Something Olde, Something New

This sermon was heard at The Federated Church in Weatherford, Oklahoma on May 1, 2016, the Sixth Sunday in Easter.

Acts 16:9-15
Psalm 67
Revelation 21:10, 21:22-22:5
John 5:1-9

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, or rock and our redeemer. Amen.

Words, they are such imprecise things. What I mean is that when I use a word it may not mean the same thing to you it means to me. Still, we are people of the Word, the Word of God. No matter how imprecise words are, the Lord used them to communicate with the prophets, priests, and kings. Jesus used words with his apostles and disciples, but it is still no wonder that we get confused by them.

My favorite Hebrew word is ruach. I love to hear it, I love to say it. I love what it means, both its simple definition and all of the wonderful meanings it carries. In Genesis 1:2, this is the word our bibles translate as “Spirit” [1] or “wind.”[2] Listen to the word again, ruach. It sounds like wind and spirit. There is a breathy, otherworldly quality to this word that mystifies me. Say it with me, ruach.

In Genesis, this breath of God, this is the spirit imparted just before light is created. It is the breath that blows across the chaos, the darkness, the void. This is the breath that precedes life. This is the breath that gives life to all creation.

This is the wind that comes off the water in the morning. It’s the cool breeze that brings the dew that falls on the grass. It’s the summer breeze that rustles the leaves in the trees and tells us that all is right in the world. It is the Spirit that reminds us that God is in charge regardless of the chaos of the world around us. It is the Spirit that says Emmanuel, God with us. This is the wind, the Spirit we read about a couple of weeks ago from John’s gospel when the disciples received the breath of Jesus. It’s the wind that will blow in two weeks on Pentecost.

Our gospel reading begins during a Jewish festival and Jesus is walking past the Sheep Gate by a pool the New Revised Standard Version called Beth-zatha. In Hebrew this could mean House of Shame or House of Disgrace. There are five porticoes in this pool, five porches reaching into the waters. These porches were loaded, overloaded with sick men and women; blind, lame, and paralyzed. They came to the pools to be healed.

Legend said that when the pool was stirred, its healing power was activated, and the first person in the waters would be healed. Angels bathing in the waters were said to cause those ripples. Since the pool was surrounded on all sides by the city walls or the slope of the hills, breezes in the pool would be infrequent. The pool was fed irregularly by an underground spring which would cause rippling. So the waiting game had to be played with patience.

In chapter nine of John’s gospel the disciples will ask “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Their understanding of disease was based on first century traditions. They had no understanding of germs and viruses. Illness was caused by sin, and maybe not even the sin of the ailing. Illness could be due to someone else’s sin. The sick were literally “sin sick.”

Further, the blind, lame, and paralyzed on the porticoes probably didn’t have much opportunity for wound care or basic hygiene. We have already established that because of location and architecture the pool had poor air circulation, so there would have been a stench that only a hospital worker with hazardous waste experience or a butcher whose power has been off all weekend can truly appreciate.

Remember too that this pool was used to wash the sheep prior to their sacrifice in the Temple. This use of the pool gave the water a halo of sanctity,[3] and I imagine it gave the pool a another distinct set of aromas.

The point I want to make is that our gospel reading is happening at a place where we would least expect to find a King. It’s loaded with the sick and infirm. It smells like infection and people who have been sitting in their filth because they have been waiting on healing. It smells like a sheep pen which would be a combination of barnyard and wet wool. While we don't know whether the spring had a harsh odor or not, we know there's a reason Glade doesn't make "Hot Spring." Oh, I forgot the flies. It would be safe to say Beth-zatha would not have been on the Chamber of Commerce tour.

So Jesus arrives at the pool seeing the sick: the blind, the lame, and the paralyzed. There, Jesus spotted a man he wanted to know. He learned that this man had been lying there for a long time, thirty eight years to be exact. Jesus asks him, “Do you want to be made well?”

Oh what a wonderful question! “Do you want to be made well?” How would you answer this question? “Oh my Lord, yes, I want to be made well!” Imagine people being asked this question all over the world? Imagine people crying from the roof tops, “Oh yes Lord, I want to be made well!” But you know, this isn’t the answer Jesus gets.

The man tells Jesus, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.”

So, is that a yes or a no?

Really, I’m asking. This isn't rhetorical.

Is this a yes or a no?

It really isn’t an answer as much as it’s an explanation. The man explains that he is unable to reach the healing waters. He tries. He really tries to make it on his own, but he cannot because there is no one there to help him. Alas, woe is he. He is unable to make it to the waters first.
So Jesus says to him, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.”

This man has waited thirty-eight years for the wind to blow across the pool. He has waited so very long for the wind to blow and for the healing power of the water to be activated for him. He waited to be caressed by the ripples in the pool caused by angels bathing.

Instead, he got something new. He got what he expected least in this world. He didn’t feel the wind blow causing the pool to ripple. He met the wind.

He met the wind. He met the living God. He met the one who causes the healing wind to blow. He didn’t meet an angel, he met God incarnate. He was waiting to feel the breeze so that he could race to the pool. Instead he met the one who is the wind. In the most real and least expected way, he met God with him; he had a personal encounter with Emmanuel.

