Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri

The Worship of God · May 30, 2010

Litany of Praise

From Psalm 8

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon, and stars that you have established,

            O Lord our Sovereign,

            How majestic is your name in all the earth.

What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?

            O Lord our Sovereign,

            How majestic is your name in all the earth.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost;

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,

World without end. Amen. Amen.

Pastoral Prayer

Jacob Thorne

Gracious God and Loving God, as we worship this morning, we come to meet you, to know you, and to love you, so prepare us. Still the noises and distractions that pull our hearts in so many directions. Ease the pain and fear that distants us from you.  Continue to move in our midst, reminding us of your life-giving presence. Help us open our eyes to wherever you may be found. Give us the courage to deepen our faith, to live with less certainty and more trust. Embrace us with love and empower us to embrace others.

As we celebrate this Memorial Day weekend and the beginning of summer, remind us that you are the one who created the trees and the flowers. You are the One, O God, whose presence is found in the laughter of children. You are the One who gathers with us as we share a meal with one another. You are the One who quenches the thirst of our souls. Unite us as one. We celebrate that we are a community of Christ. You call us to serve you. 

Hear us now as we say together the prayer that your Son taught us…

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: for thine is the kingdom, the power, and glory, forever. Amen.

New Testament Lesson

Luke 7:1-10

After Jesus had finished all his sayings in the hearing of the people, he entered Capernaum. A centurion there had a slave whom he valued highly, and who was ill and close to death. When he heard about Jesus, he sent some Jewish elders to him, asking him to come and heal his slave. When they came to Jesus, they appealed to him earnestly, saying, “He is worthy of having you do this for him, for he loves our people, and it is he who built our synagogue for us.” And Jesus went with them, but when he was not far from the house, the centurion sent friends to say to him, “Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof, therefore I did not presume to come to you. But only speak the word, and let my servant be healed. For I also am a man set under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to my slave, ‘Do this,’ and the slave does it.” When Jesus heard this he was amazed at him, and turning to the crowd that followed him, he said, “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.” When those who had been sent returned to the house, they found the slave in good health.

Message

The Centurion’s Slave

Tim Carson

Sometimes I think the New Testament writers just mess with our heads for the fun of it. They take us down a road that is too difficult, someplace where we cannot understand. Like the story before us today, for instance. Is it just because it is another Bible story that we don’t hear it? Or is it because it is so remote – the experience, the culture, the context is so different – that we don’t connect with it?

Imagine: Jesus is in the hometown of his adulthood, Capernaum, up on the north shore of the Galilee, when the elders of the village show up to seek his help. Specifically, they are envoys for someone else. From all we can tell, the man they represent has never met Jesus personally but just heard about him. Nevertheless, he is in pursuit of something specific. It’s not only that this man is a Gentile, and going to his house for anything would mean ritual contamination for any practicing Jew. He is also part and parcel of the occupying Roman forces in the land, the Roman machine. He is the enemy. He’s the one who is controlling your country by force and making sure that taxes are raised for the whole Roman enterprise. So, he is the one asking for help. So do you go to him?

Try to imagine what it would be like today. Imagine American forces occupying some town in Afghanistan; let’s say the capital, Kabul. And let’s also imagine that the American commander gets desperate because one of his trusted aides becomes strangely sick. He has somehow heard about a man there in Kabul, a man who has a great reputation for healing. Knowing that he shouldn’t approach him directly, he appeals to the elders of the city, the ones he has been working with to maintain security, set up elections, build new schools, and getting the infrastructure back in place. And he asks them if they will go for him. After deliberating on the matter, several of these tribal chiefs go on behalf of the American commander to this healer. They explain the whole situation, making the case for helping because, after all, this particular commander has been a person of good faith and has tried to build up their city. Does the healer go? Does he collaborate with the occupying forces? Does he allow himself to be seen in the American camp? Does he believe that his healing should be used for anyone besides his own people?

This is the sticky situation we find when the elders of Capernaum decided to approach Jesus on behalf of this Gentile centurion, this officer with at least 100 soldiers under his command – not stationed in Capernaum, but perhaps nearby. This centurion has been good to them, has even been a benefactor. That’s the least we could do for him, they thought. Let’s keep things friendly. Let’s build good will. So, on that basis they make “the ask” to Jesus.

The request is for help for the centurion’s slave (Gk: doulos) who had fallen sick. As in the rest of the New Testament, they assume something as normal that we don’t, namely slavery. In the Greco-Roman world, slavery was a taken-for-granted part of life, and there were hard-labor slaves, gladiator slaves, household slaves, and administrative slaves. And rather than focusing on, say, eliminating slavery, like we might, the story stays with something else. The centurion focuses on the treatment of this slave; he is concerned about the health of his slave. Does that concern derive from compassion? Or is he simply concerned that he might lose a valuable asset? We don’t know.

Jesus, for his part, decides to go, to travel to the home of the enemy, to enter the house of Gentile impurity, to reach out to the slave for no other reason than compassion. Frederick Buechner said, “Compassion is the sometimes fatal quality that places ourselves in the shoes of another.” (From Wishful Thinking). Real compassion drives us to address the need just because it is a need; for a creature just because it is a creature.

