KEEPING YOUR EYE ON THE BALL
May 9, 2010, The Sixth Sunday in Easter (Mothers’ Day)
John 5:1-11, 15-16
Michael L. Lindvall, The Brick Presbyterian Church in the City of New York
Theme: We need to keep our focus on what really matters – individually and as the
church.
“May your holy word bring healing into our lives, O Mother God. May the words
of Scripture, read and heard, lift us to our feet. And now may the words of my
mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my
Rock and my Redeemer. Amen.”
The gospels are full of stories about Jesus healing people. They make it clear that
Jesus simply could not walk past human suffering; he had to do something. Taken
together, they paint a narrative portrait of a God of consummate compassion. But
many of them are more subtle – and none more so than the one Kent just read.
Jesus is in Jerusalem. He happens by a natural pool named Beth-zatha, famous for
its healing powers. By the way, the old pronunciation was “Bethesda,” which is
why there are so many hospitals by that name. Archeologists have recently
unearthed the site – five porticoes and all, located just where the Gospel says –
near the Sheep Gate. Anyway, it seems that this pool bubbled once and again, and
the rumor was that the first person in the water when this happened would be
healed. This drew quite a crowd of the afflicted – “invalids” John names them.
Every time the water was troubled, there was a mad dash. You can only imagine
the pathos and panic, shoving and yelling, the lame trying to get to their feet, the
blind trying to find the pool, the paralyzed calling for help.
Jesus happens by and speaks to a man in this crowd who’s been paralyzed for no
fewer than 38 years. Jesus asks this guy who’s been in heaven’s waiting room for
38 years one question: “Do you want to be healed?”
Strangely, he doesn’t answer the question. The first thing out of his mouth is not
an answer; it’s a complaint. “I don’t have anybody to carry me to the water so I
never get there.” Which might lead you to ask, “Then why have you been sitting
-1* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.
here for the past 38 years?” Jesus ignores this and simply says, “Stand up, take up
your mat and walk.” And the man does just that. But that’s not quite the end of
the story.
There are some great potential sermons in this story. There’s a sermon about how
people get themselves stuck in impossible, “Catch-22” situations, like sitting by a
pool waiting for it to bubble so you could jump in, but you actually can’t jump in.
This is painfully ironic, but the truth is that people like you and me, smart people,
get themselves impossibly stuck in life in similar ways all the time.
And then I suppose there’s another sermon about complaining. It’s so illuminating
that when Jesus asks the man if he wants to be healed, he doesn’t answer; he
complains.
And, of course, there’s a deep sermon about the fact that this man finds the healing
power his life needs, not in the magical waters of the Bethzatha, but in Jesus and in
himself. Jesus speaks the word, and the guy finds the gumption to get on his own
two feet.
But I’m not going to preach any of those sermons today. I’m going to talk about
“the rest of the story,” as Paul Harvey would have said. The rest of the story goes
like this... This guy who has been an immobile, urban fixture for nearly four
decades, a veritable emblem of despair, is suddenly trotting around Jerusalem with
his mat under his arm. And how do the religious leaders of the city react? Oddly
enough, they’re furious, outraged, indignant because Jesus and the man with the
mat have broken rules. It’s against the rules to heal people on the Sabbath, they
point out, and furthermore, it’s against the rules to carry mats on the Sabbath!
Outraged religious leaders, indignant about obscure rules, are an easy target for
modern ridicule. Actually, they’re too easy a target. “How absurd,” we say, “a
human being has been lifted from suffering and indignity to whole, new life and
here you are fussing about some obscure theological footnotes about Sabbath
keeping? Talk about losing sight of what really matters!”
But like I said, they’re too easy a target. The way these religious leaders
-2* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.
understood things, Jesus and the man with the mat had both defied one of the Ten
Commandments, number four: “You shall remember the Sabbath Day and keep it
holy. Six days shall you labor…. But the seventh day you shall not do any work.”
Healing people is work. Carrying a mat around is work.
You have to remember that the Jewish people were a beleaguered minority in the
Greco-Roman world of the First Century. Jews, then as now, were always in
mortal danger of losing their identity, of being swallowed up in a vast sea of
Gentiles. And it was stringent, uncompromising obedience to the strictures of
Torah that kept Jews who they were. So odd dietary restrictions, rules about
washing things and what you could wear, and these quirky sabbatarian laws were
all designed to keep Jews, Jews. Now of course, at the end of the day, refraining
from shellfish and not carrying things on the Sabbath were not really what made a
Jew a Jew. What really made a Jew and Jew – then as now – was, as the Old
Testament prophet Micah put it, “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk
humbly with your God.” Rules about eating pork mattered. Rules about the
Sabbath mattered. But these were just details designed to remind Jews of what
really mattered. They were not the center; they were on the periphery pointing to
the center. The center, what really mattered, was the “justice, kindness, and the
walking humbly with your God.” But these religious leaders of Jerusalem seemed
to have gotten their priorities skewed. Peripheral matters became their center. The
marginal had become what really mattered.
