John 5:1-9

After Jesus healed the son of the official in Capernaum, there was a festival of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.

Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes. In these lay many invalids-- blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, "Do you want to be made well?" The sick man answered him, "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." Jesus said to him, "Stand up, take your mat and walk." At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk. Now that day was a sabbath.

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"Now that day was a Sabbath". If we chose to end the narrative here, as the lectionary does, we have little more than a really nice miracle story. Jesus heals a man who has been afflicted for 38 years. A man who was pushed aside by others, who struggled to make his way to the healing waters. And Jesus doesn't just heal him, he has the man take responsibility for his own well being by telling him to take up his own mat and walk. This is rich, satisfying stuff. Jesus the healer and Jesus the empowerer. We like it, the world likes this image of Jesus. But it was the Sabbath. If Jesus had healed this man on a Tuesday, it would have been no problem. There were plenty of miracle workers making their way around Judea, healing on Tuesday or Wednesday. But healing on the Sabbath was in violation of pharisaic law. It was forbidden to do work on the Sabbath. While it was evident to everyone that God's work continued on the Sabbath. The sun rose, babies were born, crops grew, creation continued to unfold. But for Jesus to do his healing work on the Sabbath made everyone uncomfortable. The Romans allowed the Jews to practice their religion as long as they kept things orderly, and didn't rock the boat too much. But healing on the Sabbath meant that Jesus didn't know his place, was threatening the establishment. He was stirring the waters. It was troubling.

The gospel of John is filled with allusions to water: The baptism of John, the turning of the water into wine at Cana, the observation that one must be born of water and spirit to enter the Kingdom of God, Jesus baptizing others, the living water that Jesus offered to the Samaritan woman. (And later the washing of blind eyes, the washing of dirty feet, the water that gushed from the wound in Jesus side.) But now we find this pool of water in Bethzatha that is reputed to have healing properties. A verse that we didn't read this morning, because its authenticity is questioned, explains that the sick man was waiting for the stirring of the water, because "an angel of the Lord went down at certain seasons into the pool, and stirred up the water; whoever stepped in first after the stirring of the water was made well". Thus the paraplegic waited 38 years to enter the pool. Each time the angel - "dipped its wings" into the water, the paralytic was too slow to be the first to enter the pool and thus was never healed. He was the victim of a vicious system of deferred healing. That is until he heard Jesus tell him to walk and he did.

The water has to be stirred to be effective. Maybe we have to be the ones to stir the water. Joe Carter, the noted preserver and singer of African American spirituals, talks about how the spirituals were meant to convey a literal message of freedom - in a way that the "massa" didn't understand. There was a subversive power hidden in the words of many of the spirituals. "Swing Low Sweet Chariot, comin' for to carry me home". This was a song of liberation. Not simply release from the bondage of life and movement toward death, but liberation from the actual chains of slavery. Meanings that the master missed. "Wade in the water, God's gonna trouble the water." Images of baptism, but also images of crossing over the troubled water to freedom. This was a meaningful story for the slaves, slaves who understand that they could be healed - freed, if they picked up their mat and walked. Walked away from remaining victims of oppression.

Troubled waters still abound.

Two weeks ago I saw a film called Still Life, set in the Chinese village of Fengjie, a city with a two thousand year history that no longer exists. The village was perched on the steep banks of the legendary Yangtze river, a river whose level rises daily as the Three Gorges Damn is nearing completion. This massive project, five times the size of the Hoover Dam, designed to address the demands for electricity of the rapidly growing Chinese economy, will have an equally massive environmental effect when it is completed next year. Already hundreds of villages and towns have been flooded and 1.5 million people are displaced. The lake created by the rising waters is expected to literally change the weather. The film, however, focuses on how the rising water affects the lives of those whose traditional way of life is being destroyed. They are sent to live in cities against their will, often having to resort to begging and garbage collecting, or prostitution to stay alive. The most graphic image, for me, was of those who remained behind as the waters rose, their means of making a living now lost, they subsist on the wages they are paid by the Chinese government to demolish, with dynamite and sledge hammers, the homes they once inhabited. These are troubled waters. Waters that must trouble God.

On my last visit to Austin I stopped by what I think of as the spiritual homeland of the city, Barton Springs. For thousands of years, man and beast have found tranquility and refreshment in the 20 million gallons of cool spring water that emerge from the springs each day. To my dismay, on that day the bacteria count in the springs was too high to allow swimming. An occurrence that is becoming more frequent as the development surrounding the springs increases. I was saddened on my first visit to Eureka Springs to learn that you can no longer bathe in the healing springs that originally drew people to Eureka. All are too polluted. Troubling waters. Healing, life giving waters, sacrificed in the name of development. Forever lost.

The man by the pool at Bethzatha was paralyzed - he could not move. It was Jesus' call to action that compelled him to take his mat and walk. I'm wondering if we aren't similarly paralyzed. Surrounded by troubled waters, but unable to act, for fear that we might violate convention, order, the way things are done. Afraid to heal on the Sabbath. We are called to take up our beds and walk toward freedom. We too are called on to be about the Lord's business - healing, liberating, and allowing all people to live into their full being.

As long as we who call ourselves Christians practice our tidy little religion in private and do nothing to challenge the established order, nothing will change. It is when we begin troubling the waters that things will get interesting. As long as Christians devote their energy to issues like denouncing the teaching of evolution in schools or trying to regulate private sexual behavior, Christianity will remain irrelevant. What would happen if, instead, we confronted the grave injustices that exist in the world because of unbridled capitalism? What if we confronted the growing disparity that exists between the rich and the poor in our country? What if we as Christians worked for peace, instead of merely allowing our government to continue to argue over how to fund a war they started, but can't finish. What if we emulated Christ's healing? What if we troubled the waters and defied the established order by calling for a radical notion like the right of everyone to be healed.

I'm wondering if it might not be a bad idea to name the health care system in the United States, the pool of Bethzatha. It is easy to imagine the uninsured, a substantial portion of the residents in Northwest Arkansas, waiting 38 years for healthcare. As many of you know, I am on the board of the St. Francis Community Clinic, the only choice (other than hospital emergency rooms) for many uninsured patients in Northwest Arkansas. The demands for services at St. Francis are so great that, if you are a new patient and become ill, and wish to receive medical attention, you will placed on a waiting list, and three months later, your name will make its way to the top. If you have a chronic illness, you might as well be told to pick up their mat and walk. Addressing the problem in a small way, we are in the early stages of planning a branch of the Community Clinic in Bentonville. And I may be calling on some of you to gather your mats and walk - to do something about this particular suffering that surrounds us.

Jesus told the sick man to take up his bed and walk. And he did. But what got the attention of establishment? He did it on the wrong day. He violated the accepted norms. He healed the sick, but this act of healing, the solution to the problem, was a threat to the powerful and wealthy. It is the same response that I imagine would happen if we called for the real solution to the problem of healthcare in this country. What if we called, worse still if we acted on behalf of universal health coverage. The health industry would not be overjoyed at the prospect of health care being available to every man, woman, and child in the country. Rather, the great hew and cry would be, "But that is socialized medicine!" "That's healing on the Sabbath!"

My prayer is that we be stirred as the waters of Bethzatha were stirred. That hearing the words of Jesus we will be stirred into action.