Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Let us pray.
Dear heavenly Father, thank you for listening to our prayers so many times. We take your time and yet you do care about every small detail of our lives.
Be with us today as we listen to your word.
We listen to your love and we feel your love in this place. Be with those here and far away up on the mountain.
Open our ears to hear your word. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.
This comes from John, the fifth chapter, the first few verses.
Jesus heals on the Sabbath.
After this there was a festival of the Jews and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now in Jerusalem, by the sheep gate, there's a pool called in Hebrew, Bethesda, which has five porticos. In these lay many invalids, blind, lame and paralyzed. One man was there who had been ill for 38 years.
When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he'd been there for a long time, he said to him, do you want to be made well?
The sick man answered him, sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when I. When the water is stirred up. And while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.
Jesus said to him, stand up, take your mat and walk at once. The man was made well and he took up his mat and began to walk.
Now that day was a Sabbath.
This is the word of the Lord.
[00:01:51] Speaker B: Good morning, church.
It is such a gift to be with you all again.
I feel like gathered in this room. So many parts of my life in California have intersected my time at Fuller, my service within the Presbyterian Church.
My husband Tim and I make our church home over in Culver City these days. And so I bring you greetings from the good folks at Culver City Presbyterian Church. And I see some friends, Megan and Ricardo Guerrero, who have joined us today. It's so lovely to see you all as well and Mara Lee and our work way back in the day with immigration. My goodness, so many intersections for me in this room. You all make for such a welcoming place to offer pulpit supply when your pastor is off doing weddings and some of your folks are up on all church retreat.
Love that you all are dialing in from the mountaintop and hope that your time away has been blessed.
Oh, as you heard, I'm a chaplain these days and I actually have a specialty in palliative care which is providing spiritual support for folks who have life limiting illness who are coming to the end of their life.
So I'm with people a lot who are on a long journey of illness and healing, of relapse and new medication, of appointments and Surgeries.
I don't know how it is for you, but for me, I tend to avoid going to the doctor or the hospital as long as I can.
I limp along with a symptom, I try and minimize it as much as possible, and then suddenly it's not something I can ignore and there can be a cascade of events.
Ironically, my brother in law actually found himself in ICU and having surgery this morning, whereas he's been putting putting up with some symptoms for a long time and didn't plan on spending his Memorial Day weekend that way.
When we find ourselves in that place, when there's no more denying it, there tends to be a lot of waiting.
A lot of time to offer our prayer up to God or to Allah or the universe, or whoever the one is upon whom we call.
As a chaplain, that's where I come in.
Not to fix or set things right, but to join with the person in their prayer, in their moment of questions, in their moments of waiting.
I understand that that's where Christ is sending me and actually sending all of us to be in those moments where the answers aren't obvious yet and the questions are causing us to tremble.
It might not be that Christ sends each of us back into the hospital to be at a bedside, but certainly Christ sends us into the waiting rooms, into the spaces outside of this beautiful sanctuary. It might be the parking lot or to the coffee hour, to a conversation, or it might be to a conversation with a co worker or a neighbor.
People make their way in this world with so many hidden pockets of pain and suffering, things that don't populate easily in a cheery quick conversation at Trader Joe's.
I think that Christ sends us to ask those questions. How's it going?
How are you holding up?
How have you been?
What's interesting.
So this text was actually lectionary text for today and it aligns so closely with my daily. It's fun to share it with you all in this way because I think that the waiting room that we hear about in the text today is remarkably similar to the waiting rooms that we have in our own lives.
It's rare unless you're a paramedic. It is rare that we are going to be present for those around us at the instant of the trauma, at the instant of the crisis, at the moment of the diagnosis.
It's more often the case that God is going to send us into that space of waiting, into the waiting room, if you will.
Now in this gospel we hear about a life in the day of the pool by the Sheep Gate, which probably does not register heavily for many of us, but the idea was that this was a place where folks would go in hopes of healing.
So, okay, just imagine Israel, a lot of sunshine. So they have a pool, and then there's sort of, like, space around the pool, and then there's porticos, which are like shade shelters. And so then folks are sort of hanging out in the shady bits, waiting, and they're waiting for the angel of God to stir the water.
