june 3, 2018

SECOND sunday of pentecost

2 Corinthians 4:5-12 & Mark 2:23-3:6

READ LECTIONARY | HEAR SERMON RECORDING

When I was in college, I got very sick. After a year of tests, specialists, and the whack-a-mole game of various attempts at treatment, we finally figured it out. Long story short, my anxiety was so bad, and my stress levels so high, that my body had essentially quit working. 

So we set about treating that. One thing my doctor recommended was exercise, which we all know has a positive effect on mental health. My partner Chas was into weight lifting, so I started doing that with him. I signed up for a beginner’s class and was soon seeing gains. But the thing about weight lifting is that there are numbers involved. You can set very clear goals and track your progress toward them. You can compete with other people. 

And so the thing that had made me sick in the first place - this anxious obsession with being the best - collided with something that was supposed to help me get well. After a year of powerlifting, during which time I started attending competitions and filled two notebooks with numbers tracking each workout, my doctor realized that this had become just another source of stress, another unreasonable standard I would wreck myself chasing, and she told me to quit.

Paracelsus, a Swiss alchemist and physician from the 16th century and the father of toxicology, coined the phrase: “the dose makes the poison.” Things that are good for us, or therapeutic, in small doses - like water, or Tylenol - are fatal in larger doses. It’s not the substance itself that has healing or dangerous properties, but how we use it. I like to think of it in the reverse: the dose is the cure. 

This is a truth we humans really struggle with. We start habits to help us be healthy, then become slaves to those habits. We come up with labels to help us conveniently identify parts of ourselves, then start believing that’s who we are. We set up rituals to connect us to the Divine, then start worshipping them as idols. Anything that comes down to “balance” is hard for us. 

In today’s Gospel, Jesus encounters people so adherent to the letter of the law that they’ve lost the spirit. He tells them “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath.” The Sabbath is a practice designed to help us grow closer to God; it is not, itself, God. To throw ourselves too deeply in the tradition risks losing sight of its true purpose. But to abandon the Sabbath entirely is also a mistake. The Sabbath was made for us, for a reason. Jesus reminds us that we can we honor this gift while keeping our eyes on its Creator.

Today’s epistle also captures the need for balance between conflicting forces - the death of Christ at work in us to make life possible. If we surrendered entirely to death, if we had a faith entirely focused on the Crucifixion, we would be lost in the darkness of that day - but if we gave up on that part of the story, if we neglected Christ’s death because we preferred life, we’d be missing a crucial step on the way to true life. 

So how do we hold onto the balance? How can we make sure that we keep our eyes on the truth, that we don’t fall prey to the comforting security of all-or-nothing thinking? How do we remember that the workout is meant to serve us, and not us to serve the workout; that righteousness and goodness are not found in blindly following a rule, but in understanding what greater purpose that rule serves; that Church, with all its traditions, is the pathway, not the destination; that it’s how we take our cure, and not the substance itself, that restores us?

I don’t have the whole answer; if I did, I might not have gotten so sick in the first place, and I wouldn’t continue to battle the all-or-nothing perfectionist anxiety that likes to turn cures into poisons. But I think acknowledging that we don’t have the whole answer is, paradoxically, itself the answer. 

There is no one answer - that’s the whole point, I think. It’s much easier to say “just follow all the rules” than to say “in every moment, stay tapped in to the Holy Spirit, do what God leads you to do, remember always to stay intentional and loving.” We all want a one-size-fits-all answer; something that’s always the right thing to do, so if we always do that, we’ll always be right.

Today’s Gospel and Epistle remind us that balance is key to a healthy life in Christ, and a healthy life period. They remind us that the counter to balance is rigidity, obsession, zealotry. Balance requires flexibility, it requires dynamic creativity, growth, responsiveness. Things that are alive can find balance - they can change, learn, grow. That’s why we say we have a living faith and a living God - we are called to a life spent in movement, always seeking balance. Adhering to one ancient law, sticking to one unchanging routine - that’s a dead faith.

Jesus calls us into a delicate dance: find something that serves you, and serve me through it. Make sure you are serving, and make sure you are being served. Keep looking toward your neighbor’s needs. If it’s all about balance, then it’s probably best we aren’t standing still. Ever seen someone on a tightrope? A little dip left, a wobble right, and that’s how we stay where we need to be. A corpse, a concrete slab, something that can’t move and adjust and respond - that would never find balance. 

I don’t think it’s an accident that we read these passages during the season of Pentecost, which is all about the Holy Spirit. A concept that came back to me over and over as I worked on this sermon was the tension between obeying the “letter” of the law vs. the “spirit” of the law. It’s no accident that it’s the same word, there - spirit. If we stay tapped in to the letter of the law, our faith is rigid, it’s fossilized, it’s dead. But that’s why we have the Spirit instead - so we can consistently be practicing a living faith, checking in with honesty, truth, and discernment. 

Pentecost is a season when we are encouraged stay aware of the Holy Spirit’s continuous presence in our lives, and to stay present to that Divinity instead of stagnating in dogma. Keep seeking the truth, keep asking ourselves: does this serve me? Does this serve my neighbor? Does this serve the Kingdom? Because the danger comes not when we do the wrong thing, but when we stop asking what the right thing is. Once we think we have all the right answers; once we’re sure, like the Pharisees, that we know exactly what is lawful and what the law means, we’re out of balance. Certainty turns to rigidity. We are blessed with a Spirit we can engage with, dialogue with, and be challenged by, so we can keep our feet moving and maintain that delicate balance of faith, knowing that Jesus will always be there to catch us when we wobble.