As my wife would phrase it, “They didn’t keep their eye on the ball.” She says this
often – to me and to our kids. I assume it’s a tennis metaphor. She plays some
summer tennis with her brother who is a very good tennis player and probably
offers advice like “keep your eye on the ball.” “Keep your eye on the ball” rather
than looking at the strings on your racket, or watching your opponent, or the heated
game on the next court over. Off the tennis court, “keeping your eye on the ball”
means focusing on what really matters rather than on the peripherals. It is very
good life advice, but by my observation, it’s advice that people forget or ignore all
the time.
For instance, churches forget to keep their eye on the ball when the building
becomes what matters most. Don’t get me wrong, this building of ours matters. It
-3* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.
matters that it’s well-maintained. It even matters that it’s beautiful. But the church
is not the building. The real church is us and what we do and how we live; it’s our
doing of justice, and loving of kindness, and walking humbly with our God. The
building is just the place where we gather to plot and plan and pray and then go out
to be and do what really matters.
The budget matters. I like to say that a church budget is the mission of the church
writ on a spreadsheet. But matter as the money does, it’s not the church’s bottom
line. Oh, it supports what matters, but it’s not what matters most.
Good church governance matters, all those Presbyterian rules and decision-making
processes that we labor with matter. But Presbyterian rules are not the church.
Now, I have to tell you, I know Presbyterians who have forgotten this. They have
forgotten it as much as those religious leaders in Jerusalem forgot that the fine
details of Sabbath-keeping were not Judaism.
The building, the budget, the church polity, all of these are but helpful means to the
real end – and that end, the center, what really matters, the ball to keep our eyes on,
is to be the church we are called to be, to be a community where justice is done, a
place where kindness is loved, a people who walk humbly with God.
And just as churches forget to keep their eye on the ball, you and I in our
individual lives forget to keep our eyes on the ball.
We forget that my job is not the same thing as my life.
We forget that a good school for our child is not an end in itself; it’s but one
means among many toward the end of a happy, productive, loving, giving
life.
We forget that apartments and country houses and financial assets are not
ends in themselves. They are at best means to an end, means by which we
might perhaps live happier lives, and more importantly, means by which we
might individually do justice and love kindness and walk humbly with God.
-4* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.
Never forget that when things we own do in fact become the ends, they
usually end up owning us.
So we dare not be too quick to judge those religious leaders in Jerusalem, so
furious at Jesus for healing on the Sabbath and at the healed man for carrying his
mat around on a Saturday. Yes, their eyes were off the ball. They did forget what
mattered most. But so do we, both as churches and as individual Christians.
I suppose I would have my eye off the ball this morning if I neglected the fact that
today is not only the 6th Sunday in Eastertide, but also Mother’s Day. So I would
end this sermon with a story about a mother who kept her eye on the ball.
About a decade ago, a member of our church back in Michigan asked my wife to
read a manuscript that she had just finished writing. It was an autobiographical
memoir that stretched from the early days of the Great Depression through the
Second World War. A few chapters into the book, the author, then a woman in her
late 80’s, told the story of a family meal at their home in a small town in Iowa
during the Depression. The author was then a very young girl. The family, she
remembers, had just sat down to the table – mom and dad and seven kids, no less.
There was knock at the back door – a hungry “hobo” as the wandering homeless of
the Depression were named – a hungry man looking for something to eat. She
remembers her mother going to the door, returning to the table, silently picking up
her own plate of food, taking it to the back door, and then sitting down again.
Everything had been dished up; there was no more. Her father asked one of the
older boys to fetch an empty plate out of the cupboard which he then wordlessly
passed around the table. Each of them shared from their own plate until there was
enough to fill the empty one.
Feeding her family mattered to that mom, growing children, hungry mouths and
all. But she kept her eye on the ball that day as my wife would say. She
remembered that doing justice and loving kindness and walking humbly with God
were what mattered most.
If you’re not sure this is true, consider the fact that a very old woman in Ann
Arbor, Michigan remembered an otherwise forgotten dinner from when she was a
-5* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.
very little girl. Of all the dinners this family had sat down to three-quarters of a
century earlier – hundreds and hundreds of dinners – this was the one that she
remembered.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
-6* Because sermons are meant to be preached and are therefore prepared with the emphasis on verbal presentation, the written
accounts occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.