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June 15, 2008- RCL Year A, Proper 6

Mark Byers

Sit Injured; Play Hurt

I grew up in a family of non-athletes. I didn’t play sports much as a kid. I liked baseball and football, but as a spectator. Once, in fifth grade, I played basketball in a city league. The team was pretty good, but for the most part, I warmed the bench. In high school, I tried baseball. JV. One season. I got on base twice, both times hit by a pitch. It’s sad, because I love baseball, but I wasn’t very good at it. Later in life, I have become an average softball player. When I connect, I can sometimes hit the ball a long way. I’m an average fielder, with a pretty strong throwing arm.

Still, something happened in between high school and college. Well, the first thing that happened was the Navy. And I developed confidence, confidence to try things I hadn’t done before. Largely because I had to: the Navy expected me to do my job, and if I didn’t know how, to figure it out, or get help if I needed. And then do my job. Even when I didn’t feel like it, or wasn’t sure if I was very good at it.

I arrived at college as a 25 year old submarine veteran. My first week of classes, I went to a party. And someone came up to me, a stocky guy, and said, “You should play rugby.” Something- several somethings, actually- made me think that was a good idea.

The next Tuesday, I was on a field with about 25 guys from my college, and another guy in his mid to late thirties. The Haverford College Rugby Club! The Angry Young Newts, so called because our field didn’t drain well when it rained. Steve, our coach, was a still a very good player. I started out just practicing, learning to throw and catch passes, learning to tackle at slow speed, learning how to do “line outs,” and “scrums.” Because I was tall and, for Haverford, a behemoth of 200 pounds, I was made a “second row.” Most of this probably doesn’t mean anything to you all, because most people are unfamiliar with the game. It’s like being a lineman in football, I suppose. Not a glamorous, eye-catching, high scoring position, but a ground-in mud, running into a lot of other players position.

My first game, the equivalent of a “JV” game, I got thrown around like a balled-up scrap of paper by the Temple University “B” side. Rugby doesn’t have varsity and junior varsity, but “A,” “B,”, and sometimes “C” sides. I was pretty well banged up after this game, and I came out to practice the next week thinking I’d take it easy. For some reason, I thought that if I was in pain, I shouldn’t practice or play until I felt better. I shared my plans with the coach. He didn’t have much to say. I sensed that I’d said something wrong. “Do you think I should practice?”

Steve said, “My coach used to tell us, ‘Sit injured; play hurt.’” I replied, “That doesn’t make any sense.” Because to me, hurt was synonymous with injury. And vice versa. He just shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you. You have to figure this out.”

And I did. I suited up and practiced. At first, I hobbled around, feeling tender and bruised. Then, as I got warmed up, I became less aware of my pain, and actually started feeling pretty good. And it started to make sense to me: hurt is not necessarily debilitating. Sometimes hurting just means you’ve been out on the field playing. Injury, I now know, is actual debility. Both make us aware of our bodies, and such awareness hopefully leads to the ability to figure out, “Am I simply in pain because of my activity, or do I need to do something extraordinary to recover?”

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve discovered that I need to treat my body differently in order to do the things I love to do. Eventually, I’ll have to quit doing some of those things. Maybe sooner than I’d like. But one thing I know is this: my body hurts now, whether or not I’ve been tackled lately. Inactivity, even in younger people, produces limitations and even pain. I think of it like this: I’m going to hurt anyway. At least this way, I’ve got a good reason, something that I love enough that I don’t mind the hurt.

Even if you don’t much care for sports, I want you to squirrel that story away for a few minutes. Let’s talk about this lesson for a moment, now.

I said before, a couple of weeks ago, that Matthew is composed of alternating teaching sections, and narrative sections. Today, our lesson overlaps the end of a narrative section and the beginning of a teaching section. The end of the narrative section finds Jesus traveling through Galilee, “teaching…, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and every sickness.” And, we’re told, he encountered crowds periodically. Perhaps they were following him, as people often did. In any case, he is said to have “had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”

Two things jump out at me, here. First, much as in other parts of scripture, healing, especially of people who aren’t especially close to him, who aren’t his disciples, is an important part of Jesus’ ministry. Not surprising, really: healing is a testimony to the authority of the healer, right? If we encounter someone who is able to relieve the pain we’re living with, we’re likely to pay close attention to that person, at least with regard to matters that have to do with what is causing us pain. But even more than this, we’re likely to be receptive after healing to additional counsel from the healer.

