Third Sunday after Epiphany 23 January 2022
(Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10 Psalm 19 1 Corinthians 12:12-31 Luke 4:14-21)
“Holy Disquiet!”
This past Wednesday, as I was making my way out of the worship space following a funeral, I realized there was a woman quickly coming after me. She caught up to me in the hallway and said, “Pastor, can I say something to you?” When a stranger comes running after me and says “can I say something to you” as an opening line, my heart skips a few beats.” I said, “Sure,” but with bit of anxiety in my voice. She proceeded to say, “I want to thank you for not making fun of ordinary people like me.” I was taken aback by her words and could only meekly respond, “thank you.”
I never even got her name or the connection she had to the deceased, but on the way to Evergreen Cemetery, I was quieter than usual because I was thinking about what this stranger had just said to me. It wasn’t so much the compliment she had just paid me, as it was the context, the reason she felt it so important to share what must have been an unusual occurrence in her life—being treated kindly as an ordinary person.
An unanticipated encounter such as this is enough to get me wondering, yet again, just how fragmented we all still are as a country and a society, as a church, as individuals—because what I heard her articulating behind the words she said to me was that, she wasn’t fine, and she is lonely, and she is tired of people making fun of her.
This encounter preoccupied my mind the rest of the day because I am well aware that rudeness doesn’t happen by accident. I am also aware how very often, when we are feeling hurt, that our first inclination is to inflict our pain onto someone else, most often by our voice and our attitude, which only continues the cycle of brokenness and fear. This chance encounter made me more acutely aware how this cycle of damage is still so very present in our society today.
And just as into the synagogue of Nazareth where He was brought up, so into our world, into our church hallways and into our lives, comes the person of Jesus, “to convey Good News…to proclaim release…..to bring recovery…..to free us from oppression, and to proclaim God’s favor.”
I hear in this Gospel text the power of the Spirit, stirring Jesus with a deep sense that “the way things were at that time was not right.” That’s also what I heard from that short encounter with the woman on Wednesday here at church—a deep sense that “the way things are in her life is not right.”
We don’t really know anything about the people in the synagogue on that Sabbath Day, but I wonder if they were a bit like the woman in our hallway—persons longing to be set free from the captivity of loneliness and disconnectedness, in order to recover one’s God-given self.
Another way to describe what I hear in this Gospel text is what I call, “Holy Disquiet” – God’s voice being heard in our longings! On Wednesday, it was God’s voice even before I heard the woman’s voice! It was God’s longing for the woman to find a healing presence—when it comes to justice, it is always God’s voice before our voice!
In our First Reading today, it was God speaking a Holy Disquiet through the prophet Ezra when the people gathered at the Water Gate outside Jerusalem to hear God’s Word with tears in their eyes. God spoke a Holy Disquiet to the people of Corinth through the apostle Paul when Paul told this infighting faith community that they were one Body in Christ. God spoke a Holy Disquiet to the 1st Century Jews gathered in the synagogue in Nazareth that Sabbath Day!
This morning, I suggest that wherever you are not content with the way things are between people you love and care about; wherever you are not content with the way things are in our larger society; wherever you are not content with the way you act sometimes—might this be the Holy Disquiet of God longing to do a new thing in you?
We know that brokenness and pain have the power to deaden us to God’s presence in the world. Hurt and suffering have the ability to make us careless in how we treat each other. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
The renowned spiritual writer, Henri Nouwen, wrote in his book, The Wounded Healer, how we do have the ability, through the grace of God, to use pain and brokenness, not to become reactive, but rather, to heal the wounds of the world, beginning with ourselves.
He talks of the saving grace of Jesus, the power of the Cross, as God’s ability to make good come from pain.
The courage of the woman in the hallway this past week to put her pain into words by using a simple compliment is exactly what Nouwen is talking about. And it is what Jesus is talking about when he begins his healing ministry in the synagogue in Nazareth. That was his life ministry.
And it is ours! If our lives are to be raised to new levels of respect; if there is ever really to become a radical restructuring of human relationships, it begins with our loving as Jesus loved, seeing our mission to be the same mission begun on that Sabbath Day.
And, as that happens……….human love becomes dignified; human relationships become sanctified; and human intimacy becomes holy.
My prayer today: that our God keeps causing Holy Disquiet in your lives, and keeps giving you the courage to face it. And…..that the scriptures we heard today find fulfillment in us. Thanks be to God! Amen.
Sermons at St. James Gettysburg 