PeaceBang

Come and Get Me, Jesus

I’m preaching tomorrow on Matthew 9:18-26 and I am surprised to find that I feel no need to exegete this as a feminist text any more.

I’m going to go ahead and post my homily because I just want to make you laugh today. And I know that the story of my babysitter (all true, friends, all true) will probably crack some of you up. If you don’t like it, please don’t tell me. This is what I’m giving and it’s done.

I would like to especially dedicate this to You Know Who, who sat with me one night at GA over cocktails and laughed ’til we both cried about the Cult of the Zombie Jesus, our interpretation of what some very discomfited Unitarian Universalists think of our religious beliefs (based on actual conversations). We even designed special liturgical headdresses and tee-shirts. Our worship attire would involve huge rings of deep black eyeshadow all around our eyes. I swear someday we’re really going to make a YouTube video to get it out of our systems.
Please understand that I’m not laughing AT people, I’m laughing with them. Because as you can see from this sermon, I used to literally believe Jesus was a zombie. I have no idea how religious beliefs and ideas can morph and change so much over one lifetime, but I attribute this phenomenon in my own life to my Unitarian Universalist upbringing, where we learned that revelation is something that can happen at any time, and that we’re always free to adapt to new ways of experiencing truth and meaning. Thanks be to God!

Come and Get Me, Jesus

My sister and brother and I had some really great babysitters in our childhood. I remember some of them very fondly, like Helma Mezzie, who used to sew great outfits for our little plastic troll dolls. She was the best. A few times, though, we had a born-again fundamentalist girl named Cecilia. Cecilia made a very serious impression on me, and not in a good way. One night when she was over we had a big storm. We lived out in the woods and the wind was blowing all the trees around. Cecilia called for me to look out the window with her at the thrashing trees and the leaves blowing everywhere. I was maybe 8, 9 years old. I was nervous about it. Cecilia took me by the shoulders and made me look out into the woods and she said in this dreamy voice, “Jesus is coming for all his children. Jesus is coming for all the little children.”

I know that she found that comforting, but I don’t know that I’ve ever been so frightened in my life. You have to understand that the only thing I knew about Jesus back then was that he was this guy with long blonde hippie hair who got killed and came back to life, and that my grandparents had pictures of him all over their house because they actually thought he was God’s relative or something. He was on their calendar with lambs and children, he was on the thermometer telling you the temperature with his arms wide open, he was on the bedroom wall nailed to a cross and bleeding. I knew that Easter was a holiday about him coming back to life, so I concluded that he was a zombie. And now this zombie was coming to get all the little children! What was he going to do with us when he got us? I figured he was going to make an army of zombie children! I didn’t sleep that night. The next day I told my parents about Jesus coming and we never had Cecilia back to baby sit.

Of course I learned much later that I had it all wrong. Jesus wasn’t a zombie – in fact, his whole life and ministry was spent trying to keep us from being half-dead ourselves, to be awake to God’s presence in the world, to have life more abundant. I also learned that, contrary to what Cecilia said, Jesus wasn’t “coming to get” me or anyone else. While he definitely had a knack for showing up and filling atheist intellectuals like me with the sudden irrational desire to follow him, he wasn’t the type to break through walls and burst out of the closet and grab you like a monster. By the time I figured out how badly I wanted and needed Jesus in my life, actually, I had to break through a few walls and closets to get to him!

Isn’t it interesting how Jesus gets this reputation for having a character like a streamroller, a force that will just rudely plow through our lives to prove his godly powers to us, to charge through the clouds with an AK-47 to bring about his triumphant reign, when in all the real life stories about him, he always seems a little bit tired at being asked to save yet another life?

Look at the gospel stories we just read: this happens all the time! It’s not Jesus marching around going “Oh hey, you there – you need some healing. I’m going to spit into my hands now, blind man, and give you sight.”
“Does anyone happen to have any dead children or parents they’d like me to resurrect this afternoon? Please, line them up!”
No, it’s never like that. It’s always someone like the woman with a 12-year hemorrhage –totally untouchable by her society’s purity laws– who grabs him on the hem when he’s on his way somewhere else. “Mister, you gotta help me.” In Luke’s version of this story, you know, it even says that as the woman pulled at him, Jesus felt his power go out of him. Healing costs Jesus something. This should be a hint to all of us who seek healing that it’s no easy thing – if healing one woman drains even Jesus, just imagine the energy it takes you and me.

There are always needy people clamoring for Jesus. And it’s not minor stuff. It’s big stuff, like “This guy in our neighborhood is being tormented by demons, could you do something about it?” And Jesus does, of course. He says it again and again, “If you believe you can be well, you will be well.” He says it to the woman with the flow of blood, “Your faith has made you well.” He didn’t have to go after her. He didn’t go around breaking down doors nabbing bleeding women and little dead girls for his zombie army.

Did you notice this? No one ever got resurrects by Jesus in the gospels unless someone who loves them begs him please, someone I love is dead. You must help us. We’re begging you, please do this. We know you can do this. Jesus, with a sigh, does it. Your daughter isn’t dead, she’s sleeping. Now she’s alive, please give her something to eat. He’s always underplaying his presence, recommending that folks not go around talking about what they just saw. It’s just not Jesus’ style to come for anyone who doesn’t want him. It is his style to be the living incarnation of God’s vision of how we should behave with one another.

That’s good news for the scared little kid I used to be, who couldn’t sleep that night long ago for fear that this creepy man would crash through my window with his arms out in front of him and drag me away from my parents and my home.

But it’s not such good news for those of us here today who maybe thought that it was Jesus’ responsibility to come and get us and drag us to the life of faith or pull us up from the floor and into the healing waters while we kick, frightened and making excuses and resisting. It’s kind of hard news for those of us who stand far distant from Jesus with our arms folded saying, “Well, if you were really as godly as all that, you would see me over here, you would know how badly I need to be resurrected, you would see my flow of blood and make me whole.”

Friends, Jesus just doesn’t play that. That is not how the Christian life works. We give ourselves to God in freedom, because we were created in freedom, and Jesus is obviously a respecter of that freedom. At our baptism, we are invited into a beloved community hosted by the Holy Spirit, and promised that we are not stranded alone on this planet. We are not washed and installed passively in a hospital bed, assuming that Jesus will give us the right medicine when he makes his nightly rounds.

Jesus is not a cosmic doctor or a magician working tricks on an unwitting crowd. He is offering himself as the way, the truth and the life– and if we happen to be blind or bleeding or possessed by a few demons – (and who among us is not ?) — we need to let him know and welcome him in to do the work of healing. Scripture tells us again and again that if we have faith, we can be made whole, but this almost never happens unless we first go the necessary distance to sincerely seek it out.

Here we are on a rainy day much like that one so many years ago when my babysitter told me that Jesus was coming for all his little children. I don’t know where she got that, bless her heart. Jesus isn’t coming to getchya, my friends. But he is there for the getting if we need him – and we do.

Rev. Victoria Weinstein
October 10, 2007