Today is the last Sunday before Lent begins. It is traditionally celebrated as Transfiguration Sunday, when the Jesus goes up on a mountain and the sky opens up and he is transfigured, blessed just as he was at his baptism. This middle blessing, the Transfiguration is a highpoint before entering the wilderness with Jesus for the final journey to the cross. If the season after Epiphany lasts a little longer, there are a few Sundays of assigned readings that we don’t always get to. I decided today to read one, a familiar story about the healing of paraplegic person.  Listen for what the Spirit is saying to the church today.

Mark 2:1-12 After a few days, Jesus returned to Capernaum, and word got around that he was back home. A crowd gathered, jamming the entrance so no one could get in or out. He was teaching the Word. They brought a paraplegic to him, carried by four men. When they weren’t able to get in because of the crowd, they removed part of the roof and lowered the paraplegic on his stretcher. Impressed by their bold belief, Jesus said to the paraplegic, “Son, I forgive your sins.” 6-7Some religion scholars sitting there started whispering among themselves, “He can’t talk that way! That’s blasphemy! God and only God can forgive sins.” 8-12 Jesus knew right away what they were thinking, and said, “Why are you so skeptical? Which is simpler: to say to the paraplegic, ‘I forgive your sins,’ or say, ‘Get up, take your stretcher, and start walking’? Well, just so it’s clear that I’m the Son of Man and authorized to do either, or both . . .” (he looked now at the paraplegic), “Get up. Pick up your stretcher and go home.” And the man did it—got up, grabbed his stretcher, and walked out, with everyone there watching him. They rubbed their eyes, incredulous—and then praised God, saying, “We’ve never seen anything like this!”

February 19, 2012

Cooperative Ministry: Tear the Roof Off

My father-in-law has been very ill for a while now and my wife has been going up to be with him every other weekend or so, trying to help him any way she can. His condition has become difficult enough that this weekend, he has decided to give up his apartment. It seems he will not ever be able to go back there. What a hard decision to make!

We have all been in situations where we are not sure what to hope for.  We want to hold out hope for miraculous recovery from an illness, and another part of us prays for the strength to face the reality of a situation and find the healing that comes with acceptance and the grace that comes from acknowledging a different stage of life; the grace that comes from knowing God’s presence with us in every part of life’s journey.

When Jesus asks which is harder to say, “I forgive your sins” or “Get up, take your mat and walk!” he is asking a question similar to our dilemma about which to hope for – the grace to accept our life situation, or a miracle to change that situation. Jesus did not ask which is easier to do, but which is easier to say. Both forgiveness and healing are easy to say, but both are really hard to do.

I have traveled with people who have tried out both roads.  One strong leader of a former church of mine found out that he had cancer. He decided he did not want to have any operations and he lived his last days with extraordinary dignity and grace. I admired him a lot. At the same time, I have also admired my father-in-law for his tenacity and will to live, and his desire to fight for life every step of the way. Modern medicine makes it possible to fight past the point where life is really of a great quality, and doctors often have trouble allowing people to make any other choice, the kinds of choices that hospice workers are great at allowing, but I don’t like to second guess people’s decisions to fight for life. Fighting for life is a natural instinct and the hope for life and even for a miracle can be a powerful model of resilience and trust.

Jesus himself, as he so often does, pushes in both directions at once in this story we read this morning.  Jesus is impressed by the bold determination of the paraplegic’s friends who dig through the roof of the mud hut in which they are meeting and he announces that the man’s sins are forgiven. In those days, people believed that all illness and disease was caused by sin, so the religious leaders around Jesus get nervous at this.  They question his ability to forgive sins, because they are used to getting a cut of the action of the forgiveness business. All through the gospel, they are in conflict with Jesus about taking away their livelihood and a part of their racket.

Jesus senses their discomfort, so he goes even farther and tells the guy to get up and walk – take his mat and walk on out of their.  That leaves everybody dumbfounded and takes care of both healing and forgiveness at the same time.  We know that it doesn’t always happen that way, but we may read the Gospel for hope in our quest for life and our quest for right living.

I’ve been reading CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity for the Journey class this week and I noticed something he wrote that helped me understand this dynamic.  He pointed out that our bodies have an amazing ability to be healed. When we get a cut, we know that our bodies have the ability to heal over time. This only works as long as our bodies are alive. In a similar way, he says, our spirit has a capacity to be healed and renewed as long as we are alive in Christ.

I have been in churches that are just going through the motions. The spirit has gone out of their worship and they seem barely alive. They sing all the old songs that are familiar to them. They say the same words and do all the same things, but there is no life in the rituals, so they can no longer find renewal and healing in the worship. They cannot be rejuvenated because they are not really alive.

Next Sunday, we will have a Church Council meeting right after church in which we will take a next step in the process of welcoming PlumbLine Fellowship to join us in a cooperative ministry venture that I sense will add extra vitality and energy to our worship and ministry in Bryn Mawr. I spoke last week about the risks of doing cooperative ministry. We give up some control when we work with another group of people and we sometimes have to compromise our sense of how everything has always been done, because the other group hasn’t always done things the same way.

