefinitely.

The man with an unclean spirit is on the margins of society and the margins of sanity, but he knows exactly who Jesus is; he understands better than anyone else in the room.  The disciples don’t figure it out for another seven or so chapters, when Peter says, “You are the messiah, the one sent by God.”[3]  This man is way ahead of them, and he wants to know, “What are you going to do with people like me?  Are you going to destroy us?”

Jesus orders the spirit to leave the man.  So Mark still hasn’t told us a thing about what Jesus taught, but he’s shown us that Jesus had a power over things that people label as unclean.[4]  Mark is making this point: This is what the kingdom of God looks like.  The will and purpose of God present in Jesus is facing and fighting against the forces that dehumanize, oppress, enslave and destroy human life; the forces that separate us from God and each other.

Then, and now.  We don’t have to believe in demons to understand that we still live, in a manner of speaking, in a “demon-haunted” world.  Men and women are haunted by fear, anxiety, insecurity and the ills that these can bring: hatred, prejudice, greed, injustice, retaliation, violence.[5]  If we’re honest, we recognize that we are all possessed by something – something that needs to be exorcised in order for us to live the whole and healthy lives that God intends for us.[6]  Maybe it’s jealousy, or an unforgiving spirit; maybe it’s excessive worry, or excessive self-doubt.  Etty Hillesum, who is not as well-known as Ann Frank but who also kept a diary before and during her internment in a Nazi concentration camp, wrote, “My battles are fought out inside, with my own demons.”

There’s an old Native American story about a chief instructing some braves about this struggle within.  “It is like two dogs fighting inside of us,” the chief told them.  “There is a good dog who wants to do right and a bad dog who wants to do wrong.  Sometimes the good dog seems stronger, and right is winning the fight.  But sometimes the bad dog is stronger, and wrong is winning the fight.”

“Who is going to win in the end?” a young brave asks.

“The one you feed,” the chief answered.[7]

And if we’re honest about it, we recognize that these internal battles we wage and our decisions about which dog to feed often lead to the madness.  It’s easy to point at people with strange behavior and call them crazy.  It is harder to face our own madness.  I’m talking about the madness that we might be able to ignore when we think in terms of ourselves as individuals – perfectly sane, highly functioning individuals – but which is harder to deny when we ask, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?  What have you to do with the madness of the world, of our culture, of our society?”  Isn’t it madness, for example, that we are letting our compulsion to consume, to buy, to own stuff destroy us and our planet?[8]  Last week an article in the New York Times raised once again the deplorable conditions of the workers at the factories in China where iPads and iPhones are manufactured.  Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens.  Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories killed four people and injured 77.  Suicide has become epidemic at the plant in Shenzhen, China, where iPods are manufactured.  And I don’t want to single out Apple: Bleak working conditions have been documented at the plants of the other major tech companies as well.  The article concludes with the statement of an Apple executive: “’And right now, customers care more about a new iPhone than working conditions in China.’”[9]  This isn’t crazy?

According to researchers, the current ideal for female beauty in the United States can be achieved by about 1% of the population[10] – and frankly, I think that’s high – but women still buy products and diet themselves to death and feel bad that we don’t look like the women on the magazine covers, even though they don’t even look like that, because those photos have been Fotoshopped beyond recognition.  This isn’t crazy?

And then there’s the fact that weapons are our nation’s hottest export.[11]  We’re arming the world to the teeth with stuff that could be used to blow us all off the planet, when human beings have a pretty bad track record of getting along.  This isn’t crazy?  And we live in the world’s wealthiest nation, yet 13 percent of people living in the United States live in poverty, and nearly one in four children lives in a household that struggles to put food on the table.[12]  This isn’t crazy?

I could go on and on.  You probably could, too.  It’s madness.  It is the madness that Jesus confronts with the truth of the kingdom of God.

He confronts the madness with the truth of his words and with the truth of his actions.  His authority, the new and astonishing teaching, rests in the fact that he confronts this madness with the truth of his life – his whole life.  In Mark’s gospel, Jesus himself is the content of the teaching.  His authority is not in particular speeches, but in this particular life.  We see Jesus eating with tax collectors and sinners; we see Jesus healing on the Sabbath, silencing the scribes’ objection not with an answer but a question: “Is it lawful on the Sabbath day to do good or to do harm, to save a life or to kill?”[13]  We see Jesus moved by the feisty faith of a Syrophoenician woman who dared to argue with him for the healing of her daughter.[14]  At the end of his ministry, we see him choose faithfulness to God over retaliation and violence.[15]  The authority of Jesus moves us toward inclusion of precisely those people who had been excluded; it values people over rules or traditions; it ends the cycle of revenge.  His authority sets us free from the madness that possesses us – whatever it is that so clearly is not the Spirit of God blessing us to be a blessing to others,[16] whatever keeps us from living in joy and hope and love as individuals, and as a culture.

And that’s why we come here.  We’ll gather after worship today to do some of the more mundane work of maintaining this institution.  But as we wrestle with budgets and do things decently and in order like the good Presbyterians we are, my prayer is that we hold in our hearts that this is the place, this is where we create the space where our madness can come face to face with the holiness of Jesus.

