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The Reverend Mark H. Byers
July 2, 2006- Year B, Proper 8
Preached at St. Gabriel’s, Leesburg, VA

People of God, Get Up!

Jairus, a leader of the synagogue, begs Jesus to come to his house. I don’t know about you, but I’m a proud man, and I don’t like to beg for anything, even when I’m praying.

“My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live.”

The mission of Jesus Christ might be summed up in words very much like these: He comes into a world at the point of death to “lay hands on it, so that [it] may be made well, and live.” Jesus isn’t in Jairus’s house just to comfort him, nor is he there to say that it’s all okay because the dead girl’s going to go to heaven. He is there to bear witness to the power of God even over death itself. Jesus tells them to keep this miracle a secret. Is this because, as some have suggested, those outside have already demonstrated their lack of faith? Is it because they aren’t ready to hear or see this miracle, given their laughter at the very idea that Jesus could make a difference in this situation?

This power that Jesus demonstrates has very real consequences for believers. Many of us gather with our sick or disheartened friends and family primarily as mourners or to express our sympathy. And no one would say that Jesus is without compassion. Nor, hopefully, are we. But his presence is not primarily about being sympathetic to those who suffer. His presence is about moving them out of suffering into new life in the unfolding Kingdom of God.

What could I possibly mean? I mean that most of us, myself included, spend our time standing outside the house laughing, quietly or even quite openly, at the notion that faith, even the desperate faith of someone like Jairus, can lead to anything other than a more reasonable system of mourning or suffering. Isn’t that what heaven sounds like sometimes? To me, it can sound like an eternal spa where we go to feel good and have our various ailments relieved by God’s divine seaweed wraps and angelic massage therapists. Heck, some people don’t even believe in that much. For some people, religion is all about ethical and moral personal behavior, and it’s just as well to strip away the supernatural stuff, the mythology. Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence that was published two hundred thirty years ago next Tuesday, believed that way.

I don’t have any idea what Jefferson would have done with this story, other than edit it out, as he did with the other biblical miracles. But editing it out, either literally or simply by saying, well, God doesn’t really do that sort of thing anymore, avoids the essential question that is underneath Jairus’s approach to Jesus, and underneath the cries of the Hebrews in bondage in Egypt, or in exile in Babylon, or that people everywhere who are in bondage cry out every day. What has God done, and more importantly, what is God going to do about the enormous mess in this world? Because make no mistake, from the top all the way down to every one of us, there is a big old mess here.

There are a lot of answers. Some of them dispense with God altogether. Market economics, entrepreneurialism, the United Nations (or its ancestor, the League of Nations), aid for development, aid for armed groups or peoples, political parties and ideologies, and various nations all have offered answers, and have even had some small successes.

Some of the answers include God in some way, but maybe only as “sponsor” or “CEO” or generic force. Or perhaps they just dispense with the God of Adam and Eve, and of Abraham and Moses, the God who came to live among us as Jesus Christ. Think of various spiritual movements that work to improve individual people’s lives by changing a person’s beliefs or piety: The new Gnostics, or the quasi-Eastern spiritual movements, or various New Age practices, or even neo-paganisms of various sorts.

Even within the church, our denomination as well as others, we get caught up in answers that don’t really address the question. We fight with one another about being prophetic or being orthodox. We pray to God to forgive our sins, and sometimes we’re very sure what they are, and sometimes we don’t really know anymore. Unless someone else is committing them; then we tend to be VERY sure what they are.

Maybe it is only in desperation that we can ask the essential question and hear the answer. But maybe even in desperation, it’s possible to ask God to do something very different than God has it in mind to do. I know a good many people that are sympathetic to a reading of St. Paul that says “I might have to be here on earth, but I’d much rather be in heaven.” (See Philippians 1: 21-26) Which twists Paul’s thoughts out of shape to a certain extent, and ignores something important: God loves the world that He made, and loves the creatures who walk, slither, swim, fly, and crawl all over it. God loves every human being and mountain and valley and river and tree. And to suggest that it is only with reluctance that we should remain here demonstrates two things. First, an almost vestigial understanding of how God thinks about the world we inhabit. Second, a considerable misunderstanding of what the Kingdom of God actually is. Dealing with both of those two things would take two other sermons, or even two books, so let me just gloss them.

What does the Book of Genesis say several times during the Creation story in the first chapter? Yes, that’s right: God saw that it was good. And near the end of that story, it says “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.”

Nothing that happened in the Garden of Eden or that has happened in human history since then has changed the fact that God hates nothing and no one whom He has made. God may be justifiably angry over particular facts about human beings and their conduct, as individuals, cultures, or nations, but God still loves us and the world.

