Meddlin’
By Margaret
Aymer
Sermon for 2009 PW Churchwide
Gathering
Delivered Sunday,
July 12, 2009
[9-16-09]Of the many
powerful presentations at the Churchwide Gathering of Presbyterian
Women, held last July in Louisville, one drew special attention from
a number of Witherspoon/Voices members who were there. Margaret
Aymer, who is assistant professor of New Testament at the
Interdenominational Theological Center, and serves on the PC(USA)’s
Facing Racism Strategy Team, preached a sermon which she titled
simply “Meddlin’.” It is a powerful call to ministry that includes
all people, that proclaims forgiveness to all, and invites them into
full participation in the life of the church, in good health care,
in much more.
The full sermon follows -- or find it in
easy-to-print PDF format
at the
Presbyterian Women website >>
This sermon was
written and delivered by Margaret Aymer at the 2009 Churchwide
Gathering of Presbyterian Women. To learn more, visit
www.pcusa.org/pwgathering
.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Since I moved to
Atlanta, I’ve picked up a number of Southern idioms. One of my
favorite southern expressions is the warning, “Preacher, you’ve left
off preachin’ and taken to meddlin’.” The good news of Mark 2:1-2 is
that it calls us to a ministry of meddlin’.
As the story begins,
Jesus is teaching in a house, and is drawing such a crowd that there
is no room, even at the door. Four folks decide to bring a paralyzed
man to Jesus, literally carrying the man between them. But, when
they get to the house where Jesus is teaching, they can’t get
inside. So, since their loyalty—a word sometimes translated as
faith—is too strong to leave the guy on the pallet outside, and
since there is no special access for people on pallets, they take to
meddlin’. They climb the stairs to the top of the house. Then the
four of them start to dig a hole, right through the roof of
the house. And having successfully destroyed someone else’s
property, they lower the one with paralysis through the hole in the
roof in front of Jesus.
Nowhere in this
entire story does anyone ask for a cure of paralysis. What
these five folks want is access: access denied to the one on the
pallet because he cannot propel himself into the house; access
denied to the four pallet bearers unless they leave their friend
outside. These five want access to the house, access to the
teaching, access to Jesus. And they want it badly enough to take to
meddlin’, even if it means they have to dig right through the roof
of the house.
Shortly after I moved
to Atlanta, I met Guy Pujol, a good Baptist preacher. He saw a need
to teach seminarians about HIV/AIDS, information that could change
their ministries and save lives. Guy proposed to teach this as a
class at his seminary for his Doctor of Ministry project. The
proposal was lauded by his advisor, needed by his colleagues, and
dismissed as impossible by the faculty of the school.
Guy wanted access—for
himself, for the seminarians, and for the HIV-positive church-going
persons that they would be serving but, there was no way in.
However, an unlikely community from a neighboring poorer,
historically-black seminary called the Interdenominational
Theological Center, the home of Johnson C. Smith Seminary, gathered
around Guy. We put him and his class on a “pallet,” “dug out the
roof” to allow him access, and lowered this class on HIV/AIDS for
seminarians down. The beloved community of ITC left off with
preachin’ and took to meddlin’. And our meddlin’, in the form of
this and many other classes on HIV, has literally saved the lives of
ITC seminarians, seminarians from ITC’s surrounding schools, and
parishioners in churches throughout the deep South.
Guy’s is not the only
story of access denied. If we are honest, at the heart of many of
our conflicts is the question of access, access to water resources,
to food and shelter and adequate medical care, to energy, to human
rights, to appropriate education, or to a place to call home. And in
our denomination, we too fight about access, about breaking open the
ceiling and giving everyone access to their God-given vocations.
What would happen if we started knocking in some roofs? What would
happen if we made it our practice to leave off preachin’ and take to
meddlin’?
Would we be
demonstrating in the streets until all women, and children and men
have access to the health care that they need, regardless of their
income level, across this great nation? Would we be overwhelming our
local, state, and national governments until people are not starving
for food, or choosing between housing and medicine in this rich
nation of ours? Would we be metaphorically climbing up to the top of
the Capitol building, and breaking through the great white dome on
behalf of those that cannot carry themselves through the door: the
undocumented, unseen, and unheard? Would we, who have so much power,
insist that if everyone can’t come in, we’re taking it to the roof?
Sisters and brothers, do we as people of faith, have the faith, the
loyalty of a community of pallet-carrying roof-breakers? Are we
ready to leave off preachin’ and take to meddlin’?
I imagine that a
pallet coming down through the roof must have amused Jesus. But even
in his amusement, Jesus would have realized that the person in front
of him had a problem. You see, in the first century, people believed
that sickness was caused by sin. So, if your body was not like every
one else’s body, if you had such a grievous illness as paralysis, if
you couldn’t work, and if you couldn’t walk, you must have been
very sinful indeed.
This belief was
something the paralyzed man had probably had to live with as long as
his paralysis. It was probably as normal to him as his inability to
walk. He may even have so internalized that shame and guilt, that he
saw himself as hopelessly and irredeemably sinful. And so Jesus
leaves off preachin’ and takes to meddlin’. Right there, in front of
them all, he performs a radical healing miracle for this man; he
looks at him and says to him: Child, your sins are forgiven.