Today, I want to invite us to notice that God is inviting us to some healing possibilities through this collaboration and through some of the new ministries and mission we considered at our winter retreat. There’s no magic to it. There will likely be no miraculous turnaround because of our prayers about poverty, or because of our willingness to try cooperative ministry. The key is not in those particular ministries, but in our acceptance of life in the Spirit, our determination to be alive in Christ, to trust in God’s healing Spirit, and to live toward God’s rejuvenating power.

I’m suggesting we tear the roof off if we have to, to get to that healing, that we do whatever it takes to avail ourselves of the promise of Christ’s Spirit.

Responsive Hymn: 374  Standing on the Promises

Mark 1:40-45 A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, “If you choose, you can make me clean.” 41 Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, “I do choose. Be made clean!” 42 Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. 43 After sternly warning him he sent him away at once, 44 saying to him, “See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.” 45 But he went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word, so that Jesus could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed out in the country; and people came to him from every quarter.

February 12, 2012                        Cooperative Ministry: Reaching Beyond Ourselves

Several bright tattoos stood out on the arms of the grocery store clerk as she packed the bags of a customer.  The customer admired the tattoos and started talking about how she wished she was brave enough to get one. That got the clerk talking! She obviously had thought carefully about her tattoos and was so pleased that someone appreciated them.

The next person in line, however, was a nurse, who quietly snorted at the conversation of the two in front of her. She thought tattoos were silly and just this side of dangerous, a bad way to treat your future self. As it came her turn to be served, she made a little louder sound of disgust in case they had missed the first one.

The two women shared the last of the moment of connection with each other and tried to ignore the judgment of the nicely dressed woman behind them.  They felt like they would never gain the approval of a person like that.  But in that moment they recognized in each other a kinship and a desire for a different kind of dressing up.

I don’t mean to glorify getting a tattoo. I know I would not be excited about my own son getting one. I mention it for several reasons in relation to our scripture reading this morning about Jesus healing of a man with a skin rash.

Leprosy was the name used for all kinds of skin rashes in the first century, and they were rather prevalent, contagious, and difficult to treat. Jesus famously touches the man, daring to heal him and to become unclean himself. We don’t have a lot of leprosy in our time, and if I showed you more graphic pictures, you would be more disgusted than the person in the line with the women talking about tattoos. Following Jesus can be a kind of messy, uncomfortable experience however. We find our nice set boundaries challenged as we are called to reach out beyond ourselves. Jesus certainly put himself into places that challenged the boundaries of the religious people of his day. He was willing to interact with and touch people most of his society looked down upon.

If Jesus touched people with contagious skin diseases, how can we self-righteously isolate ourselves from our brothers and sisters with skin piercings and skin decorations, which are not nearly as contagious? This is just one of the risks we take in cooperative ministry.

We are considering working together with other congregations on the Main Line specifically to help each other reach out to new people, beyond the boundaries that we have put up that keep people from hearing the Good News which we say we want to proclaim. Last week, I described briefly the cooperative ministry that I experienced in Philadelphia in the 1980’s, the Frankford Group Ministry, or FGM.

Today, I’d like to talk about some of the pluses and minuses of cooperative ministry, since we are going to be deciding whether and how we might want to try it out in our area. The great thing about cooperative ministry is that it automatically reaches past our usual boundaries.  When we work closely together with other churches, we inevitably work with people who do things differently than we have always done them. Each church in a cooperative ministry gets challenged to think about why they do things certain ways, and to open themselves to doing things a little differently.

Moreover, new ministry is possible when churches pool their resources than when they try to work separately. In the FGM, they would advertise church events for all 4 churches at once in the local paper. Often they had the events together, but sometimes they were advertising things that happened at the churches separately. When they pooled their people resources, they felt like they could do more than any of their churches could do by themselves. Their vision grew bigger as they thought about the whole community – the community between their churches, not just the community within their church,

So the wonderful thing about cooperative ministry is that it pushes people to think bigger and to reach beyond the boundaries of the local church. Conversely, the drawback of cooperative ministry can be that it takes on a life of its own and does not pay enough attention to the needs and dynamics of each local church. I remember there was always a little tension in the FGM between the work of the whole and the folks who were concentrated on the needs of the local church.

I would like to say that the FGM created tremendous growth in the local churches of Frankford and solved all their problems.  For years, the group ministry increased the effectiveness of the outreach of those local churches. At its height, the FGM had million dollar budgets and major influence over almost anything that happened in Frankford.

The local churches benefited greatly from those efforts and I think they grew through those ministries, but they still struggled and today, they are going through the same kinds of struggles as other churches in attendance and growth. The glory days of the 80’s and 90’s are in the past for them.  They had a great run, but the key leaders of that ministry moved on and it has been hard to sustain the success of those early years.