It’s here that we are perpetually astounded by the food of hope and grace.

It’s here that we meet the “Holy One of God” who has the authority to call evil out of us, to forgive us, and to transform us.

It’s here that we are fed on the scriptures read, proclaimed, and taught.

It’s here that we are nourished by the sacraments that make us one and transform us.

It’s here where we can practice living in a community that reflects the light of the kingdom of God.

And it’s as we leave this place and follow the light out into this crazy world that we, we of all people, are given the authority to speak, and live, and heal in ways that feed a hungry world.

Now that’s truly astounding.[17]

Amen.

It’s that time of year when we start thinking about Lent. As is our tradition, we serve communion on six Sundays during Lent, beginning on February 26. That means we will need a total of 48 communion servers!  This year, I’m excited to announce that we are introducing online sign-ups! Now you can simply visit a web page, take a look at what slots are open, and type in your name. It’s easy, give it a whirl! Just click here to be taken directly to the online sign up page.

If technology is not your thing, fear not. You can still contact Lynn Bicknell via email at vialynn@comcast.net or by telephone at (415)-459-7919.

You can learn more about serving communion, and how to sign up online or otherwise, by clicking here.

Thank you!

My sister, who shares my from-a-distance fascination with the grocery store tabloids, informed me over Christmas that the Weekly World News has gone out of business.  Where will we now go to read that Hillary Clinton has adopted an alien baby or that Dick Cheney is a robot?  How will we keep up with the adventures of Bat Boy?  If you’re worshiping with us for the first time, I want to assure you – I promise you – I only read these headlines safely from the other side of the checkout counter – well, except for those few times I’ve used them in sermons.  But after all the times I’ve made fun of the tabloids, today we read from a story in the Bible that could have come straight off the cover of one of them.  “Man Survives Three Days in Belly of Giant Fish.”  There’d be a photo, of course – in black and white – a fish that looks suspiciously like a large-mouth bass blown up to look ten feet tall with a cheesy photo of a tiny bedraggled man superimposed next to it.  The article probably would say that scientists believe the fish is the product of a mutation caused by organic dairy products.

The famous part of the Jonah story – Jonah’s three day ride in the great fish – comes before our verses this morning.  Even people who never open a Bible know about Jonah and the whale – the Bible doesn’t say “whale” but that’s the way we all remember it.  The story begins with a Hebrew word that our Bibles translate as “Now,” but might also be translated, “And it happened,” or “Now it came to pass.”  If it began, “Once upon a time,” we’d know exactly how we’re supposed to read this story.  Or if it began, “A prophet and a person from Nineveh walk into a bar,” we’d know how to read that, too.  This story is something of a hybrid, full of fantasy as well as humor and irony.  And it ends with God almost saying, “Don’t you get it now, Jonah?”

Jonah never gets it.  Before we jump to what it is he didn’t get – and what it is we’re supposed to get – we need to go back to the beginning.  Nineveh was the capital of Assyria.  It was on the banks of the Tigris River, near where Mosul, Iraq, is today.  It was destroyed in 605 B.C.E., some time before the book of Jonah was written, but the author chose Nineveh for this story because the Assyrians were still remembered by the Hebrews as the Enemy, with a capital E.  Have you noticed that when Hollywood wants to create villains that are purely evil, that will in no way elicit our sympathy, they make the villains either Nazis, or Nazi-like, like the Imperial officers in the first three “Star Wars” movies?  Even though the Nazis were defeated over 65 years ago.  I don’t think it’s out of line to say that the Assyrians were ancient Israel’s Nazis.  They were brutal; they used torture to frighten their enemies into submission.[i]  They were the most hated of Israel’s oppressors.

God tells Jonah to take the word of God to Nineveh.  This is exceptional in the Old Testament – all the other prophets speak to God’s chosen people.  In spite of God’s clear instructions, Jonah heads in exactly the opposite direction, jumping on a ship to Tarshish – we’re not sure where that is, maybe Spain.  The point is it’s about as far away from Nineveh as Jonah could get – and Jonah thinks it’s as far away from God as he can get.  But there’s no running away from God.  God causes a huge storm, and the frightened sailors figure out that Jonah is the cause of it.  Jonah tells them to throw him overboard to stop the storm, and after trying several other more humane options they give up and toss him into the sea.  That’s when Jonah becomes dinner for the great fish.  He spends three days and nights there.  In the Veggie Tales cartoon movie about Jonah, which, honestly, is as good a sermon as any on this book but it’s an hour and a half long, Jonah is serenaded by a rousing gospel choir that reminds him that our God is the God of second chances.[ii]  In the Bible, Jonah’s prayers are answered.  The fish vomits him up onto the shore.

And that is where we pick up this morning.  Jonah has done everything in his power to disobey God, and God gives him a second chance.  God says, “Get up, go to Nineveh, and proclaim the message that I tell you.”  This time Jonah obeys, but his heart isn’t in it.  He goes just part way into the huge city and cries out a doomsday message – only five words in Hebrew – with no hint of hope whatsoever.  The city will be demolished in forty days.  Period.  You can almost picture Jonah saying, “OK, I did it.  Now get off my back.”

