It will not surprise you to know that I spend a good deal of time talking with people about scripture.  I often hear evidence of a perceived split between the theology (or God talk) of what is called “The Old Testament” and the theology of “The New Testament” or the canon of scripture written before Jesus and the canon of scripture written after Jesus.  I always want to say, “not so fast.”  Yes, our Christian Bible is divided into two main parts – before Jesus and after Jesus.  But the narrative about the Holy One and the people of the Holy One is ongoing, multidimensional, complex, spanning hundreds and hundreds of years and many many voices in conversation or in response to one another, sometimes in disagreement.  In addition, there are many many voices whose faithful words were not recorded, but that’s a different sermon.  The Gospel of Matthew, the first book of the New Testament, is profoundly Jewish in its orientation and its outlook.  In it, Jesus is clear that his God-given work is not about abolishment but fulfillment of the law – the Torah – and the prophets.  It is in this context, with this in mind, that Jesus enters the ongoing conversation and says, “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy not sacrifice.’”  He’s quoting the prophet Hosea.

      Over the past few weeks, we’ve heard excerpts from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ first course of instruction in the Gospel of Matthew.  This week in the Gospel of Matthew, we encounter stories from the interlude between Jesus’ first and second courses of instruction.   The brief interlude is chock-full of healing stories about people with leprosy, paralysis, fever, mental illness, tax collection, hemorrhaging, untimely death, blindness, deafness and the inability to speak.  Many who were possessed and all who were sick, every disease, every sickness.  Maybe you are thinking, “wait a minute, tax collection?  Is tax collection a condition requiring healing?”  Well, in Matthew’s Gospel tax collection is a condition requiring healing.  Tax collectors were known extortionists.  We all know that extortion is just bad behavior.  How interesting that bad luck and bad choices are all mixed in together in the stories of those needing healing.  Matthew makes it clear that healing includes curing, and yet healing is not the same as curing.  It’s broader than that.  Healing has to do with restoration of relationship with the community (even, I’d add, when curing isn’t possible or death is inevitable).

      I’m sure I’ve said this already in my preaching at Emmanuel, but I’ll say it again (and again and again).  The important question to ask about scripture (and here about the healing stories) is not, “did this happen?”  The important question to ask is “does this happen?”  Not “could this have really happened?” But “where is this really happening?”  Can healing happen for the people in our society who are outside of the community because of bad luck or bad choices (or a dizzying combination of both)?  What are the conditions that cause people to be shut out?  Illness and disability; addiction to drugs or alcohol or sex, or whatever; lack of a shower or a home address; any behavior which is deemed outside of the law; whatever makes people too sad or too sorry or too strange.  Sometimes the exclusion is coincidental or accidental.  Sometimes the exclusion is excruciatingly intentional.

      A wise woman once said to me that she believed that tolerance for deviance is the measure of the Christ in any Christian congregation. I think about that so often – and want to push it even further. I want to move beyond tolerance to compassion – and further still, from compassion to identification. I want us to be always moving from judgment of others – to compassion for others – to identification with others.1

      It’s that identification with others that I want to spend some time on this morning, because each one of us has parts that are too sad or too sorry or too strange to reveal. And each one of us has stories of healing, of being restored to relationship – restored to community. Writer Nora Gallagher puts it this way: “Hidden in each of us are our histories—depression, divorce, bulimia, layoffs, adultery, abuse—the wreckage of late-twentieth-century lives, our debris. And with it the healed family, the happy second marriage, a found vocation, the long-awaited birth.”2 What is it for you? What demons possess you? What fever sets you apart? What bleeding that will not stop? What part is paralyzed or stuck, unable to move or feel? What part of you has died too young? What part of you, shamed or diseased or cut-off is longing to be recovered or reconciled? And what do you know of restoration and redemption? What do you know of Love which is present, bidden or unbidden? When have you been brave enough to ask for healing? What has made you foolish enough to accept healing? What Love has inspired you to offer healing to others? These are questions not only for each of us as individuals, but for us as a congregation and as a Church.

      I don’t know if you saw the article in the Boston Globe this past Friday about Bishop Shaw’s trip to Zimbabwe.  He travelled there last week, alone and in secret, in response to our Presiding Bishop’s request.  She asked him to go to express support for the Anglicans who are suffering humiliating human rights abuses.  They have been barred from worshiping in their churches and when they defy that ban, they are routinely beaten and attacked by riot police with attack dogs.  Nevertheless, more than 400 people came together for worship last Sunday in the backyard of a home in a very poor township of Harare. 

      Bishop Shaw preached at that service. He told them that there were millions of people around the globe praying for them. And he told them that they are “a model for the rest of us around the world, in the way that they are standing up against oppression, and not letting it get in the way of their worship for God.”3 What made me weep was the report of the collection that they took up for underprivileged children in our own city of Lynn, Massachusetts. Now, the economic situation in Zimbabwe presently includes an inflation rate of one million percent and unemployment rates of 80-90 percent. Their generosity and their dignity in the midst of their devastating humanitarian crisis and widespread economic deprivation, reveal the bravest kind of faith, a kind of hoping against hope that the Apostle Paul lifts up. In fact, their generosity and their dignity reveal the Love of God, recovering, reconciling, restoring and redeeming, as well as anything I know. And what I know from the story of Abraham is that it’s never too late to respond to God’s call: to leave the familiar, the safety net, to become more and more of who and whose we are, to bring mercy and healing all around. Let’s go and learn what this means.