Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Mark 2:23-3:6

A few weeks ago, I started with an embodied practice.  Let’s do it again.

I invite all of you to stand.  When we gather on Sunday morning, we become an assembly of the body of Christ.  It’s reconstituted week after week. It changes every time, and every Sunday its new.

We are connected already.  We’re going to act it out.  We do this sometimes when we’re blessing someone in the middle of the church or offering a farewell to a beloved staff member who is leaving. Come into the center aisle.  You’ll have a couple of choices.  And wait just a minute to start. Let me describe the options first. If you feel comfortable, stretch out your right hand and place it on the shoulder of the person next to you.  If you prefer instead, stretch out your hand, palm facing the other person, palm to palm with as much space between as you need. If you’re a shoulder person, you might have to do a hand on one side. If either of those is just too much, just place your hands at your sides, and the people next to you on either side will let their arms rest, too. No matter what anyone chooses, it’s all good. Take a moment to notice each other and find your gesture.

Now, I invite you to take a moment, breathe, and bring your awareness to the connection you have together.  It sounds cliché’ but feel the love. See if your heart can feel the energy of life that flows from one to another.

Okay.  You can sit down.

“Stretch out your hand” is Jesus’ command to the man in the synagogue.  This is not simply a restoration of physical ability.  It’s a demonstration of what it looks like to be in community with one another.  It points us to our human and spiritual capacity, which is fully present no matter how your body is operating. When the man’s hand is restored, it gives him the capacity to participate, to be part of the body, to touch and be touched.  It’s also an example of what happens when a community notices the pain of one of its members.

The problem with the religious leaders is that they are so focused on their own agenda that they cannot see or experience either the pain of someone right next to them or be aware of their own potential to be healing agents.  They seethe instead of stretch.  I fear we are increasingly living in a culture that seethes, rather than stretches.

One caveat:  Do not hear this gospel reading as a conflict between a rigid and rule-bound Judaism and a loving, free, saving Christianity.  That’s a false read of Judaism and it fails to recognize the ways that Christianity itself has refused to reach out a hand to heal or welcome.  The story points to all of us.  Our potential to be present and healing, and our potential to turn religion into a heartless prison of rules and regulations that serve our own agenda.

Jesus wants to point all of us to a way of being together that is present and attentive, open and aware of those around us.  We’re willing to let the pain and struggle of another move us to stretch.  This is the church’s vocation, to reach out to the ones around us.

May I give you a hand?

Of course, Jesus is the hand of God offered. An embodiment of sabbath law.

Rev. Isaiah Shaneequa Brokenleg says, “Sometimes we forget that we are all related” Pastor Brokenleg preaches because in their Lakota culture they are described as Winkte, (wink-ku-tay)a Two Spirit person. Winkte been called by their communities to be spiritual, social, and emotional healers. They are often not defined by gender and may have bodies that are associated with one gender but dress in clothing often labeled for another gender.  Western culture has often considered this kind of “two-spirited people” as a sort of withered form of a human being.

Slide on Screen with the word WOLAKOTA

Pastor Brokenleg teaches that Wolakota is the state when all things are in right relationship, when we are in right relationships with ourselves, with each other, with creation, and when we are in right relationships with the Creator. Wolakota is peace, and wolakota is home.[1]

This morning, as we give thanks for new paraments and vestments, works of art by Kristen Gilje, For the roughly 27-week green season of growth in faith, they bring God’s creation into the sanctuary..  God’s glory in the natural world is one of our relations. If the church is to be faithful, we have to stretch out our hands to the hand of God that meets us there.  Only at that connection, hand to hand, life to life, spirit to spirit, will we be able to find the courage to change our habits and save the planet.  We have to be moved by the pain that is often raised up beyond our awareness and outside our closed, air-conditioned houses.  Maybe stretch out your hand and place it on a tree today.

The promise on that morning in the synagogue and in those wheat fields with their abundant harvest, and in this room with its wealth of resources and sometimes awkward collection of bodies, is that God’s hand is already stretched toward us.  Love has come and we have been healed, if not in body, then in capacity, stretched into mercy and glory.

If you’re just not sure this can all be true, I suggest one more embodied practice. Jesus first command was “Come Forward.” In the presence of God’s harvest, at the confluence of living water, in the presence of the Healing One, come forward, stretch out your hand and let healing take shape in you.  The body of Christ given for you.

For you.  For all the relations.  For the healing of everything that’s withered.  For this, stretch out your hand.

[1] Isaiah Brokenleg, Revisiting:  Enfleshed Relationship, 2021, Church Anew Website: https://churchanew.org/blog/posts/wolakota-right-relationship.