On the way to the centurion’s house, another delegation intercepts Jesus with another message from the centurion. This time the message is, “Thanks, but no thanks. You don’t need to come after all. I can’t expect you to come under my roof, and I really can’t even show my face to you. That would be asking too much of you. Would you just pray for him from a distance?” Out of respect for Jesus, the centurion will settle for a remote prayer.

But then comes the irony of it all: The centurion says that, in the same way that people under his military authority know how to take orders, so Jesus has a similar authority in the spiritual realm, and if Jesus says “heal,” then heal it is. Jesus hears this message and says, “Never have I seen such faith, not even in Israel.”

Suddenly we realize that the tables are completely turned and all of the characters have changed places. Those who should be open to Jesus and his message have not been, and the people you would least expect to be faithful are. The self-righteous bask in self-congratulation and miss the kingdom of God, while the people who doubt whether they even deserve for God to make an appearance in their lives are the most blessed. The one who seems to be an outsider actually has the strongest faith. That’s the upside-down kingdom of God that Jesus is always talking about in his parables. And it also represents the great concern of Luke for the mission to the Gentiles. “God shows no partiality …” (Acts 10:35).

As we interpret our story for today, we are not especially preoccupied with Jews and Gentiles; that’s not our issue. For us the question is: Who are the insiders, and who are the outsiders?

The elders represent the insiders of religious life, and they are portrayed as making judgments about who is worthy to receive the healing of Jesus. The centurion represents the outsiders who are willing to leap with a risk-taking faith. Who is that today? It seems to me that for us, the elders represent the Church. And the centurion represents anyone outside of the Church. So what does that mean?

So often in the church, we are self-preoccupied. We are living inside of our own sealed canister. We operate with a lot of props in place – the props of an established community, an established tradition, a tight, little doctrinal system through which we think we have it all figured out, so we control God. Sometimes, the Church resembles a closed, exclusive club. We like to retain our comfort zone and control zone, too. But we are not asking what God might want us to do. Here is the question: How do we stay close, how do we stay intimate, how do we stay caring, but have a semi-permeable margin to reach out to everyone God would be bringing to us in our community?  

Surprise! The people outside of the walls are engaged in just as serious a search for God as those inside the walls, perhaps more. And most usually, their urgent personal, emotional, relational needs drive them there. If you want to know where to engage people, it’s at the point of their need. For the centurion, it was the illness of a person in his circle of concern. In our culture, it is a similar kind of thing. People come to the end of their rope.  They are shattered by grief. Their health fails.  They run out of fuel, whatever it was that allowed them to keep on going to this present moment; it just runs out. Their loved ones are suffering, or there is a national calamity, or environmental disaster. All of these things propel people to take the risky leap of faith, and sometimes leap over the wall toward the elders, toward the Church. So how do we respond?

Many of you know that the actress Lynn Redgrave died recently following her seven-year struggle with cancer. She had little to no church-going experience having not actively practiced the faith during her lifetime. But in 2003, just months following her first surgery, she was in search for a Christian community; because she knew she needed something more. She said, “I felt so profoundly alone and profoundly helpless.” Strangely enough, she came in contact with a little Congregational Church in Kent, Connecticut (The Christian Century, June 1, 2010, p. 19). She shared later how at the time she felt so utterly alone and afraid and found there an unexpected and amazing reservoir of strength. The first time she heard the pastor say, “This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it,” she burst into tears. She knew that was the one thing she had been missing. So she joined the church, became active and even addressed a national convention, expressing her deep gratitude for found faith and found spiritual community. Now, what if people, at that moment of her greatest need, asked Lynn Redgrave if she merited God’s grace? What then?

What Jesus sees is something else, and that’s why this story is finally, ultimately, not about us. It’s about the nature of God. And the nature of God is graceful love, always moving outside of the ways we think God is moving. It is because God is transcendent and far beyond anything we can imagine God to be. What we know about God, you can pour into a thimble. No. That’s too much. It is enough to love God, if that is all. God is always moving outside of the place where God is moving. 

We are so much like the little boy who was riding his tricycle furiously around the block, around and around again. Finally, a neighbor stopped and asked him why he was going around and around. The boy said that he was running away from home. And so the neighbor asked why, if he was running away from home, that he kept going around the block in circles. And the boy responded, “Because my mother said that I’m not allowed to cross the street.”

God’s already at work, in powerful ways, on the other side of the street. It’s just that we who are going in circles on this side of the street just don’t know it.

The end of the story, of course, is that the slave is healed, even without Jesus drawing near. It all happens through a mysterious mixture of grace and faith and at a distance. And if Jesus can heal from a distance, then all the barriers we’ve constructed become irrelevant. If you can fly over it, the Great Wall of China becomes an interesting part of the terrain, but it keeps people neither in nor out. If the love of God soars above all the barriers we’ve constructed, then whether we are insiders or outsiders, Jew or Gentile, elders or centurions, slave or free, man or woman, churched or unchurched, it is beside the point. In the end, there is Jesus, humble faith, and an open gate to a whole new world.

Thanks be to God for the gracious gift. Amen.

Benediction

And now may the wideness of God’s mercy accompany you this week, and may you be the source of God’s mercy for every soul you meet. Amen.