And lo and behold, the people of Nineveh respond by repenting.  It isn’t a half-hearted repentance; it’s not just for show.  It’s full-fledged, honest-to-God repentance.  The people of Nineveh change their evil ways.  They reform.  They turn into upstanding, God-fearing people, the kind Jonah and you and I would want for neighbors.  Later, Jesus used the repentance of the Ninevites as a standard by which to measure us.[iii]   And so God calls off the demolition.  The city is saved.

So the first piece of good news in the book of Jonah is that God is the God of second chances.  Last Sunday morning, in the assurance of God’s grace and forgiveness after the prayer of confession, Carl Basore said, “There is no sin so terrible that God cannot forgive, no hurt so terrible that God cannot heal.  God accepts us, forgives us and sets us free.”  This is who God is; this is what God does.  It is God’s ability to do the incomprehensible, to extend mercy to the least deserving that opens the door to our own hope.[iv]

Now, you’d think this would be a reason to celebrate, but in the verses that follow this morning’s reading, Jonah is furious.  The second piece of good news in Jonah – but the news Jonah himself just can’t swallow as good – is that God’s mercy is not the exclusive property of God’s chosen people or anyone else.  Jonah was all in favor of God’s mercy when it was flowing in his direction.  He just didn’t want any of it to flow over to Nineveh.  The reason he took off for Tarshish in the first place is that he was afraid this very thing might happen.  “I knew you were merciful,” said Jonah.  “I knew you were a God who loves losers and ingrates and – and them!”

Jonah would rather die, he says, than live in a world where his enemies can worm their way out of total destruction by something as flimsy as complete and unadulterated repentance.  So he goes and sulks in a little hut he builds for himself outside the city, out in the harsh desert wind and sun.  God makes a bush grow over Jonah’s head, and Jonah is relieved to be in the shade.  But then God withers the bush, and Jonah is exposed and angry once again.  And God says, “Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?”  Jonah says it is.  So God says, “You are concerned about a bush; shouldn’t I be concerned about a city full of people, including innocent children?”

Don’t you get it now, Jonah?

The startling, troubling message is that God loves the Assyrians, the most un-chosen people this ancient Jewish writer could conjure up, and Jonah needs to get over it.  Although maybe what really would make it as startling to us and as troubling for us as it’s supposed to be is if we substitute a more current enemy.  God loves the Nazis.  God loves the people on Death Row.  God loves Islamic jihadists.  God loves whatever politician or talk radio host it is that you love to hate.  God doesn’t just love us.  God loves them, too.

William Willimon writes, “When I look up on Sunday, me cozy with my God, only to find God working the other side of the street with them, well, it just doesn’t feel all that merciful.”[v]  Willimon says the book of Jonah is a political joke, a satire, poking fun at the way we still divide the world into good guys and bad guys in denial that there is one God.  The Ninevites repent – even the cows are in sackcloth and ashes, for crying out loud – and Jonah can’t stand it.

Thousands of years after Israel met the one God, after Moses taught us to pray, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one,”[vi] we still find it tough to accept that there one God over Israel, and over Nineveh.  One God over Israel and over Palestine; over the United States, Iran, and North Korea; over the wealthy and the welfare mothers; over the Democrats and the Republicans; over the Presbyterians who support ordination of gays and lesbians and the Presbyterians who don’t.  One God.  Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one, and that one God does not belong to us.  We make a distinction between insiders and outsiders; we carve up the world and even our denomination into competing camps.  Then comes the one God, blurring our careful distinctions.[vii]

It’s only the first month of this presidential election year, I’m already tired of what Willimon describes as politics which forsakes Aristotle’s search for the common good and instead “degenerates into mere management of the conflicting claims of the caucuses” and special interests, so that we hunker down “behind our various ‘modes of discourse,’ unable to hear, to understand, to empathize.”[viii]  One of my favorite Bill Moyers quotations is, “Talking with people who agree with you is like jogging in a cul-de-sac.”[ix]  And jogging in a cul-de-sac galvanizes our sense that we are right and the other is not only wrong but dead wrong or ought to be.   In his Second Inaugural, Abraham Lincoln pointed out that during the Civil War “both sides read the same Bible and pray to the same God and invoke his aid against the other.” Lincoln, always a pretty good theologian, noted that God could not answer the prayers of both, and probably not either, for that matter.[x]  Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one.

So the question is, will the joke on Jonah be a joke on us?  Do we believe at some level that our unity – our national unity, our political unity, our theological unity – needs an enemy?  Have we – we, not God – have we created a situation in which we only strive creatively and energetically when we’re striving against someone else?  Does our positive sense of ourselves depend on our negative assessment of someone else?

Or can we remember that the Lord our God is one?  Can we accept the gift of God’s mercy, the gift of God’s grace, for ourselves, and rejoice that this gift is for everyone?  Can we strive to be faithful to God as best we know how, but with enough humility that, at the same time, we can repent of our fondness for drawing the lines that create an us, and a them?

   Jonah never got it.  Can we?

©Joanne Whitt 2012

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Lesson: Jonah 3:1-10