This passage in the New International Version does not call the pool Beth-zatha. It says Bethesda. Bethesda means “House of Mercy” or “House of Grace.” That name is fitting for a group of invalids who seek the unmerited favor of healing by the restorative powers of the waters. Is it any wonder that a Presbyterian Church founded near the sight of a bubbling spring in rural Maryland in 1820 would be called Bethesda? Is it any wonder one-hundred-and-twenty years later a Naval Medical Center built nearby would come to be called Bethesda?[4] A place named for the House of Grace would be the place to receive special treatment, both medical and spiritual.

For this man, there was no more “House of Shame.” He has met the one who brings the living waters of the “House of Grace.” In a glorious new way, he was baptized not in water, but in the Spirit of the Lord, by which he took his mat and walked. That day, that Sabbath day, Jesus showed that he is come to reconcile all creation into right relationship with himself. As the wind blew across the water in Genesis beginning all creation, Jesus blew across this man who was not able to get himself to the pool, not even able to say he wanted to get himself to the pool, and gave him new life.

I love words, and in one act, Jesus changes Beth-zatha to Bethesda. He takes the House of Disgrace and makes it a House of Grace. He makes this House of Shame a House of Mercy. This is the wind that blows across the healing waters. This is ruach.

Jesus has taken something old, the ancient myths and legends of the healing waters of a pool of water. A pool called the House of Shame and Disgrace because these afflictions were considered shameful and disgraceful. The Messiah, Jesus the Christ instead offers something new, grace and mercy, where neither existed before. He takes the stench of what kept them unclean and gives new life. Gone is the old, in Christ new life has come in abundance.

Our Lord, our Messiah is the one who is able to do more than we could ever hope or imagine. He is able to do the unexpected. We read this in Acts. Acts 16:13 tells us that on the Sabbath, Paul and his traveling party went down to the river, down to the place of prayer, and spoke to the women who had gathered there. I am not going to go into the big explanation about why the women are the people we would least expect Paul to speak with on that day, we know about the subordinate roles women played in ancient times. Paul had crossed into Europe to share the Good News of Jesus Christ in the Roman Empire and first shared it with women.

One of the women in the group, a believer in God named Lydia, was listening to Paul at the river. She was a dealer in purple cloth. To decode this phrase, she was in her way rich and powerful. Her clients were rich and powerful because only the rich could afford to purchase purple and only the powerful were allowed to wear it.

This woman, rich and powerful in her own right, brought her household to Paul for baptism. In effect, her household is the first toehold of Christianity in Europe. A woman’s home in Thyatira becomes the site of the first European Christian church. This easily qualifies something new. [5]

This gives us hope in Christ. This bit of Bethesda, this slice of the “House of Grace” comes again to the water and the wind blows across it bringing something new, the grace and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ to the world where it is least expected. By the grace and mercy of God, these women are reconciled to all creation.

Even more unexpected is the vision of New Jerusalem found in our reading from Revelation. The winds of change, the winds of reconciliation, the winds of life blow across the river of life flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb. If you noticed, there is no temple in the city because there is no need. There is no need for a temple because all of New Jerusalem, the city where nothing accursed will be found, becomes the new temple.[6]

This is the wonder and the glory of new life in Christ. The most glorious things we could never expect are just the beginning. The wind of new life blows across Bethesda lifting a man who had not walked in thirty-eight years. The wind blows across the river where the women pray and opens Europe to the gospel. The Gospel Incarnate, the Lamb of God will be seen again on the day of the New Jerusalem when there will be no more night.

Pope John Paul II took the opportunity to “put Bob Dylan right” when the two headlined a gig together in Bologna, Italy in 1997.[7] Dylan met His Holiness on stage during a Catholic youth event before playing three of his best-known songs. After the two men had shaken hands and exchanged a few words, the Pope stepped up to the microphone and took the singer to the theological cleaners.

“You say the answer is blowing in the wind, my friend,” he observed. “So it is. But it is not the wind that blows things away, it is the wind that is the breath and life of the Holy Spirit, the voice that calls and says, ‘Come!’”

Clearly enjoying the thunderous applause that greeted these words, the Pope continued in a style that would not have disgraced a television evangelist: “You ask me, how many roads must a man walk down before he becomes a man? I answer: One! There is only one road for man, and it is the road of Jesus Christ, who said I am the Way and the Life.”

Rejoice! The wind that blows over the creation of creation blows today. Through the work of the Holy Spirit, God in Christ is doing something new. It is up to the Body of Christ to listen for the word. It’s time to feel the wind, stand up, take up our mat, and walk.

Amen.

[1] Jerusalem Publication Society, New American Standard Bible, New International Version, New Living translations
[2] New Revised Standard Version
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pool_of_Bethesda, accessed May 12, 2007
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethesda%2C_Maryland and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Naval_Medical_Center accessed on May 12, 2007
[5] Cousar, Charles B, Gaventa, Beverly R., McCann, Jr., J. Clinton, Newsome, James D. “Texts for Preaching, A Lectionary Commentary Based on the NRSV, Year C.” Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994, pages 314-316.
[6] Ibid, pages 318-320.
[7] Ship of Fools Magazine Online, September 29, 1997 as found at HomileticsOnline.com, http://homileticsonline.com/subscriber/illustration_search.asp?item_topic_id=1887, May 7, 2010.