So, we are talking about cooperative ministry with a bit of a different twist. Instead of just combining the work of 4 different churches, we are talking about having one of the churches, Narberth, by necessity, close its doors and merge with one of our other churches. Their new church start called PlumbLine Fellowship, will continue as its own ministry and we will use the resources of the closed church to fund that ministry to focus on outreach and mission in all of our cluster churches.

In other words, the group ministry will itself be a church, not a mission arm of the four churches together. The other churches in the cooperative will support that new ministry and that new ministry will create alternative future possibilities for those churches. I think it is a great opportunity for us a church, but it will definitely challenge us, and make us stretch beyond our comfort zones. We might find ourselves relating to someone with a tattoo. We might find ourselves offering support to people with skin diseases or AIDS or cancer. We might find ourselves making closer connections with people living in poverty.  Jesus would be pleased.

This is God’s good news.

Cooperative Ministry: Introduction to Frankford Group Ministry

Feb. 5, 2012

When I was in seminary in New York City, I came back to Philadelphia for summer internships at various churches and church organizations.  One year I worked at a place called the Frankford Group Ministry, and I ended up writing my senior paper about that cooperative ministry.  FGM, as it was called, Frankford Group Ministry, was considered a national model for churches working together, so it immediately comes to mind as a model for our exploration of the possibility of cooperative ministry on the Main Line – working together with Ardmore, Bala Cynwyd, Narberth, PlumbLine Fellowship and St. Luke.

The FGM was a ministry of 4 churches in the Frankford area of Philadelphia.  One church was a fairly wealthy, traditional white congregation, 2 were churches serving white working class neighborhoods that were starting to transition to being more Latino, and the fourth church was a small, poor, but lively African American congregation serving a neighborhood with projects and many problems.

Needless to say, this was an interesting mix of churches.  The first thing they did together was to start a summer day camp for children from all the neighborhoods. The churches could do so much more using the resources from all four of their churches than they could individually, it was a rousing success. The group ministry took on more and more problems in the area, and eventually became of the most successful non-profit organizations in the city. They influenced everything that was going on in Frankford.

They hired me to help start a community development organization (CDC) that is still active in helping people find jobs, housing, and starting businesses in that community. The Frankford Group Minsitry has shown that when churches turned from looking inward and only helping themselves, they could make a significant difference in their communities.

In our reading from Mark this morning, Jesus may be teaching a similar lesson. After Jesus heals Simon’s mother-in-law on the Sabbath, he heals a bunch of other people as soon as the Sabbath ends. All of Caesarea comes to the door to be healed. Jesus wants to heal people, yet as he begins to heal folks one by one, crowds immediately begin to form and he can’t possibly reach all of them one by one.

By the way, one thing that jumped out at me in reading this passage is that line about Jesus healing Simon’s mother-in-law. All the women notice it every time, and I again noticed that part – as soon as Jesus heals the woman she gets up and begins to serve them.  Women who read that tend to scoff and say – “See, that’s what happens to women.  She’s hardly off of her deathbed and the men expect her to be serving them coffee and cookies!

As I researched that part of the passage though, I read that there is a formula for healing passages in Mark. The sickness is revealed. The person is brought to Jesus. He heals the person by one method or another. Finally, the person does something to show they are healed. The woman’s service is the sign that she is healed. As the head of the household, it was an honor as well as an expectation for her to serve her honored guests.  It would have pained her not to be able to do so.  But that’s not the new insight I had this year.  This passage subtly asserts that when we are healthy, we serve. When we are alive and well, we give to other people and serve other people.  Not just women, but men as well.

But back to the story –the morning after healing all these people, before daybreak, Jesus gets up and goes off to a deserted place to pray. (Jesus is always doing taking time to go on retreat. We sometimes have trouble doing it once a year.)

Jesus goes off to pray, but the disciples search for him and find him. They say, “Everyone is searching for you.” You’d think that might be what Jesus wanted to hear, but it wasn’t.  He doesn’t say, “OK, let’s go back and continue the healing ministry.” No, he says, “Let’s head out the other direction. We need to go to other towns and proclaim the good news there.” He can’t restrict the good news to one town or one group (one church) of people. He is trying to get at the root causes of the afflictions of the people. He heals people and he also proclaims and works for an end to their afflictions. Jesus heals people individually, but he also challenges the demons that keep separating them from others and causing illness to return to the community.

Jesus heals and offers healing to all people – even to us today, who think we don’t need healing, but in fact need healing as much as anyone.  The healing comes with an expectation that we too will become healers. Jesus balances serving others and taking care of himself, knowing that they are intertwined, that one who is well serves others, and one who best serves others takes care of him or herself to be able to serve others. Jesus challenges us not to just be healing presence to our own, but to reach out beyond ourselves, and spread the good news.

When we are well we serve others; as we serve others we become more healthy. God’s healing power aims to heal the core illnesses of our lives.  God’s healing power enables us to be of service and also to take care of ourselves. To serve and to advocate in the lives of the poor. God’s hand works in and through us all.

Communion Hymn: 2175  Together We Serve