And guess what? When the water is stirred, one person who's the quickest.
This is a very problematic setup, by the way. One person who's the quickest to get into the water, then gets the healing.
Everybody else, you gotta wait for the water to move. Again, it sounds a little rough, but here's where it gets even saltier.
Like, there is an understanding that if you are sick enough to show up at this pool, it means that your body, it's not just your body who's sick. It means that this outer sickness is probably an exterior indication of an interior sin or problematic behavior, and that this is how God is dealing with you.
And so obviously, you are no longer the most popular person at work.
Obviously, you might not even get to go to work. You get cut off from your social connections.
So it's not like this is the who's who of Jerusalem.
This pool, this portico, this place by the sheep gate is a place that most people would make a detour around.
And even if Waze would tell them that's the quickest way through into the city, they wouldn't do it. They would reroute.
So as we hear about that, like, roughly 2,000 years later, it sounds a little silly. And I notice in myself, I feel a little condescension. I'm like, really? You're going to look down on people who are sick? Really, you're going to cut them off?
Really, you're going to sit and wait for the water to be stirred by an invisible angel wing?
But think about it.
What does it look like when we get sick?
How long have you waited on hold, my friends?
How long have you waited for your clinic appointment or for the insurance to approve it or for a diagnosis and the test results?
When you've been in the hospital, what percentage of your time have you spent waiting?
A lot, right?
Waiting is the space in which we find ourselves when we are seeking our healing as well.
Maybe we're waiting for results of the scan to see if the cancer has come back or if the chemo has been effective.
Waiting for the Pain to stop now that we've taken the medication, waiting for visiting hours when our loved ones can come see us, because we're kind of cut off when we're there in the hospital.
We're waiting.
Now, the scripture, this morning, John tells us that this guy has been there waiting 38 years. Now, I have never been on hold for 38 years, but that's a long time to be waiting.
And out of the blue, one day, Jesus shows up in this place where rabbis don't normally show up.
Okay? Nobody knows that he's Jesus. Like, when we hear this, we're like, jesus is there. It's going to get better there. They're just like, oh, this guy must be lost.
He doesn't look like he belongs here.
But we're Christians. We know that when we hear that Jesus is showing up somewhere, it's on us to figure out what Jesus is about and to go and do likewise. So what is Jesus doing here? How is he acting? Well, first of all, yeah, he showed up. He went to the place where people are waiting and watching for their healing.
And remember what I said, like, there's a stigma with being sick. It's a stigma that's understood to be sort of a contagious situation. So if you're a rabbi and you want to go be a good rabbi, you can't have, like, the cooties or the jubies on you from the portico. So there's not a lot of rabbis in circulation in this place.
And how is Jesus there, do you think? He's, like, squirting hand sanitizer and keeping himself close so he doesn't touch anything?
No, he's there, and he's at home with himself, and he's at home with the people who are there.
And he's making his way through the place. There's crutches, there's bloody wounds. There's probably, like, flies on the wounds. Probably does not smell well because of the sun and the heat.
Jesus was risking contact.
He's fully present.
He isn't checking his cell phone. He's not rushing the moment.
He's engaging with people.
He's waiting with them.
So what does he do? John tells us he saw the man who had been lying there for a long time.
Well, how did Jesus know that? It's not like the guy had a cardboard sign. I've been here 38 years, seven months, two days, four hours.
No, I imagine that the only way that Jesus knew that he had been there a long time is because they had a conversation and they Had a real conversation.
And maybe Jesus invited him to say what it's been like and how he's doing. And maybe the guy shared about what it was like to get sick at first and then how he lost his job and then maybe his wife passed away and his brother kicked him out or what led to. What led to. What led to him sitting there that day, making it 38 years. Now, remember, people didn't live that long then. That's like almost a lifetime of unanswered prayers.
So close, but literally so far from the source of healing that was being dangled for him.
If we were going to make a screenplay out of this lectionary passage, this is the moment right here where I would say the miracle is happening.
Right there, when Jesus is making eye contact with this gentleman and kneeling down and asking the man to trust him with his story.
Right there, where Jesus is holding his gaze with every twist and turn.
