Five years ago I was walking into Church, thinking that things had seemed unusually calm, not much had happened lately and it felt kind of strange and being who I am I started worrying about that.
I opened the door, the parish secretary was running down the hall in tears, saying two jet planes had just crashed into the World Trade Centers.
We pulled out an old television found a working station, and watched the reports that came in with growing horror, began making phone calls, then both the towers fell, in smoke and fire and water.
Five years later, five years of trying to make things right, and we only keep making things worse.
Its not that we live in an imperfect world, the Christian world view isn’t about perfection or imperfection, what it is, is that the world is fallen and withering away, all that makes for life is drying up.
Our beginning premise is that creation is very good.
Our second premise is that we are fallen and dying.
The powers of sin and death are at work in the world, trying to make us cast ourselves down into water and fire, to affect our own destruction.
This Gospel lesson today catches my attention.
It catches and holds my attention because it defies a tidy summary, or a clear interpretation. It is a ragged and raw story, gritty and unorchestrated, sloppy, unpleasant and true to life. It is so unusual a passage that it has been relegated to being optional. The other alternative reading is to hear the confession of faith by Peter, a well known and well loved and perhaps overused scripture lesson.
Instead of Peter’s confession of faith we have a desperate father crying out for help and for belief, and the disciples are all thumbs and left feet, and Jesus is annoyed and put upon and in a hurry, a real grouch.
And then there is the sick child, possessed by what they called an unclean spirit. We read the story and know that it is clearly epilepsy.
The disciples saw it as an event and a story of exorcism, we see it as a story of healing a seizure disorder. Different, but still similar.
Both ways of seeing the story sees a world that kills its children, a world doomed.
Both ways of seeing the story show a grumpy Jesus who has literally just come walking down THE mountain, from the mountain top experience of THE Transfiguration. He comes walking down from a high, and steps in it, the messy mess of life.
So the grumpy Jesus does something.
A healing? An exorcism? Either way it is a refashioning of a dying creation.
And he raises the child up from the appearance and the experience of death’s power.
In the middle of the usual muddle of things, everyone talking at once, something new happens and we grow quiet.
We are each person in this story.
We are the disciples trying to fix a horrible mess and only making things worse.
We are the father who only wants two things, his child to be well and to believe in something in world gone terribly wrong, a world that destroys its children.
We are the child, a life withering away, a life that is on the edge of destruction, falling into fire and water in our desperation and panic.
We are even Jesus, grumpy and grouchy at the never ending reminder that the life of faith, living in the Spirit, the life of God always, always requires us is to step in it, to get our hands soiled in the dirty diapers of life.
We are even like this story, ragged and gritty, unorchestrated, awkward, confused.
A story interrupted by a sudden silence.
A child brought back from the brink.
And Jesus stands there, knowing that he has to go to the brink, and beyond.
A few moments of silence as we know that something new is happening, someone has arrived, the same old story isn’t the end of the story. All that has fallen in smoke and flame and water will rise up again.
We carry this living hope with us.
We carry this silence and stillness, this pause with us.
And in living in this hope, part of that future life, spills back and ripples outward into the present.
We carry this hope with us, it is a seed, it is balm, that plants gardens of hope, that brings healing, that brings belief, that brings life.
We have become part of the Good News, part of the arrival.
The story continues, everything gets loud and sloppy again, and only gets more and more so, but in the midst of it there is the beginning of something beautiful