Doctors, in our day, typically confine themselves to matters of physical health and well being, because we chop life up into different areas of expertise. But in Jesus’ time, people didn’t distinguish between the physical, emotional, spiritual, political, social, and historical realms, just to name a few of our categories. Wellness, healing, and every facet of life were seen as a continuous whole. One of the great ironies of life in our day and age is that more and more, we are learning that some of the ways we think about ourselves differently than our ancestors probably aren’t as true as we thought. We are beginning to understand, as our ancestors did, that our emotional, spiritual, and physical well-being is deeply integrated. We are beginning to understand, as our ancestors did, that our actions in one realm of life spill over into other areas we might once have thought of as being wholly separate. My consumer choices, for instance, can have deep implications, when multiplied across an entire nation, for the well being of nations far removed from my own.

So Jesus heals people, teaches them, has compassion on them, and then begins to speak to his disciples: “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” What does he mean by this? We go from teaching, to proclaiming the kingdom, to healing… Then to compassion, the motivation behind the former actions. And then to agricultural imagery…

Jesus is getting at just what sort of people the disciples are being molded to be. Teachers, centered in the new reality of God’s kingdom, who bring healing with them, who act from compassion. Compassion in this instance is not really “empathy.” Empathy is the sense that we can feel what another person is feeling. This can actually lead to the illusion that we understand and experience another person’s pain. God, and especially God in Jesus Christ, is certainly capable of authentic empathy. For mortals, it’s more dangerous: most of us have heard, or have said, in response to “I know exactly how you feel,” “You can’t possibly know how I feel.” Neither of these things is precisely true, although both speakers probably believe deeply that they are. Compassion, on the other hand, is emotion that arises from the suffering of another. We see a person who is suffering, and it fills us with a deep desire to alleviate their distress. Compassion is as authentic and desirable an emotion as there is: it finds its source in the heart of God, and God’s Son, as we heard today.

If compassion finds its source in God, so does discipleship, and all that it means. Discipleship is simply this: learning from Jesus how to labor for and in the kingdom. The beginning of this narrative section I discussed has Jesus gathering the disciples and giving them “authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and every sickness.” Why? Because people are able to hear good news best when bad news has receded in importance. Christian disciples are people for whom Jesus and the kingdom have become so central that, in spite of other pain and hurt, they are able to labor in love with their Master, Teacher, and Healer.

Notice that I’m not saying that Christians are pain- and disease-free. We all know, or should know, that Christians feel hurt, get sick, and even die in their mortal selves. Yet in spite of all that life throws at a disciple, they heave their hurting selves out of bed every morning and celebrate the good news of Jesus, the wisdom of Jesus, the healing of Jesus. They know in their lives what my coach Steve taught me about athletics. “Sit injured; play hurt.” Because there is joy in stepping into the harvest, even when your hands ache, your back is sore, and your feet are blistered. Even the Risen Christ is marked by wounds. Real resurrection, real healing doesn’t mean no pain, no scars and a convenient case of amnesia about all that has caused us hurt. It means offering our battered selves to God and to the world as a testimony to the power of God’s compassion and faithfulness.

Even as Jesus, in compassion, sends out the disciples to be similarly compassionate, he tells them not to expect a champagne reception. “Stay alert. This is hazardous work I’m assigning you. You’re going to be like sheep running through a wolf pack, so don’t call attention to yourselves. Be as cunning as a snake, inoffensive as a dove. Don’t be naïve. Some people will impugn your motives, others will smear your reputation- just because you believe in me…. When people realize it is the living God you are presenting and not some idol that makes them feel good, they are going to turn on you, even people in your own family. There is a great irony here: proclaiming so much love, experiencing so much hate!” [The Message]

Maybe it’s trivial to use sports to better understand the gospel. I don’t for a moment think that sports is a better metaphor than a harvest, but maybe it’s easier to grasp for all of us who no longer win our bread directly through our labor, but rather, buy it at the supermarket. There is a harvest of souls in the fields of our community. Imagine, for a moment, what it will mean in your life to be the channel for meaning in another person’s life. To help someone grow from being simply another stalk of grass in an enormous field of grass to being sustenance, someone whose existence through God breathes life into others, sheds God’s healing upon others. Being centered in knowing that this is the life that God wants for us can help injury to become hurt, and hurt to become a reminder that we are truly alive, doing truly valuable work. We’re going to hurt anyway; at least this way, we’re doing something that we love so much that the hurt isn’t the most important thing in our lives.

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