Second, the purpose of the coming of Christ is the redemption of humanity through his life, death, and resurrection. While that certainly opens the gates of Heaven, it seems that God’s intention is for Heaven to flow forth into our world, rather than to build an escalator up to our appointed clouds. We believe, after all, in the bodily resurrection, or say we do, and Jesus did not reassure Jairus that his daughter was now in heaven, but rather, he brought her back into this realm. Likewise, when he appeared following his own resurrection, he made a point of emphasizing that he was not simply a disembodied spirit. He had substance: a body that bears eternally not merely the form but the identifying marks of his life in this world. In other words, he isn’t some wraith or fairy. He is himself, and so shall we be ourselves, too.

Which changes, of course, what Christian life is about. It’s not simply about, as one noted pastor says, preparing in this life for eternity. Christian life recognizes that the Kingdom is already coming in the presence of Christ within the church and every believer. And so the witness of the church is not simply to the hope of salvation to heaven in the spiritual “Calgon, take me away!” sense, but rather to the hope that God is continuing to lay claim to this world and everyone and everything in it as his own. And that means that the way we live together in the church, and with even our most hated neighbors, and with every non-human creature, both breathing and inanimate, should recognize His Lordship.

How many parents and kids here recognize this phrase? “Not as long as you are under my roof.” That is the refrain that most parents use in some form or another during the childhood and adolescence of their kids. And it is a perfectly reasonable and just thing to say. The lord and lady of the house have the right and privilege of defining the terms of their children’s residency, even when the children have no choice over whether to leave. How much more the case when the Lord is Jesus Christ and the household is the entire Cosmos! Would you like to extinguish a species, perhaps the Humpback Whale? Maybe log or slash and burn rain forests out of existence? Kill each other over fossil fuels? Well, those are certainly options, much as it is an option to teenagers to sneak out and get drunk. But if we or they imagine for one instant that there are no consequences, then we deceive ourselves.

Do we imagine that God has no opinion of this? Does this not make it all the more imperative that we who will be called to account think seriously and speak out about what is done in our names, rather than abdicating such choices to our leaders? At the very least we should not hand over the moral compass of our nation to others without even a peep, be they our political leaders, spin doctors and lobbyists of all stripes, Hollywood, Madison Avenue, or the Military/Industrial Complex.

We are, after all, not merely Americans in this room, but followers of Jesus Christ, disciples of the Prince of Peace, and we know, or should know, better than most that Jesus holds all people and all nations to account. Jairus, in his desperation, knew that Jesus could do more than offer him platitudes, could say more to his condition than, “God never closes a door without opening a window.” Jesus took that little girl by the hand and said, “Little girl, get up.”
“Little girl, get up!” Live! Breathe! Jesus touches her, speaks to her, and she climbs back into the realm of the living, the realm where Jesus Christ is Lord of All.

The church that believes in the power of Jesus Christ to destroy death is never simply about getting “spiritually healthy” or “saved.” It is about DESTROYING DEATH, about offering hope through Jesus Christ, who lives in us and through us, who is Lord of All, and who doesn’t care in the least whether the President finds that this infringes upon his authority as commander in chief, or that corporate America is worried that they’ll have to take a cut in profits if they want to produce cleaner, safer products, or that the American consumer is worried that perhaps, just perhaps, other people deserve to share as much in the bounty of God’s creation as we do, even if it means we get a little less. It’s not our house. Jairus knew that, and so he asked Jesus in and even though everyone outside was laughing, laughing at the futility of his begging and Christ’s words, he watched his dead daughter get up and live.

Sometimes people ask me, “What am I supposed to take away from your sermon?” And generally, I say, “Take whatever the Holy Spirit moves you to take.” But let me be more specific.

Be like Jairus. Be desperate enough to put aside for a moment whatever position and beliefs you’re expected by the world to have. If you have to, beg. And we have to, all of us. Be brave enough to ask Jesus Christ for life. And don’t let anyone else laugh or scoff your faith away. If we don’t think that churches, through Jesus Christ, can destroy the power of death, then we don’t believe that Jesus Christ is truly Lord of his own house, and we are far worse off than any rebellious child that any parent ever raised, because we have no hope.

People of God, get up! If you have Christ within you, then you have everlasting life within you, and power over the forces that enslave and destroy the creatures of God. If you have Christ within you, then you have the mind of God within you, and the imagination to see ways forward from fear, from polarization, from greed, from spiritual blindness and selfishness.

People of God, get up! This is God’s house. This whole world is God’s world, and it’s time for us to say, “Not under His roof. Not under his roof may you kill the innocent, or pollute the rivers, or soil the minds and hearts of his people. Not under his roof may you demonize other people, even enemies. Not under his roof may you work for Satan, or take food and health from people in distant lands.” People of God, get up!

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