Understand, the
healing of this man takes place in the moment that Jesus pronounces
the man’s forgiveness. In that instant, the paralyzed person is set
free from the cycle of guilt and the self-loathing that came with
being seen as accursed. He is healed, because he has been declared
whole. This, not what follows, is the radical act of healing that
gets Jesus in trouble. Jesus looks at the man and takes the burden
of “it’s your fault” off his shoulders. Let it go, child; your
sins are forgiven.
We, the community of
faith in the twenty-first century, claim not to really understand
what’s going on here. We profess to have separated sin and sickness
in our thoughts, don’t we? Ava Johnson, the protagonist of Pearl
Cleage’s novel What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day,
might take issue with our self-righteous assertion. In the first
scene of the novel, she is watching a TV show on women who are
HIV-positive, and she, who is also HIV-positive, says to the reader
“I try to tune [them]
out…but they’re going on and on…and all of a sudden I get it.
They’re just going through the purification ritual. This is how it
goes. First, you have to confess that you did nasty, disgusting sex
stuff with multiple partners who may even have been of your same
gender. Or you have to confess that you like to shoot illegal
drugs into your veins and sometimes you use other people’s works
when you want to get high and you came unprepared. Then you have to
describe the sin you have confessed in as much detail as you can
remember. …Then once your listeners have been totally freaked out by
what you’ve told them, they get to decide how much sympathy,
attention, help, money, and understanding you’re entitled to based
on how disgusted they are” (What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary
Day. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. pp. 3–4)
It is possible that
Presbyterians have too many social graces to actually engage in
those conversations; but there is a national prurient interest in
the purification ritual. Consider the popularity of shows about
weight-loss, recovery from addiction, and terminal disease. As a
nation, we do connect sickness with sin and we want our sick to
engage in the purification ritual. And, we differentiate between the
“innocent” sick and those who “have no excuse” for their diagnosis.
But as Christians,
Jesus calls us to leave off preaching and take to meddlin’. That
means, we do not get the luxury to decide between those who do and
do not deserve health care. We do not get the luxury to decide
between those who should and should not be able to afford medicine.
We do not get the luxury to decide between the “innocent” sick and
those “who have no excuses.” To follow Jesus, we must give up our
desire to see the purification ritual. Instead, we must be the
community that, in Jesus’ name, takes to meddling in the world’s
affairs. We are called to stand up on behalf of all those that the
world considers sick and sinful, all of the excluded and shunned,
all of those from whom the world demands the purification ritual. We
are called to say to the one paralyzed with the belief that she is
impure, unclean and irrevocably sinful: Child of God, your sins are
forgiven.
Just in case you
don’t believe me that the most radical, healing act Jesus does in
this passage is to forgive the sins of the paralyzed person,
consider the reaction of the biblical experts. I call them biblical
experts, because that’s who the scribes were. They were my
people, people who made their living in these texts, texts that were
ancient even two thousand years ago. And they are right. The witness
of the scriptures of the Hebrew Bible is that it is God, and God
alone who forgives.
However, the Bible
required rituals to signify that forgiveness: sacrifices of
particular animals in the Temple of Jerusalem by the priest.
According to Leviticus 6, the priest then got to eat that which was
sacrificed. Friends, this means that every time a person was
declared forgiven of sin, the priests of the Temple got a lamb
dinner.
Thus, when Jesus
declared to this paralyzed person that his sins were forgiven, he
had left off preaching and taken to meddlin’. There wasn’t just a
theological issue at stake here. There was a social and economic
issue at stake, an issue of authority, of power, and ultimately of
control. If preachers could declare forgiveness willy-nilly without
the sacrificial lamb, then what would become of the priesthood, the
Temple, the entire economic structure of Rome’s client city
Jerusalem? Jesus had stepped over the line. He was claiming that God
is not confined to a place, a series of rituals, a group of trained
professionals, or a set of legal requirements. Jesus claimed that
the authority to forgive sins on earth is given to him; and as we
find out in other gospels, it is given to us. Not even the Torah can
bind that authority. It is only because Jesus needs to
demonstrate this forcefully that he cures the man’s paralysis. For
the cure is not for the man; the cure is for those who do not
believe that Jesus has the authority that the priests in the
Jerusalem Temple do.
Are we willing to
accept the cure? Are we willing, truly willing, to claim that Jesus’
authority transcends all rules, all legislation, all church
governance, all ordination standards, all social taboos, all of our
genuinely-held beliefs and arguments? We insist upon a doctrine of
the Sovereignty of the Triune God. But do we really believe it? Or
are we afraid that if we follow Jesus to his logical end,
we will have gone from ministry to meddlin’?
I have news for you.
Ministry is meddlin’. Every time we stand with those whom our
society calls unlovable and says “Child of God, your sins are
forgiven,” we are meddlin’. Every time we stand against the
purification ritual and say, “I don’t need to know how or why you’re
sick; you need to know that you are beloved of God,” we are meddlin’.
And every time we get up on the roof and knock in the ceiling so
that those who are paralyzed by the injustices of our society have
access to the resources that they need, we, the community of faith,
are meddlin’.
Presbyterian Women, I
beg you in the name of the Sovereign, Triune God: Leave off of
preachin’. Take to meddlin’.
Margaret Aymer, assistant professor of New Testament at the
Interdenominational Theological Center, is a member of the
PC(USA)’s Facing Racism Strategy Team. She is the author of the
upcoming 2011–2012 Horizons Bible study on the
beatitudes.
