The First Leading Cause of Life: Connection

A Sermon by John Pitney

September 20, 2009

 

A leper came to Jesus, begging him, and kneeling, said to him, “If you choose, you can make me clean.”  Moved with pity (anger?), Jesus stretched out his hand and touched the leper and said to him, “I do choose.  Be made clean!”  Immediately the leprosy left him and he was made clean.   (Mark 1:41-42)

 

         All week I’ve had the same picture in my mind.  I see a tiny baby hand with baby fingers wrapped around the tip of a large parent finger squeezing tight.  It triggers a memory of the first times our children squeezed my finger.  It was that miracle of connection and it makes me think I can almost remember the first time I squeezed my mother’s smooth or my father’s rough finger and I imagine, then, my father first squeezing the fingers of his parents and mother hers and the picture keeps growing until the whole world through all the generations of life are holding on.

                  The next several Sundays, we are affirming not the leading causes of death, but the leading causes of life.  From the book by that title by Larry Pray and Gary Gunderson.   Debbie got us going last week and I’m here to tell you now, the first leading cause of life is Connection...Connection.  

                  The story of Christian the Lion has been all over YouTube.  A story of Connection:

 

In 1969, John Rendall and Ace Berg saw a lion cub for sale in Harrods.  Cramped and lonely in a small cage, they decided to bring it home.  A local vicar allowed them to exercise the cub, now named Christian, in the church grounds, but he very quickly became too big for their flat.  The only thing they could do was to try and reintroduce him to Africa, which they managed to do.  A year later they wanted to visit him, but were told he was now head of his own pride and as such was completely wild and would not remember them.  Undaunted, they went anyway.

After many hours of looking for the pride, this is what happened when they finally found the wild lion...

 

He even introduced them to his wife.

 

Love knows no limits and true friendships last. 

Get back in touch with someone today. 

You’ll be glad you did. 

 

                  We are made for connection.  We are made from the ground and so we have a memory from before the time God knit us together in our mother’s womb that calls us to connect with the sacred places of Earth.  We are made of each other and so we carry an imprint of connection that gives us memory of even the most unlikely friendships.  Where in your life are you out of touch today? Where in your life do you yearn today to reactivate the imprint of relationship that makes you alive?  Take that red thread in your hand.  Hold onto one end and give the other end to anyone near you.  Go ahead.  You are connected.  We are creating a memory of Connection.

                  Welcome to church.  Connection is what we do best...and creating memories of Connection. And Connection is what we must do better.  What our world does best is Disconnect.  Our Alaska Native friends have a word for a bottle of booze.  They call the bottle an “orphan” because when someone is drinking they act like an orphan.  A child born of an addicted womb may be an orphan for life.  Children given away at birth, even adopted into the best homes may never quite reconnect.  Sometimes the world seems like a cosmic orphanage.  Addicted to wealth, addicted to fear, to success, to poverty to hopelessness, to perfection...with texting, emailing, facebooking, twittering, we have never been more in touch but we have never been so out of touch.  But we are the church of Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ was a connector.  We are a religious community.  The word religion means to “bind back.”  Are you still connected to your neighbor?

                  Did you notice the leper in our Gospel story this morning didn’t ask to be cured.  The leper asked to be made clean.  Lepers were dirty, untouchable, by religious policy they were to go about in the community shouting “Unclean, unclean!”  Not so hard to understand, is it?  A man is dying of cancer.  He’s not contagious.  But his friends disconnect.  Somewhere in his deepest heart he believes the disease must be from something he did or didn’t do.  It’s in the culture.  A woman has an STD.  She got it from her husband who sleeps around and beats her every night  if dinner isn’t on the table and calls her a whore and she believes it because even today we have this cultural understanding that it’s always the woman’s fault.  A child with a pre-existing condition can’t get health insurance, because we have made health care a privilege here.  Some believe homosexuality is a disease.  Some believe poverty and mental illness are infectious.  Illegal immigrants might as well be lepers. 

                  Some scholars say the word translated to mean “pity” here, might instead mean “anger.” Jesus moved to anger.  Makes sense to me.  Our communities are full of lepers. Some sick, many with no visible disease, all infected by a stigma, a value, a perception or a policy that makes them unclean, disconnected and untouchable.  The Gospel leper is a metaphor for all lepers in all times and places.  The law of that time was you kept them disconnected and you were forbidden to touch.  The miracle of this epidsode is that Jesus broke the law and touched.  Yes the disease was cured, but the healing was in reconnection.

                  Quoting from the book: “Connections are like the breath of air on which our very lives depend.  The strength of the church is connecting people beyond the lines of blood and money.  Congregations did this long before we even had printing presses and will do so long after the cell phones go dead.”  We are the community of Jesus.  The lepers come, all the lonely and disconnected, the orphans of our time and they expect alot of us.  They don’t ask for a cure.  And we can’t cure them.  They want to know they are clean.  They think we can make them touchable again.  Well, we can and we do.

                  I got to do a wedding this summer for a woman who, as a girl, went through youth group with our kids.  She lived with her parents but felt like an orphan in her own home.  As I worked with her and her fiance’, she began to cry and then I began to cry as she told me about the note I sent her when I was her Sunday School teacher.  I had forgotten.  She had dropped out.  She said it reconnected her at a time when she felt most unloveable.  Sunday School teachers send notes here.

                  And we do weddings here.  Debbie and I had 8 weddings this summer and we listened to 8 sets of vows, among them words Jane and Allen of our congregation said to each other.  Vows are words of connection. What could be more powerful than: “I love you, I will spend the rest of my life with you.  I will be there through all of it.”  On the doors of our church we have posted a public vow that our doors are truly open to all.  Our safe sanctuary policy is a vow to do everything in our power to make this a safe place, especially for the most vulnerable.  I have been meeting with each of our CGroups these past few months and I am constantly amazed at the  power of the vows we affirm in those covenant groups to be there for each other.  Time and time again group members say we never knew how disconnected we were until we made real authentic Connection through our groups.

                  A few years ago, at a food conference in Washington D.C., the manager of a new farmer’s market in a poor neighborhood in D.C. talked about Connection.  He said as they opened their first season of operation, they were puzzled at the number of canes that were left behind at the market and never reclaimed. When they started watching they saw how old men and women, disconnected from each other over time, would walk to the farmer’s market with the help of their canes, reconnect there with old friends and neighbors and walk home together completely forgetting their canes.  I think the story of Christian the Lion and this story of the canes are wonderful metaphors for what a church can be in the midst of a world of orphans and the amazing healing that comes in a space made for Connection.

                  I close with an extraordinary story.  A teenager of this congregation, cut loose  from family, community and congregation has been reconnected.  Through bad choices about friends and addiction to alcohol and drugs and immersion in a world that could only use and abuse, this child of God was effectively disconnected in a disconnecting world.  But this child’s family never gave up and this child’s church never gave up.  And now, after several years of isolation away from family this human being is about to graduate from high school and, not to long ago, celebrated one year clean and sober.  Now this story in itself may be good enough, but the story I want to tell is of church.  I don’t know what possessed them but, hearing of her one year anniversary of sobriety, 2 elders of our congregation, themselves both recovering alcoholics and addicts traveled to her place away from here.  These 2, in person, presented this child with the one-year chip, a tradition of Alcoholics Anonymous.  Does this connection guarantee her sobriety?  No that’s up to her.  It does guarantee that, in the family of God, we are never alone.  We live in Connection.