Right there, when the love of God in the flesh is reaching out to a man whose illness has left him cut off, cut off from God, from his friends and his family.
Right there is where the wing of the angel is stirring the water, and there is a miracle of healing.
Now, this is the part that Hollywood normally picks up on what happens next.
So after our miracle transpires, Jesus does go on to call on this man to take up his mat and walk.
And miraculously, he does.
But for me, this moment when the man is pulling himself up to standing, this is an outward confirmation of the inward transformation that has been worked.
This is the outward confirmation of the inward transformation when the love of God shows up in those hard places in that waiting room. Jesus had crossed through the taboos of culture and faith to make a connection with this man. Of course, physical healing would follow such an outpouring of divine love.
I believe that God and Jesus call us as disciples to go and do likewise.
So faithfully we do.
Church. You've been at this for a long time.
You go into those waiting rooms.
They're labeled differently in our community, of course. And we know it's not always easy to keep our eye on what's happening there and not scan the room for the exit sign.
Our lives are busy. We have a lot on our plate.
And it can be tricky to draw near to somebody who's truly suffering.
It can be challenging to lean in when it feels like we might get sucked in to the vortex of somebody's trauma and challenge and pain.
Because healing is complicated, and it's hard not to get overwhelmed by somebody else's nightmare.
Sometimes it feels like we might catch their misfortune.
But Jesus invitation guides us to that holy ground.
We see his example of compassionately reaching out and that can give us the courage we need to send a text or make the call or ask the follow up question.
Now just take note. Jesus is not demanding that we fix the situation. We're not called on to make the situation empirically better. We don't have to be a doctor, we don't have to be a healer.
All that's asked in this miracle is for us to come alongside and be present to remind them that God has not been forgetful or neglectful and that they are not alone and that we will be there waiting for the healing that God has for them.
I think it would be fair to call our hospitals a modern day pool of Bethesda of healing.
As a chaplain, it's true. I get to go to the bedside and ask people to trust me with their stories. I'm a complete stranger to them and it's often within just a few minutes that people who are battling addiction and it's disorientation are sharing with me what it's like to try and show up as the father they want to be.
Or people who have been injured by friends, stabbed or burned or shot by their partners.
What it's like to try and find trust after their flesh wound heals over.
People who've had just a regular everyday life last week are now trying to figure out what that spot on the scan means and how it might change their life forever.
They're trusting in me to catch their story and my respect of their vulnerability connects us in a way that we are finding ourselves then in the heart of God's beloved community.
And it's together that then we wait for the healing that God works in them.
But hospitals are not the only place this happens and chaplains aren't the only people who catch those stories.
So I wonder for you church, where are your pools?
Where are your waiting rooms?
God has equipped and favored each of us with the ability to step into spaces where there is hurting.
God has equipped and favored each of us with a unique life experience that gives us exactly what is needed to catch the story of illness and seeking that a person will offer up.
Where would you go?
Where have you been?
I imagine that there is a lot of sifting through ashes these days in your church, family and in your community.
I know that summer's coming and extreme heat will also create hardship and illness for many.
Or maybe it's a person who looks a little rumpled at the target door asking for money.
Or it could just be the soft spoken person at the coffee hour who says a quick good morning and then skedaddles before real conversation can happen.
What do you think Jesus would do in your waiting room?
If Jesus was Presbyterian, and maybe he was, he might have a commission or form a study.
No, Jesus is going to sit down and have a conversation.
A conversation in which he probably will not do most of the talking but do the lion's share of the listening.
I think Jesus notices who's hurting and asks how's it going?
Are you suffering?
And then leaves space for what happens next.
The waiting room is a sacred place, my friends. The spirit of God goes where it chooses.
We never know when the water will be stirred, when the healing will come, or when the person in front of us will find themselves well and church. As Christians, we claim the miracle of the waiting room.
It's our privilege to show up there and be the hands and feet and eyes and ears and heart of God in those places.
When we come alongside those who are seeking their healing and when we risk sharing our stories when we're the one doing the seeking, this is where the ground turns holy and where people of great faith or no faith call on God, put themselves in God's hands.
I pray, dear church, that we will continue to follow Jesus into the waiting room and go and do likewise.
Amen.
